The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (8 page)

“Indeed? Noo, lass, could we go back over this entire conversation.

Who said what to whom, and in what order?”

Since the conversation had been so short and so fraught with unexpected revelations, Dittany succeeded in repeating the whole thing. Sergeant Mac Vicar nodded once or twice but did not interrupt. When she’d finished, he asked, “And that was all? Nothing after Churtle told you he was writing his memoirs?”

“I think he said, ‘Ta-ta, miss.’ Then it was boots, saddle, to horse, and away. I’m surprised he didn’t go straight to the station if he was so hot after his blocks and tackles.”

“Aye, and why did he choose this particular morn to pick it up, syne he’d been content to leave it here so long?”

“Because he figured we’d all be off baking custards for the widow, and he’d have the place to himself.”

“Pairhaps. There’s food for thought here, lass. According to your account, Churtle did not deny knowledge of a death here yesterday, albeit he either did not know or feigned not to know the demised was the friend of his youth. Furthermore, and this is the part that puzzles me, when he did find out, he failed to ask when the funeral is to be held. I believe I will pay my respects to Mrs.

Fairfield. She is in the back parlor, you say?”

“Yes, only she’s calling it her office now. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Dittany knew perfectly well Sergeant Mac Vicar didn’t have to be shown. He knew she knew. Being a perspicacious man, however, he also knew Mrs. Fairfield had been giving Dittany a rough morning, that Dittany in any event would have no intention of being left out of whatever was going on, that he’d waste his time trying to keep her back because she’d been aye the same since she was a wee bairn, and that considering the lemon oil, he didn’t blame her. Therefore, he contented himself with making her presence official.

“Dittany, Mrs. Mac Vicar always maintains a woman needs another’s supportive presence in time of grief and stress. Therefore, you will be good enough to remain whilst I ask Mrs. Fairfield a few questions. I will endeavor not to tax your sensibilities unduly, Mrs.

Fairfield.”

“Oh, please don’t fret yourself about my sensibilities, Sergeant.”

Mrs. Fairfield touched a folded handkerchief to the corner of her right eye and brought it away, Dittany noticed, perfectly dry. “I’m trying to be a good soldier. I know what a bore it must be for you all, having something like this occur to a stranger within your gates. I shall be so relieved when this apartment finally gets finished and I at least have a place to call my own. Not that Mrs.

Oakes hasn’t been the soul of kindness, but you know how it is. Or perhaps you don’t, never having been in a similar position. I must say, when I broke up my own lovely home to come here, I never dreamed anything like this would happen.”

She plied the handkerchief again. “Ah well, you don’t want to hear about my troubles. Ask your questions, Sergeant, and I’ll do my best to give you sensible answers. If I can just keep my poor wits about me, that is.”

“Then suppose we start with something easy. Tell me about Mr.

Churtle. Dittany tells me he is an old acquaintance whom you had not seen for many years.”

“That’s correct. At least thirty, possibly more. Frederick Churtle was my husband’s acquaintance, not mine. They’d been boys together.

He was never, I must say, one of my favorite people.”

“And why was that, Mrs. Fairfield?”

“As I’ve already told Mrs. Monk, I resented the way Frederick took advantage of my husband’s good nature. I despised him as a person of low habits and no principles. To put it in a nutshell, he drank, gambled, and consorted with loose women. He rioted away his own paycheck every week, then came and mooched off my husband.”

“Indeed? A most pernicious state of affairs.”

“You don’t know the half of it. I couldn’t begin to tell you how much money he borrowed from us over the years and never paid back. My husband used to slip it to him without telling me. That was after we’d had a few dustups over Frederick’s constant sponging, I must admit. Then at last things came to a head.”

“Aye, ‘tis ever thus. What happened, Mrs. Fairfield?”

“I’m not quite sure, but I do know Frederick got into some dreadful scrape. I believe he was caught stealing from his employer and had to make good or go to jail. Anyway, he desperately needed five thousand dollars, and Peregrine absolutely insisted on lending it to him out of our savings. I shan’t pretend I yielded with any good grace. I made Frederick sign a note for the money, promising to pay within six months. I hoped that would force him to face up to responsibility.”

“A vain hope, I mistrust.”

“It certainly was. Instead of paying, Frederick skipped town and apparently changed his name so we couldn’t catch him. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he breezed in here this morning, brash and brazen as ever.”

“You had not the slightest inkling yon Churtle was in this area?”

“Heavens no. How could I? I told you we hadn’t seen hide nor ban” of him for thirty years. Not that we’d have stayed away on his account, I can assure you. My husband’s eyes were opened long ago about his dear old boyhood chum. In any event, the stipend here is hardly conducive to large-scale philanthropy. Not that I’m complaining you understand. I quite realize the trustees would pay more if they could afford to. I will say that if I’d known who this so-called Brown was, I’d certainly have recommended they find another roofer.”

“But you never saw the soi-disant Brown working here?”

“No. I believe he’d finished whatever he was supposed to do before my husband and I arrived. Those ropes were already hanging down the stairwell. I did ask to have them taken away because they’re such a nuisance, but Mrs. Monk’s aunt told me the trustees wanted them left in place until they’d made sure the skylight wouldn’t leak again. That made sense, of course, although I can’t see how I’m expected to get that stairwell papered with them in the way. I rather wish you’d let Frederick take them away, Mrs.

Monk. Now every time I see them, I’ll think of him and that outrageous suggestion he made about Peregrine this morning.”

“I have been wondering how I might broach that subject,” said Sergeant Mac Vicar.

“Why? Surely you don’t think there’s any truth in it?”

“Yon attic windows are extremely small, Mrs. Fairfield.”

“Well, Peregrine was no giant,” the widow retorted sharply, then remembered she was bowed down by weight of woe. “Mrs.

Monk did say something about the windows just now. It was she who opened them in the first place, you know.”

That was too much for Dittany. “Yes, and I’d have closed them when we left, only you said not to.”

The handkerchief came into play again. “Did I? I suppose I meant to send up the Munson boys or somebody. There are always so many people in and out of here, you know. It never occurred to me Peregrine might wind up having to shut them himself.”

“We are not sure he did,” Sergeant Mac Vicar remarked.

“What do you mean? Were the windows still open after we found him?”

“Two were shut, two were open, one of which latter was the window under which Minerva Oakes found him.”

“Well, of course it was. You’d hardly expect him to turn around in midair and shut it after him, would you?”

“Nay,” Sergeant Mac Vicar agreed, “a man plummeting to his doom might well be excused for overlooking such a trifle. But you see, that raises another question. Not only were the windows unusually small, they were in grievous disrepair. They required to be propped open, which Mrs. Monk had in fact done with bits and pieces she found lying about. Given the meager space he’d have had to squirm through, how would Mr. Fairfield have managed to do so without knocking out the prop and thus being pinned between sash and sill?”

“Peregrine was a very small man.” Mrs. Fairfield was looking pretty green around the gills by now, Dittany noticed.

“I grant you that. However, there is the further complication of the window sills.”

“The window sills? Attic windows don’t have them, surely?”

“I stand corrected. The proper term would have been ledges.

On account of the sloping mansard roof, you see, and the windows being set in plumb to the attic floor, there is thus created a flat shelf approximately a foot deep in front of each one.”

“If you say so. But what-“

Sergeant Mac Vicar waved a magisterial hand for silence. “Now, since you have seen ample evidence of the state John Architrave’s ancestral home was in at the time it fell into possession of the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club, you can well believe, eh, that yon ledges had not been cleaned off for decades.

Therefore, had your husband gone out one of the aforementioned windows either by accident or by design, he must inevitably have left a trail among the accumulated dirt and debris, as well as transferring some of this material to his clothing. We found no evidence that he did so, therefore we are forced to conclude that he did not make his final exit by that route.”

“Then it must have been one of the second floor windows he fell from.”

“Aye, but here again we run up against an enigma. In the first place, Dr. Somervell questions whether the relatively shorter drop could have resulted in such extensive injuries as Mr. Fairfield was found to have sustained. There is the added difficulty that above the spot where his body was discovered, there is only one other window that might conceivably have answered the purpose.

This is that odd little porthole affair high up in the stairwell, which is accessible only by a most precariously perched ladder. Why it was ever put there, the Lord in His infinite wisdom doubtless knows.”

“But what about those ropes of Frederick Churtle’s?”

“A most ingenious suggestion, Mrs. Fairfield. But e’en supposing a man of your husband’s years, dignity, and known aversion to heights presumed to make a monkey of himself by means of the rigging, it would have availed him nowt. That window was painted shut sometime around eighteen hundred and seventy-two, from the look of it, and has obviously never been opened since.”

“Sergeant Mac Vicar, what are you trying to tell me?”

“I am trying to point out to you that having ruled out possible alternatives and having found certain evidence to support our thesis, we are led to assume your husband fell off the roof.”

“The roof? Oh, but that’s impossible. Peregrine would never in the world have gone on the roof. He was scared to death of heights from the time he was a little boy. I can remember that odious Frederick Churtle teasing him about it. Frederick himself doesn’t mind heights a bit. He was an elevator repair man when I first knew him. He’d tell dreadful stories about walking across an elevator shaft forty stories high on a narrow plank, and poor Peregrine would get sick to his stomach just hearing about it. Surely you must be mistaken, Sergeant Mac Vicar. Isn’t it more likely Peregrine lived long enough to have crawled away from the spot where he fell, or that he-he bounced when he hit?”

She clapped the by now somewhat less pristine handkerchief to her mouth. Sergeant MacVicar shook his head.

“I fear not, Mrs. Fairfield. He landed in a bed of bee balm, you know. The plants were badly crushed by the impact of his body.

There is no such crushing anywhere but underneath where he lay when we found him. Dr. Somervell gives it as his considered opinion that the dent in Mr. Fairfield’s head was such as to have effected his instant demise. Also, we have discovered yarn from that gray Shetland cardigan he was wearing at the time caught on one of the ornamental spikes that surround yon skylight. Can you explain how it got there?”

Mrs. Fairfield shook her head. “Then-then what you’re saying, Sergeant MacVicar, is that my husband killed himself.”

Sergeant Mac Vicar’s blue eyes remained unswervingly focused on her face. “Can you think of a reason why he might have done so, Mrs. Fairfleld?”

“I never saw anybody look so much like a largemouth bass in my life,” Dittany told Hazel Munson later, not derisively but merely in the interest of accurate reportage.

Nor was she exaggerating. It was some time before Mrs. Fairfield managed to get her lower jaw back under control. Even then she had to wet her lips and swallow a couple of times before her voice came back.

“No. Not really. I suppose one never knows what may be going on inside another person’s mind, but I’d have thought Peregrine was the last person in the world to commit suicide. He hadn’t been happy about retiring, but then the appointment to the Architrave came along and that cheered him up. Of course when we got here we found it was-well-something less than we’d been given to expect, but that just made the challenge all the greater. Peregrine was quite cheerful about it, really. He said it was like starting a new career.”

“And what about his health, Mrs. Fairfield?”

“Not bad, for a man his age. He took blood pressure pills, but that’s nothing unusual.”

“Any pressing financial worries?”

“Not after I managed to get Frederick Churtle’s hand out of his pocket. One doesn’t exactly get rich in our line of work, you know, but we’d managed to build up a little reserve, and Peregrine had his pension. The salary here isn’t much, of course, but we felt that getting our living quarters provided by the Architrave made it a reasonable enough situation. No, Sergeant Mac Vicar, unless there was some secret in Peregrine’s life I don’t know about or unless Peregrine had a sudden attack of brain fever, I simply can’t picture him climbing up on the roof and jumping off.”

“Then that brings us to the final alternative, does it not?”

“The final-I’m not sure what you mean.”

“A mere matter of logic, Mrs. Fairfield. Since we have ruled out the likelihood that Mr. Fairfield effected his own sorry demise either by accident or by design, then it must follow as the night the day that somebody murdered him.”

The widow took his words better than Sergeant Mac Vicar appeared to have been expecting. Dittany wasn’t a bit surprised, though. Tough as a boiled owl was her own ungenerous private appraisal, not that she’d ever boiled an owl or would have dreamed of trying to. Anyway, Mrs. Fairfield must have seen it coming. She bowed her head, employed her handkerchief, then replied quietly enough, “I suppose there’s nothing else left to believe, is there? But who on earth would want to loll Peregrine?”