The Scold's Bridle (7 page)

It crossed DS Cooper's mind that Dr. Blakeney wasn't well. She looked very pale when she opened the door, but she smiled a welcome and stepped back to let him in, and by the time they were settled on chairs in the kitchen some of the colour had returned to her cheeks. "You telephoned last night," he reminded her, "left a message saying you had more information about Mrs. Gillespie."

"Yes." Her mind raced.
She said you would know what to do for the best.
But I don't! I DON'T! "I've been worrying about why she wore the bridle," she said slowly. "I've come to the conclusion that she was trying to tell me something, although I must emphasize that I don't know what that something could have been." As clearly as she could, she repeated what she had told Robin Hewitt the night before about Mathilda's nickname for her. "It's probably just me being fanciful," she finished lamely.

The Sergeant frowned deeply. "She must have known you'd make a connection. Could she have been accusing you, perhaps?"

Sarah showed an unexpected relief. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted. "You mean a slap over the knuckles to bring me down a peg or two. Doctors can't cure unhappiness, Sarah. Something along those lines?"

He found her relief puzzling. "It's possible," he agreed. "Who else knew that she called you her scold's bridle, Dr. Blakeney?"

She folded her hands in her lap. "I don't know. Whoever she mentioned it to, presumably."

"You didn't tell anyone?"

She shook her head. "No."

"No one at all? Not even your partners or your husband?"

"No." She forced a light chuckle. "I wasn't altogether sure that she meant it as a compliment. I always took it as such because it would have strained our relationship if I hadn't, but she might have been implying that I was as repressive and tormenting as the instrument itself."

He nodded thoughtfully. "If she killed herself, then you and I will be puzzling over the significance of this for the rest of our lives." His eyes watched Sarah's face. ''If, however, somebody else killed her, and that person knew she called you her scold's bridle, then it does seem to me that the message is very direct. Namely, I have done this
for
you, Dr. Blakeney, or
because of
you. Would you agree with that?"

"No," she said with a spark of anger. "Of course I wouldn't. You can't possibly make assumptions like that. In any case I was under the impression that the inquest verdict was a foregone conclusion. The only reason I felt I should tell you all this was because it's been worrying me, but at the end of the day I'm probably reading far more into it than Mathilda intended. I suspect the pathologist was right, and that she simply wanted to deck herself out like Ophelia."

He smiled pleasantly. "And, of course, you may not have been the only person she used the nickname on."

"Well, exactly." She plucked a hair from the front of her jacket. "May I ask you something?"

"By all means."

"Does the pathologist's report come down firmly in favour of suicide or is there any room for doubt?"

"Not much," the policeman admitted. "He's unhappy about the absence of a letter of explanation, particularly in view of the rather dramatic way she killed herself, and he's unhappy about the flower arrangement."

"Because the nettles stung her?"

"No. If she was set on killing herself the way she did, a few nettle stings wouldn't have worried her." He tapped his pencil on the table top. "I persuaded him to do some experiments. He's been unable to reproduce the arrangement she came up with without assistance." He drew a quick diagram in his notebook. "If you remember, the Michaelmas daisies were set upright in the forehead band, which incidentally is so rusted it can't be tightened, and the nettles hung down like a veil over her hair and cheeks. The stems were alternate, a nettle down, a daisy up, completely symmetrical all the way round. Now that is impossible to achieve without help. You can hold half the arrangement in place with one hand but the minute you get beyond the stretch of the fingers, the flowers start to drop out. It's only when three-quarters of the arrangement is in place that the gap between the frame and the head has reduced enough to retain the other quarter without dropping them, assuming the same circumference head as Mrs. Gillespie. Do you follow?"

She frowned. "I think so. But couldn't she have used cotton wool or tissues to pad the gap while she put in the flowers?"

"Yes. But if she had, then something in that house would have had rust marks on it. We searched it from top to bottom. There was nothing. So what happened to the padding?"

Sarah closed her eyes and pictured the bathroom. "There was a sponge on the bathrack," she said, remembering. "Perhaps she used that and then washed it in the bath."

"It does have particles of rust on it," he admitted, "but then the bath was full of them. The sponge could have picked them up when it was soaked by the water." He pursed his lips in frustration. "Or, as you say, it could have been used as padding. We don't know, but what worries me is this: if she did it herself, then she must have sat at her dressing-table to do it. It's the only surface where we've discovered any sap." He made a vague gesture with his hand. "We picture it something like this. She placed the flowers on the dressing-table, sat down in front of the mirror and then set about arranging them in the framework on her head, but she wouldn't have discovered she needed padding until she was half-way round, at which point the natural thing to do would have been to reach for some Kleenex or some cotton wool, both of which were there in front of her. So why go to the bathroom for the sponge?" He fell silent for a moment or two. "If, however, someone else killed her and arranged the flowers after she was in the bath, then the sponge would have been the obvious thing to use. It's a far more logical scenario and would explain the absence of nettle rash on Mrs. Gillespie's hands and fingers."

"You said the pathologist's report mentioned nettle rash on her cheeks and temples," said Sarah apologetically. "But she'd have to have been alive for her skin to react to the stings."

"It was only slight," he amended. "The way I see it, her killer didn't wait till she was dead-you don't hang about when you're murdering someone-he or she shoved the nettles in while she was dying."

Sarah nodded. "It sounds plausible," she agreed, "except-" She didn't finish the sentence.

"Except what, Dr. Blakeney?"

"Why would anyone want to murder her?"

He shrugged. "Her daughter and her granddaughter had strong enough motives. According to the will, the estate is to be divided equally between the two of them. Mrs. Lascelles gets the money and Miss Lascelles gets Cedar House."

"Did they know?"

He nodded. "Mrs. Lascelles certainly did because she showed us where to find the will-Mrs. Gillespie was very methodical, kept all her papers and correspondence in neat files in a cabinet in the library-but whether
Miss
Lascelles knew the precise terms, I don't know. She claims her grandmother intended her to have everything and is very put out to discover she is only going to get the house." His face assumed a somewhat ironic expression. "She's a greedy young woman. There's not many seventeen-year-olds would turn their noses up at a windfall like that."

Sarah smiled slightly. "Presumably you've checked to find out where they were the night she died?"

He nodded again. "Mrs. Lascelles was at a concert in London with a friend; Miss Lascelles was thirty miles away under the watchful eye of a housemistress at school."

She forced another smile. "Which puts them out of the picture."

"Maybe, maybe not. I never set much store by alibis and someone had to get into Cedar House." He frowned. "Apart from Mrs. Spede and Mrs. Gillespie herself, the Lascelles women were the only other ones with keys."

"You're determined to make it murder," protested Sarah mildly.

He went on as if she hadn't spoken. "We've questioned everyone in the village. Mrs. Spede was at the pub with her husband and, as far as friends are concerned, we can't find anyone who was on calling terms with Mrs. Gillespie, let alone at around nine o'clock on a Saturday night in November." He shrugged. "In any case, her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Orloff, say they would have heard the bell ringing if someone had come to her door. When Mrs. Gillespie sold them their part of the house, she simply had the bell moved from the kitchen, which is now theirs, to the corridor outside which remained hers. I tested it. They couldn't have missed it if it was rung that night."

Sarah caught his eye. "Then it seems fairly obvious that it must have been suicide."

"Not to me, Dr. Blakeney. In the first place, I intend to put those two alibis under a microscope and, in the second place, if Mrs. Gillespie's murderer was someone she knew, they could have tapped on the windows or the back door without the Orloffs hearing them." He closed his notebook and tucked it into his pocket. "We'll get them eventually. Probably through their fingerprints."

"You're going on with it then? I thought your boss had decided to drop it."

"We raised a number of fingerprints in that house which don't belong to Mrs. Gillespie or the three women who had keys. We'll be asking everyone in the village and outsiders like you, who knew her, to let us take prints for comparison purposes. I've persuaded the Chief to find out who else went in there before he draws a line under this one."

"You seem to be taking Mrs. Gillespie's death very personally."

"Policing's no different from any other job, Doctor. The higher up the ladder you are the better the pension at the end." His amiable face grew suddenly cynical. "But promotion has more to do with empire-building than ability, and to date my light has always been hidden under some other sod's bushel. I do take Mrs. Gillespie's death personally. It's my case."

Sarah found this bleakly amusing. She wondered how Mathilda would feel about a policeman benefiting from her death, assuming, of course, he could prove it was murder and then convict the murderer. She might have felt happier if she wasn't so convinced that he was going to score on both counts.

"Keith? It's Sarah. Sarah Blakeney. Has Jack been in touch with you, by any chance?" She toyed with the phone wire while she listened to the sound of Cooper's car fading into the distance. There were too many shadows in this hall, she thought.

"Not recently," said Keith Smollett's pleasant voice. "Should he have been?"

There was no point beating about the bush. "We had a row. I told him I wanted a divorce and he's gone off in a huff. He left a note saying I could contact him through you."

"Oh, good God, Sarah! Well, I can't act for both of you. Jack will have to find himself another solicitor."

"He's opted for you. I'm the one who has to find someone else."

"Bugger that," said Keith cheerfully. "
You're
my client, sweetheart. The only reason I've ever done anything for that lazy good-for-nothing is because you married him." He and Sarah had been friends from university days and there had been a time, before Jack entered the frame, when Keith had had designs on Sarah himself. Now, he was happily married with three strapping young sons, and only thought about her on the rare occasions when she telephoned.

"Yes, well, that's a side issue at the moment. The main issue is that I need to talk to him rather urgently. He's bound to contact you so will you let me know where he is as soon as he does. It's desperately important." She glanced towards the stairs, her face a pale glimmer in the reflected light from the kitchen. Far too many shadows.

"Will do."

"There's something else. What's my legal position with regard to a police investigation into a possible murder?" She heard his indrawn breath. "I don't mean I'm involved or anything but I think I've been given some information that I really ought to pass on. The police don't seem to know about it, but it's incredibly sensitive stuff and very second-hand, and if it doesn't have any bearing then I shall be betraying a confidence that's going to affect quite a few lives really badly." She drew to a halt.
Why had Ruth told her about the letter and not Cooper? Or had she told Cooper as well?
"Does any of that make any sense?"

"Not much. My advice, for what it's worth, is don't withhold anything from the police unless it's confidential medical information on a patient. Force them to go through the proper channels for that. They'll do it, of course, but you'll be squeaky-clean."

"The person who told me isn't even a patient."

"Then you don't have a problem."

"But I could ruin lives by speaking out of turn," she said.doubtfully. "We're talking ethics here, Keith."

"No, we're not. Ethics don't exist outside church and ivory towers. We're talking big, bad world, where even doctors go to prison if they obstruct the police in their enquiries. You won't have a leg to stand on, my girl, if it turns out you withheld information that could have resulted in a conviction for murder."

"But I'm not sure it
is
murder. It looks like suicide."

"Then why is your voice quivering about two pitches higher than normal? You sound like Maria Callas on a bad night. It's only a snap judgement, of course, but I'd say you're one hundred per cent certain that you're looking at murder and ninety-nine per cent certain that you know who did it. Talk to the police."

She was silent for so long that he began to wonder if the line had been cut. "You're wrong about the ninety-nine per cent," she said at last. "Actually, I haven't a clue who might have done it." With a muted goodbye, she hung up.

The telephone started to ring before she had removed her hand from the receiver, but her nerves were shot to pieces that it was several moments before she could find the courage to pick it up.

The following morning, Saturday, a solicitor drove from Poole to Fontwell with Mathilda's will in his briefcase. He had telephoned Cedar House the previous evening introduce himself and to unleash his bombshell, namely that all Mathilda's previous wills were rendered null and void by the one she had signed in his office two days before she died. He had been instructed by Mrs. Gillespie to break the news to her daughter and granddaughter in person as soon as convenient after her funeral, and to do it in the presence of Dr. Sarah Blakeney of Mill House, Long Upton. Dr. Blakeney was free tomorrow. Would eleven o'clock be convenient for Mrs. and Miss Lascelles?