It was on the Friday night after the coven’s next meeting that Mrs. Beatrice Cater’s activities were discouraged for all time. Ernie Hurst, the Upper Marldale milkman (who came from Pringle) entered the Old Tollhouse to find her hanging from a hook that had been driven into a beam in her living-room by, one assumes, one of the original Tollkeepers.
It was rather less than a minute after seven o’ clock that Ernie Hurst made his discovery. The Tollhouse was his first call on entering the village, and local by-laws were unambiguous that no house-to-house deliveries were to be made in Marldale before the stroke of seven.
Asked, as he was several times within the next two hours by ascending ranks of investigators, if it was his normal practice to enter a woman’s house, and indeed her living-room, in order to deposit her daily pint, her orange-juice and her cream, Ernie replied with steadily diminishing patience that it was Mrs. Cater’s cat, Boudicca, who was at the bottom of this daily ritual.
“Rum bloody name for a cat, innit?” asked the resident constable from Pringle, who, fired by the mystique of sudden death, was on the scene from his home five miles away within three quarters of an hour.
“Well, she was that sort of woman, wasn’t she? Anything she had she had to have a rum bloody name for. How the hell did she get herself up there, do you reckon, Sid?”
Beatrice Cater was hanging from the beam by about eighteen inches of rope. Given that the room was eight feet high, that the beam was six inches thick, that her height was five feet four, and that her neck had been elongated by about four inches in the course of her terminal experience, her toes were actually in contact with the ground. They could not, however, have gained enough purchase to give her useful support if she (or an assailant) had undergone a last-minute change of mind. It rather looked, even to one with the intellectual limitations of PC Bowman, as if an assailant must have been involved, because there was no sign that any chair or stool had been stood upon to enable her (or an outsider) to fix the rope to the beam. Nor was it apparent that she had kicked aside any article of furniture to accelerate her irreversible despatch. The constable also noticed that coffee and some sort of liqueur for four people had been served, and that the hostess had not considered it desirable—or had not had time—to wash up the cups and glasses before hanging herself (or being hanged).
In accordance with received practices, PC Bowman got Ernie Hurst to help him down with the body, in order to ascertain that death was as actual as appeared to be the case and to apply resuscitatory drills if applicable. That these would be superfluous was apparent from the manner in which Mrs. Cater’s cervical vertebrae were incapable of holding up her head. Although he normally lived within a sort of emotional armour-casing in the face of death and calamity, PC Bowman was relatively distressed by Mrs. Cater’s head and its grotesque independence of its accustomed anatomical support. For several days he introduced this topic into all his conversations with all men.
“I reckon she’s a write-off, Sid.”
“Oh, aye. Not much point in towing her to a garage. What were you saying about her cat, Ernie?”
“Boudicca?”
“I still think that’s a rum bloody name for a cat.”
“‘If ever you see her waiting to be let in, Mr. Hurst,’ she told me, ‘let her in.’ And four mornings out of five she was waiting to be let in. Funny thing—”
The milkman furrowed his brow. Anything inexplicable was a rare event. He was a man who readily accepted the most immediate explanation for anything.
“Funny thing. I opened the door this morning, and she wouldn’t go in. You know, I reckon animals sometimes know things, Sid.”
“Happen.”
Bowman wrapped Mrs. Cater’s telephone in his handkerchief, as he had been taught by TV police procedurals, and rang through to the desk sergeant at Bradburn, who initiated action in several well-established directions. Thus Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw received the news while engaged upon the third and final phase of his breakfast.
“Suicide?” he asked, at the mention of hanging.
“The reporting constable seems to have his doubts, sir.”
“Who’s that?”
“Bowman, sir.”
“Christ! Scene of Crime?”
“On their way.”
“Coroner’s sergeant informed?”
“I am the coroner’s sergeant, sir.”
“Inspector Mosley told?”
“Can’t find him, sir.”
Grimshaw thought fast. Just for a change, he was going to make this his own case. He could give Mosley something innocuous to do on the periphery, if that was ultimately unavoidable. Grimshaw went back to his toast and marmalade. There was no point in arriving there too soon, and simply getting in the way of the Scene of Crime team. He did a little more thinking about Mosley. Yesterday he had been convinced that he had been very astute about the Inspector; now a little shrug of doubt was beginning to take the edge off his third and last cup of tea.
He had known—because Mosley had told him—that last evening Mosley had been intending to sit in on a meeting with the Marldale witches. But he had prevented Mosley from attending. He had arranged for him to be otherwise occupied: organizing and assessing questionnaires about the Bradburn muggings, and personally supervising an on-the-ground check of nightbirds who claimed any pretext to be on the streets of Bradburn after dark. This, he told himself, was an essential task, in which it was even conceivable that Mosley might turn up something useful; though it was, his second-echelon brain-cells tried to remind him, doubtful practice to take an officer off an enquiry, even an unreported one, that his teeth were already well into. Still, the Assistant Chief Constable’s say so had been unequivocal he did not want Mosley involved.
So, really, it was an uncalled for act of masochism to be tormenting himself with the incipient niggle that if Mosley had been in Upper Marldale on the previous evening, Mrs. Beatrice Cater might still be alive.
The Detective-Superintendent had one more thought before leaving home for Marldale. He rang his office and asked for Detective-Sergeant Beamish to be made available from D Divison. Grimshaw’s sergeant-clerk smiled as she dialled the Chief-Inspector, D: so Tom was going lone patrol on this one—and making sure that it got solved.