‘So presumably he left you to look around his shop on that Monday morning.’
‘I asked whether I might and he agreed and said he had some paper-work to finish, so would I shout if I found anything I wanted to buy. He went off and I turned the card round on the door so that it said CLOSED, picked up the milk bottle from outside the door, bolted the door as quietly as I could and sneaked along by the way I had seen him go. I had a knife – razor-sharp it was, too – because, of course, I was prepared for a fight when I tackled him about Ellie.’
‘You thought you could win if it came to physical combat?’
‘I had the knife. He was sitting at the big desk, bent over it, but he heard me and swung round. Then he jumped up and I don’t know whether he panicked or whether he thought I’d turn and run, but he rushed me, so I stuck out the knife and that was that. Then I got back as far as the door and fainted.’
‘You did not faint!’
‘Actually, no, but one always puts in a bit of local colour. If I’d been writing this up for my paper, I should certainly have said the woman fainted, whether she did or not.’
‘I see.’
‘Yes. Look here, you must have had something definite to go on in suspecting me. What did I do wrong? – apart from breaking the sixth Commandment, I mean.’
‘Psychologically you were my first suspect, unless (as was possible, of course) some person quite unknown to me had done the deed. My other suspect would have been Niobe Nutley, but I soon dismissed her from my calculations because, far from objecting to Bosey’s experiments, I think she enjoyed them because she had to find compensation for Piper’s defection.’
‘She could have ended up on that sacrificial altar, the same as I was afraid, when I got at the truth, Ellie might have done.’
‘I think Niobe Nutley felt that, with her weight and strength, she could have held her own against him if matters went beyond the merely obscene and looked like ending fatally for her.’
‘Did you ever suspect Ellie?’
‘No. She had taken matters into her own hands to protect her life, even though, in so doing, she had had to sacrifice what some might call her virtue. Besides, I cannot see her as a killer.’
‘Yes, that’s right enough, I suppose. So what do you want me to do? – give myself up?’
‘Why? Your story makes sense. You carried the knife in self-defence and Bosey rushed you and spiked himself on it. Maybe you should not have been carrying an offensive weapon, but that is the most, so far as I am concerned, which needs to be said. But the milk bottles still puzzle me. Can you explain?’
‘Oh, yes. I remembered that milk bottles left on the doorstep are a suspicious circumstance, so early on the Tuesday morning, knowing I could get in by the back door because I had left that way, I went along and found, to my horror, not one milk bottle, but two. The bottle I’d picked up on Monday morning must have been left on Sunday and he hadn’t bothered to take it in. Well, I shoved both bottles into my brief case – luckily it’s a roomy one – made sure nobody was about, went in again by way of the alley and the back door, which, of course, I knew I’d left unlocked, dumped the bottles and scarpered.’
‘Well, after all, it was suicide,’ said Laura defensively, when she heard the story. ‘If he rushed her and spiked himself on the knife she happened to be holding, he took a calculated risk and bought the result.’
‘Quite. She needs not this spirited defence from you. I accept that that is what happened, although I do not believe it.’
‘What will she do now? I’m desperately sorry for the poor blighter.’
‘She has her health, her work, and, when she comes to think things over, the satisfaction of having rid the world of one of the wickedest individuals who have ever lived. Not that I wish to exaggerate, of course, but the police are still checking the facts with regard to the disappearance of those schoolgirls.’
‘Do you think he had some idea that Minnie was double-crossing him?’
‘I think he distrusted her from the moment she took up residence in the bungalow.’
‘But why?’
‘She was there for one reason only, it seems to me.’
‘To push her claim to the Jacobson-Dupont property by looking for a lost will?’
‘Exactly. From that time onwards he suspected that she was putting her own interests before his and, with the police hot on his trail, he could not afford to have a traitor or even a dissident in his camp. I think he came more than once by night to the bungalow, no doubt to put his case. Mr Shard, the self-appointed spy, knew of those meetings and, although he refused to name the man to me, claiming that he did not know who it was, I am perfectly certain that he did know. He had attended at least two of the Satanist meetings and must have heard Bosey speak at them.’
‘But didn’t you tell me that Shard accused Piper of the murder?’
‘Mr Piper was, unwittingly perhaps, the cause of envy and jealousy. Miss Nutley seems to have done her utmost to throw suspicion on him, although I think she regretted it later and, as for Shard, well, Mr Piper is everything which Shard is not – frank, athletic, good-looking, and (more than this) very attractive to two tall women, Niobe Nutley and Elysée Barnes. Shard was once engaged to a girl whom unkind acquaintances referred to as his “beanstalk”. He broke off the engagement in consequence.’
‘Poor little runt!’
‘Pity is not akin to love, especially when it is couched in those terms.’
‘Sorry. But I am truly sad about him, same as I am about Billie Kennett.’
‘Billie Kennett? Ah, yes. The devil-marks on Elysée Barnes’s fair body were the last straw, I think. She got the truth out of Elysée and brooded on it until she was ripe for murder. Ah, well, she has been faithful to her Cynara – in her fashion.’
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[converted from free-floating anonymous RTF file and reproofed cautiously, but without benefit of a printed copy for reference]
[A 3S Release— v2, html]
[April 11, 2007]