The Trouble with Harriet (32 page)

“Ned did tell me you were trying to get Sir Casper upstairs after he was taken ill.” Again I felt compelled to ask, “Is he recovering?”

“I’m afraid not; the doctor doesn’t hold out much hope that he will last more than a few weeks or months at most.” She could have been talking about the unlikelihood of the rain clearing up by the afternoon. I said I was sorry to hear that and hoped she at least would soon be on the mend. Whereupon Mr. Jarrow dipped his overgrown mustache in my direction and wheeled her into the hall proper. Again my hand went to the receiver, but before I could dial, I felt someone touch my shoulder.

“How’d you like to have your fortune told by a true Gypsy?”

Slowly I turned to face her. The voice was the same, as was the face, other than for a trace of red lipstick and green eye shadow. Today she wore the camel coat, and her hair looked as though it has been recently washed.

“I’m not interested in any more of your predictions.” I was surprised at the firmness of my voice.

“You should be, lady, because here’s one that’s important. There’s worse in store for you than black cats crossing your path if you don’t persuade your father to hand over that urn.”

“It’s called a reliquary.”

“So it is.” She reached into her pocket for a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches and lit up. “Isn’t it lucky that we understand each other?”

“And who’s my father to hand it over to?” I was shaking, but only on the inside.

“Why, me, of course, lady.” She dropped the match on the floor and puffed smoke in my face.

“And just who are you?”

“I’ve got lots of names. I have one for every day of the week.”

“Would one of them be Harriet?”

“It’s a pretty name, isn’t it?” Her smile was genuinely amused. “It seems to go with platinum-blond hair and blue silk frocks and sapphire earrings. But don’t you go worrying your head about details. I’m sure you’ve had your hands full these last few days with your dear Daddy spilling tears everywhere he goes, ranting on and on about his grand passion. All you need do is to see sense and be ready when I get back in touch. It will be soon. And remember, it won’t be you that gets hurt if you don’t play by my rules. It will be that handsome husband of yours or one or all of those adorable kiddies. For now you can just sit nice and quiet watching the play. Not a squeak out of you or you’ll be sorry. I can see it in my crystal ball.”

Before I could pry my lips open, the outer door opened once more, and Mrs. Malloy came clicking in on those ridiculous heels of hers. When I turned my head, the woman in the camel coat was walking back into the church hall.

“What’s got you by the throat?” Mrs. Malloy demanded in a voice steeped in something stronger than tea.

“Kathleen Ambleforth was afraid you weren’t going to show up.”

“Well, that’s no excuse for you to look like you’re getting ready to fall to pieces, Mrs. H. You know me, always the professional. Just point me to the stage and I’ll be Malicia Stillwaters come to life.”

She was now standing at a most peculiar tilt. “Wish me luck!”

She went to go back out the door, but mercifully Kathleen appeared and airlifted her through another one at the far end of the vestibule. Somehow I found my way back to the rows of folding chairs and sat down in the nearest one before my legs gave out. What, I wondered in numb terror, did the Gypsy woman have in mind for this evening’s performance? How could she be Harriet if Harriet had died in the car crash?

While I was still batting this question around inside my head, Kathleen stepped onstage to announce that because this was a rehearsal there would be no intermission between the second and third acts. And almost immediately afterward the curtain parted. The audience was treated to the sight of Mrs. Malloy seated at a writing desk, wearing my missing pink nightie and negligee.

“How am I supposed to be writing a poison-pen letter?” She swiveled around to glare at the audience. Her voice was slurred, and even in my dazed state I realized she wasn’t just tipsy. She was drunk. “Look what I’m given to do the job. A Biro”—she was waving it wrathfully— “with not a drop of arsenic or cyanide in it! If it isn’t enough to make you spit. As I tell Mrs. H. every day of the week, if you want a job done right, you’ve got to have the tools. Now what’s that blinking noise?”

It was Freddy knocking on the set door. He came into view when it fell down before he could open it, but luckily it was only made of cardboard, and he stepped over it with commendable aplomb.

“Greetings, Mrs. Stillwaters!” His voice projected to the back row of the tombstones out in the churchyard. And Freddy continued to enunciate every syllable as if it might be his last. “Or may I have the rare privilege of addressing you as Malicia?”

“You can call me what you damn well like so long as it’s not Mother.”

“And I am Reginald Rakehell, a hero to my valet ...”

“Go on with you!” Mrs. Malloy snorted. “You’re Freddy Flatts. And if I was your mum, I’d smack your behind, big as you are, for telling lies with all them people sitting out there listening to you.” She swiveled around again and stared down at the audience. “Don’t you lot go encouraging him by snickering, especially after you just come from dancing into church to watch the vicar nod off in the pulpit!”

I was able to sit in my seat and on some distant level absorb the disaster in progress even though the questions kept hounding me. If Harriet hadn’t perished in that accident on the cliff road, as the Hoppers claimed to believe was the case, who was the woman who had died? Did it still make sense to think Herr Voelkel might have been her fellow victim in the crash?

How many rows of chairs separated me from Ben? How long would it take me to reach him after the curtain came down? Was Kathleen Ambleforth so stunned by Mrs. Malloy’s reconstruction of her part that she was physically incapable of calling a halt to the proceedings?

The second act started, and I became fixated on the books lined up on the fake mantelpiece. There was such a compelling familiarity to them, especially one with a blue-and-white dust jacket. It was the cookery book Ben had written shortly after we were married. I sat mulling this over in a deadened sort of way until the obvious solution slid into place. Mrs. Potter had taken it from Ben’s study along with the other volumes when she came to see what props I could contribute. And because I wasn’t there, Mrs. Malloy, intent on boning up on her understudy role, had left Mrs. Potter to wander at will, taking whatever props she needed. What did it matter? What did anything matter given the warning I had been issued in the vestibule by the woman who had called herself a true Gypsy? Would she now be true to her terrible words?

Suddenly the curtains were opening on the third act. I was now completely numb. Or so I thought until I saw what was now on the mantelpiece alongside the row of books. It was supposed to be an Indian vase containing incriminating evidence against Malicia Stillwaters and bequeathed to Reginald Rakehell by Major Wagewar. As I found myself rising up in my seat, I remembered what Mrs. Malloy had told me about what was to happen next. Malicia Stillwaters would produce a gun and shoot at the vase. Shattering it into shards.

In reality, it would probably be made to fall by being poked at by a stick from behind the paper-thin wall because the gun would be a stage one. Not the real thing. Except for this particular performance, that is. Mrs. Malloy, who at the worst possible moment had sunk herself into her role as Malicia Stillwaters, was pointing—I recognized with the awful clarity bestowed by ice-cold fear—Mr. Price’s small, almost-toy-sized gun at the urn.

I knew now what had happened. Mrs. Potter had not only helped herself to some books; she had also found the urn, which she understandably thought was so ugly, we had hidden it away and would not be upset if it were sacrificed in a good cause. As for the gun, hadn’t Kathleen asked me if I might happen to have one of those gimmicky cigarette lighters?

I was on my feet, but I couldn’t open my mouth to shout out. Never mind. There were two other people who weren’t at such a loss for words. One was the woman in the camel coat. The other was Mr. Price. Mrs. Malloy was so startled by their frenzied yells and their assault upon the stage that her arm swung wide and the gun went flying straight into my father’s hand. Thank God for his oversized reach and for the aplomb with which he turned it on a pair of villains. For once he didn’t emote. He didn’t cry out the name Harriet. There was a very good reason for that, because the Hoppers rose out of their seats as one.

“That’s Herr Voelkel’s wife,” said Cyril in an aggrieved voice, pointing at the Gypsy woman.

“So it is.” Edith nodded her wooden head.

“It most definitely is,” said Doris. “I remember that Harriet brought her to the flat once and we didn’t like her.”

“She laughed at us,” Cyril agreed, “but she’s not laughing now, is she?”

“You’re going to have to explain things to me very slowly. I didn’t get more than a wink or two of sleep last night.” Freddy was sitting at our kitchen table the following afternoon, tucking into his third piece of Frau Grundman’s delectable blackberry-and-apple strudel. He deserved to pamper himself after spending the better part of the last twenty-four hours listening to his mother’s tearful assurances that finding herself in danger of being shot in the fray at the church had cured her of kleptomania. It was clear he had minded very much having to wait so long to get the story. “Who was the Gypsy woman?”

“Anna Voelkel,” I told him.

“Herr Voelkel’s wife?”

“His widow; he was killed along with his mother when that car went over the cliff near the Old Abbey. His body wasn’t found at once because miraculously he managed to crawl out of the wreckage into a cave a few yards away. It was dark, and I don’t suppose the rescuers thought anybody could have survived the impact.”

“Hold on a minute.” Freddy sat tugging at his beard, a sure sign he was perplexed. “You say Herr Voelkel’s mother was in that car with him?”

“That’s right.” I took the cup of tea Ben handed me and joined my cousin at the table. “She was the housekeeper, the old woman dressed in black who opened the door for Daddy and took him into that room with the picture of the dead cat.”

“But, Coz, aren’t you missing someone?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought Harriet was killed in that accident.”

“That’s what the Hoppers thought because it was her car, but Harriet was already dead, murdered by the Voelkels in Germany.”

“When did you find all this out?” Freddy, finding himself in need of a restorative, drained his teacup and picked up mine.

“At the police station. They were pretty decent to Morley because he did save the day down at the church hall,” Ben spoke from over by the Aga. He was stirring a saucepan that contained ingredients for a recipe Frau Grundman had given him, and he hadn’t been able to wait to try it. He had told her that if it worked out as he hoped, he would put it in his new cookery book and give her credit.

“The detective told Daddy that he’d known people charged with stupidity to get twenty years, but he smiled when he said it.” I smiled too, remembering. “And Mrs. Potter’s nephew kept coming in with cups of tea. That’s Chitterton Fells for you. All rather friendly and casual. Although I don’t suppose Anna Voelkel had much of a good time.”

“There is something about having the handcuffs snapped on that kills the ‘we’re all mates together’ feeling,” Freddy agreed.

“I don’t think anyone’s wasting time feeling sorry for her.” Ben spooned the contents of the saucepan into a baking dish and sprinkled on a generous handful of buttered bread crumbs.

“I expect those were her cigarette butts that Daddy said stunk up the room the day Ingo Voelkel told him Harriet was dead and that his wife was too upset to come down and talk to him.” My mouth twisted in distaste. “Poor Harriet. It’s impossible not to feel terribly sorry for her. When Sir Casper hired her to steal St. Ethelwort’s relic from the Christ Kirche in Loetzinn, he didn’t know that it was a reliquary. At the Old Abbey it had been stored in a simple wooden box. So Harriet wasn’t prepared for the discovery that she couldn’t simply slip the relic into her makeup bag. It was this complication that made it necessary for her to find someone who wasn’t known to the authorities to smuggle St. Ethelwort—or rather, his finger—out of Germany into England. Daddy, with a daughter living in Chitterton Fells, must have seemed like the gift of a kindly fate. Things could be done pretty much in one spot.”

“Convenient. But as things turned out, not such a bright idea.” Freddy had extracted a few crumbs of strudel from under his plate and was again munching away.

“Poor Harriet. The Hoppers said she was tired of her way of life,” I told him. “She really had been seriously ill, and that had caused her to rethink things. She refused to up the price she had agreed on with Sir Casper before she knew about the reliquary. But she didn’t count on the outrage of the Voelkels, with whom she had worked, on other jobs involving art and jewelry thefts. They weren’t content with a percentage of fifty thousand pounds. Not when they knew the reliquary would be worth infinitely more to a collector willing to forgo asking too many questions.”

“They really were an evil trio.” Ben joined us at the table. “From the sound of it, the foul old mother pulled the strings, but the other two seem to have been more than willing to dance. They decided to murder Harriet in the manner that was to have been staged for Morley’s benefit. Anna and Ingo persuaded her that it would be a smart idea to drive the route to be described to Morley on informing him of her supposed accident. They stopped the car at a suitable spot, delivered her a blow to the head, and sent the car off the road into the river.”

“I want to think it was quick and she didn’t suffer,” I said, and felt Freddy reach for my hand.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

“The Voelkels proceeded with the plan as scheduled.” Ben again picked up the story. “I suppose it made good business sense for them to offer the reliquary to Sir Casper at an inflated price, rather than to an outside buyer, because his instigation of the theft placed him in an extremely vulnerable position. Besides which, a man in search of a miracle isn’t likely to count pennies. They must also have thought it a good move to let the Hoppers proceed as arranged to collect the urn from Morley. After all, who would suspect those simpleminded characters of being up to no good.”