Chapter Fourteen
FOURTEEN
“Daisy?”
“Darling! You’ve rung just in time. Tom wants to interrogate me.”
“So do I. Tell him to hold off with the thumbscrews until I arrive.”
“Right-oh. Are you at the Yard still? I’ll give him a cup of tea in the meantime. And all the others, too, I suppose. Mrs. Dobson’s getting a trifle fed up.”
“What are they all doing there? No, don’t tell me! Doubtless I shall find out in due course. I’m on my way.”
Daisy hung up. If he was coming home, surely he wouldn’t then take Tom and Mackinnon back to the Yard, or even to the local station, to give their reports. With any luck at all, she would manage to listen in.
Instead of trying to guess from Tom’s questions what the Jessups had told him, she would hear it from his own mouth.
It wasn’t that she intended to lie on their behalf, but nor would she disclose everything unless she was convinced that the police needed to know.
In her experience, they were all too apt to read a sinister significance into the most innocent actions.
Tom and Ernie had arrived first. When Elsie announced them, Daisy had told her to show them into the dining room.
No sooner had she joined them there than Mackinnon and Warren turned up, looking for Tom.
Before Tom had made up his mind whether Daisy ought to leave while he and Mackinnon discussed the results of questioning the Jessups and the Bennetts, the telephone rang.
But Alec’s call had been very brief. Returning to the dining room, Daisy hoped she hadn’t missed anything.
As she pushed open the door, Ernie Piper was saying in an incredulous voice, “Shopping? The biggest gossip in the neighbourhood, with a murder on her doorstep, and she goes shopping? You’re having us on.”
Daisy slipped in and sat down as quietly as possible. Tom and Ernie were staring at Mackinnon, Ernie looking quite indignant.
“Simmer down, lad,” said Tom calmly. “Mr. Bennett told you his sister went shopping, Mr. Mackinnon?”
“So did the servants.”
“Ah. Well, that’d be what they were told.”
“It’s not as odd as it sounds,” Mackinnon protested.
“It seems she has a school friend living in the country who comes up to town once a month. The ladies go out to a show and supper, and then, rather than come home late—I gather Bennett objects to being disturbed after midnight—his sister stays at the friend’s hotel.
And next day, they go shopping together.
Sometimes, if they manage to get tickets for something good, they’ll stay over another night. ”
“Sounds to me like a load of codswallop,” said Warren.
Though Daisy would have used a less vulgar term, that was exactly what it sounded like to her.
Why on earth had the Bennetts—or Mr. Bennett—invented such a farrago?
Surely not to give Miss Bennett time to escape the police?
It just wasn’t possible that she had murdered the man in the garden.
She wasn’t capable of killing anything but reputations.
“He claims he doesn’t know what hotel she stayed at last night,” Mackinnon went on. “Nor whether she intends to come home today.”
Tom glanced at Daisy. She should have known her return had not escaped his eagle eye. She shook her head. She’d never heard of Miss Bennett’s monthly outing, or her school friend, come to that, and she hadn’t had time to develop any theories.
“Tell it to the Chief,” Tom said. “I take it no one in the house saw or heard anything last night?”
“The servants didn’t. Mr. Bennett was … What would you say, Warren? Evasive, perhaps.”
“Kept on and on about how they hadn’t thought anything of it at the time and he wouldn’t want to say anything that might get someone into trouble when he wasn’t absolutely sure—”
“Ha!” escaped Daisy inadvertently.
They all looked at her. She was afraid they’d stop talking about the Bennetts, though they’d find it difficult to ask her to leave her own dining room.
However, Tom turned back to Mackinnon, produced an ah laden with meaning, and asked, “Anything else?”
“It’s what he refused to say that seems to me significant, Mr. Tring,” said Mackinnon. “He refused to tell us anything more until he talks to his sister to see if she remembers the same.”
“Never heard that one before, Mr. Mackinnon! Now, Mrs. Fletcher knows the Bennetts. What do you think he meant by it, Mrs. Fletcher?”
“I wouldn’t say I know them. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid them. But if you ask me, neither of them saw anything and they’re waiting to see which way the wind blows before they invent a story.”
“Waiting to find out what happened and who’s suspected, you mean?”
“Exactly. I simply can’t believe she’d go off to a show and a day’s shopping if they had really seen anything. She’s keeping out of the way to give him an excuse to postpone telling what they’ll claim to have seen, so that when she returns, they can concoct a tale to fit the facts.”
“I bet that’s it,” said Ernie Piper enthusiastically. “I bet you’ve hit the nail on the head, Mrs. Fletcher.”
“Ah,” said Tom, his eyes twinkling. “We’ll see.”
“Nae doot the chief inspector will try to persuade Mr. Bennett to tell his tale before he has a chance to learn the facts from servants and neighbours and pass them on to Miss Bennett.”
“Not much hope of that, Sergeant,” Warren put in with his accustomed gloom. “We’ve talked to every servant in the Circle, and you can bet they’re all comparing notes by now. However careful we’ve been, they’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.”
“In any case,” said Daisy, “I should think Alec’s more likely to send you to do it, Tom.
He doesn’t like the Bennetts any better than I do, and I expect they know it.
Not that he’d let his dislike get in the way of the truth, but if he disbelieves them, they might make a fuss and start spreading nasty rumours about prejudice. ”
“Sounds to me like they’ll do that anyway,” said Warren.
“Probably, but there’s no point adding fuel to the flames. One thing’s certain: Whatever they claim to have seen will be aimed at making trouble for someone. That’s what they live for. Don’t you think you should have a go at him, Tom?”
“It’s for the Chief to decide. In the meantime, now that I’ve talked to the Jessup household, I’ve a few questions for you, Mrs. Fletcher, before we go back to the Yard to report to him.”
“That was Alec I talked to on the phone just now, and he said he’s on his way here.” Daisy sighed. “He wants to ask me questions, too. So, since I’m so popular at the moment, why don’t we just wait till he arrives? We can have a cup of tea while we wait.”
She was pouring second cups all round when the front doorbell rang again. Elsie ushered in DC Ardmore. He looked somewhat nonplussed at finding himself in the middle of a tea party.
“Do sit down, Mr. Ardmore,” Daisy invited.
“Another cup, madam?” asked the parlour maid resignedly.
“Yes, please, Elsie, and some more hot water.”
“I telephoned in, Sarge,” Ardmore told Mackinnon, “and they told me the chief inspector left a message to meet him here.”
“That’s right. Any luck?”
“Depends how you look at it. No one at the Hampstead station recognised the passport photo. Me and a couple of the uniformed lads covered Well Walk, Flask Walk, and the High Street and we found four people who thought they might have seen him. Only not a one of ’em would swear to it, and they didn’t know anything about him anyway, just seen him about.
We went to a couple of hotels and lodging houses, but no luck there.
It’ll take more time or more men to check everywhere in the area. ”
“And he could be staying anywhere,” said Tom. “Doesn’t have to be Hampstead. I expect we’ll have to circulate the picture to all stations. Go on.”
“The other American, your friend Lambert, Mrs. Fletcher—lots of people recognised the description, and the woman at the newsagent’s told me where he lodges. So I went along there and had a chat with the landlady—it’s a widow who lets out a couple of rooms. Hodge is the name.”
“He wasn’t there?” Mackinnon asked.
“No, nor he didn’t come in last night,” Ardmore said with heavy significance.
“She doesn’t know where he went?”
“No, but she does say he’s often away for a night or two,” the detective constable conceded, “so she wasn’t worried. She says she doesn’t usually let to foreigners, but he speaks English quite well, and he’s a nice young chap. Keeps his room tidy and very helpful about the place when he’s home.”
“That sounds like Lambert all right,” said Daisy. “Did he tell Mrs. Hodge why he’s here? In England?”
“It seems he said he’s in the import business and looking for suppliers.”
Daisy laughed. “It’s true, in a way.” She didn’t know how much of Lambert’s clandestine mission Alec had entrusted to the others, so she didn’t explain that he was in the business of preventing imports and looking for the suppliers of bootleggers.
The coincidences really were too much to swallow: A Prohibition agent who was interested in a wine merchant who was visited by a mysterious American who turned up dead a hundred yards from his house.
Although Daisy couldn’t see Lambert as a cold-blooded killer, she couldn’t forget the irresponsible way he had waved his gun around at their first meeting, when she and Alec were in the States.
Yet if anyone was going to get bumped off, an agent of the law seemed the most likely victim.
Into the middle of a discussion of which she hadn’t heard a word, Daisy dropped the question: “What if Lambert has been murdered, too?”
Everyone stared at her in silence.
Tom was first to recover. “Have you any reason to think he might be?”
“Alec didn’t tell you why he came to England?”
“Not just to visit you and see the sights, I take it.”