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Authors: Leo Bruce

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The headmaster made a sound like ‘Ttsschk!'

“That should have been obvious almost at once. Mrs Rumble told me that there was less than a third of a bottle of gin left in Grazia's cupboard. I doubt if Grazia, who by then was a fairly hardened gin-drinker, could have got drunk on that, or if drunk would have swallowed an overdose of sleeping-pills. Besides, Minerval was more a habit of hers than gin, though she rarely took it in excess of one tablet at a time. Her last tube had been prescribed and bought from the chemist by Mrs Rumble a week before her death and contained ten tablets which, as Mrs Rumble said, ‘she must have been taking' during that week. Mrs Rumble had noticed on the day previous to her death that there were only two tablets left in the tube. So that
we can reasonably assume that all that could have been self-administered by Grazia Vaillant that evening was a third of a bottle of gin and two Minerval tablets. Or possibly three or even four Minerval tablets if she took the two which Flora Griggs gave her. These would probably have done her no harm and certainly would not have killed her.

“Besides, there is no reason to suspect her of wanting to take her own life. With the death of Millicent Griggs the long struggle for supremacy in the parish was ending in her favour. ‘There was nothing wrong when I left that afternoon. In fact she was quite excited about getting a statue on the altar of the side-chapel'. So said Mrs Rumble and I see no reason, in this matter, to doubt her. No, Grazia was murdered.

“We know of only two people who were in her house that afternoon, Mrs Rumble and Miss Flora Griggs, but we have no means of knowing who, if anyone else, was admitted. On the other hand we can see how easy it was to poison her. She always had the same kind of gin and took the same kind of tranquillizers. A combined overdose of these two would be fatal. All a would-be murderer had to do was to provide himself or herself with a bottle containing the amount of Horsely's gin which approximately was left in Grazia's bottle and dissolve in it say half a dozen Minerval tablets. Grazia Vaillant mixed enough lime juice with her gin to kill the taste and would swallow this fatal mixture quite readily. It would not kill her at once but within an hour or two, unless she called assistance, she would be dead.

“She was anxious that no one should know she had taken to drinking gin in secret. That is the worst of this repulsive puritan doctrine of guilt about alcohol. Convince someone that it's wrong to drink, ignoring the lessons of the First Miracle and the Last Supper, and you can create a secretive drunkard, morally undermined, from someone who in openly enjoying a glass of wine would be a balanced and temperate person. Grazia's
secret guzzling of raw spirit disguised by
ersatz
lime juice laid her open to murder.

“What is more, the murder would be difficult to detect and almost impossible to prove. She herself could be relied on to throw the poisoned bottle into the deep well outside her back door where it would sink and lie with all the other bottles which had once contained Horsely's gin, the specially-shaped oval bottles so easy to slip into a bag or shopping basket. She herself would wash the glass which had contained the fatal mixture, as she always washed away the traces of gin before leaving the glass in the sink. And even if she were overcome before she had done these things, her murderer would be difficult indeed to identify.

“We knew, in this case, that the motive could not be simple robbery, as was suspected in the case of Millicent Griggs, for the house had not been broken into and nothing had been stolen. Although the expression on her face was one of fury it might merely have been at the thought of death. We know she grew violent when she had been drinking. And we had become accustomed to meeting very angry old ladies in this case.

“So for me it became, as these things so often are, a matter of motive. But a more complicated one than I had previously met. There were not the usual persons with obvious motives standing round, the relatives who would inherit money, the man remorselessly blackmailed, the third party in a love-triangle. The motives which one had to suggest for the murder of Grazia Vaillant were farfetched.

“The only persons, so far as we know from the details given to the Coroner, who could be said to have expectations under Grazia's will were Mrs Rumble and the two clergy of the parish, the Reverend Bonar Waddell and the Reverend Peter Slipper. Unless you add persons who make suspicion fantastic, like those connected with the various-church charities who would see them flourish, the choirmaster, the members of the Boy Scout Troup and so
on, the two clergymen and the sexton's wife alone could benefit financially by Grazia's death.

“The only other possible motive seemed to be sheer hatred. We know that for years the sisters Griggs had hated Grazia Vaillant with all their natures and all the fervency of their religious beliefs, and that the surviving sister still hated her. We may suspect that Mrs Waddell nursed a strong detestation for Grazia. There may have been others whose hatred was better concealed. And since one at least of those who hated Grazia at the time of her death was a rich woman one could not altogether rule out the possibility of another person bribed.

“But in compensation for all this vagueness in the matter of motive I knew certainly the cause of Grazia's death and this gave me certain hard facts about the murderer. He or she had to have the following:

  1. A knowledge that Grazia was secretly drinking Horsely's gin.
  2. The knowledge that for some time she had been taking Minerval. (This, of course, so that when it was found she had died from an overdose, suicide would account for it.)
  3. Access (even if only for a moment) to the cupboard in which she kept her gin.
  4. Access to a sufficient quantity of Minerval.
  5. The ingenuity to substitute poisoned for unpoisoned gin in an identical bottle.
  6. An opportunity of doing so.
  7. A motive.

“There was really only one person who fitted all seven conditions.”

Carolus paused and lit a new cigar.

Mr Gorringer was the first to fall into his little trap.

“For once, Deene, you reduce speculation to a minimum. It was, of course, the unbalanced younger sister,
Miss Flora Griggs, who poisoned the unfortunate woman. You have mildly deceived us by suggesting that she has passed out of the affair.”

“I don't think so,” said Phoebe Thomas. “It was Mrs Rumble.”

Carolus shook his head.

“Oh no,” he said. “You might have ruled those out from the fact that I have dropped the case. It was Millicent Griggs.”

“But …” began Mr Gorringer.

“I think you are forgetting,” said Carolus firmly, “that very important information given me by Mrs Rumble which I scrupulously repeated to you before dinner. ‘There was a bottle nearly a third full', she said on the morning Grazia was found dead. ‘
I told you she hadn't touched it since the other one died'
.”

“Millicent Griggs went to see Grazia, not, I am convinced, for any wish for reconciliation but with about as much hatred and malice in her heart as a woman well could have. Millicent was, as we have already seen, a hateful and malicious woman. She came away from that first meeting and Mrs Rumble described her vividly—‘All flushed up, she was, besides, I could smell her breath.' So after a lifetime's teetotalism, on which she held the strongest possible views, she had accepted some gin from Grazia.
Why
?

“Her words to her sister when she reached home were significant. Reported by Flora Griggs, they were ‘she told me we should not for ever suffer, that we should be able to stand against the wiles of the devil'. Flora Griggs was sure that there had been no real reconciliation. Rumble, in fact, heard Millicent use stronger terms to Flora on that day when she returned from her last visit to Grazia. Woe unto the wicked, it shall be ill with her. For the doing of her hands shall be done unto her. But Millicent had seen the cupboard in which the gin was kept, had seen the characteristic Horsely's bottle. Moreover she knew from Dr Pinton that Minerval in conjunction with
alcohol, both even mildly in excess, could prove fatal, for as Dr Pinton told the Coroner, he gave his warning whenever he prescribed Minerval, even when he regarded such a warning as no more than a formality. She had a way of revenge ready to her hand and to this bigoted and abnormal woman such a revenge was justified.

“That she put it into action we know. The manager of Forster's Stores in Burley said: ‘the lady who was murdered ‘—he was referring to Millicent Griggs—' had been a customer of ours ever since I came to the shop as a boy. She has never been known to order anything alcoholic till about a week before her death. Then she came in and asked me for a bottle of the same'—that was Horsely's gin—‘for purely medicinal purposes'. It would have been more accurate to say for purely homicidal purposes.

“During that week, too, she had to ask Dr Pinton for an extra supply of Minerval, giving the excuse of having lost her own. In reality she had used at least six, probably more tablets to doctor the gin which she was going to place in Grazia's cupboard during her second visit in place of the one she had seen there on her first.

“She had to depend on guesswork here and decide about how much gin there would be in the bottle by the time she paid her second visit. I think she judged well or was lucky, for Grazia never noticed it if the level was different.

“So she called again, armed with the large bag we have heard about, in which lay an oval bottle one-third full of Horsely's gin fortified with Minerval in lethal quantity. It was not difficult to change the bottles and depart. It was also an almost unprovable murder. If she had lived she could not, probably, have been charged with it, though she never dreamed that Grazia's death would be delayed by ten days and her own would intervene.

“But the fact that murder could never have been proved does not mean that it could not be fairly easily deduced. To anyone who had the facts of the case it
should not have been difficult to see not only that Grazia was murdered but by whom and how.”

Mr Gorringer shook his head.

“I'm bound to say it eluded me,” he admitted. “But in view of the evidence you have quoted, especially of the manager of Forster's Stores, I see that I was wrong in suspecting the younger sister. But in one little matter, Deene, you have surely deceived us. You described Detective Inspector Champer as saying to you derisively: ‘You are not going to tell me you accept the police explanation of events? One murder, one attempted suicide and one accident?' To which you replied in the affirmative. Was not that almost … cheating?”

“Not at all. Those are exactly my explanations. But not in that order, headmaster.”

“Bravo!” said Mr Gorringer and in a rare moment of abandon emptied his glass.

 

BOOK: Furious Old Women
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