Authors: C T Mitchell
Tags: #Murder at the Fete
It was nearly lunchtime when the winner of the sponge
cake was declared, and it was well-deserved. Mrs. Davies would take home first
prize and the five hundred dollars and, much to the dismay of Mrs. Grant and
Maggie, Mrs. Neddles took the honor of best scones. Apparently they were
“smoother to the palate” than Mrs. Grant’s, which Maggie highly disagreed
with.
As for the fruit tarts, Melissa Shepherd had actually
entered and won in that category. The look on Constable Greenaway’s face when
she was announced the winner was the only consolation Maggie had after Mrs.
Grant scones were snubbed. The boy looked positively in love.
****
As he had taken to doing every year, Simon walked
Maggie to the restaurant tent to have lunch with her. It was Maggie’s favorite
part of the day, because she could catch up on the gossip from Simon’s small
town, which wasn’t too far away. She filed this information away
systematically, to be retrieved later if needed.
Usually, the two of them would have hamburgers and
chips, but today Maggie caught her nephew drooling over the Bangalow pork belly
with plum sauce, so she suggested they each get a plate of that instead.
Between that, the roasted potatoes, steamed broccoli and tea, the two of them
were perched happily under the tent for the better part of an hour. For
dessert, they each had a slice of fruit tart from Melissa’s award winning tray.
Maggie knew she would have to do a few extra laps of her ten acre property
tomorrow to wear off the extra calories she devoured today.
As Maggie was scooping the sauce from her last bite of
pie, there was a commotion near the back of the tent. Someone was choking, and
apparently no one knew what to do anything besides sit and stare. That is,
until Mrs. Davies stood up and knocked her chair over, causing Jane Neddles to
scream at the sight of her friend writhing on the ground for breath. At that
point, people started clamoring around her, unsure what to do.
“Someone find Detective Sullivan!! Or a doctor!” Jane
screamed, trying to pry Mrs. Davies hands from her face so she could help.
Soon, though, the woman stopped thrashing, and relaxed her hands, then relaxed
her whole body into Jane’s arms.
“Oh my God!” Jane cradled her friend, pushing the hair
back on the top of her head as if she were petting a cat. “No no no…..”
“How can that be?” Mrs. Grant whispered as Maggie
trotted up behind the crowd.
****
Tom Sullivan rushed through the front of the tent.
He’d been visiting the fete with his family, just like everyone else, but was
happy to help. Frantically, he searched for the choking victim. All he’d been
told was to get to the food tent immediately because someone was choking.
Pushing through the crowd, he knelt down next to Jane and lovingly helped her
stand up and passed her off to a nearby onlooker.
“You there!” He pointed to an older woman who looked
as though she could speak well enough. “Which table was she at?”
The old woman pointed to her right with a shaky hand.
Tom spoke loud enough for the entire tent to hear. “No
one touches that table, you understand? Don’t even pick up your purse. Leave
it there; I don’t care if it’s inconvenient. Don’t touch it.” There were a
few grumbles, but everyone stayed away from it.
Constable Greenaway trotted into the tent, and Tom gave
him some sort of signal to manage the crowd, which he did.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said only loud
enough to be heard. “You heard the man. Stay back.”
Tom opened his mobile phone and dialed the only funeral
parlor driver in town. Carmichael’s Funerals had been a part of Bangalow since
1949, a family run business now in its third generation. Since the town was
small, it didn’t have its own autopsy facility or morgue, so Mrs. Davies would
have to be transported to Lismore, some thirty kilometers away, for evaluation.
Tom was pretty certain he was dealing with an elderly woman that had choked on
her food but needed to be sure.
It was very sad, but hardly the reason to make people
wait any longer than they had to. He would take some snapshots and get a few
statements and let everyone get back to the event if that’s what they wanted.
The crowd was already growing restless.
****
It wasn’t twenty seconds before Tom’s eye was
twitching. The body had only been gone a few minutes, and already he saw
Maggie set into motion. The woman was a dear soul, but nothing irked him more
than having her know things first. Tom didn’t want to be shown up again by Lady
Margaret Turnbull, Bangalow’s would be amateur sleuth, over a highly trained,
academy graduated detective.
“Stay here if you want, dear. I’m going to talk to
Mrs. Grant. That woman’s up to something.” Maggie patted her nephew on the
shoulder and rushed away, but not before the Detective Inspector grabbed her
gently by the forearm.
“Leave it alone, Maggie. It’s nothing.”
“It’s Lady Margaret Turnbull to you, Detective. And
I’m just going to talk to someone. It’s nothing.” She winked at him and
hurried away. Detective Sullivan sighed in frustration knowing that anything
involving Lady Maggie wasn’t just about nothing. She was acting on one of her
hunches again and they are usually right, much to the displeasure of the
Detective.
“Aunt Maggie!” It was Simon, trotting toward her,
looking as though he was saddling up to say something brave. “Don’t go,” he
suggested, taking her by the hand. “I know you like to help the police, but
can’t you just sit this one out?” Simon knew his aunt had a reputation for
getting caught up in police matters, and it didn’t matter if she figured things
out first or not, she was still a bit of a nuisance to the police force.
Maggie kissed him on the nose and walked briskly to the
other side of the food tent, sliding in and out of mini crowds that had formed
and making her way through them easily. She was in pretty good shape for being
in her fifties; he had to hand it to her. Simon watched her briskly stride out
from under the tent; she really was cut out for her favorite hobby.
Mrs. Grant was startled when Maggie sat forcefully into
the chair next to her. “Hey there!” Maggie said loudly, patting the woman on
the leg. I heard what you said back there, why was that? What made you say “This
can’t be?”
The color drained from Mrs. Grant’s round face. “I
have no idea…did I say that? Probably something I mumbled from shock.”
Maggie didn’t buy it. There was still plenty of time
left in the day to have a cup of tea with the woman and sort things out, so she
suggested just that, recommending a little trip home to Mrs. Grant’s house to
help her deal with her shock. Surprisingly, Mrs. Grant agreed, and the two
women walked arm in arm right past Tom Sullivan on their way to the parking
lot.
He stood up and looked at them, eyeing his nemesis as
though it would change the fact that she was taking a witness home with her.
If he tried to stop her, she would only cause enough of a fuss to delay his
entire day, so he let her go and returned to questioning witnesses at the table
closest to the crime scene. It didn’t seem to be going well; all the people at
the table could say was how shocked they were that anyone would want to kill
Mrs. Davies.
The Detective Inspector wouldn’t be going home
tonight. Everyone else would probably stay at the fete in order to shell out
their money to happily give funds to the children’s shelter. Tom, however,
tossed the keys to his wife and rented a hotel room at the Bangalow Gardens
Motel, on the edge of town. Thankfully they had a room for him.
“I find it strange,” Maggie said on the phone with
Tom once he’d reached his room for the evening, “that Mrs. Davies was poisoned
in the food tent.”
Tom sighed; he was going to have to hear her out, one
way or another. And after all, she had helped him on quite a few cases, so the
woman at least deserved a hearing. “Why is that, Mrs. Turnbull? A food tent
seems like a perfectly normal place to poison someone to me.” He pressed his
eyebrows together with his forefinger and thumb and sat down in the desk chair
in the motel room. It felt like it was going to be a long night.
“Poisoning someone is a private affair, Detective,”
she said plainly. “One never randomly poisons somebody. It’s usually targeted
and personal.”
Tom waited for a minute, processing his response. He
didn’t want to blow her off or seem ungrateful for her assistance but once
again she was meddling in police business. And he didn’t want to make it seem
like this was news to him, but he had to admit, she had a good point. She went
on to talk some sort of nonsense about Mrs. Grant mumbling a phrase under her
breath at the crime scene. Maggie seemed to think that Mrs. Grant assumed she,
herself, would be the victim. The idea struck Tom as the most ludicrous thing
he’d ever heard, but he nicely mentioned that it was “far-fetched” at best and
promised to appease her and keep her posted.
“No need, dear. I’ll figure it out.” And she hung
up. Tom sat back in his chair, shoulders slumped thinking to himself, ‘here we
go again.’ He looked to the ceiling of his room, sipped his tea and grimaced at
the thought of Lady Margaret not only being involved but right.
The next day, Tom decided to investigate Maggie’s
hunch and take a trip to Mrs. Davies’ cottage. Yet, before he had the chance,
the forensic science team from Lismore called him stating that they’d found a threatening
letter in her study desk. He wondered if Mrs. Grant had received a similar
sort of letter, and told them to wait for him at the cottage.
Maggie called the Inspector from her house at eight
o’clock that following morning, having already put several more hours in on the
case, and she felt more energized than she had in months. Maggie was an early
riser most mornings preparing breakfast for her guests, taking delivery of
Melissa’s pastries and pottering around re-arranging the fresh flowers that
adorned the lounge and hallways in the house. But sinking her teeth into a
case, invited or not, gave her an extra spring in her step.
“You see, Detective, I went straight to Mrs. Grant’s
house yesterday after the festival. I knew you’d trust me with her, and you
were right to do so.” She loved rubbing it in the Detective’s face that he
pretty much let her have her way with things, and she waited for him to respond
to her jab.
“And?” he asked impatiently, letting out another sigh;
something he would do often around Lady Margaret. It sounded like he was
traveling somewhere, and she didn’t want to actually waste the man’s time, so
she hurried through the account of the previous night.
“When we got there…I told her I just wanted to have tea
with her and would buy some of her delectable scones, hoping the idiocy of the
timing would catch her off guard. It worked, of course, and she let me in. We
weren’t five minutes into the tea and pastries before she started to shake. I
really am good, eh?”
“Oh yes, the best Lady Turnbull. Can you tell me why
she was shaking or are you just going to leave the story at ‘I made an old
woman shake’?”
“Now listen here you little smarty, she isn’t much
older than me, so watch your tone. And of course there’s more. She fetched an
odd letter from a stack of papers in her kitchen and let me read it. It just
said ‘Lying is a mortal sin.’ What do you make of that, Detective Sullivan?”
“I’ve no idea.” She could hear him put his rackety car
in park and shut the door, and was sure he’d hang up soon, so she blurted out
the rest.
“The only other thing she asked me was what kind of
poison was used to kill Mrs. Davies. Since I’m not privy to autopsy
reports…yet…I told her I thought it was probably arsenic. A few drops in her
tea would have sufficed, don’t you think? Anyway, before I left, Tom…she said
something strange.”
She just said “There were three of us… Mrs. Grant
immediately looked as though she’d regretted saying anything at all, but when I
turned around to ask her what she meant, she merely crumbled into my arms in a
sobbing heap. I couldn’t really make out much more of what she said.”
Tom was quiet for a moment.
“You might want to get it from her before she destroys
it. She’s a bit off her rocker at the moment. And you may want to visit Mrs.
Carrington, as well. She’s a cantankerous old bat who probably won’t let you
in the door, of course, so I would be more than happy to accompany you if you
like?”
“Mrs. Carrington?” he asked, sounding out of breath.
There was a knock on Maggie’s door, so she switched the
mobile phone to her other ear and straightened her blouse. It felt good to be
this active in the morning. She opened the door just as Tom was flipping his
mobile phone closed. He slipped it into his pocket and gestured toward the
inside of the house, asking to come inside.
“Well I never! Come in, Detective. Anyhow, Mrs. Grant
and Mrs. Carrington testified to a crime some years ago; carrying the
conversation on now face to face. Before you and I were ever in this area.
Whatever the old case was, the suspect that was accused didn’t commit the
crime. Mrs. Grant refreshed my memory, but that’s really all she’d tell me.”
“Isn’t she an invalid or something? My wife visits her
for church, I think.” He followed Maggie through the foyer of the bed and
breakfast and she poured him some tea. They adjourned to the verandah and took
in the view of the grassy valley to the distant mountains, where they discussed
their next move; Lady Margaret now firmly entrenched in the case regrettably
accepted by Detective Sullivan.
“We need to get over to Mrs. Carrington’s place” Tom
exclaimed finishing his tea and retracting his attention from the engulfing
view and re-focusing back on the job at hand. “Let’s see if she has received a
letter also?”