Down the Hatch

by M C Beaton

  “Give me a couple of hours to sort out the formalities and get rid of this lot,” Cathy whispered to Agatha, “then meet me back at my flat. I’ve got something to show you.”

  * * *

  Agatha and Toni trotted down the steps in the grassy embankment leading to the main door of Cathy Nelson’s apartment block. They sheltered beneath umbrellas until they were inside the entrance hall, then collapsed and shook them to get rid of the excess water as they waited for the lift. The lift, however, failed to appear. According to the indicator lights, it was stubbornly stuck on the second floor.

  “Come on, Toni,” said Agatha, turning towards the stairwell. “We’re fit enough to climb a couple of flights.”

  They hurried up the stairs, and on reaching the second floor, Toni turned right.

  “Mrs. Nelson’s flat is this way, isn’t it?” she said.

  Agatha nodded, unwilling to talk lest it show how hard she was breathing.

  “Look,” Toni pointed, “the door’s not properly closed.”

  “That’s strange.” Agatha had now recovered enough to speak, and pushed the door wide open. “Hello? Mrs. Nelson? Anyone home?”

  There was no response, so the two women made their way inside. The heavy rain clouds had made the flat quite dark, and there were lights on in the short hall and the sitting room. Laid out on the coffee table, Agatha could see the documents that Mrs. Nelson had concealed during their previous visit.

  “Check the other rooms, Toni.” As she flicked through the pages, her hand nudged against one of two cigarette packs on the table. It rattled. Curious, she picked them both up. One was almost full with cigarettes; the other had nothing in it but a small gold lapel badge. The Admiral’s president’s badge, Agatha mused. Was that a strange thing for Cathy Nelson to keep? Maybe she wanted to sell it. It was gold, after all, but quite small and not worth very much. And why hide it away in an empty cigarette packet?

  She returned to the documents, which included a hand-written letter from Cathy Nelson to a company called Ancestry Tracer and a report the company had prepared for her. What she saw in the report left her startled.

  “No sign of her anywhere,” Toni reported. “What’s that on the mantelpiece?”

  Agatha turned and picked up an envelope on which was printed—clearly from a computer printer rather than an old Remington like Miss Palmer’s—the words To Whom It May Concern.

  “That could be us.” She shrugged and opened the envelope. An old, faded black and white photograph fell out. Toni picked it up.

  “Wow,” she said, studying the couple in the photo. The man was dressed in the Royal Navy uniform of an able-bodied seaman and the woman wore a plain white wedding dress. “Look at that young guy—it’s the Admiral. This photo must be from his first wedding. She looks like a young Cathy Nelson, doesn’t she?”

  “That’s poor Constance,” said Agatha, pulling a folded sheet of paper from the envelope. She opened it and read out the words: “I am glad he is dead! He killed my mother! He was evil! He knew! He knew—and now everyone else will, too. I can’t bear the shame. I hope he rots in hell!”

  “Cathy Nelson was tracing the Admiral’s family history,” she nodded at the documents on the table, “and her own. They extracted DNA from the samples she sent and it turned out that Cathy was actually his daughter. The bastard married his own daughter!”

  “Agatha—this is a suicide note!”

  The curtains by the full-length window billowed in a sudden gust of wind, and they realised for the first time that the window was open. They rushed to the balcony. Below them on the ground, face down on the embankment, lay Cathy Nelson.

  “Call an ambulance!” Agatha yelled, dashing for the door.

  Chapter Ten

  The main bar area of the Mircester Crown Green Bowling Club smelled of fresh paint and linoleum polish. The doors to the veranda that overlooked the bowling green stood open to allow a free flow of fresh air, and from where she sat, Agatha could see the emerald and jade stripes of the precisely mown playing surface luxuriating in the sunshine, the rain clouds having drifted off to the east. To her right was a bar, currently dormant and in darkness behind a closed metal grille, and to her left, on the other side of the clubhouse lounge, was the door to the kitchen and a serving hatch, both also closed. She sat at a table with Mr. and Mrs. Swinburn, the elderly couple hugely apologetic for not being able to offer her tea.

  “The kitchen’s all locked up, you see,” said Mr. Swinburn. “The renovation team have the keys, and of course, the bar is closed at this time of day.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Agatha said. “Thank you for agreeing to see me here.”

  “It’s our pleasure, dear,” said Mrs. Swinburn. “It gave us a chance to open the doors and air the place now that the rain has stopped. What did you want to talk to us about? Have you any news about the Admiral’s killer?”

  “There is certainly some news,” Agatha agreed, “and I’m afraid it’s not good.”

  “Really?” said Mrs. Swinburn. “What on earth has happened?”

  “Well … Oh, Mrs. Swinburn, what happened to your gold badge?” Agatha pointed to the pin-hole mark on the old lady’s lapel.

  “I think it fell off in the car,” Mrs. Swinburn explained, stroking the blank space. “The seat belt, you know? It rubs against my shoulder. We haven’t found it yet.”

  “Could be a job for the lads down at our old workshop,” said Mr. Swinburn. “They might have to take out the seats.”

  “Oh dear,” said Agatha. “Good luck with that. So … what I wanted to tell you was that yesterday afternoon, Cathy Nelson’s body was found at her block of flats, beneath her balcony. I was there with a colleague and it was us who found her. She was still wearing her black dress from the funeral. It looked like suicide.”

  “Suicide? Oh my goodness!” Mrs. Swinburn held her husband’s hand and waited for more.

  “It seems that Mrs. Nelson was trying to trace her husband’s ancestry to find out if, as he often claimed, he was related to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. She sent off a sample, from which they extracted his DNA. At the same time, she had her DNA sampled to trace her own roots. Lots of people do this nowadays. It’s very popular.

  “The results showed that Harry Nelson was not related to Horatio Nelson, but that he was related to Cathy Nelson. He was her father. She was the child that his first wife, Constance, gave up for adoption before they were married. We found a photograph of Harry and Connie on their wedding day, and the likeness between Cathy and her mother was unmistakable.”

  “Well, I never,” Mr. Swinburn breathed.

  “So now Cathy, something of an orphan and a drifter all her life, knew who her mother was. She also realised that the stories she had heard about Harry having killed his first wife meant that he had murdered her mother. The wedding photograph she discovered showed that she was the spitting image of her mother, too. Now she could see that Harry must have known who she was from the moment he first saw her. He knew she was his daughter and he married her to keep her close, to make sure that she would do what he thought a daughter should—look after her father in his old age.”

  “The poor woman must have been beside herself!” Mrs. Swinburn gasped.

  “I’d say she was distraught, and I’d say she was furious,” said Agatha. “Angry enough, I’d guess, to kill Harry Nelson in order to avenge the mother she never knew and to avenge herself for the shame he’d caused her by tricking her into marrying her own father.”

  “He was a wicked, wicked man.” Mr. Swinburn shook his head in disgust.

  “She mixed his painkillers with some of his Smuggler’s Breath rum here at the club, and when he gulped it down, he became so stupefied that it was easy to mix half a bottle of his weedkiller with more rum and let him drink that, too. That’s why, despite the fact that Harry always used a full bottle of weedkiller on the paths—that was his measure—there was a half-full bottle on the shelf in the tool shed.

 
“Sadly, the story doesn’t end there, because Miss Palmer, just as Harry had done, had recognised who Cathy was straight away. She was appalled by the illegal, immoral marriage and it tormented her for years. Should she denounce the Admiral and let the world know what he had done? He would surely be punished, but Cathy would suffer more. She would suffer the disgrace, and Miss Palmer was loath to inflict that on her. When Harry was killed, however, the situation changed. She couldn’t keep quiet when she suspected that he had been murdered.

  “Cathy must have realised that Miss Palmer was on the verge of exposing the whole sordid business, and killed her, too. Then, when she thought I was getting close, I was the next one she tried to bump off. After the funeral, she realised that the truth was going to come out and it all got too much for her, so she wrote a suicide note and threw herself out of the window, just as people believed her mother had done all those years ago.”

  “That’s such a dreadfully sad story,” Mrs. Swinburn said with a sob, dabbing a tissue to her eye.

  “It is,” Agatha nodded, “but it’s not entirely true, is it?”

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Swinburn frowned.

  “Well, the suicide note got me thinking,” Agatha explained. “It was a bit hysterical and didn’t really sound like the Cathy Nelson I had spoken to. She would have been mortified by the whole situation, naturally, but she had always been a drifter. She had no roots in Mircester and nothing to stay here for. She could simply have sold up and moved on, far more financially secure than ever before.

  ‘The note was also produced on a computer and printed out. Cathy had neither a computer nor a printer. She could have gone to an internet café to do it, but that’s hardly likely, is it? No, if she was to leave a suicide note, it would have been hand-written and signed, so I came to the conclusion that the printed, unsigned note was a forgery. That being the case, the death of Cathy Nelson was more likely to be murder than suicide, but who killed her?

  “Then I found this.” Agatha produced a cigarette packet from her handbag and emptied out the small gold president’s badge onto the table. “It’s yours, isn’t it, Mrs. Swinburn?”

  “It might be,” said the old woman. “Where did you find it?”

  “I didn’t,” Agatha admitted. “Cathy Nelson did. When she looked down from her balcony the day my car was forced into the river and saw Harry’s car so badly damaged, I’d say she was livid. She’d planned to sell the thing, but now it was worth practically nothing. She went down to take a look at it and found this on the floor. You lost your badge in a car, Mrs. Swinburn, but not in your own car; in Harry Nelson’s car when you two were trying to murder me.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” barked Mr. Swinburn. “That could be any past president’s badge!”

  “The only other past president on our suspect list is Mr. Partridge, and he showed me his badge earlier this morning. We checked the other living former presidents, of course. There aren’t many, and they all have their badges.”

  “If Cathy had that thing, it must be the Admiral’s badge!” cried Mrs. Swinburn.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Agatha. “Then I realised that his went into the furnace on the lapel of his blazer. I’m betting that the only fingerprints on this badge are Cathy Nelson’s and yours, Mrs. Swinburn.”

  “Fingerprints?” His face crimson with anger, Mr. Swinburn grabbed the badge and rubbed his own fingers all over it. “What fingerprints? You can’t prove any of this! You’ve no evidence at all!”

  “If I look hard enough, I will find the evidence,” Agatha promised, “because it all fits. Cathy Nelson told me that you visited her shortly after her husband’s death. I’m betting that one of you used the bathroom and planted the painkillers in the cabinet. Cathy said she’d never seen them before and Harry had no history of needing painkillers, but you knew you’d have to subdue him in order to get him to drink the poisoned rum, and the mixture of alcohol and the powerful drugs did the trick. But you also knew the pathologist would find traces of the painkillers, so you had to make it look like they were Harry’s.

  “Had everyone believed that Harry committed suicide, you would have been happy, but then I started shouting about murder, and people read about it in the Telegraph. That didn’t concern you too much, though, because you had already put a backup plan in place. It was you who suggested to Cathy Nelson that she should contact Ancestry Tracer in order to stop Harry from shouting his mouth off about being related to Admiral Nelson. You also encouraged her to give it a go herself. You knew what she would find out. As soon as you heard that the information had arrived, you went ahead with the murder. You provided her with a powerful motive so that the finger of blame would point to her, leaving you two in the clear.”

  “You have no way of knowing if that’s true or not.” Mr. Swinburn now seemed to have calmed down and appeared coolly confident. “You’re guessing.”

  “Okay, how’s this for a guess?” Agatha shrugged. “I think you’re the ones who persuaded Miss Palmer to keep the scandal of the Nelsons’ marriage under her hat. Maybe you told her that you would take care of it all. Maybe you thought you could use that secret to have the Admiral booted out of your precious bowls club. But it all came to a head when he started talking about becoming president for life. You simply couldn’t allow that to happen. You hated him for all the disruption he was threatening at the club you both so love, but the hatred runs far deeper than that, doesn’t it?

  “You told me about your business, and about selling up when you retired—not passing on the business to your children. That’s because you’ve never been able to have children, have you? When Harry Nelson abandoned Constance with a baby on the way, you must have been appalled.”

  “We’d have taken that baby,” Mrs. Swinburn’s voice was wavering. “We’d have given it a loving home and a good life, but it had to be sent away. It couldn’t be raised locally. That might have caused problems.”

  “And when Constance died with another baby on the way,” Agatha continued, “that must have hit you hard, too.”

  “We knew he did it.” Mr. Swinburn’s voice was hard. “We were certain he killed her. He was a vile human being. Not a human being—an animal.”

  “Back to your business, Mr. Swinburn,” Agatha went on. “Auto repairs. You know your way around cars. It must have been easy for you to steal Harry Nelson’s old car to use as a battering ram against me. I should think it was even easier for you to steal the car you used to kill Miss Palmer.”

  “That car was set alight—there was practically nothing left of it,” Mr. Swinburn said. “No proof that we had anything to do with it.”

  “The Admiral’s murder was too much for Miss Palmer. You knew she’d talk. The case was closed as far as the police were concerned—an accident—but you saw her speaking to me at the ladies’ society talk, didn’t you, Mrs. Swinburn? So you had to stop her from telling me everything. How could you do that? How could you murder a woman you had known almost all your lives?”

  “She was going to ruin everything!” Mr. Swinburn snapped.

  “Charlie, bite your tongue,” warned Mrs. Swinburn. “You’ve said enough!”

  “She’s got nothing, my dear. She’ll never prove any of this,” Mr. Swinburn sneered. “Dorothy Palmer was a silly old fool. We sent her to her God in heaven and I hope she’s at peace. And Harry Nelson? I hope we sent him to the other place. You got off lightly, but you need to drop this now or next time maybe you won’t be so lucky. You can’t prove we killed Harry or Dorothy and you can’t prove we killed Cathy.”

  “You haven’t been very careful so far,” Agatha goaded him. “You didn’t realise that Cathy Nelson couldn’t drive, did you? Miss Palmer’s death, and my death for that matter, could never have been blamed on her. So many mistakes. Once the police forensics people get to work in her flat, I’m sure they’ll find bits and pieces to place you at the scene.

  “Maybe you left fingerprints on the Admiral’s old wedding photograph. That’s
not the sort of thing he would have kept. You gave it to Cathy, didn’t you? Or maybe they’ll find the key you had made to let yourself into her flat yesterday. How did you get that? Secretly take an impression of her house key during your little visit, perhaps?”

  “No need.” Smugness and overconfidence gave way to recklessness, and Mr. Swinburn pulled a key ring from his pocket. “The Admiral’s house keys and car keys were left lying around. All I had to do was pocket them. It couldn’t have been easier.”

  “Yesterday afternoon was tricky, though, wasn’t it? I think you were still there when Toni and I arrived. You’re not good with stairs, Mrs. Swinburn, so you stopped the lift on the second floor to make sure you could get out quickly. That’s why Toni and I had to use the stairs. You bundled Cathy off the balcony while we were waiting for the lift. By the time we got upstairs, you were on your way down. We must have missed each other by seconds.

  “I reckon you were sheltering somewhere near the main entrance, watching for Cathy to come out onto the balcony for a smoke. Then you hurried inside, took the lift, let yourselves in and crept up behind her. It took both of you to heave her off the balcony, and we know for a fact that Cathy was attacked by two people. Although she can’t remember much about what happened, she is certain about that.”

  “Wait a minute … Cathy’s certain?” Mrs. Swinburn sounded confused. “You mean she’s—”

  “Roy!” Agatha called, and the kitchen serving hatch was flung open. Standing in the kitchen, framed in the hatch, were Roy Silver, Toni and, wearing a neck brace and her arm in a sling, Cathy Nelson. “My friend Roy has been working with your renovations team. He had the keys to let the others in.”

  “And I think I’ve heard all I need to,” said Bill Wong, walking in through the kitchen door. Alice Peters and PC Hastings appeared on the veranda. Mrs. Swinburn burst into tears. Her husband put his arm around her.