Chapter Eighteen
M ARCH 24, 1931
B OULOGNE-SUR- M ER, F RANCE
Leaving the Gare Centrale, we march back up the blasted hill to rue de Lille in silence. Typically, I cannot bear quiet, but now that I understand the how, my mind is spinning wildly with the why. Why on earth would a young English nurse on a leisure-time jaunt to France feel driven to go such lengths to vanish? Particularly when it meant that her friend and fellow nurse would be stranded, since May had the ferry tickets and Celia had no money? What was she hiding—or fleeing—from?
The silence breaks with Margery. “You’ve solved the locked-room puzzle, Dorothy. That calls for congratulations. A toast over lunch?”
“I don’t feel very celebratory,” I reply.
“Why?” Margery asks. “This conundrum lay unresolved for six months.”
“We may have solved the locked-room puzzle, but that resolution means her disappearance was planned and raises countless questions. Someone or something prompted May to disguise herself and run away, leaving her friend high and dry. What or who? And when one pairs these facts with the way in which her body was arranged, with her purse and the infamous syringe lying nearby, well…”
I leave my sentence unfinished. I do not want to be presumptuous and assume these brilliant puzzle masters aren’t reaching the same conclusions as I am.
Agatha takes up the thread. “The purse contained her identification, so there would be no mistaking her body for someone else’s.” She shakes her head disapprovingly. “And the syringe—”
Emma interrupts. “It’s a supposed explanation for her murder, a drug deal gone wrong or an overdose. But it’s an obvious red herring.”
Ngaio practically snorts. “Almost textbook stuff. So heavy-handed.”
I nod. What a relief to be in the company of these women who speak the same shorthand as I do. “But not to the police and the press, who are looking for headlines and an easy solution. To them, the syringe is a godsend,” I say. “One they’ll cling to unless another solution hits them in the face. And soon. Otherwise, case closed.”
“It seems the authorities and journalists are unbothered by the illogic of two British nurses traveling to France to procure an illicit substance that is readily available in their place of work,” Emma says. “I mean, the girls probably injected morphine into patients every day. Would have been the simplest thing in the world to skim a little off the top.”
“The authorities are utterly unperturbed by the logical fallacy of it,” I say in agreement. “They might be thinking that the girls were selling instead of buying, but that seems far-fetched. They each traveled to Boulogne with only a handbag, an improbable and too-small carrying case for glass morphine vials. The rest of their belongings stayed behind in Brighton where May and Celia stayed the night before heading to Boulogne, and where they’d presumably return for another night when their ferry came back to England.”
“It will be interesting to see how reporters spin the autopsy findings when they get their hands on them. I’m convinced that May’s death had nothing to do with drugs. They won’t find morphine in her system,” Agatha says.
“Not that the facts will stop the authorities or the press from insinuating that her involvement with drugs somehow led to her demise,” Margery adds.
“If you are going to consort with riffraff, then you’re asking to be treated like riffraff and all that,” Ngaio sneers.
“More troubling to me is that all this planning demonstrates that May was afraid and that there was someone to be afraid of. Someone about to undertake a premeditated murder.”
Agatha nods. “The stakes have just been raised.”
We reach the apex of the cobblestone hill, and just as we are about to turn onto rue de Lille, the pale pink storefront of the chemist’s shop on the corner catches my eye. We’d considered stopping in the Pharmacie Notre Dame yesterday, but when that young reporter spotted me through the millinery window, the plan fell by the wayside. Now that May’s murderer has shown himself or herself to be a deliberate, careful actor, however, we need to proceed accordingly.
Unlike most utilitarian pharmacies, the Pharmacie Notre Dame, proudly founded in 1847, is downright charming, with its rosy exterior and brown-and-white-striped awning. I gesture to the pretty shop and ask, “Shall we?”
Just as I’m about to push open the pink door emblazoned with the words HOMEOPATHIE and PHYTOTHERAPIE , Ngaio asks, “Would the young women faff around in a chemist’s on their holiday?”
“I’m not sure this was a holiday for May,” I say.
I’m about to add that we wouldn’t allow our fictional detectives to skip a single store, so we shouldn’t, either. But Agatha answers for me. “We must err on the side of caution. And anyway, it’s most likely a formality.”
We file into the store, empty of customers but lined with crowded wooden shelves painted the same blush shade as the exterior. A beautifully coiffed blonde steps out from the back. She could be in her fifties, but she is so exquisitely made up and outfitted in a bias-cut emerald dress that her age is indeterminate. “Bonne journée. Comment puis-je vous aider?”
This time, I will not be playing the role of innocent tourist. We need to get straight to the point. I just want to tick the box marked “visit every shop on rue de Lille.” No stone left unturned and all that.
Reaching into my purse, I slide out the pictures of May and Celia and hand them to the shopkeeper. “Je me demande si vous avez déjà vu cettes jeunes femmes.”
“Ah, this is the poor Miss Daniels and her friend. First missing, now dead.”
“Yes. I am sure the police have asked you about her.”
“Oh, yes. Terrible business.” She sighs, then gestures down rue de Lille. “All the shopkeepers have been visited by the gendarmes because, of course, this area is popular with tourists. And the young women were tourists.”
“I’m not surprised tourists flock here. It is delightful.”
A tiny grin forms upon her crimson lips, then fades and is replaced by a furrowed brow. “Why are you asking about her? You can’t possibly be affiliated with the police.” We both know that the only positions open to females in the French and English police departments are typists and aides who work with imperiled women and children. Even then, the scope of their responsibilities is very limited.
“No—my husband is covering the case for News of the World, and I volunteered to help. Anything for the poor young English girl,” I answer. This of course is a half truth, knowing as I do that the shopkeeper has no real reason to share a single morsel of information with me and every incentive to paint a pretty picture and thus keep the tourist trade steady. “I’m wondering if you saw either one of the girls on the October day that Miss Daniels disappeared.”
“I did,” she answers, to my surprise. The chemist’s shop was only mentioned in passing in the police reports.
“You did?” I blurt out, gobsmacked at my luck. Triple luck, actually, since we’ve now encountered three women who interacted with the nurses but whose names aren’t referenced in the police report. Did the gendarmes not think the observations of Madame Brat, the millinery salesgirl, or this shopkeeper worth recording? Interesting that these everyday women have been devalued or ignored by the authorities, even though they see and hear and know more than anyone believes possible. Perhaps Emma was correct when she pronounced that May’s murder needed to be solved by women, in part because only female sleuths properly credit female witnesses.
“Yes, the young women stopped in my store.”
In as calm a voice as I can manage, I ask, “About what time?”
“Just before four o’clock, I believe.”
“Do you know what brought them into your shop?”
“Miss Daniels had”—she pauses, then says—“an illness of the belly from la mal de mer . I showed her the proper remedies.”
A stomachache. Just as Madame Brat had mentioned. It seems the tea and toast hadn’t settled her seasickness.
“Can you show me the medicine you directed her to?”
“Yes,” she says. I follow her at a brisk clip for a few feet until she stops before several boxes bearing sketches of various plants. The other women hover nearby but do not intrude on the conversation. She points to a package and says, “I recommended this to her.”
“Did Miss Daniels purchase it?”
“No. She examined several other products,” the woman replies, adding, “despite the fact that I assured her that this particular formulation is superior.”
Perhaps Miss Daniels wanted to check the prices. A young nurse on a day trip to France wouldn’t have budgeted for medicine and would want to keep this unplanned expense low. Not to mention that she had either just purchased the fedora at the millinery or was about to and so perhaps needed to be careful with her funds.
I ask, “Did she say why she didn’t want to purchase it?”
“She said it wouldn’t alleviate her stomach pain . Yet the label says that it does help with la mal de mer .”
“What did Miss McCarthy do while her friend was studying the boxes?” I ask, trying to get a sense of the entire scene.
“She lingered over the cosmetics,” she answers, pointing to the display of lipsticks.
“I assume you shared all this information with the police?”
She raises one of those perfect brows and says, “Of course I answered the gendarmes’ questions.”
“Of course,” I hasten to say. I have no wish to offend her by intimating that she’d be anything less than forthcoming with the police. Especially when she’s being so forthcoming with me. But then I realize that she hasn’t answered my query directly, so I take a chance. “Did they ask about your conversation with Miss Daniels?”
“No, they never asked. They inquired as to whether she made any purchases. Only you have asked, and so you are the one who knows.”
Interesting, I think, although I’m not yet certain what to make of May’s unsettled tummy and her exchange with the store owner. “I appreciate your candor,” I say.
“And I appreciate your thoroughness. No young girl should suffer a terrible fate without an exhaustive investigation,” she says, and I realize that she understands what we’re doing—that the police work is strangely shoddy and that concern over tourism shouldn’t be the reason for half-baked detective work. Then she adds, “The autopsy report was a bit unsettling, wasn’t it?”
“The autopsy report is back?”
“Oh, yes.” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “It came in this morning, along with the results of the soil tests conducted on the earth around and under the body.”
I refrain from asking how she knows. The townspeople of Boulogne, I’m guessing, are an interconnected bunch, but I wonder if my suspicions about the shopkeeper are correct. Is she sharing because I asked the right questions but the police did not? And because I listened to her answers when no male investigator had?
“May I ask what the testing discovered?”
“Only if you did not hear it from me,” she insists.
“I promise.”
“Miss Daniels appears to have died from strangulation.”
I gasp. Even though I knew that sort of violence was possible, I hadn’t prepared myself for it.
“But that’s not all. There was a great deal of blood in the soil underneath the body,” she continues.
This is a strange finding given the cause of death. “Did the coroner find other wounds on the body? Aside from the strangulation marks, I mean.”
“No. And the authorities appear perplexed.”
I’m confused as well. Where would all the blood emanate from if May had no other injuries? Strangulation generally doesn’t yield an abundance of blood.
The woman stares at me, her expression inscrutable but pushing me onward. She will say no more—that I can see. I must draw the next conclusions on my own.
And then it dawns on me. “There are other places from which women bleed.”
The shopkeeper nods at me, as if I’m a student who’s finally mastered a lesson.
I thank the woman and gather the others to leave . When the shop door closes behind us, the women stare at me, waiting for my revelations. I indicate a nearby park bench. As I take a spot at the center of the hard wrought-iron seat and they flank me, it occurs to me that this must be the park where May spent a few moments alone on that fateful October day.
“The autopsy apparently shows injuries to the neck consistent with strangulation. Despite the fact that there were no other wounds on the body, a great deal of Miss Daniels’s blood was discovered in the soil underneath her. The police are perplexed by this,” I tell them.
To my surprise, Agatha is the first to comment. “I cannot imag ine what the police find baffling about a woman hemorrhaging. Women bleed every month, after all. To me, the only questions are the amount of blood and the reason for her hemorrhage. Was it induced by violation of her person? Or could it have been the result of a terribly heavy period or even a miscarriage?”
I hadn’t thought Agatha would be the one to lay out the options so plainly. Even in the exclusive company of females, some women are squeamish about discussing such matters. But now that propriety and euphemisms have been jettisoned, the others come racing through.
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Agatha,” Ngaio says approvingly. Then, turning to me, she asks, “Do we know if Miss Daniels had a boyfriend? Or secret paramour? Could she have been pregnant?”
Margery lets out a low whistle. “That would shed a completely different light on this whole affair.”
“‘Affair’ being the operative word,” Ngaio quips.
Emma joins in. “It might help ascertain a motive—for May’s vanishing and for her murder. What if the hemorrhaging was the result of a back-alley abortion? Could May have snuck away from Celia for the procedure? And then it went horribly wrong?”
As the women debate these possibilities, I try to mask my shock. Never in my wildest imaginings did I think these proper women would launch headlong into a discussion of such taboo topics—subjects the male journalists and police and governmental authorities have most studiously avoided. Even if this “female blood” yielded a crucial clue, I think the men would ignore it. And yet, as I listen to the women’s unabashed exchange, this seems the most natural topic in the world. Perhaps I’m the only one shrinking from a frank conversation about menstruation, unplanned pregnancies, miscarriage, and abortion. And I have my reasons.
“A pregnancy would certainly explain why May ordered tea and toast at the H?tel Morveaux, an act we initially attributed to seasickness. It would also explain why, hours later, she looked for antinausea medication at the chemist’s shop. And she declined a medicine designed specifically for seasickness,” Agatha says.
“Mmm. Nausea can also stem from pregnancy,” Ngaio muses. “Or womanly conditions that can cause it to terminate.”
“May was in a fraught state that day. Remember that the Englishman told us his friend observed her in this very park”—I gesture around us—“alone and crying? Scribbling away? Perhaps she was suffering through a miscarriage. Or debating whether to terminate the pregnancy. Could she have been thinking through her decision by writing it all out? I know that’s how I work out my thoughts. But maybe she said nothing because she didn’t want to alert Celia to the pregnancy in the first place. Or could another sort of personal catastrophe have befallen her—perhaps of the romantic variety?”
Describing this quandary, I feel a pang. And I nearly have to hold back tears myself.
“Interesting,” Margery says, weighing in. “Although these options don’t explain the strangulation injuries.”
“Agreed,” Agatha responds.
A thoughtful silence takes hold of our group until my conjectures come spilling out. “All this informs the likelihood that, at some time during the course of that day, May began bleeding profusely—and that a separate violence was perpetrated upon her. I suppose it’s possible that the latter caused the former.”
The women nod in agreement. Shoulders squared and gaze steady, Agatha adds, “Regardless of the order of events, I think we can agree that this case demonstrates a level of premeditation. Something nefarious is at work here, and we are the only ones who seem to see it. The authorities appear content with easy, damning explanations for May’s murder.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I glance at my friends. “We’ve gone back to the beginning of May’s disappearance. Now we need to go even further back into her life. Let’s begin unearthing the secrets of May Daniels.”