Design for Murder (16 page)

“That’s absolute nonsense,” I said, trying to stop myself
from sounding shrill. “We often used to buy things from her shop, and she and Oliver were friendly, that’s all it ever was.”

“If you say so,” nodded Mrs. Sparrow with sage disbelief.
“The way it struck me, though, was that if his death had upset her very bad, like ... well, that could’ve accounted
for her losing control of her car. Not properly thinking about what she was doing, if you see what I mean.”

I said, less than coherently, “Well, anyone can be upset
when ... when a friend is
murdered.
It doesn’t mean that
Mrs. Kemp ...”

Mrs. Sparrow allowed my babbling to pass her by. “I wonder where she was going, at that time of night?”

“What time of night?” I asked quickly. “Is it known when
the accident actually happened?”

“Well, it must’ve been latish, stands to reason. After dark for sure, otherwise the fence and all that would’ve been no
ticed sooner. And that means sometime from about ten
o’clock on. So, where would she have been going, d’you
reckon?”

“Going home after a visit somewhere, I imagine.”

“No, that’s what makes it so peculiar. She was driving
away
from home.”

I didn’t intend to phone Neil in Mrs. Sparrow’s hearing.
Telling her that I wanted to get to the studio early this morn
ing, I hastily put my breakfast things into the sink and left. She was disappointed, I knew, having reckoned to spin out
the interesting speculation over a cup of coffee. Doubtless she was hoping that my close association with Oliver would throw
up a gossipy titbit.

I rang Neil the instant I got to the studio. He wasn’t in,
though, and I refused to talk to anyone else. So I had to leave a message for him to call me back, and the hour or so that
passed before he rang seemed like an age.

“You wanted me, Tracy?”

Stupidly, now that he was on the line I suddenly became
choked with doubt. A few odd suspicions strung together didn’t turn an accident into suicide
...
a suicide motivated by a murder.

“Neil
...
it was just ... about the accident to Ursula Kemp. I suppose you’ve heard about it?”

“I most certainly have.”

“Well...” How on earth did I begin?

“You’ve got something on your mind, Tracy?”

“I’m not really sure, but...”

Neil made a swift decision. “I’m coming straight over. You’re at the studio, are you?”

“Yes.” I was glad, now, that there was no going back.

As I waited for him, making meaningless squiggles on paper, I suddenly remembered a job I’d completely forgotten
about. At once I phoned the contractors who were supposed
to be working on the consulting rooms of the chiropractor in Cheltenham. To my intense relief I learned that they’d started
the job yesterday, and that so far there’d been no snags.
Thank God for that.

When I heard Neil’s car in the courtyard, I went to the
head of the staircase to greet him. He ran up and took hold of
me by the shoulders, studying my face.

“Now then, what’s this all about?” he demanded. “On the phone you sounded in a bit of a dither.”

I came out with it in a rush of words. “Ursula Kemp’s accident
...
do you think it could possibly have been suicide?”

“Anything is possible, love,” he said. “I thought I’d already taught you that lesson. You’d better give me your reasons for
thinking it was suicide.”

“I’m not sure that I
do.
It’s just...”

“Why not sit down,” he suggested, “then talk?”

He himself perched on the edge of my table, facing me,
while I began uncertainly, “After driving back from the inquest yesterday, I called in on Ursula, and she was in a very odd mood.”

“Why
did you call in on her?”

I looked up and met his gaze. “Because I thought that you
were being rather tough on her, Neil. I mean, even though
you didn’t really suspect Ursula, you were putting pressure on
her to try and extract information about Oliver. I reckoned it must have really upset her. You said yourself how desperate
she looked in court, so I thought I’d ...”

“Tracy, you weren’t intending to pass on to her what I’d
told you in confidence?”

“Of course I wasn’t. I was just
...
I don’t quite know
what I intended to do. I felt sorry for her, and it was an im
pulse. Ursula hadn’t many friends, you see, and she was ob
viously taking Oliver’s death very hard.”

Neil smiled wryly. “You’re too soft-hearted. So what hap
pened?”

“Well, while she was making me some coffee, I noticed a
copy of
Cotswold Illustrated
lying on a table ... last
month’s issue. I took a quick look at it, and all the pages were
intact.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes. Anyway, Ursula saw that I’d picked it up, and she
told me that you had been asking her about it the day before,
but that she couldn’t find it. She said that it had turned up
later in her sewing cupboard.”

“So then?”

I made a helpless little gesture with my hands. “I know it must sound stupid, but an idea suddenly hit me. It all fitted in
with the terrible state Ursula was in
at the inquest, and she
still was when I called round to see her. I suddenly thought— suppose she
had
sent that anonymous letter? After you asked her about the magazine she might have reasoned that she’d
better get hold of last month’s issue to cover up her tracks.
She
could
have bought it somewhere in Gilchester on Monday
morning.”

Neil was thoughtful. “Why should she send a nasty letter
about you, Tracy? Did she have something against you?”

“No, I’m sure she didn’t. Ursula never showed the least sign
of disliking me, or in any way resenting me. But it could have
been just to divert suspicion from herself. She knew how vital it was for me to establish that I’d driven through the village at
twelve-fifteen, and not any earlier.”

“How did she know that?”

“Because I told her—the day after Oliver was killed.”

“So what you’re saying is that you think it was Ursula
Kemp who killed Oliver Medway? Presumably because he
was blackmailing her?”

“Well... yes.”

“Tell me, Tracy, how did you make the surprising deduction that Mrs. Kemp killed herself?”

As I had dreaded, Neil was pouring scorn on my ideas. But I couldn’t back-pedal now.

“Doesn’t it all add up?” I argued. “The way I see it is that when you questioned her on Sunday about the magazine,
Ursula must have thought you were suspicious of her—not
guessing that it was just a routine enquiry. And at the same time you asked her a lot of probing questions about Oliver, too. So my guess is that she was really scared by then. She
would have known that the police always follow things
through. So if you started delving into her past—before she
came to Steeple Haslop—you would soon turn up whatever it was she wanted to keep hidden so desperately that Oliver was
able to blackmail her because of it. When that happened, the game would be up. So her only chance was to make a run for
it—or to give up and kill herself.”

“What a tissue of supposition,” Neil remarked, after a mo
ment.

“Which means that you think it’s all a load of rubbish?”

“I think it’s an interesting hypothesis,” he said.

“But you don’t believe it for one second?”

He slid off his perch on the table and wandered over to the
window, staring out across the river as if debating how much to tell me. Eventually, he turned to face me again.

“I think the suggestion that Ursula Kemp committed sui
cide is considerably more likely than that her death was acci
dental.”

I was astonished to hear Neil agreeing with me, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit triumphant.

“Does this mean that you’ve found some evidence to sug
gest it was suicide?” I asked him.

“Nothing definite. But in my job you develop a nose.’”

“You still have doubts, though?”

Neil stood there with a deep frown on his face. I had a feel
ing that he was mentally sorting through the few facts and the mass of supposition about Ursula’s death. He said slowly, “There’s a third possibility, Tracy.”

My skin  prickled. “You   ...   you  mean  that   some
one
...?”

He nodded. “If that accident was faked, if it was murder
made to
look
like an accident, that puts a whole new complexion on things, doesn’t it?”

In the oak-beamed refectory at Haslop Hall everyone was
busy talking about the weather. What a blessing it was fine, we all said. How much more depressing an occasion this fu
neral would seem had it been a wet day ... like the day
Oliver was—no one could quite bring himself to actually use
the word.

Earlier, in the little Saxon church dedicated to St. Gregory,
the vicar had conducted the service to a capacity congre
gation. The Reverend Peter Anders was a modern young
churchman who, so I’d heard, was wont to have straight man-
to-man chats about sex with embarrassed youth club
members, and daily downed his jolly pint in the bar of the Trout Inn. He was here now, gravely enjoying the good
amontillado provided by Sir Robert while he circuited the
room exchanging a few polite words with each guest. I
watched him move inexorably towards the corner where I
stood with Tim.

“Hallo, you two. What a tragic business this is! And now
we have another fatality in our little community. Poor lady.
Still, we must be thankful, I suppose, that her passing was not
attended with the same hideous brutality as with Mr. Med
way. What a monster the assassin must be.”

I had been forbidden by Neil to give the slightest hint of his
suspicions concerning Ursula’s death. For the time being, he’d
adjured me, it must continue to be regarded as an accident.
So I made suitable concurring noises until the vicar felt that his duty to us had been done.

“That chap almost trips over his own exclamation marks,” Tim commented, as he moved out of earshot.

“He works hard,” I said. “You’ve got to grant him that.”

The guests, each in turn, had mumbled a few conventional
words of condolence to Sir Robert upon arriving at the Hall, after which everyone seemed very content to steer clear of him. The poor man was seated in an upright chair to one side
of the massive carved mantel, Sebastian hovering at his
elbow. Oliver’s father had borne himself with dignity through
out the ordeal at the church, but now he looked drained,
scarcely aware of what was going on around him. His fighting
spirit seemed to have evaporated completely. Perhaps, I
reflected, he felt that he could give up now that his heir was
the virtuous Sebastian.

Lady Medway, mourning with elegance in an expensive
black silk dress, was conscientiously moving from one group
to another. Or did she find this preferable to being in the
company of her husband? I realised that I’d not seen them ex
change as much as a single word this morning.

Tim, observing her reach out for another glass of sherry from the circulating Grainger’s tray, remarked, “Lady M. is tanking up, isn’t she? That must be her fifth or sixth.”

Yesterday had gone by without Tim and I managing to
patch things up. But today, when he came and sat down beside me in the church, a truce had tacitly been declared be
tween us for the duration of the funeral.

Diana Medway was bearing down on us, a little unsteadily but still in fair control.

“You’re a sly one, Tracy,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Lady Medway, I don’t understand.”

“No?” She flickered a meaningful glance at Tim. “This is the ‘friend’ you took riding with you, I hear. It didn’t take
you long, did it?”

She meant, to find myself a replacement for Oliver. And I
had to stand there meekly and take it. I could hardly start a
slanging match right here in her own house on the day of her stepson’s funeral.

Tim, bless him, spiked her guns with an easy smile. “You didn’t object to my using one of your horses, did you, Lady
Medway?”

She lifted her slender shoulders in an elaborate shrug.

“I haven’t the least objection,” she drawled, “so long as you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh yes, I can assure you that I do know what I’m doing with horses.”

Diana Medway stared at him coldly, but decided not to follow that through.

“As I told Tracy the other day,” she said, with another
elegantly performed shrug, “those animals need exercising.”

Tim observed with amusement as she tacked off across the room, “What a flaming bitch that woman is.”

“She’s been in a very peculiar mood lately,” I said. “I just
don’t know what to make of it. Her attitude to me was always
distant, but on Saturday, when she stopped me and suggested that I should keep up the riding, she was suddenly very pally.
Then today ...”