by Joyce Cato
No doubt they’d also made good use of the couple of hours peace and quiet left to them to discuss her defence and map out a strategy for her trial.
Jenny hoped so.
As soon as they’d docked, Graves and Rycroft had left with their prisoner, David Leigh following on close behind, and Jenny had taken advantage of the peace and quiet to give the galley a thorough clean and to pack her case.
Lucas had sent Francis back to Buscot to ready the house for his return, so the silent valet was no longer on board. Jenny was glad. She still found him creepy.
‘Well, then, ready for the off, Miss Starling?’ Lucas asked, coming to rest by the port deck rail, once more back to his relaxed and normal self.
The parrot hopped off his shoulder and waddled along the railing towards the big cook, who reached into her handbag to withdraw six thin wafer biscuits. She’d cooked them especially for the bird whilst the Swan was sailing to Swinford.
The parrot took the offering with a solemn blink of his eye, and proceeded, surprisingly neatly, to scoff the lot.
‘I’ll have to get a lift back to Buscot to pick up my van,’ Jenny agreed. ‘But I can’t say as I’ll be sorry to get off the boat,’ she added archly. ‘After you’ve paid me my fee, of course.’
Lucas grinned at her, then produced his wallet and counted out her wages. Jenny thanked him and put the money safely away in her handbag. Just as she snapped the catch closed, she heard a car pull up and watched it park neatly on the grass verge.
She was not particularly surprised to see Rycroft and Graves emerge.
‘It’s all right, sir, she’s still here,’ she heard Graves say. A moment later he negotiated the planks and stepped through the boarding gate. The look he gave Lucas was enough to send him, and his parrot, scurrying off into the main salon, and well out of the way.
Inspector Rycroft joined his sergeant and the cook on the port deck, and grabbed the only deckchair. He looked rather frayed at the edges.
‘Everything … done?’ she asked delicately.
Rycroft grunted. ‘When we got to the station, David Leigh forbade his wife to make a statement and immediately got on to some big-shot silk he knows in London. A QC who’s never lost a case, or some such thing. When we left, Mrs Leigh had been charged, and was awaiting the doctor. I thought it best to call one in.’
Jenny nodded. ‘A good idea,’ she concurred.
Sergeant Graves, who’d left to purloin the solid chairs that were still sitting out on the starboard deck, returned at that moment and very firmly set them up.
The cook took the hint and sat down, resting her packed suitcase at her feet.
‘Now then, Miss Starling,’ Rycroft began, settling himself back in a chair, for all the world like a boy scout settling around a camp fire, all set to hear the best ghost story ever told. ‘I want to know exactly how you deduced that Dorothy Leigh was the killer. Or was it just a good guess?’
‘A good guess?’ she squeaked, so indignantly it set all her magnificent flesh aquiver.
It was, Sergeant Graves had to admit silently to himself, a most impressive sight.
‘Sorry,’ Rycroft said hastily, realizing he’d rather badly overstepped the mark. ‘But I do want to know how you knew she was the culprit.’ He himself had never seriously even suspected her.
Jenny sighed, but was mollified. ‘Well, for a long while I didn’t know it was her,’ she began, scrupulously honest, even to the last. ‘Even when I discovered how the murder had been committed, it didn’t tell me the identity of the murderer.’
‘Yes,’ Graves broke in, unable to contain himself. ‘But just how the Dickens did you get onto that in the first place?’
Jenny shrugged. ‘Well, right from the first, I found that rope and boot very suspicious. As a way to drown a man, it seemed so far-fetched and needless. Why not just cosh Olney over the head and heave his body into the river? That made much more sense. It could be argued that Mr Olney had somehow fallen overboard, banged his head on the side of the boat on the way in and drowned. But the rope and boot was so theatrical. Tying a man up by his ankle, dangling him over the side of a boat and drowning him. It was so outlandish. And when I saw the body for myself the second time, and I was able to take a more detailed look at it, and could detect no bumps on the head … Well, I began to doubt the scenario the killer had set up even more. So, when the medical examiner confirmed that Gabriel hadn’t been drugged either, I was absolutely convinced that the rope and boot had been deliberately planted.’
‘The classic red herring so beloved of classic detective fiction, in fact,’ Rycroft murmured appreciatively. Now that the murder had been solved, he could afford to relax and be magnanimous.
Jenny nodded. ‘Yes. Exactly. But the police surgeon told you that Mr Olney had, in fact, drowned.’ She paused. ‘And his corpse was undoubtedly wet, and had left a pool of water in the cupboard. So, the facts pointed to drowning as the murder method. But not in the way the murderer wanted us to think. It was obvious, then, that I had to think of another way in which the murder had been committed. How else could Gabriel Olney have been murdered by drowning?’
‘And you came to the conclusion that he must have been drowned in the freshwater butt,’ Graves murmured, his excitement every bit as intense as that of his superior now.
Jenny smiled. ‘I didn’t just grab that conclusion out of thin air, you know,’ she said, trying to curb their eagerness. ‘I did have a few clues pointing me in that direction.’
Rycroft leaned forward in his chair. ‘It had something to do with the way you sniffed the body, didn’t it?’ he demanded, his rather indelicate way of putting it making the cook colour slightly.
‘Er, yes,’ she agreed. ‘I was puzzled by the fact that I couldn’t smell the river on him, you see. Even a river as clean as the Thames smells … well, like a river.’
Rycroft leaned back in his chair, his expression sublime. ‘Ah. That’s what you meant when you asked me if I could smell anything. And when I said I couldn’t—’
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Only freshwater would leave no odour at all. And then there was the fact that Mr Olney’s body had dried out in such a clean way. I looked and looked at him, but I couldn’t see a bit of river weed, or slime, or even a smidgen of river mud on him.’
‘So that’s why you stared at him with such a puzzled look on your face,’ Rycroft mused.
Jenny nodded. ‘Exactly. So, because there was no river smell on him, or weed or mud, I came to the conclusion that he must have drowned in clean, fresh water, and not in the river at all.’
Graves nodded and, like so many police officers before him, said thoughtfully, ‘It all makes perfect sense, now that it’s been explained to you.’
‘Yes, but I still don’t see how you came to suspect Mrs Leigh,’ Rycroft said impatiently. ‘Why not her husband? Or Lucas? Or any of the others. They all had equally strong motives.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Yes, they did. And that’s what started me off looking in the right direction,’ she added, once more confusing the other two. ‘You remember when we discussed how risky it all was, how the murder itself smacked of such desperation?’
Both men nodded.
‘Well, I kept asking myself, what made the killer so sure that he, or she, could possibly get away with it? On the face of it, the murderer seemed so reckless and very willing to take as many risks as he or she needed to. Anybody could have caught them out. I asked myself, if I were the murderer, would I be so willing to leave everything to chance, even if I were as desperate as desperate could be? And I came to the inescapable conclusion that no, I wouldn’t.’
Rycroft frowned but said nothing. He was following her thinking but still, for the life of him, couldn’t see how the cook had made the jump (and the correct jump, as it turned out) to Dorothy Leigh.
‘So, I put myself in the killer’s shoes,’ Jenny continued. ‘If I took it for granted that the killing wasn’t quite as reckless as it looked, then the killer mu
st have done something to lessen his or her chances of getting caught. So I looked out for anything that would point in that direction. And, of course, there was one obvious, in fact, glaring example.’
Rycroft blinked.
‘The note to Jasmine Olney,’ Graves said matter-of-factly.
‘Exactly,’ Jenny said. ‘Somebody had ensured that Jasmine Olney would go to her room and stay there, for some considerable time, because she was expecting Brian O’Keefe to pay her a visit. Now the writer of that note could have been anybody, of course. Everyone (including Dorothy Leigh) had seen how Jasmine ogled the engineer. It could safely be assumed that Jasmine would take the bait. But we knew that O’Keefe didn’t send the note, because he was searching her room at the time and nearly got caught. No, it was a fair bet that it was the killer that sent it.’
‘So you eliminated Jasmine as a suspect?’ Graves chipped in.
Jenny nodded. ‘But there was also one other point about that note that struck me quite forcibly at the time.’
She glanced at Graves, who reluctantly shook his head.
‘The writer was at pains to make sure that Jasmine stayed near the door,’ she emphasized.
‘That’s right,’ Rycroft agreed. ‘In case the husband came up,’ he added, remembering the note in perfect detail.
‘Yes. But why would the killer want Jasmine to stay near the door?’ the cook asked. ‘At the time, I had no idea, but I always kept it in mind.’
‘All right,’ Graves said, his big hands interlocking in his lap as he followed her reasoning through. ‘The killer managed to get Jasmine out of the way. But nobody else, as far as I can see, was lured into any kind of trap.’
Jenny smiled. ‘Except David Leigh,’ she chided mildly. ‘Dorothy urged him to go to his room to work on the will he’d brought with him. As a solicitor’s wife, she knew it would keep him busy for nearly an hour or so. And the last person Dorothy wanted hanging around was her husband. She adored the man. For a start, she wouldn’t want to involve him, and for another thing, she was terrified that if he realized what she’d done, he might be so disgusted with her that he’d leave her.’
‘But the man adores her,’ Rycroft snorted.
‘Yes, but she was willing to take no chance of losing him. That’s the reason she killed in the first place. And in that, I think I was a little at fault there,’ Jenny said, with genuine regret and self-horror. ‘I was the one who pointed out to her that there was more than just an annoying flirtation behind Gabriel’s pursuit of her. I more or less came straight out and said that the man was planning on dragging her name through the divorce courts – or at least, bandying it about in a very pubic manner.’
Sergeant Graves shook his head. ‘You can’t blame yourself for that, Miss Starling,’ he said. ‘You weren’t to know how unstable she was. Besides, if Olney had gone ahead with his plans – and knowing the kind of man he was, I’m sure that he would have done – she’d soon have realized for herself what was afoot, and killed him anyway. She’d just have done it a little later than she did, that’s all.’
Rycroft shifted impatiently on his seat. ‘All right, so you realized the killer had got Jasmine out of the way. And David Leigh was sent off to his room to work on the will, so that was him out of the way. Did….’ Rycroft suddenly sat bolt upright. ‘Wait a minute. Jasmine was in her room from about 2.15 to 3.10. The same as David Leigh. But the rope and boot and the wet planking on the port deck wasn’t discovered until 4.15!’ Rycroft was almost incandescent with disbelief. ‘The timing’s all wrong.’
Jenny and Sergeant Graves both smiled at the ugly little man with almost identical, patient smiles.
‘But, sir,’ Graves said, not wanting it to be the cook to explain the obvious, ‘if the rope and boot were fakes, so was the wet deck. Mrs Leigh faked the timing of the murder, just as she faked the method of the murder.’
‘Oh.’ Rycroft leaned back. ‘So when Miss Starling went back to the galley after asking her if she wanted some dry toast and a cup of tea, she slipped away from her husband and set up the rope and boot and wet the planking then?’
Jenny nodded. ‘Yes. Luckily for her, though, Jasmine Olney had chosen that moment to slip upstairs to change. Other than that, it was as simple as ABC. There were plenty of places on board she could have hidden Olney’s boot and a length of rope. No doubt she told her husband she was just going upstairs to get an aspirin, or to nip to the loo or something. It wouldn’t have taken her a minute to set up the rope and boot and lower a bucket down on the rope to slosh water all over the deck.’
‘Or her husband might have known what she was up to,’ Rycroft said darkly, then just as quickly shook his head. ‘No. No, of course he didn’t. She didn’t want him to know, as you said, and he couldn’t have faked his shock on hearing her confession.’
Jenny nodded.
‘You were talking about how the killer lessened the odds on being discovered.’ It was left to Sergeant Graves to get them firmly back on track. ‘You’ve proved she kept Jasmine Olney and her own husband out of the way. But what about the others?’
Jenny sighed. ‘I couldn’t find any proof that any of the others had been deliberately waylaid.’
Rycroft pursed his lips. ‘So that still left Lucas, Brian O’Keefe and Captain Tobias who could have come across her killing Olney?’ He whistled softly. ‘She was still taking an awful lot of risks. By his own admission, Lucas had been wandering around the boat at random. He could have come across her at any time.’
‘Ah,’ Jenny said, ‘but that was one of the other things that made me realize that Dorothy Leigh was the only one who could have killed Mr Olney.’
This time it was Graves who frowned in puzzlement. ‘I don’t follow you, Miss Starling. How do you come to that conclusion?’
Jenny smiled. ‘Tell me, Sergeant, just what do you think Lucas would have done if he had seen Dorothy Leigh kill Gabriel Olney? Bear in mind that, with Olney dead, he gets to keep his boat, and be rid of a blackmailer. And keep in mind too that Lucas was very fond of Dorothy. Do you think he’d turn her in, or pretend he’d seen nothing and keep his mouth firmly shut?’
Graves opened his mouth, then shut it again.
Jenny nodded. ‘Now, what do you think would have happened if Brian O’Keefe had seen her? Could you seriously see a good Irish God-fearing Catholic handing over a pregnant woman to the cops? Bear in mind too that Brian O’Keefe, like most men of his sort, do their best to avoid the police as a matter of principle. Much the same could be said if Tobias Lester saw her. Both Lester and O’Keefe stood to lose their jobs and their homes. But with Olney dead….’
Rycroft nodded. ‘I begin to see what you’re getting at. She relied on the fact that everybody had reason to want Olney dead.’
‘And that nobody – or at least, none of the men – would want to see a pregnant woman go to prison for it,’ Graves said. ‘Not if avoiding it meant that they only had to keep their mouths shut.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Right. As outrageous as it might sound in this day and age, she was actually relying on male gallantry to keep her safe, if she was seen,’ she admitted. ‘But that’s not really out of character for her. For all her life, Dorothy Leigh has been treated like delicate china. Her petite build and fair delicate colouring has guaranteed that men have always placed her on a pedestal. She’d take it for granted that, if the worst did come to the worst, and she was seen killing Olney, that the men would band together to protect her. Especially when she could tell them what Olney had threatened to do to her and David. Only Jasmine Olney might want to see her husband’s killer get caught,’ the cook pointed out, ‘and then, not so much out of a desire for justice, but more likely because it would put her in the clear.’
Jenny thought about the widow for a moment and smiled wryly. ‘That’s why Jasmine had to be got out of the way. And, incidentally, why the note stressed that Jasmine should stay by the door. Dorothy wanted her as far away from the window as possible. The fresh water
butt, remember, was on the starboard deck. It was the one thing that could have caught her out if Jasmine had happened to hear anything outside. But even in that, Dorothy Leigh was lucky. Brian O’Keefe shut the window as he escaped down onto the lower deck. So, as it was, Mrs Olney didn’t hear a thing as her husband was being drowned just yards away, more or less right under her window.’
Graves sighed. ‘That’s another thing that gets me. In fact, it’s the only thing that makes me glad that we actually caught her. It was such a cold-hearted way to kill a man.’
Jenny sighed. ‘She was desperate. And, no matter what you feel about it, you have to admit that it was very clever.’
Rycroft nodded. ‘How do you think it was accomplished, Miss Starling?’
The cook shrugged. ‘Very easily, I should imagine. She got the trolley and the plastic sheet from the engine room when O’Keefe was elsewhere and took them to the water butt. Then she hunted out Gabriel and told him some pretty story – probably that an earring had dropped off and fallen in the water butt and that her arms weren’t long enough to reach the bottom, and could he help? You must remember that Olney had been pursuing her for some time. He’d jump at the chance to perform such a simple, gallant little task. It would earn him brownie points with the lady, if nothing else. And you must remember the kind of man Olney was – he no doubt thought it was only a matter of time before Dorothy Leigh fell for his charm. He probably thought that her request to come to her aid was just her way of flirting with him.’
Graves snorted. ‘So she takes him to the water butt, and he leans in and starts fishing around for the bauble, but can’t find it.’
‘So he has to stand right up on tiptoe and lean even further in. Yes,’ Rycroft said softly. ‘I can see how that would work.’
‘Then,’ Jenny finished, ‘it was a simple matter to grab his legs and upend him head-first into the butt.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d have had the strength though,’ Rycroft said dubiously, even though the lady herself had admitted, in her rush to clear her husband, that that was indeed exactly what she had done.
