Rosemary dibbed the forefinger of her left hand into the soft soil several times and drew it out again, the fingernail clogged with dirt. She ripped the top off the small brightly coloured envelope she was holding in her other hand, and poured a stream of tiny black grains into her palm.
‘You see?’ she muttered fiercely. ‘They come from Suttons at 75p a packet, you old fool!’
A car came down the tree-lined drive leading to the road which ran along the top of the ridge. It crunched across the weed-strewn gravel sweep in front of the house and drew up by the front door. Two men got out, looking about them.
Rosemary wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve. Bending over the flowerbed, she busied herself with the seeds, letting each fall into its shallow grave and smoothing the earth over it.
‘Afternoon.’
Detective Inspector Stanley Jarvis stood looking at Rosemary from the other side of the flowerbed. His companion, who wore dark glasses and appeared to be chewing gum, remained by the car.
‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ Rosemary replied.
Jarvis nodded sagely.
‘Planting something?’ he observed.
‘Just a few seeds.’
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’
Rosemary did not reply. Jarvis walked round the flowerbed and plucked the packet from her fingers.
‘Poppies?’ he exclaimed. ‘I never knew they needed sowing. Thought they just happened.’
‘They do grow wild, of course, but sometimes nature can do with a helping hand.’
Retrieving the packet, she filled the rest of the hollows with seeds.
‘It’s much the same as planting clues in a whodunnit, if you like,’ she mused. ‘It may seem a bit contrived, but the results are so much more interesting than the dreary crimes you read about in the papers.’
Jarvis made a face.
‘I don’t like,’ he said. ‘Now then, do you know where Mrs Hargreaves is? My colleague and I are here to take her statement.’
‘I believe, in the house. Go through the French windows, I should. No one will mind, and it’s quicker.’
Jarvis nodded briskly.
‘Right you are. Tomkins!’
The two men converged on the house. Rosemary upended the packet of seeds, scattering the remainder across the flowerbed.
There, now,’ she murmured. ‘You’ll just have to fend for yourselves. I’ve interfered quite enough as it is.’
She raised one arm in response to a wave from Jack Weatherby, who had appeared from the grove of rhododendrons beyond the croquet lawn. He called out something that Rosemary couldn’t quite catch.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she returned heartily.
With a broad smile, Weatherby continued along the path. In his straw hat and linen suit, recovered from a trunk of his belongings discovered in the attic, he looked and moved like a younger brother of the man who used to sit slumped in his chair by the fireplace until the time came to shuffle back to bed. A change no less dramatic was to be seen in the other residents of Eventide Lodge. It was only now that Rosemary realised the extent to which she had come to accept that their condition was an inevitable consequence of the ageing process, only to be expected in people who were virtually at death’s door. She had been astounded by the effect of a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air and renewed contact with their families and the outside world.
Not that the transition had been entirely smooth. Purvey was still under medical supervision after suffering a nervous collapse due to his belief that the ‘new owners’ were going to turn him out. Charles Symes, too, was in hospital, the media interest in the affair having pushed him to the front of the queue for his operation. Even Rosemary had suffered mild attacks of anxiety following the abrupt collapse of the system which had ruled their lives for so long. The day the plastic sheeting covering the windows had been torn down had been particularly fraught, with both Grace Lebon and Samuel Rossiter requiring sedation. But by far the worst affected had been Belinda Scott, who tried to get the others to join her in a campaign of passive resistance to the changes. When that failed, she had gone on hunger strike, accusing everyone else of betraying the rightful authority of Mr Anderson and Miss Davis and threatening to exact a terrible retribution when they returned.
However, the chances of that happening were remote indeed. The charges of wilful cruelty and gross neglect on which the siblings had been arrested the previous week had been substantiated beyond a vestige of doubt both by the residents’ statements and by the evidence of the medical examinations they had all undergone. The discovery that a resident of the Lodge named Hilary Bryant, who had since died, had been persuaded to alter her will in the Andersons’ favour, and that pressure had been put on others to do the same, had sealed their fate. Even if by some miracle they escaped a prison sentence, their careers in residential care for the aged were quite clearly over.
Pending further developments, Eventide Lodge had been placed in the care of the Local Health Authority, who had staffed it with personnel recently been made redundant owing to the closure of the geriatric wing of a hospital in another part of the county. Their cheerful attentions had done wonders to awaken the residents from the catatonic stupor and paranoid delusions into which most of them had retreated, but an equally important factor had been the letters, phone calls and visits from friends and relatives horrified to learn what had been going on behind the genteel facade which the Andersons had maintained-and ashamed that they had not made it their business to find out earlier.
In the attic of the Lodge, the new staff had found over twenty dustbin liners crammed with post which the Andersons had deliberately withheld to increase the residents’ sense of isolation and dependence. All outgoing letters were read by Anderson or Miss Davis, and any reference to conditions at the Lodge censored. The resulting anodyne communications served to persuade the recipients-not that they usually needed much persuasion-that their nominally beloved but in practice rather tiresome old relatives were as well as could be expected, and that phone calls and visits were pointlessly upsetting for everyone concerned. On the rare occasions when family members did insist on paying their respects in person, the residents were reduced to incoherent passivity by dosing their food with drugs prescribed by the compliant Dr Morel.
Rosemary made her way across the lawn to the garden seat which stood on the path at the foot of the rockery. She sat down and felt in her pocket for the letter she had received that morning. But it was another piece of paper that emerged, crumpled and soiled, with her name written on one side in shaky capitals. Hastily replacing it, Rosemary located the air-mail envelope with its large, colourful stamps in an unfamiliar currency.
She read the enclosure from beginning to end several times, then lay back on the slats of teak weathered to a silvery sheen, basking in the weak autumnal sunshine. A council employee was at work mowing the lawn at the other side of the house. Rosemary gazed up at the sky of hazy blue seamed with strata of diffuse cloud. The throaty purring of the motor-mower reminded her of the flimsy biplanes of her youth, when flying was still an adventure. She dosed her eyes…
A shadow fell between her and the sun. Rosemary looked up to find Stanley Jarvis standing in front of her. His expression was unsympathetic.
‘Have you been winding me up?’ he said.
Rosemary peered at him, pondering the meaning of these words. She thought of the tin soldiers her brother had used to play with before a real war killed him, and was on the point of making a joke about clockwork toys when Jarvis went on.
‘Mrs Hargreaves now refuses to confirm her earlier testimony about the cocoa.’
Rosemary brushed some grass clippings off her dress.
‘How very tiresome of her,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t give me that!’ Jarvis snarled.
He fixed her with a stare.
‘Perhaps you don’t appreciate what’s at stake here, Miss Travis. When I came here last week, Mrs Hargreaves told me that Miss Davis had specifically warned her against taking the blue mug of cocoa, claiming that it had extra sugar in it as a special treat for Mrs Davenport. Mrs Hargreaves went on to say that when she tasted the cocoa in Mrs Davenport’s room later she found that it had a bitter taste with a, quote, sort of chemical edge to it, unquote, and that she slept exceptionally long and soundly that night.’
‘I hope you’ll forgive my saying so, Inspector, but…’
‘The implications are quite dear. The cocoa intended for Mrs Davenport had in fact been dosed with crushed sleeping tablets, and since Miss Davis warned Mrs Hargreaves against taking it, she must have been a party to this. Everything else then falls into place. The morphine syrup was adulterated with blue curacao, one of Miss Davis’s favourite drinks. Once Mrs Davenport was unconscious, Purvey’s missing syringe-which he saw Miss Davis take from his room-was used to inject the lethal dose of morphine. You discovered the body very early next morning and raised the alarm, and Mr Channing overheard the Andersons’ panic as they struggled to set the scene of the supposed suicide before my officers arrived.’
‘I feel that the real problem, Inspector, is that you…’
‘But the credibility of that entire scenario depends on the crucial fact of Mrs Hargreaves’s testimony, which she has now withdrawn! According to what she’s just told me and Tomkins, she took her usual mug that evening. As for Mrs Davenport’s cocoa, she has no idea what it may or may not have tasted like because she didn’t try it, and she slept neither better nor worse than usual. In other words, the whole episode was fiction from beginning to end.’
Jarvis wagged his forefinger under Rosemary’s nose.
‘And you were the author! She told me that you put her up to it!’
Rosemary gave him a pitying look.
‘You can’t believe everything a suspect tells you, you know.’
‘Mrs Hargreaves is not a bloody suspect!’ Jarvis retorted.
Rosemary nodded earnestly.
‘That is precisely the problem. As I’ve tried to point out to you on several occasions, your approach to this case has been flawed from the start. You arrived here convinced that Dorothy committed suicide, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to persuade you otherwise. You then abandoned that error only to rush headlong into another, and assume that the Andersons were the guilty parties. This blinkered approach not only prevented you from examining the case in the open-minded and impartial manner befitting a detective, but has also made it possible for the person really responsible to manipulate the situation to his-or her-advantage.’
Jarvis regarded her with mingled suspicion and curiosity.
‘Meaning what?’ he demanded.
‘Has it really not occurred to you that there might be another explanation for Mrs Hargreaves telling you a story which she now admits was untrue?’
‘You mean…’ groped Jarvis.
‘I mean, my dear Inspector, that it was intended to divert suspicion from herself!’
Jarvis looked utterly baffled.
‘But I don’t suspect her! I’ve never suspected her for a single moment!’
Rosemary sighed.
‘I believe you,’ she said in a kindly tone. ‘But to those who know you less well, like Mavis Hargreaves, such naivety would have seemed almost impossible to credit from someone in your position. She would therefore have concluded that you were in fact playing a very deep game, pretending to suspect the Andersons in order to put the rest of us off our guard, and sought to cover her tracks by inventing the episode of Miss Davis and the cocoa, whose authorship she now attributes to me.’
She gave him a wry smile.
‘And you must admit, Inspector, it worked a treat!’
Jarvis looked longingly at the police car. His colleague lay spread-eagled on the bonnet, soaking up the sunshine, his foot wagging in time to some inaudible music.
‘How did you know Tomkins was from the island?’ he asked.
‘My mother was from the New Forest, but I was raised in Ryde,’ Rosemary explained. The children at school used to call me a foreigner, because I was born on the mainland. I can still hear their mocking voices. The accent is unmistakable.’
‘Ryde,’ mused Jarvis.
He smiled. ‘Remember the Beatles? Okay, I used to think, so she’s got a ticket to Ryde. Why should that mean she doesn’t care?’
‘It’s not just the islanders,’ said Rosemary. ‘People in general can be very heartless.’
Jarvis gazed into the distance, lost in thought.
‘As for the beetles,’ Rosemary went on, ‘I certainly do remember them. But I’m glad to say that we’re no longer troubled by them since the council fumigated the rooms.’
‘That was when I first started to take you seriously,’ Jarvis muttered almost inaudibly. ‘If she’s on to Tomkins, I thought, she can’t be as far gone as this Anderson is trying to make out.’
He considered the grass at his feet for some time.
‘Just the same,’ he resumed, ‘I don’t think much of this Hargreaves angle. Apart from anything else, she doesn’t have a motive.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure, Inspector. Shortly before her death, Dorothy asked to see a solicitor with a view to changing her will. The Andersons believed that the alteration was in their favour, but I think that very unlikely. Hilary Bryant made the mistake of thinking that the prospect of the inheritance might soften the Andersons’ hearts, but they were if anything even more beastly to her afterwards. With that example before her, I can’t imagine that Dorothy would have allowed herself to be swayed, particularly since she knew it was likely she would have to go into hospital anyway. On the other hand, what more likely, under those circumstances, that she should have wished to settle her affairs, and that she should have decided that her close friend Mavis Hargreaves was a more suitable beneficiary than her apparently ungrateful and neglectful relatives?’
A dreamy smile spread across Jarvis’s face.
‘Of course!’ he breathed. ‘Why didn’t I see it before? The solution’s been staring me in the face all along!’
He looked keenly at Rosemary.
‘We were quite excited about that aspect of the case for a few days there, but we rather lost interest when it transpired that Mrs Davenport had in fact instructed the solicitor to make over her estate to Miss Rosemary Travis.’
Rosemary sprang to her feet.
‘No!’ she broke out hoarsely. ‘It’s not true!’
Jarvis gave a smile of triumph.
‘You’ve played a very clever game, Miss Travis, and you nearly got away with it. Yes, Mrs Hargreaves’s tale about the cocoa was indeed intended to deceive us, but she didn’t dream it up. Mavis Hargreaves isn’t a detective story addict any more than she was Dorothy Davenport’s close friend. You, on the other hand, are both!’
He thrust an accusing finger at her.
‘Who had a better opportunity to poison the morphine syrup than the person who went to Mrs Davenport’s room to fetch it just a few hours before her death?
The only fingerprints found on the bottle, apart from those of the deceased, were yours, Miss Travis! Your sleeping tablets were used to adulterate the cocoa, and you admit spending a considerable time alone with the victim after everyone else had left and the lights had been turned off. Your room is directly opposite that of Mr Purvey, whose door is always open. He assumed that the woman he saw taking his syringe was Miss Davis, because of the smell of alcohol, but it could equally well have been the person who had just entered Anderson’s office and removed a quantity of blue curagao!’
He stepped forward and gripped Rosemary’s arm.
‘I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me to headquarters, Miss Travis, and it’s my duty to inform you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.’