Authors: Christianna Brand
He thought it all over, deeply and quietly—for it had been a plot deeply and quietly laid. ‘I’ll see those four for myself,’ he said to his sergeant. ‘Mrs. Caxton, of course, the son and the step-son and the doctor.’ These were the principals and one might as well tease them a little and see what emerged; but for the rest of course—he knew
*
: the how and the when and the why, and therefore the who. Some details to be sorted out, naturally; but for the rest—he knew; a few words recollected, a dozen, no more—and with a little reflection, how clear it all became! Curious, thought Cockie, how two brief sentences, hardly attended to, might so twist themselves about and about as to wind themselves at last into a rope. Into a noose.
He established himself in what had been Cyrus Caxton’s study and sent for Elizabeth. ‘Well, Mrs. Caxton?’
White teeth dug into a trembling lower lip to bite back hysteria. ‘Oh, Inspector, at least don’t call me by that horrible name!’
‘It is your name now; and we’re engaged upon a murder investigation. There’s no time for nonsense.’
‘You don’t really believe—’
‘You know it,’ said Cockie. ‘You were the first to know it.’
‘Dr. Ross was the first,’ she said. ‘You saw him yourself, Inspector, leaning over Cyrus as he was lying back in that chair; sort of—snuffing. Like a terrier on the scent. He could smell the cyanide on his breath, I’m sure he could; like bitter almonds they say it is.’
It had not needed an analyst to detect the white traces of poison on the peach and in the heavy syrup. ‘Who brought the food for the luncheon, Mrs. Caxton?’
‘Well, we all… We talked it over, Theo and Bill and I. It was so difficult, you see, with no servants; and me being in London. I ordered most of the stuff to be sent down from Harrods’s and Theo brought down—well, one or two things from Fortnum and Mason’s…’ Her voice trailed away rather unhappily.
‘Which one or two things? The peaches, you mean?’
‘Well, yes, the peaches. He brought them down himself, yesterday. He was up and down from London all the time, helping Bill. But,’ she cried, imploringly, ‘why should Theo possibly have done this terrible thing? His own father! For that matter, why should anyone?’
‘Ah, as to that!’ said Cockie. Had not Cyrus Caxton spoken his own epitaph?
At certain times there are numerous males, the drones, which have very large eyes and whose only activity is to eat and to participate in the mass flight after the virgin queen.
He had seen them himself, stuffing down Mr. Caxton’s oysters and cold chicken and ham, their eyes, dilated with devotion, fixed with an astonishing unanimity upon Mr. Caxton’s bride.
‘Only one of them mates, however,’
he repeated to himself,
‘and he dies in the process.’
That also had been seen to be true. ‘Elizabeth,’ he said, forgetting for a moment that this was a murder investigation and there was to be no nonsense, ‘from the hornet’s-eye angle, I’m afraid you are indeed a virgin queen.’
And Theo, the young drone, stout and lethargic, playing with his stocks and shares in his cosy London flat… Inspector Cockrill had known him since his boyhood. ‘You needn’t think, Cockie, that I wanted my father’s money. I’m all right: I got my share of my mother’s money when she died.’
‘Oh, did you?’ said Cockrill. ‘And her other son, Bill?’
‘She left it to my father, to pass on if he thought it was right.’
‘Wasn’t that a bit unfair? He wasn’t Bill’s own father; and it was her money.’
‘I think she’d probably sort of written him off. I mean, it’s easy enough to hop across from America nowadays, isn’t it? But he never came to see her. Though I believe the servants let him know, when she was dying; and they did correspond. In secret; my father would never have allowed it, of course.’
‘Of course!’ said Cockie. He dismissed the matter of money. ‘How well, Theo, did you know your father’s new wife?’
‘Not at all well. I saw her when I came to visit my mother during her illness, and again at the funeral after she died. But of course…’ But of course, his tone admitted, a man didn’t have to know Elizabeth well, to… There was that something…
‘You never contemplated marrying her yourself?’
But Theo, lazy and self-indulgent, was not for the married state. ‘All the same, Inspector, it did make me pretty sick to think of it. I mean, my own father…’
Would Theo, dog in the manger, almost physically revolted by the thought of his adored in the gross arms of his own father—would Theo kill for that? ‘These bottled peaches, Theo. You served them out, I know; but who actually opened them? I mean, had they been unsealed in advance?’
‘No, because they’d have lost the bouquet of the Kirsch. Right up to the last minute, they were sealed.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘Elizabeth can bear me out. We nipped in here on the way to the wedding—I drove her down from London—for me to go to the loo in case I should start hopping in church. And she took a quick dekko just to see that everything looked all right. She’ll tell you the bottles were still sealed up then; you can ask her.’
‘How quick a dekko? Tell me about this visit.’
‘Oh, good heavens, Inspector!—the whole thing took three minutes, we were late and you know what the old man was. We rushed in, I dashed into the cloakroom, when I came out she was standing at the dining-room door, looking in, and she said, “It all looks wonderful,” and what a good job Bill and I had done. Then
she
went into the cloakroom and we both got into the car and went off again.’
‘Was the tin of cyanide on the hall table then?’
‘Yes, because she said thank goodness Bill seemed to have got it for her and saved her more trouble with Father.’
‘No one else was in the house at this time?’
‘No, Bill had gone on to the church with my father.’
‘O.K. Well, send this Bill to me, will you, Theo? And tell him to bring his passport with him.’
He was ten years older than his step-brother; well into his thirties: blond headed, incisive, tough, an ugly customer probably on a dirty night; but rather an engaging sort of chap for all that. Cockie turned over the pages of the passport. ‘You haven’t been in this country since you were a boy?’
‘No, they shipped me out as a kid, my new papa didn’t want me and my mother doesn’t seem to have put up too much of a fight for me. So I wasn’t all that crazy to come rushing home on visits.’
‘Not even when she died?’
‘At that time I was—prevented,’ he said briefly.
‘By what, if I may ask?’
‘By four stone walls,’ said Step-son Bill, ruefully. ‘Which in my case, Inspector, did a prison make. In other words, I was doing time, sir. I got into a fight with a guy and did six months for him. I only got out a few weeks ago.’
‘A fight about what?’
‘About my wife, if you have to know,’ he said, sullenly, ‘I was bumming around, I admit it, and I guess he got her on the rebound. Well, bum or not, I took and chucked her out and that was the end of her. And I took and pulled him in, and that was the end of
him
—in the role of seducer, anyway.’
‘You divorced your wife?’
‘Yeh, I divorced her.’ He looked at Inspector Cockrill and the hard, bright eyes had suddenly a look almost of despair. ‘I think now I made some pretty bad mistakes,’ he said.
‘At any rate, having got out, you learned that your stepfather was marrying the nurse; that your mother’s money was in jeopardy, perhaps? So you came across hot foot, to look the lady over?’
And having looked her over… Another drone, drawn, willy-nilly—the more so for having been for long months starved of the company of women, for having been deprived of the wife whom he still loved—into the mass flight after the virgin queen. ‘It was you, I believe, who brought the poison into the house?’
‘Yes, I did. The old man was furious with Elizabeth because she hadn’t ordered it. How could she, poor girl, when she wasn’t here half the time? So I went down and fetched it, just to save her more trouble, and put it on the hall table so he’d think she’d got it.’
‘But she was in London: how could she?’
‘Oh, heck, he couldn’t care: if it wasn’t there, she was responsible.’
‘And after all this alleged fuss and urgency, it never got used?’
‘Didn’t I tell you?—it was only to make more trouble for Elizabeth. He was a man that just loved to find fault.’
‘I see. Well, we agree it was you who introduced the cyanide. Was it not also you who handed a plate of cold meat to your step-father?’
‘Was it I who—? For heaven’s sakes, Inspector! Those old ladies were running around like a lot of decapitated hens, snatching plates out of our hands, dumping them down in front of just anyone who’d accept them.’
‘You might, however, have said specifically to one of them, “This plate is especially for Mr. Caxton.”’
‘I might at that,’ said Bill, cheerfully. ‘Why don’t you ask around and find her: she’ll tell you.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? The poison wasn’t on the meat, was it? It had been put on the peach.’
‘If it had,’ said Cockie, ‘it had been put there by someone very clever.’ He dwelt on it. ‘How could it have been placed there so that the whole dose—to all intents and purposes—was on the one mouthful that he happened to take? The first mouthful?’
And he sent Step-son Bill away and summoned Dr. Ross. ‘Well, doctor—so we have it.
Only one mates; and he dies in the process.’
‘You’re referring to the thing about the hornets?’ said Dr. Ross rather stiffly.
‘That’s right: to the thing about the hornets. But nobody could call
you
a drone, doctor. So busy with that little bag of yours that you had it with you out in the hall, all ready to hand.’
‘At intervals of about one week,’ said Dr. Ross, ‘policemen like yourself exhort us not to leave our medical bags in unattended cars.’ He fixed Inspector Cockrill with a dark and very angry eye. ‘Are you suggesting that it was I who murdered my own patient?’
‘Will you declare yourself outside the mass flight, Dr. Ross? You must have seen a good deal of our little queen in the sickroom of the late Mrs. Caxton.’
‘I happen to have a little queen of my own, Inspector. Not to mention several little drones, not yet ready for flighting.’
‘I know,’ said Cockie. ‘It must have been hell for you.’ He said it very kindly. He added: ‘I accuse you of nothing.’
Disarmed, he capitulated, immediately, wretchedly. ‘I’ve never so much as touched her hand, Inspector. But it’s true—there’s something about her… And to think of that filthy old brute…’
‘Well, he’s gone,’ said Cockie. ‘Murdered under your nose—and mine. And talking of noses—’
‘I smelt it on his breath. Oh, gosh, the faintest whiff—but there was something. I thought it must be just the Kirsch—the Kirsch on the peaches.’
‘Such a curious meal!’ said Inspector Cockrill, brooding over it. ‘He was the bridegroom: you’d think somebody would be falling over themselves to please him. But no: he didn’t like oysters, but he has to have oysters, he hated cold meat but all there is, is cold meat, he was violently teetotal but he’s given peaches with liqueur on ’em.’ He sat with his chin on his hand, his bright eyes gazing away into nothingness. ‘There has been a plan here, doctor: no simple matter of a lick of poison scraped out of a fortuitous tin, smeared on to a fortuitous peach-in-liqueur; but a very elaborate, deep laid, long-thought-out, absolutely sure-fire plan. But who planned it, who carried it out and with what ultimate motive…” He broke off. He said at last, slowly: ‘Of course whatever’s in the will, as the law goes now she will still be a rich widow; more agreeable to her, presumably, than being a rich wife.’
‘You don’t honestly think that Elizabeth—?’
‘Elizabeth had nothing to do with the preparation of the food; she hasn’t been in the house for the past three days, except for that brief interlude when she and Theo came in on their way to the church. Each of them was alone for a period of a minute or two—Elizabeth probably for less. Not nearly enough time to have chanced prising open the tin, scooping out the stuff, doctoring the peaches (which anyway were still in sealed bottles) or the cold meat or oysters. On the other hand—Elizabeth is a trained nurse…’ He mused over it. ‘He had a bad cold. Could she have persuaded him to take some drug or other? On the way back from the church, for example.’
‘He was a man who wouldn’t touch medicines. He got these colds, the place was stiff with pills and potions I’d prescribed for him, but he’d never even try them. Besides,’ he insisted, as Bill had before him, ‘the stuff was on the peach?’ And it was that fat slob Theo who had been responsible for the peach. Not that he wanted to suggest, he added rather hurriedly, that Theo would have murdered his own father. But… ‘You needn’t think I haven’t seen him gooping at her.’
‘You needn’t think I haven’t seen you all gooping at her.’
‘I’ve made up my mind,’ said the doctor, quietly and humbly, ‘if I can get out of this business with my family still safe and sound, never, so long as I can help it, to see Elizabeth again.’
‘You are a worker,’ said Cockie. ‘Not a true drone. It will be easier for you. Bill is a drone; he admits it—only
he
calls it a bum.’
And so was fat Theo a drone. Bill, Theo, the doctor…
But the doctor had a family of his own, whom he had had no intention, ever, of deserting for Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. And for that matter, so had Bill a wife of his own, whom, even now, even knowing Elizabeth, he cared for. And Theo was sufficient unto himself and would go no further than a little yearning, a little mooning, an occasional sentimental somersaulting of the fatty heart.
Only one of them mates…
Of the four, mass flighting after the queen, only one in fact had been a potential mate; and sure enough had died.
Of the three remaining—which might be capable of murder, only to prevent that mating?
Investigation, interrogation—the messages to Harrods’s, to Fortnum’s, to the chemist’s shop in the village; the telephone calls to Mr. Caxton’s lawyers, to Step-son Bill’s few contacts in America, to the departed domestic staff… The afternoon passed and the light summer evening came; and he stood with the four of them, out on the terrace of the big, ugly, anything-but-desirable residence which must now be Elizabeth’s own. ‘Elizabeth—Mrs. Caxton—and you three gentlemen… In this business there is only one conceivable motive. Money doesn’t come into it. The new will had been signed, Mr. Caxton’s death now or later made no difference to its contents. None of you appears to have been in any urgent financial need. So there’s only one motive, and therefore only one question: who would commit murder to prevent Cyrus Caxton from ever holding Elizabeth in his arms?’