The Spring Cleaning Murders (20 page)

“Same here, love.” She sounded suddenly forlorn, and I felt a twinge of pity. Was she always sticking her nose into other people’s business because her husband was never home—on account of the funny hours he worked?

Another clap of thunder sent her scurrying back home and me down the brigadier’s path.

I was struck all at once by the blank stare of the house. Blank because all the curtains were drawn and because the house didn’t have much facial expression, anyway. A very ordinary narrow-faced house, identical to almost every other one on the street. Was Brigadier Lester-Smith away? Or had Clarice Whitcombe returned when Marilyn Tollings was somehow absent from her post and, overcoming her shyness, made it all the way down the extremely short path to the door? Had Clarice rung the bell and been welcomed in with open arms by the brigadier? Were they even now sitting in the half dark, afraid that a chink of light would reveal to the entire world that there was a tryst in the making? I was certain that Clarice was the woman Marilyn had seen in the raincoat and woolly hat. And equally convinced that they were two middle-aged people caught up in the near-paralyzing terror of teenagers falling in love. I hated the idea of interrupting what might be a breakthrough in their relationship. Still, I didn’t feel I could leave the brigadier’s raincoat on the doorstep, and I needed to get Ben’s back.

I rang the bell and waited. It was raining harder now and I wasn’t getting much cover from the narrow overhang that substituted for a porch. A full minute went by and I was debating whether to try again when the door inched open and I found myself almost nose to nose with the brigadier. He was wearing a dressing gown and had a towel wrapped around his head. The smile he produced in greeting missed his eyes completely. It also missed his lips by inches.

“Brigadier, I’m sorry.” My voice rattled along with the brass chain he was slipping from its slot. “Obviously I’ve caught you at a bad time. But I did want to return your coat.”

“My what?” He now had the door properly open.

“The raincoat Ben took by mistake.”

“Ah, that one.” He sounded not one whit enlightened. “Sorry about this.” He looked down at his dressing gown, saw a gap that shouldn’t have been there, and in the process of tugging himself into order almost dropped the towel off his head. “I was washing my hair. I always do it on a Tuesday.” He sounded flustered, and I didn’t like to point out that this was Thursday.

“I won’t keep you. You take this.” I handed him the coat. “If you’ll let me have Ben’s, I’ll get out of your hair.”

Far from smiling at my feeble joke, he looked panicky as he invited me to step inside. Was it possible Clarice was in the house? I just couldn’t see her and the brigadier getting to the dressing-gown stage in such unseemly haste. Then there was that towel on his head. Could it really be no more than a prop?

“I’m not quite sure where I put Ben’s coat.” Brigadier Lester-Smith poked at his collar with unsteady fingers before retying the dressing-gown cord yet again. “Why don’t you go into the sitting room, Ellie, while I have a look round for it?” This was utterly unlike him; the brigadier was not a man to misplace things. I began to hope that lovesickness was his only problem as I perched on the arm of a chair, waiting for him to return. I found myself growing increasingly jumpy. Perhaps it was because I’d already spent too much time sitting today in Dr. Solomon’s surgery. Anyway, I felt like a schoolgirl, desperately needing to go to the loo and being unable to ask to be excused because the teacher had left the classroom. After several minutes of this, I got up and went back into the hall.

“Brigadier?” I called.

There was no answer. After trying again, I decided I really couldn’t wait any longer. Luckily I was familiar with his house, so I nipped up the narrow staircase and across the tiny landing to the bathroom. He’d had the wall knocked out between it and the once-separate toilet, making things less cramped. He had also put in new fixtures. At first I didn’t look towards the frosted-glass shower doors. But a few moments later, while I stood washing my hands at the sink, I glanced sideways and noticed that the doors were pushed to the side, and I could see reddish-brown stains spattering the wall and even deeper dribbles of... the red . . . stuff going down the white tile to puddle by the drain.

“Ellie?”

On hearing the brigadier calling my name, I levitated a couple of feet off the ground, then staggered out onto the landing to collide with him at the top of the stairs.

“Sorry! I had to use the loo,” I babbled. The expression on his face gave him away. He knew I had seen. And he knew he had to offer some sort of explanation. But even as the bloom faded from his peachy cheeks, he was saved by a piercing scream from outside. Looking like a man in a turban forced into battle against his religious beliefs, Brigadier Lester-Smith hurried down the stairs ahead of me towards whatever horror had paid an evening visit.

A collage of dark shapes emerged through the drizzle to group in the middle of the road, where they fleshed out into real people, all jabbering away about having heard the scream. Marilyn Tollings’s voice rose above the rest with her announcement that she’d had one of her funny feelings on and off all day that something terrible was about to strike Herring Street. A male voice drowned her out, saying it was probably nothing, just some fool of a woman thinking there was a man hiding under her bed. The group now shuffled uncertainly, murmuring amongst themselves.

It was then I noticed the lights were on in Mrs. Malloy’s house. When I’d first arrived, I had thought how sad and deserted it looked, even though one of Mrs. Malloy’s C.F.C.W.A. cronies was supposed to be staying in the house. But whether the caretaker was Trina McKinnley, Winifred Smalley, or Betty Nettle continued to escape my mind. It was hard for me to picture Trina being a woman to run screaming into the road whatever the provocation, or even sticking her nose out the door if she heard someone else do so. But either one of the others? Yes, it was definitely odd that Mrs. Smalley or Mrs. Nettle wasn’t out in the street with the other neighbors.

I turned without saying anything to Brigadier Smith. I had blocked him right out of my mind along with what I had seen in his shower. But he followed close behind me as I hurried over to Mrs. Malloy’s house. My heart was pounding while my brain did nothing at all as I raced up the path to ring the bell. Nothing. Then I pounded on the front door.

My hand reached for the knob. It turned, and there I was in Mrs. Malloy’s hall with Brigadier Lester-Smith at my elbow, in his dressing gown and towel turban. Straight ahead was the kitchen, its door half open, and from within came the sound of a woman’s voice. It wasn’t talking to us. And it didn’t sound panic-stricken, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was walking in on someone or something horrific. There was no point in dillydallying, hoping for a poker to appear in my hand. I took the few remaining steps towards the kitchen. Cautiously!

The hall had been reduced to shoulder width by the amount of furniture Mrs. Malloy had miraculously squeezed into it. A clothes tree protruded, along with several whatnot tables and an ancient aspidistra in a very large, very ugly pot. China poodles and Indian brass pieces had been scattered about with a generous hand, all geared up to come toppling down at the least nudge. I should have had enough sense to walk sideways, as I discovered with a leap of alarm when a decorative plate came clattering off the wall, propelling me and Brigadier Lester-Smith into the kitchen.

There were two people in that kitchen. One of them was Trina McKinnley, but she wasn’t talking. She was lying facedown with a knife stuck in her back, her neck twisted around so that she appeared to be looking up at us in glassy-eyed inquiry. There was blood . . . The kitchen faded out and for a moment I thought that I was back in the brigadier’s bathroom . . . until his hand came down on my shoulder. I sat down with a jolt in a chair already pulled out from the table. It was hard to concentrate, but I made myself look at the woman in the fake leopard coat and the black velvet toque standing with hands on her hips like a mannequin in a shop window.

“If I’d known you was stopping by, I’d have had the kettle on and some crumpets toasted,” said Mrs. Malloy, coming abruptly alive. Something poor Trina McKinnley would never do. “But as you can see”--waving a hand at the corpse on the floor—"things is rather at sixes and sevens here, Mrs. H. Some homecoming this has turned out to be. But it doesn’t do to complain, does it? We’ve all got troubles.”

I could only stare at her.

“And what’s he doing here, dressed up like something out of the Taj Mahal?” Mrs. Malloy demanded, suddenly appearing to notice Brigadier Lester-Smith standing behind my chair.

“We’ll get to that later,” I said, hoping desperately that I sounded casual, because when one is in the room with a possible murderer, it makes sense not to unduly put the wind up that person. “Mrs. Malloy, you have to tell us what happened here. You have rung the police, haven’t you?”

“Well, it was like this.” Mrs. Malloy began slowly unbuttoning her coat, perhaps to give her hands something to do. “I came up from London on the coach, it’s not quite as quick as the train, but it puts me down within walking distance of home. And I’d only the one suitcase with me, so it was no bother.” Still standing in her coat, she pointed at the suitcase leaning against the wall by the back door. “The coach was about fifteen minutes late, so I suppose I got off at around six, and by the time I got here it must have been close to twenty past because I’d stopped to buy a bottle of milk at the shop down the road. It’s there on the table, and lucky I didn’t drop it.” Mrs. Malloy wobbled for the first time.

“And you walked in to find Trina dead.”

“Don’t be daft, Mrs. H.! I came storming in bent on finding fault with how she’d been taking care of the house during my absence, and when I saw the state of the kitchen, I picked up the carving knife and let her have it good and proper.” Mrs. Malloy snorted a laugh that broke into pieces, so that the next moment she was shaking and sobbing. And I found myself helping her into the chair I had vacated, while the brigadier mumbled something about brandy.

“Who could have done this to her, Mrs. H.? That’s what I was asking myself before you walked in.” Mrs. Malloy shook her head, dislodging the toque so that her hair was revealed. The maroon shade she had switched to after becoming a grandmother was no more. She was back to her tamer jet black, with the requisite two inches of white roots—much better suited to a woman in mourning. “A nice girl like Trina! Well, maybe she wasn’t all that nice, but that’s not the point, is it? We in the C.F.C.W.A. was fond of her. She could be a laugh, could Trina. Bossy, I’ll give you that, and a bit on the grab when it came to money, but that’s no reason to chop her, is it?”

“Absolutely not,” agreed Brigadier Lester-Smith, who was gingerly stepping around the body to open the pantry door. Mrs. Malloy, understanding what he was about, said he’d find a bottle of medicinal gin on the second shelf.

“We have to figure out who done it.” She was fanning her face with her hand, a face that was beginning to show signs of emotional wear and tear in the mascara smudges under her eyes and the droop of her butterfly lips. “And we’d better do it on the double, Mrs. H., or as sure as my middle name’s Nelly, the police will think it was me.”

“We don’t know how long she’s been dead,” I pointed out. “It may turn out to have been several hours, putting you in the clear.”

“Or, with my bleeding luck, it could have happened minutes before I waltzed in the door.”

“Do you think the knife is one of yours?”

She nodded. “Looks like the one I used for the Sunday joint. I always left it out by the cooker.”

“You didn’t touch it?” I said.

“Now why would I do that?,” she shot back.

“People do. You hear about it all the time. The person who finds the body goes to pull out the knife or makes contact with it while they’re feeling for a pulse, or ... whatever.” My voice petered out.

“You’re a fat lot of help, Mrs. H! What I need is for you to get me off the hook by pointing the finger at someone else right this minute.” A crash turned the last couple of words into an exclamation point. We both jumped. Brigadier Lester-Smith had dropped the bottle of gin. Amazingly, it didn’t break. Or Mrs. Malloy might have turned into a murderer then and there. And from the expression on the brigadier’s face, he wouldn’t have been surprised if either one of us had turned on him.

“I rather fear Ellie thinks I did it, Mrs. Malloy,” he stammered through lips that twitched as if pulled by puppet strings. “Regrettably, she saw some suspicious-looking stains in my shower just before we came over here. And it is not to be wondered you took them for blood.” He turned jerkily towards me. “I remember thinking that’s what it looked like after I stepped out of the shower and realized it hadn’t rinsed away, probably because the showerhead wasn’t at the right angle. And I was just about to clean it up when the doorbell rang.”

“And if it wasn’t blood, buster,” Mrs. Malloy, too, had read her share of American crime novels, “what was it?”

“Hair dye.”

“Hair dye?” Mrs. Malloy repeated scornfully. “You really think Mrs. H. here and yours truly are chumps enough to believe that cock and bull. Better pull the other leg, Brigadier, it’s got bells on!”

“See for yourselves!” He unwrapped the towel and, understandably, hung his head.

“Well, blow me down!” Mrs. Malloy let out a whistle that should have brought the police running if they weren’t on their way already. The brigadier’s hair was a damp, sticky crimson.

“How long are you meant to leave it on for?” I asked, almost forgetting about poor Trina.

“Five minutes.”

“And how long has it bloody been?” put in Mrs. Malloy, sounding downright vexed. “Oh, don’t bother answering that! Too long. Green hair is what you’ll get. And serves you right!”