Murder of the Bride (13 page)

“I've brought the fairy cakes I made with the boys this morning,” she told Donna, holding up a plastic container.

“Nan, Nan!” a crescendo of voices spilled from the front room.

“Coming,” the elder woman responded, upbeat and in control, much like a general about to enter the fray.

“Best take your plastic poncho,” she advised her daughter. “It's coming down heavy.” She stared in concern at Donna's face. “You going to tell me what's going on?”

“When I get back,” Donna promised. “But something bad has happened. Mr. Graves is here to help. He's a private detective.”

“Listen, Donna,” Rex cautioned. “May I call you Donna? I may not be helping you at all. If your husband is involved in the Newcombe business, I need to know.”

“What Newcombe business?” Donna's mother asked. “Is it about money?” Clearly she did not have any close friends among the Newcombes or Thorpes who might have called her with news of the murders. Rex decided this wasn't the time to enlighten her. He and Donna had to get going.

“In the unlikely event Dud calls, I'm in the shower,” Donna instructed, grabbing a transparent poncho from the coat tree and opening the front door. “Don't worry,” she added.

Her mother looked no less worried at hearing this.

Rex passed in front of her. “Wait here while I pull up the car.” Turning up the collar of his jacket, he plunged headlong into the rain.

“Take care of her, Mr. Graves,” Donna's mother called after him.

Night Intruders

Donna directed Rex to
Mabel's house, having spent the brief drive looking over her shoulder and airing her anxieties about the hit men who were threatening her husband. “I just don't know what they'll stop at,” she said more than once. “If they've got our home phone number, they know our address, as we're listed.”

This was not at all reassuring to Rex, who was fond of his knee caps. “What will you do with the information you find?” he asked, unpersuaded that Donna had thought this through logically, as was often the case with people under considerable stress.

“I'll consider my options.”

“Your mother seems a together sort of person,” he offered as consolation.

“She's a godsend, but she hasn't any money to help us. She warned me against marrying Dud. Stop! It's this one right here.”

Rex parked on the street in front of the white end-of-terrace house Donna had indicated. The windows, hung with net curtains, were
unlit from within. A dim globe light beneath the stone porch roof re
vealed a glass-paned door. His phone stirred in his jacket. Drawing it from his pocket, he saw Helen's name on the display. Oops. He'd been gone longer than intended.

“Rex! Where are you?”

“I'm still in Aston chasing down leads. What's going on at Newcombe Court?”

“The police are still here dithering about.”

“Are the Thorpes there?”

“Yes, all three. When are you coming back?”

“Verra soon, lass, I promise.” He snapped his phone shut and returned it to his pocket.

“Was that your wife?” Donna asked.

“My fiancée. A truly understanding woman. Ready?”

She nodded but seemed reluctant to leave the peace and warmth of the car. He was anxious to take a quick look inside the house before Mabel got home. Even if Donna had a flimsy pretext for being there, he had none.

“I hope you get on well with your mother-in-law,” he said.

“She interferes a lot and, of course, no one is good enough for her Dudley.” Donna sat looking at her hands, her diamond solitaire sparkling with white fire in the gloom. “Dud wanted me to pawn it,” she said, holding up the fingers of her left hand. “But I won't.”

On that note, she opened the passenger door. The rain had eased off again. Avoiding the puddles, Rex followed her up the path to the porch.

“Oh, bugger, it's not here,” Donna said sweeping her fingers along the window ledge. “It's usually kept in a crack at this end. What are we going to do?”

Heck if I know
, Rex thought. This was, to be sure, an anticlimactic turn of events. “Why does Mabel keep a spare key outside?”

“Timmy is forgetful.”

“That's true,” Rex said, recalling the scene at the church gate when Mabel had reminded her son about his inhaler and Tums. Rex looked around for another suitable hiding place for the key. “He's also quite tall,” he murmured, reaching into a hanging basket of purple and yellow pansies above his head.

People were often more concerned about accidentally being locked out of their homes than about a burglar finding an easy way in, as he had learned from trying cases of home invasion. Feeling uncomfortably like a burglar himself, he groped among the velvety petals and discovered the small hard item he sought.

“
Eureka
,” he said, holding up the key.

Donna grabbed it and rammed it into the keyhole. “I bet they put it up there so I wouldn't find it.”

The door opened. Rex took the key and replaced it in the
basket
.

Once inside, Donna threw off her wet poncho. Before either of them could make another move, a thud from behind the door to their right froze them to the spot. Rex's heart leaped to his throat. Seemed they weren't alone after all. By the porch light seeping through the frosted glass, Rex signaled for them to get out. That's when he heard a
meow
.

Donna put a restraining hand on his sleeve. “It's only Monty.” As she switched on the light in the stairwell, a large ginger tom tore out of the room and bolted for the back of the house, tail at half mast.

“I would have thought Timmy was the type to be allergic to cats.”

“He's not, but Dud is. Timmy's had him eight years.” Donna mounted the stairs. “I'm going to check out my husband's old room. Keep watch, will you? Best lock the door.”

Rex did so and followed the ginger tom's path to the kitchen. Donna must have put the light on in Dudley's room. An upstairs window shed illumination on the walled-in garden, which backed onto those of a similar row of terraced homes. He decided to risk putting on the kitchen light since the house was already lit up like Vegas.

The orange tom, a shorthaired species with a white chin and snowy forepaws, stood by the cat flap eying him, waiting perhaps to see if the stranger would replenish his food bowl. Rex had not expected to find anything as companionable and homely as this fine fellow at Mabel's abode, for she had struck him as somewhat sterile and austere. When Monty saw that no treats were forthcoming, he head-butted the flap, and his furry hindquarters and striped tail followed through the gap, leaving Rex alone.

The kitchen, though not ultra-modern, was neat and orderly. Two cups and saucers had been left upside down to dry on the draining board. Ditto a pair of teaspoons. A quick and careful look in the dishwasher revealed two neatly stacked breakfast bowls and plates, as yet unwashed. His gaze rested on the blue tin canisters on the Formica counter by the stove, labeled Tea, Coffee, and Sugar, but he refrained from rifling through the cabinets. An in-depth search was well outside his purview, and he was on extremely thin ice being here in the first place. He wished Donna would hurry up. He had an uncomfortable feeling about the whole situation.

His shoes squeaked on the shiny linoleum as he tiptoed into the dinette, where half the table was spread with bills and correspondence. A Welsh dresser in dark mahogany, matching the table, displayed a crockery set of the same blue floral design as the tea cups by the sink and the bowls and plates in the dishwasher—
serviceable ware but not fine china, in keeping with what he had seen so far of the house. On a shelf mainly reserved for cookery books, his eye picked out a number of medical encyclopedias and books on accounting.

A creak sounded on the landing upstairs. Rex flipped off the kitchen light and returned to the hall, glancing into the shadowy living room as he passed and confirming his impression of a functional and comfortable house, but not one on which a lot of money had been lavished. Perhaps Mabel had downgraded after Dr. Thorpe's death.

“Find what you were looking for?” he called up the stairs.

Receiving no answer, he climbed the carpeted steps two at a time and, taking a right turn on the landing, entered the room directly above the kitchen. No Donna.

A brown shag pile rug curled up against the base boards. In a corner perpendicular to the window lay a narrow bed draped with a beige crochet coverlet. Continuing anticlockwise, his gaze took in a bedside table and a small desk beneath the window ledge, each with the drawers hanging open and, against the third wall, a wardrobe whose doors stood agape, empty but for a few boxes on the upper shelf.

Across from the desk, a cheap set of shelves sagged beneath a boyhood collection of old textbooks, sports trophies, and souvenirs from the seaside—shells, artfully shaped driftwood, and colored bottles washed up on some shore. Posters of soccer stars tacked to the patterned wallpaper and a crossbow propped in a corner behind the door lent an element of masculinity to the old-maidish décor and rounded out his inventory of the most noteworthy items in the room.

Donna wandered through the doorway, holding a depleted checkbook and a sheaf of bank statements. “Couldn't find anything next door,” she informed him. “I didn't dare touch Timmy's stuff as he'd notice if anything was out of place. This is what I found in here.”

She brandished the contents in her hand. “We're still in the black, but only just. Twenty-eight quid in the chequing account to last us until the end of the month. Nothing in savings. I found several large cash withdrawals, which would be for his bookie. And something else. A cancelled cheque to a Doctor Forspaniak for almost the amount of our monthly mortgage, dated November of last year. Dud's never been ill in his life, except for the occasional hangover.”

“Maybe it was supplemental care for his mother.”

“Mabel has the constitution of an ox, though you wouldn't think it to look at her. Timmy bears the brunt of ailments in that family.”

“Let's get everything put back the way it was,” Rex suggested, keen to get going now that Donna had what she'd come for and he'd gained an insight into the Thorpe family home.

As they moved toward the door, Rex cocked a thumb in the direction of the wooden bow. “Does your husband fancy himself as Robin Hood?”

Donna snortled. “You mean rob the rich to give to the poor? Meaning himself. Yeah, maybe.”

“You seriously think he poisoned the Newcombe family to get hold of their money?”

“Don't you? That's why you came to see me, isn't it? He could easily have gone to Newcombe Court this morning. Besides, he had access to the arsenic.”

“Did he?”

“Well, he'd know where to get hold of some. His dad used it to treat his leukemia.”

“What?” Rex asked in astonishment.

“It didn't work, but it's in one of the medical books about cures for cancer downstairs.”

Rex had no more time to assimilate this information. A scuffling noise at the front door arrested Donna in the process of switching off the light to Dudley's room. From the landing, Rex glimpsed a large shadow behind the door pane. A key turned in the lock.

Donna yanked Rex into an airing cupboard at the top of the stairs and swiftly drew the louver doors closed. It felt warm and cramped in the closet, claustrophobically so, and he had to keep his head bowed. Had Mabel returned, her form magnified through the opaque glass in the door? What would she think if she found her daughter-in-law and the Scotsman from the reception hiding in her cupboard? A sharp scent of lavender laundry detergent pricked at his nostrils and he feared he might sneeze. Wrangling an arm free in the limited space, he pressed his hand to his nose. Donna stiffened beside him as footsteps stomped up the creaking stairs.

Perspiration began to pool in the armpits of his jacket. Between the slats of the doors, he made out the back of a broad figure in a dark hooded jacket. The individual paused on the landing, darting his head in both directions, and then pushed open the door to Dudley's room. The light went on, the door closed. Nudging Donna, Rex eased open the louver doors and led her down the inside tread of the stairs to avoid creaking boards, while the scrape and juddering of displaced furniture on bare floor continued above them.

In the hall, Rex tripped over the plastic poncho Donna had dropped on their way in and held out an arm to brace himself, hitting the door as he did so. They exchanged a panicked look.

Rex stopped her as she bent to retrieve the garment. Turning back the knob on the front door, he shot a look up the stairs. All clear. He gently clicked the door shut after them. Then, grabbing Donna by the arm, he dragged her across the grass beside the boundary hedge and through a gap to the car. Helen's car beeped as he hit the remote, but it couldn't be helped. Dudley's room, in any case, was on the far side of the house. However, on the off chance he'd been heard, he started the engine and pulled out without lights, not wishing to be seen. At the end of the street, Donna broke the silence.

“Did you see who it was?”

“A man with large shoulders wearing a hoodie.”

“Dud doesn't have a hoodie.”

That you know of, thought Rex. It appeared there were other things about which Dudley kept Donna in the dark. He sped up, lights now on full beam in the rain, and headed down the deserted road toward her house. “If that wasn't your husband, how did he know which room to look in?” he asked.

“Why would Dud ransack his own room? I hope it's not him. He'd recognize my poncho and give me grief for sneaking into his mom's house. I don't know what Mabel is going to say when she finds it. You should've let me take it.”

“It was as squeaky as a wet balloon. And whoever it was must have seen it and would have noticed if it was gone. Best tell Mabel you went over and someone else was there. In fact, call the police right now.” He handed Donna his phone.

He regretted not having apprehended the intruder himself, but he had no idea whom he was dealing with, in addition to which his own presence was a bit sticky to explain.

“Dud would kill me if I called the police.”

“What if your mother-in-law's house is being burgled?”

“There's nothing worth stealing at Mabel's. And it wasn't a break-in. The person used a key.”

“So did we. Perhaps he was watching us.”

“Look, I'll call her when I get home, okay?” Donna returned his phone and he dropped it into his pocket with a sigh of resignation and a feeling that events were spiraling out of control.

“Okay, but make sure you do. And tell the police about the threatening phone calls while you're at it. Things have a way of escalating where loan sharks are involved.”

“Dud should be able to fob them off now that he's related to the Newcombe family, especially with Victoria out of the way. But if he goes to prison for murder, they might come after me for what he owes.” She bit her lip and gazed numbly out the window.

Donna had a point, Rex conceded. She was a brave lass and she had brains, but would prove no match for a gang of vicious hoodlums. The car slushed to a stop outside her home and the front door flew open. Silhouetted in the doorway, Donna's mother threw them a friendly wave, in which no small measure of relief was apparent.