Fran was glad of her taxi ride back from the station, for it was dark and cold by the time she got off the train. Mrs Snegglington was gratifyingly pleased to see her – though this may have been something to do with her empty dishes on the kitchen floor – and it didn’t take long to have the fire (expertly laid by Ada earlier in the day) blazing brightly in the sitting room. After she had fed the cat and made a pot of tea for herself, Fran switched on the wireless in order to dispel the lonely quiet. It had drifted off the station, as usual, and she spent some time fiddling with the knob which tuned it before the wireless finally stopped hissing at her and produced something intelligible.
‘A new recording from across the Atlantic,’ the announcer was saying. Everything new and exciting seemed to be coming from America these days, Fran thought. There had been a huge amount of fuss last year when Ulverston had seen the arrival of the first talking picture. She had not gone to see it herself, preferring the theatre to the flickers, but Ada had been full of it, and some of the men at the tennis club who liked to be thought of as in the swim of things had taken to saying ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet!’, which Fran herself found rather vulgar, as no gentleman of her acquaintance had ever used the expression ‘ain’t’.
I’m getting out of date, she thought. Sitting here on the sidelines and most distinctly not in the swim of things. As if to mock her, the new recording turned out to be ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ Fran said crossly, as she marched across to the wireless and switched it off in disgust.
At some point soon, she would have to tell her mother that she had decided to divorce Michael. She would also have to explain how things stood to Tom and the prospect of that seemed almost as bad. She had already written to Michael, telling him that she wished to discuss something important with him, using carefully neutral language so that the letter could not be open to any dangerous interpretation in the event that it ever came into the hands of the wretched King’s Proctor. Michael had written back agreeing to meet her at the Grand Hotel in Grange-over-Sands for a conversation over a drink on Monday evening. In many ways it would have been easier to have him come to see her at Bee Hive Cottage, rather than going to the bother of getting the bus into Grange, but she did not want Michael in her home, wiping his feet on her mat, leaving his imprint on her sofa cushions, drinking out of her teacups, when she had just managed to successfully eliminate him from her personal life.
She picked up her library book, but it was no use. By the time she had read the conversation between Dr Aziz and Mr Mahmoud Ali on page eleven three times over without it sinking in, she knew that she needed something other than A Passage to India in which to immerse herself.
It would be awfully nice to telephone Tom … But that would have been extremely selfish after he had spent the whole afternoon with her while poor old Veronica nursed her cold at home. And anyway, she was going to have to get used to not talking with Tom all the time, besides which, she didn’t really have anything to talk with him about. That was it – she would go through all her notes on the case. Not because it would give her a good reason to telephone Tom, but because time was running out for Mr Ripley, whose case had been listed for hearing at the next assizes. Although his daughter had rejected their efforts to help, Fran still felt as if they were bound by their promise to do so – and maybe, just maybe, Mr Ripley was innocent. After all, he could not possibly have hit Mr Hargreaves over the head a fortnight ago.
More than an hour later, when Fran rose to make herself a fresh pot of tea, she knew that her instinct had been right. The deaths in Durley Dean had retained her attention in a way that E.M. Forster had not.
There was no doubt, she thought, that Dr Owen’s behaviour in pretending he had been at a football match was most peculiar. Was it connected to an attack on Mr Hargreaves? When one stopped to think about it, there would really have been no need to invent such an elaborate excuse. In order to have attacked Mr Hargreaves, the doctor could have merely concocted a story about a nearby house call – he didn’t have to account for an entire afternoon. Then again, perhaps there genuinely had been some misunderstanding about which fixture he had attended. The simplest way to try and find out would be to call Dr Owen and ask him directly about it. Why not? Asking the question could not push them any further into the dark than they were already.
As she asked the exchange for Dr Owen’s number, it did occur to her that the last time she had attempted to flush out information from a killer she had ended up imperilling her own life, but she reassured herself that Durley Dean was many miles away, and Dr Owen probably didn’t even know where she lived.
It was the doctor himself who answered the telephone. When he discovered the identity of his caller, he made no attempt to conceal his surprise. ‘Mrs Black, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again. Are you back in the neighbourhood? Not having any problems which require my professional services, I hope?’
‘No, thank you, I’m perfectly well. I’m calling from home, actually. There’s a little point that’s rather puzzling me and I was wondering whether you could clear it up.’
‘Well naturally, I will assist you if I can.’
‘When you were kind enough to see Mr Dod and myself a couple of weeks ago, you told us that you had been to see Nottingham Forest play, but we realized afterwards that Nottingham Forest had not been playing at home that afternoon.’ Fran paused, letting the unenunciated question hang in the air.
There was a pause, then Dr Owen said, ‘I am just going to transfer you to the extension in my consulting room. Stay on the line, if you please.’
There was a click as if the line had gone dead and then silence until, just as Fran was wondering if they might have been cut off, another click preceded Dr Owen’s return. ‘Now look here, Mrs Black,’ he began, and she noticed that the usual charm was wearing rather thin. ‘You are quite correct in your deduction that I was not at a football match that afternoon. I have no idea why my whereabouts should be of any interest whatsoever to you and your friend, Mr Dod, but I would much prefer it if you would say nothing about this to my sister.’
‘Of course,’ Fran said. ‘I don’t see that there is any need at all for us to mention it to your sister, or indeed to anyone else.’
‘Thank you.’ The doctor sounded curt, rather than grateful.
‘I wonder, though, if you were not at the football match, would you mind telling me where you did spend the afternoon?’
‘Yes, I would. Frankly, I do not see what business it is of yours where I was.’
‘No, of course not. It was just that … Well, when we were making enquiries, anything which seemed a bit out of place …’
‘I understood that you were no longer making enquiries,’ the doctor said crisply. ‘Miss Ripley informed me that your commission on her behalf was at an end.’
‘Yes. You see, I was just tidying up loose ends … for my own satisfaction, really.’
‘I am not a loose end, Mrs Black. Good evening.’
‘Good evening, Doctor Owen, and thank you very much for your time.’
After she had replaced the telephone receiver (she did love the sleek elegance of her modern handset, rather than the stumpy old candlestick model that so many people still had), Fran decided to check that all her doors were locked. It was silly to imagine that Dr Owen would realize he was suspected and come hotfooting across the country in the hope of silencing her, but once bitten twice shy.
She considered ringing Tom to tell him about the conversation, but then again it did not really amount to anything, being no more than confirmation of what they knew already.