A Death in Two Parts (12 page)

“Is that so?” Joseph Ffeathers looked at once sceptical at Crankshaw's youth and impressed at his origin. “Does this mean you are not … I believe the phrase would be ‘satisfied'? I should be glad to hear that poor young Patience was well out of it.”

The remark rang curiously false to Crankshaw's sensitive ear, but Harris seemed to notice nothing. “Oh, no, not that.” He was bland, almost soothing. “I don't think there's much doubt we've got the guilty party – speaking quite off the record, you understand. But of course we have to have it all shipshape for the inquest, and Crankshaw here is going to take care of the routine for us. To tell you the truth” – he obviously found Ffeathers sympathetic – “we're a bit short-handed right now and if this young fellow hadn't come along I don't know how we'd have got our case together for Friday.”

Crankshaw felt himself patronised, resented it, and at the same time reminded himself that the more innocuous he seemed, the better were his chances of getting under somebody's guard. If he only knew whose …

“So the inquest's Friday, is it? That's quick work. Well, of course we'd hoped the questioning and so forth was all over with, but naturally we'll do all we can to cooperate with Mr – er – Crimshaw. I just hope he'll go easy with the womenfolk; they're all pretty well on edge, as you can imagine.”

Ffeathers had cast himself, Crankshaw thought, as one of Kipling's Indian colonels, though surely underneath the
façade there lurked something a good deal more intelligent, and very likely less trustworthy … But it was too early to be more than generally suspicious.

Harris was looking at his watch. “I must be on my way. You may think yours is the only crime in Sussex, but it's not by a long way. Let me have a report when you get back tonight, Crankshaw.”

On that, with perhaps the faintest of malicious twinkles, he was gone. Sink or swim, thought Crankshaw; but it suited him well enough.

The pseudo-colonel was looking at him from under bushy brows. “First job, eh? We'll do all we can to help. Now, where do you want to begin?”

“Perhaps at the beginning,” suggested Crankshaw mildly. He pulled a solid, straight-backed chair up to the wrong side of the desk, cleared a space for himself and opened his notebook.

“Oh, the beginning. Well, I suppose you'd say that was the week before Christmas, when we heard poor Patience Smith was broke – she's a kind of cousin of ours, you know.”

“Yes, so I understand. But that is not just what I meant by the beginning.” Crankshaw looked at the older man, very much at his ease against the chimney-piece, and waited.

“Oh, I see. You want it
ab ovum
, as the curate said.” Was the laugh a shade too hearty? “Would my mother's birth be far enough back for you?”

“I think that would do nicely.” So far Crankshaw had written nothing, but now, deliberately, he took up his pen, wrote ‘Mrs Ffeathers' in very beautiful script, underlined it and looked up at Ffeathers.

“Right. Here goes then. Born 1859 of poor and not too
honest parents. She rather boasted about her father's goings-on, but then she boasted about so much, poor Mother.” It was the first genuine note he had achieved. “Early life very much what you'd expect,” he went on. “One semi-slum after another, Grandfather drinking when he had the money, beating his wife when he hadn't. Am I being detailed enough for you?”

“Quite, thank you.” Crankshaw welcomed the note of mockery. “I understand that your mother had very considerable success on the stage.”

“Music halls, you mean. She was a riot. She's got a great trunkful upstairs: programmes, ads –
billets doux
generally. You can go through it if you like; it gives you a pretty good idea of the times she had. I've always admired Mother, she was a great girl.” Again, it rang true.

“Yes, I see. And how long was she on the stage?”

“Fifteen years. The fifteen best years of her life, she always said. Then she retired – it was a pretty hot pace she had to keep up and I don't think she really regretted giving it up as much as she used to let on.”

“Retired to be married, I suppose?”

“Oh, good Lord no. She'd been married for years. Father was her – well, I suppose you'd call him her agent these days; her fixer generally. He discovered her, way back, in a pub in Seven Dials singing sea shanties with her father. He got her her first part and when she clicked, well, he married her. I expect it was the safest way for an agent to get his cut in those days. But he'd died before she retired. There were—” he coughed, hesitated “—various relationships. She used to tell the most amazing tales, did Mother. Some of them may even have been true. But she did like to shock people.”

“Yes, I see. So what year did she retire?”

Ffeathers hesitated. “Damned if I can remember. I expect Josephine will, or my brother Seward. He was born in 1890. I do know that because he made a bit of a song and dance about his sixtieth birthday. So I expect they were married in 1889, if I know Mother. She was never one to let the grass grow under her feet.”

Crankshaw did his best to look shocked. “Your brother Seward is the oldest of you then?”

“Yes. There was a gap after him. I expect he interfered with her career more than she'd expected. I wasn't born till 1900.”

“And your sister?”

“In 1902. She's a mere chicken, Josephine. Good idea to get it straight from me, come to think of it. She'd tell you 1910.”

Crankshaw made another note, amused at the effort Ffeathers was making to get back into the role of bluff colonel out of which he had slipped a bit in the course of the interview. “I see,” he said. “I understand that Mr Brigance is dead, and that your and your brother's wives live here. So that takes care of your generation. Now for the next one.”

“Five deplorable grandchildren, Mother would have told you. Two of Seward's: Ludwig and Leonora, poor creatures. He intended them for musicians, but they're chemistry-mad instead. They've got a room at the back of the house I'd advise you to keep out of if you don't want to suffocate. Two of Josephine's: Mark and Mary, decent enough youngsters, good-looking, bright enough. Mark did well at Cambridge, Mary's got a job, interior decorating or
something, and a flat in town. Her fiance's staying here, you know; Tony Wetherall – if he has the nerve to go through with it. They only announced it on Christmas Eve.”

“Bad luck, that,” said Crankshaw, and then, as the pause prolonged itself, “And your family?”

“One girl, Priscilla. That's the lot.”

“The entire Christmas house party?”

“Yes – no, there was a young fool called Duguid, Brian Duguid, my wife asked down for Priss. I could have told her that was no good.”

Not for the first time in the interview Crankshaw registered surprise at how much he was being told. But no doubt far more of the iceberg, truth, was still submerged. “Good,” he said. “So much for the house party. Now, if you wouldn't mind just taking me through what happened on Christmas Eve, I don't think I'll need to trouble you any further.”

“But you've forgotten Miss Smith. I mean, I don't like to drag her in, but of course she was here too.”

“Yes, of course; stupid of me. She is a cousin, I understand?”

“More or less; Mother's sister's granddaughter. Her parents died when she was a child and she lived with us for a bit. Seward and another cousin, Paul Protheroe – you'll meet him, he's Mother's lawyer – are her trustees. Not that there's anything left in the trust, poor kid. It's no wonder she went haywire. D'you think they'll be able to make it unsound mind?”

“That,” said Crankshaw, “is hardly my affair.” He hurried on to conceal the anger that charged him. “She had only been here ten days, is that right?”

“Yes. When we heard about her money being gone,
Josephine suggested we get her down for Mother – two birds with one stone, you know. Just between you and me, Mother was a bit of a tartar, and companions never stayed.”

“But she liked Miss Smith well enough to leave her all her money?”

“Oh, Lord bless you, that didn't mean anything. Everyone she met had it left to them at one time or other. She'd run through all of us, and been playing the same game on charities. Less entertaining though, because they weren't around to suffer over it. She was threatening to cut Patience off already. I heard her. I suppose that's what drove the poor kid dotty – she was really broke, you know; stony. It's a bad business Crankshaw, a bad sad business.”

“Murder is.” Crankshaw's hand shook as he wrote the note that might help to hang Patience. But keep calm, keep calm. “Now for the events of Christmas Eve.” The formal language steadied him.

“Well, let me see. Nothing out of the way till dinner. Nothing much then, for the matter of that, but I expect you want everything.”

“Of course.” Crankshaw took extensive notes while Joseph described the formal dinner, the charades and then the moving of the party up to his mother's room. “She liked us to fill the stockings up there, y'know. They hung from her mantelshelf.” The account was accurate enough except that it omitted all mention of the stolen five pounds and Mrs Ffeathers' threat of a momentous announcement in the course of the evening.

“Thank you,” said Crankshaw when he had finished. “And
in your opinion no one could have drugged the Bovril once it was in Mrs Ffeathers' room?”

“That's right.” Joseph was positive. “The only one with a ghost of a chance was my poor Priss and you can bet your last penny she didn't. Besides, where'd she have carried the stuff? She'd no bag to go with her dress; I know because my wife was after me to give her one for Christmas. Lot of female nonsense.”

That seemed to be all that was to be got from Joseph Ffeathers, and Crankshaw thanked him again and asked if he might interview the rest of the party. “In any order that's convenient. I don't want it to be any more trouble than it has to be.” He forestalled Joseph's complaint.

Josephine came first. Voluble and exclamatory, she added little to what Crankshaw already knew. Only, probing behind her words, he felt that where Joseph would gladly have Patience hanged and the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, Josephine had some curious, semi-conscious uncertainty about Patience's guilt. She insisted again and again that the legacy to Patience was not necessarily a passing fancy: “She adored Patience, you know, simply adored her at sight. We were all quite green with envy. Patience needn't have worried, she'd have been all right …” And much more on the same theme, which became more comprehensible to Crankshaw when he interviewed her son and daughter.

Mary came first, accompanied, at her request, by Tony Wetherall. She wore a black dress and a brave little air of ‘no secrets' that obviously pleased Tony. Plunging at once into the middle of things, she begged Crankshaw to be gentle with her brother. “Poor Mark is in a frightful
stew,” she explained. And with a conspiratorial glance at Crankshaw, youth appealing to youth: “That man Harris absolutely chewed him up.”

“He minds very much, your brother?” To an extent, Crankshaw met the appeal.

“Dreadfully. Not so much about Gran,” she went on, with the realism of her age and sex. “Of course, it's wretched about her, and we all feel it, but after all she was ninety-one. She'd had quite a run.”

“Yes,” said Crankshaw. “So I understand.”

Another conspirator's glance. “How she loved to talk about it,” Mary digressed. “To shock people, you know. She used to have Priss and Leonora absolutely crimson – and Ludwig too. I remember she tried it on Patience the first night, but she was a tough one. No blushes there. I think that's when Gran began to take to her. I don't think Patience did it, you know. She has more sense.” It was almost an aside, casual and unemphatic. “But Mark seems to think she did. He was rather taken with her, more than he admitted, I think. Rather funny, that, when you think about it.” She did not explain why. “Poor old Mark, he never did have much sense. Brains, you know, but not sense.”

Interviewing Mark, Crankshaw was inclined to agree. He paced, he prowled, he lit cigarettes and abandoned them, sat down and got up again to pace and prowl some more, until Crankshaw could gladly have shaken him for what seemed almost a travesty of his own ferocious anxiety. He became, as the questions and answers went on, more and more convinced that Mark Brigance knew something absolutely damning, but would rather die than admit it. His manner in the witness box would be disastrous for Patience,
Crankshaw thought, and dismissed him for the time being, his burden of anxiety heavier than ever.

Seward and his ailing wife had nothing to add to the story of the evening, but managed to convey so cold an impression of fear that Crankshaw relegated them, too, to the mental limbo where Mark awaited further consideration. Something was worrying them badly, but he was not at all sure if it had anything to do with the murder. About that they were drearily positive, and on the note of ‘poor Patience' and a flood of invalid's easy tears he dismissed them.

Priss followed them, pale and red-nosed. Like Mary, she refused to believe in Patience's guilt. “It can't be true. I liked her.” Crankshaw had the impression that she did not like many people.

But under questioning she could only confirm the impossibility of anyone's drugging the Bovril under her eyes. It had been across the table from her, beyond the tea tray. Yes, people had been going to and fro with cups, but she would have been sure to notice. “You know, you watch people when you are serving them. Besides, there was Gran. She didn't miss much, I can tell you.”

“And I gather you had nowhere you could have carried the pills?” He put it to her straight.

She raised red-rimmed eyes to his. “No. Lucky for me, wasn't it? I did hope Dad would give me a bag for Christmas, but now I'm glad he didn't. I had a foul cold, too; I had to borrow Leonora's handkerchief.”