The item to which I referred so excitedly was another letter, this time an original. I skimmed it quickly. Dated several years ago, it had been written by a friend, someone named Parthenope Foxwell, who obviously well knew Abigail Winterton’s snoopy tendencies. I read it again more slowly; and Jane did the same.
Dear Abigail,
As always, the arrival of your latest missive filled me with anticipation, for you never fail to entertain me—one who lives where the most excitement to be obtained comes from discussing marrows with my nearest neighbor. How I do long for the excitement you seem to find in your Snupperton Mumsley!
Your latest letter, replete with the antics of your dearest old friend Lady Prunella Blitherington was a jewel even for you. How that woman can live with herself after the way she constantly undermines your efforts to achieve something of positive good in her little feudal enclave is beyond me!!! [I nudged Jane and pointed to this sentence. Jane read it in a glance, then gave a most unladylike snort of derision.] But we have discussed her megalomania before, haven’t we, my dearest Abigail?
It sounds as if the recent parish flower show was another roaring success, thanks in large part, I have not the slightest doubt, to your judging this year! You seemed to be simply purring with satisfaction when you penned your description of it. My congratulations, as ever, my dear!
I was struck also by your description of the handsome young man who has just assumed the proprietorship of your village bookshop. Tis truly amazing to me how coincidence sometimes operates in our lives, for surely this is the same Trevor Chase with whom I once taught at the school in the next village. (Ah, those lovely, heady days before retirement!) All the female staff were quite taken with young Trevor. So handsome and fresh, right out of university in his first posting, and we did all sigh after him a bit. But, alas, it was to no avail, for we soon discovered that his preferences lay elsewhere, shall we say?
(I still cannot bring myself to say the word, dear Abigail, but I have no doubt that you know exactly what I mean.) All became apparent when Trevor was caught in a most compromising position with the mayor’s son. The mayor being the mayor, of course, managed to keep things quiet, and young Trevor found himself looking for another post right away, down south. One cannot but hope that he learned something from that debacle!
The letter meandered on for several more paragraphs, but the rest of it mattered nothing to Abigail Winterton’s murder. I looked at Jane, who had finished reading when I did. “A few more nails in the coffin, do you think?” I asked.
Jane winced. “I do wish you wouldn’t use that expression, Simon. It brings back terrible memories of Paris during the Terror. Sometime when I feel like it, I’ll tell you the story.”
“Sorry,” I said, intrigued. I had little doubt that I could get several novels’ worth of material out of Jane’s life. I hadn’t written a novel set during the French Revolution. What an exciting possibility!
“Back to earth, Simon,” Jane said sharply. “You’ll have more than enough time to fictionalize my exploits later!”
Jane had got to know me rather well, in all too short a time, I considered. I resisted rolling my eyes at her.
“To go back to your inelegantly expressed point,” Jane said, gesturing toward Parthenope Foxwell’s letter, “yes, this does add further motive for Trevor Chase. This is even more humiliating, I’d say, than his obsessive pursuit of Giles Blitherington.”
“And even more dangerous,” I observed, “since it’s hearsay.”
Though it pained me to think of him that way because of the favorable first impression he had created, Trevor Chase was now looming large as our chief suspect in the murder of Abigail Winterton. How quickly the view can shift once details are added.
There were several more pages of items from Abigail Winterton’s collection, and Jane and I turned the page to go on. There were two items on this page, both notices clipped from the local newspaper and dated a little over twenty-five years ago, though several months apart. According to one of the clippings, Sir Bosworth Blitherington had returned from a two-month visit to Kenya, on some mission on behalf of the government. The date on the piece was March 3. The second item was an announcement of the birth of a son, Giles Anthony Adrian, to Sir Bosworth and Lady Prunella Blitherington, on October 31 of that same year.
For a moment I couldn’t figure out what was significant about these two items. Idly, I realized that they must have been clumped together in one of Abigail Winterton’s books or they never would have gotten copied together on the same page. Then it hit me. I did a rapid calculation, and I was a bit stunned by the result.
I looked at Jane, and Jane looked back at me, her eyes wide with surprise. “Maybe Giles isn’t a Blitherington, after all?” I said.
Jane nodded. “It looks to be a distinct possibility, Simon. Either Giles was rather a late baby, which is entirely possible, or Lady Prunella foolishly got herself pregnant by another man while her husband was on the other side of the world.”
Oh, dear, I thought. This was a complication I hadn’t counted on. Could this give Giles a reason to have murdered Abigail Winterton? Of course it did! He wouldn’t be entitled to the estate if he were proven a bastard. This distressed me more than it should.
Then I brightened. Perhaps his mother, who would be even more humiliated were the truth known, had murdered Abigail Winterton. Lady Prunella made a much more attractive suspect.
Jane was staring thoughtfully into space. “This one is going to be rather difficult to suss out, Simon.”
“What do you mean?” I asked stupidly.
For once Jane didn’t react impatiently at my denseness. “One can’t simply walk up to Lady Prunella and ask, ‘My dear Lady Blitherington, who is Giles’s father? Your husband or some lover?’”
“No, I see what you mean,” I said, light breaking through the sudden fog in my mind. “There must be some other way. What about family resemblances? Does Giles look like Sir Bosworth at all?”
Jane shook her head. “From the family portraits I’ve seen, Giles is the image of his maternal grandfather. Who was, if I may say so, a very handsome man.”
“Maybe some notion will present itself later,” I said, sighing heavily. “This is getting more and more tangled.”
“Just like the plot in one of your mysteries, I suppose,” Jane said.
“Ha ha,” I said sourly.
I turned the page and found another set of accounts.
At least I thought they were accounts, but they were certainly odd ones, if so. This time there were only initials at the head of the list, but I thought that “LBM” must indicate Letty Butler-Melville. What reason could Abigail Winterton have had to blackmail the vicar’s wife? What dirt could there possibly be clinging to such a figure of rectitude?
Jane was also absorbed in scanning the list. There didn’t seem to be any notation of figures. Instead, there was a rather curious shorthand, which I could not interpret no matter how I tried.
“What does it mean, Jane?” I finally gave up.
Jane grimaced. “I think it’s a list of committee assignments. For example, ‘FR’ could indicate the flower quota for St. Ethelwold’s. For the longest time, Letty Butler-Melville has handled the flower quota, and she did an excellent job of it, too. You can’t imagine the petty jealousies and bickering that can be caused, all by who does the flowers and when for the church.” She laughed briefly. “About four years ago, Letty suddenly announced that Abigail had kindly consented to take over that duty for her, to free her to do other things.”
I looked down at the paper. There was a date beside the “FR” that corresponded with that year. Other entries, for that and succeeding years, showed that Abigail Winterton was getting increasingly greedy for power, spreading her control over various small activities, like running the church’s annual Jumble Sale and Bazaar. Jane interpreted the various notations for me.
“This explains something that had been puzzling me for some time,” Jane said. “I had thought that Letty simply had tired of Lady Prunella’s high-handedness in assuming that she was naturally the one to run everything and was simply trying to shift her out of various committees by favoring her rival. But evidently Abigail was blackmailing her into it.”
“How?” I asked, and Jane simply shook her head. We hadn’t found anything in Abigail Winterton’s collection of material that gave us a lead except Neville Butler-Melville’s connection with the death of Colonel Clitheroe’s son.
“Perhaps your idea about Neville’s having murdered Lester Clitheroe and staging an accident wasn’t so far-fetched, after all,” Jane admitted. “Letty would certainly go to great lengths to protect her husband. Perhaps even murder.”
“And he’d never even know what she had done,” I added, and Jane nodded.
“Letty shields him from as much unpleasantness as possible. Including blackmail, I’d be willing to bet,” Jane said darkly.
The remaining few pages contained evidence of Abigail Winterton’s profiting from her various positions of influence in the village. She had raked in various sums from numerous villagers who wanted badly, it seemed, to win prizes for flowers, jams, pets, and so on.
Jane and I set the papers aside and consulted. “Since our chief suspects were already those who were present when Abigail Winterton died, I suppose we can dismiss from the list those poor people who were paying Abigail money to win the ‘best in show’ prizes,” I said.
Jane agreed. “Lady Blitherington, Giles, Trevor Chase, Mrs. Stevens, and Letty Butler-Melville are stronger suspects, certainly. The colonel may figure into this somehow, perhaps something to do with the death of his son. We’ll have to dig something out of him when we visit him at teatime.”
I stood up, and Jane accompanied me to the front door. “Do you suppose,” I said, struck by a sudden thought, “that Detective Inspector Chase already knows about Trevor’s past?”
“Most likely,” Jane replied.
“That would explain the antipathy that Trevor seems to have for his cousin.”
“No doubt,” Jane said dryly. “I would imagine that Trevor is more than a bit uneasy at the moment”
I nodded. “I certainly would be.”
Jane reminded me of the date for tea she planned to make with Colonel Clitheroe, and then I walked back to my cottage.
The day was sunny and warm, full of the heady scents that I had always associated, at least mentally, with a summer in England. The village was quiet and peaceful in its late-morning langour. Not for the first time, I couldn’t really believe I was here. And would be for as long as I wanted. Sighing happily, I opened my gate and proceeded up the path to the front door of Laurel Cottage. Inside, I called a quick “hello” to Giles, who answered briefly, evidently absorbed in what he was doing. I went into the kitchen and to the back door in order to have a look at the back garden. I had to have something to say to the colonel this afternoon when Jane and I were going to visit him, ostensibly to talk about improvements to my garden.
I hadn’t the least notion what most of the plants were. Horticulture has never been my thing. But the flowers grew in colorful profusion all around the garden, which covered perhaps half an acre. To my untrained eye, the effect was lovely, if a bit undisciplined. Not the orderly perfection I had glimpsed in many English gardens. The garden could remain as it was as far as I was concerned. But if I had to follow through with having something done because of our need to question Colonel Clitheroe on his own turf, then I would. Who knows? I asked myself. I might actually enjoy gardening. Or watching someone else do it.
I was just closing the back door when I heard the bell at the front door. Calling, “I’ll get it,” to Giles, I strode quickly to the front of the cottage.
I barely had my hand on the knob when the door was thrust open by Lady Prunella Blitherington. I stumbled backward, and the door crashed against the wall. Lady Prunella had in tow Detective Inspector Robin Chase, who, I noted quickly, seemed more than a bit embarrassed by Lady Prunella’s behavior.
“This is the man, Detective Inspector!” Lady Prunella screeched and pointed a finger at me. “Arrest this man for corrupting my son!”