Murder on the Flying Scotsman (22 page)

‘Gosh, need you ask, of
course
I’ll help,’ she said. ‘If anyone decides to be difficult, I’ll tell them the alternative is a grim old police matron. Do you
want me to ask them questions, too?’

‘No, Daisy, absolutely not!’ Alec looked appalled. ‘Don’t you dare. In fact, if you should find suspicious scratches, which I don’t expect, you’re not to
comment, let alone ask for explanations or make accusations. Just tell Piper. He’ll be right outside your door.’

Daisy had not considered that there might be a threat to her own safety. She still didn’t really, not when she’d only be seeing the ladies, but it would be comforting to have help at
hand in case someone went for her with a poker. ‘Good,’ she said, with a warm smile for the young detective, who blushed and beamed.

They decided her bedroom was the best place for her to operate. She went up, and a few minutes later Piper ushered in Enid Gillespie.

‘Really, Miss Dalrymple,’ she snapped, ‘I can scarcely believe
you
are lending yourself to this sordid business.’

‘If you prefer to go to the police station and see a police matron, I’m sure Chief Inspector Fletcher will oblige,’ Daisy assured her.

‘Certainly not!’

‘Then I rest my case. May I look at your hands, please, Mrs. Gillespie?’

‘My hands? Good gracious, is that what all this fuss is about? The police must be quite baffled if they are taking up palmistry,’ Enid Gillespie said sarcastically, holding out her
hands palms up. At Daisy’s request she turned them over to display several singularly ugly, rings, ornate Victorian settings of not very valuable stones. No scratches.

‘Now I must see your arms.’

‘This is going too far!’ Mrs. Gillespie spluttered.

‘Shall I ask Detective Constable Piper to escort you to the police station?’ Daisy prayed the obstreperous woman would give in. Whether Piper, or even Alec, had the authority to do
anything of the kind she had no idea. She should have found out.

In grim silence, Mrs. Gillespie removed the fitted jacket of her black costume, unbuttoned the cuffs of her white blouse, and rolled the sleeves up to her elbows. Daisy was quite disappointed
not to discover any evidence blazoned upon that loose, pallid, blotchy skin.

After her, the rest were easy. Mrs. Smythe-Pike, though bewildered, was willing. Madame Pasquier was quick and businesslike. Anne was so busy complaining about the hotel’s lack of
facilities for small children that she was hardly aware of baring her arms for Daisy’s inspection. Judith seemed distinctly uneasy, worried even, but she complied without demur. As for Kitty,
she considered the whole thing a terrific lark. All were unmarked.

As Kitty bounced out, Piper stuck his head into the room. ‘There’s just Mrs. Jeremy Gillespie left, miss,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think she oughta be running up and
down more’n she need ’case she has her baby on the stairs.’

‘Is she crying?’ Daisy asked apprehensively.

‘No, miss, not at the moment, but the chief’s decided to see her right after her husband, and he’s in there now.’

‘Let’s hurry, then.’ Daisy headed for the stairs, Piper on her heels. ‘If everyone’s finished in the dining room, I’ll see her in there. Not that I believe
for a moment she could possibly have attacked anyone.’

‘Don’t seem likely, do it, miss?’ Piper agreed.

Mattie Gillespie was scratchless – and tearless until, lumbering from the dining room with Daisy, she met Piper with a request to proceed to the Chief Inspector’s lair. Eyes
swimming, she clutched Daisy’s arm.

‘Come with me,’ she begged.

Suppressing with ease a noble impulse to suggest Jeremy as a preferable escort, Daisy went. Alec couldn’t very well object after asking for her help. In fact, he looked resigned but made
no protest.

His questioning was of the gentlest, without the least hint of suspecting Matilda. Nonetheless all he got out of her, through floods of tears, was that Jeremy didn’t do it and she
didn’t care about the money, all she wanted was to go home.

Alec sighed and let her go. Daisy supported her tottering steps from the room, though obviously dying to stay and find out what progress he had made.

She wasn’t missing anything. He was, as Tom said, ‘No forrader.’ Peter Gillespie without his wife was no more informative than with her. Jeremy Gillespie and Harold Bretton
sober remembered no more than they had drunk – less if anything. Not a scratch on any of them.

‘None of the women scratched, I take it, Ernie?’ Alec said. Piper shook his head. ‘We’ll go up to Smythe-Pike then. I want to leave Raymond till last. It won’t hurt
to give him time to get the wind up.’

‘Poor chap,’ Tom murmured.

‘Poor chap indeed,’ Alec soberly agreed, ‘but it’s for the lawyers to argue over diminished responsibility. Our job’s to find Albert McGowan’s
killer.’

From the fuss Smythe-Pike kicked up when asked to bare his arms, anyone might have guessed him to be the murderer. Sitting up in bed in his crimson-striped flannel pyjamas, he roared curses at
the presumptuous peelers who dared disturb a sick man’s rest. However, the Chief Constable with whom he claimed intimate friendship was hundreds of miles away. At last he grudgingly pushed up
his pyjama sleeves, revealing sinewy arms without a sign of a scratch.

That was his only concession. When Alec tried to ask a few questions, Smythe-Pike brandished his fist and gobbled like a turkey, his face turning as crimson as the stripes on his pyjamas. Afraid
of causing an apoplectic fit Alec desisted.

‘Crikey,’ breathed Piper as the door closed behind them, ‘I’m glad we don’t have to try and arrest
him
!’

‘What about the lawyer, Chief?’ Tom asked.

‘If he done it, why’d he stick around?’ said Piper. ‘He didn’t have to. You’d think he’d be off like a shot.’

‘He’d’ve wanted to keep tabs on things,’ Tom informed him, ‘see if we was looking his way. They often do. Not that I think it was him.’

‘Nor do I,’ Alec agreed, ‘but I suppose we’d better check him. The more I think about it, the more Miss Dalrymple’s theory seems like a far-fetched farrago, but I
don’t want to have to tell her I didn’t even look. You take a dekko at McGowan’s valet, Tom, while Ernie and I pay a call on Braeburn. See you downstairs.’

The solicitor was up and dressed, but once again huddled in the chair by the fire. He still looked thoroughly miserable, red-eyed and hollow cheeked, his black silk scarf wound close about his
throat.

‘I’m very sorry to disturb you again, sir,’ Alec said. ‘Your throat’s still bad, is it? Well, I shan’t be asking you to do much talking, unless you have
recalled anything new?’

‘Nothing,’ said Braeburn gruffly. ‘What do you want?’

‘We’re just asking everyone who entered Mr. McGowan’s compartment to show us their hands and arms, sir. If you wouldn’t mind . . .’

‘Mind? Of course I mind! You can’t do that without a warrant.’

Alec raised his eyebrows with a cold stare. ‘I can’t insist without a warrant, sir. I’m just requesting. None of the others has refused.’

‘They all have a motive for wanting Albert McGowan dead. No doubt they’re anxious to clear themselves.’

‘We don’t have to prove motive, sir, though it helps. I’d be remiss in my duty if I didn’t check everyone who had means and opportunity.’

‘Well, I don’t practise criminal law,’ Braeburn reluctantly conceded. ‘I am not conversant with the ins and outs of it. Very well.’ He stood up, took off his
jacket, and rolled up his sleeves.

His bony arms were clean as a whistle. So much for Daisy’s wild conjectures, Alec thought, solicitously helping him on with his jacket. Young Ernie must be disappointed at this proof of
her fallibility.

CHAPTER 18

Daisy hadn’t minded helping Alec by examining the women, but now she found it slightly embarrassing to face them. Unwilling to skulk in her room, she retreated to a
corner of the lounge and hid behind last week’s
Berwick Journal.

Still snow on the Cheviots, she noted. No wonder it was so cold. She had just missed Wanda Hawley in
Miss Hobbs
at the Playhouse, and a film of the eruption of Vesuvius, with music by the
Playhouse Orchestra. A motor-car speeding at over twenty miles per hour had hit a perambulator on the bridge. No one badly hurt, she gathered. The motorist’s defense was that the pram was
being pushed in the roadway, but as Superintendent Halliday pointed out in court: ‘We have hardly come to that stage yet when the public has no right to be on the highway. In a recent
decision, a learned judge has laid it down that even if a person is sitting in the middle of the road they have no right to run over him.’

An advertisement offering farmers ten-pence ha’penny each for moleskins caught Daisy’s eye, then her mind wandered. Alec hadn’t placed much faith in her interpretation of
Belinda’s mystery words. What else could they mean? ‘Arsony’ – ‘arsenic’? Had Albert McGowan somehow got wind of a poisoning? Had someone been poisoning him? She
rather thought an upset stomach was a symptom of arsenic poisoning.

She should have asked Belinda about the bits of shouting she
had
understood, which might well give a clue to the rest. Nor had the child ever answered the question about what made her
believe she would be sent to prison.

Surely she ought to be back from her walk by now. Oh lord, Daisy thought in a sudden panic, were she and Alec both quite wrong to trust Chandra Jagai?

Jumping up, she dropped the newspaper on her chair and hurried out to the lobby.

‘Miss Dalrymple!’ Belinda, rosy-cheeked, was just taking off her hat. Behind her the doctor, smiling, unbuttoned his coat. ‘We had ever such a nice walk, on the walls by the
river. It’s perfectly safe there. We saw fishing boats and swans and all sorts of things.’

‘And we talked, didn’t we, Belinda?’

‘Dr. Jagai says I have to tell you or Daddy absolutely everything.’

‘Thank you, Doctor, I was just thinking we hadn’t quite got to the bottom of things.’ Daisy noticed Briggs pausing on his way through the hall and pricking up his ears.
‘Come into the dining room, Belinda. There shouldn’t be anyone in there.’

‘I’ll be in the lounge if you need me,’ said Jagai.

The tables in the dining room were already set for lunch. Daisy pulled out a chair and sat down. Belinda stood before her, hands tightly clasped, looking guilty.

‘I didn’t
mean
not to tell you.’

Daisy took her hands. ‘It’s all right, darling. I know you were frightened. But what exactly was it that frightened you? Why did you think you’d be sent to prison?’

‘He said so. It was in the corridor, after I fetched Dr. Jagai, ’member? He went in with you and I waited outside, and then the guard came to see why the train stopped, and everyone
came out. Someone whispered in my ear about wicked little girls listening at doors and they’d get put in prison if they told what they heard.

Leaning forward, Daisy asked urgently, ‘Who?’

‘I can’t be quite absolutely sure. There were lots of people crowding around and talking. But I thought it was that lawyer.’

‘Mr. Braeburn! Now I remember you asked me if lawyers could put people in prison. It’s a pity you’re not sure, but I think we’d better tell your father right away. Come
on.’

They went to the landlord’s parlour but no one was there. As they came out, Tom Tring came down the stairs. ‘Looking for the chief, ladies?’ he asked. ‘He’s
upstairs, with Mr. Braeburn.’

‘I don’t want to go!’ cried Belinda.

‘Mr. Tring, could you take Belinda to Dr. Jagai?’

‘O’ course, miss. Come along, Miss Belinda.’ He engulfed her small hand in his vast one. ‘Room nine, miss.’

Daisy sped upstairs. After a false start she found the room just round the corner from hers, and was raising her hand to knock when she heard Alec’s voice thanking Braeburn for his
cooperation.

It must mean the solicitor was not scratched. Confused, Daisy let her hand drop. The door opened and Alec stared down at her in surprise.

‘What is it?’

In a low voice she told him, ‘Belinda says Braeburn threatened her with prison if she repeated what she’d overheard.’

She was about to add that Belinda wasn’t quite sure, but Alec didn’t wait. He flung back into the room.

‘You threatened my daughter?’ he roared in a voice worthy of Desmond Smythe-Pike, standing arms akimbo glaring down at the chair by the fireside. Unfortunately it hid the lawyer from
Daisy and she couldn’t very well just barge in.

‘Threatened?’ he squeaked. ‘Good lord, no.’

Suspicion joined the fury in Alec’s face as he stared down. His dark, heavy brows met over his nose in a formidable scowl. ‘Take off that scarf,’ he demanded, his tone
deceptively calm.

‘I really must protest, Chief Inspector,’ Braeburn said shakily. ‘I’m an ill man. I shall take a dangerous quinsy if I expose my throat to the cold. You yourself admit
that you have no legal right to insist on . . .’

He spluttered to a halt as Alec leaned forward and grabbed. His hand returned to Daisy’s view with a black cravat dangling. Piper, standing just inside the door, moved towards them.

Now Alec’s voice was as soft as a panther’s footfall, and as dangerous. ‘Just how did you come by those scratches on your neck, Mr. Braeburn?’

‘I must have done it when half asleep,’ Braeburn squawked.

‘You claim they are self-inflicted?’ Alec asked sceptically.

‘It has happened before,’ he gabbled. ‘I am subject to acutely painful quinsies. One instinctively reaches for an itch or a source of pain, and in a half waking state one is
not aware of clawing oneself until too late It is most embarrassing. You will understand why I didn’t care to reveal such a ridiculous plight.’

‘Hardly ridiculous. They look nasty. You ought to ask Dr. Jagai to wash them with boracic and apply iodine.’ Was Alec backing down? Daisy wondered in dismay. But he continued,
‘We are losing sight of my original query: What’s this about your threatening Belinda?’

‘Not threatening, Chief Inspector, warning.’ Braeburn had regained his composure. ‘I had seen Miss Fletcher in the corridor when Mr. Smythe-Pike and Mr. Gillespie were
consulting me. When I saw her again lurking, as I supposed, outside Mr. McGowan’s compartment, I merely warned her in a fatherly way that eavesdropping is wrong.’