Fox gravely contemplated Sergeant Pender. He was a stickler for procedure.
Alleyn introduced Pender to his colleagues. They took off their coats and hats and he laid down a plan of action. They were to make a systematic examination of the premises.
“We’re not looking for anything specific,” he said. “I’d like to find out how she stood, financially. Correspondence, if any. It would be lovely if she kept a diary and if there’s a dump of old newspapers, they’ll have to be gone over carefully. Look for any cuts. Bailey, you’d better pick up a decent set of prints if you can find them. Cash box — tooth glass — she had false teeth — take your pick. Thompson, will you handle the shelves in here? You might work the back premises and the bedroom, Fox. I’ll start on the parlour.”
He approached Cissy Pollock, who removed her headphones and simpered.
“You must have known Miss Cost very well,” he began. “How long have you been here with her, Miss Pollock?”
A matter of a year and up, it appeared. Ever since the shop was made a post office. Miss Cost had sold her former establishment at Dunlowman and had converted a cottage into the premises as they now stood. She had arranged for a wholesale firm to provide the Green Ladies, which she herself painted, and for a regional printer to reproduce the rhyme-sheets. Cissy talked quite readily of these activities, and Miss Cost emerged from her narrative as an experienced businesswoman. “She were proper sharp,” Cissy said appreciatively. When Alleyn spoke of yesterday’s Festival she relapsed briefly into giggles but this seemed to be a token manifestation, obligatory upon the star performer. Miss Cost had inaugurated a Drama Circle of which the Festival had been the first fruit, and Cissy herself the leading light. He edged cautiously towards the less public aspects of Miss Cost’s life and character. Had she many close friends? None that Cissy knew of though she did send Christmas cards. She hardly got any herself, outside local ones.
“So you were her best friend, then?”
“Aw, well…” said Cissy, and shuffled her feet.
“What about gentleman friends?”
This produced a renewed attack of giggles. After a great deal of trouble he elicted the now familiar story of advance and frustration. Miss Cost had warned Cissy repeatedly of the gentlemen and had evidently dropped a good many dark hints about improper overtures made to herself. Cissy was not pretty and was no longer very young. He thought that, between them, they had probably indulged in continuous fantasy and the idea rather appalled him. On Major Barrimore’s name being introduced in a roundabout fashion, she became uncomfortable and said, under pressure, that Miss Cost was proper set against him, and that he’d treated her bad. She would say nothing more under this heading. She remembered Miss Cost’s visit to the hospital. It appeared that she had tried the spring for her moles but without success. Alleyn ventured to ask if Miss Cost liked Dr. Mayne. Cissy with a sudden burst of candour, said she fair worshipped him.
“Ah!” said Sergeant Pender, who had listened to all this with the liveliest attention. “So she did then, and hunted the poor chap merciless, didn’t she, Ciss?”
“Aw, you do be awful, George Pender,” said Cissy, with spirit.
“Couldn’t help herself, no doubt, and not to be blamed for it,” he conceded.
Alleyn again asked Cissy if Miss Cost had any close women friends. Mrs. Carstairs? Or Mrs. Barrimore, for instance?
Cissy made a prim face that was also, in some indefinable way, furtive. “She weren’t terrible struck on Mrs. Barrimore,” she said. “She didn’t hold with her.” “Oh? Why was that, do you suppose?” “She reckoned she were sly,” said Cissy and was not to be drawn any further.
“Did Miss Cost keep a diary, do you know?” Alleyn asked, and as Cissy looked blank, he added: “A book. A record of day-to-day happenings?”
Cissy said Miss Cost was always writing in a book of an evening but kept it away careful-like, she didn’t know where. Asked if she had noticed any change in Miss Cost’s behaviour over the last three weeks, Cissy gaped at Alleyn for a second or two and then said Miss Cost had been kind of funny.
“In what way, funny?”
“Laughing,” said Cissy. “She took fits to laugh, suddenlike. I never see nothing to make her.”
“As if she was — what? Amused? Excited?”
“Axcited. Powerful pleased, too. Sly-like.”
“Did you happen to notice if she sent any letters to London?”
Miss Cost had on several occasions put her own letters in the mailbag but Cissy hadn’t got a look at them. Evidently, Alleyn decided, Miss Cost’s manner had intrigued her assistant. It was on these occasions that Miss Cost laughed.
At this juncture, Cissy was required at the switchboard. Alleyn asked Pender to follow him into the back room. He shut the door and said he thought the time had come for Miss Pollock to return to her home. She lived on the Island, it appeared, in one of the Fisherman’s Bay cottages. Alleyn suggested that Pender had better see her to her door as the storm was so bad. Bailey and Thompson could be shown how to work the switchboard during his absence.
When they had gone, Alleyn retired to the parlour and began operations upon Miss Cost’s desk, which, on first inspection, appeared to be a monument to the dimmest kind of disorder. Bills, dockets, trade leaflets and business communications were jumbled together in ill-running drawers and overcrowded pigeonholes. He sorted them into heaps and secured them with rubber bands.
He called out to Fox, who was in the kitchen: “As far as I can make out she was doing very nicely indeed, thank you. There’s a crack-pot sort of day book. No outstanding debts and an extremely healthy bank statement. We’ll get at her financial position through the income tax people, of course. What’ve you got?”
“Nothing to rave about,” Fox said.
“Newspapers?”
“Not yet. It’s a coal range, though.”
“Damn.”
They worked on in silence. Bailey reported a good set of impressions from a tumbler by the bed, and Thompson, relieved of the switchboard, photographed them. Fox put on his mackintosh and retired with a torch to an outhouse, admitting, briefly, the cold and uproar of the storm. After an interval he returned, bland with success, and bearing a coal-grimed, wet, crumpled and scorched fragment of newsprint.
“This might be something,” he said and laid it out for Alleyn’s inspection.
It was part of a sheet from the local paper from which a narrow strip had been cleanly excised. The remainder of a headline read: “…to well-known beauty spot” and underneath: “The Natural Amenities Association. At a meeting held at Dunlowman on Wednesday it was resolved to lodge a protest at the threat to Hatcherds Common, where it is proposed to build…”
“That’s it, I’m sure,” Alleyn said. “Same type. The original messages are in my desk, blast it, but one of them reads threat (in these capitals) ‘to close You are warned’: a good enough indication that she was responsible. Any more?”
“No. This was in the ash-bin. Fallen into the grate, most likely, when she burned the lot. I don’t think there’s anything else but I’ll take another look by daylight. She’s got a bit of a darkroom rigged up out there. Quite well equipped, too, by the look of it.”
“Has she now? Like to take a slant at it, Thompson?”
Thompson went out and presently returned to say it was indeed a handy little job of a place and he wouldn’t mind using it. “I’ve got that stuff we shot up at the spring,” he said. “How about it, sir?”