Deadly Stuff (13 page)

The inspector didn’t seem to notice his sudden discomfort. ‘All right, sir, that’s all for now. My sergeant will walk you back your office. Thank you for your time.’ To Trent he quickly whispered some instructions into his ear, and watched the pair depart.

Then he turned to his companion. ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked. Then, receiving no reply, looked over at the impressive cook. Today she was wearing a long, red, crushed-velvet skirt and a red, blue and green flowered blouse over a white background. With her thick, dark hair and lovely blue eyes, curvaceous figure and pale complexion she was a sight to raise any man’s spirits. James Raye, Trevor Golder couldn’t help thinking, was a lucky man to have attracted her attention.

But, right now, his thoughts weren’t on the vagaries of romance. ‘Miss Starling!” he said again, slightly louder. That the woman was deep in thought was obvious, and with this particular woman, he wanted to know exactly what she was thinking.

Jenny started. ‘Hmm? What? Sorry Inspector, I was miles away.’

‘Yes, so I could see. So spill it, then. What’s on your mind?’ he demanded shortly.

‘Stuffed bears,’ Jenny said promptly, nonplussing him totally.

‘Huh?’

‘I was just wondering why a man as vain and as full of himself as Maurice Raines,’ Jenny explained patiently, ‘did all the shifting and hauling of that stuffed bear himself, on the morning that he gave his opening speech.’

‘Oh,’ Trevor said. But for the life of him, couldn’t see the relevance.

But Jenny was barely paying attention. Because now her
mind had gone on to something else that was worrying her. Something to do with the two full cups of coffee on the table that had been beside Maurice’s dead body. Something about that hadn’t ever made much sense and she should have known at once what it was. Now that she had remembered something that she’d overheard at breakfast that first morning, those cups of coffee could only make sense in one particular way. But could it really be true? Wasn’t she taking two and two and making twenty-two, instead of four?

And yet…. How else could it have been?

Trevor, seeing that he was going to get no sense out of her, turned back reluctantly to his paperwork, whilst Jenny, with all thoughts of James Raye and the prospect of a pleasant lunch all but forgotten, continued to sit and think.

Over and over again she went over the facts and, time and again, she came back with only one solution that made sense. But, if she was right, then it was all too fantastical for words. No, she must have got it wrong, she told herself, giving a mental head shake. But the strands fit. Well, sort of fit. Well, up to a point. And they all definitely pointed one way. Yet, that simply could
not
be right, because what should have happened, hadn’t, in fact, happened.

She frowned, and was so deeply engrossed in going over her theory and pulling huge holes in it, that she missed Peter Trent’s return. It was only when he started to talk, that she pulled herself out of her reverie, and began to listen.

‘So, what’s the set up like over there?’ Trevor began briskly by asking his sergeant.

‘Mr McIntyre has one of the ground floor rooms in the Cotswold stone building down by Walton Street,’ Peter Trent said. ‘Most of the admin offices are in there, apparently. It’s one of those set-ups whereby you have to go through his secretary’s smaller, outer office before you get into his. The toilet they both use is off her room. I had a word with her, and she swears up
and down that our friend never left his office after he started work at his usual time of eight-thirty that morning.’

Trevor sighed. ‘She strike you as reliable?’

Peter Trent grinned. ‘My granny wouldn’t have been able to find fault with her, guv,’ he said sadly. ‘In her early sixties, and devoted to her hubby and three cats. I’d say she likes our Mr McIntyre all right, but she’s hardly that fond of him that she’d perjure herself.’

‘Right. And the loo’s in her office you say, and they both use it?’ Trevor prompted.

Trent, with all the weight of his years working with this man behind him, easily read his thought process. ‘Yes. So even if he had left his office for a few minutes, say, with the excuse of a call of nature, he’d still not have left her sight.’

‘No windows in the loo, I suppose?’ Trevor asked despondently.

‘Only one of those small, high up ones, that you’d need to be as lithe as a weasel to get through, guv,’ Trent confirmed, unhelpfully. And both men grinned at the thought of the short, fat Art McIntyre trying to wriggle through such an aperture. Then the inspector’s face tightened.

‘You said his office is on the ground floor, was the door between the secretary’s office and his shut when you went in?’

‘Yes, and it usually is kept shut; I checked,’ Peter said, and then added, ‘but if you’re thinking that he might have climbed through the window in his office and out into the garden, I don’t think so, guv,’ he added regretfully. ‘Granted it is one of those much bigger, sash-window affairs, so it’s big enough, but I checked, and right outside is a well-planted flowerbed. Mostly roses too, with a few pretty bushes and marigolds for good measure. None of them has been trampled down. I’d be willing to bet a month’s wages he never waded through them.’

‘So, unless our little bursary man launched himself from the window ledge and managed to sail unseen over the shrubbery,
there’s no way he could have got out of his office and stuck the knife into our murder victim,’ Trevor concluded.

‘Seems not, guv,’ Peter Trent said sympathetically. ‘And I can’t believe that somebody wouldn’t have noticed him either. It’s not often you see a grown man clamber out of a window! And there’s always people milling about inside and out around this place, what with it being open to the public and all. So another perfectly good contender bites the dust,’ Trent finished in disgust.

‘It makes our little Mrs Dawkins mystery man look better and better by the minute, doesn’t it?’ Trevor mused. ‘Even if he wasn’t conveniently bloodstained. But if, by some chance, he isn’t the killer, what’s the alternative?’ He threw the question out to the floor. ‘He was there during the right time-frame, and so far we haven’t a clue who he is.’

‘Perhaps our Mr X came across Maurice’s dead body just shortly before I did,’ Jenny took up the call to play devil’s advocate, ‘and simply wasn’t as public-minded as me, and decided to just skedaddle instead of reporting it. People do that, don’t they? Panic, I mean?’

And, she added silently to herself, especially if they had a good reason to want to keep out of it all, as she strongly suspected their Mr X would have wanted to do. Supposing her fantastical theories were correct of course, she reminded herself ruefully.

‘Always possible,’ Peter Trent acknowledged. ‘People do do funny things if they have a sudden shock. And if our Mr X had dodgy reasons of his own for being out and about, he’d not want to come to our attention, that’s for sure.’ Like his boss, it had occurred to Peter Trent to wonder if their mystery man had been someone checking out the place with possible burglary in mind. There had to be many pieces of art and other goodies that would attract the seriously light-fingered in an Oxford college, after all.

‘You don’t think that the man Debbie Dawkins saw is our killer, do you?’ Trevor said flatly to Jenny, making his sergeant regard the cook thoughtfully.

But once again, Jenny Starling was thinking hard, trying to put herself in the killer’s place, and, whilst it all fit, there was one little piece that didn’t.

‘You didn’t find a second mobile phone anywhere in Maurice’s room, did you?’ she asked, seemingly out of the blue.

Peter Trent quickly consulted his notes, but was pretty sure that he already knew the answer. ‘No, we didn’t,’ he said. ‘But then, we found his mobile phone on him.’ The older man was sure that the cook had been present when he’d told Trevor as much. ‘Perhaps you’d forgotten?’ he asked kindly.

But Jenny hadn’t forgotten. And it was not the victim’s own mobile phone that interested her.

Trevor, who didn’t for a moment believe that the sharp-witted cook forgot a single thing, opened his mouth to ask her just what she was getting at, but Jenny forestalled him.

‘There’s something else,’ Jenny said. ‘About the coffee. I think you’ll find that it—’

Just then, one of the constables who’d just taken a telephone call, came rushing over, obviously in a lather of excitement, and waving a piece of paper in the air. ‘Sir, that was labs. Forensics have just got some results through, and the man in charge over there thought you’d like to know. One of the cups of coffee, found next to the victim, had enough drugs in it to kill an elephant!’

I
nspector Golder froze for a second, and then slowly reached out to take the piece of paper from the young constable’s hand, and read the message for himself.

‘I don’t speak scientific, but it seems clear enough,’ he said at last to his intensely interested audience. ‘One of the coffee cups contained nothing but coffee, milk and sugar, and the only potentially deadly thing in it was the usual amount of caffeine. The other had … er….’ Trevor squinted at the multi-syllabic chemical formula that the constable had conscientiously written down and grunted. ‘Says in the summary, that it’s something that’s available on prescription and is usually given out to people, mainly the elderly it seems, with a certain heart condition. Administered in the form of a drug called digi— something-or-other.’

Jenny nodded, without surprise. She’d been about to say that she thought one of the coffee cups must contain some kind of poison, but she didn’t think that it was politic of her to say so now. Not only would it smack of boasting – a proclivity that had never been one of her favourite pastimes – but it wouldn’t do to interrupt the inspector in full flight.

However, she did need to tell Trevor Glover something very important and cleared her throat to get his attention. When she
had it, she smiled briefly, almost as if in apology. ‘When I was at breakfast, I overheard Maurice Raines say that his mother had a bad heart condition,’ she said. ‘You might find it useful to contact her GP and find out if she was prescribed the same drug.’

‘You think Mrs Raines, the wife, I mean, might be in the frame then?’ Trevor said sharply. ‘She’d probably have access to her mother-in-law’s medication all right. Providing they were on visiting and speaking terms, that is,’ he modified, after a moment’s thought. Not all in-laws got on, as he well knew.

Jenny Starling opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. After all, having an outlandish and unproven theory was one thing; sticking her neck out without more proof to back it up was another.

‘It makes sense in one way,’ the inspector carried on, not noticing the cook’s hesitation and waving the still-hovering and excited constable away. ‘The spouse and immediate family are always the first suspects when it comes to killing your nearest and dearest. But in this case, we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the lady,’ he added grimly. ‘And I would imagine that most of the conference goers here probably know their chairman’s wife by sight and, if she had been sneaking around, surely she’d have been spotted?’

‘Not necessarily, guv,’ Peter Trent pointed out. ‘Not if she picked her time. When Maurice Raines was killed, everybody was out of the way doing their own thing, remember? The conference people at lectures and what-not, and the college staff doing their cleaning rounds and so forth.’

‘Yes, but how would she know when the time was right unless she had access to some sort of timetable, or was holed up somewhere waiting for her opportunity?’ Jenny felt compelled to point out. ‘I find it hard to believe that she could have even found her way around college without thoroughly checking it out first, let alone manage to find the one time that
her husband was on his own, without either a lot of luck, or the sort of planning that would be bound to leave traces. And you haven’t found anyone who admits to seeing a strange woman hanging about, have you?’

‘No. But she might have come down to Oxford before the conference began and pretended to be a tourist or something, and checked out the lay of the land then,’ Trevor said stubbornly. ‘Peter, find out if Mrs Raines, the victim’s mother, that is, was on this digi-whatsit, and if she is, get a current photograph of Mrs Raines, the wife, and start showing it around college, and see if any of the scouts or anyone else for that matter, recognizes her.’

‘Right, guv,’ the sergeant said, and was about to leave when the constable came back again. ‘Sir, line four. The PM report is in.’

Trevor nodded and reached for the telephone. He listened to the steady voice on the other end, and unhurriedly made notes, ignoring Trent and Jenny, who watched him and tried to guess clues from his reaction. It was a pointless exercise however, and Jenny, with an inner smile, suspected that the inspector would make a demon poker player. His face was, in fact, still expressionless when he finally hung up and turned back to them.

‘Well, no big surprises really. Death was due to the knife in his neck, and the pathologist says the shock probably brought on a heart attack, although he would have died anyway from the loss of blood. He had a fairly healthy liver and heart, for his age, and would have gone on to live for another good few years yet, apparently.’

Peter grinned at his boss. ‘Come on, guv. We’re dying to know, was he poisoned as well?’

‘Of course he wasn’t,’ Jenny murmured automatically, her thoughts already wandering. She was simply going to have to do something about that mobile phone. She had half a mind to ask the inspector to see to it, but he was obviously busy right
now. Perhaps, with the bursar’s endorsement of her still ringing in their ears, the scouts would search for it if she asked them.

She nodded, making a mental note to ask Debbie Dawkins’s mother to head the search. She could only hope that the contents of the waste bins were all stashed in the bigger refuse bins which hadn’t been emptied yet.

Unless, of course, he’d gone to more pains to get rid of the phone than by simply binning it, Jenny mused. In which case…. Jenny’s thoughts came to a sudden halt when she realized that both of the policemen were positively glowering at her.

‘What?’ she asked defensively.

Trevor Golder sighed at her obviously genuine confusion and ran a hand over his eyes. Well, all of his predecessors who’d worked with her before had, in their own various ways, tried to warn him to get used to this feeling that the blasted woman would always be one step ahead. Now he was beginning to appreciate for himself just how aggravating that could be.

‘How did you know that the victim didn’t have the drugs in his system, Miss Starling?’ he asked flatly.

Jenny opened her mouth, then shut it again. No, she simply wasn’t ready yet to come out with the way her thoughts were heading. These seasoned policemen would only laugh at her and, more than likely, accuse her of letting her imagination run wild. And who could blame them? Seeing that they were still patiently waiting for an answer, she thought about it for a second, and came up with the obvious solution.

‘Well, the coffee cup was still full, wasn’t it?’ she said sweetly. ‘So obviously, he hadn’t drunk any of it.’

‘It could have been his second cup,’ Trevor pointed out icily.

‘Oh,’ Jenny said. Then looked at him thoughtfully. Perhaps giving him a gentle hint about how the land lay, and then letting him figure it out for himself was the way to go? ‘You
know, now that I think about it, I remember Maurice saying to some woman at the conference that he was strictly a tea drinker. He liked a special blend, I think he said, and always bought his own supply,’ she relayed with clear emphasis, willing him to pick up on it and run with it.

‘That’s right, I’ve got a note of that too,’ Peter Trent said at once. ‘Several people, in the initial interviews mentioned Maurice asking for it to be made especially for him after dinner their first night. You know, when everyone else was having the coffee the scouts served afterwards.’

‘Hmm,’ Trevor said, not willing to let the cook off the hook yet. ‘But you were about to say something about the coffee cups before the constable interrupted us. Just what were you about to say?’ the inspector challenged. Because he was beginning to get the alarming feeling that the Junoesque cook had already realized that the coffee cup had been poisoned.

Which meant, damn it, that she really
was
way ahead of them.

‘Was I?’ Jenny said innocently. ‘I don’t—’

‘Oh there you are, inspector,’ a somewhat imperious female voice interrupted Jenny’s need to start telling wholesale fibs, and the cook looked up at the fast approaching Vicki Voight with a smile of sheer gratitude.

But if the treasurer of the Great Jessies noticed it, or even her presence, she gave no sign. ‘I wondered if it was possible to have a word. Only, I’ve been thinking you see, and I’m not sure if anybody else would have thought to tell you. Not that I like to come bearing tales myself, and it almost certainly isn’t important, but I thought you’d better know.’

Trevor, dragging his fulminating thoughts away from the aggravating cook, turned to Vicki Voight thoughtfully. Her mass of carefully coloured honey-gold hair had that tint of red in it that he liked, and her figure, although rather fuller than the lady herself would probably have wanted, was the kind
that appealed to him. If he hadn’t been content in his marriage, she was the sort of woman a man might find tempting.

Which led to the question: Had Maurice been tempted? Perhaps the affair he was having was closer to home than they realized. But there hadn’t been even a whisper of it from the rest of the conference goers, and surely it would have been hard for them to keep it a secret under so many knowing and prying eyes? Besides, when he’d interviewed the lady about Maurice Raines he simply hadn’t got that vibe. In fact, he thought he’d detected a certain hint of coolness there.

‘Perhaps you could be a little more, well, coherent, Mrs Voight,’ Trevor said. ‘What is it, exactly, that you think we should know?’

‘Well, it’s nothing much really. It’s about Pippa Foxton actually. You do know she’s not one of us, right?’

Trevor blinked.
Not one of us? What the hell was that supposed to mean?. Not straight, not a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant; not of the middle classes? What?

Seeing his confusion, Jenny stepped in smoothly. ‘You mean, she’s not a paid-up member of your taxidermy society, Mrs Voight?’ she asked smoothly.

Vicki glanced at her briefly, then fixed her eyes on the inspector once more. Jenny wasn’t insulted. She’d already long since realized that Vicki Voight was a man’s woman, so to speak.

‘Yes. She’s here with Ian as a bit of a lark, obviously. Not that that’s what I wanted to point out. So long as she – well, more likely Ian – has paid the fee, what the hell!’ Vicki smiled briefly. ‘We’re not such a stickler for the rules that we would make anything about that! No, it’s just about the way she was with Maurice.’

Trevor Golder sat up straight. ‘And just how
was
she with Maurice?’ he asked quietly.

Vicki, now that it had come to it, looked momentarily
unsure. ‘Well, that’s just it,’ she said, somewhat helplessly. ‘She was really odd with him.’

‘Odd?’ Trevor savoured the word thoughtfully. ‘In what way, Mrs Voight?’

Vicki sighed. ‘Well, it’s hard to put into words. You’ve all met Pippa, right?’

They all nodded. ‘A good-looking girl, bit of a fashion
aficionado
, ambitious, and all the rest, yes? The sort that likes to flirt a little, have some fun. And no harm in that, right? Especially with that boyfriend of hers, so smitten and jealous and possessive, it’s not surprising that she goes out of her way to wind him up sometimes.’

‘Ah,’ Trevor said, suddenly seeing the light. ‘You mean she was flirting with Maurice? Yes, we have had several reports of that in our interviews, Mrs Voight. One or two of the other members of your society mentioned that she liked wrapping the chairman around her little finger, as I think one of them put it.’

Vicki sighed in obvious impatience. ‘Yes, but that’s just it, Inspector, it wasn’t quite that innocent. I mean, that wasn’t all there was to it. I can’t explain it, exactly, but it wasn’t … normal.’

Trevor shot a quick glance at Jenny to see if she had any clue where this was going, and Jenny gave a quick shake of her head to show that she didn’t.

‘Not normal?’ When in doubt, the inspector had learned that it often paid to simply parrot a phrase and see what came back at you.

Vicki gave another heavy sigh. ‘Oh, I knew this was going to be hard to explain. Look, it’s normal enough for a pretty girl with a jealous boyfriend to maybe play with fire a bit and flirt with a handsome enough, middle-aged man. I know I used to do it, back when I was Pippa’s age. Flirting is fun, and light-hearted, and everybody more or less knows the rules and
nobody gets hurt. That’s all well and good.’

‘I’m with you so far. Are you saying that Pippa took it too far? Did her boyfriend….’ Trevor glanced at Trent, who quickly helped him out.

‘A Mr Ian Glendower, sir.’

‘Right. Did he not, perhaps, see things quite so light-heartedly?’

‘Well, no, he didn’t as a matter of fact,’ Vicki said, with the air of someone who’s been distracted. ‘He’s in that first flush of obsession whereby his sense of balance is all off kilter,’ she carried on. ‘I know for a fact that he’s warned her off Maurice a number of times.’

‘Did he make any threats towards Mr Raines himself?’ Trevor asked, trying not to sound too eager.

‘He might have done, but I never heard him do so personally,’ Vicki said vaguely. ‘But he’s a bit of a hothead, so I wouldn’t be surprised. But it’s not Ian that’s at issue here,’ she swept on impatiently. ‘His reactions are just what you’d expect from a young man in love: it’s Pippa that’s not quite right.’

Vicki looked from one of the men to the other. ‘There was just something … off, about the way she flirted with Maurice. It wasn’t, quite … natural. The first time I saw them at it, I hardly paid any attention. I knew it didn’t mean anything on the girl’s part, and Maurice was too wily to make anything of it for himself, so I never gave it another thought. For all he liked the ladies, Maurice was savvy enough to know when he was being played. Besides, he is … sorry,
was
, always careful to keep his little adventures strictly from the wife. She’s the one with the money, you know,’ Vicki added, a shade spitefully. ‘No, Maurice could see that Pippa was too unpredictable and wild to play away with. So, like I said, I never gave it much thought. But then I began to notice the way she was with him just didn’t quite ring true. She was tense, and sometimes the things she said seemed to have some double meaning that she
found grim or savagely funny. Once or twice, I could see even Maurice didn’t get it, whatever
it
was.’