Read Murder At Wittenham Park Online
Authors: R. W. Heber
Murder At Wittenham Park (29 page)
“It doesn't begin to add up.” Morton sifted through his voluminous papers on the case. “It's a hell of a pity all these tests take so long.”
It was late Tuesday morning and much had happened. The poison that killed Welch had been positively identified as veterinary tranquillizer. The pathologist confirmed that it was very likely to have been administered in tea. Welch would have died almost instantaneously and there was little possibility that the poison had been administered earlier, since it was present in his blood, but not in his urine.
Nearly all Jim Savage's suppositions had been shown as correct. Traces of the drug had been found in the tiny laboratory bottle. Loredana and Hamish were now “helping police with their inquiries,” in the understated British phrase. Adrienne had been released. Priscilla had been warned against ever starting a fire again and been put on a train home. Dulcie had also gone home to discuss what to do next about their respective spouses with Trevor. Jim had wondered, idly, if those two would end up getting together. Now that Trevor had recovered his nerve, he could be a different man. But that was irrelevant speculation. The reality was that everyone except the Savages had left Wittenham Park.
“You reckon that Mr. Savage is right, sir?” Timmins asked.
“One hundred percent, damn him. I'm going to talk to him again.”
It was stupid to be resentful, and Morton knew it was, but he could not help himself. However, he would do his best to conceal his feelings.
“Could we go over the way you saw events once again?” Morton asked Jim, when coffee had been brought to the library, which he had chosen deliberately because he wanted the Savages to feel relaxed. He was confident that they could not have been connected with the crime, save as observers.
“The key was the way people kept acting out of character,” Jim explained. “Lord and Lady Gilroy never did that. They were consistent from the moment the weekend began. They loathed Welch and they hated having to sell their land. They made no secret of it. The rows we heard before and after dinner on the Friday night were all about pressurizing them.”
“Unpleasant, but not criminal,” Morton observed.
“You'd be the best judge of that,” Jim said tactfully. “It was when Gilroy refused to sign that things went wrong.”
“In what sequence?”
“Dulcie McMountdown tried to engineer a compromise. Her final act was to take the amended contract to Welch at around eleven
P.M
., urging that this was the best she could achieve. He told her it wasn't good enough. She left him, incidentally taking the drugged cocoaâa complete red herring so far as any investigation was concerned. Everything Priscilla Worthington did confused the issue. She'd been asked to make the weekend dramatic and found herself unable to stop.
“She's one from the cuckoo's nest,” Jemma said.
“Anyway,” Jim continued, “Dulcie had already told Hamish that she'd had enough and was going to divorce him. Before she fell asleep she warned him that Welch was still going to sue him for fraud over Lloyds.”
“Could Welch have done that?” Morton was no expert on the convolutions of the insurance market.
“Managing agents have been sued. Fraud, incompetence and malpractice are the words.”
“And then?”
“As we know, once his wife was asleep, Hamish sneaked out along the passage to Loredana's room.”
“We heard him go past, didn't we, Daddy?” Jemma confirmed.
“We heard someone go past our doors. Presumably him. When he told Loredana that Dulcie was definitely throwing him out and Welch would be suing him, they evolved their plan.”
“None of which can be proven?” Morton asked.
“It's informed supposition. But what transpired supports it. Take Loredana's behaviour. Why, when her affair with Hamish was so secret, did she insist on telling me how she had found true love at last? Because they were each other's alibis, that was the reason. What is less explicable is that accident on the back stairs yesterday.”
“I think they genuinely had quarrelled,” Jemma said.
“Perhaps they were getting the wind up after the inspector's questioning,” Jim said. “Or else Hamish was trying to back out of the affair now that his own problems were solved and that Trevor had woken up to what was going on.”
“They were certainly nervous,” Morton agreed. One of the few complete conversations that his bugging device in the library had picked up was that one, but nothing had been said that could incriminate either Hamish or Loredana. Not that he intended Savage to know this.
“I suspect it all lies in Loredana's character,” Jim suggested. “She's a creature of instinct, of impetuous action. Jemma, remember how she insisted on having the âgazelle-like' role at the start, and all the fuss about knowing Africa? She likes dramas. She might well have persuaded Hamish before they arrived that Welch had to be killed. Look at it from her point of view. She was bored stiff with her husband, who didn't earn enough to indulge her and was often away and she'd taken up with Hamish.”
“Who wanted an easy lay, but not a divorce,” Jemma said.
“Exactly. Hamish didn't intend to burn his boats with Dulcie. He was having a very satisfactory love affair on the side. Divorce is expensive, and anyway, he probably had no thought of actually marrying Loredana. She's not the most intelligent woman in the world, whereas Dulcie is extremely switched on.”
“That would figure, Daddy,” Jemma said. “He's a calculating so-and-so.”
“But this weekend changed everything. He was being divorced, and he was being sued. It had become a now-or-never situation. If she could possibly do so, Loredana had to bounce him into total commitment. She'd acquired the poison, almost by chance. The next stimulant was the horoscope. Last night she didn't even try to deny the influence that had on her. That made her decide to act.”
“Horoscope?” Morton queried.
“She had taken her stars for the month out of a magazine,” Jemma explained, “the usual spiel. The astrologer said Saturday was a day for decisive action for future happiness.”
“You might just break her down over that,” Jim suggested. “It's a very weak point in her psychology.”
“So you think the horoscope decided her to kill Welch?” Morton asked.
“I think she'd thought about how to deal with him a lot. The poison practically fell into her lap. The horoscope convinced her that she had to act at once after she heard that Gilroy hadn't signed the contract. The horoscope said Saturday and she sees everything in immediate terms. I believe she then talked Hamish into their using the poison. And once he was party to a murder she'd got him where she wanted him. Or thought she had.”
“You don't think he planned it?” Morton suggested.
“He could have done. He's one of those Dr. Crippen characters,” Jemma said. “Totally cold, totally calculating.”
“Either way,” Jim said, “she then went through the routine we've already discussed and poisoned Welch very successfully. Hamish certainly took no risk himself. But she overdid it with the maid when she eventually took the tray down. Having said she wanted to help the staff, she couldn't resist explaining exactly how she wanted her breakfast done. Result? The maid remembers that she came down at least twenty minutes before anyone else. She had to if she was going to be unobserved going into Welch's room again. But pretending to be helpful to the staff was entirely out of character. Just as it would have been out of character for Welch to put his dirty tea-things out in the passage, where we all saw them and were fooled into assuming it was the tray he had actually used.”
“Her only problem was that I saw her go into his room the first time,” Jemma said, “although I didn't recognize her night-dress until I saw it later.”
“It was both premeditated and an opportunist murder,” Jim said. “And she took a lot of trouble to cast suspicion on Adrienne.”
“I couldn't go on holding Mrs. Welch,” Morton admitted. “Her fingerprints were on the contract, but so were several others.”
“Adrienne was a worried woman,” Jim said. “She'd been worried about what her husband was letting himself in for the night before, because she knew what financial trouble he was in. When she first found him dead she saw the contract on his bedside table and must have snatched it with the idea of destroying it if necessary.”
Morton nodded. This was precisely what Adrienne had claimed she did.
“And, as I told you, when I hinted in front of her that I knew where it was, it appeared on my bed.”
“Thank you, Mr. Savage,” Morton said, convinced that these explanations held water. “It's all very plausible.” He gave Savage a friendly smile for the first time ever. “Now tell me how do I get Mrs. Chancemain into court?”
Jemma looked at the inspector. “I thought the police often started with a lesser charge and worked up from there to a confession.”
“You've been reading too many crime magazines, miss.”
“Writing them, actually.”
“Well.” Morton considered this. “Could it be proven that the tranquillizer bottle was stolen? She claims it was given her and Ted Matthews isn't alive to dispute that.”
“Wait a minute,” Jim said, showing excitement for the first time himself. “You might have a witness. Gary, the assistant keeper, the boy who insisted that Ted never made mistakes. He'd know if a bottle had been officially missing.”
Half an hour later Gary was with them, in his ranger's khaki uniform, and explaining that Ted had complained about a missing bottle. Shown the vial, he recognized it at once.
“I remember now. Ted was very particular about equipment. He'd had two empty ones of these by the lab sink and he asked me if I'd taken one. Well, I hadn't. Nor had no one else. Then, after Ted got killed, we forgot all about it.” He looked hard and long at Morton. “You mean that dart was interfered with, like?”
“Some of the tranquillizer was transferred to this bottle and the other must have been topped up with water.”
“Well, I can swear on oath it was stolen, if that's what you need.” Gary looked both horrified and bewildered. “Bastards,” he muttered.
“Don't worry,” Morton assured him, “we'll get them.”
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
T
HE TRIAL
several months later at Oxford Crown Court was far from being an open-and-shut case. Loredana was charged with murder and Hamish with being her accomplice. But they had hired good lawyers and the most Loredana would ever admit was that the horoscope had made her decide that she and Hamish must elope.
When the trial ended, after eleven days, the jury was divided, unable to agree. Both the accused walked free, though to boos and catcalls from the crowd outside.
Morton felt strongly that the prosecution should have opted for a lesser charge, though Savage knew that once they had realized the weakness of the case, neither Loredana nor Hamish would have given way.
In the meantime Jim Savage had found a job as secretary of a country club, which kept him occupied but was hardly exciting. He and Jemma were both called as witnesses by the prosecution and when the trial was over he felt curiously empty, as though an era of his life had ended.
The Gilroys were more than thankful that it was all over, although the publicity had doubled the gate money at the Lion Park.
“Agatha Christie would not have approved,” Dee Dee told her husband as they drove back to Wittenham “And that is absolutely the first and the last of our murder weekends.”
However, Buck was ready for her. “Definitely,” he agreed, “but I've had a brilliant idea, darling. Why don't we go into hosting ghost weekends instead?”
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Contents
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK
.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.
MURDER AT WITTENHAM PARK
. Copyright © 1986 by Thornton Cox Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.