Down the Garden Path (34 page)

“What a time for anyone to come calling; why, it’s gone eleven.” Hyacinth was looking at the mantel clock illuminated by two candles. Harry brushed past me on his way to the door.

“Dear heaven, I hope he looks out the hall window before letting anyone in,” Primrose cried, as though Harry were a child who might be snatched out into the night never to be seen again. But the phantom of the doorbell proved to be only Constable Watt. Only? Something about his measured stride told me that there had been a new development in the case. Even more alarming, he was holding his helmet like a flag at half-mast over his stomach, one finger again tapping out his rendition of “Rock of Ages.”

“Forgive the uncivil hour, but I come here in the painful pursuit of my duty.” Rising, we faced him in a tight-knit group.

He had come to take one of us away. But far from experiencing any desire to succumb to the vapours, fury flowed through me at the sight of his pleased face made redder by candlelight. Stepping outside the protection of the group, I glared up at him. “I won’t let you take anyone away and lock them up. We had the crime almost solved when you came barging in.”

“Be quiet, Tessa.” Harry moved to my side and gripped my arm.

“That’s all right, sir. I won’t book the little lady for contempt, seeing as how this here murder business is hard on women. Don’t seem able to stomach it like us men—in the general way of things, that is. There’s one what’s took to it like a duck to water.” He cleared his throat. “It is me solemn and unpleasant duty to inform all here present that Mr. Godfrey Grundy has been foully murdered. And his poor old mum tooken in to custody for doing him in and Mr. Angus Hunt afore.”

Godfrey killed! And by his mother! No! But if a lowly constable felt free to refer to the lady of the manor as a “poor old mum,” her case was desperate indeed. I was clinging to Harry, afraid if I let go I would fall. Constable Watt grew puffy with importance as the others milled around him.

“Surely there is some mistake,” cried Primrose.

“The making of mistakes is not a police hobby, madam. We’ve had our suspicions regarding the lady for some time—from late afternoon, to be exact. Enquiries in the village brung out certain suggestions that the old girl has, on occasion, put poisonous substances in people’s bevs at the local cafe. The proprietor had been hesitant to kick up a dust, but he has now stated for the record that whenever Mrs. Grundy come in, someone was took bad.”

Now I would have gone down if Harry had not twined an arm more tightly around me. The coachman—the one who was taken ill on my first trip to Flaxby Meade! He had been sitting opposite a white-haired old lady. Hadn’t Harry joked when I told him that story, suggesting that the woman might have slipped arsenic in the coachman’s tea? And hadn’t I felt on meeting Mrs. Grundy that I had seen her somewhere before? Why had she pulled such stunts? And how often? Reverend Snapper ... she had put some of her “glucose” in his coffee minutes before he staggered from the room. But he had lived, as had, I presumed, the coachman.

“Why did she kill Mr. Hunt?” asked Chantal. Her voice conveyed shock, disbelief, and could it be ... hope?

“Motive? The likes of that one don’t bother with motives. Completely barmy she is. Said so for years has my missus. Went all to pieces, did Mrs. G., when Inspector Lewjack and I went up to the Hall to inform her that her son’s body had been found stabbed and stuffed into one of the drains. The butler was the one what summoned us. Very distraught he was. Devoted to his master; meaning he must be a pretty ‘queer’ customer, if you get me, sir.” Constable Watt winked man to man at Harry. “Wept, he did and all, to think he had bin away from the house, along with the other servants, tonight. I ask you! If he had any sense he’d be laughing, wouldn’t he, at having an alibi?”

I drew away from Harry, staring into Constable Watt’s fat red face.

“It was the butler,” he continued, “what took us up to that wicked laboratory where Mrs. G. concocted the stuff she put in the bevs.” Probing into his pocket, Constable Watt drew out his notebook, flexing his lips before opening it up and reading out one word: “Phenolphthalein.” He flipped the book shut. “Admitted to making the stuff, she did; said lots of kids hear about it in chemistry class. The old girl said the phenowhatsit wouldn’t kill no one—just send ‘em running to the toilet—pardon me, ladies—in a horrible hurry. Nothing more’n a joke, said she. Told us she’d always been partial to practical jokes. ‘Struth, I says to the inspector, this joke’s on her. She’ll get life and rightly so. Doing in of her own son to keep him from blowing the whistle on her! Almost makes me ashamed of being Flaxby Meade born and bred, it do!”

That book,
A Thousand and One Practical Jokes,
the one I had picked up and tried to read at Cheynwind! Now I understood why the idea that the murderer had made a macabre joke of Angus in dressing him up in the monk’s robe had not only repulsed but niggled at me.

Everything neatly solved. It would have been hypocritical to pretend any regret that Godfrey was gone. He had been a reptilian creature and would have made a shocking husband. Conversation flowed around me but I could not escape to the security it offered. My thoughts kept circling around Godfrey’s proposal.

The certainty grew that the charges against Mrs. Grundy were nonsense. Yes, she was mad. I could even believe that she might have murdered Angus, poor dear Angus, because she imagined that he was keen on me and therefore a blight on Godfrey’s hopes, but didn’t each brand of madness follow a certain pattern? One of the most crucial aspects of Mrs. Grundy’s wackiness was her obsession with getting Godfrey married and, with my arrival at Cheynwind that evening, she must have felt that her goal was within reach. If he had attempted blackmail, wouldn’t she have smacked his bottom and sent him to his room rather than killing him and stuffing him down a drain in a re-enactment of a murder way back in the annals of the Grundy family? She had spoken with immense pride of that murder but even so ...

I must protest Mrs. Grundy’s innocence even though, in doing so, I would have to own up to the nature of my conversation with Godfrey this evening. Where would that place me as a suspect? Nowhere ... because I had an alibi. Chantal—
she
had answered the phone when he called.
Both times!
My heartbeat slowed. If Godfrey had never previously performed a decent deed in his warped life, he had performed one tonight when he made that second call. My mind played over the chills it had inspired and the relief when he had hung up to go to answer the door and admit the unknown visitor with whom he had an appointment. Rain lashed the windows and the wind blurred Primrose’s rambling enquiries concerning poor Ethelreda’s present mental state.

Constable Watt was folding up his notebook with official deliberation. Into his pocket it went and on went his helmet. I would have to speak, explain how certain I was that Mrs. Grundy ...

“Well, we won’t keep you, George,” said Hyacinth. Butler raised a candle for the journey down the hall and in its hazy glare I saw Chantal’s face. The black eyes looked blind. She lifted a hand with infinite slowness to one cheek.

“Yes, best be pushing off.” Constable Watt’s chest expanded. “Have to notify Nurse Krumpet that her boy’s safe now, and then it’s back to the station for more paperwork.”

“Nurse Krumpet and Bertie are staying here tonight, and we will certainly tell her the good news. Well for her it is good ...” Primrose faltered.

“I suppose I should speak to her myself, but I really must be off. One of the young nippers in the village—name of Ricky—was knocked off his bicycle this evening by a hit and run. Lucky to be alive, fractured skull and a broken leg, but...”

“These maniac drivers should be locked up.” That was Hyacinth. I was picturing that child lying broken in the road. Chantal must have seen the same image. Her hand dropped from her face, and I had never seen such glistening pallor.

“My fault,” she cried. “My fault, all my fault. I was so afraid that he would try something like this, but at the school they said that there was no child named Fred.”

Constable Watt naturally enough thought he had broken the hit-and-run case. Out flew the notebook, despite Primrose’s protestations that it was apparent Chantal was rambling and that everyone knew gypsies tended to be vastly dramatic.

Harry put an end to Constable Watt ’s hopes by informing him that he had taken the Tramwell car that afternoon and not returned with it until evening, since which time Chantal had never left the house.

Upon the constable’s departure we instinctively regrouped around the table. Several of the candles had burned low and new ones had to be fetched by Butler. Outside, the wind assumed an almost human wailing. And during the brief interludes when it did quiet down, the hush became menacing, as if the night, too, held its breath—waiting for what Chantal would say. Fred. What had she meant about being afraid for him? The child did not exist, except as part of Bertie; and Bertie was safe upstairs. It was that other child who had been hurt.

“You can wait no longer, Chantal.” Primrose spoke in a sadly pensive voice. “Whatever my many failings, I am not a coward. I was raised to face what needs must.”

So she did not believe any more than I did that wacky Mrs. Grundy was the murderer. Her suddenly fragile face turned towards Hyacinth and they clasped hands.

Chantal sat motionless. “I have betrayed you, but that wasn’t my intent on coming to Cloisters. I had no thoughts of revenging old wrongs then, but he—he—came with his thirst for murder, and ...”

Swaying forward, Primrose gripped the table edge. “Don’t—don’t say you were in this with him?”

Harry uttered an exclamation of protest, rising out of his chair, and Butler peered over steepled fingers as I cried, “Chantal—who is this man?” She couldn’t mean Harry. If she did, I would want to die.

“His name is Egrinon Snapper.”

“The Reverend Snapper!” Hyacinth had been chafing Primrose’s hands, but she now sat rigid; stunned like the rest of us.

“He claims to be a clergyman, but I suspect that is a fiction.” Chantal looked around the table. “He was at Cheynwind the other night, prepared to fake an interest in cards because he wanted to learn more about their antique murder for the book he is writing. But it is Tessail’s murder which most intrigued him, and no one from the village would provide him with any details. He talked to me one morning in the Ruins, and I ... I agreed to try to uncover information for him. He particularly wanted the names of Tessail’s murderers. “

“But obviously you did not give him all the information he wanted or he wouldn’t, have continued lurking around Cloisters.” I drew a deep breath. “And several times I have sensed someone in the garden.” I looked at Harry. “Didn’t you tell me that the night before last you glimpsed someone you took for a tramp in the Ruins?”

Chantal broke in. “I had arranged to meet Snapper there, to tell him that I had changed my mind. But first you, Harry, and then Tessa came, making a meeting impossible.”

“My dear Chantal,” Hyacinth interrupted, “I must tell you I am relieved that you did not meet such a man in the middle of the night and that you did think better of assisting him in dredging up past sins. Our Mrs. Mudd would undoubtedly feel compelled to resign as chairwoman of the Women’s Institute if it were revealed that one of her ancestors was not only a murderer but a fishmonger; but why do you think Snapper responsible for the murders?”

“Because”—Chantal lifted a hand to her brow and swept back her hair; shadows lay in dark pools under her eyes—“he is obsessed with old murders, and Mr. Hunt’s death was a costumed reproduction of Tessail’s death, and ...”

“And Godfrey went down the drain like his ancestor,” I said. The urge to giggle was pure nerves.

Harry pushed up the sleeves of his sweater. “Chantal, aren’t you building a case against this man out of misplaced guilt? Your thinking about spilling the beans is not the same as spilling them, and a penchant for writing about murder is not the same as a penchant for committing murder.”

“What if he is mad? What if he wanted to be revenged upon me and close-mouthed Flaxby Meade? But the most telling piece of evidence against him is that he didn’t know that Fred was imaginary, and that boy Ricky has been struck down. I had such a fear when I looked into the crystal. This afternoon I tried to find Snapper and couldn’t, then I went to the school and asked the headmaster if he had any pupils named Fred. He said no, not realizing (as I didn’t) that Ricky is an abbreviation for Frederick. I think his grandparents now live in Florida, and he may have adopted that nickname when he went out to visit them. I don’t know. All I do know is that the murderer must have thought ‘Fred’ needed removing, which leaves out everyone in this room since we all knew about—”

“I didn’t know Fred was an imaginary friend,” said Harry, “and I was out in the car this evening.”

“Oh, don’t be so silly,” I snapped. “Someone else thought he was not imaginary, too—Clyde Deasley. Remember, he asked why the police weren’t out looking for the other child.”

I had spoken in a burst of bravado, not daring to think of Harry driving that hearse through the night, but now I looked at Primrose’s face. She couldn’t think Mr. Deasley the murderer, could she? What about the alibi? It was the alibi that had made me think I must be wrong about Angus’s watch ... that Mr. Deasley could not be the one. But now I was seeing things differently. That alibi should have strengthened my suspicion of him. What gentleman would have exposed his lady love in public, without compelling reason? And what more compelling reason could there be than deflecting suspicion from himself?

“Oh, Primrose, I’m so sorry. It would be a lot easier on everyone except Chantal if the murderer could be Reverend Snapper. But you don’t believe it, do you?”

She shook her head. “Dear me, I have been such a fool. Completely taken in; and now I suppose it will be thought that I was his conspirator in Mr. Hunt’s death. I cannot expect the police to believe that had I concocted an alibi for myself, I would have provided equally for Hyacinth. That smooth-tongued traitor. My dears, when I lay on my bed this afternoon I began to remember how drowsy I had felt this morning.” She blushed. “And not for the reason you may suppose. I believe now that Clyde drugged me. I had a packet of herbal sleeping draught in my room, because I had given some to Minerva earlier so I could let Clyde in unnoticed. He must have put it in my sherry after we had ... sat talking for a long time.” Primrose was now fidgetting in her seat, hands fussing with her curls. “Dearest Hyacinth, the reason Clyde ... Mr. Deasley was in my bedroom last night was not for immoral purposes, although perhaps you will consider the breach to which I must now confess even more onerous. I have broken my solemn promise to you. The promise that whatever else we might be forced to sell, I would never part with my share of Mother’s jewellery. When the estimate for the repairs to the roof came yesterday (along with Violet’s letter saying she was regrettably in no position to help financially), I was in despair. We cannot get through the winter without the roof being fixed, so I felt compelled to part with one or two brooches and rings without your knowledge. I spoke to Mr. Deasley when he was here and he later telephoned to tell me that he had a client who might be interested, but that he must have the pieces immediately. Never, never will I forgive myself for having unwittingly aided that duplicitous creature. I remember wishing that he would go so I could get to bed—and then his shaking me, telling me I had begun to nod off. Wicked, wicked man; I must have slept, under the influence, for as long as he needed. Dearest Hyacinth, how can I ever hope you will forgive me for what I have done to you and dear Minnie?”