Fran had not expected to hear from Tom again for a few days at least, so she was extremely surprised when her telephone rang at three the following afternoon and she heard his voice on the line. (Some people had their servants answer the telephone, but Ada was unaccustomed to the instrument and approached its use much as one might approach an encounter with a dangerous snake.)
‘Hello, Tom,’ she said. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘There’s been a surprise development. Aunt Hetty telephoned just now, which she never does unless there’s been a family bereavement.’
‘Oh dear, has someone died?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. She wanted to tell me that the police have turned up with an exhumation order for Mrs Ripley.’
‘Oh my goodness!’
‘It’s supposed to be a secret. They’re going to do it tonight, under cover of darkness, but word has leaked out somehow or other, so the entire village seems to know about it and the whole place is in a state of subdued uproar.’
‘Can one have a subdued uproar?’
‘Do you think this is the moment for a discussion on semantics?’
‘No, of course not. So I suppose we have to wait and see what happens next?’
‘I suppose so. Though Aunt Hetty said that if either of us want to go back and stay with her to do some more sleuthing we are welcome at any time. Apparently she doesn’t have much faith in the regular authorities, as she thinks they have already allowed the killer to strike three times. I told Aunt Het that our next plan was to bone up on the evidence given at the inquests – and I suppose it’s become more urgent now, but there’s no chance of me getting away from the office until Friday at the earliest.’
‘I expect I could go down there by train,’ Fran said, knowing perfectly well there was nothing in her diary that could not be put off.
‘I knew you’d come up trumps,’ Tom said. ‘Let me give you Aunt Het’s telephone number so you can make arrangements direct with her.’
‘I say,’ Fran said, after she had written down the number on a handy sheet of paper, ‘when I got home yesterday, I found an invitation to Richard Finney’s wedding waiting for me.’
‘Yes, we’ve received one too,’ Tom said. ‘And luckily it’s a date we can make. Jolly nice of him to ask us.’
‘Yes, jolly nice,’ Fran echoed.
We’ve received one. Of course. Richard Finney and Julia Spencely would have known that Tom was married and naturally included his wife in the invitation as a courtesy, even though they had presumably never met her since Veronica did not attend Barnaby Society meetings. As she went through the motions of signing off on the phone, Fran found herself fervently wishing that her morning had been too busy for her to have already taken her little note of acceptance down to the postbox at the end of the lane. It would look odd now if she cried off, but for reasons she could not explain, even to herself, the idea of meeting the previously unseen Veronica had wrong-footed her completely.
Ada was clearly surprised when Fran explained that she was going away again at short notice, and when she passed the kitchen door she overheard the daily saying something conciliatory about ‘a nice tin of sardines’ to the cat. No wonder Mrs Snegglington was putting on weight.
Without Tom to drive her, it would take the best part of the day to reach Aunt Hetty’s, but she knew that Tom was right about the increased urgency. If there was an exhumation in progress, things might move very fast, just as they had in various other high-profile poisoning cases during the past few years. And surely poison must be suspected, for why else would an exhumation order have been granted?