Furious Old Women (20 page)

“That's what I tell her. But she won't listen to me. Threatens to go to the police and give herself up.”

“I shouldn't worry about that. Champer's cocky and self-important but he's not a half-wit. In murder cases the police often get quite a number of peculiar people accusing themselves. So long as all she has to confess is handing over two Minerval tablets, I don't think your aunt will be in trouble.”

“You won't go and see her, then?”

“I don't think it's necessary. I'm pretty busy at the school just now. I warned Mrs Bobbin in the first place that this could only be a part-time job for me.”

“There is another aspect of it, old man.”

“Yes?”

“Flora's inclined to be a suicidal type.”

“I hadn't heard that.”

“Runs in the family. My grandfather, who built the Griggs Institute and what-not at Gladhurst, cut his own throat. They could get away with calling it an accident in those days. I shouldn't be a bit surprised to see Flora do something of the sort particularly if the police take no notice of her confession.”

“Still, I don't quite see what I can do about it. You had better call in a psychiatrist.”

“Think so? You may be right. Must do something. I thought at least I'd put it to you.”

Carolus was wondering what it was he disliked about Dundas Griggs. His live-wiriness? Or his habit of saying ‘old man'? No. Something deeper than those.

“I mean,” added Griggs rather fatuously, “we don't want
another
death in Gladhurst, do we?”

“Personally, I didn't want any,” said Carolus shortly.

“No. Of course. I meant….”

“I think I understand what you meant. Have another drink?”

“Thanks. You see it's a bit uncomfortable when you stand to benefit.”

“I suppose so.”

“Not that there's likely to be much. If I know anything about Flora it will mostly go to her pet charities. But there's bound to be something.”

“You feel that makes you a suspect?” said Carolus rather brutally.

“How can I be a suspect? The old girl's not even dead yet.”

“Two women are.”

“Yes. But … That's absurd, of course. No one could possibly….”

“Most murders are like that, Mr Griggs. No one could
possibly
have done them. Yet always somebody has.”

Dundas Griggs stood up.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said. “I've said what I felt I ought to say. Since my aunt, Mrs Bobbin, consulted you, I mean. I'll run along.”

Carolus showed him to the front door.

W
HEN
Carolus next went over to Gladhurst he found the Reverend Bonar Waddell in some perplexity.

“The testamentary dispositions of these two good ladies,” said the vicar, “well-meaning and generous though they are, have given us all food for thought. Lawyers, executors, churchwardens and clergy, we are all concerned to follow their wishes as far as we are able and at the same time not to lose the little benefits for our parish institutions which they offer. My own share I would gladly sacrifice if it helped to provide a solution, but unhappily the same conditions apply to the church and parish charities as to the bequests to me.”

“It must be very difficult for you,” said Carolus, fascinated as usual by the vicar's agility in proceeding in two opposite directions at the same time.

“At a first glance,” said Mr Waddell, “the conditions they lay down might seem to conflict one with another. Miss Griggs, for instance, stipulates that there shall be no Popish practices in the church while Miss Vaillant insists on the introduction of certain items … details … small etceteras of ritual. One has to realize at once the force of the word Popish. Far be it from me ever to introduce
anything to which that word could justly apply. If I, for instance, were to appear in the
triregenum
, the tiara or triple crown worn by the Pope, with a cross ornamented on my shoe for the kisses of my congregation, I think there would be no doubt that I should be indulging in what Miss Griggs calls ‘Popish practices', but I cannot see that fulfilling the simple conditions laid down by Miss Vaillant can be held to be so.”

“I see your point.”

“Then Miss Griggs stipulates that there shall be ‘no chanting of Masses'. Have I not frequently expostulated with Miss Vaillant against her use of that word with its most unfortunate associations? No, there shall certainly be no chanting of Masses. We have Sung Eucharist and that is quite enough.

“There is another seeming conflict. Both wills make reference to confession, Miss Vaillant insisting that the ‘Sacrament of Confession' shall be encouraged while Miss Griggs makes it a condition of her bounty that ‘no confession boxes' shall be seen in the church. We shall therefore have to do without any of those—in any case rather ugly—wooden erections which some Anglican and all Roman Catholic churches have installed. Then Miss Griggs, fortunately using somewhat archaic language, demands that there shall be no ‘graven images' in the church. She could be assured, if she were alive, good soul, that the life-sized statue which Miss Vaillant has purchased for our new Lady Chapel is certainly neither ‘graven' nor an ‘image'; it is a plaster figure of Our Lady of Lourdes, admittedly purchased from the firm of Burns, Oates and Washburne, but Lourdes now has surely ceased to be a merely sectarian place of pilgrimage.

“None of the other little demands of Miss Vaillant conflicts with the conditions of Miss Griggs, the use of a Sanctus bell, the ringing of the Angelus, Reservation of the Sacrament, until we come to one which both ladies mention specifically and which puts us all in a quandary.”

“What is that?” asked Carolus with genuine interest.

“Incense!” cried the vicar. “Miss Griggs says there must be none of that ‘nauseous and Roman Catholic incense' in the church and Miss Vaillant makes the ceremonial use of incense at Sung Eucharist, at the Gospel, Offertory and Elevation, a condition for all her benevolence. What am I to do?” asked Mr Waddell.

“You should be able to see a way, surely,” encouraged Carolus.

“I hope, perhaps I may have done so,” said the vicar. “It is, you will observe, nauseous and Roman Catholic incense' which Miss Griggs objects to. We will have none of it. We will purchase our incense from the excellent old Anglican firm of Mowbray's which will be quite another matter. No one can then say that we are ignoring the wishes of either of the dead and the parish will benefit accordingly.”

“Excellent,” said Carolus in congratulation. “There was something else I wanted to ask you about. Laddie Grey and Naomi Chester are both, I believe, parishioners of yours?”

The vicar pursed his lips.

“They both live in the parish. Grey and his wife were married over at Breadley where she lived but I christened their child. Naomi Chester I do not often see in church.”

“They hope one day to get married,” said Carolus.

“That depends on a number of things,” pronounced the vicar. “By the law of the land, Grey's wife's insanity does not provide grounds for divorce until the unfortunate woman has been confined as incurable for five years. That leaves nearly two years in which some change may take place.”

“Then?”

“Then, if Grey is given a divorce, I shall have to decide whether or not I should be doing my duty in marrying him and Naomi Chester. On the one hand under the law of 1937 I cannot be compelled either to marry them or to allow their marriage to take place in my church. Convocations, indeed, have resolved that
marriages of divorced persons should not take place in church. On the other hand civil law allows me to use my own discretion. I shall have to decide.”

“Have you explained this to either of the parties?

“I have had no occasion to do so.”

“So that if they decide to take the matter into their own hands and simply start living together….”

“Dear me! You alarm me, Deene. In my parish? I trust nothing of the sort would occur to them. It would set a most unfortunate example in a small community such as this. Really, I scarcely think you can be serious. Co-habit? Oh, no. I cannot suppose … The parents would surely dissuade them.”

“Thank you, Mr Waddell. I just wanted to know the position.”

His next call was at a pleasant-looking house at the lower end of the village. Here he asked for Dr Pinton.

“Was it private?” asked a smart young woman in nurse's uniform.

“Yes.”

“Will you wait in here a minute? Dr Pinton's just finishing his National Health. He's had rather a rush this morning. Colds and sore throats.”

The doctor was an active little man with pale ranidaean features and smooth thinning hair.

“Morning,” he said, “What's the trouble?”

His big mouth worked like a trap.

“I'm sorry to take your time, Doctor. I'm that most irritating of all things—a private detective. Mrs Bobbin has asked me to try to find out about her sister's death.”

“Oh, I see,” croaked the doctor. Really he did look as though he had just come out of a pool. “Don't see how I can help. I had nothing to do with it.”

“It was about these tranquillizing pills you prescribed for Grazia Vaillant.”

“Best thing possible. Safe. Not habit-forming. Always prescribe them for neurotic old women. Nothing wrong with any of them except their nerves. Can't stand the pace
of modern life. Brought up to different standards. Find themselves harassed to death. Money worries. No servants. World upside down. What can you do? Give 'em tranquillizers.”

“But isn't it rather dangerous, as in the case of Grazia Vaillant?”

“How was I to know she was on the booze? Of course it's dangerous if you take too many when you're tight. But normally, no. Have to understand these old middle-class women, Deene. They're damned annoyed with things as they are. They suddenly realize that the world has no use for them. Wants to see the back of them, in fact. They bumped them off in Russia and I'm not sure it wasn't more humane. We're just letting the species die out. Some of them can see that and are furious about it but there's no remedy. The least I can do is smooth their last years.”

Carolus nodded.

“Old women! You never stop to think of them, do you? I don't mean only those from middle-class families but working class as well. Thirty, forty years ago the better-off ones had companions and went down to death selfishly, perhaps, but decently and without humiliations. The poor ones, even old widows of farm-workers, kept their own cottages to the last, when a cottage cost half-a-crown a week. Yes, and tottered round their little bits of garden and had visits from their grandchildren and perhaps their great-grandchildren, and made jam and homemade wine if they lived in the country and crept round to the pub with a jug sometimes if they lived in town. Now what happens? Herded into homes to sleep in dormitories and obey the rules like children. Or, if they've got enough money to keep them out of that, have the pestered, anxious, artificial existences that these old women here had. Do you blame old Mrs Bobbin, who has character, for being angry? Do you blame her sister for getting a sort of religious mania? Do you blame Grazia Vaillant for taking to the bottle, as apparently the old girl did, lately? Above all, do you blame me for
prescribing anything I can that gives them a few hours' worry-free sleep?”

“No,” said Carolus. “I don't. But I would like to know for whom you prescribed it?”

“Only those who could afford it, unfortunately. The National Health Scheme won't run to Minerval. Millicent and Flora Griggs. Mrs Bobbin didn't need it. Grazia Vaillant. Agatha Waddell, sometimes. And of course Fyfe's wife.”

“Why ‘of course'?”

“Hypochondriac. Leads him the hell of a life.”

“But he doesn't need Minerval himself?”

“Oh, yes. Fyfe takes tranquillizers. What do you expect? We're living in the atomic age, Mr Deene.”

Carolus made no comment.

“Do you keep any check on these tubes of Minerval?”

“Only in the sense that I make a new prescription for each one and never give more than one in ten days.”

“Never?”

“Well, as Gilbert says, well ‘hardly ever'. There was an occasion, about a week before Millicent Griggs died, when she had lost her supply. Silly old thing had dropped it, or something. I gave her a second lot. But that was extremely rare.”

“Tell me, as a matter of interest, do your confreres generally follow your practice in this?”

“Never discuss it. I should imagine so. This is much like any other village in Great Britain, Deene. You schoolmasters are still living in the pre-war age.”

“Perhaps. Thank you for all you've told me.”

But none of it, thought Carolus, did much to explain the one, the basic, the central fact of murder.

The telephone rang and Dr Pinton excused himself as he answered it, then rose to his feet.

“An accident,” he said, “up at the church.”

Carolus followed him from the house and got into his car, then decided to keep behind the Doctor on his way and see what had summoned him.

At the lych-gate was Rumble, for once without his grin. Dr Pinton pulled up short, jumped out and faced him.

“Where?”

“This way, Doctor.”

Carolus followed them. The West door of the church stood open but in the early spring afternoon the interior looked gloomy. There seemed to be no one else present and Rumble made for a little door at the West end under the tower. This opened with a creak and revealed a spiral stone staircase.

Rumble switched on a light and started ascending, Pinton behind him and Carolus a slow last. It seemed a long ascent—spiral staircases always exaggerate the distance—but at last Carolus reached the place in which the bell cords were looped against the walls. The other two had already ascended farther and, pausing only a minute to notice the eight great swollen ropes, Carolus followed.