By the simple reason of being murdered on Christmas Eve, Mrs Muriel Endicott managed to cause all concerned as much trouble in death as she had in life.
It appeared very shocking at first, indeed scarcely possible, that such a terrible thing as murder could actually have happened in a quiet, rather dull little village like Kirby Purefoy—and on Christmas Eve, too—but the victim being Mrs Endicott went a long way towards removing incredulity. A plastic bag pulled over her head removed any further doubt.
Her body was found at half past ten in the evening, and the police doctor, whose duty required him only to certify the fact of death, did so as expeditiously as possible. Anxious not to spoil his Christmas, he then hurried on to the carol service in the village, which was followed by midnight mass. He did, however, out of the goodness of his heart, pray for Mrs Endicott’s soul, an act of Christian charity which would one day earn him rewards in Heaven. He was probably the only one in the village to do so.
The pathologist, meanwhile, had also arrived at the scene of the crime, having reluctantly left his Christmas Eve party to answer the summons to examine the body. Declaring that in his opinion Mrs Endicott had been dead for about six hours and that she’d suffered a wound to the back of her head before being suffocated by the plastic bag, he pontificated further without adding anything to the already known sum of knowledge about the cause of death, and refused to do the post-mortem until the day after Boxing Day: his wife, he rightly concluded, would not care to have her slice of turkey, carved by him, after he had so recently carved up Mrs Endicott.
The thought of slicing up a turkey also caused a delicate shudder to run down the spine of Mrs Endicott’s only son, Hugo, a plump, petulant and slightly balding person who dealt in antiques, but the shudder came only from the notion of such hackneyed Christmas fare. He had a friend staying with him, and had arranged a civilized Christmas dîner á deux in his luxury flat, with a brace of pheasant, a bottle of Margaux, and some fine ripe Stilton to follow. Since he’d already had his Christmas Eve interrupted by the arrival of the police, and by having had to identify the body, he saw no reason to postpone any further arrangements. His mother was, after all, in no position to object, and wouldn’t have been eating with him, anyway. Hugo had not been fond of his mother, nor she of him.
She’d been about to enter her own front door when she’d been attacked. A window at the back had been forced open, and it was thought she had surprised a burglar, causing him to panic. The door was unlocked and the key still clutched in her hand. Her Christmas dinner—a small chicken and a pre-packed individual pudding—plus a few other groceries, were scattered over the path, and the Sainsbury’s plastic bag which had contained them was drawn tight over her head.
She was found by two venturesome young carol-singers, who’d been dared by the rest of the group to go and sing at old Ma Endicott’s cottage. They’d have been better off not bothering, Hugo considered. They must have known there’d be no invitation inside to partake of mince pies, and that they’d be lucky if they came away with a five pence piece, let alone without having the door slammed in their faces.
The cottage was near the centre of the village, with only a narrow strip of garden and a picket fence at the front to separate it from the road, a space no more than three or four feet wide, which Mrs Endicott had kept filled with old pots that spilled over with cottage garden flowers in the summer, and ivies, ornamental cabbages and universal pansies in the winter. It was of Elizabethan vintage, low and white, with an old pantiled roof and windows with tiny, square panes. Roses and clematis bloomed around the door. It was much admired by the visitors who came to buy the plants she propagated and sold in the large garden at the back, having undercut the family-owned nursery garden on the main road by twenty per cent. The back garden had been small, too, when she and Hugo had first come to the cottage, but Mrs Endicott was always prudent, and in order to extend her acreage, she’d purchased the field behind from the farmer who owned it, getting it at a bargain price because he was going through a bad patch at the time.
When she discovered the interest paid to the cottage by her customers was nearly as great as that in buying plants, Mrs Endicott had begun to serve English Cream Teas at small tables set on the flagstones at the back of the house if the weather was clement, indoors, if not. Miss Pilgrim, who ran the Tudor Café, hadn’t been pleased about this, but it proved to be a more lucrative and dependable source of income than that gained from selling plants, which tended to be unreliable in regard to damping off, greenfly and all manner of other annoying plant ailments. It led on to her offering bed and breakfast accommodation, which was very popular with visitors who preferred home comforts to the damp beds and leathery bacon and eggs which the Dusty Miller offered.
And after all, who could resist the appeal of staying in a house where Anne Hathaway had once slept?
Mrs Endicott had, shortly after acquiring it, renamed her cottage. Instead of being No. 5, Church Road, it was now Hathaways. Gullible visitors were intrigued by this, those who believed what they wanted to believe, and who were delighted to learn that Anne Hathaway had indeed briefly stayed there, before her marriage to William Shakespeare.
‘Why do you tell such lies? There’s no evidence she ever came near the place!’ Hugo demanded pettishly of his mother.
‘She might have. It’s only a bus ride from Stratford-upon-Avon.’
‘They didn’t have buses in the sixteenth century, for God’s sake!’
‘They had good strong legs. Twelve miles there and twelve back, they thought nothing of it. And there were Hathaways in the next village at one time—that’s a provable fact. They may have been related. Besides, there’s the letter, isn’t there?’
Oh yes, Hugo was forced to agree, there was the letter. But, not wanting to pursue this subject, he added, ‘You’ll be telling them next that the four-poster in the back bedroom is Shakespeare’s second-best bed!’
‘Now there’s an idea—why didn’t I think of that?’ Mrs Endicott looked thoughtful. ‘He did will that to his wife, didn’t he?’
‘Leave me out of it this time,’ Hugo warned. ‘That letter’s bad enough. It’ll get you into trouble one day.’
‘Oh, rubbish! I’ve never actually claimed it was genuine. People put their own interpretations on it. Now, about that bed . . . ’
But, meeting his scowl, she understood what he meant, and gave in. They had been blackmailing each other in this sort of way for years. It was how he’d got his antique shop started.
His mother was, if not exactly rich, worth a bob or two by now. She’d always had an eye to the main chance, which was why she’d married his father. Unfortunately, Basil Endicott, a minor civil servant of some promise, had disappointed her by inconsiderately dying before his promise could be fulfilled. And even more inconsiderately, by not leaving any money, so that the building society very soon foreclosed on the mortgage of their house.
In order to provide a home for herself and fifteen-year-old Hugo, she had been forced to take a position as housekeeper to a Mrs Neasden, the bedridden old woman who lived in what was to become Hathaways, with her sour-faced, resentful daughter, Vera. A necessity which had, in the end, proved to be a blessing in disguise. The old lady had taken a fancy to Muriel Endicott, who knew which side her bread was buttered and acted accordingly. Unlike Vera Neasden, she let it be seen that she didn’t mind how menial or distasteful were the tasks she had to perform. When Vera took the huff about the favouritism her mother showed the newcomer, and to having a clumsy, disagreeable adolescent about the place, she upped and left, and old Mrs Neasden quickly came to see that her housekeeper would be a more worthy beneficiary under her will. She died soon after altering it, leaving Mrs Endicott everything she possessed. It wasn’t a fortune, just the cottage, and a small sum of money, but it had marked the start of Mrs Endicott’s upward mobility.
It was almost immediately afterwards that she’d seen the possibilities of the Hathaway letter.
Her only regret about her bed and breakfast trade was that she could offer but one set of accommodation at a time, even though the cottage, like the garden, had been extended. Originally three small labourers’ cottages, over the years a wall or two had been knocked down here and there, a staircase removed, fireplaces opened up, doors stripped of their 1950s hardboard flushing and a damp course installed, so that now it was charmingly unexpected: low-ceilinged and dark-beamed, with cosy alcoves and floors at different levels to trip the unwary.
The ‘letter’ was a scrap of tattered paper which had appeared during the demolition of a wall, behind which was a tiny room, formerly used as a cold store in the days before refrigerators and freezers. Opening up the room considerably enlarged the living-area, but the storeroom having originally been built out into the rising ground at the back of the cottages, it was cold and dank as the grave, and gave off a peculiar smell. Hugo and his mother stuck it out for a while, but the wall was eventually reinstated and the door bricked up.
The torn piece of paper was stained with mould and covered in crabbed, faded handwriting with long s’s, the lines sloping upwards across the page. The barely legible signature might, by an adroit exercise of the imagination, be construed as ‘Anne Hathaway’. How it had remained intact for four hundred years, considering the damp state of the room where it was found, was not a question visitors were encouraged to ask, but if they did, Mrs Endicott was ready to explain its state of preservation as being due to the draughts which whistled through the cavity wall and had presumably preserved it, like a mummy. It had been framed, and now hung in the place of honour over the fireplace of the room set aside for serving tea, scones and home-made jam at four round oak tables.
Despite other grave faults, the late Mrs Endicott had been a woman of taste. She had a flair for reproducing the right atmosphere without allowing it to become twee. A comfortable casualness and mixing of periods was apparent in the furnishings of the cottage, yet they blended happily together against cream plastered walls and vibrantly patterned old rugs spread over the polished, original stone floors, her collection of old English porcelain adding distinction to the décor.
The collection had begun modestly with a couple of slightly chipped Derby figures and a few Coalport plates, but had grown enormously over the years and was now worth a tidy sum. She had an eye for a genuine piece. It was about this that she and Hugo had quarrelled violently on the morning of her death.
Much of her prosperity, he’d have been the first to admit, was due to hard work and determination. She could turn her hand to anything, and frequently did. She wasn’t, however, at all fussy about how she achieved her success—and she was lucky. Only a few weeks ago, at a Sunday morning car-boot sale in the car park of the Dusty Miller, she’d picked up an old Chelsea figurine: the rumour soon spread that it was worth a sum that would have had Sotheby’s swooning—much to the chagrin of the Cartwright family, from whom she’d bought it for a few pounds. But they were an ignorant and feckless lot, one of their number always in trouble of one sort or another. They’d have sold off their grandmother if she hadn’t died the week before, leaving them with nothing but a load of old junk even they wouldn’t give houseroom to. They wouldn’t have recognized a Chelsea piece if it had jumped up and bitten them. Mrs Endicott got it for less than a song.
Hugo had no objection to that. It was fair game. But he considered such an extremely valuable piece of porcelain would be far better being offered for sale in his shop rather than kept on a shelf in the dark recesses of the cottage where it might, God forbid, get knocked off by that dozy Sharon Simmonds.
Young Sharon, the desperate end of Mrs Endicott’s long line of disgruntled cleaning women, was hovering in the kitchen, languidly polishing silver, when she overheard this. Bridling indignantly, she made it her business to overhear almost every word of the following heated exchange, and what she couldn’t manage to catch, she interpreted. Apart from anything else, Hugo had argued, his mother’s china collection was beginning to go over the top. How could one fully appreciate fine pieces among all this clutter?
‘Clutter?’ Mrs Endicott had repeated dangerously, and they had gone on from there. Hugo to remind his mother of what he knew of her past but unspecified activities, and she to remind him, in her turn, of things he would rather forget. It had ended with Mrs Endicott informing Hugo that she was going to make an appointment to see her solicitor after Christmas to change her will.
Well! thought Sharon, whose boyfriend was Kevin, the middle Cartwright boy. Her mind boggled at what Hugo said the Chelsea figurine would fetch.
* * *
Speculation was rife in the Dusty on Christmas morning when the news of Mrs Endicott’s untimely demise became public.
In charge of the investigation was a young woman detective inspector named Mary Treadwell, highly ambitious and unmarried, with no responsibilities other than presents to buy at Christmas. She had been going to spend Christmas Day with her family: her parents, two sisters and their husbands, plus five rumbustious children under five. She was quite willing to forgo these pleasures in the interests of her career.
Though it soon became aPparent to everyone in the village who she was, Mary preferred for the moment to retain her anonymity. Women drinking on their own were likely to be looked on with suspicion in the Dusty at any time, but especially on Christmas morning, when they should have been at home stuffing the turkey, peeling the sprouts, coping with overexcited children and putting the pudding on to steam. So she had with her a young police constable in plain clothes, a Scotsman who had volunteered for Christmas duty because his own celebrations were centred around New Year, rather than Christmas. An easy-going type who knew he’d only been roped in as cover, he was content to drink his pint and leave the detecting to her.
The season of peace and goodwill didn’t extend to being charitable about the late Mrs Endicott, Mary soon discovered, listening quietly in her corner. Though not overtly expressed, the general consensus of opinion appeared to be that she’d had it coming to her one way or another.
‘It’ll be that Hugo that has it coming to him now,’ remarked someone. All that lovely, lovely money,’ he mimicked, drooping a limp wrist.
Sniggers all round accompanied this jest. In the macho ambience of the Dusty, antique-dealers were apt to be thought quite likely to varnish their toenails.
‘What about Vera Neasden, then? She’ll be sick as a parrot to hear that. Wheresomever she may be.’
‘Serves her right. Should’ve been nicer to her old mum in the first place.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. The old ’un led her a right dance, I reckon.’
‘Two for a pair, then. Vera weren’t above proof. Funny old business, that, though, her going off so sudden after sticking it all them years.’
‘Who d’you think done in the old witch then?’ asked the landlord, and the ensuing conversation became very interesting to Mary Treadwell. By the time she left, she’d added further names to Hugo’s on the list of suspects: the Cartwrights, simmering under a sense of injustice about the figurine they thought Mrs Endicott had swindled out of them . . . the belligerent son of the outwitted nursery garden owners . . . Miss Pilgrim, who’d been forced to reduce the price of her afternoon teas, although her scones were much lighter than Mrs Endicott’s. Not to mention Trowbridge the farmer, who considered she’d pulled a fast one on him over the sale of the field and swore, moreover, that she’d thrown fresh yew clippings over the hedge and poisoned his cows. If the cows were daft enough not to know what they couldn’t eat, that was nothing to do with her, Mrs Endicott had retorted, but Trowbridge hadn’t forgiven her. And she hadn’t exactly been a favourite with the landlord of the Dusty, either, putting it about that his beds were damp.
Hugo met Mary Treadwell for the second time, this time at the cottage on Boxing Day, at her request. He didn’t care for women police, or women at all for that matter, and this one he sensed was sharp and intuitive. He repeated his previous statement to her: Sharon had exaggerated the extent of the quarrel he’d had with his mother, whom he certainly hadn’t seen again after that visit to her on Christmas Eve morning. Then, unable to stand it any longer, he made a beeline for the back recesses of the cottage and the shelf where the figurine had stood. He gave a yelp. He cried in anguish, ‘The Chelsea piece, it’s gone!’
‘What Chelsea is this?’ Mary asked. ‘Tell me about it.’
He launched into a precise and loving description. According to Hugo, it had been an exceedingly fine and rare composition, a pair of rustic figures on one simple base, a shepherd and shepherdess. Tears came into his eyes at the thought of it. Perfect in every respect, superb quality, of the much-desired Red Anchor period, with rich, bright colours that blended perfectly with the soft-paste glaze. Worth—oh, my God, Hugo couldn’t bear to think about it!
There were other things missing, too, he added, looking round, bits and bobs, a few small pieces of silver . . .
‘Is that so? Perhaps you’d give me a list,’ Mary said casually over her shoulder, as though the framed Hathaway letter which she was facing and reading was of more importance. She turned round, smiling slightly. ‘Where did you come across this?’
Hugo swung into the usual glib explanations, about finding the letter when they’d had the mistaken idea of taking down the wall, while she moved interestedly around the cottage interior, coming to a halt by the rebuilt wall, as the flow of words finally came to a stop.
‘Well, I daresay it’ll do for the tourists, but I don’t believe a word of it,’ she said cheerfully.
‘Oh,’ said Hugo.
‘You don’t really expect people to swallow that, do you?’ she asked, though plenty of people had. ‘Cavity walls, for one thing—in a house this age?’ she went on, laying her hand on the wall in question. ‘Hardly likely, I’d have thought. Nice piece of fakery, though, that letter. Your own work?’
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Hugo declaimed modestly, after a small silence. But he was beginning to sweat, even though the forgery was harmless, nothing actually illegal, as his mother had said often enough.
The policewoman had bright blue eyes which regarded him with interest. She removed her hand from the wall, rubbing it fastidiously. ‘Feels clammy. No wonder you bricked up the room behind again.’
Oh, God, this was it. Despite her apparent casualness he was suddenly, absolutely, convinced that she knew. Somehow, she’d sussed it out. The police never took anything on face value—she must have been listening to gossip in the village . . . His glance slid hopelessly away, and her eyes sharpened.
Hugo wasn’t a clever man. Astute, like his mother, when there was money to be made, but not very intelligent in the long term. But it was apparent, even to him, that retribution, the thing he’d dreaded for twenty-five years, was snapping at his heels. He should have told the truth in the first place, never mind his mother’s advice. Well, it was too late now for those sort of regrets, and his mind began to seek for other ways out.
Dimly, he reasoned that if the police knew he was being honest with them now over this, however belatedly, it would go better for him in the matter of his mother’s murder. Better to confess rather than let them find out.
Because they surely would find out. He knew with terrible certainty that this woman inspector had put two and two together, and that they would dig under the flags of the room behind the wall, and when they did, they’d find the bones of Vera Neasden.
He hadn’t meant to kill her. He’d been only fifteen. She’d been sniping at him and he’d pushed past her, a big clumsy youth who didn’t know his own strength. And she’d fallen and hit her head against the iron-bound corner of the oak chest . . . The words tumbled out as he explained, years of pent-up guilt fell away. ‘It was an accident,’ he said, ‘an accident.’
Mary Treadwell sat down abruptly on the nearest chair as he began, and thereafter listened in silence.
It had been his mother who’d said they must hide Vera in a cupboard at first, until they could think what to do with her, telling him that the police would never in a million years believe it had been an accident. Hugo would have done anything she said, he’d been so terrified. Then she’d come up with the idea of burying the body under the flagstones of the cold-store room, of pulling down the wall to give more credence to what they were doing if anyone should enquire, and at the same time gaining themselves a little more much-needed living-space. When the old lady asked what all the noise was, downstairs, his mother had replied, ‘Spring-cleaning. I’m afraid Vera wasn’t always as meticulous as she should have been.’
‘It would seem there were a lot of things Vera wasn’t. One of them was grateful,’ the old lady said sharply, fingering the note her daughter had left behind, the note which, at his mother’s command, Hugo had forged in Vera’s handwriting. He’d always had the knack of being able to copy anything, had carried on a brisk trade at school in forged sick notes, dodgy bus passes, pop concert tickets, anything, really. It was a facility that had come in very useful later, too, when he began to deal in antiques, in faking documents of provenance and the like. But his success in fooling old Mrs Neasden had unfortunately given his mother the idea for ‘finding’ the Hathaway letter.
He’d always known that little piece of unnecessary deception would land them in trouble one day.
Unfairly, his mother, the instigator of it all, was beyond punishment now. Despite the fact that it was she who’d forbidden him to go to the police when Vera died, had told him what to do and helped him to bury her. Despite the pillow she’d held over the face of Mrs Neasden as soon as was decently possible after she’d changed her will.
When the policewoman had questioned Hugo carefully over every detail, she was silent for a while, then asked him to accompany her to the station to make an official statement. ‘Before we go, I must tell you that we’re questioning Kevin Cartwright in connection with the murder of your mother. He left his fingerprints all over the place, and he’s also confessed to breaking in.’
Hugo reeled. What had he done? Had he delivered himself into her hands—confessed to a crime when there was no need to have done so? With no guarantee that his claim that it had been an accident would be believed, either. He felt ill. His asthma was coming back.
‘The Cartwrights started celebrating Christmas early, and Kevin was drunk enough to think he could get the Chelsea figurine back,’ the inspector was continuing. ‘He got in through the back window, but couldn’t find what he’d come for. While he was searching for it, he heard your mother’s key in the lock and rushed out, knocking her over. He thought she was only stunned, but he wasn’t sure—’
‘So he put the plastic bag over her head to make certain she wouldn’t recover and name him,’ Hugo intervened quickly
‘Not quite. He couldn’t find what he came for because it had already gone, hadn’t it? You came back after your quarrel with your mother, knowing she’d be out doing her Christmas shopping, broke in at the back and lifted the figurine, together with more bits and pieces to make it look like a genuine robbery—’
Hugo’s breathing became noisy.
‘Then you heard Kevin getting in, kept out of sight while he began to search—until he heard your mother’s key in the lock, in fact, and rushed out. You followed him, but by the time you reached the door, he’d gone and you found your mother lying there, unconscious. It was you who suffocated her with the plastic bag.’
He hadn’t, after all, fooled Detective Inspector Treadwell for one minute by that clever piece of play-acting over the disappearance of the Chelsea piece. He didn’t bother to ask her how she knew it had happened exactly as she said. Had it been anyone else, he’d have accused her of making wild and unfounded guesses, but you never knew with women. They had mysterious powers beyond his ken. Her instincts had probably told her, though he had to admit it was probable she had some sort of proof as well—his prints on the plastic bag, he supposed dully, he’d been in too much of a hurry to think about that. It didn’t matter. All that really mattered was that he was for it, one way or another.
Hugo was crushed. Women had bedevilled him all his life. He’d never been able to follow the labyrinthine twists and turns of their minds, to understand in any way what they might be thinking. But now, he knew exactly how Anne Hathaway must have felt when she discovered she’d been left only her husband’s second-best bed.
He’d risked everything for a piece of porcelain. Furious at his mother’s threat to cut him out of her will, he’d returned to the cottage and taken the figurine and the other trifles, as the policewoman had guessed, reckoning on certain outlets he knew about where he could later secretly sell the porcelain.
He should have known better. Even dead, his mother had followed him and exacted her revenge. As he fumbled for his door key, the Chelsea piece had slipped through his sweaty palms on to the expensive, imported Etruscan tiles in the entrance hall to his flat, and smashed into a thousand pieces, utterly beyond repair.
‘Shall we go?’ asked Mary Treadwell.