Death in Practice

by Hazel Holt

  “Thank you Sheila. Perhaps you would be good enough to put them into sequence for me – the pages are numbered – and then hand them to me one at a time in the right order.”

  As I handed each page to her she studied it carefully, initialled each one and then, on the final page, as if she was putting her signature to some world-shaking international treaty, she wrote her name with a flourish, gathered up the papers and gave them to me to put back into the envelope. Feeling like some minor Foreign Office official, I did so and she sat back with an air of satisfaction and rang the bell for Elsie to bring in the coffee.

  As well as coffee (to be poured by me with some trepidation from the heavy silver coffee pot) there was a plate of Elsie’s delicious cinnamon biscuits as well as her homemade shortbread, so I felt well rewarded for my labours. I also thought this might be a good opportunity, while Mrs Dudley was in a mellow mood, of getting some information.

  “Rosemary said that Malcolm Hardy had an aunt and a cousin,” I said. “I never knew that.”

  “Oh yes.” Mrs Dudley said, pleased, as always, to be in the position of knowing more than somebody else. “Geraldine Hardy – she was Geraldine Miller, you know – had a sister, Dorothy. Their father was a dentist, he had a practice up on West Hill. But his father came down here from London and he was, I believe, a very successful businessman, quite well off.”

  “Really?”

  “Unfortunately,” Mrs Dudley continued with some satisfaction, “he had this addiction to horse racing and other forms of gambling and lost a great deal of his money so that, in the end, they lived in really quite reduced circumstances.”

  “How sad.”

  Mrs Dudley gave me a disapproving glance. “Not sad at all,” she said. “Improvident. However, his son trained as a dentist and made quite a good living. He married Esther Nichols and she had some money of her own. They bought that end house on the Porlock Road, just before you get to Bracken, quite a nice property. And both the girls, Geraldine and Dorothy, were good looking enough to make advantageous marriages. Geraldine managed to catch John Hardy after his first wife died and Dorothy married some sort of Scottish lawyer – they call them something different up there I believe – and went to live in the Highlands. Caithness, I believe, or was it Sutherland? In any case, she was not on the spot when their father died – the mother had died some years before – so she was not in a position to see what happened to all his Things.” Mrs Dudley gave the last word particular significance. “And that was where she made her mistake.”

  “Goodness,” I said eagerly, “what was that?”

  “Well,” Mrs Dudley, satisfied at having totally captured my attention, leaned back in her chair, “there was the picture. She didn’t know about that.”

  “The picture?”

  “AVictorian painting. The girls had never really cared for it – an undraped female in some sort of classical setting. It had belonged to their grandfather, one of the few things that hadn’t been sold, I believe, to pay his gambling debts.”

  “Valuable?”

  “Oh yes,” Mrs Dudley said with some satisfaction. “When Geraldine’s father died she had the pick of the furniture and so forth – Dorothy didn’t come down for the funeral for some reason and Leonard Hardy, who was always very shrewd, had some of the stuff valued. It turned out that the picture was by some quite famous painter – now what was he called? Sounds like a woman’s name but he was a man…”

  “Alma Tadema?” I suggested.

  “That’s the one – such a stupid name – but apparently he was very well known, the Royal Academy and that sort of thing. So the picture turned out to be worth a considerable sum of money. Well, Geraldine, who, as I said didn’t care for the painting, wanted to sell it, but Leonard Hardy thought that if they held on to it it would increase in value – and of course he was right. They tell me such things fetch an astonishing amount of money these days.”

  “Oh they do,” I said. “But was it Geraldine’s to sell? What about Dorothy?”

  Mrs Dudley gave a short laugh. “Dorothy didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “As far as she knew none of their father’s things was worth anything and Geraldine certainly didn’t tell her otherwise.”

  “I see.”

  “However,” Mrs Dudley continued with some relish, “you can’t keep that sort of thing quiet for ever. Dorothy found out somehow about the picture – I expect someone felt it their duty to tell her – and, naturally enough, she was extremely angry.”

  “Didn’t their father leave a will?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, but that only said that his money should be divided equally between them, and so it was, including the money from the sale of the house – I believe it fetched quite a good price, Francis James and his wife bought it – but nothing was said about who was to have the contents. Of course, most of the stuff was sold, not that one gets a proper price for really good things at a time like that, but, by then Leonard Hardy had had the valuers in and found out about the picture.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “There was a certain amount of bad tempered correspondence between the two girls.”

  “They didn’t go to court about it? I mean, if Dorothy was married to a lawyer…”

  “Oh, he’d died by then, he was some years older than she was. No, it’s a great mistake getting lawyers mixed up in things, much better to keep these things in the family. All lawyers are dishonest.” She gave me one of her rare smiles. “Always excepting dear Michael of course.”

  She handed me her empty coffee cup to put back on the tray and settled herself back in her chair again. “A little while later,” she continued, “Dorothy died and so did Geraldine.”

  “So there was just Malcolm Hardy left and he got to keep the picture? No, hang on, Rosemary said there was a cousin. Presumably, then, Dorothy had a child.”

  Mrs Dudley nodded her approval at my deduction. “Exactly,” she said. “A boy called Donald.”

  “So is the feud over the picture still going on? “

  “It certainly was when Malcolm Hardy was alive,” she said. “What will happen now, of course, I don’t know. It may be that June will feel that this man has a right to it. After all it belonged to Geraldine’s side of the family and not the Hardys’. It will be her decision.”

  I didn’t, naturally, tell Mrs Dudley that it would probably not be June’s decision, but Julie’s, which might be quite different.

  “Do you know where this son lives?” I asked. “Is it somewhere in Scotland?”

  “No,” Mrs Dudley said, “he lives in London. He is a doctor, apparently quite high up in his profession, some kind of specialist I believe.”

  On the way home I tried to remember if I had seen a picture answering that description at The Willows when Anthea and I were there. I couldn’t remember it in any of the downstairs rooms, but then I recalled Mrs Dudley’s description of it as ‘an undraped female’. It was most likely, then, that it had been in the gallery of similarly undraped females in Malcolm Hardy’s bedroom. I hadn’t examined the collection in detail since I had been so taken aback by what I saw and with Anthea registering profound disapproval in the doorway it had hardly seemed the moment to make any sort of inventory.

  The appearance on the scene, as it were, of one more person who had a reason to dislike Malcolm Hardy might perhaps be said to have added another dimension to the problem of his murder. Had this Donald person (what was his surname?) been in touch with his cousin recently? Even if he had a motive for the murder (and was the picture really motive enough for such a violent act?) how could he have had the opportunity to administer the fatal dose? Indeed, how would he have known what sort of fatal dose was needed?

  It seemed, on reflection, that what might have been a promising lead was simply a false trail that would get us nowhere. However, when I saw Rosemary a few days later I couldn’t resist asking her if she knew what Donald’s surname was.

  “Oh, let me see now – Mother did t
ell me – something Scottish, Macsomething… No,” she said triumphantly, “I know. It’s Gillespie, Donald Gillespie. Why do you want to know?”

  “Your mother told me about the picture and all the bad feeling, so I wondered if there just might have been the faint possibility –”

  “That this Gillespie man might have murdered Malcolm Hardy?”

  “Well, it is a possibility. Not a very strong one, I admit.”

  “I can’t think,” Rosemary said, “why you’re scratching around for yet another suspect. Surely there are quite enough close to hand without dragging in someone from outside!”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I said reluctantly. “The trouble is, I know all the suspects close at hand and I like them all. I’d much rather the murderer was someone from far away who I’d never met and knew nothing about.”

  “That’s not very fair!”

  “I know. But you must admit it’s difficult to think of anyone at the surgery being a killer. Isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.” She thought for a moment and then she said, “Still, there’s always Claudia Drummond. We don’t like her.”

  “Mmm, she is a possibility. But, somehow, suddenly discovering about this cousin, at this stage, and a sort of motive… I wonder what the picture is worth?”

  “Who did you say it was by?”

  “Alma Tadema.”

  “Oh yes, I always mix him up with the other one – you know who I mean, the one there was that exhibition of at the Tate a few years ago.”

  “Lord Leighton?”

  “That’s right, all that classical stuff, odalisques and so forth.”

  “There was quite a vogue at that time for langorous ladies lying about on marble benches. And of course there’s a tremendous interest in Victorian painting now, people pay vast sums of money for them.”

  “How vast? Millions, like for those rather dim French things or horrible scribbles by Picasso?”

  “Not millions perhaps. Hundreds of thousands, though. I suppose it depends on what size it is and if it’s a good example of the genre.”

  “Enough to commit a murder for?”

  “I suppose it would depend how much you needed the money. If this cousin is a successful London consultant he’s hardly likely to be short of a bob or two. It would be interesting to know, though, if the picture’s still there, at the Willows, I mean.”

  “You could always ask Roger,” Rosemary suggested. “I don’t suppose it’s an official secret or anything.”

  “Yes,” I said thoughtfully. “I might just do that.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  Egged on by those television advertisements for a certain dry food guaranteed to prolong your cat’s active life, I called in at the surgery to see what they had on offer. When I got there Kathy and Julie were at the front desk engaged in what looked like a serious conversation. When they looked up and saw that it was me Kathy said, “Here’s the very person. Mrs Malory is a great friend of Chief Inspector Eliot so she’ll know if you ought to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?” I asked.

  Julie looked nervously at Kathy and then said reluctantly, “I don’t suppose it’s all that important and I don’t want to go bothering the police. Anyway, it might cause trouble.”

  “If you know anything, anything at all,” I said, “I do think you ought to tell someone.”

  “Well I think it might be important,” Kathy said. “Anyway, why don’t you tell Mrs Malory and see if she agrees with me.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling in what I hoped was an encouraging manner, “tell me what it is and we’ll see.”

  “It was while I was with Malcolm,” Julie began hesitantly. “It was at a weekend, late one Sunday morning, we were just going out for a drink and the doorbell went. Malcolm went to the door and I heard him in the hall talking to someone on the doorstep, then he said ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’ A man came in with him, a bit older than Malcolm I would think. Anyway Malcolm said to me ‘Get lost Julie, I’ve got some business to see to.’ So I went out of the room.”

  “Did he often speak to you like that?” I asked.

  She gave a little shrug. “Sometimes,” she said. “This time it made me really annoyed – it was the way he said it, as if I was nobody, just someone to be got out of the way. Well, because I was annoyed I didn’t close the door properly and I stayed outside to listen to what they were saying. Malcolm said, ‘Look here Gillespie, what do you mean by badgering me at home like this? I told you on the phone that I hadn’t got the damned picture.’ Then the other man said, ‘Where is it then?’ and Malcolm said, ‘I told you before, my mother got rid of it years ago’. That made the man really angry and he said, ‘In that case I want the money – it’s rightfully mine.’ Malcolm laughed and said, ‘You can whistle for the money, Gillespie, you haven’t got a leg to stand on. Now get out of my house and if you ever come here again I’ll call the police.’ They came over to the door so I had to move away fast, but I heard the other man shouting out as he left, ‘You haven’t heard the last of this – I’ll get even with you one way or another.’”

  Julie stopped and looked at me enquiringly.

  “So what do you think?” she asked. “Should I tell the police?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, “most certainly. How was Malcolm after the man left?”

  “Oh, he was very pleased with himself, as if he’d done something clever. I was a bit surprised because it all seemed a bit odd, but then I forgot about it, and I only remembered it when I saw that one of the new reps was called Gillespie, Mike Gillespie he is, but he’s young and quite different to the man who called. Still it made me remember and, when you think about that man, it did sound a bit threatening, that last remark of his. So I wondered if he had anything to do with it – you know, the murder.”

  “I think that’s for the police to decide,” I said, “but you must certainly tell them, it’s something they need to know.” I thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, I shall be speaking to Chief Inspector Eliot myself this evening. Would you like me to mention it to him? Then he can get in touch so that you can give him the details.”

  She smiled gratefully. “Oh that would be kind of you, if you’re sure that will be all right.”

  “Yes of course. Incidentally, how are you after that nasty fall? Is everything all right with the baby?”

  “Oh yes, I’m fine and so’s the baby. But I’m only working part time now and Keith says I must give up altogether next month and rest properly.”

  When I got back home Foss began weaving around my legs demanding something to eat so I poured some of the dried food into his dish and put it down for him. He sniffed it cautiously, gave me a look of complete contempt and stalked away. Even Tris, coming in and seeing uneaten food, only managed a couple of mouthfuls before abandoning it in disgust. Oh well, I thought, as I put the rejected food out for the birds, I suppose my visit to the surgery wasn’t a complete waste of time since I had gleaned some useful information about Malcolm Hardy and his cousin. And also (the thought occurred to me) confirmation of Keith’s extremely protective attitude towards Julie and her baby.

  Roger sounded quite interested in what I had to tell him.

  “You do seem to attract information like a magnet,” he said. “I haven’t the least idea whether all this has anything to do with the murder but it’s certainly something that should be followed up.”

  “I suppose you don’t know,” I said tentatively, “if the picture is still in the house. I thought it might be among Malcolm Hardy’s gallery of young ladies.”

  “I’ll have to go and have a look,” Roger said, “and I expect, Sheila, that you’d like to come with me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, of course…”

  “Would tomorrow at two thirty suit you? I’ll see you there.”

  The Willows was even more dank and miserable than the last time I’d been there with Anthea. I wrapped my coat more closely about me although it wasn’t
the cold that I felt the need to ward off. Roger, however, merely said, “Very bad to keep a place like this shut up for so long. It needs a thorough airing,” before moving from the hall into the drawing room.

  “Do we have any idea of what this picture looks like?” he asked.

  “Typical Alma Tadema, I imagine. Victorian classical.”

  I looked at the pictures on the figured damask wallpaper (sage green to match the hall) which were mostly of heavily wooded landscapes with thatched cottages and small figures engaged in various kinds of rural activities. There were also a couple featuring meditative cows (after the Dutch School) standing in or beside streams and a large still life with baskets of fruit and flowers interspersed with dead ducks, pheasants and the corpse of a particularly realistic wood pigeon which made me look hastily away.

  “Nothing like that here,” I said, “and it wasn’t in the hall so it must be upstairs.”

  The impact of Malcolm Hardy’s picture collection in the bedroom, though not as startling as the first time I saw it, was still disturbing.

  “I think they’re mostly reproductions,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, as if I encountered such things every day. “Prints or pictures taken from art magazines and framed.”

  “They all seem to be by famous artists,” Roger said. “A very eclectic selection. From Botticelli to Modigliani. But is there an Alma Tadema?”

  “There’s a reproduction of Canova’s Three Graces,” I said after a careful search, “but nothing else at all classical.”

  “You’re right it’s not here. Perhaps we’d better look in the other rooms up here just in case.”

  We checked the other bedrooms and the landing with no luck.

  “I suppose he might have hidden it away,” I suggested. “There’s boxes of stuff up in the attics. I mean, if he knew that his cousin was after it he might feel it would be safer if it wasn’t on view. Shall we have a look?”

  But in spite of much hauling about of dusty tea chests and old trunks we found nothing that resembled the missing picture. The water had been turned off in the bathroom so we weren’t able to wash our grubby hands there.