That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds-'
'
Sarah nodded unhappily. 'She told me once that her entire education was based on learning chunks of Shakespeare by heart.'
'Well, we're not going to learn much by standing staring at the poor woman,' said the policeman abruptly. 'Unless Ophelia was murdered.'
Dr. Cameron shook his head. 'Death by drowning,' he said thoughtfully, 'while of unsound mind.' He glanced at Sarah. 'Was Mrs. Gillespie depressed at all?'
'If she was, she never gave any indication of it.'
The policeman, decidedly more uncomfortable in the presence of death than either of the two doctors, ushered Sarah on to the landing. 'Many thanks for your time, Dr. Blakeney. I'm sorry we had to subject you to that but as her GP you probably knew her better than most.' It was his turn to sigh. 'They're always the worst. Old people, living alone. Society's rejects. Sometimes it's weeks before they're found.' His mouth turned down in a curve of distaste. 'Very unpleasant. I suppose we're lucky she was found so quickly. Less than forty hours according to Dr. Cameron. Midnight Saturday, he estimates.'
Sarah leant her back against the wall and stared across the landing towards Mathilda's bedroom where the open door showed the old oak bed piled high with pillows. There was a strange sense of ownership still, as if her possessions retained the presence that her flesh had lost. 'She wasn't that old,' she protested mildly. 'Sixty-five, no more. These days that's nothing.'
'She looks older,' he said matter-of-factly, 'but then she would, I suppose, with all the blood drained out of her.' He consulted his notebook. 'A daughter, you say, living in London, and you think a granddaughter at boarding school.'
'Don't Mr. and Mrs. Spede know?' She had caught a glimpse of them in the library as she came in, grey faces curiously blank from shock, hands clasped tightly together like petrified children. 'They've been coming in twice a week for years. He looks after the garden and she cleans. They must know more about her than anyone.'
He nodded. 'Unfortunately we've had nothing but hysterics out of them since Mrs. Spede found the body. We'll be asking round the village, anyway.' He looked towards the bedroom. 'There's an empty bottle of barbiturates on her bedside table beside the remains of a glass of whisky. It looks like a belt and braces job. Whisky for courage, sleeping pills, then the Stanley knife in the bath. Do you still say you wouldn't have expected her to kill herself?'
'Oh, lord, I don't know.' Sarah ran a worried hand through her short dark hair. 'I wouldn't have prescribed barbiturates if I thought there was a chance she'd abuse them, but one can never be certain about these things. And anyway, Mathilda had been taking them for years, they were commonly prescribed once. So yes, I would rule out suicide from what I knew of her, but we had a doctor-patient relationship. She had severe pain with her arthritis and there were nights when she couldn't sleep.' She frowned. 'In any case, there can't have been many of the sleeping pills left. She was due for another prescription this week.'
'Perhaps she was hoarding them,' he said unemotionally. 'Did she ever open her heart to you?'
'I doubt she opened her heart to anyone. She wasn't the type. She was a very private person.' She shrugged. 'And I've only known her-what?-twelve months. I live in Long Upton, not here in Fontwell, so I haven't come across her socially either.' She shook her head. 'There's nothing in her records to suggest a depressive personality. But the trouble is-' She fell silent.
'The trouble is what, Dr. Blakeney?'
'The trouble is we talked about freedom the last time I saw her, and she said freedom is an illusion. There's no such thing in modern society. She quoted Rousseau at me, the famous rebel-cry of students in the sixties: 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' There was only one freedom left, according to Mathilda, and that was the freedom to choose how and when to die.' Her face looked bleak. 'But we had conversations like that every time I saw her. There was no reason to assume that one was any different.'
'When was this conversation?'
Sarah sighed heavily. 'Three weeks ago during my last monthly visit. And the awful thing is, I laughed. Even that wasn't a freedom any more, I said, because doctors are so damn scared of prosecution they wouldn't dream of giving a patient the choice.'
The policeman, a large detective nearing retirement, placed a comforting hand on her arm. 'There now, it's nothing to fret about. It was slitting her wrists that killed her, not barbiturates. And the chances are we're looking at murder anyway.' He shook his head. 'I've seen a few suicides one way and another, but I've yet to see an old woman turn herself into a flower arrangement in her bath. It'll be money that's behind it. We all live too long and the young get desperate.' He spoke with feeling, Sarah thought.
An hour later, Dr. Cameron was more sceptical. 'If she didn't do it herself,' he said, 'you'll have the devil's own job proving it.' They had removed the body from the bath and lain it, still with the scold's bridle in place, on plastic sheeting on the floor. 'Apart from the incisions on her wrists there's not a mark on her, bar what one would expect, of course.' He pointed to the lividity above and around the wrinkled buttocks. 'Some postmortem hypostasis where the blood has settled but no bruising. Poor old thing. She didn't put up any sort of a fight.'
Sergeant Cooper leaned against the bathroom door-jamb, drawn to look at the poor grey body, but deeply repulsed by it. 'She couldn't if she was drugged,' he murmured.
Cameron peeled off his gloves. 'I'll see what I can find out for you back at the lab, but my advice is, don't I hold your breath. I can't see your Chief Super wasting too much time and resources on this one. It's about as neat as anything I've seen. Frankly, unless something pretty unusual shows up in the post mortem, I'll be recommending a suicide verdict.'
'But what does your gut tell you, Doctor? The nettles are telling mine it was murder. Why would she deliberately sting herself before she died?'
'Self-reproach, probably. Good God, man, there's no logic to this kind of thing. Suicides are hardly in their right mind when they top themselves. Still,' he said thoughtfully, 'I am surprised she didn't leave a note. There's so much of the theatre about this headdress that I'd have expected something by way of explanation.' He began to tuck the plastic sheet about the body. 'Read
