A Match Made for Murder

by Iona Whishaw

  “Officer, I’m finished, and I should like to return to my hotel. I presume someone can drive me?”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mrs. Renwick. I’m going to have to ask you to remain here. We will be conducting a search of your room.”

  Ivy Renwick’s face went crimson. “This is outrageous. It’s bad enough I’ve been dragged here for this nonsense, you have absolutely no right to search my property. Does he?” She looked at the lawyer furiously.

  Davis, who could see plainly that she did not remember his name, chewed his bottom lip. He found the entitled rich difficult to deal with. They always seemed shocked that anything could be pinned on them and outraged that anyone should try. He looked at Martinez. “You will need a warrant, even though the hotel room is not her home, strictly speaking, if it is your intention to go through her things.”

  Ivy Renwick turned triumphantly back to Martinez.

  “I am aware of that. Getting a warrant will, of course, take a bit of time, but I don’t think we should have any trouble getting one.”

  The lawyer turned to Mrs. Renwick. “It will speed matters up if you give your permission.” He left unsaid the question, “Is there any reason you don’t want your room searched?”

  Reluctantly, Ivy Renwick nodded. “Fine. Make it snappy. I’d like to go back and pack and get the hell out of here. You’ve kept me here long enough. I have a company to run.”

  An hour later, Martinez returned to the interview room, where he had sent a lunch and a cup of coffee in the interim. The coffee was gone, but the lunch was untouched.

  “Mrs. Ivy Renwick, I am arresting you for the murder of your husband John Philip Renwick. We will be placing you in custody . . .”

  Ivy did not hear the rest. She only heard the loud thrumming of panic inside her head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “We will have to go back to Miss Van Eyck,” Ames said. “There are unanswered questions there about her interaction with Watts.” He made no move from where he sat, his back to Terrell, looking out at the lowering sky. “And where is Gilly with the post-mortem?” He turned and looked accusingly at the door, which remained steadfastly innocent of Gilly coming with information.

  “I could go out and do it,” Terrell offered. “I’ve done up the notes from today. You could get busy with the rcmp on the disappearance of Ada Finch. Miss Van Eyck doesn’t know me; she might find it easier to tell me the whole story.”

  Constable Terrell sat next to Tina on the picnic table by the lake. Tina had suggested they sit there because she did not want her father, hard at work in the garage, to overhear. They would have been warmer in the living room, but Tina felt the need to be outside, blown clean, perhaps, by the light gusts that had picked up. The sky promised another evening of rain or even snow if the temperature dropped enough.

  “We usually need to find out as much as we can about a person who has been robbed and died like this. Any insight into his life might provide a clue,” Terrell said as soothingly as he could.

  “Sergeant Ames too chicken to come?” asked Tina.

  “There are several interviews in town that need to be completed,” Terrell answered.

  “I bet. Well, what do you want?”

  “I’m just wondering if you could tell me a bit about your earlier relationship with Mr. Watts. I am not at liberty to say, of course, but your information may add to what we already have.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with him dying, so I don’t see how it matters.”

  “I know,” said Terrell, nodding, not indicating what he knew. He waited.

  “Look, it’s true. I wasn’t completely truthful about why he came. He came here to ask, none too nicely, if I’d ever talked to anyone about what happened back then. He was angry and tried to intimidate me, stomping around like an ss man.”

  “What did he mean by that? Who might you have told about what?”

  Tina looked down. “You’ll have to know the whole thing, I suppose.” She paused and broke a scrap of wood off the table and threw it onto the ground. “I met him when I was sixteen. I was a bit bowled over, I suppose. I’m embarrassed about it now. He was older, good looking, had a car. What kind of a moron does that make me?”

  “It makes you a normal sixteen-year-old girl who had no defence against a man like that.”

  “He asked me out, and I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I knew it. I was scared even when I was sneaking out of the house to meet him on the top of the road. But . . . I don’t know. Why do we do stupid things when we are young?”

  “Because we are young. You can’t judge yourself against what you’d do now,” said Terrell. “Did something happen on that night? Or some other time?”

  “I never saw him again after that,” Tina said, skirting the question. “Not till he turned up the other day. It knocked ten year’s growth off me seeing him. Still acting like he owned the place. Then he had the nerve to say he’d missed me and how pretty I still was, that we should go out sometime. It was all I could do not to slug him with the spanner I was holding. I guess I shouldn’t say that. Won’t help my case, I expect.”

  “So something did happen that night you went out?” Terrell prompted.

  “He . . . he said he was going to show me a good time. I thought that meant we’d go to a bar or out dancing somewhere or something, but he was driving away from town. You can imagine the rest, I suppose. I don’t have to spell it out.”

  “I’m sorry, this is a difficult question, but did he assault you?”

  Tina turned away convulsively, got up from the table, and stood looking at the lake. Small whitecaps were just beginning to appear. Like trouble brewing, she thought. It shocked her to hear the word, because she had never said it to herself. She had spent the war fending off advances from drunken servicemen. “Tough Tina” she’d been called. She’d been proud of that reputation. But it hadn’t stopped her from falling for a charming Welsh infantryman who turned out to be married.

  She turned and looked at Constable Terrell, who was sitting watching her with his head tilted. He looks kind, she thought, but he’s a man. He’d be judging her.

  “Look, Constable, I’m not proud of myself. I tried to stop it, but he was so strong . . . I never should have gone off with him. Here’s the thing that’s really embarrassing: I already knew he had a reputation. I thought I would be different, that he really liked me. I can’t have this come out. If my dad ever found out what really happened, he’d have me out on my behind.”

  “You don’t know that. He seems like a very understanding man.”

  He was right. Her father being an understanding man only made it worse. It would be better to be thrown out. It would only be what she deserved. He would be understanding and angry on her behalf—and wonder why she’d never told him. It would be unbearable. Especially after her idiocy during the war with the married infantryman, she didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy, especially not his.

  She looked at him and shook her head. “Is there anything else, Constable? You know everything now. I presume neither you nor Sergeant Ames will be bothering us again?” Almost as an afterthought she looked at the ground and added, “I suppose he’ll have to know.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes. Just one last thing: Did you go to the police at the time?”

  Tina stood silently for so long that Constable Terrell had to prompt her. “Miss Van Eyck?”

  She turned away to look north at the long stretch of dark, unsettled water. “That’s what I don’t understand. I did go one afternoon on my own because one of my friends told me it didn’t matter that I had put myself in that position, that what Watts did was still wrong. She drove me there. I talked to a guy at the station. He took some notes and said he’d look into it and I should come back the next day. When I went back, he was angry. He asked me why I was lying, trying to get a respectable man in trouble. He called me
. . .” Tina turned to look at Terrell and then looked away again. “He called me a little tart who got what I asked for.”

  Constable Terrell clamped his mouth into a grim line and made a note in his book. He kept his voice as dispassionate as he could. “Do you recall the name of the officer you spoke with?”

  “I barely remembered my own name after that. He told me I could get in trouble with the law and that my parents would be dragged through court.”

  Tina got up and pulled her thick shirt around her body and glanced at Terrell. “That was the end of who I used to be. That day. Not the day it happened. I was terrified by what he said. I decided that I would be tough, that no man would ever tell me what to do except maybe my own father. And I can tell you, when the chance came to leave and work in the old country during the war, I could not have been happier. I thought it was over and I’d got past it, till that bastard walked in the other day throwing his weight around. I don’t understand why he came around thinking I’d said something to someone after all this time. I’m glad he’s dead. You find that shocking.” Tina glanced up at Terrell’s face, but could read nothing on it. “This had better be the end of it.” She was embarrassed by how peevish that sounded. A man had died, after all.

  Terrell shook his head, frowning at the words he’d written. He could see now that it might not be. “I’m sorry, just one thing more. Do you, by any chance, remember the date of your visit to the police station?”

  “So you can dredge it up for all to see?” Tina said furiously. “No, thank heavens, I don’t. All I can say is that it was June of the year I graduated, 1935.”

  Terrell made a final note in his book, closed it quietly, and pushed it into his raincoat pocket. “I’m very much obliged to you, Miss Van Eyck. I can’t promise you won’t get any more visits. It depends on the how the investigation goes. But I will say this: I’m sorry it went so badly when you reported it. That wasn’t right. It should never have happened.” It shouldn’t happen, he thought, but it did. All the time.

  Just as they reached the car, he stopped. “Miss Van Eyck, I’m sorry to ask this, and you’ll be within your rights not to tell me. Was there any outcome from that meeting when you were sixteen? Pregnancy, that sort of thing?”

  Tina reddened. “No, thank God.”

  Ames had lurched out of his chair and now stood looking out the window. Rain was coming down again. He could see the little rivulets running along the street below. He imagined them gathering force, turning into a river. Terrell had been reading from his notes about his conversation with Tina Van Eyck.

  Ames swore under his breath. “Who the hell would have told a young girl she got what she asked for?”

  “It was back in June of ’35. How much turnover has there been here since then?”

  “God knows. I don’t know if Darling was even here then. He might know. I bet he never even started a file, whoever it was. And Tina’s right. Why, suddenly, after a decade, did he reappear to ask her if she’d told anyone? Well, Tina’s story supports what we’ve learned about Watts so far,” he said finally. “But it still doesn’t follow that one of the apparently many young girls he probably violated suddenly up and robbed him as he lay dying. It seems Ada Finch wasn’t with him, so we’re back to the hitchhiker theory. When did you say those ads in the paper and the radio about hitchhikers would run?”

  “They will be in tomorrow’s paper, and I think the radio will start this evening.”

  Ames was about to make another comment when there was a knock on the door. They turned and saw Gilly with a paper in his hand.

  “Sorry this took so long. It took some time to complete the tests. I thought you two might be interested in this. Your robbery victim didn’t die of a heart attack exactly, though he did have a weak heart as it turns out, and his heart stopped. He died of suffocation, brought on by ingesting a combination of chloroform and very likely strychnine.” Gilly, usually staid and understated, said this with something bordering on a triumphant flourish.

  “Poison?” Terrell and Ames asked at once.

  “Yes indeed. And organ failure. His heart for sure, his kidneys perhaps. As to his heart, the failure came on very suddenly. His inability to breathe is interesting in that context as well. It looks as though his whole system gave up.”

  “Are you saying . . . what are you saying, exactly?” asked Ames.

  “I tested his blood for some sort of poison but it’s difficult with the tests we have now. It was a sweet bleachy smell that put me on to what possibly happened. Chloroform and strychnine together could produce these symptoms. Chloroform by itself can be dangerous. It’s notoriously unreliable, even in competent medical hands. More people than you’d want to think about die on the operating table. A civilian flinging it around could do untold damage. So let’s have the murderer use chloroform to subdue him, thus living up to every cliché in the book, by the way, and strychnine soaked in a rag so he would be breathing it in. It could have been followed up with some administered by mouth, though I couldn’t swear to it. If it was just the strychnine, he could have inhaled a large enough dose that he would have been dead inside of a couple of hours. But I’m going to say that it was much quicker than that because of his heart stopping. Forensic science is moving along at a good clip. In a couple of years maybe someone will come up with a way to definitively screen the blood, but there’s nothing now. However, following on my inhalation theory, I looked for residue of strychnine on his moustache and so on.”

  “And?” If Watts was poisoned, it would drastically alter the whole complexion of the case.

  “A bit on the right side of his mouth in his moustache.”

  Terrell frowned thoughtfully. “So, someone subdues him with chloroform, then makes him breathe in strychnine?”

  “That’s about the size of it. Strychnine by itself is not a swift death, and is pretty unpleasant. My guess is if we add a solid dose of chloroform to that hanky, the assailant could have subdued him and then he’d be passively breathing in the strychnine. Pretty elaborate because the chloroform alone probably did it for him with his heart stopping. The killer wouldn’t have known that, of course, so he or she, let’s be generous here, would want insurance, and wouldn’t want his victim thrashing around. I’d say the attack came from behind, by someone who is right-handed. The problem is, a man driving a car, attacked from behind, will have put up a fight no matter how strong the assailant is. I think it’s significant that it would have been done by someone behind him. He could have been caught by surprise, gasped, which involves a good strong breath, and speeded up the action of the sedative and the poison.”

  Ames furrowed his brow. “That might account for that strange smell in the car. I can see the strychnine because it’s basically rat poison. Lots of people have it around the house. But how would someone get hold of chloroform? Isn’t it for medical use?”

  “Things do go missing from hospitals all the time. But, failing that,” Gilly added with a slightly ghoulish air, “just mix some household chlorine bleach with rubbing alcohol. It’s volatile and dangerous, but it can be done.”

  Lane was lying on the bed, reading and waiting for her turn to have a bath to soothe the stiffness from their day on horseback, when the phone rang. Puzzled—and worried because Lord Peter was even now climbing into the bell tower, a manoeuvre she already knew would do him no good—she put her book down, pulled her robe around her, and went to answer it.

  “Lane Winslow speaking.”

  There was a hesitation at the other end of the line and then a worried voice. “I was hoping to reach a Mrs. Darling. Is she at this number?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I am Mrs. Darling. I don’t usually use my married name. Who is calling?”

  “My name is Martha Yelland. I’m the head nurse at the St. Mary’s Hospital. I’m calling on behalf of one of our patients.” Martha lowered her voice. “Mrs. Paul Galloway was brought in v
ery late last night. She’s in quite a bad state. She didn’t want me to call unless things became really bad, but while she’s not on death’s door, I feel like someone should know.”

  “My God! But what about her husband?”

  “He brought her in,” she said, her voice sounding very compressed.

  “Yes, so he must be there with her,” Lane tried to understand what was underlying the nurse’s strange communication.

  “Ma’am, I’m calling because I think she needs a friend right now, and you’re the only contact I have. She’s in very bad shape, but she managed to tell me you’re the only person she can trust. She asked me to call you. I’d best be getting along. It’s a busy ward.”

  Lane hung up the receiver. Why was she the only person Priscilla could trust? She began to throw her clothes on, calling out to the bathroom door, “Darling, something has happened to Priscilla. She’s in hospital. I’m going to just pop down and make sure she’s all right. You won’t mind?”

  “Of course I’ll mind. Was that Galloway? Why do you need to be hauled out in the middle of the night?” The splashy sound of an irritated man quitting his bath came through the door.

  Lane opened the bathroom door just enough to put her head through. “It’s not the middle of the night. No, it was a nursing sister from the hospital. Don’t get out, darling. It’s just the nurse was behaving rather peculiarly. I think she was trying to say something without saying something, if you know what I mean.”

  “I haven’t the first notion what you mean,” Darling said, subsiding. “I should come with you.”

  “No,” Lane said hesitantly. “I think this might be something I have to do. I get the feeling Priscilla might barely want me, but certainly not you. It all seems a little cloak and dagger, and Galloway isn’t with her. I think—but no, I won’t say until I’ve seen her. The front desk will get me a cab. Don’t worry about a thing.”