there, I expect.'
Mr. and Mrs. Spede hovered in the library like two squat spectres, so unprepossessing and shifty in their appearance that Cooper wondered if they were quite normal. Neither seemed able to meet his gaze and every question required unspoken consultation between them before one would offer an answer. 'Dr. Blakeney tells me Mrs. Gillespie has a daughter living in London and a granddaughter at boarding school,' he said. 'Can you give me their names and tell me where I can contact them?'
'She kept her papers very neat,' said Mrs. Spede eventually, after receiving some sort of permission to speak from her husband. 'It'll all be in the papers.' She nodded towards the desk and an oak filing cabinet. 'In there some place. Very neat. Always very neat.'
'Don't you know her daughter's name?'
'Mrs. Lascelles',' said the man after a moment. 'Joanna.' He tugged at his lower lip which drooped oddly as if it had been tugged many times before. With a petulant frown his wife smacked him on the wrist and he tucked the offending hand into his pocket. They were very childlike, thought Cooper, and wondered if Mrs. Gillespie had employed them out of compassion.
'And the granddaughter's name?'
'Miss Lascelles,' said Mrs. Spede.
'Do you know her Christian name?'
'Ruth.' She consulted with her husband behind lowered lids. 'They're not nice, either of them. The Mrs. is rude to Mr. Spede about his gardening and the Miss is rude to Jenny about her cleaning.'
'Jenny?' he queried. 'Who's Jenny?'
'Jenny is Mrs. Spede.'
'I see,' said Cooper kindly. 'It must have been a terrible shock for you, Jenny, to find Mrs. Gillespie in her bath.'
'Oh, it was that,' she howled, grabbing her husband's arm. 'A terrible, terrible shock.' Her voice rose on a wail.
With some reluctance, because he feared an even louder outburst, Cooper took the polythene bag containing the Stanley knife from his pocket and laid it across his broad palm. 'I don't want to upset you any more, but do you recognize this? Is it a knife you've seen before?'
Her lips puckered tragically but she stopped the wailing to nudge her husband into speech. 'The kitchen drawer,' he said. 'It's the one from the kitchen drawer.' He touched the handle through the bag. 'I scratched an h'aitch on it for 'house.' The one I keep in the shed has a gee on it for 'garden.' '
Cooper examined the crude 'h' and nodded as he tucked the bag back out of sight into his pocket. 'Thank you. I'll need the one from the garden for comparison. I'll ask an officer to go out with you when we've finished.' He smiled in a friendly way. 'Now, you presumably have keys to the house. May I see them?'
Mrs. Spede drew a string from around her neck, revealing a key that had lain within the cleft of her bosom. 'Only me,' she said. 'Jenny had the key. Mr. Spede didn't need one for the garden.' She gave it to Cooper and he felt the warmth of her body seeping into his hand. It repelled him because it was damp and oily with sweat, and this made him feel guilty because he found them both deeply unattractive and knew that, unlike Mrs. Gillespie, he could not have tolerated them about his house for even half an hour.
Mathilda Gillespie's nearest neighbours lived alongside her in a wing adjoining the house. At some stage Cedar House must have been one residence, but now a discreet sign indicated the door to Wing Cottage at the western end of the building. Before Cooper knocked on it, he walked along a gravel path to the rear corner and surveyed the patio at the back, neatly bordered by tubs of everlasting pansies, beyond which a clipped box hedge separated this garden from the expanse of lawn and distant trees that belonged to Cedar House. He felt a sudden envy for the occupants. How dreary his own small box was by comparison, but then it was his wife who had chosen to live on a modern estate and not he. He would have been happy with crumbling plaster and a view; she was happy with all mod. cons and neighbours so close they rubbed shoulders every day. It was a policeman's lot to give in to a wife he was fond of. His hours were too unpredictable to allow him to impose his own yearning for isolation on a woman who had tolerated his absences with stoical good humour for thirty years.
He heard the door open behind him and turned, producing his warrant card from his breast pocket, to greet the fat elderly man who approached. 'DS Cooper, sir, Dorset police.'
'Orloff, Duncan Orloff.' He ran a worried hand across his wide, rather pleasant face. 'We've been expecting you. Dear me, dear me. I don't mind admitting Jenny Spede's howling is a little difficult to take after a while. Poor woman. She's a good soul as long as nothing upsets her. I can't tell you what it was like when she found Mathilda. She came rushing out of the house screaming like a banshee and set her wretched husband off in sympathy. I realized something dreadful must have happened which is why I phoned your people and an ambulance. Thank God they came quickly and had the sense to bring a woman with them. She was really quite excellent, calmed the Spedes down in record time. Dear me, dear me,' he said again, 'we live such a quiet life. Not used to this sort of thing at all.'
'No one is,' said Cooper. 'You've been told what's happened, I suppose.'
He wrung his hands in distress. 'Only that Mathilda's dead. I kept the Spedes here until the police car arrived- thought it best, really, what with them collapsing in heaps about me-mind you, I wasn't going to let my wife downstairs till it was safe-one can't be certain about things-anyway the uniformed chaps told me to wait until someone came to ask questions. Look, you'd better come in. Violet's in the drawing-room now, not feeling too well in the circumstances, and who can blame her? Frankly, not feeling a hundred per cent myself.' He stood aside to let Cooper enter. 'First door on right,' he said. He followed the policeman into a cosy, over-furnished room with a television on low volume in the corner, and bent over the prostrate figure of wife on the sofa. 'There's a Sergeant to see us,' he said, raising her gently to a sitting position with one hand and using the other to swing her legs to the floor. He lowered his large bulk on to the sofa beside her and gestured Cooper towards an armchair. 'Jenny kept screaming about blood,' he confided unhappily. 'Red water and blood. That's all she said.'
Violet shivered. 'And Jesus,' she whispered. 'I heard her. She said Mathilda was 'like Jesus.'' She raised a hand to her own bloodless lips. 'Dead like Jesus in blood red water.' Her eyes filled. 'What's happened to her? Is she
'I'm afraid she is, Mrs. Orloff. It's only approximate, but the pathologist estimates the time of death between nine o'clock and midnight on Saturday.' He looked from one to the other. 'Were you here during those three hours?'
'We were here all night,' said Duncan. He was clearly drawn between his own perceived good taste of not asking questions and an overwhelming need to satisfy a very natural curiosity. 'You haven't told us what's
