They began to search everywhere in the room. There was a chest of drawers. Agatha pulled out each drawer and felt underneath. Nothing.
“Let’s try the desk.” There were three drawers. Agatha began to slide them out one by one. The bottom drawer stuck a little and Agatha gave it an impatient wrench. It clattered onto the floor and a packet of letters which had been taped to the underside of the drawer spilled across the floor.
They gathered up the letters. They were all addressed to Jessica, care of Sommers. “That’s Trixie and her address,” said Agatha. “She must have been using Trixie to get letters from her boyfriend.” She gently spread out the envelopes on the desk.
“We’ll split them up. There are twelve here. You take six and I’ll take the other.”
They turned out to be passionate love letters from Burt. It was evident he hoped to marry her as soon as she had finished school.
“There’s something here,” said Phil. “He says in this letter that he’s worried that Jessica was letting her friends blackmail her into going clubbing with them. ‘If Trixie and Fairy are threatening to tell your teachers, then let them. I don’t like you going around with that precious pair. The other thing with them is just a laugh, just work.’”
“That’s interesting. What other thing? It’s time we had a talk with those girls after school.”
“What do we do with the letters? Hand them over to the police?”
“No, there’s nothing there that can really help them.”
“Yes, there is,” said Phil. “It sheds a new light on why she was seen with Trixie and Fairy. And I wonder as well about that ‘other thing’ she refers to.”
“Let’s leave poor Jessica a bit of privacy. We’ll put them back. I mean, it’s awfully romantic to send letters in this day and age instead of texting and emailing.”
They went downstairs and Agatha asked Mrs. Bradley, “Weren’t you worried about Jessica going out clubbing?”
“Yes, I was. But she had changed. She said all the girls did it. She was always home on time until the last night.”
“Did the police take away her computer?”
“They wanted to check if she’d been in contact with anyone on the Internet, but I told them my husband was always afraid of girls getting into one of those chat rooms and meeting a pervert and he used to check all her emails.”
The Bradleys were turning out to be stricter than Agatha had imagined. “Did Jessica have a mobile phone?”
“Frank, that’s my husband, wouldn’t let her have one. She begged for one, but he said that perverts were texting schoolgirls. I suppose that’s why we let her go clubbing, but just the once a week. We didn’t want to put too many restrictions on her and they do grow up so fast these days.”
They promised to let Mrs. Bradley know as soon as they found anything and left.
“Why,” asked Agatha as she got into the passenger seat of Phil’s old Ford, “would Trixie and Fairy blackmail her into going out with them?”
“Jealousy,” said Phil. “Good scholar. Probably wanted to make her as low as they are.”
“I’m starving,” said Agatha. “Let’s have something to eat.”
Agatha’s mobile phone rang just as they were finishing lunch. It was Bill Wong. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Just left Mrs. Bradley’s house. Why?”
“The Smedleys came to see you this morning, didn’t they?”
“Yes, both of them. Very lovey-dovey. Smedley asked me to drop the case. Why?”
“Smedley’s just been found dead in his office. We think it’s poisoning. You’d better come here to police headquarters and make a statement.”
Agatha and Phil were interviewed by Bill Wong and Detective Chief Inspector Wilkes.
Agatha told them about the visit of the Smedleys. Then she remembered about Harry noticing a bruise on Mrs. Smedley’s arm. “He could have been beating her. Oh, there’s something else.” She told them about being with Roy in Bath and seeing Smedley with a young woman.
“Description?” snapped Wilkes.
“Lots of red hair, sort of pretty but with a pale face and a rabbity mouth. Good figure.”
“We’ll look into it. Could be one of his employees. Sounds like his secretary. All right. From the teginning. They came into your office this morning …”
“Didn’t you get it the first time?” demanded Agatha crossly. But Bill Wong flashed her a warning look so she went over the whole thing again.
Finally they were told they were free to go. “She must have cracked and poisoned him,” said Agatha outside police headquarters.
“They’ll have a hard time proving that if she wasn’t at the office with him,” said Phil. “Maybe it was that rabbity girl. Anyway, it’s police business now.”
They went back to the office. Patrick Mullen phoned. “I tracked down Burt at a shop in Oxford. We went for a coffee. I swear the man’s sincere and in a miserable state of grief.”
“Two things, Patrick. Can you catch him again and ask him about a red-haired, rabbity-looking girl who might work at Smedleys Electronics? I saw her with Smedley in Bath on Sunday. Smedley’s been poisoned. It isn’t anything to do with us any more but I’d really like to know who she is. And ask him about Fairy and Trixie. Evidently they were threatening to tell the school about him unless Jessica hung out with them. Also she was into something with them that she described as being just work.”
“Will do.”
Agatha rang off and asked, “What now?”
“What about, say, talking to Trixie’s parents while we wait for the pair to get back from school?” said Phil.
“There’s an idea. Let’s go. Mrs. Freedman, could you find out about a bereavement class and phone the information to Mrs. Bradley? And is there any news from Harry?”
“Nothing. I’ll find out about the bereavement class right away.”
Agatha had expected Mrs. Sommers would prove to be a hardfaced blowsy woman, but it transpired she was small and meek and harassed-looking with pale blue eyes and neat hair.
“We are investigating the death of Jessica,” began Agatha, “and wondered if we might ask you a few questions.”
“Come in. That poor girl.”
The living room was almost a mirror image of the Bradleys’: three-piece suite, coffee table, but no books.
When they were seated, Mrs. Sommers asked anxiously, “How can I help?”
“Jessica had a boyfriend, a much older boyfriend,” said Agatha. “In a letter Jessica received from this boyfriend, it appears that Trixie and Fairy had told Jessica that if she didn’t hang out with them, they would tell her teachers that she was going out with this man.”
Agatha expected a hot denial, something on the lines of, “My daughter would never do a thing like that,” but Mrs. Sommers looked sad. “I don’t know what to do with my daughter, and that’s the truth. My husband won’t hear a word against her. He gives her too much pocket money and just laughs when I protest at her clubbing and wearing make-up. ‘You’re in the dark ages,’ he says. ‘Let her have her fun when she’s young.’”
“So you think Trixie might have been blackmailing Jessica?”
“That’s too strong. She might have teased her about it.”
The front door crashed open. “Trixie?” called her mother. Trixie and Fairy sauntered in and stopped short at the sight of Agatha and Phil.
“What are you doing home from school so early?” asked Mrs. Sommers.
“Sports. We don’t do sports,” said Trixie.
“Is it true you threatened to tell Jessica’s teachers that she was seeing an older man if she didn’t hang out with you?” asked Agatha.
“Naw. Well, maybe we might have teased her a bit. We was friends. Wasn’t we, Fairy?”
