A Colourful Death: A Cornish Mystery (33 page)

He was the only witness called. The coroner asked the jury whether they wanted to retire to consider the verdict. After a brief consultation, the foreman announced that they were already agreed on “murder by person or persons unknown.”

Detective Inspector Scumble requested an adjournment to allow the police to proceed with their enquiries. The cooperative coroner granted a week and, on the advice of the police, signed a burial order. The proceedings closed.

“Well, that was a waste of time!” said Jocelyn.

Stella was obviously dismayed when Jocelyn announced, on arrival back at the Riverview Home, that she intended to call on her husband’s parishioner.

“Have you any objection?” Jocelyn’s voice was chilly.

“No, of course not. I’m not even on duty. It’s just—I don’t use the name Maris here. Miss Weller, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly.” Jocelyn could be gracious, too. “If I should have reason to refer to you.”

The weather had ameliorated by that time. Gusts of wind still made the new-leaved trees sway, and an occasional spatter of raindrops had flung itself at the rear window of the car as they drove eastward. But there was enough blue sky in the west to make several sailors a pair of trousers each, and Nick said firmly, “I think I’ll go for a walk. How long, Mrs Stearns?”

“Half an hour? Forty minutes? We shan’t leave without you.”

“If you go down through the garden,” said Stella, “there’s a footpath along the river bank.”

“Thanks.” Nick went off around the side of the house.

The others went in. Stella actually said good-bye and repeated her thanks before disappearing up the stairs. Miss Jamieson popped out of her office.

“To see Mrs Batchelor?” she enquired brightly. “She may be in her room, but I expect she’s in the lounge. One of our most sociable guests, I’m happy to say.”

She showed them to a large room with windows facing south, to the drive and the circular bed of roses, and west over a long bed of bearded irises, somewhat bedraggled alter the heavy rains, and a wooded hillside. Mrs Batchelor was again sitting with Mrs Redditch. They were both delighted to see Jocelyn and Eleanor.

“Ever so kind!” Mrs Batchelor beamed.

“I shall mention it to the bishop,” said Mrs Redditch regally.

“Please don’t.” Jocelyn looked thoroughly disconcerted, as well she might, Eleanor thought, considering her mixed motives for the visit. “We just happened to be passing. I didn’t know you were acquainted with the bishop, Mrs Redditch.”

“I live in Truro, and my late husband was the Dean of the Chapter. I must say life in the cathedral close is much less interesting than here.”

“Such goings-on,” put in Mrs Batchelor. “Ought to know better at his age, he did.”

“Who is that?” Eleanor asked hopefully.

“The doctor, Mrs Trewynn. Dr Fenwick.”

“What Maybelle tellt us is, he’s to wed Miss Weller. Well! Nurse or no, she’s a giglet if ever I saw un. A flighty piece,” she translated.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Jocelyn. “How would Maybelle know such a thing?”

“She tidies up Dr Fenwick’s flat and Miss Weller’s room. She doesn’t do the heavy cleaning—charwomen come in from Wadebridge for that, early in the mornings.”

“Clains the dispensary, she does.” Mrs Batchelor pronounced the difficult word with care and some pride. “That’s where they keep everybody’s pills and tonics and such. It has to be done over special. Disinfected, like, with Dettol.”

“Maybelle’s more of a parlourmaid than a housemaid. She hears things.”

The two old ladies nodded at each other, in perfect agreement though one might conceivably have been a parlourmaid in her heyday and the other had certainly employed one or more.

“And I don’t mean spirits,” Mrs Redditch added. “In my young day we all went in for a bit of table-turning and ouija boards. Before I married the Dean, of course. Though he was only a canon then.”

“Like my Joe started a deck hand and ended up master of his own boat.”

Reminiscences of deceased husbands, now sainted whatever their flaws in life, are hard to stop. Eleanor and Jocelyn heard no more about Stella and the doctor.

As they left half an hour later, Jocelyn whispered crossly to Eleanor, “Tittle-tattle about the clergy and Port Mabyn, where I’ve spent half my life! I wish you’d told some stories of your husband’s adventures, and yours.”

“They wanted to talk, not to listen. If I reach my eighties, you shall hear everything, over and over, until you’re heartily sick of it.”

“You should write a book.” They stepped into the hall, Teazle pattering close at their heels. “Ah, Miss Jamieson, we’re just leaving.”

“Already?” said the nurse in a perfunctory tone. She looked upset. “I was just going to invite you to stay for tea. I’m sorry, I should have sent Maybelle sooner, but I have a good deal on my mind.”

“Is something wrong?” Eleanor asked.

“Yes, there is!” At this small sign of sympathy, grievance and worry burst forth. “Stella—Miss Weller—has just informed me that neither she nor Dr Fenwick will be here for the next two weekends! She asked if I would come and stay here for the whole time. I can have her room, if you please, because she’s never coming back! And it’s true I could do with the extra money—who couldn’t?—but I have other obligations, and so I told her.”

“It’s a lot to ask,” Eleanor agreed warmly.

“She said both the others—we do eight-hour shifts during the week, so as to always have an RN on the premises—both Gloria and Mrs Hendred refused, too, so the doctor will have to get someone from an agency. Which is all very well, but some of our older guests get very anxious when there’s any change in our routine. A new nurse in sole charge is going to set them all in a flutter. They all have their little ways, you know, their preferences, and she won’t have time to get to know them all. She won’t understand about calling them guests instead of patients. The whole atmosphere we’ve worked so hard for will be ruined! It makes me feel terribly guilty, but I simply can’t!”

“My dear Miss Jamieson,” said Jocelyn, “your concern for your patients—guests—is admirable. You have no cause for guilt. I’m sure Dr Fenwick will make adequate arrangements for his absence and your guests will survive the experience. It seems very short notice, however. I’d have expected the doctor to plan for his absence well in advance.”

“They’re getting married! Can you believe it? I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but I didn’t promise, and you’re a vicar’s wife, after all. They’ve been planning it for some time, apparently! No one knew a thing! Then Stella suddenly had to leave the place she was living. A row with her landlady, she said. So they’re getting married at the Plymouth registry office on Saturday and going off to Greece for their honeymoon. Talk about luck! She is very pretty, of course. Still … She’s going to stay at a hotel in Plymouth till Saturday, then move into his flat when they come back. All super de luxe, of course. She’s gone up to finish her packing now.”

Maybelle came into the hall with her tea-trolley. “You was busy, Miss Jamieson, and it’s getting late, so I thought I’d better go ahead with tea.”

“Yes, yes,” Miss Jamieson said distractedly. “You’re a dear good girl, Maybelle.”

Maybelle looked astonished, then grinned and said, “I does my best, Miss Jamieson.” She trundled onwards.

“You appreciate loyalty,” said the nurse with considerable bitterness, “when you don’t get it where you ought to be able to rely on it. I’m sorry, I oughtn’t to unload my troubles on you. I hope you won’t tell Stella I told you—you know what. It’s very kind of you to visit Mrs Batchelor and I know it cheers her up no end. Do come again. Good-bye.”

She marched off towards the rear of the house.

Thus dismissed, Eleanor and Jocelyn went out to the car. There was no sign of Nick.

“Bother him,” said Jocelyn. “It’s been quite three quarters of an hour.”

“Let’s go and look round the corner of the house to see if he’s in sight.”

They walked over to the southeast corner, which had the advantage of being out of sight of the guests’ lounge. Nick was just starting up the slope from the river. He saw them and waved. Teazle gave a little yelp of recognition and dashed to meet him, short legs covering the distance at an amazing speed.

“Hmph,” Jocelyn snorted. “He’s in no hurry! He’ll be another five minutes. You can’t believe anything anyone says these days. By the way, didn’t Mrs Redditch tell us before that her husband was a colonial governor?”

Eleanor smiled. “Yes, I wondered whether you’d remember. She’s a romancer. I expect he was something very ordinary and dull like a schoolmaster. She’s obviously ‘gently bred,’ as we used to say, and I dare say she lives in Truro—”

“She certainly knows a lot about the cathedral clergy!”

“—But we’d better not take anything she’s told us too seriously.”

“Miss Jamieson confirmed Stella’s engagement to the doctor. So that’s why she’s moving away, as she told Nicholas. I wonder why she didn’t tell him about the marriage.”

“Oh Joce, I’m sure she wants to keep her past and present as separate as possible. You can’t blame her, if half what we’ve heard about her is true.”

“I would hope she’d have confessed to the doctor when he asked her to marry him!”

“Well … perhaps. It would still be most uncomfortable to keep up an acquaintance with people who knew her before she reformed.”

“What makes you think she’s reformed?”

“At her age, surely she’s ready to settle down,” Eleanor said charitably. “She’s leaving her job. I expect she wants children. That’s something you can’t put off indefinitely.” She sighed. She and Peter had been too busy, and frequently in such inhospitable places, that they had never seriously considered starting a family until it was too late.

“The question is, should we tell the police?”

“Tell the police what?” Nick’s long legs had brought him up faster than Jocelyn had reckoned. “I’ve discovered a very pretty spot to do some painting. What have you discovered that the police ought or ought not to be told?”

Eleanor and Jocelyn exchanged a glance.

Jocelyn started walking towards the car. “Sorry, Nicholas. We were told partly as a rumour and partly in confidence.”

Eleanor wasn’t sure she would have been so scrupulous had Jocelyn not been there to keep her on the straight and narrow. They had not, after all, actually promised Miss Jamieson not to tell, but she supposed silence signified consent. Jocelyn apparently didn’t extend this protection to the extent of keeping the information from the police.

Did Eleanor’s silence now lend her consent to not telling Nick? She knew him much better than Jocelyn did and trusted him absolutely not to pass it on. She decided that if they told the police, she would tell Nick, too.

She did understand Jocelyn’s point: Once you started choosing whom it was safe to tell, you started on a slippery slope.

Nick opened the back door of the car for Teazle and the passenger door for Eleanor. As he got into the back with the dog, he said in a somewhat piqued voice, “Then I hope you don’t expect to hear from me what I’ve remembered.”

“What, Nick?”

“Oh, just a question I wanted to ask Scumble. A point that’s been nagging at me in a vague sort of way, but I’ve been too busy with
Hope and Glory
to track it down.”

Ignoring this, Jocelyn drove round the rose-bed and up the drive, and turned onto the Wadebridge road before she said, “Eleanor, I think you’d better tell Megan. She’s the best person to decide whether That Man needs to know. I can’t see that it has anything to do with the murder, though. Geoffrey Clark seems to have let Stella … um … disport herself with other men. He wasn’t the jealous sort, and, of course, they were not husband and wife.”

“That’s a good idea. I’d much rather talk to Megan.” She would wait to call her when she got home from work, to avoid the risk of finding Mr Scumble on the other end of the line.

And she could invite Nick to ask his question on her phone at the same time. Thus each would hear the other’s story. An admirable—though admittedly sneaky—solution, in Eleanor’s view. If Jocelyn asked whether she had told Nick about Stella’s marriage, she could honestly deny it. Well, fairly honestly.

Wilkes drove Megan and DI Scumble back to the Bodmin nick after the inquest. In the back seat of the 1100, Scumble said, “That went nicely. Some coroners are too thick-headed or bloody-minded to accept any suggestions. I’ve got to report to the Super when we get back, so you needn’t drive too fast, Wilkes.”

“Right, sir.”

“Pencarrow, I want you to give me a summary of where we’ve got to. You never know, it’s just barely conceivable that you may have picked up something I didn’t. Wilkes, are you listening?”

“I … uh…” He obviously wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to be listening or not. “I’m concentrating on the driving, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it. But if you can spare us a modicum of your attention, and use whatever brains you happen to have concealed about you, if any, you can put your oar in if you think the sergeant has missed something important. Or if there’s any details you haven’t got round yet to reporting properly. I don’t want constant interruptions, mind you. And keep concentrating on the driving.”

“Uh … yes, sir.”

Scumble rolled his eyes. “Go ahead, Pencarrow.”

Megan was also uncertain of exactly what he wanted. She plunged in.

“For a start, sir, we’ve shortened the period when Clark could have died from the doctor’s three hours. He left Port Mabyn after noon so couldn’t have been killed in Padstow before half past at the earliest. We’ve also narrowed the list of suspects a lot. Tom Lennox and Jeanette Jones’s alibis are solid. Douglas Rosevear and Quentin Durward give each other an alibi smack-bang in the middle. Either could conceivably have made it down to Padstow before three, but neither had any reason to suppose that Clark would be alone in his studio. Durward has no apparent motive. I’d knock him out, and I’d say Rosevear is pretty unlikely though his motive is strong.”

She paused. Scumble grunted.

“Of the others at the colony, Leila Arden is still a possibility. She hated Clark, though we still don’t know why.”