‘Hello? Is that Tom? Mrs Dod? Oh, I see, well, I’m so sorry to trouble you at such a late hour, but I wonder if I might speak with Tom … Yes, that’s right. It’s Frances Black here.’
At that moment it no longer seemed to matter what the woman with the pleasant voice at the other end of the telephone line might think about a female friend of her husband telephoning so late. Fran was far too excited and full of news to consider the risk that Veronica Dod might be the sort of spiteful woman who would tip off the King’s Proctor to the effect that would-be divorcee Mrs Frances Black was having frequent telephone conversations with a man friend.
She waited for a moment or two while Veronica fetched her husband. She could hear very faint music in the background – presumably a wireless or a gramophone record – and then Tom’s voice came on the line.
‘Hello? Fran? Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, it’s me. Sorry to ring so late, but I think we may have solved the case.’
‘We?’
‘Mo and I. We’ve been through the evidence and tied up one or two loose ends, and we’re pretty convinced we’ve got the solution.’
‘Well, come on then, don’t keep a fellow in suspense.’
‘It’s Dulcie Smith,’ Fran said. ‘Aunt Hetty’s instincts were right all along.’
‘But I thought we agreed that Mrs Smith didn’t have access to Mrs Ripley, which ruled her out completely?’
‘She didn’t need to have direct access to Mrs Ripley. She only needed access to the medicine. Don’t you remember how she told us that she occasionally helped with dispensing when her brother was busy? When Doctor Owen initially visited Mrs Ripley, he only prescribed enough medicine for twelve doses, so on his third visit, knowing that Mrs Ripley would run out after her breakfast dose the next day, he must have asked his sister to make up a bottle of rhubarb and whatever it was and drop it in. He did mention that he had prescribed a second dose, but he didn’t think to mention that his sister had been the one who made it up and dropped it in, because that was a fairly routine occurrence whenever he had a lot of work on.’
‘And no one in the Ripley household remembered that Mrs Smith had called,’ Tom said.
‘Actually,’ Fran said, ‘someone did. We just didn’t ask the right person. I telephoned them tonight and spoke to Mademoiselle Bertillon. I explained our thinking and she went round to ask the one person who was at the house that day who we didn’t bother to interview.’
‘What? Who on earth …?’
‘Binks,’ Fran said triumphantly. ‘Binks was working out in the garden as usual when Mrs Smith arrived and he distinctly remembers her calling him across to the garden gate, handing the bottle to him, and asking him to take it into the house. He in turn handed it over to Martha at the kitchen door and Martha took it straight upstairs, where Mrs Ripley told her to put it into the cupboard where the medicines were always kept. In all the excitement that followed, Martha had completely forgotten the transaction – but even if she had remembered, she probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it.’
‘Crumbs!’ said Tom. ‘It feels as if it was done under our very noses without us noticing.’
‘When I explained the situation to Mademoiselle Bertillon, she put on her hat and coat and went straight round to Mr Binks’s cottage, and she was back to me within half an hour, confirming what Binks and Martha had said. Mademoiselle also volunteered the information that while she couldn’t remember when the first bottle of medicine ran out, she did remember that when she and Martha were clearing out the medicine cabinet, about a week after Mrs Ripley had died, she particularly noticed that the bottle of medicine prescribed by Doctor Owen was virtually full, because Martha commented on it and said rather sadly that the medicine had not done Mrs Ripley any good.’
‘This is absolutely amazing,’ Tom said. ‘And I suspect there is more to come.’
‘There is. It was mostly Mo who worked out the truth about the medicine,’ Fran said modestly. ‘But when we looked at some of the questions that had struck me during a previous review of the evidence, a few other things jumped out. Do you remember Miss Rose explaining how at the bank she used to phrase things so that she did not actually tell lies and yet managed to conceal the truth? Well, Mrs Smith does the same thing. Remember the eighth commandment? “Thou shalt not bear false witness”.’
‘There’s also a commandment “Thou shalt not kill”,’ Tom pointed out.
‘Mo and I reckon that Dulcie Smith is so dotty that she doesn’t realize that what she is doing is wrong. At some stage she became so brainwashed about what she perceives as Reverend Pinder’s mission that she imagines she is furthering God’s work by smiting the people who are standing against the vicar. Remember the way she claimed that Mr Vardy and Miss Tilling had not died by accident, but by the Lord’s hand? And also that she was always out doing the Lord’s work?’
‘I do,’ Tom admitted. ‘But there’s still a lot here that doesn’t fit.’
‘Bear with me. The first death was Mr Vardy. Mrs Smith sat in her drawing room and described his death to us just as if she had been a witness to it. “He walked too close to the edge of the pond, slipped in the mud and fell in.” I’m pretty sure those were her exact words.’
‘Well, anyone might have surmised as much.’ Tom’s tone was doubtful.
‘But when you are surmising, you say things like “I suppose” or “I expect”. Mrs Smith spoke as if she knew. She said that his heavy coat and working boots hampered him from getting out of the water. How did Mrs Smith know he was still wearing his working boots?’
‘Perhaps her brother mentioned it to her, after he’d been called in to look at the body.’
‘Unless you were standing in the lane, you couldn’t hear him shout. That’s what Mrs Smith said, but how did she know he shouted out if no one could hear him unless they were standing in the lane? As she herself pointed out, no one heard anything at the Bird in Hand beerhouse.’
‘I see what you’re getting at, but how on earth can you prove that Mrs Smith was standing in the lane? In fact, why on earth would she be standing in the lane?’
‘Mademoiselle Bertillon isn’t the only person I’ve spoken with this evening. You remember the Brayshaws mentioned that their old vicar came back to take Mr Vardy’s funeral service? Well, at one point I commented that Mr Vardy must have really loathed Reverend Pinder if he arranged for another clergyman to take his funeral service, but Mo laughed and pointed out that most people don’t get to organize their own funeral and, anyway, although Mr Vardy had been cross about a lot of the things Reverend Pinder was doing, he’d still been taking communion from him – which set me wondering why his funeral service was taken by someone else. I couldn’t ring Reverend Pinder himself, because there is no telephone at the vicarage, but I rang your Aunt Hetty instead and luckily she knew the answer.’
‘Which is?’
‘Reverend Pinder was on his annual holiday when Mr Vardy was buried, so naturally it was necessary to call in someone else.’
‘And Mr Vardy would have been buried within a few days of his death …’ Tom prompted.
‘Precisely. Reverend Pinder was away from the parish for Mr Vardy’s funeral and when he died. It’s our own fault again, I’m afraid, for not asking the right questions. If we’d asked the vicar what he remembered about Mr Vardy’s death, he would have told us that he wasn’t around when it happened. But instead, we asked him whether he agreed with Dulcie Smith that the deaths were all part of a pattern.’
‘So what about Saul, the dog?’
‘According to Aunt Hetty, whenever Reverend Pinder goes away, his dog is looked after by Mrs Smith.’
‘Crumbs,’ Tom said.
‘Mo and I think that what happened, broadly speaking, is that Mrs Smith was looking after the dog and took it for its last walk of the day, along the lane where the beerhouse is. Mr Vardy happened to leave the Bird in Hand beerhouse just as she was passing, and of course he recognized the dog and said hello to it. Mrs Smith probably continued a few yards further up the lane and then turned back for home – by which time Mr Vardy would have been walking, perhaps a little bit unsteadily, a few yards ahead of her. He would have turned off into the field, climbed over the same stile that we did, and walked towards the pond. Perhaps Mrs Smith paused to watch him crossing the field, or maybe the dog stopped to sniff something in the hedge, or perhaps Mr Vardy fell in at just the moment she was passing the stile, and his shouts and splashing alerted her that something was happening. But anyway, one way or another Mrs Smith became aware of the accident from the lane.
‘Remember that she was full of condemnation for this man. He had been drinking and he’d stood up against the vicar, and been generally behaving badly so far as she was concerned. So instead of doing anything to fetch help, she stood and watched him drown, believing that it was no accident and that God wanted him to die.’
‘That’s a rather chilling picture you paint,’ Tom said. ‘But having seen and heard Mrs Smith, I have to admit that I can see it happening just as you say.’
‘We think that while she wouldn’t have wanted to broadcast to the world that she had stood by and watched Mr Vardy drown when she might easily have tried to get help, at the same time she regarded it as the Lord’s work. She may even have believed that being in the right place to witness Mr Vardy’s death was some sort of sign.’
‘A sign that this was the kind of thing which ought to be happening to anyone who stood in the vicar’s way,’ Tom said.
‘Exactly. Then there’s Miss Tilling. In a way, we managed to ask the wrong question about her too.’
‘Go on,’ said Tom.
‘As I said before, Mrs Smith tends to answer questions truthfully, so when we asked her whether she had seen anyone going in to Miss Tilling’s house, she told us she hadn’t. However, if we’d asked her whether she saw anyone coming out of the house that afternoon, she might have had much more of a struggle with her conscience.’
‘Spit it out,’ Tom said. ‘I’m afraid you’re far too clever for me this evening.’
‘From where she was sitting, nosing out of the window as usual, Dulcie Smith would have seen first Clara, the cook, going out of the gate on her half-day, and then a little bit later she would have seen Alice, the maid, going off with a parcel under her arm. At that point she would have known that Miss Tilling was alone in the house, which offered a small interval for some mischief.
‘We know that Miss Tilling would have let Mrs Smith in, and we can surmise that Mrs Smith would have been a prime candidate to take an interest in Miss Tilling’s father’s religious library. As they started going back downstairs, she could easily have used the figure from the shelf as a cosh, then sent the rest of the china raining down on top of poor Miss Tilling as she lay at the bottom of the stairs. After that, all she had to do was let herself out of the front door and pop back across the road.’
‘And when the police asked a question implying that she had spent the entire afternoon goosegogging out of the window, she told them that, on the contrary, she had been out doing the Lord’s work when Miss Tilling died,’ Tom finished for her. ‘Which seen through her lunatic’s blinkers was no more than the truth. You have the method for Mrs Ripley’s murder sorted out – and as for the attack on Mr Hargreaves, she must have sneaked through his cottage and out into his garden on her way either to or from handing out hymn books at the wedding. The question is, how do we prove all this?’
‘Mo and I have a theory about that, too,’ Fran said.