Nest of Vipers

not until our expensive and cultured charwoman complained about it that it came to my mind that it had been in my possession for some days.

‘Which, if I have moved that parcel once, sir, in order to clean the hall floor, I have moved it twenty times,’ she said angrily.

This I knew to be picturesque exaggeration, but she had made her point.

‘Good Lord! I’d forgotten it was there,’ I said. I fished it out and went out in the rain to deliver it. I failed in my object. The curtains of the bungalow were still drawn and seemed to say, like Macbeth’s porter, ‘Knock, knock, knock! who’s there, i’ the other devil’s name? But this place is too cold for hell.’ I continued to knock. Then I began to shout. Then I banged on each of the bungalow windows in turn. Then I became alarmed. Poor old Miss Minnie, I concluded, had been taken ill. We were so used never to see her about that it had not occurred to me to wonder why she had not answered the door to the postman or made any enquiries about a parcel which, ten to one, she must have been expecting. I felt bad about the parcel. It probably contained a Christmas present.

I tore back to the house and hammered on Evans’s and then on Targe’s door. It would not take the three of us to break the kitchen window, which was the only one uncurtained, but I did not want the responsibility of being alone in discovering Miss Minnie either desperately ill or even dead in bed.

She was dead all right, and she was in bed. There had been water everywhere and her head was in the most dreadful mess. It was Latimer Targe who dealt competently with the situation. He was hardboiled mentally, no doubt, by his years of researching into violent crime. He sprinted back to the house and telephoned for a doctor and the police after telling Evesham and me to remain in the bungalow until the authorities took over.

‘Surely there is no need for both of us to stay here,’ said Evesham, who had turned white and looked as though he might be sick at any moment.

‘Oh, yes, there is,’ said Targe. ‘You are each other’s witness that nothing is altered or disturbed before the police get here. This ruddy woman has got herself murdered.’

There was not a trace of pity for poor old Miss Minnie in his tone. I wondered whether he knew more about the dead woman than I did.

Chapter Four

Routine Enquiries

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(1)

AS you have asked me to go on with my account, Dame Beatrice, I will write it as though you have not seen the newspapers or talked with my solicitor.

I suggested to Evans that, so long as we stuck together, there was no reason why we had to stay in the room with the dead woman. He seemed glad to agree to this, so we repaired to Miss Minnie’s little sitting-room.

Like all the sitting-rooms up at the house, that at the bungalow was furnished with an electric fire and had no open fireplace. It was a little surprising, therefore, to see a heavy old-fashioned brass poker lying on the hearthrug. Evans picked it up.

‘Wonder what she wanted with this?’ he said, swinging it to and fro.

‘Brought it with her from her old home, thinking there would be coal fires here, I expect,’ I said. ‘By the way, ought you to have handled it? Targe rather warned us, I thought, that nothing ought to be touched.’

‘Oh, he meant in the bedroom, of course,’ he said. He began to hum in a tuneless sort of way and continued to swing the poker. ‘I say, you do realise somebody must have murdered the old girl, don’t you? I mean, Targe was right.’

‘She may have drowned herself, but she hardly bashed her own face in,’ I said, ‘and for God’s sake stop swinging that poker about!’ My voice cracked. I could not control it.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Nerves.’

‘Well, put it down, man.’

But, although he stopped swinging it about, he retained his hold on it. I can see his reason now, of course. At the time I thought he was in the same upset state as I was and that the feel of the poker gave him confidence. I see now that he suspected me all along and was holding on to the poker as a means of defence in case I set about him and made my escape before the police turned up, and I see that his desire to return to the house was not to get away from the corpse but to get away from me! At the time, however, such a thought was far from my mind. I pulled myself together and tried to do some logical thinking, for the police would arrive at any moment and would be asking questions, no doubt, of all of us, but of me in particular as the owner of the bungalow and especially as the person who had summoned assistance in order to break into it. No use telling them I had no key to it, so far as I knew.

But, so far as I could see, there was no logic about the matter. So far as the rest of us were concerned, Miss Minnie had hardly existed. It was true that she had been a social misfit, an oddity, a recluse, a misplaced person in our little community. It was also true that she had claimed to be Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s rightful heiress, and it was possible that she was a snooper, a pseudo-ghost and the probable writer of anonymous letters. It was obvious that she objected to innocent merrymaking, but, allowing for all this, I could see no reason for anybody’s having gone to the extreme length of murdering her.

I recalled the joke – it could have been nothing more – made by Billie Kennett that Miss Minnie must be a woman with a past and I remembered my own facetious observation and began to wonder whether the printer had been right and that indeed a true word had been spoken in jest and also that something or someone connected with Miss Minnie’s past had at last caught up with her.

On the other hand there were those anonymous letters. That they were libellous there was little doubt, but had one of them contained a dangerous amount of truth, I wondered? I looked at the brass poker dangling from Evesham Evans’s powerful, hairy fingers. I recalled the tough, he-man novels he wrote; his noisy, violent quarrels with his wife; the fact that I knew nothing of his background (although that was true of all of my tenants, now I had come to think of it); nor did I know whether he had received one of the letters.

My thoughts turned to little Mandrake Shard with his spy stories full of violence, torture, double-crossings, and his self-confessed history of alcoholism. I thought of Latimer Targe, steeped in stories of real-life violent crime and