Spotted Hemlock

‘Not that I remember.’

‘Was Mrs Coles still in Ireland when her sister died?’

‘As I’ve never been told when her sister died, I can’t tell you, but if it was…’

‘Never mind, sir. Guessing won’t help us.’

‘Date of murder a deep, dark secret, eh? Well, when you’ve found Mrs Coles, you can ask her herself where she was when her sister died. I couldn’t care less, but I think the chances are she was with me.’

‘What do you mean? You couldn’t care less, sir? I should have thought her whereabouts would concern you?’

‘I mean that you’re trying to trap me. Well, I’m not going to be trapped. If I say any more, it will be in the presence of my lawyer.’

‘Very good, sir. You are quite within your rights there. But I hope you will soon get in contact with him. Keeping back information which might assist the police in the execution of their duty can be a serious matter, you know.’

‘What’s Piggy up to?’ asked Laura, when Dame Beatrice had been given a report of the conversation and had detailed it to her secretary.

‘Trying to cover his tracks,’ said Carey. ‘Fancy the chump trying to get away with that hospital alibi, though! You’d think he’d have had the sense to realise that it was bound to blow up on him sooner or later.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ argued Laura. ‘Given a staunch chap in the hospital bed and no snoopers, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have pulled it off. It was just his rotten luck that Dame B. and I should have rumbled.’

‘What did give you the clue?’

‘The description the matron gave of his character,’ said Dame Beatrice, to whom the question was addressed. ‘Once our suspicions were aroused, the rest was simple.’

‘What’s the next move?’ asked Laura.

‘I think we must track down the ghost-horse. It we can identify him and his owner we may be able to find out who hired him.’

‘And for what purpose?’

‘If my suspicions are leading us to the truth, we shall not be told for what purpose he was hired. We must imagine it for ourselves. Once we have a correct picture, we may know who murdered Carrie Palliser and the reason for her death.’

‘Do you really think so?’ asked Carey.

‘I really think so,’ said Laura. ‘To go further, I would say that some person or persons stood to gain by her death; but whether they stood to gain in money, in kind or in personal safety is something I cannot postulate, although my feeling is for the last-named.’

Her employer cackled harshly, but Carey asked:

‘You mean that the dead woman had the goods on them? Knew some secret or other?’

‘And what secret or other isn’t difficult to determine,’ said Laura, with a haughty glance at Dame Beatrice. ‘After all, Mrs Coles was married and she did choose to leave her new-wedded lord and go off with Piggy Basil, didn’t she? In other words, she was making the best of two worlds and she was being blackmailed for it, and you can’t wonder at it. She was an absolute gift to anybody unscrupulous enough to accept her.’

‘Is that your theory?’ Carey demanded of his aunt. She pursed her lips into a little beak and shrugged her thin shoulders.

‘It was one of my theories, but there is one circumstance in particular which hardly makes it the most likely. Well, we need not find ourselves at a standstill. There are various courses open to us.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as probing further into the dead girl’s past,’ said Laura. ‘It certainly seems to have been a bit murky. I suppose that involves another visit to the Biancinis.’

‘First, I think, to Mr Coles,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Who’s going to talk to him this time?’ demanded Laura.

‘I have some definite questions to put to him, so I think I will talk to him myself. Ring him up and find out when it will be convenient for me to visit him.’

When she turned up on the appointed day, Coles presented himself in a new suit, new shoes and with his hair cut. He referred obliquely but intelligibly to these splendours by telling Dame Beatrice that he had an evening job teaching pottery in a youth club and had done some interior decorating. She congratulated him and asked whether his course at the art school would last very much longer.

‘I’d thought of carrying on until June,’ he replied, ‘but now this business of Norah has turned up, I’m thinking of emigrating and taking a job in Australia.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘Anything I can get.’

‘Rather a waste of your training.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. If Norah had lived, and we’d had that smallholding, I don’t suppose I’d have had much time for painting except painting our humble shack. Anyway, I’ll be glad to get out of the country as soon as those blistering lawyers will let me have my money.’

‘I see. What I really wanted from you, Mr Coles, is further information about your wife’s past life.’