‘Dear me, I’m sorry, but I can’t help laughing,’ Mo said. ‘Just thinking about Tom being ticked off for lurking in the pantry by some slip of a girl.’
‘I suppose it does have a funny side,’ Fran said. ‘Do look out, or you will spill that Martini.’
‘Goodness, darling, that would never do.’ Mo righted her tilting glass and took an appreciative sip. ‘You really do make gorgeous Martinis. It’s because you’re not stingy with the gin. So come along, you must explain why Tom had gone fooling about in the pantry, and what on earth he was up to when he got you to lie on Mrs Ripley’s couch.’
‘He’d gone into the pantry to check on the ginger cordial. You see, Florence said her stepmother was very partial to it and that Mr Ripley bought some specially when she was first taken ill. It occurred to Tom that the ginger cordial would be a perfect medium for the poison, because, first of all, it was strong-tasting and would help mask the arsenic; and secondly, as no one else ever touched the stuff, the killer could add the poison and then bide his or her time, knowing that it would find its way into the victim’s system eventually.’
‘That’s jolly smart thinking. And I suppose if the bottle was still sitting in the pantry, he could have got the contents analysed for arsenic.’
‘Exactly. Except there was nothing doing with that theory, because he found the bottle on the top shelf, just where Florence had said it would be, and the seal hadn’t even been broken.’
‘Botheration! It was such a good idea.’
‘Tom’s never short on good ideas,’ Fran said. ‘The trouble is they’re not the right ideas.’
‘What about the business of getting you to lie on the couch?’
‘Well, that did turn out to be a bit more useful, even if it was in slightly poor taste and helped to earn us the order of the boot. Tom explained it all to me afterwards, and I realized he was right. When Mademoiselle Bertillon went over and opened the door of the cupboard above the basin, it was absolutely impossible to see anything of the cupboard, or the little glass shelf just below it or the washbasin itself, because from where Mrs Ripley was lying on the couch all she could have seen was the governess’s back. Mrs Ripley probably wasn’t watching anyway – but even if she was, she would have been none the wiser if mademoiselle had uncorked her medicine bottle and slipped something into it. It wouldn’t have taken a moment to do it, and of course Mrs Ripley couldn’t see through her.’
‘I didn’t realize that the governess was a suspect,’ Mo said.
‘She has to be a suspect, as she’s the last person who had access to Mrs Ripley’s food and drink that day.’
‘What about the other servants?’
‘Well, yes, I suppose they’re in the frame too, but they both appear to be absolutely harmless and, like Mademoiselle Bertillon, they don’t have any motive. All three appear to have been genuinely fond of Mrs Ripley, for all her various foibles.’
‘One of them may have had a secret motive,’ Mo gestured vaguely with her glass, once more endangering its contents. ‘Perhaps there was a love affair between the cook and Mr Ripley? Or maybe he bankrupted one of their brothers, as he did with Mr Pascoe? Mrs Ripley could have stolen an inheritance that was rightfully the governess’s—’
‘You obviously haven’t seen their cook, and if you’re going to be silly …’
‘No, no, don’t go all censorious on me. I will behave, I promise. Do tell on.’
‘There isn’t really much more to tell. We went back to Tom’s aunt’s house and told her what had happened, and then we packed our things and Tom brought me home.’
‘You’re not giving up, are you?’ asked Mo. ‘After all, it isn’t as if the Ripleys were even paying you. I think that girl’s got a damned cheek virtually throwing you out of the house when you were only trying to help. Besides which, didn’t you originally set out to solve the case in order to put Tom’s aunt’s mind at rest?’
‘We haven’t exactly managed to do that,’ Fran shook her head. ‘In fact, Florence Ripley’s right, really. We haven’t managed to help anyone at all. There was certainly no point our staying on in Durley Dean. We’d already spoken to everyone who had any obvious connection with the case.’
‘What about that poor old chap who got bonked on the head?’
‘Mr Hargreaves? No, we haven’t spoken to him, I agree. Word from Aunt Hetty is that they’ve found him a bed in the cottage hospital for a bit to help him recuperate. She goes there to read to patients and write letters for them sometimes, so she is going to have a chat with him and try to find out more about what he wanted to say to us, though Tom and I both think it’s only that Mrs Smith has been claiming the three deaths are part of a pattern.’
‘Yes, but what about the chap’s so-called accident? I suppose the police aren’t even investigating.’
‘No. Doctor Owen virtually ridiculed the idea. He’s convinced that it was just an ordinary fall.’
‘You should be looking at the whole case in a different way,’ Mo said.
‘What sort of different way?’
‘Why not consider each suspect in turn?’
‘Half the trouble is that apart from Mr Ripley himself, we scarcely have any sensible suspects. Most of the evidence, for what it’s worth, seems to point to Mr Ripley killing his wife in order to marry Miss Rose. Quite honestly, I’ve begun to think the real problem may be that because his daughter had asked us to help him, we didn’t want to believe Mr Ripley was guilty, so we were trying to find evidence which pointed another way. As Tom said on the way home: instead of being open-minded, we’d become hired guns.’
‘Gosh, that sounds exciting,’ Mo said. ‘Like those American gangsters one hears about. Time for a top-up, then we’ll put our thinking caps on – or load up our unhired guns, or at any rate, whatever it is one should do to prepare the ground in such circumstances.’
‘Well, getting blotto won’t help.’
‘Nonsense, darling. Lubrication is extremely good for oiling the mental wheels.’
‘I say,’ Fran said, when she had returned from the kitchen, bearing two replenished glasses. ‘Would you mind awfully if I borrowed that mustard-coloured hat you had made for your cousin Adela’s wedding last year? It would go splendidly with my good brown coat, and I’m rather stuck for something to wear to this wedding on Saturday week.’
‘Of course you may. I recommend plenty of layers if the weather doesn’t buck up. Why on earth did they choose to be married in October?’
‘Didn’t want to wait until the spring, I suppose.’
‘What sort of do is it going to be?’
‘Church service, followed by a tea dance. Miss Spencely’s family are Temperance, I believe, so there won’t be any drink.’
‘Goodness, how on earth will they toast the happy couple? Remind me again who these people are.’
‘Richard Finney, the editor of the Robert Barnaby Society’s journal, and Julia Spencely, who is also a member. They met through the society.’
‘Hot bed of romance, isn’t it, the Robert Barnaby Society? Well then,’ Mo went on when Fran didn’t answer. ‘Let’s get down to it. Who could have killed Mrs Ripley?’
‘It’s very difficult to see how it could be anyone outside the household,’ Fran said. ‘Mrs Ripley became ill immediately after her lunch. No one seems to be able to remember now exactly how much of the food she had actually eaten, but from what little the police have told Mr Gaffney – he’s Mr Ripley’s solicitor – it looks very much as if she took in a large quantity of poison and reacted to it very quickly. That means it was either in her lunch or in something else she took just before eating it, which of course leads us to the medicine.’
‘Do you think she could have taken some other medicine – say an indigestion mixture – in addition to what the doctor had prescribed?’
‘We asked Mademoiselle Bertillon about that,’ Fran said. ‘But she thinks that if Mrs Ripley had wanted to take anything else that was in the cabinet, she would have asked for it to be fetched at the same time as Mademoiselle Bertillon got the medicine out.’
‘Hang on,’ said Mo. ‘Where would the servants or the governess have got arsenic from in the first place?’
‘We thought about that too,’ Fran said. ‘The trouble is that the question of getting hold of the arsenic applies to just about everyone except Doctor Owen, who is sure to have had some in his dispensary.’
‘And Doctor Owen didn’t get there until she was dying. And if he’d put any arsenic in the bottle originally, Mrs Ripley would have shown signs of poisoning from when she first started taking it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Same goes for the vicar.’ Mo sighed, as if disappointed. ‘I would have put my money on him but, just like the doctor, he arrives on the scene too late. I say, wasn’t there a case where a poisoner made an arsenic solution by soaking flypapers?’
‘I think so. The trouble is there are loads of ways of getting hold of arsenic. Weedkiller is the most obvious one. Or you can just go and buy some over the chemist’s counter and sign the poisons register. They’re supposed to dye it purple now when it’s sold neat, but I’m not sure how long that’s been going on, and you know what people are like for not throwing things away. I bet that bottle of ginger cordial will sit on the top shelf in the Ripleys’ pantry for the next twenty years, just in case it comes in handy.’
‘Does arsenic go off?’
‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘So it’s just the servants, the governess and Mr Ripley himself?’
‘And Florence.’
‘And Florence,’ Mo echoed.
‘And the most likely scenario is that it was Mr Ripley himself. You see, on the morning of his wife’s death, when he popped in to see her, just before going off to work, he could easily have pretended that he needed something from the cabinet or that he was putting the medicine bottle back after his wife had taken her breakfast-time dose. When he was standing in the corner, with his back to the chaise longue, he could have slipped the poison into the bottle and then gone to the bank as usual. He’d probably think it would look less suspicious if she died while he was out of the house. In fact, that might be why he didn’t come home when Mademoiselle Bertillon first asked him to.’
‘I thought the secretary said she didn’t give him the message?’
‘Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she, if they were in cahoots? If so, then it was rather clever of her to persuade mademoiselle to say nothing in front of the family about the first telephone call, supposedly in order to spare their feelings.’
‘Very well then.’ Mo took another slug from her glass. ‘How would any of those people fit in with the death of Miss Shilling?’
‘It’s Miss Tilling, dear heart. And they don’t have to. Not if Mrs Ripley was murdered and the others died by accident.’
‘But if we are trying to see it from different angles,’ said Mo, ‘then perhaps we need to find a common denominator. Isn’t that the way of it in geometry? Or am I thinking of algebra? Anyway, find your common denominator and you’ve found your murderer.’
‘All right then.’ Fran played along. ‘We can be pretty sure that if someone killed Miss Tilling, it was someone she knew and would have admitted to the house. That rules out the Ripley servants, because they wouldn’t have been among her circle of social acquaintances; and if they had called round on an errand or to see one of her own servants, she would have expected them to go to the back door.’
‘The vicar, however, is well up the list of possibilities.’
‘It’s unfortunate that Mrs Smith went out that afternoon,’ Fran observed. ‘Her favourite seat is in prime position to see anyone going in or out of Miss Tilling’s gate.’
‘Is there only one gate?’
‘Yes, just the one, and then callers can either take the path to the front door or the one that leads round the side to the tradesman’s entrance.’
‘So it was lucky for the killer but very unlucky for Miss Tilling that Mrs Smith happened to be out. Now your Miss Tilling would have let the doctor in too,’ mused Mo. ‘And probably also the governess, and most certainly Florence Ripley. And her father too, come to that.’
‘The trouble is we don’t know what any of these people were doing that afternoon.’
‘But they are all possibilities,’ said Mo.
‘Which is all well and good,’ Fran said, ‘but what possible motive would any of those people have had for murdering Miss Tilling? The only one she’s made an enemy of is Reverend Pinder, but we’ve already established that he can’t possibly have murdered Mrs Ripley.’
‘Which is particularly infuriating because when we get to Mr Vardy there’s that really brilliant clue about the dog, which puts the vicar right on the spot,’ Mo said. ‘Whereas I can’t see any of the others hanging about in a country lane at that time of night.’
‘Florence certainly wouldn’t be out on her own at that time in the evening,’ Fran said. ‘Nor would the Ripley servants, unless one or other of them was on their half-day. The same probably applies to Mademoiselle Bertillon, though I daresay Doctor Owen and Mr Ripley could easily excuse themselves and go out for an evening stroll if they wanted to. And here’s another thing: how would they explain themselves when they arrived home soaked to the skin after wrestling with Mr Vardy in the pond?’
‘The vicar lives alone!’ Mo brandished the information triumphantly. ‘He wouldn’t have had to explain himself to anyone.’
‘Whenever I’ve seen him – even when he’s off-duty – he’s always been wearing a heavy cassock. That wouldn’t exactly have helped if he needed to wade into the pond and finish Mr Vardy off.’
Mo grimaced. ‘That’s another wretched complication. Is there anyone else who fits in with all three deaths?’
‘Mr Pascoe is a rather nasty piece of work,’ Fran said. ‘But he doesn’t appear to have a motive for killing anyone apart from Mr Ripley, and Mr Ripley isn’t dead.’
‘And there’s no way he could have got at Mrs Ripley’s medicine?’
‘No.’
‘There’s still the point that he knew about the poison, which is why he wrote to the chief constable.’
‘Miss Rose thinks that he didn’t actually know Mrs Ripley had been poisoned, he just hoped to stir up trouble for Mr Ripley by writing something nasty to the chief constable. Tom says the police receive simply scads of letters from cranks and busybodies and people trying to make trouble for their neighbours – and although in the vast majority of cases they are full of nonsense, the law of averages suggests that if you throw enough darts, sooner or later one will hit the target.’
‘So the general idea is that Mr Pascoe wrote his letters simply to stir up trouble with the police in order to get his own back on Mr Ripley, but by sheer luck he happened to hit on something which turned out to have some substance to it?’
‘Mr Pascoe said as much himself.’
‘What about his involvement in the trouble at the church?’
‘According to Aunt Hetty, the Pascoes don’t attend any church and appear to hold no strong religious convictions. In fact, none of the other parishioners seem particularly likely except Aunt Hetty’s favourite, Mrs Smith, but she wasn’t at the Ripleys’ house, isn’t likely to have been hanging around in the lane that leads to the Bird in Hand beerhouse and is just one of a very long list of people who might have been let into the house by Miss Tilling.’
‘I suppose we have to consider who might have been able to attack Mr Hargreaves, too.’ Mo sounded as if her enthusiasm for the common denominator theory was waning.
‘Well, Mr Ripley was in custody, so we can rule him out – although we don’t have any idea what his potential partner in crime, Miss Rose, was up to that afternoon. Mrs Smith and Reverend Pinder were both assisting at a wedding in the parish church, so they would have been within yards of Mr Hargreaves’ cottage on their way to and from the service. The Ripleys’ servants, Florence and Mademoiselle Bertillon can probably all vouch for one another. Doctor Owen was miles away at a football match, so he’s probably got dozens of witnesses to his whereabouts. And if you really want to include him, we know that Mr Pascoe was out walking his dog not far away from the scene in the early part of the afternoon.’
‘We’re not getting anywhere, are we?’ Mo sighed.
‘Shall we have our supper?’ asked Fran.
At that moment the telephone rang.
‘I bet that’s Tom with a new clue,’ Mo said.
‘Much more likely to be my mother checking up on me, or just wanting to spread the usual gloom and despondency.’ Fran picked up the telephone. ‘Hello, hello? Oh, yes – hello Tom.’
Fran turned her back to avoid Mo’s triumphant, ‘Told you so.’
‘No, no. It’s not a bad time. It’s only Mo. We were trying to go through all our so-called evidence and getting absolutely nowhere with it. Mo has just predicted that you are calling with a fresh clue.’
‘My compliments to Mo,’ Tom said. ‘She’s almost right.’
‘What do you mean – “almost”?’
‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘this isn’t so much a clue as another unexplained oddity which might turn out to be a clue, if we can work out what it means.’
‘That sounds rather complicated.’
‘Well, it is a bit complicated.’ Tom took a breath. ‘You know that Nottingham has two major football teams, Nottingham Forest and Notts County. One plays at the City Ground and the other at Meadow Lane, and like most cities where there are two clubs they play home and away games alternate weeks, so that when Forest are at home County are away and vice versa.’
‘Yes, I suppose I knew that already.’
‘Now if you remember, the first time we called at Dr Owen’s house, the maid told us he had gone to Nottingham to watch Forest play.’
‘Yes,’ Fran agreed. ‘I particularly remember her saying that because whenever anyone mentions Nottingham Forest, it always makes me think of Robin Hood.’
‘Nottingham Forest were not playing at home last Saturday.’
‘Oh.’ Fran hesitated a moment, then said, ‘I suppose the maid got confused about which match he was going to. He must have gone to watch Notts County, instead.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Tom said. ‘Doctor Owen said the result was a draw – and as it happens, both Forest and County drew on Saturday. County drew three-each with Stoke, and Forest managed a one-all draw at Tottenham. Our maids use the old newspapers for laying the fires, but luckily they still had the Sunday sports pages, so I was able to check. The thing is that Doctor Owen was definitely talking about Nottingham Forest. He said something like “If we’re not careful, we will be relegated”. It’s the way people talk about the team they support.’
‘Perhaps he watches whichever team is playing at home?’ suggested Fran.
‘I doubt it very much. In the big cities, most people support either one team or the other, United or City, Rangers or Celtic, Villa or Blues. I think Doctor Owen told his sister and the servants that he was going to a football match in Nottingham that afternoon when in fact he was going elsewhere. Do you remember the way he appeared to relax when I said I wasn’t much of a football man and hadn’t seen the results? It meant he could bluff us, by saying he’d been to a match, and we would be none the wiser.’
‘But it turns out that you are a bit of a football man after all.’
Tom laughed. ‘Not really. Ever since the football pools took off, my bookkeeper, Miss Finnemore, has been in charge of organizing the office pools syndicate, and I gather from her that the syndicate has had a small win. Nothing that is going to lead to mass retirement of our staff, or anything like that, but amid all this talk of away wins and score draws and so forth, I suddenly remembered reading about how Nottingham Forest had been thrashed at home on the twenty-eighth of September, and it occurred to me that it was rather unlikely they would be playing at home again the very next week. So when I got home this evening, I got the newspapers out of the kindling box and checked.’
‘But if he wasn’t at the match, where was he? And why is he lying?’
‘Jolly good questions. I only wish I knew.’
By now, Mo was all but bouncing up and down on the sofa with impatience. ‘Come on, Fran,’ she stage whispered. ‘What is Tom saying? Do share.’
‘Hold on a sec, Tom. Mo wants to know what’s going on.’ Fran moved the receiver away from her face and said, ‘It’s about a football match.’
‘Oh.’ Mo was disappointed. ‘What on earth is there to say about a football match?’