Murder in the Afternoon (40 page)

She poured a glass for herself and raised it to me. ‘Here’s to better times. All things will pass.’

‘Cheers.’ I raised my glass. ‘Why would Ethan have come to you, and not to Bob? After all, those two were old friends.’

‘I was a shoulder to cry on. Ethan and Bob had a fall out over something or other, like little boys. Ethan was dead set against Bob selling the farm, and there was something else too, but I’m not sure what.’

I did not tell her that it was because Ethan had discovered Bob informed on him and his political activities. Perhaps she did not know that, though I guessed not much would pass this woman by. Keep her talking. Hope that she will give herself away.

‘Mrs Conroy, I’m trying to understand what was going on. This is a little awkward, but Mary Jane and your husband, were they … well, closer than they ought to be?’

She bit her lip. ‘Do you know … Now that you say it,
I wonder if Ethan did suspect something going on between Bob and Mary Jane. They always got on so well. There was something there when you saw them together, an understanding.’

I took a chance. ‘Perhaps that’s why Ethan encouraged Bob to marry. Bob told me it was Ethan who urged him to answer your advertisement I think.’

She looked at me quickly. Her lips parted but she said nothing.

‘Sorry. He did wish he hadn’t told me.’ I continued. ‘Of course Mary Jane didn’t know how you and Bob met. You’ll have to excuse that he told me. I caught him at a weak moment, in the churchyard, at his brother’s grave’

She wouldn’t be able to catch me out in a lie, not with Bob in hospital and in no position to make a denial. No doubt she had sworn Bob to keep quiet about how they met. She was not speaking. I was meant to make her talk, and all the words were coming from me. She would be a hard nut to crack. ‘Bob said he’d seen you leave the vicarage. That you must have been having a word with Miss Trimble.’

The denial came quickly, too quickly. Her lips formed a grim line. ‘What are you getting at? I did not leave the farm on Monday.’

I had not mentioned Monday. Now it was my turn to wait.

She steered the conversation. ‘I didn’t visit Miss Trimble. Bob went to see her. He was thinking of having a commemorative window designed in honour of his parents and his brother.’

‘Ah yes. His brother met with an accident shortly after you and Bob married.’ I kept my voice light, sympathetic, without a hint of accusation. ‘Miss Trimble
thought she saw Mary Jane by the quarry. But that was you, wasn’t it?’

She reached for the wine and poured herself a drop more, offering the same to me. I declined.

Her hand was steady as she returned the bottle to the table and raised the glass. ‘It’s been such a bad business. It puts us all on edge. But you’re wrong.’

‘What puzzled me was Bob’s brother’s death, when he was searching for the lost lamb in the quarry. But then, there was no lost lamb was there? You told him a child had come reporting the lost lamb. No one ever found out who that child was. But of course there was no such child. You made that up. You went with him. You pushed him. That’s why no lamb was ever found.’

She laughed. ‘Are you mad? Why would I do that?’

‘So that when you killed Bob, there would be no one else who could lay claim to a share of the farm. Only Ethan was very inconvenient. He’d noticed that you got a little ahead of yourself and advertised in the paper again. When I showed the advertisement to Bob, it gave him quite a shock.’

‘Have you told anyone about your wild ideas, Mrs Shackleton?’

I turned the bottle around so that the label faced me. ‘Dandelion wine. It should be sweet, unless it’s laced with something. You should have stayed with Miss Trimble until she died.’

For the first time, Georgina Conroy looked rattled. She rubbed the ball of her thumb against the wart on her finger. ‘She was dead.’ Immediately, she realised her mistake and tried to swallow her words. ‘The doctor pronounced her dead.’

‘She talked to me. She tried to tell me. You gave her a
bitter drink, and told her it was dandelion wine. You thought there’d be plenty of time for her to die before her brother returned, and her housekeeper. She’d already begun to lose feeling in her feet, her legs, her lower body. But somehow she tumbled off the sofa, dragged herself across the room. And then there was me, being nosey.’

Mrs Conroy grabbed at the sharp kitchen knife. As she lunged at me, I jumped from the chair, grasped the chair back and whipped it round, using it as a shield. She came at me. With all the force I could muster, I brought the chair down on her arm. The knife clattered to the floor. We faced each other.

‘Miss Trimble’s words meant nothing, until today, until you kindly brought out your homemade wine. Is that what you took with you when you visited her? Do you have a special dandelion wine recipe, for murder?’

She stared at me, her face a mask. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to have Mary Jane freed, and she will be set free, because Bob has confessed. Mary Jane will need money. I expect as a well provided woman you already have a little nest egg. Is that why Ethan cut out your first advertisement, because he thought Bob would find a wife who could help him financially, bring the farm through difficult times?’

‘Oh yes, Ethan thought that all right, that I would pour good money into this place. A fool and money are soon parted, but I’m no fool. As a going concern, this farm isn’t worth a pint of sour milk. But I’m admitting nothing. Your accusations are preposterous.’

‘I don’t care what you’ve done. I want to help Mary Jane. Bob’s confessed to killing Ethan. Mary Jane will be freed, but she’ll need money.’

‘I like Mary Jane. If she needs money, I’ll help her. But
what is it you want? Why are you saying these things to me?’ She was walking a tightrope of denial, and yet testing me out. Could I be bought?

‘For myself? Nothing, except to know why you killed Ethan.’

We stood at some distance from each other. I still held onto the bentwood chair like a shield.

‘Why would I kill Ethan? Bob has confessed. You didn’t know Ethan. He had a sneaking admiration for me, someone who cocks a snook to all that’s holy. So what if I advertised for a husband?’

At last, an admission. Would that be the only one? If Ethan had fallen out with Bob, he could still have wanted to spare his friend’s feelings, and his pocket, by giving Georgina a warning that she must leave without taking Bob’s money, the proceeds of the farm sale.

My silence worked. She spoke again. ‘You can’t connect me to what happened to Ethan.’

‘We’ll see.’

She gave a lopsided smile that curdled my blood. ‘So … I’m a murderess am I? Well then, you think because we both drank from the same bottle of dandelion wine you are safe. But what you did not see was what I sprinkled at the bottom of your glass. If you’re helpful, I could fetch the antidote.’

She was bluffing, or was she?

‘Then fetch the antidote for yourself, because I switched the glasses while you were cutting the cake.’

She laughed. ‘Clever. You and Ethan would have liked each other.’

‘Yes, I think we might.’

‘Whereas Bob is a drippy sort, trailing on Ethan’s coat tails, slavering after Ethan’s wife.’

She took a step towards me, and perhaps there was nothing threatening in it, but I didn’t take the chance. I brought the full of force of the bentwood chair down against her knees. ‘Is that how you felled Ethan before you hammered him to death?’

She gave a cry of pain, and then, ‘You can’t prove a thing.’

I am not usually a violent person, but there was one thing Georgina Conroy was right about. I would have liked my brother-in-law. And it made me angry to think of Harriet and Austin growing up without a father. All the same, I resisted the urge to execute her and claim self-defence.

‘I won’t have to prove anything, Mrs Conroy. But I have a feeling you’ll have an awful lot of questions to answer.’

Through the window, I saw Marcus striding up the yard towards the house, his sergeant beside him, with the confident glow of a man with a search warrant in his pocket. Sergeant Sharp brought up the rear.

I went outside.

Marcus hurried towards me, motioning the other two on towards the farmhouse. ‘Kate! You were to wait in the farm cottage with the children.’

‘Oh? Sorry. I thought it might be helpful to make sure Mrs Conroy was home. Now, unfortunately, she’s had an argument with a chair.’

‘What was going on in there?’

‘Hold your horses, Marcus. I think you might be interested in what Mrs Conroy had to say.’

I told him of our exchange, and about the mystery of Miss Trimble’s last words: bitter, dandy. ‘You’ll find the dandelion wine on the table, and more in the pantry I should think.’

Marcus gave me a shrewd look. ‘Unless we find a poison it would be difficult to make your suspicion stick. We could not test for every single poison, and they don’t all stay in the body.’

‘Test for hemlock, if that’s possible.’

His sigh was a little exasperated, as if he had enough to do without being given tasks by me. But he waited to hear the reason behind my suggestion.

I described seeing Miss Trimble through the window, going into the house and finding my way to the parlour. ‘My first thought when I went in the room was that she had seen a mouse and tripped, and when I thought about the colour of her dress the word “moleskin” came to mind, though it was only an ordinary grey.’

‘A mouse? Moleskin? How does that take you to hemlock?’

‘I must have caught a whiff of something mousey. The only poison I remember from my
Materia Medica
that is described as having a mousey smell is hemlock. And it would explain why she could still speak. It’s a poison that spreads upwards, paralysing the body slowly.’

He stared at me, and then nodded slowly. ‘I’ll talk to you later, Kate.’

As he reached the farmhouse door, I called after him, and caught up. ‘Will you need the children again tonight?’

‘No. Mrs Sharp helped me to get Millie talking. No mean feat. Millie said Mrs Conroy started the fire in the barn. From what the child tells me, her own father died under suspicious circumstances.’

‘In Clitheroe?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was where Miss Trimble spent last week. Georgina Conroy must have feared she would make some connection.’

The farmhouse door opened. Sergeant Sharp brought Georgina Conroy into the yard. Her look of hatred turned me cold.

‘Take her to the car,’ Marcus said.

We watched her go.

‘Marcus, am I to take it that Mary Jane is free to leave the Ledgers’?’

‘There’ll be paperwork to complete.’

Bugger Marcus’s paperwork. Mary Jane had suffered enough. I would gather up Harriet and Millie, and fetch Mary Jane from the Ledgers’.

Sykes rode up just before midnight, disturbing the silence of our quiet road with the roar of his borrowed motorbike. I pulled on my dressing gown and went downstairs to let him in.

He brought a breath of fresh air into the hall as he pulled off his helmet. ‘Sorry. I saw you were in darkness but with a light in your room, and I thought you’d want a report.’

‘You look half frozen.’

‘I’ve come from Otley. I took the information to Chief Inspector Charles. He was still at his desk.’

I led him into the sitting room where Sookie was sitting by the embers of the fire, her kittens in the trug brought from upstairs.

Sykes rubbed his hands over the dying fire. ‘My teeth are chattering ten to the dozen. Have you got a drop of something warming?’

It took an hour for his long story to come out, over glasses of brandy. The verger’s wife, Miss Trimble’s cousin, had chapter and verse on the woman we knew as Georgina Conroy, née Waterhouse. In Clitheroe she had been married to a retired solicitor’s clerk. He died of
heart failure, only six months after his only son met an accident in their garden, falling from a ladder while tying up the branch of an apple tree. After Georgina left the area, police from Manchester came looking for her in connection with the death of a previous husband.

‘I wonder why she took Millie with her?’

Sykes grunted. ‘A useful little slave. It was the way she treated Millie that made me think less highly of her than you did. She’s personable, and a good actress. It was a small thing. Mrs Conroy didn’t buy socks for Millie. The child seemed so forlorn, with her couch grass fire, clogs and no socks. I thought, something’s not right here.’

‘I hope Marcus will be able to pin her down for this.’

‘Oh he thinks he will. He’s having every inch of the sundial fragments tested for her fingerprints. A single print will put her at the scene. And he found some useful stuff when searching the farmhouse.’

It surprised me that Marcus had confided in Sykes, but then, we had done most of the work. ‘What sort of things did he find in the farmhouse?’

‘He’s having some substances tested by a chemist. And there were different identity papers, bank books, the deeds of houses inherited from previous husbands. I wonder when she would have stopped.’