Grave Matters (20 page)

Later, when he had finished with the local police, Colin took him up to the belfry in the church so that he could see the small trap through which Carol had dropped a great stone on Madge’s head as she passed below. The stone had been found in a pile of mowings in the churchyard. Silently, Colin pointed to the roster in the church which declared that Winifred Kent was due to arrange the flowers that weekend.

‘Madge wore a scarf over her head, so Carol didn’t recognise her,’ he said.

‘But – it was Friday – don’t people do the flowers the day before?’ Patrick asked. ‘On Saturday?’

‘Winifred told her other guests, on Thursday, after you’d all left, that she’d be doing them the next afternoon as she and George were going out for the day today. Of course, they cancelled that, after what happened. Oh, and she’d mentioned, too, that she was at Slade House.’

‘And Madge was bringing back the brass she’d cleaned,’ Patrick said slowly.

‘Yes,’ agreed Colin. ‘The vicar said she did this once a month or so. The unknown factor, where Carol was concerned.’

Lionel Merry had been shattered at what had happened in his church and knew he would never forget the terrible scene he had found, with Madge, her head battered in, lying in a pool of her own blood, and the candlestick that had killed her on the ground nearby, bearing traces of her hair and bits of bone.

‘The ironical part is that Winifred doesn’t remember Clarissa Daniels,’ Colin went on. ‘She said she’s a lot older than Clarissa – Carol – and they can’t have overlapped at all, at school.’

After their visit to the church, Patrick and Colin went to the Kents’ house, where Valerie was told she might leave. She sped off at once in her mini to Sussex, where it seemed she had a painter friend with whom she often stayed, but remembered before going to thank Patrick for saving the books and so much of the furniture.

Winifred could still scarcely take in the fact that Carol had intended to kill her, not Madge.

‘Even if I had recognised her, would it have been so terrible?’ she asked. ‘What had she done that was so awful? We aren’t all judged by what we did at school, I hope.’

‘She’d lied and cheated – cribbed at exams, and stolen money,’ Patrick said. ‘And other girls were blamed at first, for she was clever.’ All this had been revealed in Mildred Forrest’s letter. ‘Eventually she was expelled.’

‘Did she kill Mildred too?’ asked Winifred, and from their silence knew the answer.

‘But why? Did they meet in Meldsmead? I thought Mildred left before the Bruces moved in?’

‘They overlapped by a day,’ said Patrick. ‘Mildred went to Abbot’s Lodge with some flowers. She saw Carol through the window and recognised her at once. She was arguing with David. Then the lights went out. Mildred rushed off, dropping the flowers in the drive. Carol must have found them later and realised she’d been seen, and what was worse, recognised.’

Mildred had said that the lights at Mulberry Cottage worked that evening. Perhaps Carol had arranged the failure at Abbot’s Lodge as another omen.

‘But she wouldn’t know who’d called,’ Winifred persisted.

‘She’d have known from the village grapevine, or from David who’d have heard from Ellen, that Mildred was at the cottage,’ said Colin.

‘And she’d recognise Amelia’s prize chrysanthemums,’ said George. ‘I expect that’s what Mildred took. Carol would see them at Mulberry Cottage – she and Valerie were friendly right away. They were thick as thieves, in fact, even though Valerie has this painter woman down in Sussex.’

‘Oh, darling!’ Winifred protested.

‘It’s true,’ George said. ‘For the last few weeks, whenever Bruce has spent the night in town, Valerie’s been here at the cottage.’

‘Oh, poor Valerie,’ breathed Winifred. ‘Carol was out of her mind, of course.’

‘Poor Valerie, yes, but don’t waste your pity on Carol,’ George said grimly, taking her hand. He thought of what he might have lost, and of what had happened to Denis Bradshaw who was now at the vicarage in a state of shock. ‘Think of her victims.’

Patrick remembered all this as he drove to the hospital later on with a bunch of roses for Ellen. If only he had acted more quickly, or realised sooner who Carol was, or thought of looking in that vase for the key of the desk, Madge might have been saved. Instead of concentrating wholly on the problem, he had let his mind wander into thoughts of dalliance with Ellen. All along, he had known there was a puzzling factor about Miss Brinton’s fall. She had dropped down a short precipice, rolled across a sort of landing and then down a steep flight of steps. If she had simply lost her balance she would have remained on the landing, though at her age such a fall might, indeed, have proved fatal. But she had fallen outwards, in a trajectory, well across the landing, rolling over it and then down the stairs. She had received a fairly hearty push to gather so much impetus, just as Miss Forrest, in the British Museum, had not crumpled up but had rolled some distance.

Another time, he vowed, if he came upon a chain of incidents that made him scent disaster nothing should deflect him from his course; no other woman should ever interfere with the workings of his brain.

But meanwhile, there was Ellen.

She was not in her bed in the hospital. She was visiting David, who had been taken back and put to bed after the events of the early morning. Patrick saw them together through the glass window in the door of David’s private room. Ellen, in a dressing-gown much too large for her and looking very pale, was sitting in an armchair by his bed. David was asleep, and Ellen watched him; on her face was the same expression Jane’s wore when she looked at her small son Andrew.

‘It’s not right. That’s not the right emotion,’ Patrick seethed inside himself. But he could not fight it. He looked down at the flowers in his hand. What a useless gesture! Well, someone would like them. He saw a passing nurse.

‘Here, nurse. Give these to some old lady who hasn’t any flowers,’ he gabbled. ‘Or keep them for yourself. The person I brought them for doesn’t need them now.’ He pressed them into her surprised arms and rushed away, leaving the nurse staring after him, amazed. She took them to the nurses’ home, for the wards were all as bright as Chelsea Flower Show, and told her friends she’d been given them by someone who had brought them for a patient who had died.

Patrick looked at his watch. He could be back in Oxford in time to dine in hall. The prospect filled him with gloom. Then he remembered that Jane and Michael knew nothing about all that had just happened. He went back into the hospital, found a telephone, rang them up to ask if he might come over, and was urged to do so.

Jane was putting Andrew to bed when he arrived at North Crowley. Michael gave him a large whisky, and when he had taken a mouthful of it, suggested a walk round the garden.

‘The dahlias are still blooming,’ he said. ‘It’s getting dark, but you can just see them in the dusk.’

The two walked round the garden twice, along neatly mown paths which separated the roses from Jane’s herbaceous border, without talking.

After a while, Michael said: ‘Gardens are rather soothing. I dug up what seemed like half an acre while Andrew was being born. Decorating’s good, too. I did out the cloakroom when Jane had that last miscarriage. The dining-room’s next.’

‘Tell me when you’re going to start,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

He managed a smile, and Michael knew the cure had begun.

‘Let’s finish our drinks, and stack up new ones,’ he said. ‘Jane will be down any minute.’

She found them seated in silence, one on each side of the fire, where some logs were burning. Her mental radar told her instantly that Patrick was sad and Michael concerned.

She had to know.

‘Is Ellen all right?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Patrick. ‘Perfectly.’

‘That’s good, then,’ Jane said, and waited. When the silence continued, she added, ‘There was a little in the paper about Madge – just a few lines. I suppose there will be more tomorrow.’

‘Carol killed her,’ Patrick said. He told them then the story of the past hours, and they listened without interrupting till he reached the end.

‘If I’d only thought of looking on the backs of the photographs for the names,’ he said. ‘Or if I’d found the key of Carol’s desk in that vase when I was at Abbot’s Lodge that night. Then I’d have seen her passport and been sure about Athens.’

‘The name Clarissa Daniels wouldn’t have meant a thing,’ said Jane. ‘She changed it, I suppose. She must have been paranoid – why commit murder because you meet someone who knows you’ve been a cheat at school?’

‘There was more to it than that,’ Patrick said. ‘She’d been to prison for embezzlement – she’d been working in an insurance office and helped herself to some of the funds. She wrote to Amelia for a character reference before the trial, and the old girl wouldn’t give it.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Jane.

‘That isn’t all. Later, she was in business with some woman, running a shop of some sort. They couldn’t make a go of it, so they set the place alight, to get the insurance money. Odd how people run to type. She lied and cheated all her life, and went in for arson more than once.’

‘What about the other woman – the fellow arsonist? Did they both go to gaol?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Was she blackmailing Carol, then? Threatening to expose her?’

‘No. She died. Fell down the escalator at Green Park, late at night,’ said Patrick. ‘It was just before Carol married David. No one saw it happen.’

There was a silence.

‘Was David the one with the money, then ? You thought it might be Carol.’

‘Yes, it was David. He inherited a fortune from his father, and the controlling share in a family business.’

‘So that was why she married him.’

‘Yes. She had expensive tastes.’

‘What about the book? The missing Cicero? Why was that significant?’Jane asked. ‘Ellen put it back with all the other books, you said.’

Patrick had forgotten the books. He had stacked them in the parish hall, along with Miss Brinton’s rescued furniture, but he had forgotten his promise to sell them. Now there would be no cosy weekends with Ellen, picking out the volumes one by one.

‘You asked about the Cicero,’ he said, aloud. ‘Mildred recognised Carol through the window. She remembered that Amelia had been given the two sets of Cicero, the
Letters
and the
Orations,
by the school, in a fit of generosity. Because she kept her Teubners away from her pupils, they thought she had no Cicero. Each volume was signed by the girls who gave it, and Carol – Clarissa – was among those who signed volume five of the
Orations.
Mildred thought the book might be important, so she took it. Perhaps she thought as she’d remembered it, Carol might too. It seems that Amelia had mentioned Carol just before she went to Greece – wondering if she’d taken a grip on herself. So it was all fresh in Mildred’s mind.’

‘Fancy her writing it all down!’ said Jane.

‘It was lucky she did. We’d have a lot of gaps that we’d be guessing at, otherwise,’ said Patrick. But they would still have known about Carol. Her record would have been discovered.

‘And Carol thought if she replaced the book, you and Ellen would stop fussing. Why did she bother, if she meant to burn the place down?’

‘She didn’t at first. That was a last-minute plan, when David and Ellen told her they wanted to get married.’ He found he could say it quite easily, to his surprise. ‘Up till then, she hadn’t meant to kill Ellen.’ At least, he thought not. David was the one who would have a fatal accident, devised to make it look as though he had intended it for Carol.

‘I don’t understand what David saw in Carol,’ Jane said. ‘Why did he marry her?’

‘He’s—he’s not a very strong character,’ Patrick said. He had been going to say that David was definitely weak, but he modified it.

‘Carol was very capable. That was what drew him.’ And now Ellen’s quiet efficiency had the same effect.

‘But the dog? Why go so far? And the laburnum seeds?’

‘It was all real to Carol,’ Patrick said. ‘She acted out her fantasies. At first probably she was just looking for an isolated country house where she could plot unobserved. Then, when she heard of Abbot’s Lodge and its reputation, it played into her hands. She made it look as though the house was continuing to harm those who lived there. The police think she filled the dog with sleeping pills – I expect they’ll dig him up now, and have a look. She probably ate a few laburnum seeds herself – enough to make her symptoms authentic. She’d asked David to buy the pie, to make it seem as if he’d added them.’

‘What if he’d eaten some?’

‘He doesn’t like blackberry-and-apple, it appears,’ said Patrick.

‘How subtle,’ Jane said, and shivered. ‘But she really cared for Valerie?’

‘Oh yes. She saved her life. She’d got past my car – it was pulled in well to the side – but the fire engine blocked the road. She scraped past it, half in the hedge, going very fast, and then saw Valerie in front of her. She pulled into the field to miss her.’ He remembered the look on David’s face as they heard Carol’s car start. The taxi that had brought him from the hospital had dropped him the further side of the fire engine. He knew Carol would go fast down the lane; he wanted her to crash. Wouldn’t that memory haunt him and Ellen forever?

‘How did Carol start the fire?’ asked Michael.

‘With paraffin. There was a ladder in the shed. The forensic people thought she’d soaked rags and shoved them into the thatch on the windward side of the cottage. The straw was very dry underneath; once it caught, it was just like a bonfire.’

‘And Mildred wanted to see Ellen that day in the British Museum to warn her who Carol was?’

‘Yes. She said so in the letter she left. She seemed to have a premonition that she might die without telling anyone, hence the letter.’

‘Which Ellen read only yesterday?’

‘Yes. And she didn’t tell David what it said. I suppose she wanted to spare him,’ said Patrick.

‘Carol was a devil, wasn’t she?’Jane said. ‘One of Miss Brinton’s failures. I suppose nowadays a child like that would be psychoanalysed. Would that have cured her, I wonder?’