Fran was awakened the next morning by a hesitant knock that presaged the arrival of Aunt Hetty’s housemaid bearing a can of hot water which she placed on the washstand before opening the curtains to admit the brilliant sunshine.
By the time she reached the dining room, Tom was already munching his way through bacon and eggs, which Fran declined in favour of toast and marmalade.
‘I was just explaining to Tom how to find the way to the edge of Mr Vardy’s land,’ Aunt Hetty said. ‘It’s very easy to get there, so I don’t intend to accompany you. I have one or two letters to write and plenty of other things to occupy myself with. And anyway, I’m sure your sleuthing will go much better if you leave me behind.’
Just for a second, Fran wondered whether there was some hidden meaning behind Aunt Hetty’s words, but then she decided that Tom’s grandmother’s stepsister would never have agreed to invite her if she had suspected for a moment that the friendship between herself and Tom was anything other than platonic.
By the time they set out on their walk, Fran’s spirits had lifted considerably. It was impossible to be unhappy on such a bright morning, with Tom loping along, lifting his hat to passers-by and idly humming snatches of a tune.
Durley Dean was a large, somewhat sprawling village, but by following the directions they had received from Aunt Hetty, they soon found themselves out of the main built-up area and walking along an unmade lane lined with cow parsley.
‘Jolly good for blackberrying in another week or so,’ Tom remarked, looking at the hedgerow.
‘Goodness me, do you ever stop thinking about fruit and vegetables?’ Fran laughed.
‘It’s the jolly old fruit and veg that keeps petrol in my motor and puts a Christmas turkey on my table,’ Tom said lightly. ‘Luckily people will always want fruit.’
‘Very useful, too, in getting us an invite to lunch with Mr Ripley.’
‘Ah, yes. Banana man. Who would ever have thought that being a fruit importer would come in so handy?’
‘Did it occur to you that Miss Rose, the prospective fiancée of Mr Ripley, had a motive for getting rid of the late Mrs Ripley?’ Fran attempted to speak nonchalantly, not catching Tom’s eye.
‘Well, yes, of course it did. And Ripley himself, too. It’s perfectly possible that the death of Mrs Ripley is entirely unconnected with the deaths of the other two. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Aunt Hetty assumes a connection because they all happen to go to the same church and have all been opponents of the new vicar – who, by the way, is just as much of a suspect as anyone else in my book – but then it could just be a series of coincidences. Any of the three deaths might be murders, and any of them might be accidents. We could have three murders all committed by the same person or we could have three complete accidents. Or we could have three separate murders committed by three separate people for entirely different reasons, or any other permutation of accidents and murders you care to mention.’
‘It’s still far too early in the morning for all this,’ Fran protested. ‘Look, is this the stile which your aunt said is the shortcut across Mr Vardy’s land?’
‘I think it must be. Here, let me give you a hand up.’
There was really no need for any assistance, but Fran willingly took Tom’s arm as she climbed over, glad that she had brought her comfortable flat brogues as she negotiated the bar, placed her second foot on the crosspiece at the other side and then hopped nimbly on to the faintly defined path that headed across the field. ‘Lucky it hasn’t rained for a while,’ she said.
It was a matter of a mere fifty yards to their destination. The place where Mr Vardy had met his end appeared to be a natural pool at the edge of a narrow belt of oak and ash trees. Though partly surrounded by rushes, there was an open space beside the water where cattle evidently came to drink, because the dried-up mud at the edge showed the marks of hooves.
‘Hmm, visible from the lane and probably not very deep,’ Tom said, looking out across the water. ‘But I suppose it would be slippery here after rain. If you fell in, how hard would it be to get back out again, do you think?’
Fran considered the question for a moment, looking out over the opaque water, its surface reflecting the clear blue sky. ‘Hard to say. You might lose your bearings if it was dark, I suppose. Or panic and start thrashing about and end up getting in deeper instead of getting out.’
Tom had been casting about on the ground and quickly saw what he wanted. He walked over to a nearby oak tree, reached under the canopy and picked up a long stick which had evidently blown down some time before, then walked to the very edge of the water and, reaching as far as he could, poked his stick at arm’s length into the pond, and then brought it back up and considered the end that had been immersed. ‘Barely more than a couple of feet deep there,’ he said. ‘But by the look of things there’s a lot of mud and leaf mould on the bottom that might make it difficult under foot – especially if you were the worse for drink, which would presumably have been the reason for stumbling into the water in the first place.’
‘Your clothes and shoes would hamper you, too.’
‘Setting the question on its head, how easy would it be to murder someone here?’
Fran considered again. ‘Jolly difficult, I should say. Firstly, you’ve got to either persuade the victim to come here or else wait here in the hope that they will just happen to turn up. Then you would have to take them unawares, push them into the water, and hold them under until they drowned. Your victim, in the meantime, would presumably be struggling like billy-o.’
‘If they stumbled in accidentally,’ Tom continued the train of thought for her, ‘I suppose a reasonably fit and active person might easily manage to get out – unless they happened to be hopelessly drunk. How old was this Mr Vardy, I wonder? But then again, it’s hard to imagine anyone actually holding someone under the water until they stopped breathing – it would be a terrific struggle and the killer would get soaking wet.’
‘So Mr Vardy’s drowning is starting to look more and more like a genuine accident.’
‘I’m inclined to think so. Of course, the Ripley situation is completely different – and then there’s Miss Tilling. What a pity Aunt Hetty hasn’t managed to find some way of wangling us a peek into her house.’
By unspoken consent, they turned away from the pond and began to retrace their steps towards the lane.