Chapter 19 #2
Mackinnon was turning out to be useful. “Dr. Curtis is free to leave when you’ve spoken to him. Tell the women I’ll be in to speak to them shortly.” Alec turned back to Ridgeway. “How long?”
“Eight hours, or thereabouts.” As he spoke, Ridgeway’s hands roved about the body, palpating, raising an eyelid to peer into a staring eye, loosening tie and collar to examine the throat. “Unofficially, around midnight. Officially, sometime between ten and two. It’s not an exact science, you know.”
“I’m all too aware of the fact. In this case I doubt it matters much, but how often you fellows would solve a case for us if you could say, ‘He died at precisely twelve-oh-three A.M.’”
“I would if I could,” said Ridgeway, “but I can’t. The pathologist might be able to help, if he’d eaten recently and someone can tell you when. Are you going to get Spilsbury?”
“I doubt it.” The brilliant Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Home Office Pathologist, was too much in demand to take on an apparently commonplace suicide. “Not unless I can prove it’s murder.”
“I thought that was the way you were leaning.”
“Not necessarily. He had ample reason for killing himself, perhaps more reason than the obvious.”
“You mean he may have done for Talmadge. Well, it looks to me like suicide. I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty that he was neither knocked on the head nor suffocated, strangled, or choked. Cherry red livor suggests carbon monoxide poisoning. There’s a hint of hydrogen sulphide about the eyes. He could have been sedated with
Veronal and moved here. Should show up at autopsy. Did you want me to do it?”
“Rather you than that idiot Renfrew, but you knew him, didn’t you? I’ll find someone else.”
“Thanks.” Ridgeway stood up. “If there’s nothing else, then, I’m off.”
“Right-oh. No, don’t wash your hands there, please. There’s a downstairs cloakroom, I believe.”
Ridgeway looked at the mugs in the sink, nodded soberly, and followed Alec out of the kitchen.
Mackinnon met them in the hall. “Mrs. Bates seems to have recovered from the shock,” he said with a grin. “She wants to know when she can have her kitchen back.”
As Alec and Mackinnon entered the sitting room, Nora Bates surged to her feet.
“I’ve my work to do,” she snapped, shocked, perhaps, but not notably distressed by her master’s demise.
“And while Mrs. Davies lounges about, the floors aren’t getting any cleaner, and I s’pose she’ll expect to be paid, same as usual. ”
“Seeing it’s not you as pays me,” said the charwoman indulgently, “don’t you fret your kidneys to flinders for nuffink, ducks.”
“I’m afraid there won’t be any cleaning done until the house has been searched. I have a few questions to put to you, Mrs. Bates.” Alec hid a smile as Mrs. Davies leant back in her sling chair, crossed her ankles, and prepared to enjoy her leisure and the show.
Sitting down again, Mrs. Bates glared at him. “Well?”
“I gather yesterday was your day off. What time did you get back?”
“Eleven.”
“Were the Walkers at home?”
“Yes.”
“In this room?”
“It’s none of my business where they sit.”
“Come now, Mrs. Bates, this isn’t a vast country mansion. I’m sure you knew where they were.”
The housekeeper’s lips pursed. “She was in here. He was in his den.”
“Thank you. Did you speak to either of them? Or see or hear them speaking to each other?”
“No.”
“All right, what did you do when you got home?”
“They dined out so there wasn’t any washing up. I put out the things for the major’s Ovaltine and went to bed.”
“The major’s Ovaltine?”
“Had to have it, every night, like clockwork.”
“What about Mrs. Walker?”
“Not her. She used to tease him about it, said it was an old-maidish kind of nightcap. Brandy’s what she likes at bedtime. Not a big one, I’ll give her that, but it’s not a proper bedtime drink for a lady if you ask me.”
So why the two mugs?
From the corner of his eye, Alec saw PC Jenkins come in. He went to Mackinnon, who was taking notes, and whispered something, shaking his head. Alec ignored them to concentrate on Mrs. Bates, who was just beginning to warm up.
“After you went up to your room, did you hear any unusual sounds?”
“When you work hard like I do, you don’t lie awake listening for bumps in the night,” she said witheringly.
Unwithered, Alec said, “So you heard nothing till your usual time of waking? You have an alarm clock, I expect. What time does it go off?”
“Half six.”
“What did you do then?”
“Same as what everyone does when they get up.”
“Wash, dress, go downstairs. Did you notice anything unusual on your way down?”
“No.”
“No smell of gas?”
“Not till I opened the kitchen door. It seals pretty tight to keep cooking smells out of the rest of the house.”
“All right, let’s start there. What did you do then?”
“Closed it quick. I’m not stupid.”
Alec’s patience frayed. “I never thought you were, Mrs. Bates, except in your uncooperative attitude. This would waste a lot less of your precious time if you’d just answer my questions fully so that I don’t have to dig for details.
Tell me now exactly what you did from the moment you realized something was amiss until you came into this room to sit down. ”
She sniffed but complied. She had opened the front door and the big window on the landing, then returned to the kitchen.
Leaving the passage door open she had dashed through, holding her nose, to the back door, unbolted and flung it open, and gone out into the garden to breathe deeply.
Not till her second foray to open the kitchen windows had she noticed the major.
“He looked dead as mutton,” she said with a shudder, the first sign of any emotion other than irritation. “I had to get out and catch my breath, but I went back in and picked up
his hand. Like ice it was. I knew he’d passed on, for sure, but I telephoned Dr. Curtis and he said to telephone the police. Which I did. I waited in the hall for the doctor. When he came, he told me to come in here and sit down.”
“You kept your head admirably,” Alec said, “and acted with the greatest common sense.”
Her snort suggested that she was not in the least gratified by his praise.
“At what point did you turn off the gas tap?”
She looked at him blankly. “Turn off the gas? I don’t remember doing that.”
“You musta done, ducks. Don’t make no sense opening all them doors and winders if you di’n’t. Where’s the sense in that, I arst you?”
Alec gave Mrs. Davies a be-quiet look.
“I don’t remember,” the housekeeper said obstinately.
“Think it through again, Mrs. Bates. Close your eyes and think back to opening the kitchen door. Imagine yourself going through each action. You opened the door, smelt the gas, and … ?”
She ran through the whole sequence again, in almost exactly the same words.
“You was flustered, Nora, stands to reason. ‘Course you don’t ’member zackly every little bitty thing you done.” Mrs. Davies turned to Alec and added confidentially, “I ’specks it’ll come to ’er in time, ducks, if you give ’er time to think about it.”
And it probably would. All the same, it was curious that Nora Bates recalled everything else so clearly yet was adamant about not remembering that one small thing. Oddnesses were beginning to mount up.
Alec asked her some general questions about the Walkers, whether she had ever heard them quarrelling, and if so what about. Her ignorance seemed to be genuine. She closed her ears and her mind to what she considered none of her business and had nothing useful to impart.
Mrs. Davies had just, with pleasurable excitement, given her full name and address, when Tring, Piper, and the ambulance all arrived. Alec sent Tom to photograph the body and fingerprint the gas taps on the stove.
“Piper, go with him and take samples of the liquids in the mugs and saucepan you’ll find in the sink. Is there something in the larder he can use, Mrs. Bates?”
“Oh for a murder bag,” muttered Tom.
“There’s clean jam jars. They’re to be returned, mind, properly cleaned and no lids missing. Waste not, want not.”
“Quite right, ma’am,” Tom said, beaming at her. “I’ll check the mugs and pan for dabs, shall I, Mr. Fletcher?”
“Yes. But do the photos first so we needn’t keep these gentlemen waiting.” He indicated the two stretcher-bearers lounging in the hall. “Take Constable Jenkins with you to fetch and carry.”
The three departed. Alec turned back to Mrs. Davies.
“Cor, I’d be ’appy to ’elp you, ducks,” she said regretfully, “but I bin rackin’ me brains and I don’t know nuffink I ain’t already tol’ you.”
“We’ll just go over what you told me yesterday, for the record.”
With Mackinnon taking verbatim notes, she repeated what she had said about the discord between the Walkers, oblivious of Mrs. Bates’s face growing sourer and sourer. Alec recalled his feeling that she had said something useful
before, but this time nothing sparked that impression. Nor did his questions elicit anything.
“All right, ladies, if you don’t mind waiting in the hall for a few minutes, the sergeant and I will go over this room. Then you can come back and clean and tidy to your hearts’ content.”
The sitting room held no obvious clues: nothing but bottles and glasses in the drinks cabinet; no safe behind the Cubist painting on the wall; no incriminating letters between the pages of the carelessly tossed magazines; no half-burnt papers in the grate.
They went out to the hall. Mrs. Davies was joking with the ambulance men while Mrs. Bates looked crabbier than ever, if possible.
Alec asked the whereabouts of the major’s den.
The small room was at the back of the house, the opposite side to the kitchen.
Here the major’s passion for neatness held sway, along with his preference for tradition.
No ultra-modern professional decorator had touched this cosy retreat with its deep armchairs and huge Victorian pedestal desk.
The only picture was an equally huge and equally Victorian painting of the Battle of Waterloo.
Wellington and Napoleon everlastingly faced each other on opposite hillsides above a scene of carnage.
“Very military,” Mackinnon commented.
“Very.” But Alec’s gaze was on the desk. On the meticulously aligned blotter lay a folded sheet of notepaper. Reaching for it, he let out a long sigh. So much for all his vague theories. “I think this is what we’re looking for,” he said.