“Wouldn’t never have been him.” Mr. Tipp answered with unusual conviction. “Mr. Vivian’s never been overly fond of Gossinger.”
“Then he’s got more sense than you’d ever guess from looking at him front or back.” Mrs. Much spooned sugar into her tea and stirred the pattern off the inside of her cup. “But that’s not the same as saying he’d be merry as a kitten with two tails and a dead mouse if his uncle upped and told him the house was being left to Hutchins. Don’t ask me why anyone would want to live here; there’s never been any accounting for bad taste. And who knows what Mr. Vivian—such a soppy name for a man—Gossinger is like when he thinks nobody’s watching. From what Mrs.
Warren tells me, there’s bad blood in the family from way back.”
“Sally Warren thinks there’s bad blood in her own husband on account of him forgetting more times than not to put those plastic liners in the dustbins,” said Mr. Tipp stoutly.
“Well,” Mrs. Much glanced at the clock on the wall and decided she didn’t need to get back to work for another half hour, “if you don’t think it was Mr. Vivian Gossinger who did the dirty deed, who else could it have been, except her Ladyship? There’s no one else as stood to lose by that will. Unless,” Mrs. Much sipped her tea as she considered the matter, “Miss Doffit got the wind up her petticoats, thinking as how she could be out her bread and board if Mr. Hutchins took over. Between you and me, Mr. Tipp, I’ve a soft spot for the old lady, but there’s no denying she’s nuttier than a squirrel’s pantry. And awfully spry for someone closing on ninety years of age.”
Mr. Tipp shook his head. He did not see Miss Sophie Doffit as a likely suspect. “I’ve been mulling it over in my head,” he said, “and I got to thinking that if it do be the case that Mr. Hutchins was murdered it could be that the will happened to come in handy for someone who wanted him out of the way for different reasons.”
“I think I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Much. “If the police was to cotton on that what happened wasn’t any accident, they’d be bound to latch onto Lady Gossinger being the person with the number one motive. And if she managed to wiggle out of the net, there was always her nephew and that poor dotty old lady. Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Not if it was someone else up to no good. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not convinced by a long shot Mr. Hutchins didn’t just fall in that toilet all on his own doing.” Mrs. Much gave another glance at the clock. “But I must hand it to you, Mr. Tipp, there’s a lot more to you than meets the
eye. Seems to me you ought to set yourself up as the likes of one of those private detectives.”
“That’s kind of you to say.” Mr. Tipp’s scraggly face creased into a smile. “Course, if I was ever to do anything like that, it could only be as a sideline, a sort of a hobby so to speak, seeing as how I wouldn’t never want to leave Gossinger.”
“And here was me thinking I could be your girl Friday.” Mrs. Much turned pale in the middle of a chuckle. “The trouble is, Mr. Tipp, that even if someone did overhear Sir Henry talking about changing his will ... or what I suppose is more likely, somebody blabbed, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of other suspects. Just you and me, when it comes right down to it.”
“There’s Sally Warren.”
“So there is,” Mrs. Much stood up and began gathering together the tea things, “and if we’re playing detective and looking for a reason for
her
to want Mr. Hutchins out of the way it could be that he’d found out she’d been helping herself to money out of the tea shop till and was going to tell Sir Henry. Perhaps,” she tried unsuccessfully to sound charitable, “the poor soul found herself in a financial bind on account of her husband losing his old job at the market garden across the way, because the owner’s son had come to work for him and Mr. Warren had to start driving a taxi.”
“I wasn’t accusing Sally,” said Mr. Tipp.
“Then who?”
“We have to do this fair.”
“All right.” Mrs. Much stood doing a balancing act with the crockery. “You give me a couple of seconds to get this lot in the sink and I’ll play Mr. Sherlock Holmes and tell you why you could be the one, and then—turnabout being fair play—you have a go at coming up with a reason for me doing away with Mr. Hutchins.” Turning off the taps, she added a dollop of washing-up liquid. “There,” she said, arms up to the
elbows in soapy water, “now I can concentrate, Mr. Tipp. Although why I’d be standing here with my back to you if I really thought you was a murderer I don’t know.”
“But if I did do it?”
“Well, that would have to be because you’d always wanted to step into Hutchins’s shoes.”
“I never did.”
“But that’s what you would say.” Mrs. Much upended the teapot on the draining rack. “And if we’re making this up, I’m going to suppose you’ve always hated being at Mr. Hutchins’s beck and call, especially when you’ve said your family has worked at Gossinger for hundreds of years. Oh, how,” she warmed to the scenario, “it must have rankled, never having a proper position here after a lifetime of service!”
Mr. Tipp opened his mouth a crack.
Mrs. Much, however, was in full flood. “Yes, I know as how you’re going to say you’re still officially in charge of the stables, but I’d think all that does is rub salt in the wound when there’s nothing out there on four legs, unless you count a couple of broken-down old tables. And then to find out Sir Henry had gone and left this place to Mr. Hutchins!” She rinsed off the milk jug. “Well, it’s not to be wondered at, my friend, if you went a bit barmy and made sure the only thing he’d be inheriting would be a place in the cemetery.”
“You’ve stitched me up tight as a glove. To tell you the truth,” Mr. Tipp twisted his hands together, “Mr. Hutchins was never quite my cup of tea.”
“Much too bossy by half,” agreed Mrs. Much in the sanguine voice of one who knew herself to be free of this fatal flaw.
“What I minded, though I never did let on, was how Mr. Hutchins would never let me help out polishing the silver.” Mr. Tipp continued to ruminate. “It got me to wondering if he was afraid I’d make off with a piece,
because of that maidservant way back in my family as was thought by some to have pinched the Queen’s silver tea strainer.”
“I don’t suppose it was that.” Mrs. Much felt called upon to soothe the poor little man’s wounded feelings before he burst into tears and she ended up having to give the table another wipe. “Possessive, that’s the word for the way Mr. Hutchins carried on about that silver. Anyone would think it had been in
his
family for two hundred years. Although, I’ve always thought that when you’ve had something for five or six years it’s time to get rid of it and have a change. As Mrs. Frome, God rest her soul, often said to me, if I can’t afford new I’d rather do without.”
Mr. Tipp, who by this time could have quoted verbatim the many acute sayings of Mrs. Frome, merely nodded his head.
“And now it’s time,” Mrs. Much gave the sink a final buff with the drying-up cloth and checked to make sure she could see her face in the taps, “for you to fill me in, Mr. Tipp, on why you think
I
should be added to the list of suspects.”
“That’s a bit of a puzzler right off the top.”
“Now, don’t be afraid to hurt my feelings.” Mrs. Much sat down at the table and turned on a beaming smile. “If I can dish it out I can take my own medicine.”
“It’s not that I really think—"
“Of course not.”
“But if,” Mr. Tipp addressed a spot slightly to the north of her head, “I was a proper detective it could cross my mind that you was more than a little worried on account of Mr. Hutchins acting so cross on account of you washing those tapestries and so on that he might have seen you got a bad reference and that could have dashed your hopes of going to work at Buckingham Palace.”
“Well, I never!” Mrs. Much tried to sound admiring. “Mr. Tipp, you’ve certainly got an imagination.”
“Left to himself, Sir Henry’s a bit of an old softie.”
“Well, her Ladyship isn’t.”
“But it’s Sir Henry as always writes the references. I’ve thought on that sometimes,” Mr. Tipp was back to looking Mrs. Much in the eye, “and I wonder if it could be because she’s a touch nervous about her spelling, same as I am.”
“Well, I doubt anyone could accuse her of going to Oxford or Cambridge. Except on a day trip, that is.” Mrs. Much had begun to recover from having been put—figuratively speaking—in the dock. But there was no denying that Mr. Tipp had set her to thinking along some rather dark lines. “It seems like we’ve covered everyone what could possibly have wanted Mr. Hutchins out of the way. There wasn’t anybody else in the house that day save for young Flora, and you couldn’t possibly think she would ... not her very own grandfather what brought her up from when she was a kiddie. Unless ...” Mrs. Much looked around the antiquated kitchen and realized anew how desperately anxious she was to escape Gossinger Hall. “Unless,” she continued, “young Flora saw herself being chained to this house so long as her grandfather lived and took what she thought was the only way out.”
Mr. Tipp did not appear to be listening hard to what she was saying. “There was other people here the day Mr. Hutchins died,” he said slowly. “There was that tour of schoolboys and their teacher from some swanky London school.”
“So there was.”
“And if you remember, Mrs. Much, one of those schoolboys was Lady Gossinger’s nephew. His name was Horace. Or it could have been Boris.”
“That’s all very interesting, Mr. Tipp, but why in the world would he murder Hutchins?”
“I’m not thinking he did; but I do mind that when I met up with him outside the tower sitting room he said something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time, Mrs. Much, but when I thought on it later, it fair gave me the shivers. That boy said as how someone should lock Lady Gossinger up in the garderobe.”
“Gracious!”
“Suppose,” Mr. Tipp’s face seemed to flesh out in his evident enthusiasm for his theory, “Boris, or whatever his name was, got Mr. Hutchins to show him the garderobe and then locked him in for a joke. It’s the sort of thing schoolboys do; leastways they did in the stories I read in
The Schoolboy’s Annual
when I was but a lad myself. And like as not he meant to go and let Mr. Hutchins out, but either he forgot or he couldn’t get away from his teacher again.”
“Oh, if that isn’t the nastiest suggestion you’ve put forward yet,” said Mrs. Much, “a kiddie of his tender years responsible for the death of a fellow human being!”
“Yes, but not with—what’s the word?—
intent.
When he went to let him out, Hutchins was dead from his heart giving out or whatever.” Mr. Tipp shook his head. “Leastways, that’s the way I see it.”
“I suppose it’s nicer to think we’re dealing with someone that pulled a silly stunt instead of a coldblooded killer who worked it all out beforehand.” Somewhat unsteadily, Mrs. Much got to her feet and went over to the pantry, where she kept an extra cardigan hanging on the back of the door. “It’s bad enough when you read about murders in the papers, like that woman what disappeared from the launderette in Grimsby the other week, or that old man as was last seen not too far from here. But you don’t never expect it on your own doorstep, so to speak. Now, like as not you’ve let your imagination run away with you, Mr. Tipp, and brought me along for the ride, but it seems to
me we might do right to phone the police. That was ever such a nice young man who came to talk to Flora and Mr. Warren about the bank robber.”
“He did do a thorough job of asking questions, didn’t he?” Mr. Tipp took a look at the clock and he, too, got to his feet. “I suppose they soon get the knack of it—asking probing questions I mean, so as to get people telling them things they never meant to let slip.”
“Yes, very clever when you come to think of it,” Mrs. Much responded in hollow tones. Her mind had settled like a damp rag on her former employer Mrs. Frome, who had been so kind as to remember her devoted housekeeper in her will, made within a few months of succumbing to an overdose. And before Mrs. Frome there had been nice, kind Mrs. Ashford, who had also left Mrs. Much a tidy little remembrance before falling afoul of the mushroom soup.
What, heaven help her, would be the outcome if the police started poking into the deaths of those two ladies? Wasn’t it almost a foregone conclusion that they would leap to the decision that they were dealing with an old hand at murder? Mrs. Much took a couple of slow, steadying breaths. It wasn’t like Sir Henry would have gone and left her anything in his will? Unless—an icy hand clutched at her heart—Sir Henry was the sort who believed it only right and proper to leave a little something to his housekeeper, even if she hadn’t worked for him more than a few months.
Afraid of betraying the fact that she wasn’t one-hundred-percent calm and collected, she walked over to the window. Where she could just make out the figures of Flora and Mr. Vivian Gossinger standing in apparent conversation in the garden. For the first time Mrs. Much pondered the question of why Sir Henry had decided to bequeath Gossinger Hall to his butler, but as quickly as it came the thought was wiped out of her head. She suddenly felt horribly defenseless with her
back to the room. She wasn’t afraid of Mr. Tipp. No, what scared her was feeling that someone ... or something ... was hovering beyond the kitchen door, soaking up her fear, having already taken in every word of her and Mr. Tipp’s conversation.
Turning back to face him, she said in what she hoped was a casual way, “Perhaps we shouldn’t go to the police at this stage of the game, Mr. Tipp. It’s not like we’ve anything really to go on, when it comes right down to it.”
“And I don’t think Sir Henry would be best pleased at us interfering, as he’d be bound to see it. So what do you think, Mrs. Much, of the two of us keeping our eyes and ears open?”
“But I won’t be here,” she replied. “I’ll be at Buckingham Palace trying to talk the Queen into fitted carpets.”
“So you will. Meaning it’s all up to me, isn’t it?”