Mrs Pargeter 01; A Nice Class of Corpse

Colonel Wicksteed couldn’t keep up with the speed of his friend’s intellect. “Sorry. Not with you.”

“I believe, in detective stories, it’s traditional first to suspect the servants.”

Lady Ridgleigh quickly ruled out this idea. “But not at the Devereux. We are talking about Newth and Loxton, remember. If there were anything lax in the morality of either, Miss Naismith would not have engaged them.”

Though the logic of this assertion might, under objective scrutiny, be open to question, they all accepted it. Mr Dawlish seemed to have had the wind taken out of his sails. “Hmm. That rules out the lower-class idea.”

There was a long silence. Mrs Pargeter looked rigidly out at the sea, and suppressed a giggle. She knew that the eyes of everyone in the room had just flickered towards her. From Miss Naismith that snobbishness and its assumptions had enraged her; from the residents, it was merely amusing.

“Ye-es.” Colonel Wicksteed made a long punctuation out of the word. “Yes. Another approach, of course, would be to think who might have had a motive for stealing the jewels.”

“That would be impertinent and in very poor taste!” Lady Ridgleigh snapped down the lid on that idea, too.

“Of course, another thing to do would be to find out who’s got a criminal record.” Mr Dawlish giggled at the incongruity of his suggestion, incidentally rescuing the Colonel from Lady Ridgleigh’s displeasure in the same way that his friend had earlier rescued him.

“Yes,” agreed Colonel Wicksteed. “Yes. Damned funny idea.”

Once again there was silence while they thought about this. Once again, still staring out to sea in amusement, Mrs Pargeter felt their eyes on her.

Oh no, she thought. You may inadvertently have got nearer the truth than you realise, but there’s no criminal record. The late Mr Pargeter was far too careful, and Arnold Justiman far too skilful, for that to have happened.

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The police search of the Devereux for Mrs Selsby’s jewels revealed nothing. Nor did questioning the hotel’s staff and residents give them any clue as to where the stolen property might be. Eventually, in the afternoon, they left to file their reports on the two incidents.

Though the official decision on Mrs Mendlingham’s death would have to await a full post-mortem and the findings of a coroner, the police who had gone to the hotel were in no doubt that it had been an unfortunate accident. Miss Naismith might perhaps be reprimanded for the carelessness of leaving a full bottle of sleeping draught within reach of an old lady on the edge of senility, but there was no question in their minds of any criminal activity.

With regard to the other case, as well, the police were critical of Miss Naismith. By delaying the announcement of the theft (for whatever delicate reasons), she had made their investigation of the incident doubly difficult. The sooner the police can be on the scene of a crime, the greater their chances of solving it. In this instance, the thief had had two days to remove the booty from the premises, which was bound to be his or her first priority, considering the value of the property involved. Since the detailed search of the hotel had revealed nothing, it was reasonable to assume that the jewellery was now in some other safe hiding place.

¦

Mrs Pargeter did not agree with this conclusion. She felt fairly confident that the stolen property was still in the Devereux.

But then of course she knew considerably more about Mrs Selsby’s jewellery than the police did.

During the rest of the day she thought about the theft. Though she was convinced that Mrs Mendlingham’s death had been a second murder, that crime took a lower priority in her scheme of investigation.

The second murder had been an inevitable consequence of the first. Mrs Pargeter could have kicked herself for her stupidity; she had not interpreted Mrs Mendlingham’s ramblings correctly. When the old lady had appeared upset by what she had seen ‘on the landing’, Mrs Pargeter had read that as the expression of a guilty conscience. She had assumed that Mrs Mendlingham was making an oblique confession to having been the one who pushed Mrs Selsby down the stairs.

Whereas now, as her own murder had shown, what had really been upsetting the old lady had been the fact that she had witnessed someone else pushing Mrs Selsby down the stairs. It was this that had prompted the anguished comments in her notebook. Unfortunately, she had somehow communicated what she had seen to Mrs Selsby’s murderer and, of course, from that moment, had signed her own death warrant.

So, although Mrs Pargeter wanted to identify Mrs Mendlingham’s murderer, she concentrated on Mrs Selsby’s death. Even though she did not yet understand the motivation for the crime, she felt certain that the theft of the jewellery was in some way relevant.

¦

The excitements of the morning had taken their toll on the residents of the Devereux, and there was a general feeling that the afternoon should be a time for private recuperation, so that they could all meet for tea in a better state to maintain the polite fiction that nothing had happened. Displays of emotion (except for the vacuous posturings of Eulalie Vance, which everyone ignored) were as little welcomed in the Devereux as midday baths, so an upheaval of the kind they had all experienced must inevitably be followed by a period of solitary rehabilitation.

The residents approached this task in different ways. Colonel Wicksteed swept Mr Dawlish off for a ‘brisk walk’ with the irrelevant misquotation that ‘the rolling drunken Englishman made the English rolling road’. Lady Ridgleigh and Miss Wardstone went up to their rooms for a ‘lie-down’, and Eulalie Vance, as Mrs Pargeter discovered when she went in there round half-past three, snored gently in her armchair in the Seaview Lounge.

¦

Mrs Pargeter looked out at the relentlessly grey sea and focused her mind on the theft of Mrs Selsby’s jewels. The timing of the crime was interesting and, along with other factors, seemed to rule out a financial motive. If someone in the Devereux had wished to steal the jewellery merely to sell it, then they would have done better to commit the theft at any other time. Mrs Selsby’s room would frequently have been left unlocked and, given her age and short sight, it was possible that the loss of the jewellery would not have been discovered straight away. The thief would have had time to dispose of it as and when he or she thought fit.

But committing the crime the night after her death meant that it was bound to be quickly discovered. Only a fool would make such a theft then for the conventional profit motive; and Mrs Pargeter was increasingly certain that she was not dealing with a fool.

Which meant that the motive for the theft could not be simply financial.

In her mind she went round the hotel, room by room. The police, in their search, had concentrated on places where valuables might be safely hidden, but that wasn’t at all what Mrs Pargeter was looking for in her mental tour of the premises.

From somewhere in the depths of the hotel came a faint scraping noise. Newth raking out the boiler. Mrs Pargeter was beginning to recognise the background sounds of the Devereux, the rhythms of the hotel’s life, the ticking of the grandfather clock, all the creaks and judders of the old building. She could understand how, in time, these noises could prove very soothing, very peaceful for a long-term resident.

Eulalie Vance woke with a little snort and looked around her in bewilderment. “Oh, dear me,” she said. “Couldn’t think where I was for a moment. Thought it was morning.”

Mrs Pargeter smiled benignly at the former actress. How kind, you’ve given me just the lead I need, she thought, as the door of the Seaview Lounge opened and the surviving residents started to assemble for afternoon tea.

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