Death in High Heels (7 page)

“Well, yes.”

“And you’re quite certain that there isn’t any substantial difference between the packet as you gave it to her and as it is now?”

“Well, no.”

“Then at least you needn’t feel any blame, need you? Now, could anyone have gone to the packet—could they, perhaps, have taken some out and filled it up again?”

“But how
could
they? I had the key all the time.”

“Well, that’s just what I’m asking you. Could they have? And you say, no. All right, then—does that mean that you’ve had the key of the drawer ever since?”

“Yes. When poor Miss Doon—when they took her away in the ambulance, she gave me all her keys and I—I thought I’d better keep them like I keep my own,” choked Macaroni, quite overcome by her memories. “She always used to take them home with her at night.”

“That was very wise of you,” said Charlesworth, kindly. “Now, do you think that there’s any possibility of there being another key?”

“Oh, no, because there were only two and I’ve got the duplicate. It’s quite a new desk. I used to take one lot home with me and Miss Doon used to take the others and then, you see, if she was late or didn’t come in or was—was ill, or anything—or if I was ill, then at least one of us would be able to open the desk.”

“This is very interesting, Bedd, isn’t it?” said Charlesworth, leaning back in his chair, and forgetting Macaroni’s presence entirely. “You see the child says that the poison was untouched; and if she took the keys home with her, Miss Doon’s as well as her own, I don’t see how anyone else can have got at it. That’s definitely the only supply of poison Doon can have got from upstairs; it does seem to cut out accident and suicide, doesn’t it? It begins to look as if your something fishy was something very fishy after all. Equally, if this is a case of murder it must have been unpremeditated, because nobody can possibly have known that the stuff was going to be brought into the place—there were too many people concerned in the suggestion that it should be bought; and in that case there won’t have been time to juggle about with extra keys and things to have got any out of the desk; you might check up on that, will you? and see that none have been lost or anything funny; but it looks to me as if we can leave out that one teaspoonful of poison altogether. They had about four times that amount, and I suppose they must have used at least one teaspoonful to clean the hat … that leaves two spoonsful unaccounted for, including what was spilt when they first brought it into the place, and what they spilt later on … oh, my poor little faggot,” he cried, coming out of his reverie at the sound of Macaroni’s accelerated weeping. “I’d entirely forgotten you. Now, don’t upset yourself all over again! Murder and suicide are very ugly words, we know, but we want to find out all we can and prove that it wasn’t either of them, but just a very sad accident. You trot back to your work, now, and try to forget all about it—and God grant that she does forget,” he added piously, as Macaroni went wailing down the stairs again. “What an ass I was to blurt it all out in front of her. Fortunately, I don’t think she’s too bright in the upper storey, Bedd, do you? I shouldn’t think she’ll have taken much of it in.”

4

They left the shop and went at once to Judy’s address. Charlesworth was surprised to find it, in sharp contrast to Doon’s lodgings, a tall, comfortable house in a fashionable square. A parlourmaid showed them into the drawing-room where, after a moment, Judy’s mother joined them, a pretty, pleasant little woman, a tiny bit flustered at this intrusion of the law but still able to meet it with grace and charm. She gave an impression of trying to hide some pleasurable excitement beneath an appearance of suitable regret at their unhappy mission. He introduced himself and asked if it were possible to see her daughter.

“Oh, yes, of course—well, that is, I don’t know. She’s supposed to be ill; oh dear, I don’t know—how can I explain … well, you see, the truth is, Inspector, that I didn’t want my daughter to go to the shop this morning so I rang up and told Miss Gregory that she was not well.”

“Isn’t she ill at all, then?”

“Oh, Inspector, you won’t say anything to Mr. Bevan, will you? Judy will be so cross with me if you do. The girls aren’t very busy there just now, it being August and so forth, and I really didn’t think it would matter for once if she didn’t go; I ought to explain to you perhaps, Inspector, that my daughter doesn’t really need to work; she likes to have a job and be what she imagines is independent, but it isn’t as if it mattered very much to her, and I’m afraid, when anything else crops up—well, I do feel that she can take a day off if she wants to.…”

“And what cropped up to-day, Mrs. Carol, if you’ll forgive my asking?”

She looked at him from beneath lowered lashes, and then said, laughing, that what had cropped up was a young man. “He used to be a great friend of my daughter’s,” she explained, “and now he’s turned up again. She—she happened to ring him up last night, and as it was too late for him to call round then, he came along first thing this morning. He’s a very great friend, Inspector, and though Judy was quite prepared to go off to work after she’d had a few words with him, I really couldn’t bear that, and I took it upon myself to ring Miss Gregory. Judy was quite horrified at first, but she soon reconciled herself to the deception!” She laughed again.

“Is your daughter in? Can I see her now?”

“Yes, of course, if you won’t be cross with her about the not being well part of it. I’ll tell her to come in here to you.” She went off beaming.

Judy was Sergeant Bedd’s favourite all through the case. He liked her frank, round face with its halo of deep-gold hair, her downright speech and her general air of health and cheerfulness. “Gimme a bit of a figger, sir,” he would argue when Charlesworth raved about the ethereal charms of Victoria. “That Miss Judy’s the one I like, a nice, straightforward English girl, comes from the North I shouldn’t wonder… Yorkshire or something like that.”

Judy shook hands with them both in her pleasant way: “I’m sorry to have dragged you round here. I ought to have gone to the shop but Mummy rang up and told Gregory some tarradiddles about me, so I thought I might as well stay at home.”

“You were there yesterday?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, I was.” She looked at them a little anxiously.

Once more Charlesworth outlined his mission. “You weren’t concerned in bringing this oxalic acid into the shop, were you?”

“Well, no, I wasn’t,” said Judy, almost as though she would have liked to own up that she had been. “I went and talked to the girls while they were cleaning a hat with it, but I didn’t actually have any of it.”

“I believe that at lunch-time you went downstairs and helped to serve out the vegetables on to the different plates; is that so?”

“Yes, Inspector, I did, though I don’t see what—well, anyway, I did do a few plates, because Rachel, Mrs. Gay, that is, was talking to Cissie, and we wanted to get on with our lunch.”

“Were you very friendly with Miss Doon?”

“Good lord, no, I loathed her,” said Judy, with a sort of cheerful abandon that was quite a relief after the guarded answers so many of the others had given. “I didn’t see anything of her outside the shop, of course, and I never had anything to do with her while I was there, if I could possibly help it.”

“Your staying away to-day had nothing to do with her death?”

“No, how could it?”

“It’s rather a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Well, it isn’t at all, actually. You see, last night, when Doon was so ill I thought—I thought a friend of hers ought to know, so I rang him up and told him about it in case he might want to go to the hospital or anything, especially as the doctor had made it pretty clear that Doon might be going to die. I thought this—this person that I rang up was still a great friend of Doon’s, but, as it turned out, he wasn’t any longer; well, then,” said Judy, getting deeper and deeper into the mire, “he said—well, I ought to explain to you that he used to be a friend of
mine
—and he said he would come round and see me, but as it was a bit late then, my mother said he had better come to-day; well, his idea of to-day was before breakfast this morning, so you see my mother rang up Christophe’s … oh dear,” cried Judy, breaking down completely and starting to laugh, “I suppose I’d better be done with it and tell you that this morning, at the unearthly hour of eight o’clock, I got engaged to him.”

So that was the joy they were bubbling over with, she and her mother. They were rather charming, Charlesworth could not help thinking, so naively and unashamedly happy about the whole affair. It was quite an effort to drag the conversation back to Doon.

“You can’t think of any way in which she might have taken any of this poison, can you?”

Now her face took on a wary look: he hated to see it there, so much in contrast with her open, generous manner. She insisted, more emphatically than he quite liked, that she couldn’t imagine how Doon could possibly have taken any oxalic acid. She had never connected it with her death until Miss Gregory had told Mummy about it on the telephone this morning.

Charlesworth shook hands with her and he and the sergeant went slowly down to the car. Judy and Aileen, Irene, Rachel, Victoria—but not Victoria!—Gregory, Bevan, Cecil, Mrs. ’Arris, Macaroni… was one of them a murderer? Could it have been suicide? Remembering those lovely faces and anxious eyes he could not help wishing that the sergeant’s “something fishy” would turn out to be just an accident after all. But in his heart he knew that that was too much to hope.

Three

1

T
HAT
night at nine-thirty, Charlesworth suddenly let out a wild yell and rushed to the telephone.

“Louise, my angel—this is too awful! I quite forgot about coming round to see you!”

“Were you supposed to be coming round to see me?”

“Well, darling, of
course
. I’ve got a damn great bunch of daisies here for you. I’ve been coming round ever since I left you last night.”

“What stopped you, anyway?”

“I’m on a case, you see; rather a treat it is—it all takes place in a dress shop, a dozen women and two men and one of
them’s
only half a man.…”

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Charles. Anyway, you can’t start coming round now. The daisies must wait till to-morrow. Come early and have supper.”

“Oh, my sweet, that’s too marvellous of you. I will if I possibly can; may I leave it that I will if I
possibly
can? You see, there’s a lot to do on this case, it might keep me late, but if I can manage to get away, of course I’ll come.”

“My Mr. Charlesworth is cooling off,” said Miss Taylor to her mother as she replaced the receiver. “However, I believe three months is quite a record.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Miss Taylor’s mother. “Such a nice boy. Who is he transferring his affections to?”

“To a dozen women and one and a half men,” said Miss Taylor, and gave a little sigh.

2

Charlesworth met the sergeant by appointment at the Yard. “Who would be a ruddy detective, Bedd? I sat up half the night with wet towels round my head and all I’ve got out of it is a stiff neck. Just the same, I’ve come to one conclusion—it looks mighty like murder.”

“You really think that, Mr. Charlesworth, do you?”

“Yes, I do. The secretary child’s perfectly clear; the packet she took downstairs hasn’t been touched. Doon didn’t take any more when she spoke to the girls at the table—her hands were too full even to take what they offered to her; and she definitely didn’t go out during the day, so she couldn’t have got any extra. Therefore it couldn’t have been suicide and I honestly don’t see where accident could have come in. The stuff that was spilled was all given to Cecil; three of the girls, at least, saw the charwoman hand it over to him. What he did with it afterwards, heaven only knows—he’s obviously lying when he says he put it down the huh-hah! You don’t suppose he can have left it about and the girl have picked it up accidentally? He might be afraid to say.”

“She was shut in her office with Mr. Bevan and the seckerterry all the morning. After lunch she sat at the table talking to the other young ladies and then she went straight back into her office; Cecil he hadn’t bin into her office so he couldn’t ’ve left it there, and I don’t see what other time there was for her to get hold of it. She couldn’t have taken it except with her lunch, and that’s a fact, Mr. Charlesworth; except it was given to her in her office before she came out to her lunch, and Mr. Bevan and the seckerterry they both alibis each other there.”

Charlesworth reflected, twirling back and forth in his desk-chair. “Except for just a moment while Bevan left them and spoke to Cecil at the carving table and went upstairs. Macaroni came out directly afterwards, but she was alone with Doon for a minute or two.”

“Well, it don’t seem likely, do it, sir? How could she ’ave given the girl a teaspoonful of poison crystals in that short time? Miss Doon wouldn’t have bin taking sweets or anythink of that sort just before lunch; and, anyway, there’s the packet of poison intact in the drawer, and the other young ladies has agreed that it was just the same quantity as they gave the kid to take downstairs.”

“You’re preaching to the converted, Bedd. Personally, I think there’s no doubt about it. Somebody pinched some of the crystals the girls were using upstairs and put it on the bunny they had at lunch-time; but the lord knows how we’re going to find out who.”

“They all seem to have been messing about down in the dining-room while it was being served out, don’t they, sir? I think this is going to turn out to be a question of motive before we’re done with it; find out who could ’ave done it and then choose the chap who had the best reason to do it; but it’s always hard to get a conviction in them cases.”

“Don’t I know it! Who’s your favourite so far, Bedd?”

“That Cecil, sir. He’s not telling the truth and that means ’e’s got somethink to ’ide.”

“What we want is to have a look at his pockets; if he’d taken the powder straight to the huh-hah he’d have carried it th ere in his hand and not put it in his pocket at all; but if he didn’t—and I’m certain he’s lying about it—he’d have shoved it into his pocket and, being what it was, just a screw of paper twiddled up by the charlady, it will have left signs in the lining or I’m a Dutchman. I think we’ll fuss off up to the shop and ask Cissie to take his coat off.”