30 - A Grave Mistake, page 10
As soon as Alleyn told him he seemed to relax. He answered all the questions readily: yes, he had spoken to Miss Preston and Prue Foster but had not been allowed to visit his stepmother. He had gone for a stroll in the grounds, had missed the return bus and had walked into the village and picked up a later one there.
"A completely wasted afternoon," he complained. "And I must say I wasn't wildly enthusiastic about the reception I got. Particularly in the light of what happened. After all, she was my stepmother."
"When was the last time you saw her?"
"When? I don't know when. Three--four years ago."
"Before you went to Australia?"
He shot a sidelong look at Alleyn. "That's right," he said and after a pause: "You seem to be very well informed of my movements, Superintendent."
"I know you returned as a member of the ship's complement in the Poseidon."
After a much longer pause, Claude said, "Oh, yes?"
"Shall we move outside and get a little more light and air on the subject?" Alleyn suggested.
Claude opened a door that gave directly on the yard. As they walked into the sunshine a clock in the stable turret told eleven very sweetly. The open front of the lean-to faced the yard. Bruce, shovelling vigorously, was in full view, an exemplar of ostentatious nonintervention. Claude stared resentfully at his stern and walked to the far end of the yard. Alleyn followed him.
"How long," he asked cheerfully, "had you been in that dark and rather smelly apartment?"
"How long? I don't know. No time at all really. Why?"
"I don't want to waste my breath and your time repeating myself, if you've already heard about the Will. And I think you must have heard it because, as I came up, the adjoining door in there was dragged shut."
Claude gave a rather shrill titter. "You are quick, aren't you?" he said. He lowered his voice. "As I said," he confided, "I was looking for that gardener-man in there. As a matter of fact I thought he might be in the other room and then when you came in and began talking it was jolly awkward. I didn't want to intrude so I--I mean I--you know--it's difficult to explain--"
"You're making a brave shot at it, though, aren't you? Your sense of delicacy prompted you to remove into the next room, shut that same openwork door and remain close by it throughout our conversation. Is that it?"
"Not at all. You haven't understood."
"You'd seen us arrive in a police car, perhaps, and you left the house in a hurry for the rose-garden and thence proceeded round the left wing to the stables?"
"I don't know," said Claude with a strange air of frightened effrontery, "why you're taking this line with me, Superintendent, but I must say I resent it."
"Yes, I thought you might be a bit put out by our appearance. Because of an irregularity in your departure from the Poseidon."
Claude began feverishly to maintain that there had been some mistake and the police had had to climb down and he was thinking of lodging a complaint only it didn't seem worth while.
Alleyn let him talk himself to a standstill and then said his visit had nothing to do with any of this and that he only wanted to be told if Claude did in fact know of a recent Will made by Mrs. Foster shortly before her death.
An elaborate shuffling process set in, hampered, it seemed, by the proximity of the ever-industrious Bruce. By means of furtive little nods and becks Claude indicated the desirability of a remove. Alleyn disregarded these hints and continued on a loudish, cheerful note.
"It's a perfectly simple question," he said. "Nothing private about it. Have you, in fact, known of such a Will?"
Claude made slight jabs with his forefinger, in the direction of Bruce's rear elevation.
"As it happens, yes," he mouthed.
"You have? Do you mind telling me how it came to your knowledge?"
"It's--I--it just so happened--"
"What did?"
"I mean to say--"
"Havers!" Bruce suddenly roared out. He became upright and faced them. "What ails you, man?" he demanded. "Can you no' give a straight answer when you're speired a straight question? Oot wi' it, for pity's sake. Tell him and ha' done. There's nothing wrong wi' the facts o' the matter."
"Yes, well, all right, all right," said the wretched Claude and added with a faint show of grandeur: "And you may as well keep a civil tongue in your head."
Bruce spat on his hands and returned to his shovelling.
"Well, Mr. Carter?" Alleyn asked.
By painful degrees it emerged that Claude had happened to be present when Bruce came into the house with the Will and had happened to see him hand it over to Mrs. Jim and had happened to notice what it was on account of the word "Will" being written in large letters on the envelope.
"And had happened," Bruce said without turning round but with a thwack of his shovel on the heap of earth he had raised, "to inquire with unco perrrsistence as to the cirrrcumstances."
"Look here, Gardener, I've had about as much of you as I can take," said Claude with a woeful show of spirit.
"You can tak' me or leave me, Mr. Carter, and my preference would be for the latter procedure."
"Do you know the terms of the Will?" Alleyn cut in.
"No, I don't. I'm not interested. Whatever they are they don't affect me."
"How do you mean?"
"My father provided for me. With a trust fund or whatever it's called. Syb couldn't touch that and she's not bloody likely to have added to it," said Claude with a little spurt of venom.
Upon this note Alleyn left them and returned deviously, by way of a brick-walled vegetable garden, to Fox. He noticed two newly made asparagus beds and a multitude of enormous cabbages and wondered where on earth they all went and who consumed them. Fox, patient as ever, awaited him in the car.
"Nothing to report," Fox said. "I took a walk round but no signs of anyone."
"The gardener's growing mushrooms in the stables and the stepson's growing butterflies in the stomach," said Alleyn and described the scene.
"Miss Preston," he said, "finds Bruce's Scots a bit hard to take."
"Phoney?"
"She didn't say that. More, 'laid on with a trowel.' She might have said with a long-handled shovel if she'd seen him this morning. But--I don't know. I'm no expert on dialects, Scots or otherwise, but it seemed to me he uses it more in the manner of someone who has lived with the genuine article long enough to acquire and display it inconsistently and inaccurately. His last job was in Scotland. He may think it adds to his charm or pawkiness or whatever."
"What about the stepson?"
"Oh, quite awful, poor devil. Capable of anything if he had the guts to carry it through."
"We move on?"
"We do. Hark forrard, hard forrard away to Greengages and the point marked X if there is one. Shall I drive and you follow the map?"
"Fair enough, if you say so, Mr. Alleyn. What do I look for?"
"Turn right after Maidstone and follow the road to the village of Greendale. Hence 'Greengages,' no doubt"
"Colicky sort of name for a hospital."
"It's not a hospital."
"Colicky sort of a name for whatever it is."
"There's no suggestion that the lady in question died of that, at least."
"Seeing I've only just come in could we re-cap on the way? What've we got for info?"
"We've got the lady who is dead. She was in affluent circumstances, stinking rich, in fact, and probably in the early stages of Parkinson's disease but unaware of it, and we've got the medical incumbent of an expensive establishment that is neither hospital nor nursing home but a hotel that caters for well-to-do invalids, whose patient the lady was, and who did not spot the disease. We've got a local doctor called Field-Innis and a police pathologist who did. We've got the lady's daughter who on the afternoon of her mother's death announced her engagement to a rich young man who did not meet with the lady's approval. We've got the rich young man's millionaire papa who coveted the lady's house, failed to buy it but will now live in it when his son marries the daughter."
"Hold on," said Fox, after a pause. "O.K. I'm with you."
"We've got an elderly Scottish gardener, possible pseudoish, to whom the lady has left twenty-five thousand deflated quid in a recent Will. The rest of her fortune is divided between her daughter if she marries a peer called Swingletree and the medical incumbent who didn't diagnose Parkinson's disease. If the daughter doesn't marry Swingletree the incument gets the lot."
"That would be Dr. Schramm?"
"Certainly. The rest of the cast is made up of the lady's stepson by her first marriage who is the archetype of all remittance-men and has a police record. Finally we have a nice woman of considerable ability called Verity Preston."
"That's the lot?"
"Give and take a trained nurse and a splendid lady called Mrs. Jim who obliges in Upper Quintern, that's the lot."
"What's the score where we come in? Exactly, I mean?"
"The circumstances are the score really, Br'er Fox. The Will and the mise-en-scène. The inquest was really adjourned because everybody says the lady was such an unlikely subject for suicide and had no motive. An extended autopsy seemed to be advisable. Sir James Curtis performed it. The undelicious results of Dr. Schramm's stomach pump had been preserved and Sir James confirms that they disclosed a quantity of the barbiturate found in the remaining tablets on the bedside table and in the throat and at the back of the tongue. The assumption had been that she stuffed down enough of the things to become so far doped as to prevent her swallowing the last lot she put in her mouth."
"Plausible?"
"Dr. Schramm thought so. Sir James won't swallow it but says she would have--if you'll excuse a joke in bad taste, Br'er Fox. He points out that there's a delay of anything up to twenty minutes before the barbiturate in question, which is soluble in alcohol, starts to work and it's hard to imagine her waiting until she was too far under to swallow before putting the final lot in her mouth."
"So what do we wonder about?"
"Whether somebody else put them there. By the way, Sir James looked for traces of cyanide."
"Why?" Mr. Fox asked economically.
"There'd been a smell of almonds in the room and in the contents of the stomach but it turned out that she used sweet almond oil in one of those glass-slipper things they put over lamp bulbs and that she'd wolfed quantities of marzipan petits-fours from La Marquise de Sevigné in Paris. The half-empty box was on her bedside table along with the vanity box and other litter."
"Like--the empty bottle of Scotch?"
"And the overturned glass. Exactly."
Anybody know how much there'd been in the bottle? That day, for instance?"
"Apparently not. She kept it in a cupboard above the hand-basin. One gathers it lasted her a good long time."
"What about dabs?"
"The local chaps had a go before calling us in. Bailey and Thompson are coming down to give the full treatment."
"Funny sort of set-up though, isnt it?" Fox mused.
"The funniest bit is yet to come. Cast your mind back, however reluctantly, to the contents of the stomach as examined by Doctors Field-Innis and Schramm."
"Oodles of barbiturate?"
"According to Schramm. But according to Sir James an appreciable amount but not enough, necessarily, to have caused death. You know how guarded he can be. Even allowing for what he calls 'a certain degree of excretion' he would not take it as a matter of course that death would follow. He could find nothing to suggest any kind of susceptibility or allergy that might explain why it did."
"So now we begin to wonder about the beneficiaries in the recent and eccentric Will?"
"That's it. And who provided her with the printed form. Young Mr. Rattisbon allowed me to see it. It looks shop-new: fresh creases, sharp corners and edges."
"And all in order?"
"He's afraid so. Outrageous though the terms may be. I gather, by the way, that Miss Prunella Foster would sooner trip down the aisle with a gorilla than with the Lord Swingletree."
"So her share goes to this Dr. Schramm?"
"In addition to the princely dollop he would get in any case."
"It scarcely seems decent," said Fox primly.
"You should hear the Rattisbons, père et fils, on the subject."
"It's twenty to one," Fox said wistfully as they entered a village. "There's a nice-looking little pub ahead."
"So there is. Tell me your thoughts."
"They seem to dwell upon Scotch eggs, cheese and pickle sandwiches and a pint of mild-and-bitter."
"So be it," said Alleyn and pulled in.
Prunella Foster arrived from London at Quintern Place on her way to lunch with her fiancé and his father at Mardling. At Quintern Mrs. Jim informed her of Alleyn's visit earlier in the morning. As a raconteuse, Mrs. Jim was strong on facts and short on atmosphere. She gave a list of events in order of occurrence, answered Prunella's questions with the greatest possible economy and expressed no opinion of any sort whatsoever. Prunella was flustered.
"And he was a policeman, Mrs. Jim.?"
"That's what he said."
"Do you mean there was any doubt about it?"
"Not to say doubt. It's on his card."
"Well--what?"
Cornered, Mrs. Jim said Alleyn had seemed a bit on the posh side for it. "More after the style of one of your friends, like," she offered and added that he had a nice way with him.
Prunella got her once more to rehearse the items of the visit, which she did with accuracy.
"So he asked about--?" Prunella cast her eyes and jerked her head in the direction, vaguely, of that part of the house generally frequented by Claude Carter.
"That's right," Mrs. Jim conceded. She and Prunella understood each other pretty well on the subject of Claude.
"But it was only to remark he'd noticed him dodging up and down in the rose-garden. He went out, after, to the stables. The gentleman did."
"To find Bruce?"
"That's right. Mr. Claude too, I reckon."
"Oh?"
"Mr. Claude come in after the gentleman had gone and went into the dining-room."
This, Prunella recognized, was an euphemism for "helped himself to a drink."
"Where is he now?" she asked.
Mrs. Jim said she'd no idea. They'd come to an arrangement about his meals, it emerged. She prepared a hot luncheon for one o'clock and laid the table in the small morning-room. She then beat an enormous gong and left for home. When she returned to Quintern in two days' time she would find the disjecta membra of this meal, together with those of any subsequent snacks, unpleasantly congealed upon the table.
"How difficult everything is," Prunella muttered. "Thank you, Mrs. Jim. I'm going to Mardling for lunch. We're making plans about Quintern: you know, arranging for Mr. Gideon's father to have his own quarters with us. He's selling Mardling, I think. After all that he'd done to it! Imagine! And keeping the house in London for his headquarters."
"Is that right, Miss?" said Mrs. Jim and Prunella knew by the wooden tone she employed that she was deeply stimulated. "We'll be hearing wedding-bells one of these days, then?" she speculated.
"Well--not yet, of course."
"No," Mrs. Jim agreed. "That wouldn't be the thing. Not just yet."
"I'd really rather not having a 'wedding,' Mrs. Jim. I'd rather be just married early in the morning in Upper Quintern with hardly anyone there. But he--Gideon--wants it the other way so I suppose my aunt--Auntie Boo--" she whispered her way into inaudibility and her eyes filled with tears. She looked helplessly at Mrs. Jim and thought how much she liked her. For the first time since her mother died it occurred to Prunella that, apart, of course, from Gideon, she was very much alone in the world. She had never been deeply involved with her mother and had indeed found her deviousness and vanities irritating when not positively comical and even that degree of tolerance had been shaken by the preposterous terms of this wretched Will. And yet now, abruptly, when she realized that Sybil was not and never would be there to be laughed at or argued with: that where she had been there was--nothing, a flood of desolation poured over Prunella and she broke down and cried with her face in Mrs. Jim's cardigan, which smelt of floor polish.
Mrs. Jim said: "Never mind, then. It's been a right shock and all. We know that."
"I'm so sorry," Prunella sobbed. I'm awfully sorry."
"You have your cry out, then."
This invitation had the opposite result to what had been intended. Prunella blew her nose and pulled herself together. She returned shakily to her wedding arrangements. "Somebody will have to give me away," she said.
"As long as it's not that Mr. Claude," said Mrs. Jim loudly.
"God forbid. I wondered--I don't know--can one be given away by a woman? I could ask the Vicar."
"Was you thinking of Miss Verity?"
"She is my godmother. Yes, I was."
"Couldn't do better," said Mrs. Jim.
"I must be off," said Prunella, who did not want to run into Claude. "You don't happen to know where those old plans of Quintern are? Mr. Markos wants to have a look at them. They're in a sort of portfolio thing."
"Library. Cupboard near the door. Bottom shelf."
"How clever of you, Mrs. Jim."
"Your mother had them out to show Bruce. Before she went to that place. She left them out and he"--the movement of the head they both used to indicate Claude--"was handling them and leaving them all over the place so I put them away."
"Good for you. Mrs. Jim--tell me. Does he--well--does he sort of peer and prowl? Do you know what I mean? Sort of?"
"Not my place to comment," said Mrs. Jim, "but as you've brought it up: yes, he do. I can tell by the way things have been interfered with--shifted like."
"Oh dear."
"Yes. Specially them plans. He seemed to fancy them, particular. I seen him looking at that one of the grounds through the magnifying glass in the study. He's a proper nosey parker if you ask me and don't mind my mentioning it," said Mrs. Jim rapidly. She brought herself up with a jerk. "Will I fetch them then? Put out your washing," said Mrs. Jim as an afterthought.
"Bless you. I'll just collect some things from my room."
