Chapter 33 #3
“As for the rest, Tom, to tell the truth, the case was a barrel of red herrings. And we couldn’t shoot them, we had to fish for them.
The stepson—he had the best motive, two excellent motives in fact: money and revenge.
The victim was his father’s second wife and treated the old man abominably, by all accounts.
Unfortunately, he has an unassailable alibi.
It’s no good looking at me like that, Tom.
I know unassailable alibis are made to be assailed. But this is truly untouchable.”
“If you say so, Chief.”
“Then there were Donald Vaughn and Roger Cartwright. Either or both may have been the victim’s lovers. Both their wives assumed they were.”
“Both of them!” Mrs. Tring was shocked.
“And a London friend now in France. She seems to have been rather free and easy with her favours, and Vaughn may have been her lover; Cartwright probably not. Anyway, each of their wives suspected a liaison and thus had a motive for hating her. Whether or not they were correct in their assumptions turns out to be irrelevant.”
“Vaughn’s the one,” Tom rumbled, “the house agent, that shut up Mrs. Fletcher and t’other young lady in the cellar.”
“That’s right. Financial fraud, as Daisy said. He’d been appropriating his employer’s money, quite a bit of it, but no large sums at one time. As he was saving—stuffing cash under a loose floorboard—he didn’t give himself away by excessive expenditure.”
“My friend Willie—Miss Chandler—was auditing the books but wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.
At the last minute, he found out. That’s why he was running away, nothing to do with the murder.
His trouble was, he was under the impression that Mrs. Gray expected him to join her in France to start a new life together with the help of his loot, but he didn’t know where she was.
He turned up at Cherry Trees in a final attempt to get her address out of Isabel. Hence our ordeal in the cellar.”
“Ah,” said Tom. “And Cartwright, Chief? That’s the headmaster, ducks.”
“Cartwright behaved in a suspicious manner because he had … er … attempted to misbehave with the young women teachers at his school, the latest of whom was one of Daisy’s friends.”
“Has he been sacked yet, darling?”
“I had a word with the rector before I left. Cartwright has been given notice for the end of term, and the board is considering making Vera Leighton headmistress. In the meantime, Mr. Turnbull will keep a close eye on things at the school.”
“Good.”
“Any more red herrings in that barrel, Chief?”
“Plenty. Miss Chandler, Miss Sutcliffe, and Miss Leighton for a start. Miss Sutcliffe spent the most time at the house during the buying and selling process. Miss Leighton jumped like a startled rabbit when Cartwright was mentioned and Miss Chandler displayed a pronounced aversion to Vaughn, and neither was willing to explain.”
“Those are Mrs. Fletcher’s friends,” said Mrs. Tring indignantly. “You can’t have suspected them.”
“Can’t make exceptions, ducks, you know that.”
“I didn’t suspect them much, nor for long.
Naturally DI Underwood was slower to trust them, but none of them had any apparent motive.
Miss Sutcliffe is a transparently forthright person, and she and Daisy together came up with the name of the hotel Mrs. Gray had intended to stay at in Paris, as well as the address of Mrs. Gray’s friends in France—”
“That’s noble of you, darling. I’ll take credit for the hotel, but you would have got the address as soon as Isabel handed over the letter.”
“True. Once we’d found out why the other two were so secretive, all three were more or less out of the picture.”
“So the young ladies,” Mrs. Tring pondered aloud, “they never had anything to do with the case?”
“Nothing but the misfortune of moving into a house with a body in the cellar.”
“And inheriting a murderous cleaning woman!” Daisy exclaimed. It might be good fortune in the end, she thought, as it had brought Mr. Underwood into Isabel’s life—but if they made a match of it, what about the other two? Life was so complicated!
“More likely,” Alec went on, “were Judith Gray’s ex-servants, and her London friends and enemies. You two found the servants for us, and I’m sorry I couldn’t give you credit.”
“Were they any use to you, Chief?”
“They were very helpful with regard to the friends and enemies, but in fact they were so many more red herrings. We never had to track down most of them because the real culprit came to light. I have to admit I never seriously considered the charwoman.”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of such a case,” Tom observed. “Might have saved you a lot of trouble if the missus and I had managed to scrape up an aquaintance with Mrs. Hedger.”
“Mrs. Hedger is not the sort with whom anyone could scrape up an acquaintance. She keeps herself to herself, even now she’s in a cell. When we walked in on her at home, she was wearing Mrs. Gray’s fur coat. Even to her it was obvious she couldn’t get away with refusing to explain.”
“What was her excuse?”
“Nothing new. You’ve heard it before: It wasn’t stealing, because the owner was dead. Of course, that required an explanation of how she knew Mrs. Gray was dead. The whole story came out then. I don’t think she realised how much she was saying.”
“Ah.” Tom nodded. “That kind that don’t talk much, once they get going you never know what’ll spill out. So how did Mrs. Gray end up with a broken neck?”
“A silly squabble over a reference. She didn’t have the common courtesy to spend a minute writing one for the old woman.
She tried to push past her. Mrs. Hedger didn’t care for being shoved out of the way and pushed back.
Unfortunately Mrs. Gray happened to be standing on the cellar stairs at the time. The railing is not a sturdy one.”
“Ah.”
“In any other place, I’m sure nothing would have come of it beyond a bit of name-calling. Whether she was really in a hurry or just being obnoxious, we’ll never know.”
“She might have been in a hurry,” Daisy proposed, “because she wanted to evade Vaughn and avoid a row about not giving him her address. Whatever he believed, I’m sure he wasn’t part of her plans for the future, not with Sir George Gantry waiting for her in St. Tropez.”
“We’ll never know,” Alec repeated.
“One more question, darling. Did you ever find the cellar key? That’s what brought us—you—into the investigation in the first place.”
“Yes. All the house keys, including the cellar key, were in Mrs. Gray’s handbag.”
“Ah. If Mrs. H. had thrown them out and kept her mouth shut, she might have got away with a charge of theft.”
“She’s keeping her mouth shut now, when it’s too late. One question is still bothering me, one she can’t or won’t answer: Why Mrs. Gray went down to the cellar in the first place. It was empty.”
“I can guess,” said Mrs. Tring. “It’s like me checking to make sure the gas is out on the kitchen stove before I go round the shops. She was about to leave the house forever, and she went down to make sure everything was as it should be. I expect she went all over the rest of the house, too.”
“Could be,” Alec agreed, smiling. “That hadn’t dawned on me. As DI Underwood remarked, we could do with more detecting ladies on the force.”