The Spring Cleaning Murders (28 page)

We didn’t have mice, as far as I knew, and if we had, Tobias would have expected me to mind my own business, but I savored this and the other pieces of housewifely wisdom anew, despite having pored over them many times in recent days. They brought back the kind and gentle ghost of Abigail Grantham, banished the spooks from the attic, and restored the past as an ally.

How hard people had worked before God gave us Hoovers! My eyes drifted shut. To imagine a pre-modern woman slogging through her housework would have been exhausting even in the middle of the day. It was now, however, two A.M. I knew I should finish my milk and return to bed before I had to crawl up the stairs. But the hard kitchen chair was so comfy I found myself nodding off again. My head slumped forward and must have hit the table because I heard a thump, actually two of them, before I was reclaimed by muzzy sleep and dreamed that someone was opening the garden door and creeping into the kitchen.

It wasn’t a dream; it was brutal reality. I shot awake, my heart hammering away as I gripped the arms of the chair and forced myself to turn and face the intruder. What I should have done was pick up my cup and slosh the remains in his or her face. Unfortunately there was only about an inch left in the bottom. But at least it would have been something to do.

“Good morning, Mrs. H.,” said the new president and fellow member of the C.F.C.W.A., as if arriving at a perfectly acceptable time of day. “The front of the house was dark, so I was forced to come round back.”

“Mrs. Malloy!” I stumbled out of my chair.

“No need to look at me like I’m a ghost!”

“I’m just surprised.” A huge understatement. For a good part of the day I had been picturing her dead and buried. But her fake leopard coat was undeniably real and the only thing even slightly unusual was that instead of her usual supplies bag she was carrying an enormous holdall that was unzipped halfway. It looked commodious enough to have accompanied her on board ship as she moved to Australia.

“A good thing I didn’t give you back the key when I left Chitterton Fells,” she continued while I was still trying to unlock my jaw. “When I saw the lights on through the glass in the door I knocked good and loud a couple of times, but you didn’t rush to welcome me with open arms.”

“I thought”—rubbing my brow—”that I’d bumped my head.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Mrs. Malloy gave me a pained look from under her neon-coated lids. “Would you mind turning off the overhead light, Mrs. H., and just leaving the one on by the back door? I’m getting a headache that threatens to turn something cruel.”

“Oh, what a shame!” Hustling over to the light switch, I agonized over what had brought her here in the middle of the night. Mrs. Malloy teetered over to the table to deposit the holdall and stand fussing with it before removing her coat, revealing a purple velvet dress underneath.

She rested a hand on the table as if to try and stop the room from spinning. “As I was saying, it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d got a migraine of your own, because in your right mind, Mrs. H., you’d be pouring me a cup of tea and asking if I wanted any brandy in it.”

“I’ve been worried about you.” I scampered to put the kettle on and shuffle Tobias off the rocking chair so she could sit down. “I was sure there had to be something wrong for you to go off like that.”

“Sorry, I should have sent a postcard saying I was having a lovely time. And I did try to phone, but the bloody line was engaged. And I had a train to catch to London.” Her butterfly lips, colored cherry red to clash with her frock, drooped. I fetched a bottle of brandy from the pantry and liberally laced her tea before handing it to her. “Here’s to you, Mrs. H.,” she toasted me by raising the cup to her lips and taking a deep swallow. “You’re a port in a storm.” A tear slid down her cheek, creating a channel between eye and chin.

“Have a little more brandy,” I urged, torn between sympathy and the urge to know what latest catastrophe had befallen her.

“Just a couple of drops.” Holding out the cup she roused herself to supervise. “That’s not even a drip, Mrs. H.! Forty of them wouldn’t make one drop.”

“How’s that?” Upending the bottle. “Now please, Mrs. Malloy, you have to tell me what’s going on and let me help you if I can.”

“I got back on the last train out of Victoria. Arrived in at a little before ten. And although I can’t say I was feeling like a dog with two tails, I was doing all right--considering. Until I walked up me garden path. That’s when it really hit me for the first time they was all gone. Gertrude and Winifred was good through and through, and I’m going to miss them like you wouldn’t believe. Then there’s Trina . . .” Mrs. Malloy reached into her purple velvet pocket for a hanky to wipe her eyes. “I was fond of her—well, as fond that is as you can be of someone you don’t ever so much like. I’m not about to say now she’s gone that she deserves a halo the size of a dinner plate. But Trina did do wonders for the C.F.C.W.A.; there’s no getting round that. She got us thinking like professional women. It was her that organized the Christmas bonus club. No one can take that away from her, Mrs. H!”

“Of course not.”

“Going back into the house tonight was the first time I was really spooked. It come back in flashes to me, like finding Trina’s body with a knife that I’d used time out of mind—stuck in her back.”

“Awful!”

“I tried to get meself to sleep.” Mrs. Malloy continued to dab away with the hanky. “But as if I didn’t have enough to think of already, I kept wondering how you and the hubby, along with Betty Nettle and Freddy, got on today. So take a load off, Mrs. H.,” she commanded magnanimously, “and tell me if you found out anything, without me there to give you all a poke in the ribs.”

“Mrs. Malloy!” I protested. “I want to hear about your day first.”

“Not till you’ve given me the scoop.” She was adamant.

So I told her. And she nodded and pursed her lips as the particular revelations required.

“You turned up a sight too many secrets,” was her comment. “Now we’re stuck thinking any one of them— plain Mr. Walter Lester Smith as he turns out to be, Miss Whitcombe, or Mr. Tingle—could be the one we’re after. True, you didn’t find nothing much at the Misses Millers’ house. But I say we put our money on them. Like I read in one of them crime novels, often it’s what you don’t find that counts big. But I’m with you on one point, Mrs. H., I’d just as soon it wasn’t our brigadier. Bleeding shame! Him thinking he had to play the part of the big-I-am to get by in life. The man should have talked to me. I’d have set him straight about how to deal with the stuck-ups!”

I couldn’t tell from the look Mrs. Malloy gave me whether she included me among that obnoxious group; just in case, I got up and poured her more tea with another slosh of brandy.

She settled back in the rocking chair. “Well, it’s not like we’re done checking out the possibles. There’s still Sir Robert and her ladyship to be put under the microscope.”

“We’re supposed to go to Pomeroy Hall today,” I reminded her.

“That’s been changed, Mrs. H.”

“Really?”

“Sir Robert rang up before I left the house this morning, or I suppose I should say yesterday, to say her ladyship was under the weather — a bad cold that’s gone to her chest — and it would be better if we left the cleaning at least till the end of the week.”

“Didn’t you find that a trifle suspicious?” I stopped, cocked my head, and looked at Mrs. Malloy. “What was that?”

“What was what?”

“It sounded like a teeny-weeny sneeze.”

“Power of suggestion.”

“I suppose so.” I got to my feet.

Mrs. Malloy was behind me, breathing heavily for a person who had done no more than stand up and take one and a half steps. “Mrs. H., there’s something I’ve been getting round to telling you about, but I needed to get meself together before giving you another shock.”

I didn’t have to ask what she was talking about; I was staring at the holdall, which she must have unzipped when she set it on the table. The sides were spread open. Sleeping peacefully inside under a fleecy pink blanket was one of the most beautiful babies I had ever seen. No wonder my cousin Vanessa and Mrs. Malloy’s son George had named her Rose.

“Little love!” Her grandmother bent forward to touch her damask cheek.

“She’s adorable,” I whispered. “But why is she here?”

“Because George isn’t her proper father . . .”

“No need to screech like that, Mrs. H., you’ll wake her.”

“Sorry!” I gulped. “But this is all such a surprise. I feel as though I’m taking part in a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest”

“It all came out just after I went to live with them in London. George has always been the neat, orderly sort. Gets that from yours truly. And one Saturday afternoon when Vanessa was having a rest, painting her toenails and such, he thought he’d do a little spring cleaning. Don’t it make you want to spit? But then I always did say no good could come of men thinking they was as good as women and had a God-given right to help around the house. Meddling is what I’ve always called it. And of course I make an exception for Mr. H., him working in the line of duty to help solve the murders. And I’m not saying as I blame George. Feed a man nonsense, and he’ll eat every scrap.”

Mrs. Malloy heaved a voluminous sigh. “He came across a letter in a drawer to Vanessa from the other man. The bugger had spelled it all out—how he was sorry about the baby, but he wasn’t the marrying sort and he was glad she’d found some chump to play the role of Daddy.”

“Oh, poor George!” My heart ached for him as well as the beautiful baby in the holdall. “I really thought Vanessa cared for him.”

“You’d have changed your tune might quick if you’d heard her when George confronted her. Believe you me, Mrs. H., I didn’t need to stick my ear to the keyhole. You could’ve heard her a mile away. Turned everything around to suit herself, she did.” Mrs. Malloy smoothed out the pink blanket with a trembling hand. “Talked about how George had all sorts of unfulfilled needs a wife could never meet, as well as throwing in how he’d insisted I move in with them. Well, that’s when my boy flipped his lid good and proper. He told Vanessa straight, he’d been forced to ask me to help out because she’d shown not a jot of interest in little Rose from the word go.”

“No wonder I hardly heard from you.” I put my hand on her arm.

“George, being soft as they come under all that business sense, tried to patch things up. But Vanessa kept right on acting the injured party. The day of Gertrude Large’s funeral there was another blazing row. No way I could walk out, not knowing what I’d come back to, because”—Mrs. Malloy’s voice cracked—”even though it’s turned out I’m not this here baby’s gran, she’s come to mean the world to me, has my Rose. I’d even got to the point of thinking, Bugger growing old gracefully, as they call it, and switched me hair color back from that silly schoolgirl red and threw out me miniskirts. Then this morning, just as I was about to leave to come here, I got a phone call from George. All in a panic he was! Vanessa had bunked off to Italy in the night. The baby was howling her little head off. And he didn’t know how to get the bottle in her mouth or the nappy on her bottom.” Mrs. Malloy blinked away a tear. “Well, enough about me, Mrs. H., I need to give you this.” Reaching into a side pocket of the holdall, she handed me a letter, which I unfolded. I recognized my cousin Vanessa’s writing:

Dear Ellie

It turns out I’m not cut out to be a mother. I know you like it, but then you never had a career such as mine to give up. So giving bottles and changing nappies all day and night probably seems like heaven to you. If you hadn’t married, things might have been different. I could have hired you as a nanny for Rose. You’d have had your own room and television, and we’d all have been happy. As it is, I’m being offered some fabulous modeling jobs. Thank God flawless perfection is back in vogue again, instead of the shapeless nymphet look that was all anyone wanted for a while. I am off to Italy for three months, and even if I wanted to do so, it wouldn’t be fair to drag the baby along. She’ll be much better off with you, Ben, and your little people. And don’t let me forget Freddy: for all his weird ways he’s a whiz with children. I’m also sure Mrs. Malloy will be glad to help out. Even after what’s happened she’s bound to have an interest in Rose. Now don’t go thinking I’m sticking you with this responsibility for life, Ellie. Who knows? I could change my mind. Let’s just think of the arrangement as temporary until I make up my mind. Don’t hate me. I’m really not a complete cow. If I were, I would have sent Rose to my mother.

Love and kisses,

Vanessa

It took a while for the impact of that letter to sink in. I don’t remember much of what I said to Mrs. Malloy, except that we agreed she would spend at least the next couple of days at Merlin’s Court, helping the baby to adjust to a bunch of strangers. I have to admit I was relieved she wasn’t willing to release her grandmotherly hold immediately. She dispatched me from the kitchen, saying I needed to talk to Ben while she gave Rose her next feed.

Entering our bedroom, I found him up and in his dressing gown, even though it wasn’t yet dawn. He’d just been about to come and look for me. Handing over the letter, I watched him read it through, his expression thoughtful.

“What do we do?” I asked.

"I don’t see we have a choice.” Folding up the pages, he laid them on the mantelpiece. “We wouldn’t turn a stray puppy away, so how can we refuse to take this baby?”

“It would be different if we knew it was permanent.” I started to pace at the foot of the bed. “We could raise her like one of our own, but being in this limbo makes me afraid. What if I really start to love Rose, the way a mother does, and Vanessa walks in one day and takes her away?”

“I don’t know.” Ben caught hold of my hand and drew me into his arms and stroked my hair as the tears welled in my eyes. “It’s a risk. Look at what Mrs. Malloy has already lost. But one thing I can tell you, whatever you decide, we’re in this together, Ellie. Let’s take it one day at a time, shall we, darling?”

“What about Abbey and Tam?” Wiping at my cheeks.