“Watkins is not my father!” Mrs. Beetle gave a bounce that shook the room.
“Well, you don’t look much like him, I’ll give you that,” Mrs. Malloy conceded, albeit begrudgingly. “And one thing I’ll say for Roman Catholics is that they do like their bingo, so I can’t see why-if you really are one that is-you’d object to your old Dad enjoying an evening of it now and then. Besides, as I can see Mrs. H. is itching to say, there’s someone else here as is another likely candidate for being Ernestine, and that is…” She took her sweet time before pointing her finger toward Daisy Meeks.
“What? Did I say something?” That lady blinked as if coming out of a trance filled to the brim with Tupperware. “Why is everyone looking at me?”
“We’re wondering about your life before you suddenly showed up at Moultty Towers claiming to be a long-lost relative and then bought a house in the village,” I said. “It’s not always easy to tell a woman’s age these days, when one can be confused by makeup, or the lack of it, into adding or subtracting ten or even more years.”
“I’m fifty.”
“So am I on a bad day,” Mrs. Malloy shot back at her. “The rest of the time it’s twenty-nine. And maybe for you it’s forty, like if you was Ernestine.”
“I’m not following?”
“Or you don’t want us to think you are, ducks. Playing like you’re muddleheaded so that people lose patience and ignore you, while all the time you’re thinking deep inscrutable”-Mrs. M. brought out the word with a flourish-“thoughts.”
“I am?” Daisy Meeks looked vaguely pleased.
“Stop it! Put an end to this cat-and-mouse game, Father!” This exclamation came from Laureen as she flung herself toward Watkins. They know from this,” she said, wildly tugging at her auburn hair until it tumbled out of its carefully arranged coil to cascade over her shoulders, “that I’m your daughter.”
“No.” Watkins was losing it fast. He backed away from her as if persued by the devil. “You’re not my Ernestine.”
“What are you afraid of?” Her voice spiraled into rage. “That I’ll reject you as my mother did? Well, let me tell you I’ve done more than that. I’ve helped these women-these two private detectives-because someone had to be made to pay for my life as the child of those appalling Merryweathers. And you made it so easy for me to settle on you.”
“Liar. You’re nothing to me! My Ernestine is sweet and gentle!” Watkins had collided with Mr. Featherstone who clamped hold of his arms from behind. Lady Krumley sat as if turned to stone, while the rest of the group was reduced to a blurred photograph.
“I led these dear women step by step to Constable Thatcher’s boy, Ronald.” Laureen waved a hand at Mrs. Malloy and me and continued remorselessly. “In picking up bits and pieces from Mrs. Hasty I knew he had seen something that had aroused his suspicions about Vincent Krumley’s death. And when this one,” she said, poking at Mrs. Malloy’s shoulder, “got him to open up, he told her he had seen you dragging Pipsie into the shrubbery and beating on it when it yelped. Ronald is very fond of animals. He’s been begging his parents for a dog of his own, and he was charging to the rescue when he and his friend both pitched into a ditch. By the time they managed to scramble out you were nowhere to be seen, Father, and neither was Pipsie. They thought you had killed him, instead of locking him inside the cottage, so that when you offered to help Vincent look for him in the grounds he would start barking and you would follow the sound and suggest looking down the well. That’s why Ronald and the other boy threw those flower pots at your car.” Laureen whirled around to throw herself at Lady Krumley’s feet and clutch at the skirt of her black dress. “They thought Watkins-Father-would be driving. He was the one who most often did so. They never meant to hurt you. And neither did I. Yes, I knew what he was up to, and I played along, giving him enough rope to hang himself. Let him play his little tricks with the brooch! And then I’d expose him. I never thought of murder.”
“Oh, come off it!” Cynthia was back in form. “You were in it up to your neck, hoping to get your hands on a fortune.”
“It does look that way.” Niles appeared to be reviving now that the focus had shifted. “What do you think Aunt Maude?”
“My dear, how are you holding up under this emotional strain?” Mr. Featherstone spoke with deep feeling. But Lady Krumley’s response was cut off by Watkins releasing a roar that knocked a couple of moose heads sideways. Staggering out of the vicar’s clutches he swung around to pummel his fists in the air.
“You,” he said, glaring at Laureen’s kneeling back, “you’re not worthy to speak my Ernestine’s name let alone pretend to be her. She’s a good woman. None of her mother’s ways about her. It broke my heart the moment I first laid eyes on her after she’d been kept from me all those long years. I made up my mind I’d make it up to her. And it was like a sign when I saw in the paper a few months later that there was a job going here. It didn’t bother me none when I had trouble finding the brooch. I knew inside here,” Watkins thumped his chest, “that I’d find it when the time was right. And so I did. But I never told my Ernestine nothing. Not even that I was her father. To her I’m still just another of the men who’ve found their way to the organization she set up to help people with problems. It’s called The Waysiders. I went there when I realized I needed help with my drinking, and it’s there I met Vincent Krumley. He didn’t remember me from the days when I was gardener here, but I had to go and tell him, didn’t I, before I got sober enough to think straight.” He was now clawing at his bald head. “In all this time I’ve been back at Moultty Towers the old geezer never once showed his face, until that other night when I made up my mind I’d be damned before I let him ruin things for me.”
The drawing room door swung inward and a man in police uniform stood in the opening. This had to be Ronald’s father, Constable Thatcher. Beside him was a woman in her late thirties to early forties-quite a pretty woman, despite a severe hairstyle and nunlike attire. It seemed to me that there was an aura about her, but that might have been because the atmosphere was so highly charged with emotion.
“Father,” she said in a softly compelling voice, “it has all been explained to me, and I have come to help you.” She held out her arms, and Watkins stumbled into them, sobbing like a brokenhearted child. As she stroked his bowed head she looked over her shoulder as if drawn by a magnet to meet Alfonse’s bemused gaze across the crowded room. I’d heard of such things happening… and didn’t get the chance to glory in witnessing it because Laureen had risen slowly to her feet. For a moment I mistook the look on her face for exhaustion from playing the role Mrs. Malloy and I had assigned to her. Then when I saw her lift Lady Krumley’s hand my heart sank. That nerve pill she had taken, what had it been really? And why, oh why hadn’t Mrs. Malloy and I suspected that Watkins had chosen this moment to commit the murder he had been working toward all these years?
Twenty-three
“What completed Watkins’s disintegration,” I explained to Freddy the following morning while I did the breakfast washing up and he watched, “was when the little dog Pipsie burst into the room like the angel of vengeance and made snarling leaps at his ankles, the throat being for a dog of his size the equivalent of a mountain peak.”