by Carola Dunn
What would she do if someone did come up? Simon might turn tail if warned that the police were in his room. If not, he could go in and try arguing with Tom Tring. Myra, Daisy thought she could deal with. But if Lorna appeared … Well, Lorna was not the sort of person one would choose to try to dissuade from a course of action she had set her mind on.
The other constable was watching them, she reminded herself. And if Lorna did escape him, Daisy could always call for help.
In fact, Worrall had instructed her to inform him, not to deal with an intrusion herself. No doubt he’d be annoyed if she sent Simon or Myra back downstairs with a flea in his or her ear. She would have liked to be able to tell Alec she’d been really helpful, but come to think of it, Worrall might well want to question an interloper on the spot.
The only person who appeared was Worrall himself, coming out of Ruby’s sitting room.
“The others are still next door, in Simon’s room,” she told him.
“No one…?”
“Not a soul.”
He thanked her and joined the others. A few minutes later they all came out. If they had found anything incriminating, they hid it well.
“The next is Myra’s,” Daisy said.
The monotony continued. No one came up Humphrey’s stairs. No one came through the door from the hall stairs. The chair turned into an instrument of torture. Daisy decided Worrall wouldn’t mind if she strolled back and forth for a while.
Myra’s room didn’t take them very long. Daisy was halfway along the passage when they came out.
“Just marching up and down on sentry-duty,” she explained. “The end room is Lorna’s. Miss Birtwhistle.”
“And the three doors in the opposite wall?” Worrall asked.
“They open into the old house. If it’s the same layout as the west wing, the one at the end is the bathroom, then the lav, and this one is Sybil’s—Mrs. Sutherby’s—bedroom and sitting room. They used to be the nurseries and before that, before the wings were built, the main bedrooms.”
“Miss Birtwhistle’s first,” the inspector decided.
Daisy couldn’t help herself—she followed them and glanced through the doorway as they trooped in. She had seen Lorna’s bedroom only in the middle of the night, by candlelight. By daylight, it looked just as drab but the plain iron bedstead had a spring mattress and a thick eiderdown.
Tom glanced back at her. The door closed as she hastily resumed her patrol.
When she returned to that end of the corridor, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. The latch must not have caught. She could hear their voices. Stopping where she couldn’t possibly be seen, she listened.
“She’s been burning paper in the grate, Mr. Worrall,” said Bagshaw.
“Anything identifiable?”
“Naw. It’d crumble if you touched it.”
“What about the w.p.b.?”
“Just getting to it.”
Daisy heard the rustle of paper as he spread out his sheet of newspaper and dumped the contents of the wastepaper basket. “Tangles of grey hair cleaned from a hairbrush, bits of paper … Here, look at this! A torn-up receipt from Asbury’s.”
“Asbury’s?” Tom asked.
“The chemist’s,” the constable told him. “Right by the bridge in Matlock it is.”
Daisy pushed the door open another few inches, enough to watch as Bagshaw sorted out eight scraps of paper from the other odds and ends. Worrall took them from him and pieced them together on the bed.
“Yesterday’s date all right. But it’s not for chloral. Chloral is dispensed as a liquid.”
Tom, peering over his shoulder, rumbled, “What’s it for?”
“‘Miss Birtwhistle, the powders, one at bedtime as needed,’” Worrall read, then, energized, “Could be bromide. Come on, fellows, we’ve got to find the stuff. Sergeant, check the bathroom, would you?”
Daisy hastily backed away. Tom came out, saw her, and raised his eyebrows. Since his forehead reached all the way to the nape of his neck, it was rather like a couple of hairy caterpillars shuffling sideways up an egg.
“Just patrolling.”
“But you heard.”
“Well, yes. It rather looks as if Sybil was right.”
“Sybil? I haven’t heard a lot of the story yet, remember.” As he spoke, he crossed the passage and went into the bathroom.
Daisy followed and leant on the doorpost, watching him turn out the contents of a small, white-painted cabinet. “She wouldn’t hide anything in here. Several people use this bathroom. Sybil is Mrs. Sutherby, my friend. Humphrey’s … secretary.”
“Mistress?” Tom asked bluntly.
“Heavens no! It’s just complicated.”
“The Chief’ll explain if I need to know. Nothing in here.” He straightened and looked round for other possible hiding places.
“You know Humphrey Birtwhistle had been ill for years? Never properly recovered from pneumonia? Sybil was afraid someone was drugging him with some sedative.”
“Sleeping powders, such as potassium bromide. It doesn’t look good for Miss Birtwhistle, but let’s not jump to conclusions. I’ll take this wastebasket across and let Bagshaw deal with it.”
“May I come?”
“No. But you can lurk and I won’t give you away.”
Daisy stretched up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
Standing outside the door of Lorna’s bedroom, she listened to mutterings of, “Nothing here,” and tried to think what the discovery of the chemist’s receipt meant.
As Tom said, they mustn’t jump to conclusions. Perhaps Lorna had trouble sleeping and took a bromide now and then “as needed.” In that case, they should be easily available, in the drawer of her bedside table, or at least in her chest-of-drawers. Perhaps the prescription was for some quite different medicine. But why should she hide the powders if they were for her own legitimate use? Sybil hadn’t discussed her fears with any of the household, let alone Lorna, so she couldn’t know there was a suspicion of Humphrey having been drugged for years.
On the other hand, supposing her responsible for that, why get a new prescription when she was about to finish off her victim with a different drug?
“Those papers in the fireplace…” said DI Worrall. “Could they have been papers—those little envelopes—of bromide?”
“Better look for yourself, sir.”
“Hmm.”
After a moment’s silence, Tom said, “Don’t think so, but that’s just the top layer. At a guess, they’re pages from the Illustrated London News—I noticed a few were torn out. Should we check what’s underneath?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
A poker clinked against the iron grate.
“Ah!” said Tom. “Half a mo, I’ve got a torch in my pocket.”
Daisy was irresistibly drawn to the doorway. The three men were crouching by the fireplace.
“Well I’ll be damned!” the inspector exclaimed. “What d’you make of this, Mr. Tring?”
“She tried to destroy the medicine by burning the packages. When it wouldn’t burn—it looks as if it half melted—she burnt more paper on top of the mess to conceal it.” Tom raised his voice slightly. “Would she have cleaned out her own grate, Mrs. Fletcher?”
Abashed, Daisy stepped into the room. “Last night, when Sybil and I came to tell her that her brother was dead, she didn’t have a fire at all. Assuming she never did, or seldom, the maids probably wouldn’t come in here to do it without being given a specific order. My guess is she’d have felt pretty safe until she had time to deal with it.”
Worrall stood up. “She must have realised we’d search.”
“I expect so, though I’d be very surprised if she had any idea how thorough modern detectives are. She doesn’t seem to read widely.” Daisy pointed at the small table by the bed, which held only a prayer book on top of the diminished Illustrated London News. “They don’t get a daily newspaper. That magazine is not noted for detailed descriptions of police
methods. And she’s pretty isolated up here on the farm. She wouldn’t have had much, if any, contact with the police. I could be wrong, but I didn’t get the impression she has friends in Matlock, just went down for shopping and so forth.”
“And picking up prescriptions,” Worrall said grimly. “Bagshaw, collect a good sample of that mess in a clean envelope. It’ll have to be analysed. Assuming it’s bromide, Mr. Tring, as the doctor suggested, or even some other sedative, what do you think it means?”
“Ah, meaning! I leave that sort of thing to the Chief. Young Piper’s getting to be a fair hand at theorising, too, I must admit.”
If Daisy theorised, Alec called it guesswork, but it came to the same thing. She hadn’t actually worked out a theory yet, though, so she held her tongue.
TWENTY-FIVE
“Darling, could I have a quick word with you?”
Alec frowned. Daisy did her best to look as if she had something frightfully important to tell him. Which she did.
Worrall had decided Daisy’s appearance in the hall would cause less disturbance, less curiosity, than his own or DS Tring’s. He didn’t know who was being questioned at present by the chief inspector and, short of bursting into Humphrey’s office, the only way to tell was to see who was missing from the hall. If Lorna were there, she might take fright at his arrival. If she were not, that would mean she was in the middle of an interview and might take fright if the inspector asked to speak privately to her interrogator.
Daisy had managed to count heads from the doorway under the stairs, so she didn’t need to actually enter the hall. She suspected Roger Knox had spotted her, but no one else. Lorna was missing.
She softly closed the door and stood thinking for a moment. Lorna was with Alec and Piper. With any luck, she would assume Daisy had some personal reason for interrupting, but if Alec had the same idea, he might refuse to cooperate. Sadly, no brilliant ploys came to mind. She crossed the passage, knocked on the door, and opened it without waiting for a response.
“What is it, Daisy?” Alec asked irritably.
Lorna sat stolidly in front of the desk, not turning her head to look at the intruder, so Daisy risked a wink and an urgent jerk of the head towards the door.
“It won’t take a moment, honestly.”
“Excuse me, Miss Birtwhistle.” Alec kept his impatient expression pasted to his face until the door closed behind him. Then it changed to eagerness. “They’ve found something?”
Daisy explained about the prescription receipt, dated the previous day, in Lorna’s wastepaper basket and the apparent burnt remains of potassium bromide powders in her grate. “They couldn’t find any sign elsewhere of the powders she bought. If she takes it herself, why try to hide it?”
“She could have been afraid it would draw suspicion to her. She doesn’t—or shouldn’t—know that chloral was used, unless she administered it. And in that case, why get bromide as well?”
Daisy was crestfallen. “It doesn’t really mean anything, then.”
“That’s not what I said. It doesn’t prove anything, but it suggests a great deal.”
“I wonder why she didn’t burn the receipt.”
“Probably threw it away automatically when she came in after shopping, and forgot about it.”
“I suppose so. It was torn up and mixed with other rubbish. So what next?”
“We’ll have to send the stuff from the fireplace to an analyst, to make sure it actually is bromide, or whatever potassium bromide turns into when it burns. Or some similar drug. We’ll have to go to the chemist and get the name of the doctor who wrote the prescription, and interview him. We’ll have to—”
“Shouldn’t you get back to her now, though, darling? Or she’ll start wondering.”
“Let her wonder. She won’t wonder for long. I’m taking her into the Matlock station. She has some serious questions to answer. So far, I haven’t got much more than ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘I can’t remember’ out of her. She’s not exactly communicative.”
“To be fair, one couldn’t call her communicative at the best of times.”
“If she hasn’t a good explanation to give us, she’s in a lot of trouble. Tom and Worrall are continuing to look for a chloral bottle, I hope?”
“Yes. Worrall and PC Bagshaw seem to be pretty thorough searchers. Not as good as Tom, that goes without saying.”
Alec grinned. “Of course. Let me think.” After a moment’s consideration, he went on, “First of all, I’ll have to consult Worrall. For one thing, if they don’t find that bottle in the house, we’re going to need a lot more men to search outside.”
“What if she and her brother are in league together? Norman could have taken the bottle with him and tossed it in a ditch or buried it somewhere. I don’t know how big the farm is, but I shouldn’t think you’d ever find it.”
With a groan, Alec admitted, “You’re probably right. Would you say they’re on such terms that they might have conspired?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t a clue. I’ve never seen them talking to each other. For all I know they dislike each other as much as they disliked Humphrey.”
“Which wouldn’t, however, prevent their conspiring to do away with him. Now, Worrall.”
“Will you go up to see him, or shall I fetch him?”
“Would you mind, love? I’d rather not leave Ernie alone with Miss Birtwhistle when he hasn’t heard the latest news.”
“You’ll have to start paying me a salary soon.”
“Don’t hold your breath. And Daisy, don’t take this as licence to meddle.”
She ignored this with what she hoped was an air of injured innocence. She never meddled. She couldn’t help it if she got involved in his cases from time to time. This one wouldn’t even be his if it hadn’t been for Superintendent Crane’s meddling.
“Tell Worrall to knock and come in.” Alec returned to Humphrey’s office.
Daisy wished she could listen to what he said to Lorna about the chemist’s receipt. She trudged back upstairs, where the men had moved on to Sybil’s rooms.
“If you find the bottle in there,” Daisy said from the doorway, “it’s because someone else put it there.”
“We’ll bear that possibility in mind,” said Worrall with a touch of sarcasm.
“But we haven’t found anything yet,” Tom reassured her. “What’s the chief going to do next?”
“Miss Birtwhistle was with him. He wants to take her in to Matlock, to the station, but he’d like to consult you first, Inspector. Just knock and go in, he said.”
Worrall left. Daisy stepped into the room. It was Sybil’s sitting room and served also as Monica’s playroom when she was at home. Both Tom and Bagshaw were going through the three overstuffed bookcases against the wall facing the windows, taking every book out, shaking it, and checking behind. As well as a selection of modern novels and histories, all the children’s classics were there: Wind in the Willows, Alice, Black Beauty, Heidi, The Water-Babies, Five Children and It, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Secret Garden … Daisy recognised most from her youth, a few later ones from Belinda’s bookshelves at home. An ottoman in a corner probably held toys and games.
“Shall I help?” she asked Tom.
As expected, he rejected her offer. The room was her friend’s, after all.
“What’s through there?” he asked, gesturing at the door opposite the one she had entered by.
“Sybil’s and her daughter’s bedrooms, I suppose. Once the night nursery and the nurserymaid’s bedroom, perhaps. I haven’t seen them.”
“So you don’t know whether there’s a door at the end to the west wing?”
“I’m pretty sure there is. When I went to bed last night—this morning—Sybil came with me up the west stairs in the hall. There’s another staircase at the north end of the wing, for Norman’s convenience, I assume. His bedroom is above his estate office.”
“This is an exceedingly complicated house,” Tom said severely. “I’v
e been in great mansions that were simpler to find your way about.”
“Fairacres, my family’s home, is complicated if you’re not familiar with it. It’s all the alterations and additions over the years. The original farmhouse must have been quite simple.”
“What’s the other side of this wall?” He knocked on the wall behind the bookcases.
“At a guess, a warren of small rooms. The original house must have had rooms for children, and the Victorian house for servants. A sewing room, perhaps. That sort of thing. Now that they haven’t any live-in servants, they may be full of lumber. Old furniture, superannuated curtains, all kinds of junk, you know.”
Tom and Bagshaw groaned in unison.
“If we did find a bottle,” said Bagshaw gloomily, “we couldn’t tell who put it there.”
“Unless it has fingerprints,” Daisy pointed out.
“Too many crooks these days read detective stories,” said Tom, “or at least hear about others being caught because they left their dabs at the scene of the crime.”
“Lorna isn’t a crook in that sense,” said Daisy, “and not much of a reader, either. I doubt she would think to wipe them off, if she did it.”
Tom’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “You don’t believe it was her?”
“Well, I’m quite prepared to believe she’s been drugging poor Humphrey for years, a mixture of spite and wanting the increased flow of money to continue…”
The men looked at her blankly.
Tom asked, “Wasn’t Mr. Birtwhistle an author, bringing in money for his books? How did drugging him increase—?”
“Haven’t you heard the whole story? I’d better let Alec or Mr. Worrall explain. The question is, why did Lorna bother to acquire a new supply of bromide if she intended to kill her brother with chloral?”
“Could be she wasn’t sure she’d be able to nerve herself to do it. If you ask me, there’s a lot more murders planned than ever get carried out.”
“That makes sense. Sort of. Do you think a doctor would give her prescriptions for both chloral and bromide, though?”
