Withering Heights

met mine. “He’s dropped off the twig!”

10

Dreadful as it sounds, Mr. Tribble’s shocking demise had the advantage of taking my mind off Val’s blatant attempts at resurrecting a relationship with Ben and his failure to give her the cold shoulder. I’d like to say it was the reminder that there are real sorrows in this world on a daily basis that brought me up short. Mr. Hardcastle had seemed very fond of the old gentleman and there would doubtless be others to miss him, but I didn’t think about that at the time. It was more a matter of the practicalities taking over.

Betty made the necessary phone calls. Mr. Scrimshank offered to drive Lady Fiona back to her hotel, a good move on his part or the undertaker might have mistaken him for the corpse. Miss Pierce, after tut-tutting about the evils of brandy served in a teacup, something Mr. Nigel’s parents would never have countenanced, appeared energized by the excitement. It took some persuasion on Val’s part to get her to return to the Dower House. She was talking volubly as they left and I would have liked to hear what she was saying, but while Tom and Ben sat with Mr. Hardcastle, I helped Mrs. Malloy to clear away the tea things. Ariel trailed after us into the kitchen, and a moment later Betty hurried in, all agog.

“Didn’t I tell you that woman’s a killer?”

“What woman?” Ariel peeked up from the chair where she now sat hunched. If ever a child looked as though she needed a cat on her lap, she was it. And no wonder! She might talk glibly about death, but having been in the room with it was something else. I placed a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.

“Oh, don’t be dense!” Betty did not bother to look at her. “Lady Fiona! Who else would I mean? She’s struck again!”

Mrs. Malloy handed Ariel a cucumber sandwich. “Get that down you. Having something inside will help settle your nerves. Works wonders every time.”

“Surely, Betty,” I said, “you don’t think her ladyship killed Mr. Tribble?”

“Certainly I do. She must have slipped something, a tablet or a little packet of powder, into his teacup when she poured him the brandy.”

“How did she do it without anyone’s noticing?” Ariel bit into the sandwich as if it also might be poisoned.

“Sleight of hand. Those fluttering gauzy sleeves of hers. She could have had whatever it was in her skirt pocket.”

“She just happened to have the stuff on her, like it was a lipstick?” Mrs. Malloy elbowed me aside to get to the sink and deposit more plates.

“It could have been some medication she keeps with her at all times.” Betty poked at her red hair as she scanned the room in search of believers. “Or something she brought along for the specific purpose of killing him.”

“Why?” Ariel demanded.

“She must have recognized his name when I mentioned he would be one of the guests. Her need to shut him up has to connect in some way to her motive for murdering dear… her husband. Remember how Mr. Tribble kept going on about being sure he’d performed her wedding ceremony?”

“Do we look gormless?” Mrs. M might have her hands in the sink, but she remained quite clear about her true position in this household. “Of course we remember, and I’m sure the same thought occurred to Mrs. H as did to me: that her ladyship was married to someone else before she tied the knot with Mr. Gallagher, and he found out about it, right before he disappeared.”

“There was that other man you told me about, Ariel,” I said.

She gave one of her characteristic shrugs. “Betty would know about him too, if she’d ever bothered to talk to Mrs. Cake.”

“Oh, please! Just for five minutes can I not be the wicked stepmother?”

“The first marriage could have took place on the sly if her ladyship’s family was against it.” Mrs. Malloy handed me a tea towel to dry the cups and saucers. “Sounded that way, from how Mr. Tribble talked about its just being the bridal couple. There’d have been witnesses, of course, but they could have been anyone: people off the street. Yes,” Mrs. M mused, “it should have been easy to hush things up when the marriage turned out to be a mistake. Better to do nothing perhaps than bother with a divorce, as would have got in the papers.”

“There you are!” Betty drew in a breath. “When Nigel discovered he’d married a bigamist, he must have been so outraged he threatened to go to the police and press criminal charges.”

“Perhaps he said he would keep quiet only if she signed the house and all the money over to him-what was left of it.” I looked at Mrs. Malloy. Did the possibility ripen that Mr. Scrimshank and Lady Fiona had joined forces in murdering the man everyone assumed to be her husband? Had they each seen themselves facing imprisonment for different reasons if Mr. Gallagher remained on the scene? The likelihood of Lady Fiona’s being slammed up for bigamy struck me as slim, but she might have panicked or, even more, disliked the thought of being embroiled in a scandal. Mr. Scrimshank’s situation was more dire. If her ladyship had discovered he’d embezzled her money, agreeing to help her out of her difficulties by way of recompense might have struck him as a good alternative to the realistic prospect of spending a considerable portion of his declining years behind bars. What was one small murder between friends? Now, if Mrs. Malloy and I were to believe Betty, there had been a second.

“Before we convict Lady Fiona in absentia”-I dried the last of the cups-“we need to find out if indeed there was a prior marriage and, if so, whether or not it was legally terminated.”

“And how do we go about that?” Removing Ariel’s half-chewed sandwich, Betty tossed it in the trash bin.

“Well, what I’m thinking,” said Mrs. Malloy, “is that tomorrow morning me or Mrs. H should phone Milk Jugg and ask him to see what he can track down.”

“Who’s he?”

“A private investigator we know. Its being Sunday, he won’t be in his office today, but I’m sure we can talk him into lending a hand, seeing as we did him a favor recently and got no thanks in return.”

I wasn’t convinced that Milk would be ready to forgive our interference in one of his cases, but Mrs. M knows far more about the male psyche than I do.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Betty said, after a moment’s thought. “I only hope it’s what Nigel would want.”

“Can’t you stop talking about him?” Ariel pounced up from her chair. “I’ve never seen you go all silly about Dad. I wish I had run away for good.”

“Oh, Ariel, I am sorry,” Betty said surprisingly, as the doorbell rang.

“Why don’t I get that?” I hurried out into the hall, but Tom was there ahead of me to let the doctor or the undertaker, whoever he was, into the house. They disappeared into the drawing room and I stood thinking about what had transpired in the kitchen. Poor Ariel! Had motherhood taught me nothing? The focus should have been on her reaction to Mr. Tribble’s death, rather than a discussion of matters better left until she was not present. Guest in her house be blowed, I ought to have cut Betty off when she got started. How likely was it anyway that Lady Fiona was responsible for the old gentleman’s dropping so abruptly off the twig, to use Mrs. Malloy’s phrase? Betty had talked glibly about sleight of hand, but her ladyship, so far as I knew, was not a professional magician. What would she know about misdirecting the eyes of her onlookers? Or had she got lucky in that regard with the water dripping from the ceiling? Could it be Lady Fiona who had crept upstairs earlier after Ariel admitted her to the house and subsequently left her alone? Had she entered the bathroom above the conservatory, put the plug in the basin sink, turned on the taps, and left it to overflow? Someone had done this, and Ariel had been vehement in her denials. Who better than her ladyship would know how to make Cragstone a conspirator? And yet somehow, I couldn’t see it. Perhaps I didn’t want the lovely young woman in the portrait transformed into a demon.

There was something else I couldn’t see as I remained in the hall, looking down at the Chinese chest with its exquisite display of snuffboxes on top. The cobalt blue and gold one I had particularly admired on first entering the house was missing. Had it been stolen or merely moved to another location? According to Betty and Tom, their kleptomaniac friend Frances Edmonds had never helped herself to any of their possessions. But the relationship had altered. The Hopkinses were now filthy rich and hadn’t rushed to be generous. Had an already resentful Frances