Belchester Box Set

by Andrea Frazer

  His eyes moved on to Maddie M-M’s, and found it to be roughly the same size as that of Fifi’s. This one was red suede, with little flowers embroidered on it, and he wondered that he had never looked at these everyday workhorses before, in all their various guises.

  Becoming thoroughly interested, now, he carried on moving his eyes from woman to woman, taking notice of their taste in such receptacles, and idly musing what one would find, should one venture to open them.

  Moody had not noticed that Hugo had fallen into a brown study, and was carrying on with his tirade. ‘And as for you,’ he shouted, pointing at Col. Heyhoe-Caramac. ‘What sort of man beats his dog? I shall be informing the RSPCA about what I’ve learnt of your behaviour towards animals.’

  At this point, now wild-eyed, as he slowly became aware that nobody was listening to him any more, and had begun to talk amongst themselves, he raised his voice as loud as he could and yelled, ‘I know who killed the captain!’

  This certainly drew attention back to him as, his face red, his hair rumpled where he had run his hands through it at the thought that they could have ignored him at such an important part of this denouement, he prepared to reveal all. His mouth wide open, he declared in a bellow, ‘It was all of you! Every single one of you, or at least in pairs. Did you think I didn’t notice what a case of overkill it was? He was poisoned! He was stabbed! He was garrotted! He was hit over the head! And his throat was cut!

  ‘Do you honestly think that I never read Murder on the Orient Express? Did you think you could fool me that easily? You all had adequate motive to do away with him, and I think you got together and planned the whole thing. Do you know how long you can get in prison for conspiracy? And I haven’t finished yet, not by a long chalk!’ He now looked and sounded like a raving lunatic.

  Hugo, meanwhile, had continued his visual examination of the various handbags in laps and on the floor of the library, and was just beginning to appreciate how much better than pockets they were. One could carry so much in them without disturbing the line of the cut of one’s clothes. One could simply put them down, without having to go around with a load of clunky things in one’s pockets.

  He had just decided what a jolly good idea they were, and was quite chagrined that men could not use them, when his eyes fell on Porky’s bag, and a small light went on at the back of his mind, accompanied by the almost inaudible tinkle of a very small bell.

  The bag was so small that he had hardly noticed it, propped up against an ankle: what he thought was referred to as a clutch bag, which could contain little more than keys and a lipstick. On Boxing Day, he had been impressed by the size of the tapestry bag she toted around with her, thinking it as big as Manda’s, and here she was today, with something in which it would be impossible to keep even something as bulky as a hair brush.

  All around him, Inspector Moody was being conspicuously ignored as the guests lost themselves in happy chatter. When Enid had gone round earlier with sausage rolls and mince pies, she had received a universal refusal. As she circulated, once more, in this vastly relieved atmosphere, with her little snacks, the uptake was a hundred per cent, as was Beauchamp’s offer of glasses of sherry. Both snacks and drinks were being relished as the babble of conversation rose in volume, to the ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’ chorus present in any parliamentary broadcast, and Moody was on his feet now, about to explode with wrath at this disrespectful attitude to one of his rank.

  The light at the back of Hugo’s brain suddenly glowed like phosphorus, and the bell rang with the sonorous tones of its campanological brother, Big Ben. It was all to do with handbags! The book was involved in there somewhere, but the clue to the murderer was a handbag, and he believed he had just had a revelation.

  As Moody called for silence, Hugo sprang, as quickly as he could manage, from a sitting position, and yelled, ‘It’s her!’

  All eyes were swivelled to look in the direction in which he was pointing, to reveal Porky, her face as white as a sheet, and opening and closing her mouth like a landed fish.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re saying, you doddering old fart?’ spat Moody, as Lady Amanda called out, ‘Explain yourself, Hugo! What was Porky? What are you saying? Tell me this instant.’

  ‘Not until I’ve asked a couple of questions first,’ replied Hugo rebelliously. He would not have his thunder stolen; no one was going to rain on his parade today. The library, now, was absolutely silent as he spoke. ‘Porky, I would like to know the name of the publishing house with which Popeye was dealing,’ he demanded in a much more forceful voice than was usual for him.

  ‘That’s none of your damned business, Chummy!’ she retorted, looking daggers at him.

  ‘And how are your finances at the moment? I would have thought that Popeye would have had a rather plump advance from a publisher who thought he was exploding a social bomb.’

  ‘That’s none of your damned business either, you nosy old fool.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Hugo?’ asked Lady Amanda, not having caught the direction of his thoughts yet.

  ‘We’ve heard, courtesy of the well-read inspector here today, about the sensitive information that was in Popeye’s book, and from the attitude in this room now, I think that we can take it that it’s not worth a penny.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Major Mapperley-Minto. ‘I admit that I did cheat at cards, but only when I was playing with her husband. I spotted him first off as a card-sharp, and I was determined to play him at his own game. Apart from the few games we played together, and he soon stopped asking me if I fancied a hand, I have never cheated at cards in my life.’

  Everyone was clamouring to have their say now, and it was Sir Jolyon ffolliat DeWinter who wrested the floor from the others, next. ‘As for that signature on my father’s cheque, it was one he had meant to sign before he went away on business for a couple of days, but if I hadn’t settled the debt, I would have been in real trouble. I was only a young stripling, and when the bank questioned the signature, my father backed me to the hilt, and said he had been feeling rather shaky that day, and the signature was, in fact, his.’

  ‘And with reference to my poaching, my father knew what I was up to, but never said anything until years later, when he explained he had kept quiet because he didn’t want me to end up a rotten shot like old Bonkers.’

  At this moment, Colonel Henry Heyhoe-Caramac shot him an evil glance, and rose to his feet for his moment of justification. ‘I may have been a bit rough when I trained the dog to which you were referring, but only with a rolled up newspaper, and that training wasn’t a waste of time. When I fell off the barn roof, it was dear old Stumpy who went back to the house and barked his head off until someone would follow him. I’d gashed my leg badly on the way down, and if it hadn’t been for that dog, I’d have bled to death. So there!’

  Lt Col. Featherstonehaugh-Armitage now stood, taking his turn in the limelight. If everyone else was going to explain away their apparent misdemeanours, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t have his turn too.

  ‘My father had no idea that I’d ‘borrowed’ money from the family business, for the simple reason that he had what we refer to now as Alzheimer’s, but in those days, was referred to as ‘senile dementia’. My mother wanted it kept as quiet as possible, because she felt it would bring shame on the family – you know how people used to think in those days.

  ‘Anyway, as co-signatory on the account, she very kindly loaned me the money until I could pay it back, which was something my father never could have done, because he didn’t even know who I was, by that time. Does that satisfy you, Inspector bloody Moody?’

  In the meantime, Lady Amanda had made her way across to the unpopular policeman, and in the guise of offering him some words of comfort at this sudden implosion of his multiple-murderer theory, whispered in his ear, ‘If you say one word about the Golightly family, I shall have you in court so quickly on a defamation of character and slander charge that your feet won’t touch the ground, son
ny!’

  She then went to the middle of the room and requested that Hugo go on with his accusation.

  Hugo, in fine form now, took the floor once more and declared, as if in court, ‘It is my belief that Porky brought that huge handbag with her on Boxing Day because of financial irregularities on the part of her husband, and that, in it, she had secreted all the weapons that were used on her husband in his murder.

  ‘Her intention was to confuse and confound, for she knew how unpopular he was. She relied on this unpopularity, so that some dolt,’ at this point, he looked at Moody, ‘would come to the conclusion that all the guests were in collusion, and had conspired to kill him.

  ‘I expect that you will find something in her house – maybe a bronze, or something of that sort – with which she brained him. He was garrotted, and the cord or wire, or whatever was used, must have been cut from somewhere. I suggest her garden shed be examined in minute detail. His throat was also cut. I put it to you,’ he was in fine courtroom drama form now, ‘that he was stabbed with the knife that also cut his throat, and that that knife was none other than the one he used at his own desk for opening mail. I’m sure I’ve seen it somewhere before, and I’m fairly certain it was in his house.’

  At this, there was a general murmur of agreement, which really gratified Hugo, as he hadn’t been in Popeye’s house for a very long time, and was actually winging it now. ‘As for the poison, may I suggest a thorough rummage through the greenhouse might throw up an old week-killing product that contains something now banned?’

  Porky raised her considerable bulk from the chair and spat across the room, ‘You foul old fiend. How did you know all that?’

  ‘Because you’ve just confirmed it for me, thank you very much,’ replied Hugo, not forgetting his manners, even in the face of melodrama.

  PC Glenister moved unobtrusively from his position in the background and slickly applied handcuffs to Porky’s wrists, before looking towards his superior for instructions as to how he should proceed.

  Moody had grabbed a sherry with each hand from Beauchamp’s beckoning tray, and was too busy pouring them down his throat to even acknowledge that he had noticed what Glenister had done.

  It was, or course, Lady Amanda who took charge of the situation, nodding to Beauchamp to stay where he was, while the inspector quenched his thirst at his leisure, although it seemed a pity to see such a fine old sherry being downed as if it were cordial.

  ‘Come on, Porky, spill the beans. Why did you really do it? Was it all down to money? I thought you were loaded. In fact, I thought that was why Popeye married you in the first place,’ she asked baldly.

  ‘I was loaded. Back then. But I had no idea how Popeye had been getting through the money, and when I went Christmas shopping just a while ago, I had my bank card refused in two shops before I thought to call into the bank to see what the problem was. The problem was that there was next to nothing left in our account, because Popeye had spent it all. And he’d always been so mean and frugal with me.

  ‘I went off home in a rage, and on the way I thought that all he could talk about for months had been this bloody book of his, so I thought I’d have a little rifle through his drawers when he next went out, so that I could work out if he’d just borrowed a chunk of it temporarily, while waiting for his advance cheque to arrive.

  ‘Boy, was I a sucker! There was no advance cheque. All I found in his desk were rejection letters from over a score of publishers. The only contract I could lay my hands on was from a vanity publishing house, which he was actually paying to print the bloody thing, and he’d ordered thousands and thousands of copies, as if he wanted to stock every book shop in the country. That’s where the last of the money went!

  ‘I was in such a rage that I felt almost calm. I opened up the computer and began to read what he had written – something of which he probably didn’t think I was capable – and it was absolutely terrible. It wasn’t just that he didn’t have enough dynamite to blow his own nose, it was the grammar and the spelling too. And talk about purple prose. If he paid for that to be published – and with my money, I might add – he’d be a laughing stock, and a broke one at that.

  ‘I rang the publishing house after checking the cheque book, and told them I’d put a stop on the cheque, and they weren’t to go ahead with anything until I said so, and if they didn’t do what I asked, I’d go to the papers about them publishing a book that was likely to attract some notoriety in the courts, because all those mentioned in it would sue the pants off both the author and his publisher. I was absolutely incandescent with fury.

  ‘And, I wasn’t quite prepared to face poverty without even the company of my old friends, and he had some hefty insurance policies on his life, so I just thought, why not? Why not remove the only fly in the ointment of my life, and at least preserve what little money I had left and collect on the insurance?’

  There was a general chorus of, ‘Porky!’

  ‘Don’t you dare look down your noses at me! What was I supposed to do? Take it all in good part and put my name on the list for social housing? I’d certainly no hopes of maintenance if I divorced him, so the only way out I could see was to do away with him completely. Why are you all looking so shocked? None of you liked him!’

  Constable Glenister helped Porky to her feet, moved over to where Inspector Moody was sitting and pulled him by the shoulder of his mackintosh until he stood up. He turned briefly towards the assembled company and wished them a cheery ‘good day’ before making his exit, on his return journey back to the police station. Once outside, he unlocked the car, ushered his prisoner into the back seat, then opened the passenger door for the inspector. ‘I think I’d better drive, don’t you, sir?’ he asked, removing his helmet before assisting the broken man into the car.

  Chapter Sixteen

  OMG – Again!

  After seeing the thunderstruck guests off the premises, Lady Amanda, Hugo and Enid gathered in the drawing room, waiting for Beauchamp to join them with a tray of cocktails, not only because it was ‘cocktail o’clock’, but because they had had a very trying afternoon, and needed a little kick to revive them.

  ‘I say, Manda, who would have thought it of poor old Porky?’ declared Hugo, a smile of victory hovering around his lips.

  ‘Well, you obviously, you cunning old bloodhound, you. How on earth did you work it out?’ retorted Lady Amanda, looking a shade jealous of Hugo’s revelations in the library.

  ‘I wouldn’t have given it a thought, if I hadn’t tripped over your handbag, old thing. Sort of put the things in my mind, so to speak, and when that dreary little inspector was droning on about the pathetic contents of Popeye’s book, I just let my eyes and mind wander, examining the women’s bags and comparing them.

  ‘Yours had contained what appeared to be the entire contents of a garden shed and make-up counter combined, and I wondered how much stuff other women carried round with them. I thought I was getting quite a feel for colour and style, when my eyes lit on Porky’s bag. I don’t know if you noticed it, but it was one of those tiny things that you can tuck under one arm. Is it a clutch bag?’ he asked.

  ‘Where on earth did you learn so much about ladies’ handbags, Hugo?’ Enid asked, making him blush.

  ‘Just the sort of thing that one picks up, you know? Anyway, there was something at the back of my head that said that bag was somehow wrong, and I didn’t have the faintest idea why I should think such a thing, when I had a vision of this vast tapestry bag, and realised that when she was here on Boxing Day, she had had an absolutely enormous specimen with her. Then I suddenly lighted on why she needed such a big one.’

  ‘To carry all the necessary weapons to make it look like a crowd of people had murdered her husband,’ supplied Lady Amanda. ‘And I actually saw her put her gloves into it when she arrived, so now we know why there were no fingerprints on anything. It did fleetingly cross my mind, with them being so obviously at loggerheads with each other, that she might have cho
sen that one just to annoy him, but then I thought no more of it, with so much going on. Clever old Hugo!

  ‘I must say, I’ve heard of crowds of people being massacred by a lunatic individual, and an individual being massacred by a crowd, but a massacre being committed by one person on only one other is really bizarre. But how ingenious of her to think of it in the first place!’

  ‘Manda!’ Hugo admonished her. ‘The poor woman’s going to prison for murder. Have you no sympathy?’

  ‘Not really. She should have kept a closer eye on her finances if they had joint accounts. She was the one who had the money when they married, and she should have been more aware of what was going on; and made regular checks. Anyway, as Popeye’s book hasn’t already flooded the market, she can claim that his death nullifies the contract, and will have no problem with the cancelled cheque, although I suppose that’s the least of her worries at the moment. Now, where’s that man? BEAUCHaargh! There you are! You nearly scared the life out of me, Beauchamp.’

  ‘That’s Beecham, my lady!’ the manservant retorted softly.

  ‘No it’s not, and I’m not deaf, you know. Not yet, anyway. I heard exactly what you said. So, what have you got for us tonight, then? Something appropriate, I hope,’ she asked, rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

  ‘I have a White Christmas for you again, my lady and a Wobbly Knee for Mr Hugo, as he’s still suffering. It might, perhaps, have been more appropriate to serve him with a Little White Lie, but I don’t think the police suspected anything when he said he’d seen the knife on the captain’s desk.’

  Hugo turned red and smiled at the same time. ‘First time for everything, what?’ he retorted.