Spotted Hemlock

The thin woman smiled in frozen fashion and rose. A minute later Laura was standing outside the front door with it closed behind her. Suddenly it opened again.’

‘Mrs Gavin!’ The blue-overalled girl was standing on the step.

‘Yes?’ said Laura, filled with a sudden, wild hope.

‘Miss Cummings wants to speak to you again. Will you come in?’

Laura followed her and was shown into the white-panelled room. The proprietress of the school was standing at the window. She turned as Laura came in.

‘You did say murdered?’ she asked.

‘No doubt about it.’

‘It couldn’t possibly have been suicide? She did threaten it when she left here.’

‘The police don’t think it was anything but murder.’

‘But a mistake was made in identifying the body?’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘That must be very unusual. Who…?’

‘The mother.’

‘The mother? Oh, but surely, of all people, a mother would know!’

‘There were good reasons, in this case, for making a mistake, but I’m afraid I can’t disclose them.’

‘Of course not, of course not! I just wanted to be quite sure it wasn’t suicide. Not that I should feel the moral responsibility of it. I mean, people must expect to be dismissed if they show they can’t be trusted. But— well — ”

‘I quite understand. Well, it doesn’t seem that you can help us. Still, thank you, all the same.’

‘You could have a word at the village post office if you wanted to know any more about Miss Palliser. Mrs Pock is renowned for being indiscreet and loquacious.’

‘Thank you very much.’ This time Laura was not called back at the front door. She strode down the gravel drive to the waiting car and told the man to drive into the village and stop outside the post office.

The post-mistress turned out to be a brisk, grey-haired, bright-eyed little woman with a Suffolk accent so pronounced that Laura, waiting while she conversed with a woman who was buying bacon at another counter, wondered whether she would be able to make head or tail of any information about Carrie Palliser which might be forthcoming. She discovered, however, that Mrs Pock’s conversation was not, after all, very difficult to follow. Laura opened the floodgates by buying a book of postage stamps and asking to be directed to the school. She was coming away from it; must have passed it, she was told; not that that was any wonder, for the board saying it was a school was almost hidden by that laurel hedge, and, anyway, it looked like a gentleman’s house, which is what it had been throughout Mrs Pock’s girlhood and almost up to the time that Pock was taken. Of course, it brought trade to the village. There were the children, just twenty of them, poor little things, with their pocket-money to spend, and then there were the parents coming down to see them, and take them out, which was why the Devil’s Advocate had been able to build on a dining-room and call itself an hotel, and then there were the sales of paint-brushes and crayons, exercise books and pencils…

Laura wanted to keep the school in the foreground as a subject of conversation, but could perceive no opportunity of stemming the tide of Mrs Pock’s reminiscences long enough to put the questions she wanted to ask. Her opportunity came with the entrance of another customer. Mrs Pock broke off in mid-sentence to wish the newcomer good afternoon. It was not long before Laura gathered that this customer was the vicar’s wife. She wanted a packet of macaroni, and appeared to be able to cut short Mrs Pock’s remarks by addressing her sternly as Lizzie and adding that she was in a hurry.

‘And who’re you?’ she demanded, turning on Laura. ‘Don’t seem to know your face.’

‘It would be extraordinary if you did,’ retorted Laura, whose worst instincts (she told Dame Beatrice later) were aroused by the vicar’s wife. ‘This is the first time I have ever been in Seethe.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for a murderer.’

‘What!’

(So the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under their skins, thought Laura, as both her hearers made the same exclamation.)

‘I am helping to investigate the murder of a certain Mrs Coles, sister to a Miss Carrie Palliser, who, I am credibly informed, once taught at the How Red the Rose School in this village.’ (It was better to stick to the newspaper reports in talking to these two, Laura thought.)

‘A chair, Mrs Pock,’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘and another for the woman police-constable.’

Mrs Pock, apparently hypnotised by the incumbent’s spouse, disappeared into the room behind the shop and came back with two dining-room chairs. These she brought round and placed one at each end of the counter.

‘Now!’ she said, beaming at Laura. ‘This is something like!’

It seemed a good plan to Laura to accept this as an invitation to speak, so she plunged in before Mrs Pock could continue.

‘There has been nothing in the newspapers about Miss Palliser,’ she said, ‘but you may have seen that the body was identified by a Mrs Palliser. She is the mother of the Miss Palliser who taught for five terms in the private school here. I have been commissioned—perhaps I should say that I have had occasion to commission myself—to investigate Miss Palliser’s past life in order to find a clue which will lead to the identification of her sister’s