Antonia drove in the direction of the Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School as fast as she could. ‘Hell for leather,’ she murmured. (Did anyone ever use the expression nowadays?)
She found herself trying to imagine the experts in violent death arriving at Philomel Cottage. She hated police procedurals, so she was vague about it. There would be a team consisting of a detective inspector, a police sergeant, a police surgeon, a photographer or two, a print man, whom she envisaged as having small delicate hands, several plain-clothes men who would no doubt subject every room in the house to a methodical search. They would be carrying with them their peculiar paraphernalia and specific skills.
She could see them very clearly now, hard-faced, bleary-eyed men and, possibly, a woman or two, standing around, looking as though they would rather be somewhere else …
Antonia had forced herself to read a couple of police procedurals and found them tedious, but she understood they had a following. Well, chacun à son goût …
She imagined Hugh sitting patiently on the sofa, smoking his pipe, his legs crossed, giving every appearance of being unperturbed, waiting for his turn to be interviewed.
‘Major Payne? You say you have nothing to do with any of this? Then what the hell are you doing here?’
No, they wouldn’t say ‘hell’; they would be politer. But they wouldn’t allow Hugh to smoke his pipe inside the house, would they? They might even confiscate it if he refused to put it out! Poor Hugh. Would the inspector take Charlie’s story of the exchanged murders seriously? Actually she had no idea. Poor Charlie.
The scene of the crime would be taped off. Every scrap of paper, threads of fabric, shreds of wood, pieces of plastic, hairs from the kitten, bits from Olga’s make-up, the detritus of everyday living would be rescued and examined to see whether it could add to the picture of how Joan Selwyn had died and at whose hands …
In her detective novels Antonia (writing as ‘Antonia Darcy’) never attempted to mystify her readers with the mechanical, the technical, the ballistic, nor, for that matter, with the forensic. Some thought it a weakness, but Antonia didn’t care. She hated doing research – she feared she wouldn’t get it right because she found the process so boring. Procedural verisimilitude simply had no place in her kind of plot.
Antonia was famous – some said notorious – for allotting the police only a tangential part in her novels. Actually, in one or two of her books the police did not appear at all. The investigation was invariably conducted by a pair of gifted amateurs. Gifted amateurs might be an anachronism, but hers were carefully camouflaged by mobile phones, references to Google, Twitter and Facebook and lashings of self-deprecating wit. (Were Charlie and Olga on Facebook? They were the right age for it.)
Antonia pulled her thoughts back to the murder at Philomel Cottage. There were some questions that needed to be answered. Who was the person that had phoned Olga and told her to go to Doctor Bishop’s clinic? Why had that phone call been made in the first place?
Joan Selwyn must have arrived at Philomel Cottage soon after Olga left. What had Joan Selwyn been hoping to achieve? She had had a front-door key in her pocket and she seemed to have been stabbed in the back as she was about to enter the house. Miss Frayle must have followed her … Well, yes … Miss Frayle was the killer … Miss Frayle had believed Joan to be Olga, so she killed her …
Antonia wondered whether they were not dealing with two murderers, both intent on the same target. How did that work out? Enter First Murderer, former girlfriend Joan Selwyn. Joan had only pretended to be over Charlie whereas in point of fact she was still hankering after him. The fact that she had dyed her hair blonde could be interpreted as pointing in that direction. Unrequited passion, as Hugh had put it once, was the devil.
Antonia tried to envisage the scene. Joan has acquired a key and she is in the process of unlocking the front door with it, her intention being to hide somewhere inside the house and wait for Olga. But just then the Second Murderer arrives. Fenella Frayle is carrying a knife in her pocket. It’s getting dark and she sees a blonde girl standing in the doorway with her back to her. She is convinced that it is Olga and she goes up to her and stabs her in the back – which introduces the joint elements of dark irony and poetic justice into the proceedings.
But Joan had no weapon of any kind on her. They had checked her pockets. No gun, no knife, no blunt instrument. Could she have intended to strangle Olga? Or had she hoped to use something from inside the house? The poker? There had been no gloves on her hands or in her pockets either. Had she planned to do it with her bare hands then? It was possible, people did do illogical things, especially if they were in the grip of a powerful emotion, but Antonia was not convinced …
There it was. Jevanny Lodge. The Sylvie & Bruno Nursery School. That was where it had all started. There were enough street lights, so the place did not look as sinister as it might have done. Only one window on the first floor was lit. Miss Frayle’s snuggery? So she was in.
Antonia pushed open the little gate and walked up to the front door. Suddenly she shivered, though the evening was not particularly cold. Someone walking on my grave, Antonia thought. She remembered Hugh had urged her to be careful …