Something Wicked (10 page)

‘I haven’t got my glasses,’ Miss Venables said severely. Then turning, but still clinging to the door handle, she called, ‘Margery! There’s a man here wants to talk to you about the General.’

A somewhat younger version of Miss Venables appeared. ‘Yes, Jane? Who is it?’

Edward explained himself and was at last ushered into the front parlour where he perched on an uncomfortable chair not designed for the male of the species and tried to be charming. He put in five minutes’ hard work before he made much headway but he did get the impression that Mrs Venables had not thought much of Inspector Treacher.

‘And that old fool, Dr Compton,’ she said scornfully. ‘I really believe he had been at the morphine.’

‘Margery!’ her sister said, shocked, ‘You ought not to say such things.’

‘Perhaps not but it is still a fact, Lord Edward, that the man is incompetent.’

‘You thought there was something suspicious about the General’s heart attack?’

‘I did. There was nothing wrong with his heart. He was as fit as a fiddle.’

‘He liked his drink?’ Edward ventured.

‘He liked his wine but he was no alcoholic – if that’s what you are insinuating, young man.’

Edward, rather flattered at being called young, decided he liked this forthright woman. ‘No, I meant was there anything about the body which surprised you?’

Mrs Venables hesitated. ‘I don’t rightly know. I was so shocked to find the General dead like that, I wasn’t thinking clearly. I do remember that when I looked at his face there was the faint smell of almonds. I thought it was queer because I knew the General didn’t like nuts and there were certainly none in the dining-room.’

Edward sighed. Lowther must have taken cyanide. It ought to have been obvious to the doctor – a slight burning of the lips, mouth and throat – but old Dr Compton had been a fool. The murderer had been fortunate. Mrs Venables was studying him and he realized she had guessed that she had unwittingly given him vital information. ‘You knew the General better than anyone – did he have relatives? Did anyone come to see him in the weeks before he died?’

‘Two questions – which shall I answer first? No, he had no relatives. His wife died many years ago during the war, before I knew him. She may have had a sister or a brother. In fact, I rather think she did but the General didn’t keep up with them. Now I think about it I believe he once told me he had a nephew in Australia or Africa. I can’t remember which.’

‘No one came to see him . . . no one you hadn’t seen before?’

‘The vicar – he came every now and again.’

‘When was the last time?’

‘Just before Christmas. I remember because they discussed whether Miss Truscott’s baby could be Baby Jesus in the Nativity play which the village school mistress puts on every year. The vicar said you couldn’t have a baby born out of wedlock playing Jesus and the General said – rather to my surprise, I must say – that babies were innocent and, as he recalled, Christ himself was conceived by an unmarried woman.’

‘So the vicar sometimes visited him? Who else?’

‘You don’t think the vicar murdered him, do you?’

‘Of course not!’ Edward said hurriedly. ‘I just meant that the General did have visitors. He wasn’t a complete recluse.’

‘No, as well as the vicar he saw the doctor and the schoolmistress, Miss Tiverton. He liked her.’ She shrugged her shoulders and pursed her lips as if there was something more to be said but this wasn’t quite the moment to say it.

Edward made a mental note to talk to Miss Tiverton in due course.

‘Did he go to London?’

‘Yes. He did go up for the day once a month,’ she said grudgingly, ‘to see his wine merchant and his stock-broker and occasionally his dentist. He had trouble with his teeth. I’m not sure who else he saw. It wasn’t for me to inquire.’

‘And when was the last time he went to London?’

‘About a month before he died.’

‘Was that when he came back with the wine?’ Edward was taking a wild leap into the dark and it didn’t surprise him when she said no. Then she added, rather pityingly, ‘He couldn’t manage crates of wine on the train. They arrived a few days later, by carrier.’

‘I don’t suppose you know where he bought his wine, do you?’

‘Justerini and Brooks in St James’s Street.’ She was obviously impressed and Edward was too.

‘Well, he couldn’t have bought it from a more respectable firm. By the way, you didn’t by any chance find a piece of paper on the body, a note of some kind?’

‘What sort of paper?’

‘Something odd, something you didn’t expect to find.’

‘You remember, Margery,’ Miss Venables said, jogging her sister’s mind. ‘You found that verse.’

‘Of course! I had forgotten all about it.’

‘Do you still have it?’ Edward tried to sound matter-of-fact.

‘I do, as it happens. I kept it. Was that wrong of me? It seemed . . . it seemed so appropriate somehow.’

‘Where did you find it exactly?’

‘In the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket. He never used to dress for dinner,’ she added apologetically. ‘He used to say, who was there to dress for and he felt more comfortable in his old . . . well, I suppose it was more what you call a smoking jacket. Very grubby but he wouldn’t hear of it being cleaned. He said he liked the smell of it. I ask you!’

‘May I see the piece of paper?’

‘Yes. Now where did I put it?’

‘It’s on the table by your knitting,’ Miss Venables reminded her sister.

‘Of course! I’m getting so forgetful.’ She disappeared and returned with a scrap of ruled paper. ‘I thought it was odd at the time but the Inspector didn’t seem interested. It’s written on a piece of paper torn out of the General’s wine book. He kept a careful record of everything. When he had bought it, when he had drunk it, whether he liked it or not. He called it his Bible.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘I think it’s still in the house.’

‘By the way, this may sound impertinent but do you know who inherited the General’s estate?’

‘I heard that he had left most of it to Miss Tiverton,’ she said with another shrug of her shoulders.

Yes, Edward thought to himself, it was what she had wanted to be asked. Mrs Venables had expected her employer to leave his estate to her.

‘I’m surprised he did not think to leave you anything for all your years of service,’ he said mildly.

‘That’s exactly what I said.’ Miss Venables nodded her head energetically.

Her sister said nothing, which was eloquence enough.

Edward examined the scrap of paper. ‘And is this the General’s handwriting?’

‘Oh no,’ she said with quiet certainty. ‘I would know his hand anywhere and this isn’t his.’

Edward looked at the paper and read: ‘As flies to wanton boys they kill us for their sport.’

When he had finished reading the old housekeeper said, ‘It’s not Kipling. He loved Kipling.’

‘No,’ Edward agreed, ‘it’s not Kipling. It’s from
King Lear
.’

‘Shakespeare! It doesn’t mention wine,’ Mrs Venables said, sounding puzzled.

‘But it mentions flies,’ Edward said, grimly, ‘and “flies” were what he was drinking when he died.’

‘Bingo!’ Edward said, placing the scrap of paper on Inspector Treacher’s desk with, perhaps, tactless excitement. ‘I think this proves that the General was murdered. We must ask Chief Inspector Pride to get his people to examine all three notes and see if they can confirm they were all written by the same person.’

Treacher rubbed his chin thoughtfully. It went against the grain but he had to admit that he ought to have made more of this note. When Mrs Venables had mentioned it to him, he had glanced at it dismissively and thrown it to one side. Now he knew he had been wrong and he was a big enough man to admit it.

‘I congratulate you, Lord Edward. I seem not to have been thorough enough. You have got more from Mrs Venables than I expected. In the light of the other murders – if that’s what we must now call them – we can see some sort of pattern emerging.’

‘Yes, but what puzzles me is that General Lowther’s wine was delivered by Justerini and Brooks – a highly respected wine merchant. We must find out what carrier they used but we should assume it wasn’t interfered with until it reached the General’s house.’

‘And Mrs Venables said there had been no visitors to the house in the weeks before he died – no strangers, anyway,’ the policeman went on. ‘And since the note was found in the pocket of the General’s smoking jacket, it must have been someone who knew him intimately.’

‘Perhaps . . .’

‘Could it have been Mrs Venables?’ the Inspector suggested without much confidence. ‘She might have discovered he hadn’t left her any money.’

‘I don’t see it. She could not know that he had left it all to Miss Tiverton. Anyway, she had worked for him for so long, why wait until that day to kill him?’

‘Perhaps she had suddenly discovered the General had made a new will. Maybe she had witnessed it.’

‘Yes, that’s a possibility, I suppose, though a witness would not have seen what was in the will.’

‘But if you witness a will, you can’t be a beneficiary,’ the Inspector persisted. ‘If she had been asked by him to witness what she thought was his will, she might have deduced that she would not inherit.’

Edward wasn’t convinced but if Treacher wanted to follow up his hunch that was up to him. ‘Well, Inspector, I’ll leave that for you to follow up. I’ll talk to Miss Tiverton and see what she’s got to say.’

‘Miss Tiverton – yes, I remember interviewing her all right. The village schoolmistress! She taught me nothing. Oh dear, Lord Edward, you are making me feel foolish.’

‘Not at all, Inspector. I’m coming at it from a different angle, that’s all. I’m starting with a presumption that the deaths were murders. You did not. There is another possibility as to how the Shakespeare quotation got into his pocket. Perhaps, when he went to London that last time, he met someone who gave it to him.’

‘Someone gave it to him . . .’ mused the Inspector, ‘and he kept it because it meant something to him. He didn’t necessarily see it as a threatening message . . .’

‘It’s a possibility – that’s all we can say until we find out more.’

‘I’ll put together a complete list of everyone who could have been in or near the house in the weeks before the General died,’ the Inspector offered. He looked at Edward anxiously. ‘I suppose we ought to exhume his body to see if there is any trace of poison.’

‘I’m afraid so, Inspector.’ Edward was tempted to say something consoling along the lines of ‘you shouldn’t blame yourself’, but decided it would sound patronizing. Anyway, damn it, it had been an inadequate investigation and the Inspector needed to face up to it.

‘I should also officially reopen the investigation into Hermione Totteridge’s death,’ the Inspector added gloomily.

‘I fear so. Might I suggest . . . a friend of mine, Charlotte Hassel, knew Miss Totteridge – she was a sort of honorary aunt to her when she was a child. She has offered to introduce me to her sister, Violet Booth. I gather she lives in Norfolk. I’d like to talk to her before there’s any suggestion that the coroner’s verdict might have to be challenged. Would that be all right with you?’

Treacher nodded his head. ‘I’d be grateful for any help you can give me, Lord Edward. The fact is that I feel rather out of my depth. There seems to be a murderer on the loose in and around Henley and I have to confess that I’ve never had to investigate a murder in all my years in the force. Perhaps I should call in Scotland Yard. Chief Inspector Pride would, I don’t doubt . . .’

‘Yes,’ Edward said hurriedly, ‘we
will
need to brief him after I have seen Mrs Booth because I am quite sure his investigation into Eric Silver’s death is linked to these murders. The quotations found on all four bodies can by no stretch of the imagination be coincidental.’

‘If we assume that they were all left by the same person, do they tell us anything about our murderer?’ Treacher asked, almost meekly.

‘Apart from my family motto which was left on Silver’s body, they’re all quotations from Shakespeare. The General’s is from
King Lear
, as I’m sure you know . . .’ The Inspector nodded unconvincingly. ‘Herold’s is from
Hamlet
and the offering left on Hermione Totteridge is from Sonnet 146 – a particularly gloomy poem. Shakespeare urges us not to worry about earthly wealth when death is so close but, instead, concentrate on building up spiritual riches.’

‘Can’t argue with that, I suppose,’ Treacher said morosely. ‘But what message is the murderer sending us or are they just – how would you describe them? – taunts?’

‘Hard to tell but, if they do mean anything, I would suggest that the General was being accused of killing someone quite wantonly – as flies are killed for sport by little boys. Presumably, in the army, he must have been responsible for a number of deaths and that’s something we need to look into. Miss Totteridge was told she was feeding on death and the only way to stop her was by killing her. There’s no more death then, as the sonnet says.’

‘Someone objected to her spraying poison on living things?’ Treacher suggested.

Edward shrugged his shoulders. ‘Possibly.’

‘And Herold’s “buzz, buzz”,’ Treacher continued, ‘could mean, as I understand it, that someone thought he talked a lot of nonsense, like Hamlet thought Polonius talked nonsense. Could that be a reference to his political views? I gather he admired Sir Oswald Mosley.’

‘A good thought, Inspector. Of course, it might just refer to his bees.’

Treacher sighed. ‘And I thought they said dead men tell no tales! I’ll borrow my wife’s
Complete Works of Shakespeare
when I get home and think about it.’

‘Do that, Inspector!’ Edward said encouragingly.

Treacher shook his head sadly. ‘I never had any doubt about Herold’s death. We all took it for granted – even his widow – that he had more or less committed suicide by disturbing his bees and getting stung to death. He had been a prisoner of his bad heart for so long and, after the life he had lived, it seemed obvious that he couldn’t stand it any more.’

‘But – reading your notes – you don’t appear to have asked how, in his condition, Herold managed to knock over several heavy hives. And, in any case, he died some fifty yards from the nearest one – or so I gather from your description of the scene.’