Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
“Darling, could I have a quick word with you?”
Alec frowned. Daisy did her best to look as if she had something frightfully important to tell him. Which she did.
Worrall had decided Daisy’s appearance in the hall would cause less disturbance, less curiosity, than his own or DS Tring’s.
He didn’t know who was being questioned at present by the chief inspector and, short of bursting into Humphrey’s office, the only way to tell was to see who was missing from the hall.
If Lorna were there, she might take fright at his arrival.
If she were not, that would mean she was in the middle of an interview and might take fright if the inspector asked to speak privately to her interrogator.
Daisy had managed to count heads from the doorway under the stairs, so she didn’t need to actually enter the hall. She suspected Roger Knox had spotted her, but no one else. Lorna was missing.
She softly closed the door and stood thinking for a moment.
Lorna was with Alec and Piper. With any luck, she would assume Daisy had some personal reason for interrupting, but if Alec had the same idea, he might refuse to cooperate.
Sadly, no brilliant ploys came to mind. She crossed the passage, knocked on the door, and opened it without waiting for a response.
“What is it, Daisy?” Alec asked irritably.
Lorna sat stolidly in front of the desk, not turning her head to look at the intruder, so Daisy risked a wink and an urgent jerk of the head towards the door.
“It won’t take a moment, honestly.”
“Excuse me, Miss Birtwhistle.” Alec kept his impatient expression pasted to his face until the door closed behind him. Then it changed to eagerness. “They’ve found something?”
Daisy explained about the prescription receipt, dated the previous day, in Lorna’s wastepaper basket and the apparent burnt remains of potassium bromide powders in her grate. “They couldn’t find any sign elsewhere of the powders she bought. If she takes it herself, why try to hide it?”
“She could have been afraid it would draw suspicion to her. She doesn’t—or shouldn’t—know that chloral was used, unless she administered it. And in that case, why get bromide as well?”
Daisy was crestfallen. “It doesn’t really mean anything, then.”
“That’s not what I said. It doesn’t prove anything, but it suggests a great deal.”
“I wonder why she didn’t burn the receipt.”
“Probably threw it away automatically when she came in after shopping, and forgot about it.”
“I suppose so. It was torn up and mixed with other rubbish. So what next?”
“We’ll have to send the stuff from the fireplace to an analyst, to make sure it actually is bromide, or whatever potassium bromide turns into when it burns.
Or some similar drug. We’ll have to go to the chemist and get the name of the doctor who wrote the prescription, and interview him. We’ll have to—”
“Shouldn’t you get back to her now, though, darling? Or she’ll start wondering.”
“Let her wonder. She won’t wonder for long. I’m taking her into the Matlock station. She has some serious questions to answer. So far, I haven’t got much more than ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘I can’t remember’ out of her. She’s not exactly communicative.”
“To be fair, one couldn’t call her communicative at the best of times.”
“If she hasn’t a good explanation to give us, she’s in a lot of trouble. Tom and Worrall are continuing to look for a chloral bottle, I hope?”
“Yes. Worrall and PC Bagshaw seem to be pretty thorough searchers. Not as good as Tom, that goes without saying.”
Alec grinned. “Of course. Let me think.” After a moment’s consideration, he went on, “First of all, I’ll have to consult Worrall. For one thing, if they don’t find that bottle in the house, we’re going to need a lot more men to search outside.”
“What if she and her brother are in league together? Norman could have taken the bottle with him and tossed it in a ditch or buried it somewhere. I don’t know how big the farm is, but I shouldn’t think you’d ever find it.”
With a groan, Alec admitted, “You’re probably right. Would you say they’re on such terms that they might have conspired?”
“To tell the truth, I haven’t a clue. I’ve never seen them talking to each other. For all I know they dislike each other as much as they disliked Humphrey.”
“Which wouldn’t, however, prevent their conspiring to do away with him. Now, Worrall.”
“Will you go up to see him, or shall I fetch him?”
“Would you mind, love? I’d rather not leave Ernie alone with Miss Birtwhistle when he hasn’t heard the latest news.”
“You’ll have to start paying me a salary soon.”
“Don’t hold your breath. And Daisy, don’t take this as licence to meddle.”
She ignored this with what she hoped was an air of injured innocence. She never meddled. She couldn’t help it if she got involved in his cases from time to time. This one wouldn’t even be his if it hadn’t been for Superintendent Crane’s meddling.
“Tell Worrall to knock and come in.” Alec returned to Humphrey’s office.
Daisy wished she could listen to what he said to Lorna about the chemist’s receipt. She trudged back upstairs, where the men had moved on to Sybil’s rooms.
“If you find the bottle in there,” Daisy said from the doorway, “it’s because someone else put it there.”
“We’ll bear that possibility in mind,” said Worrall with a touch of sarcasm.
“But we haven’t found anything yet,” Tom reassured her. “What’s the chief going to do next?”
“Miss Birtwhistle was with him. He wants to take her in to Matlock, to the station, but he’d like to consult you first, Inspector. Just knock and go in, he said.”
Worrall left. Daisy stepped into the room.
It was Sybil’s sitting room and served also as Monica’s playroom when she was at home.
Both Tom and Bagshaw were going through the three overstuffed bookcases against the wall facing the windows, taking every book out, shaking it, and checking behind.
As well as a selection of modern novels and histories, all the children’s classics were there: Wind in the Willows, Alice, Black Beauty, Heidi, The Water-Babies, Five Children and It, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Secret Garden …
Daisy recognised most from her youth, a few later ones from Belinda’s bookshelves at home.
An ottoman in a corner probably held toys and games.
“Shall I help?” she asked Tom.
As expected, he rejected her offer. The room was her friend’s, after all.
“What’s through there?” he asked, gesturing at the door opposite the one she had entered by.
“Sybil’s and her daughter’s bedrooms, I suppose. Once the night nursery and the nurserymaid’s bedroom, perhaps. I haven’t seen them.”
“So you don’t know whether there’s a door at the end to the west wing?”
“I’m pretty sure there is. When I went to bed last night—this morning—Sybil came with me up the west stairs in the hall. There’s another staircase at the north end of the wing, for Norman’s convenience, I assume. His bedroom is above his estate office.”
“This is an exceedingly complicated house,” Tom said severely. “I’ve been in great mansions that were simpler to find your way about.”
“Fairacres, my family’s home, is complicated if you’re not familiar with it. It’s all the alterations and additions over the years. The original farmhouse must have been quite simple.”
“What’s the other side of this wall?” He knocked on the wall behind the bookcases.
“At a guess, a warren of small rooms. The original house must have had rooms for children, and the Victorian house for servants. A sewing room, perhaps. That sort of thing. Now that they haven’t any live-in servants, they may be full of lumber.
Old furniture, superannuated curtains, all kinds of junk, you know. ”
Tom and Bagshaw groaned in unison.
“If we did find a bottle,” said Bagshaw gloomily, “we couldn’t tell who put it there.”
“Unless it has fingerprints,” Daisy pointed out.
“Too many crooks these days read detective stories,” said Tom, “or at least hear about others being caught because they left their dabs at the scene of the crime.”
“Lorna isn’t a crook in that sense,” said Daisy, “and not much of a reader, either. I doubt she would think to wipe them off, if she did it.”
Tom’s eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “You don’t believe it was her?”
“Well, I’m quite prepared to believe she’s been drugging poor Humphrey for years, a mixture of spite and wanting the increased flow of money to continue…”
The men looked at her blankly.
Tom asked, “Wasn’t Mr. Birtwhistle an author, bringing in money for his books? How did drugging him increase—?”
“Haven’t you heard the whole story? I’d better let Alec or Mr. Worrall explain. The question is, why did Lorna bother to acquire a new supply of bromide if she intended to kill her brother with chloral?”
“Could be she wasn’t sure she’d be able to nerve herself to do it. If you ask me, there’s a lot more murders planned than ever get carried out.”
“That makes sense. Sort of. Do you think a doctor would give her prescriptions for both chloral and bromide, though?”
“Two different doctors,” Tom suggested. “Or maybe she got the chloral a while ago and only just decided to use it.”
“The receipt we found is only for powders,” PC Bagshaw put in. “She must have gone to two different chemists, too, if she got both yesterday.”
“We weren’t in Matlock long enough yesterday for her to visit two doctors and two chemists’ shops. She did some other shopping, too. Her basket was quite full.”
“Ah.” Tom paused for reflection. “Been hoarding it then, likely. Maybe waiting till there were plenty of people about to confuse things, to increase the number of suspects.”
“Not just the number. With so many people moving about, passing food and drink and so on, no one can remember who did what when or where.”
“Not even you?”
“It was so similar to Monday evening, my first here, I get the two confused.”
“Sounds like a right muddle! The Chief’ll sort it out, though.
You know how it is, one person remembers one little detail, and that leads to another, and soon the whole lot’s disentangling.
What you said just now, Miss Birtwhistle’s basket being full of shopping and her not likely to get the bromide if she was planning to use chloral to do away with the old man, either of those could be a loose end that’ll start things rolling. Or have you already told the Chief?”
“No, I haven’t had the chance.”
“You’d better go and tell him.”
Daisy wasn’t so sure. About the basket, perhaps, though he’d probably be annoyed that she hadn’t mentioned it before. But once she embarked on theoretical matters, either he’d already considered the possibilities himself or he’d accuse her of indulging in wild speculation. And meddling.
All the same, she might as well go down and see if she could at least mention the basket without interrupting an interview. It just might provide a way to insinuate herself back into the heart of the investigation from which the arrival of the reinforcements had dislodged her.