lies in lashbrook 14

 

Chapter 14

 

“I phoned my sister,” said Savin. “She’s willing to have me; I should have checked before, but she said she can find a bed for me.  Ronald and George -her sons, my nephews - are willing to share a room, which is kind of them.” He gave a hysterical giggle. "With 'Bicester' rhyming with 'sister' it's almost a lymerick... 'I once had a sister in Bicester, until a solicitor kissed her; he put aside deeds to marry with speed, and 'twas only then that I missed her.'" 

“Write it down; I expect Irma would have liked it. I am glad you have some family who can help,” said Alexander. The drive to Bicester was otherwise silent, until Savin murmured directions when they got there. He got out of the car with his old army kitbag.

“You forgot the teddy bear,” said Alexander, picking it up.  “He has pretty hard stuffing, doesn’t he?”

“Not the most comfortable to hug,” said Savin. “But he smells of my little girl. And I need that right now.”

“Understood,” said Alexander. He noticed that Savin had not wanted a keepsake of his wife. A woman came out of the house and hugged Savin, drawing him in, a girl of about twelve and two older boys, or really, young men, with her, surrounding their uncle, and chattering to him. Alexander drove away, and back to Lashbrook village.

Vera Tweedie-Banks was audible when he got to the police house.

“Goodness, Tim, what are you going to do with all that row?” Alexander asked.

“Go over to the Clene Shepe to sleep,” said Tim. “I can’t be expected to do my job if I don’t sleep and she isn’t going anywhere. It’s all mod cons, she has a toilet pan and a sink behind a screen, and I’ll leave food and water.”

“It’s not as if she’s in danger, after all,” said  Alexander. “If she isn’t the poison-pen, the real one has no reason to kill her, as she knows nothing, indeed, she lets him off the hook for a while, if I am right, though if the reasoning is to throw the blame on a female relative, then more letters have to be sent whilst she’s in custody.”

“I’m hoping she’ll shut up while we are at the autopsy,” said Tim. “The Hell! We shall have to have her at the inquest.”

“Have you got that booked?”

“Yes, can’t be done until Monday,” said Tim. “I asked for an official car and a policewoman to take her into Oxford for a preliminary hearing tomorrow. She’ll be up before the magistrate and she’s plainly guilty of wasting police time, and I’m hoping she will be held in contempt of court if she goes off on a tirade there. And I think there’s enough evidence to commit her to trial for being the poison pen and potentially a killer.”

“Make sure she has a solicitor,” said Alexander. “I am glad I’m on leave; I can’t cope with her.”

“I think her solicitor is old Benbow,” said Tim. “I’ll phone him up; he can talk through the bars while we’re at the inquest.”

“Fine,” said Alexander. “I don’t know him.”

“He’s a fussy little man who doesn’t take any nonsense,” said Tim, happily. “I want to write down for him any evidence that she may be the poison-pen.”

“Firstly, proximity to the two women killed, who claimed to know who the poison-pen was,” said Alexander, as Tim took notes.

“Maggie will type this up for me,” said Tim, his ears going red at his untidy writing. “She can use carbon paper for several copies, she’s very good.”

“An excellent help-mate,” said Alexander. “You should indent for the cost of her services; I’ll sign you off on it.”

“Really? If she can be paid that will really help,” said Tim.

“The government did not ought to rely on wives and girlfriends to work unpaid,” said Alexander. “Anyway, the lady has a record of criticising others, which could be a clue to her identity as the poison-pen.  Of course, many do swallow resentments and store them up, but she is a woman at this certain age when things can break out, and the poison-pen is lashing out at those to whom Mrs. Tweedie-Banks has no other opportunity of normal interaction.”

Tim hesitated over the spelling and Alexander took his pen to write in ‘interaction’ for him. Tim flushed and nodded thanks.

“And she admitted breaking and entering and looking for Irma’s diary,” he said. “Though she denies burning it.”

“I’m inclined to think that she did not, in fact, find Irma’s diary,” said Alexander.  “Mrs. Savin described it specifically as Morse Code, and I suspect Irma of using that since she learned it at Girl Guides.  Mrs. Tweedie-Banks described it as ‘dots, squiggles, and dashes.’ And what course was Irma taking?”

“Shorthand,” said Tim. “That could easily describe the Pitman shorthand outlines. Especially at the early stages where she is putting in dots for vowels to remind herself.”

“Quite,” said Alexander. “Now, I am hoping that whoever killed Mrs. Savin, and somehow I can’t see Twiddly-bonk using a kitchen knife, made the same mistake and burned Irma’s practice books. Come to think of it, I did not see any, and at the time, in my mind, her father had taken them with the course books, but why would he?”

“No, indeed,” said Tim. “So, the diary is still somewhere. But where? Not under the pillow or under the mattress, or even in the ottoman thing which Ida searched.”

“She ferreted about deep in the golf bag as well as checking inside all the books Irma thought she had grown out of but did not want to pass on,” said Alexander. “And the trinket chest. The drawers were all flung onto the floor so it was easy to check the backs and bottoms for anything taped onto them. Ida sounded every floorboard for a loose one. The walls are plaster, distempered, so nothing there.”

“I don’t know where she might have stuffed it,” said Tim, frustrated. “Perhaps the killer did find it, and burned the shorthand books as well, just in case.”

“Or burned earlier volumes with the shorthand books,” said Alexander. “You gave me a thought, though; I need to search one more place but I need Theodore Savin.”

“It won’t be up the chimney; there was a coal skuttle, so she’s used to have a fire there,” said Tim.

“I’ll keep my own counsel, if I may,” said Alexander. “I don’t want to upset Savin if I don’t have to.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with, too,” said Tim. “I think Ida checked any pockets in clothing.”

“She did, and seams in the dressing-gown,” said Alexander.

“It seems that Irma went to a lot of trouble to hide it; I wonder why,” said Tim.

“Well, for one thing, she was a rather romantic girl, who would see a secret diary as filled with romance,” said Alexander. “Moreover, we know her mother pried, or she would not have known that Irma began logging her thoughts in Morse.  And if Irma knew or suspected that Twiddly-bonk was in the habit of using the concealed back door key to poke around, even more reason to conceal the diary.  I would imagine a question Twiddly-bonk should be asked is whether this was the first time she had effected an entry, and whether she was in the habit of it, and if she did so in the houses of other neighbours.”

“Habit of breaking and entering won’t look good,” said Tim. “The neighbours on the other side are Miss Harmon and Miss Goodie; they’re... well, you know, but in a more regular way, a nice couple and no trouble. Though I believe Miss Goodie, who’s a large woman and none of it is fat, has been known to threaten Mrs. Tweedie-Banks.”

Alexander nodded. Their relationship was their own business, but having the aggressive Mrs. Tweedie-Banks interfering in it would not be helpful. If one of them was capable of enforcing their privacy, that would help.

“I don’t think the killings were about any kind of sexual frustration,” said Alexander. “I think Mrs. Tweedie-Banks uses her personality as intimidation rather than anything else. I doubt she did lust after either Savin woman, or she’d have shown it in more than just trying to overwhelm Violet as Savin described. Strangling can be a sex crime, but the efficiency and rapidity of the killings of Sally Braithwaite and Irma Savin suggest more a brutal expediency. As does a knife to the carotid artery. So, if the killer is a man, the same applies.”

“Thank goodness for that, I hate complications of love tangles,” said Tim. “So, purely protective of the identity; and I wonder if the killer had done anything else, maybe a foray into poison-pen writing which Sally knew about?”

“It’s a good hypothesis,” said Alexander. “And Sally might have found out something about Tweedie-Banks when she was her companion, so it does not let her out. And a ligature strangling does not need extraordinary  strength.”

“Stabbing, though....”

“And it was a sharp steak knife which I wager would slide in like it was hot butter,” said Alexander. “We have no idea how deep it went, as Savin pulled it out. It doesn’t have to go far to nick the carotid. But whoever did it would surely be covered in blood from the initial arterial spray.”

“If it was a man, and personable, there was nothing to stop him stripping, borrowing Savin’s dressing-gown, and taking it off while she sat there,” said Tim.

“Good grief! That’s... oh, well, maybe it’s my generation that finds it shocking,” said Alexander. “I blame Hollywood; it makes people think that licentious behaviour is normal.”

Tim blushed, but laughed.

“I think it’s a reaction to the war,” he said.

“It may well be, but I can still be shocked whilst acknowledging the feasibility of the idea,” said Alexander.

“It’s something we discussed as Boy Scouts,” said Tim, blushing more. “We were discussing murder – you know, as little boys do – and how police methods could find out more, and one of the other boys said that if you could kill someone when you were in the nude, you could wash off any blood and be in the clear.”

“Good grief! Who was that?”

“I’m sorry, I disremember,” said Tim. “I can’t have been more than fourteen so it’s almost ten years ago. It was dark, and we were telling lurid stories. You know.”

Alexander nodded. He knew! He had not been a Boy Scout himself, being just too old for it, but he had camped with friends and cousins. Ghost stories and lurid penny-dreadful type stories were part of camping.

“So, basically, we have opportunity; motive of a sort; and a woman of the right age,” said Alexander. “That she was interfering in an ongoing investigation could be seen as another way to divert suspicion.  If my instincts didn’t tell me it was wrong, I’d say it was a strong case to take to court. It’s certainly strong enough to ask for a warrant to search her home for the diary, in case she was lying, for bloodstained clothing, and for evidence of cutting out letters from newspapers. You sent them off to forensics, of course?”

“Oh! Yes. The lab boys laughed at me when I asked about finger prints. They found marks of eyebrow tweezers, which suggests a woman, but some men use them for moustache shaping, too. They were all from the Oxford Journal, which so many people take you can’t really check.”

“Well, at least we know what papers to flick through when we have somewhere to search,” said Alexander. “I want to get into Twiddly-bonk’s dustbins too.”

“We can get a search warrant when we have her before the beak tomorrow,” said Tim. “Right, I’ll leave Maggie typing that up, she said she’d be a guard while I’m out at the inquest. And I suppose I should sleep here tonight.”

“Probably,” said Alexander. “It’s unlikely that anyone would sneak in to do away with her... and by the way, I just thought.  Savin might be leading up to framing her.”

“He’s totally cut up about his daughter,” said Tim.

“True,” Alexander agreed. “Though someone else, the one who killed Sally, might still have killed Irma, if she threatened to accuse him.”

“As if it wasn’t complex already!” said Tim.

 

oOoOo

 

“Well, well, here we are again,” said Dr.  Hammond, cheerfully. “You always generate a lot of business for me, Inspector Armitage.”

“That sounds like I go around killing them,” said Alexander.

“I suspect you make things happen by spooking people,” said Hammond. “And dig out disguised murders, too.”

“And go disinterring composted bodies which had been moved, I know,” said Alexander.

“Well, this one is straightforward, adult healthy woman around forty, give or take a few years, bled out in minutes from the carotid artery, occasioned by a knife strike to the neck. There would be some considerable arterial spray at first but the wound-track shows it was thrust in deep enough for the hilt to block the spray. Presumably she knew the killer as there are no defensive wounds.”

“Well, now we can have the funeral at least,” said Dr.  Brinkley. “I was going to bury her daughter tomorrow; we might as well bury both together so Theodore only has to go through it once.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Alexander.

“We’ll be in Oxford,” said Jeff.

“I’ll represent the Yard,” said Alexander. “Well, I shall be glad to get home tonight.”

“I don’t mind that it’s your home, it’s comfortable,” said Jeff. “And I like the company.”

“So do I,” said Alexander. “But I’m having the boiler updated.”

Jeff laughed.

“Well, yes,” he agreed.