Die Laughing (6 page)

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Authors: Carola Dunn

BOOK: Die Laughing
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“Why on earth would Hilda give away a thing like that? I had the impression she's devoted to her mistress.”
“She is, darling, beyond the bounds of common sense, but she was too upset to be discreet. When she dropped Lord Henry's name, she was actually trying to defend Daphne against Miss Hensted's aspersions.”
“No love lost there.”
“No, I thought for a minute they were actually going to come to blows over who should look after her. I was never so glad to see you in my life.”
“‘What, never?'”
“‘No, never!'”
“‘What,
never?
'”
“‘Hardly ever!'” (They had recently taken Bel to see
H.M.S. Pinafore
.) “Seriously, though, Hilda blurted out that Daphne should have married Lord Henry, then felt obliged
to explain it to me. I suppose the title—though it's only a courtesy title, like mine—must be an attraction. Lord Henry hasn't much else going for him.”
“You know him?”
“Slightly, but I wouldn't dream of prejudicing you for or against him. I assume you're going to see him?”
“Yes, of course,” said Alec. “The lover doing away with the husband is the oldest tale in the book.”
“As old,” Daisy asked, “as the husband doing away with the lover?”
M
ackinnon returned to the kitchen and took up his notebook again. “DS Tring will ask about Lord Henry and about the goose and gander, sir,” he reported.
Alec had a feeling the sergeant was having a hard time keeping a straight face. That was always the way when Daisy got involved in a case. Either other police officers concerned strongly objected to her meddling, or they fell for her, hook, line, and sinker. Just as well it was usually the latter, he thought with a sigh.
Mackinnon was also obviously bursting with curiosity. Alec asked the question for him.
“Daisy, what's this about sauce for the goose and gander?”
“It was a bit confusing at the time, because what Hilda really meant was ‘what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.' She was excusing Daphne's carrying-on by hinting that she was getting back at her husband for his own peccadillos. Who sinned first I can't guess, but it wouldn't surprise me if he had a mistress.”
“Why not?” Alec asked, resigned to venturing into the dangerous territory of Daisy's speculations.
“Well, he really was devastatingly handsome, wasn't he? I heard—at some of those local parties we've been to—that women swoon when he bends over them with that intent look on his face, even though what he's intent on is their rotting teeth.”
Alec momentarily forgot Mackinnon's presence. “Is that why you made your appointment with him?” he asked, with more interest than jealousy, he hoped.
“Darling, he's … he was your dentist, Belinda's dentist, and yet more important, your mother's dentist. I wouldn't have dared go to anyone else. Besides, I'm far too frightened of dentists to care about their looks. And everyone said he was a very good dentist.”
“He was.”
“I was just making the point that any man so attractive would have to beat off the applicants for the position of mistress. Which is a shockingly vulgar thing to say and I hope you're not writing it down, Sergeant.”
“Not me, ma'am.”
“Good. Incidentally, as an additional indication, I think you'll find the Talmadges have … had separate bedrooms.”
“I suppose we'll have to go through all his records and pick out the eligible patients,” Alec groaned.
“Yes. What fun for you, darling. Now I really think I've told you everything I can remember—”
“And a good deal else besides!”
She wrinkled her nose at him in the way that begged for a kiss, but this time he remembered Mackinnon's presence. “I'd rather like to go home now. Bel's bringing a couple of
school friends home for tea and I promised I'd be there. If I think of anything else, I'll write it down so I don't forget.”
“Right-oh, love, off you go. Do you want a taxi?”
“No, I'd rather walk. I shall contemplate the daffodils and put everything that's happened this afternoon out of my mind for a while.”
Alec wondered momentarily why she needed to be home when Belinda brought her friends home from school. His straitlaced mother had not been an ideal person to bring up his daughter after Joan's death, but that was one thing she had never cavilled at.
What, never?
Hardly ever.
That one time had driven Belinda to run away. If this was the same child visiting again, he was glad to have Daisy to sort out the situation. He dismissed it from his mind and returned to the case before him.
 
 
By that time, the dead dentist, daffodils, and her mother-in-law had already ceased to claim Daisy's immediate attention. When she reached the Talmadges' front hall, she saw Gladys peering out through the coloured glass panel beside the front door. The housemaid swung round.
“Are you leaving, m'm? You don't want to go this way. A reporter come knocking on the door, bold as you please, and Constable Atkinson, he come running after and says he's trespassing. Seems he climbed over the wall! Did you ever? Mr. A shooed him back to the street and he's closed the gates, m'm, and there's more people there now, too, so if I was you I'd go out the back way.”
“Thank you, Gladys, I will, if you'll explain how to get there.”
“It's easy, m'm. Just go out the back door by the kitchen and down the drive and past the garridge. You'll see a gate. There's an old alley or lane, not much more'n a footpath. A ginnel Cook calls it, that's from Yorkshire.”
“I'll try it. Thank you.”
As Daisy turned back, the rumble of Tom Tring's voice came from the dining room. Gladys giggled.
“He's a caution, that Sergeant Tring. Ever so nice, really. I don't mind telling you, m'm, I was shaking in my shoes when Miss Kidd said he wanted to see me, but he wasn't a bit scary. He was even nice when I had to say I don't know nothing. I wish I could've helped him,” she added regretfully, “but Miss Kidd, she never tells me nothing. Cook and her stop talking when I come in.”
“Where were you around midday?”
“Me and Miss Kidd had our dinner around noon, in the kitchen, and I laid Mr. Talmadge's lunch in the dining room, then we went up to the sewing room. It's up on the second floor by our bedrooms, and it's only got one window, the opposite side from the drive. We didn't hear nothing nor see nobody.”
“What a pity.”
Daisy returned down the hall to the back door. Passing the kitchen door, she nearly went in to tell Alec about the alley, and also that Cook might be privy to any secrets known to Hilda Kidd. But a glance at her watch made her hurry on. She didn't know how far out of her way the alley would take her, and no doubt Alec would find out about it for himself.
The back garden was bright with tulips, hyacinths, and pansies, growing in ranks in formal beds surrounded by low box hedges. It reminded Daisy of the formal, comfortless drawing room, though pansies are incapable of real formality. The whole added up to a show place, not a home, suggesting the residents' emotional needs were satisfied elsewhere—if at all.
When she reached the garage, she saw that the gravel continued in a narrower path around the side. Until she came to the rear corner of the small building, it hid the wooden gate in the garden wall. In the narrow space between the garage and the wall lurked a compost heap and a rubbish incinerator, which emitted a trickle of noisome smoke.
The bandages and sticking plaster which had killed Talmadge might even now be smouldering there. She hesitated, wondering if she ought to take a look.
A choking wisp of smoke reached her nostrils and dissuaded her. If she went back to Alec, she'd only find that Mackinnon already knew all about it. In any case, it was a very slow fire. Anything not already consumed could wait another ten minutes. She'd ring up from home and ask Alec whether anyone had looked in there.
The wooden gate in the wall had a bolt, but it was held firm in the open position by rust. The latch worked easily, though, and the gate swung on its hinges without a squeak. Before she stepped through, Daisy checked that there were no footprints approaching the gate for her to spoil.
The alley was about six feet wide, between walls, fences, and hedges separating it from the gardens on either side. It was cobbled, the mortar between the stones long crumbled away. Grass and dandelions grew along the sides, but the
centre was clear, so presumably used regularly. The cobbles showed no footprints, and a patch of gravel from the path, spreading in a fan beyond the gate, was equally unhelpful.
As she approached the end of the alley, a whistling errand boy on a bicycle turned in from the street. Seeing her, he stopped and backed out again to leave room for her to pass.
“Afternoon, miss,” he called, touching his cap. “Beautiful day, eh?”
“Lovely. Do you often ride this way?”
“Now an' then. It's a good shortcut, see, 'cause of them dead-end streets.”
“Most convenient,” Daisy agreed, taking note of the shop name on the packages in his basket: J. Witherbee, Chemist. Alec might want to ask J. Witherbee's boy if he'd seen anyone unusual in the alley earlier today.
She hurried on. Halfway home, the beautiful day dissolved in another shower. At that point she remembered that her umbrella was waiting for her in the waiting room—always supposing it hadn't been impounded by the police as a valuable clue. Far from providing shelter, the plane trees lining the streets simply gathered the rain and deposited it in great splotches instead of small drops.
Feeling damp, Daisy turned into Gardenia Grove. A dark red Sunbeam tourer with gleaming brass and a dark-skinned chauffeur passed her and pulled up before the Fletchers' garden gate. Before the chauffeur could get out to open the doors, three little girls in navy blue school uniforms scrambled out of the rear. After them, at a more leisurely pace, came a flamboyant figure in a yellow sari embroidered with
green leaves, a shawl covering her glossy black hair. The chauffeur raised a large black umbrella over her.
“Poor Mummy, have you been at the dentist all this time?” cried Belinda, ginger pigtails flying as she ran to hug Daisy.
“Sort of, darling. Hello, Deva. Hello, Lizzie. Sakari, too sweet of you to bring the girls from school.”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Prasad,” said Belinda, echoed by Lizzie.
“Go on into the house, girls,” Daisy said. “I hope you'll stay for a cup of tea, Sakari?” She touched cheeks with the plump Indian woman, conscious of the exotic fragrance of her.
Sakari murmured, “Ulterior motive, I am afraid, Daisy.” She spoke excellent English, her accent making her sound formal even at her most colloquial. Her dark eyes sparkled with mischief. “I brought Melanie, also. She is cowering in the car, hoping you will not think us too vulgarly inquisitive for words.”
“So you've heard already.” Daisy sighed, going to peer into the hooded back of the car. “Mel, come along, do. I'm getting wet. I'll tell you what I can, and probably more than I ought.”
“Oh, Daisy dear, how dreadful for you!” Melanie Germond's husband was the local bank manager, as Alec's father had been. As his wife, Mel was eminently acceptable to St. John's Wood society, but she was frightfully shy.
Despite this handicap, she had championed the Prasads' entrée into the social life of the neighbourhood, though there were still plenty of houses where the Indian couple
were not invited. These had, until Daisy's marriage, included the Fletcher household under old Mrs. Fletcher's sway. Daisy had met both women through Belinda's school, and had grown very fond them.
“Kesin,” Daisy said to the chauffeur, “if you go to the kitchen, Dobson will give you a cup of tea.”
“Sank you, madam.” He bowed to her, hands folded together, and looked to Sakari, who nodded. He went off to the kitchen door while Daisy took her friends into the house.
The girls were already in the dining room, chattering over a lavish spread laid out in advance by Dobson. Daisy, pausing in the doorway, hoped the cook-maid had saved some cake and biscuits for the grown-ups.
Belinda saw her. “I told Gran I'm home, Mummy, and I said you are too, so she needn't bother with us.”
“Right-oh, darling. Don't forget to take Nana out, between showers.”
So Bel had neatly evaded a confrontation with her grandmother over Deva, leaving Daisy to face her unprepared mother-in-law with Sakari in tow. Daisy wondered whether Mrs. Fletcher had already heard about the murder. Her involvement was bound to be another bone of contention. Not that there would be a vulgar row, just pointed arrows sent her way at every opportunity.
Swallowing a sigh, she led the way to the sitting room.
Mrs. Fletcher's lips tightened when she saw the Indian woman. Her cold “How do you do” was aimed somewhere between Sakari and Mel. Placing a bookmark in the book she had been reading, she stood up. “I'm glad you're home at last, Daisy. Will you keep an eye on the children? I have one or two errands to run.”
“Have you had tea, Mother?”
“I shall have mine at the tea shop in the High Street.” Thus making it plain—and no doubt telling any cronies she met there—that she had been driven from her home by her daughter-in-law's insistence on entertaining unsuitable people. She stalked out, her drab silk skirts rustling reproachfully.
The room seemed the warmer for her absence. It was a pleasant room, looking southwest over the back garden, now sunny again. Alec's first wife had had the ponderous “good” Victorian furniture reupholstered in gay prints and the walls painted white. A cheerful view of Paris hung over the fireplace, in front of which, on a low table, Alec and Belinda's unfinished chess game from last night awaited them.
“Sit down,” Daisy invited. “I simply must ring up Alec, but I won't be a moment.”
“Clues!” Sakari pronounced gleefully. “You have thought of some clues which he missed.”

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