Murder by Mistake (20 page)

The inspector huffed. ‘I understand that you and your husband brought the boys back here, that you didn’t see any intruders, and so left the house. Is that correct?’

Ellie debated saying that she didn’t think there had been any intruders, felt the boys’ eyes on her, and nodded.

The inspector swung back to Denis. ‘I’ll need a statement from the boys in due course, with a suitable adult present.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said their father. ‘No need for anyone else.’ He swung back to the boys. ‘It wasn’t you who made such a mess of the place next door, was it?’

As one, the boys shook their heads, eyes wide with innocence.

At this inopportune moment Marge hiccuped, and then giggled.

Denis turned on her. ‘What do you mean by that? Oh, I see. You’re drunk.’

‘Not drunk. I saw you there last night.’

Angry. ‘Of course you did. I called to pay her for child-minding and to arrange for her to have them again today.’

Marge flushed. ‘I know what else you used to do with her, and I know how much money she had in her account. Is it still there, do you think?’

He towered over her. ‘What do you mean by that, may I ask? Are you daring to suggest that I had anything to do with her tragic death?’

‘I don’t know, do I?’ said Marge, obstinacy itself. ‘You might have.’

Denis turned to the inspector. ‘Drunk. As usual.’

‘Ears’ nodded. For once, the two men thought alike. ‘We’ll have to take her statement, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Denis, magnanimous in victory. ‘I shan’t sue her, even though you are the best witness I could possible have.’

They both laughed. Members of the men’s superiority club.

Marge said, ‘What, what?’ Even her neck flushed a painful red.

Ellie wondered whether to tell the inspector what the boys had told her about trashing Mrs Summers’ place. She opened her mouth to do so, and met four pairs of eyes begging her to keep quiet. She thought about the weals she’d seen on the boys’ legs, and about the difficulties faced by children in a divorce situation, and shut her mouth again. Perhaps she would have a word with the boys’ mother when things had calmed down a bit.

A shabby car drew up outside, and there was an altercation with a uniformed policeman outside.

‘Mum!’ cried the boys, and rushed to the front door, letting it bang to behind them in their haste to be gone.

A tall slender woman with a mop of pale yellow hair in a no-nonsense bob, counted the boys off and ushered them, mother hen like, into her car.

‘Their mother,’ said Denis. Dropping his voice to indicate he was telling a joke, he added, ‘God bless her.’

The inspector laughed, as intended. Neither Ellie nor Thomas, nor Marge joined in.

‘Ears’ said, ‘Mrs Quicke. Leave your address before you go.’

‘You know where I live,’ said Ellie, annoyed and frustrated.

He produced a notebook. ‘Tell me again. We can’t be expected to keep up with everyone’s details, can we?’

Ellie gave her address and telephone number with exaggerated clarity, and got to her feet. ‘Well, if that’s all. Thanks for everything, Marge. We’ll keep in touch, shall we?’

Thomas patted Marge on her shoulder. ‘It was good to meet you. Thanks for the coffee.’ And to the police, ‘You have my statement already, right?’

Down the path they went and into Thomas’s car. Ellie noted the dark patch on the passenger seat in front, where the Lieutenant had left his mark, and sat in the back. A policewoman was busy taping off Mrs Summers’ house as they drove away.

‘What do you think, Thomas?’

‘It would take a monster to let the boys find their childminder dead.’

‘But they didn’t, did they? Find her, I mean. He’d locked the bathroom door after he killed her, and pushed the key underneath. He counted on the boys not actually breaking a door down, and they didn’t. He lied about other things. He knew about the mess the boys had made earlier on, because Mrs Summers told me he’d promised to make good the damage they’d done.

‘She admitted that it was he who’d put her up to renting a big house from us with false references. She said that he’d asked her to pay the deposit herself – she’d plenty of money in her current account – but she’d refused, so he’d promised to transfer money into her account, to cover it. She was too trusting. She gave him her bank details.

‘Given that he’d asked her for money once and been refused, I think he tried her again last night, and when she refused for the second time, he killed her. Once she was dead, he had until her body was discovered to empty her bank account.’

‘Is he that cold-blooded? It’s hard to understand.’

‘So are the bruises on the backs of the boys’ legs. They went to their mother willingly enough. She must know about the bruises, mustn’t she? How can she bear to let the boys visit him?’

‘It sounds as if she’s between the devil and the deep blue sea. Does she have a job? What are the outgoings on the house she occupies? Didn’t you say he put the boys into private education? Is she frightened of him? Perhaps she knows but is too frightened to say anything.’

He turned into their driveway and parked. There was only one other car there now; probably the Party Planner’s. Something or somebody dodged behind the car, and Ellie put her hand to her heart. ‘What was that?’

‘What?’

‘Not sure. A man hiding behind that car?’

Thomas went to look. Bushes rustled and shook. A figure broke out of them and ran off down the road. Thomas laughed. ‘Someone caught short, perhaps, thinking our shrubbery offered a refuge? Which reminds me, I’ll scrub that car seat out now before I forget.’

Ellie looked up at the front of the house and wondered what scenes of wedding preparation and chaos it might be concealing from the public gaze. The windows of the house seemed to wink back at her – recently cleaned, thank goodness – and she thought they might be saying, perhaps a little wearily, that they’d seen it all before, but would still be there at the end of the day.

She was grateful for this reminder; her worries looked trivial compared to the hundred or so years that this house had already seen.

One thing was for sure, she was never going to host another wedding reception here. Far too much aggro.

She let herself into the hall and had to fall back to avoid being trampled underfoot by a screaming mob. Someone pushed past her, yelling. A pile of boxes was knocked into by another person, and rocked dangerously till a third person pushed it back upright. A streak of ginger flew from the top of the grandfather clock and landed on a bridal archway of entwined summer jasmine and ivy, which sank in the middle and was only saved from crashing to the floor by the cat taking another leap on to a pile of tables, which then did slid sideways with a crash, followed to the floor by a stack of chairs.

Midge cannoned off Ellie’s legs and bolted out of the front door and down the drive, ears flattened to head, tail bushed out to twice its normal size.

‘Midge!’ The cat vanished.

Ellie called over him, but he wasn’t listening. Would he be run over? He didn’t usually go out of the front door, did he?

Thomas, cleaning rags in hand, emerged from his car, spotted Midge’s tail disappearing into the road and started off after him. Only to return, shaking his head. ‘He’ll be back when he’s calmed down. What set him off?’

‘I don’t know.’

There was a babble of sound indoors. ‘Have you got it?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to push you, but—’

‘Help her up! Are you hurt badly?’

‘Oh, it’s bleeding.’

Ellie took a deep breath, and went into the hall. She didn’t get far, since her way was barred by cardboard boxes full of plants in full bloom. The mob reduced itself to Mr Balls, the Party Planner and his two slaves, plus Rose, who was sitting on the lowest stair, holding her wrist. And Mia, wide-eyed and breathing hard. The slaves looked the worse for wear. Over the banister came the heads of two of the cleaning team, eyes and mouths wide, who were supposed to be turning out the bedrooms in readiness for Saturday.

Mr Balls leaned against the newel post, wiping his brow with care so as not to disturb his toupee. One of his slaves was checking out the bloodied elbow of the other. Mia wept, sucking a cut finger.

Rose saw Ellie first, and got to her feet at the second attempt. ‘So sorry, such a madhouse, I don’t know what got into that cat, but he’s been growling and getting in our way ever since the parcel arrived—’

‘What parcel?’

‘Can we help?’ asked one of the cleaners, half way down the stairs.

Ellie waved her away. ‘No, thanks. It’s all right. You get on with what you were doing.’ The cleaner withdrew with some reluctance. She didn’t come across this much excitement every day.

Rose said, ‘A wedding present for Ursula. Honest, we did our very best, but we don’t even know who it’s from, so how ever is she going to thank them for it?’

‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush,’ said Mia, drying her eyes. ‘It was an accident. I’ll tell her. She won’t create, I’m sure she won’t.’

‘It might have come from his side of the family though,’ said Rose, brushing herself down. ‘They might get upset, think we were careless, though goodness knows we put it in a safe place on the table next to the telephone, and when Midge knocked it off there we put it high up on that little ledge outside the cloakroom where you wouldn’t think he could get at it, but somehow he did, and hooked it down and it smashed on the edge of that stack of chairs.’

‘Never mind,’ said Mia, returning with dustpan and brush. ‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and Mr Balls and his assistants were really wonderful and I’ll make it all right with Ursula, just you wait and see.’

‘Dear Mrs Quicke.’ Mr Balls puffed and panted. ‘What a scene to greet your return, when really we were right on target, everything going well except for the shortage of cables but that will be put right tomorrow, I do assure you.’

Ellie felt rather faint. ‘Yes, of course. But what about your wounded soldier?’

‘It’s nothing,’ muttered the wilting female slave.

‘Let me look,’ said Rose. ‘Oh, I’ll just run it under the tap and then put a plaster on it. Naughty, naughty Midge. No dinner for him tonight.’

Mia bent over the mess on the floor, looking as if she might cry again.

Ellie took the dustpan and brush off her. ‘Go and attend to that cut on your finger. I’ll deal with this. We may find a label inside the package that will tell us who it’s from.’

The parcel had been inexpertly wrapped in a layer of coloured tissue paper which looked as if it had been used before, and which hadn’t proved to be much protection for the glass dish within. Ellie couldn’t see any label, though she turned the mess over and over by pulling on the paper with her fingertips, once she’d got it into the dustpan. Something squishy and pink clung to the tissue paper.

‘Who would send newly-weds an old-fashioned moulded glass dish?’ Ellie wondered. ‘Someone of the older generation, perhaps? Not even cut glass. Well, I suppose we must put it safely into some sort of container and keep it for Ursula to see. Perhaps she can make a guess as to who might have sent it. I’ll find something with a lid on it in the kitchen.’

Mr Balls fanned himself with his clipboard. ‘Dear lady, you are efficiency itself, and no great harm done, except to my nervous system. So, shall we have a quick run through what we have achieved today and what still needs to be done tomorrow?’

Ellie gestured with the dustpan. ‘As soon as I’ve got rid of this. We don’t want any more blood shed, do we?’

She took the sticky mess out to the kitchen, where Rose was busy putting a plaster on one of the slave’s elbows. Ellie rummaged in the cupboard where she kept plastic boxes with lids from the freezer, and found an old ice cream carton which would do.

‘Now where shall we put it? In a cupboard where Midge can’t get at it?’

‘In the larder. He can’t manage that door knob.’ Mia opened the door for Ellie and followed her down the two steps into a narrow, tiled room with a stone shelf running along one side of it, which had served the house well as a cold store before the advent of refrigerators. In old Miss Quicke’s day, there had still been a meat safe at one end, with a mesh front to keep the flies out, but this had long been banished, and new shelves fitted to house Rose’s fabled collection of chutneys and jams.

Mia took the box off Ellie, and opened the lid. ‘I just want to . . .’ She poked at a wodge of pink with one finger, and let out a hiss. ‘It wasn’t meant for Ursula. It was meant for me.’

Ellie took a closer look at the mess. ‘What makes you think that?’ She smelt it, and spotted a mass of blue speckles in the pink. ‘Ah.’

Mia shivered, but didn’t break down. ‘That pink stuff is coconut ice. I used to love it, in the old days. But this doesn’t smell right to me. What about those blue granules? What do you make of them?’

‘They remind me of something, but I can’t think what.’

‘Something used to kill mice? We had mice at Prior Place one summer, and I seem to remember the man putting down some blue granules which the mice were supposed to eat. He made sure we had no pets around the place first. I think there’s something nasty in that block of sweet stuff, and that Midge knew.’

Ellie put the lid back on the box and dropped it into a large crock which had been used in the second world war to house eggs pickled in isinglass, and which Rose occasionally used to keep bread fresh.

Mia replaced the lid on the crock and smiled at Ellie. ‘Not to worry. I’m not going to faint or anything. In fact, you don’t need to worry about me any more. I’ve done all the agonizing I’m going to do, and somehow all the fear has gone. For good, I hope. What happened before is all in the past. I’ll probably continue to have nightmares for a bit, but one day, maybe, I’ll even be able to sleep properly without waking up every half hour to make sure I’m not still in my old room with men coming at me to . . . No, no. That’s all in the past. At the moment I seem to be bearing a charmed life, what with cars missing me by a fraction and poisonous sweets meeting a sticky end. Long may it last.’