I spoke to the remaining staff in the kitchen before leaving Glen Road. They were drinking their tea from mugs, which kept it hotter than the conservatory china. I tried with great gulps to burn out my whisky thirst. I quickly established that the two women’s full names were Anita O’Sullivan and Ada Hubbard. The latter had been widowed early in life and had worked for the Watts for more than thirty years.
She corresponded very much to the image I’d formed of the fond, irascible family cook on the verge of pensionability. A pair of bifocals in heavy black frames sat before her bulging brown eyes. She was fleshy without being flabby, and of the hairs that escaped her cap, the grey outnumbered the brown by not less than four to one. The smell of baking pastry was in the air, and steam was rising from a soup pot on the range. I imagined that dinner guests, while they would not be begging for her recipes, would go home neither hungry nor discontented.
“I can see you’re in the middle of preparing dinner,” I said. “I won’t keep you long.”
“I don’t know who’ll have any stomach for it tonight. I’ve no appetite myself.” So saying, Mrs. Hubbard took a comprehensive bite out of a piece of jam-covered bread.
“Why did they shoot him, sir?” asked Nita, pushing her tea aside. “No one could have wanted him dead. It’s so awful when the best people are shot, the very best. I thought that ended with the war.”
“I say it was a mistake,” put in Mrs. Hubbard. “As you say, there’s not a person on this earth that could have wanted to harm that sweet man. One gangster probably meant to kill another gangster. People make mistakes all the time, misplace things. Well, if you misplace a bullet, somebody dies. I say get rid of the guns—or at least put them out of reach of the crooks.”
“Do you think it was a mistake, sir?” Nita persisted.
I resisted the urge to tell her that shooting someone usually is.
“You’ll have heard,” I said, “that there’s a problem with the car. If it was tampered with, it’s hard to see how the shooting can have been an accident or a case of mistaken identity.”
“Cars have breakdowns,” Mrs. Hubbard countered testily.
“I see what he means, though. Curtis kept the car in tip-top shape.”
“I know you won’t hear a word against Curtis, Nita dear. All I’m saying is: accidents do happen.”
“Nita,” I said, “are you and Curtis courting?”
Nita shook her head, but a blush covered her face from her pointed chin to the fringe of her bob. Even her freckles turned red.
“ ’Course she is,” said Mrs. Hubbard, conveying the last bread crumbs from plate to mouth with moistened finger tips. “A most scandalous case of flirting on the job.”
“Are you planning to get married?”
“We wanted to, sir, but . . .”
“I presume the obstacle was lack of money,” I said.
“No, not that,” Nita replied. “It’s my parents. They don’t know Curtis like I do, and I can’t think of marrying without their blessing. Mr. Watt—Mr. Digby Watt—was going to speak to them and make it all right, but now . . . Oh, sir, I am sorry for him and for his family, truly, but his dying has just wrecked my chance for happiness utterly.”
The tears came faster than she could wipe them, so she did the only thing she could and ran from the room.
“She didn’t want to tell you, sir, but the real trouble with her parents is that Curtis has been in the Penitentiary. Not—I want you to know—for anything that could make any sensible person lose any sleep or not want to give him a chance, but—”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Hubbard. Was it the Penitentiary Curtis was in or the Carleton County Jail in Ottawa?”
“Oh, aren’t they the same? It was just for three months, in any case.”
“That won’t have been the Pen. It’s down in Kingston, and they don’t take a man in there for less than two years.”
“No, bless you, nothing like that! I’m sure Nita’s mother and father would have listened to Mr. Digby, a man of such upright character, but it’ll be hard to find anyone to fill his shoes there any more than in his business world.”
“Did Curtis know that Digby Watt was going to speak to Nita’s parents on his behalf?”
“I suppose so, but I can’t say I ever heard them talk about it. Curtis isn’t much of a talker in any case.”
“He’s certainly wasted no time in gaining the family’s trust,” I observed. “Morris Watt speaks highly of him.”
“That’s always been the family way with staff, unless they find reason not to trust.”
“And have they ever found reason?”
The cook thoughtfully pushed her bifocals up the bridge of her broad nose.
“Not that I can recall,” she said at last.
“Mrs. Hubbard, what became of Curtis’s predecessor?” I licked my chops at the prospect of a vengeful ex-employee. “Did he fail to give satisfaction?”
“Lordy, no. Webster was looking for a business opportunity, and Mr. Watt gave him one of the Atkinson stores to manage.”
“Atkinson?” I hadn’t heard that name before. “Could it have been Atkins hardware?”
“That’s what I said. You’ve never seen a happier man.”
The former chauffeur’s full name and forwarding address went into my notebook, though I had to admit he didn’t sound like a wellspring of bile and rage.
I didn’t think there was more work for me here at present, and I still had Olive Teddington to see, but before rising from the kitchen table I trotted out my last stock question.
“You mentioned guns, Mrs. Hubbard. Are there any firearms at all here on the premises?”
“Luckily, none that I know of.” She got up to put away the tea things. “None but the rifle from the cottage.”
That’s what I heard, but I thought I must have forgotten to clean my ears.
“From the cottage on Lake Simcoe? It’s here in the city?”
“Oh, yes. Last Thanksgiving when we were closing up, I just wasn’t easy in my mind about leaving it there all winter. You know how it is. Every winter one or two cottages get broken into. I hated to have anything to do with it, but I just thought I’ll take it to the city for the winter and take it back in the spring. That way it won’t fall into the wrong hands. It’s the same shape as the vacuum cleaner, I thought, so I’ll just pack them together.”
“Did you tell anyone you were doing this?”
“I don’t remember. Yes, I do: I told Miss Edith.”
“And where in the house is the gun stored?”
“Why, I just locked it in the silver closet with the best plate and all the inscribed hardware they presented to Mr. Digby in recognition of his public service. You know, all the hardware he thanked them for but didn’t want to have to look at. That’s the place.”
“Could you show me please, Mrs. Hubbard?”
“Why would you want me to show it to you? That gun had nothing to do with his getting shot.”
“Nonetheless.”
“You policemen do have peculiar ideas. I’d have to get my keys first.”
“Who besides yourself has a key to that closet?”
“No one. Mr. Digby said he had enough other keys to cart around, so I kept them both. Where are they now? Yes, in my room.”
I was as interested to see how the keys were stored as how the gun itself was, so I accompanied the cook to the second floor. Access was by a back staircase, but Mrs. Hubbard’s quarters were on the same corridor as the principal bedrooms of the house. She did not keep her own door locked, and I could see that it would be easy for anyone to enter her room without her knowledge while she was in the kitchen. Mrs. Hubbard led me through a snug sitting room into a compact bedroom, also unlocked. Beside the large bed in the corner stood a bedside table of green painted wood. She opened the drawer in this table and took from it a ring of half a dozen keys of various sizes. Picking one of the smaller ones to hold the collection by, she led the way back down to the kitchen and from there to the basement. To this level also, I noticed, there were both a back and a front staircase. Beyond the foot of the latter, the cook turned into a storage room of many cupboards, none of which had built-in locks and only one of which was secured by a padlock. This she opened. She proceeded to remove velvet bags whose contents could be surmised by shape to be the inscribed teapots and salvers she had alluded to. I could imagine: To Acknowledge Digby Watt’s Service to the Empire in the Great War, In Grateful Recognition of Digby Watt’s Tireless Work on Behalf of the Hospital for Sick Children, To a True Friend of the Rotarians . . . the Y.M.C.A . . . the W.C.T.U . . . the I.O.D.E. Et cetera. And behind this useless hardware . . .
“It’s gone!” Mrs. Hubbard exclaimed.
“You’re sure?”
I helped her make quite sure the rifle was nowhere in that cupboard. When my matches ran out, she fetched a flashlight to supplement the dim bulb hanging from the storeroom ceiling. We checked some other cupboards as well, but the cook was adamant that she would not have stored the gun anywhere without a lock.
“Mrs. Hubbard,” I said at last, “let’s go find Miss Watt.”
“All those stairs,” Mrs. Hubbard grumbled. “Still, you can’t argue with the police. I’ll send her down to you, shall I?”
“No, I’ll keep you company.” I didn’t want there to be any possibility of the inspector’s saying Edith and her cook had worked out a story between them.
In the event, we didn’t have to return to the second storey. A murmur of voices led us to a ground-floor study. There, on the ingle-bench, Miss Watt sat with her arm around Nita O’Sullivan’s drooping shoulders. Edith glared at me as I entered. If it had been the housemaid I had had to lay siege to at that moment, I thought, there’d have been blood on the Axminster carpets.
“Excuse me, Miss Watt. Does your family own a rifle?”
“Yes. It’s at the cottage at Roches Point. In the cupboard of my father’s bedroom.”
“It wasn’t brought to the city last fall?”
“No, we never bring it to the city.”
“Now, Miss Edith!” Mrs. Hubbard was huffing from her recent stair climbing and possibly from indignation. “I told you I was bringing that gun down here and was going to lock it in the silver cupboard. On account of the break-ins. Don’t you remember?”
“Certainly I remember your saying that, but I asked you not to. I had discussed the subject with my father, and we had agreed we didn’t want firearms about in the city, even under lock and key.”
“I don’t care to be doubted,” Mrs. Hubbard retorted.
“No one doubts your good intentions, dear Mrs. Hubbard.” Edith’s voice softened, and she rose to look her old cook in the eye. “All I can say is that if you did bring the thing down, I knew nothing about it. I thought the matter was settled.”
“Would Mr. or Mrs. Morris Watt be able to clear this up?” I asked.
Edith shook her head.
“They left on the Sunday before we packed up.”
“What about you, Nita?”
“I wasn’t there at all, sir.”
“Nita had last Thanksgiving off to spend with her own family,” Edith added.
The housemaid had been showing signs of recovery, but mention of her family started her juices flowing again.
“This is a hard day for all of us,” said Mrs. Hubbard, hastening to drown out Nita’s sniffles, “but I tell you again, missy, I don’t very much like being contradicted to my face.”
“Put it down to my bad memory then,” Edith tactfully suggested. “As you say, we’re none of us ourselves. Is that pastry I smell burning?”
“My pies!” Turning her bifocals reprovingly on me, the cook hastened off.
“I’m still not sure what this is about, Mr. Shenstone,” Edith said. “I presume you’ve been looking for the gun in the silver cupboard and not finding it.”
“It seems to me, Miss Watt, you’ve a very good idea what this is about.”
“In that case, the quickest way to set your mind at ease is for someone to go to Roches Point and see if the gun is there.”
Going or even phoning out of town meant expenses. The inspector would grumble. There had to be a simpler way to disqualify the Remington as the murder weapon. The position of Digby Watt’s body suggested he had been facing his office building when he fell; if so, he had been shot at short range. A rifle was the wrong tool for the job, as well as being hard to conceal on city streets.
“This gun,” I asked, “what size bullets does it fire? Your brother said you might know.”
“Point three-five,” Edith replied without hesitation.
I kicked myself all the way out to the motorcycle for not having asked sooner.