Page 76 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
“But the…” He glanced at me, “the blood, and the other matter…?”
Urk. There was that word I hadn’t wanted to think, let alone say. I could feel the blood drain out of my head, leaving me dizzy.
“Catch her, young man,” Doctor White’s voice said, from farther away than it should have been, “before she falls down. You really ought to know better than that.”
“Sorry.” I felt Christopher’s hand under my elbow. “Come along, Pippa. Over in the shade. This way.” I heard one of the motorcar doors open, and then he nudged me onto a seat. “There we are. Deep breaths.”
“Sorry,” I said, keeping my head down and my eyes closed. “I’m not usually so feeble. It was just that word…”
Plus the fact that a month ago, I had driven around London with the head of a dead man in my lap, wrapped in a towel. There had been blood and brain matter then too. This brought back bad memories.
“Hmph.” Doctor White cleared his throat with irritation. “You wouldn’t have lasted a week on the ward during the war, young lady. Amputated limbs and infected wounds and maggots…”
No, I wouldn’t have, and I didn’t want to hear about it now. My stomach flopped over in an unpleasant manner.
“Carry on,” I told him—told them both—with a flip of my hand. Perhaps moving on with the conversation would help. “You were saying that the mallet wasn’t the murder weapon?”
The doctor harrumphed again, but said, “No. She was hit with something else first.”
Something else? “What?”
I admit it, I had visions of fireplace pokers and rolling pins and golf clubs flitting through my head. All the things we had talked about just a few minutes ago, that had been readily available to anyone who wanted to commit murder.
“Something with a smaller circumference, likely metal,” Doctor White said. “There were specks of rust in her hair.”
So not just metal, but rusty metal.
That would explain why someone was rustling around in the carriage house, anyway. There were sure to be plenty of metals in there, rusty and otherwise. The entire building is a lock-jaw accident waiting to happen.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Christopher objected. “Why would someone hit her with something else, and then go get the mallet and hit her with that, only to leave the first thing lying around in the carriage house?”
“Who said anything about the carriage house?” Doctor White wanted to know. “And she wasn’t hit with the mallet. I thought I made that clear. She was hit with something else, and then someone fetched the mallet.”
“But didn’t hit her with it? How did the blood and… um…” Christopher glanced at me.
“You can say it,” I told him grumpily. “By now, that’s hardly the most disturbing thing about this situation. Someone hit her with something else, then went and fetched the mallet, and rubbed the head of the mallet in the wound, so it would look as if she was hit with the mallet?”
“In a word,” Doctor White answered. He seemed pleased, either because I’d figured it out or because I wasn’t fainting after articulating it all.
“But that’s barbaric,” Christopher said, and the doctor turned to him.
“Less barbaric than hitting the dead corpse with the mallet a second time, I would say. Although I’ll readily admit that none of it is pleasant.”
No, it absolutely was not. And furthermore, it was well-nigh unbelievable. I couldn’t imagine any of us doing something like that. The idea of Constance or Laetitia first wielding the classic blunt instrument—and in rusty metal; where would either of them have got their hands on rusty metal? It’s not like we keep our fireplace pokers or kitchen utensils rusty.
But all right, so we had Constance or Laetitia bashing poor Abigail over the head with a rusty, blunt instrument, and then, not being satisfied with that action, running into the carriage house, fetching one of the croquet mallets, dipping it into the blood and brain matter on the back of her head—I gagged—and throwing it on the grass to make it look like the murder weapon, before gathering up the original blunt instrument and restoring it to whence it had come, presumably to divert suspicion from herself.
If that was the case, the real murder weapon must be something that could implicate whoever had used it. Otherwise, why not just leave it on the lawn?
Of course, it might have been as simple as fear that the rusty poker contained the murderer’s fingerprints, but if it truly was as rusty as all that, it didn’t seem likely that it would. And besides, why not just take it away without substituting the mallet? And if he, or she, could keep his or her fingerprints off the mallet, why not keep them off the original weapon, as well?
“Better now?” Christopher asked me. He must have noticed that I had slipped from nauseated silence into the quiet of contemplation.
I nodded. “Much, thank you. I suppose all we have to do now is find the rusty poker—or whatever it is—and it’ll lead us straight to the guilty party.”
“I’m sure Sammy is trying to do exactly that,” Christopher said, and turned to the doctor. “What can we do for you, Doctor White? Do you want to go back to the village? You’ll have to do the post mortem on the body, I assume, even if it’s already obvious what caused her death.”
Doctor White nodded. “Yes, my boy. For the inquest, you know. Best to have all the details figured out and sound like I know what I’m testifying about.”
