“By all means. I know one isn’t supposed to feed birds because it upsets the natural order of things, or something to that effect. It interferes with migration, I think. Could that be it? Or is it survival of the fittest, perhaps? Daniel read me something from one of the papers he takes, but I can’t remember.”
Leo, who had never once in his life thought about the ethics of feeding birds, and tried his best never to think of the ethics of anything, murmured something he hoped Mrs. Griffiths would interpret as she saw fit. He crouched down with his hand out, but the birds scattered as he moved.
“But the truth is,” Mrs. Griffiths went on, haphazardly scattering another handful of seeds onto the dirt, “I’m not sure there is a natural order of things anymore. I’m quite sure a good number of birds died during the war, don’t you think? So, really, how can it matter whether I feed these little fellows or not?”
This observation comported so thoroughly with Leo’s own worldview that he felt in perfect charity with the vicar’s wife. He returned to his feet and regarded her with new approval. “Cigarette?” he asked, producing the packet from his coat. From the way she was babbling with little prompting on his part, he guessed she was starved for conversation, and that it would take no effort to have her divulge anything she knew about the night of the murder.
“Oh, bless you,” she said, taking a cigarette and leaning forward for him to light it. “We can sit here, if you dare.” She gestured to what had once been a bench but was now a collection of half-rotten boards.
“I live dangerously,” he said, which was no less than the truth. The bench creaked ominously but seemed able to support them both. “How long have you lived here?”
“Going on eight years. The place was falling apart when Daniel was sent here, and this is such a tiny parish that there isn’t the money to fix it up. Heaven knows we can’t do anything about it ourselves, not with the children’s school fees and everything else.” Leo suspected that she was in the habit of apologizing for the state of her house. “The vicar who had this post before us didn't keep it up either, I’m afraid, so the poor shambles is going on four decades of neglect. Reverend Sommers must have been eighty when he finally died. I can hardly blame him for letting the roof leak.” She sighed. “And for letting the plumbing go to ruin.” She fell silent, as if in mourning for the plumbing.
“That would be Dr. Sommers’ uncle? Odd for a child to be sent to live with an elderly bachelor uncle.” He spoke in an offhand way that suggested he didn’t much care about Dr. Sommers either personally or professionally but was just trying to engage a woman in conversation.
She nodded. “The usual thing. Mother in the colonies, child sent to England to be educated and passed around amongst relations during the holidays.”
There was a hint of flatness in Mrs. Griffiths’ accent. She was perhaps Australian or South African, but had lived in England long enough to acquire most of the usual vowels. “I saw the doctor this morning on my walk,” Leo said. “And also a Mr. Marston, I think his name was? I’m afraid I startled him and, well, he might have taken it amiss.”
“Oh, dear. Did he snap at you? You can’t hold it against him. He had a bad war. He was skin and bones when he came here, and he never speaks of his people. I’m not sure if they died or if...” She let her voice trail off, as if realizing she was spilling secrets that weren’t her own. “In any event,” she said more briskly, “you can’t blame him for being a bit jumpy. Lord knows I go a bit daft when I have to take a mouse out of a trap, so it’s no wonder men can get strange after all that killing.” She scattered another handful of seeds, even though the birds, having gorged themselves, seemed to have lost interest. Leo remained silent, hoping Mrs. Griffiths would talk more about Mr. Marston.
“Dr. Sommers’ father was another one. A shell shock case, I mean,” the vicar’s wife continued. “Or, battle fatigue, I suppose we’re calling it now. Of course, I never knew the man, but he took his own life and then his wife ran off to India. Or maybe it was the other way around. Things do get jumbled in the retelling.”
“I haven’t even been here for two days and I’ve already heard half a dozen versions of how the charwoman died,” Leo said casually, pausing to take a drag from his cigarette.
“They’ll never stop talking about it,” Mrs. Griffiths said. “They run out of things to talk about in a village, so they run through the same gossip again and again. Every unfortunate thing one’s ever done gets talked to death.” The vehemence in her tone made Leo wonder whether she spoke from experience. “I suppose one can’t blame them. One does get bored in a place like this.” She took a final puff on her cigarette and then dropped it to the ground where she crushed it with a badly scuffed boot.
A shadow fell on the ground before them, and when Leo looked up, he saw Colonel Armstrong’s fair-haired secretary approaching from the same garden gate through which Leo had entered a few minutes earlier. He wore an unremarkable dark hat and blandly nondescript tweed coat, as if trying to subdue his good looks. If so, he had failed. In the colorless, derelict garden, he was like a bird of paradise among the sparrows.
“They’re certainly talking about poor Mrs. Hoggett now,” the secretary said. “I had to mail a letter, and everyone at the post office was talking about how much Veronal had been found in her system. System sounds horribly euphemistic.”
Mrs. Griffiths seemed to remember that introductions were required of her. “Edward, this is Mr. Page. Mr. Page, Mr. Norris,” she said, unhooking the spectacles from her collar and perching them on her nose, as if to get a better look at the visitor. “You look very fine for a trip to the post office. Why are my glasses always smudged?” she asked, seemingly to nobody in particular. She dug a handkerchief out of her pocket to wipe the lenses, but two other handkerchiefs came tumbling out. Leo bent to retrieve them, and saw that Mrs. Griffiths’ careless style of dress extended to her handkerchiefs—they were made of plain cotton, threadbare, embroidered with what he assumed to be the initials of her maiden name: M.O. Given that her children appeared to be school age, the lady was highly overdue for a purchase of new handkerchiefs.
Leo stood and tipped the brim of his hat at the secretary. “The girl at the Rising Sun said you were both there the night she died. Must have been a dreadful shock.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Griffiths said unconvincingly before shaking her head and sighing. “If I’m honest, she was just the sort of woman one expects to be murdered.”
“Mary,” Mr. Norris reproved.
“Well, it’s true. I’ve lost count of all the tales I’ve heard from the old cats in this village. As if there’s something I could do about it.”
“What kind of tales?” Leo asked.
“She had a habit of poking her nose into things, I’m afraid.”
Leo didn’t like that one bit. It was his professional opinion that all you had to do was scratch a snoop and find a blackmailer, and blackmail complicated matters dreadfully.
“I can tell you, there’s nothing worth prying into at the hall,” Norris said. “Dullest post I’ve ever had. But the village does have its attractions.” He didn’t even try to conceal the fact that these words were directed at the vicar’s wife, but the lady seemed oblivious.
“The cook at the hall is very good,” Mrs. Griffiths said. “She manages to do marvelous things, even with rationing being what it is. A couple of turnips and some dried beef and she’ll have you eating like a king.”
Leo did not miss the way Norris rolled his eyes. The fellow had evidently come for a flirtation and was being rebuffed in favor of discussing the virtues of turnips.
Up close, there was no question but that Mary Griffiths was a very pretty woman. She was about his age, which was to say nearing thirty. He had at first thought her a good ten years older, closer to her husband’s age. Her particular style of bad dressing—a smudged pair of spectacles hanging from the collar of a badly darned jumper, a pencil tucked behind her ear, that hair—was the sort that transce
nded age. He might have thought Mrs. Griffiths was the stepmother of the children who had been present at the funeral, but the little girl looked so much like her mother that they had to be related. This likely meant Mrs. Griffiths had been married at about twenty, and at that age, she must have been a beauty.
Nevertheless, she had married an older clergyman. Did she ever wonder what the girl she had been must think of the life she led now, tossed outside while her much older husband met with Sunday school teachers? He thought briefly of Dorothea Brooke, who last night had married that decrepit old man despite Leo’s sternly telling his copy of Middlemarch that it was a bad idea. Not that Griffiths was in any way decrepit. But Leo could see how Norris might think it safe to assume that the pretty young wife of an older man might be up for a flirtation, or even more. Maybe she was. Maybe Mrs. Hoggett had found out.
He was searching for loose threads, anything he could pull on in order to unravel this mess of fabric. It might not lead him to the murderer, but it would lead him somewhere.
“The colonel must entertain often if he has such a good cook,” Leo suggested. He was coming sideways at the question he really wanted to ask, which was why the colonel had held the dinner party in the first place.
“No, not often. Occasionally he dines with people he knew from the war or his family’s business,” Norris said. “But never anything grand.”
Mrs. Griffiths muttered something that sounded like “skinflint.”
“But the evening of Mrs. Hoggett’s death, all the guests were people from the village, weren’t they?”
“He does that from time to time,” Mrs. Griffiths said. “He invites all the local eminences at once so as to discharge his social obligations for the quarter, I daresay. It’s usually the same group. Miss Pickering and Miss Delacourt are his neighbors, and they brought Wendy, naturally. James—that’s Dr. Sommers—went because he’s a darling dear and goes to all these terrible things. He was called away to a patient before we sat down to dine, though. And Edward was there, of course,” she said, gesturing at the secretary.
“It’s too awkward not to ask me to dine when there’s company,” the secretary said with a tone that was not quite a complaint. “And I evened out the numbers of men and women.”
“In the taproom I heard someone say they thought the charwoman might have been killed by accident,” Leo lied. “That maybe one of the guests was the intended victim.”
“Oh, everybody’s taken to amateur sleuthing,” Mrs. Griffiths said dismissively. “You wouldn’t believe the theories I’ve heard. Besides, it makes no sense.” She tapped her cigarette onto the bare earth. “How do you push the wrong person down the stairs? Or is the idea that the Veronal was intended for somebody else, and Mrs. Hoggett got it by mistake, and toppled down the stairs on her own? That could be. Mrs. Hoggett was just the type of servant to drink from a glass after clearing the table, I’m afraid.”
“Whose glass?” Leo asked. He knew that the police laboratory had examined all the glasses and dishes, and no traces of Veronal or any other suspicious substance had been found in any of them. But he wanted to hear all about the village’s most secret enmities.
“The colonel,” Mrs. Griffiths said at once.
“Mary,” Norris said reproachfully.
“Why would someone want to kill Colonel Armstrong?” Leo asked innocently. “I thought you said he was perfectly boring.” He directed this last remark at the secretary.
Norris and Mrs. Griffiths stared at him and then glanced at one another. “Mr. Page,” Mrs. Griffiths said, “have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?”
Chapter 4
James checked his watch. He had an hour left before his evening patients would be waiting for him at the surgery, which was just enough time for a cup of tea at Little Briars. The Murphy boy was recovering from tonsillitis, an ointment had been prescribed for the postman’s chilblains, and the district nurse was cleaning a gash a farm laborer had gotten on her leg. There was not a single interesting or troubling case on his roster of patients, thank God.
As he walked up the drive, he saw Edith Pickering’s solicitor leaving the house. “Good evening, Henry,” James called.
“Damned freezing,” Henry responded, turning up the collar of his coat as he walked briskly to his car. “Stay warm, Sommers.”
It was unquestionably cold, but James hardly felt it. He had been walking nearly all day, visiting patients. Well, visiting patients and arguing with Special Branch agents in the woods. The memory unsettled him. Damn near everything unsettled him these days, which was the problem with having a brain that stubbornly refused to grasp that the war was over. Leo Page seemed like the living embodiment of a war that still roiled on in the dark recesses of James’s mind. That night in Caen, he had been certain he was stitching up a French freedom fighter, but at the vicarage, he had been equally certain Page was a mild-mannered clerk with a too-obvious taste for men. This juxtaposition left him feeling disoriented, as if the battlefields of France were encroaching into his village. The rustle of wind and the scent of hearth fire seemed to transform into the distant sounds of shellfire, the odor of gunpowder lingering on corpses—
He knocked on the heavy oak door of Little Briars, fighting the urge to press his face against it as a reminder that he was safe, he was home. Within seconds the door was thrown open by Wendy. “Hullo James. I’m an heiress,” she said. Her tone was light, but she had the bleak, unfocused look he was used to seeing on survivors of air raids.
“Pardon?”
“Mrs. Hoggett left it all to me.”
“How much money can she possibly have had?” She was a charwoman, for heaven’s sake.
“She said she had a bit put aside, but I didn’t know it was that much. Nearly a thousand pounds, which may not seem a lot to you, but I’ve never had any money at all, so I feel quite rich.”
People had been killed for less, James reflected, and then felt guilty for having formed the thought. Wendy must have guessed the turn of his mind, because she scowled. “It was a nasty trick for her to play, because now everybody’s going to think I did her in.”
“Nobody’s going to think anything of the sort,” James said automatically. He steered Wendy toward the parlor, where Cora and Edith shared the settee nearest to the fire. Edith was attacking her knitting with her customary fury while Cora absently stroked a ball of wool. The room was almost uncomfortably warm, and James had to peel off coat, muffler, hat, and gloves before sitting.
After the women had filled him in on the contents of Mrs. Hoggett’s will (“a single page,” Edith had said, jabbing a needle into the wool, “but Henry said it’ll stand.”), the four of them sat in stunned speechlessness.
“I can’t imagine where she came by it,” Edith said, her lips pursed in a way that suggested that she did not think the money could have been acquired by fair means.
“Wasn’t she an old servant of yours?” James asked. He did not miss the glance the two older ladies darted at one another. Before he could press the point, Wendy interrupted.
“What I can’t imagine is why she left it to me. Unless it was pity,” the girl said in a small voice, breaking the silence. Before anyone could protest, she hastily got to her feet and headed for the door. “I really ought to go feed the chickens.” A moment later they heard the back door slam and the chickens squawking.
“We’ve told her again and again that she’s welcome to stay with us as long as she likes,” Cora said. “Or for good. We’re fond of the girl.” There was an unspoken even if she is a bit odd at the end of Cora’s statement.
“She’s at that age,” Edith said. “You can’t say anything to please them.”
James thought Wendy was simply grieving—maybe not for the unpleasant Mrs. Hoggett, but in a more general sense. She had lost a mother and presumably a father before that, so this recent loss might brush the cobwebs off some old sorrow. James’s own parents had died when he was a child, and he had often wondered if tha
t was why death took him badly. He ought to have developed a callus over whatever part of his heart was meant for mourning, but instead, it was like a wound that never quite healed.
He took his leave. There was no sign of Wendy by the chicken coop or in the kitchen garden. She was probably traipsing about in the dark, which James didn’t care for at all. As he walked back to the village, he decided that the more he thought about it, the less he liked what Wendy had said about people suspecting she murdered Mrs. Hoggett for her money. Because she was right—people would speculate, again and again, until it took on the force of truth. After all, she was at that blasted dinner party. Wendy had always been a bit odd, they’d say, and it would be true. For the hundredth time, James cursed the Lewis baby for having chosen to be born that night; otherwise, he would have been at Wych Hall and might have seen what really happened.
The only way to stop that false story from being bandied about was to find out the truth behind Mrs. Hoggett’s death. He recoiled almost bodily from the prospect. Discovering the truth would mean an end to his grand plan of pretending it hadn’t happened. But he would do what it took to protect Wendy. She had nobody in this world besides a pair of elderly spinsters. James knew what it was like to be alone and adrift. So he set his jaw and headed toward the pub. As he walked, a chill that had nothing to do with the weather passed through him.
WHEN THE DOOR TO THE taproom of the Rising Sun swung open, letting in a gust of icy air, Leo wasn’t entirely surprised to see Dr. Sommers. This was a small village, after all. But he was surprised indeed when Sommers scanned the room and headed directly for Leo’s table. This was rather more forward behavior than Leo had expected from the doctor.
“May I...” The doctor bit his lip. “May I join you?”
“Please,” Leo said, gesturing to the empty chair across from him.
“What have you learned?” Sommers asked, pulling out the chair and sitting.
Hither Page (Page & Sommers Book 1) Page 4
