Wednesday cont.
As promised, Gary organized a search of the crypt on
Wednesday evening, when it was thought that Jessie was most likely to seek
shelter. But despite a thorough search, no sign was found that Jessie had been
there.
The fact that Jessie was apparently less than half his size
would have made a struggle superfluous, but that was the only hitch to heroism
in his view. He would prefer a struggle with a gangster, or even a bit of a
shoot-out in which he remained unscathed, but as it turned out, Jessie was
nowhere to be seen and after a night on what he liked to call the ‘crime tiles’,
Dave had to turn in a negative report.
***
“Useless, Sir,” he told Gary when he called in Gary’s office
to report back.
“Don’t call me Sir, Dave. I haven’t been knighted yet,” was
Gary’s ungracious reply. He was annoyed that once again Jessie seemed to have gone
to ground. Forensic evidence had revealed that Mrs Coppins had swallowed
overdose of barbiturates before she was immersed in Kelly’s pond, and poisoning
was Jessie’s style, after all, though she had used arsenic last time. Whether
killing her mother was her style was neither here nor there. A phone call to
Cleo was designed to pick her brains.
***
Cleo wondered where Jessie could get poison or drugs and
there was an even greater mystery accompanying her application thereof, which
Cleo thought highly unlikely. Did she steal pills in the hospital wing of that
penitentiary? Or had the capricious girl complained of sleeplessness and then saved
the prescribed sleeping pills instead of swallowing them? Maybe Jessie had
wanted to kill Kelly and found a way of adding the drug to a bottle of
something after creeping into the house?
***
It worried Cleo that Jessie might have killed her mother,
gone back to the prison undetected and then escaped again hours later. She was
reported missing too long after she had escaped noticeably from the prison. Was
that carelessness on the part of security, or had someone helped her?
There was also something wrong with the timing of events
leading to Mrs Coppins’ death. She had visited Kelly and gone home, but
returned there without Kelly’s knowledge, or that’s what he had said. So where
would Jessie come into that? How would
she get her mother to swallow a lethal dose of barbiturates? The simple answer
was that she hadn’t.
***
Feeling that her arguments had to be logical, Cleo went
through the timing of Mrs Coppins’ death again, looking for flaws in her
thinking. If – and it was the biggest if – Jessie had been going to kill her
mother, she would have absconded from the penitentiary on the Sunday, but was
not missed. If Jessie had put barbiturates in a bottle, it would have to be
when her mother was not at home, and there was no guarantee that Mrs Coppins
would drink out of that particular bottle. Suspecting Jessie was already
ridiculous. If she had left at all, she was in back the prison on Monday
morning, or presumably she was be missed if she wasn’t there for breakfast on a
Monday morning. Then, on Monday afternoon she absconded again and her
disappearance was reported, though Gary only heard that she was missing on Tuesday
morning. It was assumed that she would go home and the address was placed under
observation, but she did not appear. On Wednesday she plundered Dorothy’s
larder, so she was somewhere near. A search for her began. Had she found
shelter in the crypt? Apparently not.
The whole sequence of events stank. Someone had helped her
to abscond, not once but twice or perhaps only once, if she had not absconded
at all on the Sunday. No one had missed her. No one had seen her. Security was lacking at that safe
location!
Another question that had to be answered was whether she
still intended to kill her mother. Assuming she only absconded once, she would
have found out that Mrs Coppins was already dead, but she did not go back to
the penitentiary. That made Cleo think that her escape was carelessness on the
part of the guards rather than an internal intrigue.
***
On the basis of her arguments, Cleo was ready to free Jessie
of the suspicious that she was her mother’s killer. If Mrs Coppins was not
drowned, she was already dead when she was dragged to the pond. Kelly was the
only suspect, in her view, however illogical that appeared.
***
Cleo did not confide in Gary that she thought it might be another
of Chris’s perfect or hopefully only near-perfect murders. Could Gary get Chris
to examine the bottles of alcohol in Kelly’s drinks cupboard?
“What are we looking for, Miss Marple?”
“Traces of barbiturates. Gary. Mrs Coppins must have taken
them without knowing I don’t believe she would knowingly desert the children in
her care.”
***
Gary phoned the Coppins’ home again to check that the young
woman had not crept im through a back door and thus evaded the observation team
parked nearby.
***
“Jessie has not turned up at home,” Gary subsequently
reported to Cleo.
“She must be around somewhere. Where else would she go? Have
you searched Kelly’s farm?”
“Surely that’s the last place she would want to be found
if...”
“...if she’d killed her mother.”
“Do you think she did, Cleo?”
“No. If anything, it’s Kelly she wanted to get rid of,” said
Cleo. “Mrs Coppins might have drunk the drugged alcohol innocently after Kelly
had given it to her without knowing it was drugged.”
“But Jessie’s still first on my list,” Gary said.
“Well, don’t write that in stone,” advised Cleo. “There’s still
more to find out about Kelly.”
“Yesterday he was a bundle of nerves.”
“And today you are making assumptions,” said Cleo.
“Do you know something I don’t know, Cleo?”
“I’ve thought it all through, if that’s what you mean.”
“So have I. Kelly is a useless witness and does not fit into
the criminal type, Cleo. Blubbering like he did yesterday is not what he would
have done if he’d been brazening it out.”
“He’s not the brazening-it-out type,” said Cleo. “ He’s sly.
Just because you didn’t catch him last time doesn’t mean he has a clean slate.”
“Meaning…?”
“Twenty years later, it still isn’t known whether he killed
the people he said were his parents. If you don’t take Kelly’s possible guilt
seriously, the Hartley Agency will have to.”
“Good luck to you then! Let me know if you discover anything
of interest.”
“I could say the same. You need to sort your suspects into
probably and unlikely categories, Gary.”
“You don’t sound very loving, Cleo,” Gary could not resist
saying.
“I don’t love suspects at the best of times.”
“You don’t have to. But you…?”
“… Yes, I do,” said Cleo. “We were talking business just now,
weren’t we?”
***
Something had clicked in Cleo’s brain as she was speaking to
Gary, who seemed to have been fooled by Kelly’s show of grief. She realized
that her puzzlement at Kelly’s farm had indeed been justified and was now
pretty sure that Kelly was the chief candidate for the murder of Betty Coppins
and had been responsible for, if not instrumental in the death of Magda, his
first wife.
How come she had missed some important signs the last time
she was there? What were they? Killers always left clues. Gary’s insistence
that Kelly was not the killer type was ridiculous. Of all people, farmers thought
of killing as part of a day’s work. On the other hand, Gary would argue that the
farm was too neglected for Kelly to be taken seriously as a farmer. What did
Kelly do apart from chase a few sheep around and sell the eggs from hens he had
also probably stolen? Did he take sleeping pills? Had he given Mrs Coppins some
of them? Cleo’s first priority would be to find out what made the guy tick. Why
would he want the woman dead who was willing to sleep with such a scruffy old
codger. Cleo phoned Dorothy for an opinion on her ideas.
***
“That farm’s been there for centuries, Cleo.”
“He apparently inherited it from his family.”
“But it was only owned by Irish farmers because they bought
it from someone. Their ownership was not a case of passing the farm down in the
family,” said Dorothy. “When I left for London it was owned by a farmer named
Smith. I remember thinking he was too old to be working. I did not know that
the Kelly family had bought the farm while I was in London.”
“So you didn’t know them, did you?” said Cleo. “Rumour has
it that Kelly turned up one day and claimed to be a long lost son.”
“He is said to have turned up the day after the only
remaining ‘family’ had been killed by carbon monoxide gas streaming from the
heating stove in their bedroom, but he was seen there before the parents died.”
“Was there no one to verify that the guy was who he said he
was?”
“I’m only telling you what I know, Cleo.”
“But surely the police could have found out by now if he’s
genuine.”
“Not if they didn’t suspect him of anything. It was before I
came back to live in Upper Grumpsfield. I only know that he found the people he
said were his parents dead in their bed. And his name really is Kelly. I
believe the police did check on that.”
“There are thousands of Kellys in the world,” Dorothy
continued. I’m sure he was at the farm before that tragedy happened. Witnesses
said as much, didn’t they? In that case he was play-acting about arriving only
in time to find the Kellys dead and he may have manipulated the heater.”
“But someone must
have been suspicious enough to follow up the story,” Cleo said.
“Your guess is as good as mine. It’s well over 20 years ago.
Kelly was accepted as the grieving son and left alone.”
“Where did you get all that information, Dorothy?”
“From Hilda Bone. She always knows or think s she knows so
much that you could not possibly remember it all. I had just moved into my
cottage and she already knew that my family’s cottage had been sold. She waylaid
me when I was out shopping. She asked me a lot of questions and tried to
impress me with her knowledge of the neighbourhood, including my family.
Apart from snooping on the neighbours, Hilda used to join in
churchy things in those days. Song and dance were her specialities. I put a
stop to the amateur song and dance routines at church events. They were
entirely unsuitable.”
“So that’s how you got to know her.”
“Yes. She sang in the church choir when I first came but
gave that up soon after Mr Morgan came as the new organist. She claimed he had
made a pass at her. Since I had engaged him I thought it wiser not to comment”
“But that wasn’t so very long ago.”
“Nobody believed her, either.”
“I’m sure even Mr Morgan wasn’t flattered.”
“No. He always fancied the pretty young women, but they just
laughed at him.”
“I wonder if Robert can tell any tales about that time?”
Cleo pondered.
“Men are not as observant,” said Dorothy. “But back to Kelly.
I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you contact Colin at records and get him to look up
the case involving Kelly’s parents? It is probably not on the database, but there
must be a file somewhere.
“That’s a great idea!”
“Colin could always say he was digitalizing the file if he
was caught.”
“Who could catch him?”
“Perhaps Colin’ is not permitted to release information,
even of abandoned or past cases, Cleo. Perhaps someone has it all under
surveillance.”
“I won’t get Colin into trouble, Dorothy, but Gary has a
fixed idea that Jessie killed her mother.”
“It’s possible, isn’t it, Cleo?”
“No, quite apart from the logistics. Her threat to kill her
mother was long ago and uttered in a moment of extreme stress.”
“Where is Jessie now?”
“They haven’t found her yet.”
“At least she has enough to eat if she is the person who
took all my fresh baking and as much of the contents of the fridge that she
could carry,” said Dorothy. “I don’t know for certain who it was. I was playing
the piano at the time and did not hear anything. The kitchen door was open to
let the fresh air in.”
“That was taking a risk, Dorothy.”
“You don’t reckon with someone entering your kitchen and
stealing food, Cleo.”
“But you think it must have been her, which would mean she
is not far away.”
“I think that Jessie
will hide out somewhere until she’s eaten all my food. She might even turn up
at my cottage for more.”
”I don’t think that’s likely, Dorothy, do you?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, except that she has already taken
enough to last her for a few days,” said Dorothy. “Have you given a thought to
whether she even knows why she was imprisoned, Cleo?”
“Maybe we should go to that mental institution, pretend to
want to visit her, and see what happens, Dorothy. They might say something
about her mental state if they know you are a close relative, so you’ll have to
be one. After all, they let Jessie run around serving tea, I understand, so
they must think she was fairly stable. You are the best person to ask those
people questions.”
“Escaping might just have been seizing an opportunity, Cleo.
Am I really the best person?”
“Yes. She knows you and the agency will pay your expenses” said
Cleo. “But we could go there together tomorrow,
couldn’t we?
“That’s a better idea.”
“I’ll call you back to fix the time.”
After the phone-call, Cleo sat for some time making notes.
***
“Are you going to phone all night?” Robert shouted. “I’m
trying to sleep.”
“You’d sleep better if you stopped eavesdropping, Robert.
Put the phone down.”
No comments:
Post a Comment