‘No, but my sympathies are with them,’ retorted Laura. ‘It’s not as though there was anything they could do for the woman herself.’
‘Well, of course, as I say, we don’t know that anybody else had stumbled upon the body. It was pretty well screened by the bushes.’
‘Was Mrs Castle a big, heavy woman?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘Oh, no, slim and small-boned. Probably weighed less than eight stone. The bushes weren’t even broken away.’
‘What had Edward James to say for himself? Did he consider that he was being victimised?’
‘Oh, Phillips and I interviewed the whole staff, including the headmaster, but, of course, we were chiefly interested in James and the two young women. We also talked to Mrs Castle’s neighbours, but there was very little they could tell us.’
What this amounted to was, at that preliminary stage of the enquiry, of negligible help to the police. She was a quiet, pleasant neighbour, went off for week-ends quite often and had once asked whether they would mind if she kept a dog.
‘Taking it as it comes,’ said Phillips, ‘we still don’t know where Mrs Castle went on Saturday, or whether she was alone, or with friends, or with whoever murdered her. Maisry thinks the chances are that she went to Bournemouth, as she had stated that such was her intention. There’s nothing shady about her past. We’ve checked pretty carefully, but shall continue with that, of course. However, it seems likely that this is one of the series involving foreigners, and is as motiveless as the other deaths.’
‘Mrs Castle wasn’t a foreigner,’ said Laura.
‘She taught a foreign language, Mrs Gavin, and was caught up with the Resistance. Well, we know she went back to her house on Saturday night, because she was at breakfast with the two young women on Sunday morning. It was a latish breakfast, and after it she set out for church. At least, she told them she was going to church, but we don’t know which church and the other two don’t know which denomination she favoured. We’ve tried them all, but she doesn’t seem to have been a church member and nothing has come of our efforts to trace where she went.’
‘Or whether she went to church at all,’ said Laura. ‘Churches are not so well attended nowadays. You’d think she’d have been spotted if she had gone.’
‘Ah, but perhaps you’re forgetting that it was Whit Sunday, Mrs Gavin. At the big church festivals – Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and, of course, the Harvest Thanksgiving – all churches are much fuller than usual.’
‘Christmas, Easter and Harvest Festivals, yes, but I shouldn’t have thought Whitsun so much.’
‘Oh, yes, the flowers, Mrs Gavin. They are a great attraction, I assure you.’
‘So all trace of Mrs Castle vanished after she left the house on Whit Sunday,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I wonder at what time she went out? Presumably, if she went to church, she attended the eleven o’clock morning service.’
‘She left her house at half-past ten.’
‘On foot or by car?’
‘On foot, but, of course, she may have caught a bus. We’re still checking on that. There’s a bus stop within five minutes’ walk of the house, and if she caught the ten-forty she could have been in Romsey, we’ll say, for service in the Abbey, at eleven-ten. There is no earlier bus on Sundays except one at eight-fifteen. If she walked, there are five churches in her own town she could have reached before eleven o’clock, and we’ve called on two vicars, a Catholic priest, a Congregational and a Baptist minister. The Methodist chapel and the Salvation Army headquarters are both so near her house that she would hardly have needed to leave at half-past ten to get to them by eleven, but we are making enquiries, just the same.’
‘Still, it’s the fact that she didn’t go back to the house for lunch, which is the important point, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘She must have lunched somewhere.’
‘Unless she was killed during the morning, Mrs Gavin, although the doctor thinks the afternoon more likely, but the fact that the body was not reported until Monday afternoon, when the Boy Scouts discovered it, hasn’t helped the doctors to fix the precise hour of the death. Then, we don’t know where the poor woman’s body was hidden before it was dumped, and, as you know, the temperature of the atmosphere can make a considerable difference in determining the time of death, because it affects the onset and disappearance of rigor mortis.’
‘What have the two young women to say for themselves? – not that there is any reason to suspect them, of course,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘They have very little to say. They are upset and horrified, but they knew very little about Mrs Castle. She was merely a colleague and the owner of the house. The three had their breakfast and their other cooked meals together as a general rule, but this was a matter of mutual convenience rather than of individual choice, and accounts for most of the time they spent in one another’s company, since, apart from these mealtimes, the young women went each her own way, and Mrs Castle went hers.’
‘How did they say they spent Sunday and Monday? We know that they went to London with a school party on Saturday, and, in any case, Saturday is not in question, as Mrs Castle is known to have been alive on Sunday morning. At least – is there any confirmation of the young women’s assertion that she was alive on Sunday morning?’
‘Oh, yes. A Mrs Reynolds, who lives next door, saw her leave and, without being prompted, puts the time as round about half-past ten. As for the young women themselves, they say that, after Mrs Castle left, they did those bits of washing which do not get sent to the laundry – small, personal garments, stockings and so forth – then prepared and cooked lunch and after lunch went for a stroll in the local park. They came back
