He nodded. "Unfortunately we've had nothing but hysterics out of them since Mrs. Spede found the body. We'll be asking round the village, anyway." He looked towards the bedroom. "There's an empty bottle of barbiturates on her bedside table beside the remains of a glass of whisky. It looks like a belt and braces job. Whisky for courage, sleeping pills, then the Stanley knife in the bath. Do you still say you wouldn't have expected her to kill herself?"
"Oh, lord, I don't know." Sarah ran a worried hand through her short dark hair. "I wouldn't have prescribed barbiturates if I thought there was a chance she'd abuse them, but one can never be certain about these things. And anyway, Mathilda had been taking them for years, they were commonly prescribed once. So yes, I would rule out suicide from what I knew of her, but we had a doctor-patient relationship. She had severe pain with her arthritis and there were nights when she couldn't sleep." She frowned. "In any case, there can't have been many of the sleeping pills left. She was due for another prescription this week."
"Perhaps she was hoarding them," he said unemotionally. "Did she ever open her heart to you?"
"I doubt she opened her heart to anyone. She wasn't the type. She was a very private person." She shrugged. "And I've only known her-what?-twelve months. I live in Long Upton, not here in Fontwell, so I haven't come across her socially either." She shook her head. "There's nothing in her records to suggest a depressive personality. But the trouble is-" She fell silent.
"The trouble is what, Dr. Blakeney?"
"The trouble is we talked about freedom the last time I saw her, and she said freedom is an illusion. There's no such thing in modern society. She quoted Rousseau at me, the famous rebel-cry of students in the sixties: 'Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' There was only one freedom left, according to Mathilda, and that was the freedom to choose how and when to die." Her face looked bleak. "But we had conversations like that every time I saw her. There was no reason to assume that one was any different."
"When was this conversation?"
Sarah sighed heavily. "Three weeks ago during my last monthly visit. And the awful thing is, I laughed. Even that wasn't a freedom any more, I said, because doctors are so damn scared of prosecution they wouldn't dream of giving a patient the choice."
The policeman, a large detective nearing retirement, placed a comforting hand on her arm. "There now, it's nothing to fret about. It was slitting her wrists that killed her, not barbiturates. And the chances are we're looking at murder anyway." He shook his head. "I've seen a few suicides one way and another, but I've yet to see an old woman turn herself into a flower arrangement in her bath. It'll be money that's behind it. We all live too long and the young get desperate." He spoke with feeling, Sarah thought.
An hour later, Dr. Cameron was more sceptical. "If she didn't do it herself," he said, "you'll have the devil's own job proving it." They had removed the body from the bath and lain it, still with the scold's bridle in place, on plastic sheeting on the floor. "Apart from the incisions on her wrists there's not a mark on her, bar what one would expect, of course." He pointed to the lividity above and around the wrinkled buttocks. "Some postmortem hypostasis where the blood has settled but no bruising. Poor old thing. She didn't put up any sort of a fight."
Sergeant Cooper leaned against the bathroom door-jamb, drawn to look at the poor grey body, but deeply repulsed by it. "She couldn't if she was drugged," he murmured.
Cameron peeled off his gloves. "I'll see what I can find out for you back at the lab, but my advice is, don't I hold your breath. I can't see your Chief Super wasting too much time and resources on this one. It's about as neat as anything I've seen. Frankly, unless something pretty unusual shows up in the post mortem, I'll be recommending a suicide verdict."
"But what does your gut tell you, Doctor? The nettles are telling mine it was murder. Why would she deliberately sting herself before she died?"
"Self-reproach, probably. Good God, man, there's no logic to this kind of thing. Suicides are hardly in their right mind when they top themselves. Still," he said thoughtfully, "I am surprised she didn't leave a note. There's so much of the theatre about this headdress that I'd have expected something by way of explanation." He began to tuck the plastic sheet about the body. "Read Hamlet," he suggested. "The answer's in there, I expect."
Mr. and Mrs. Spede hovered in the library like two squat spectres, so unprepossessing and shifty in their appearance that Cooper wondered if they were quite normal. Neither seemed able to meet his gaze and every question required unspoken consultation between them before one would offer an answer. "Dr. Blakeney tells me Mrs. Gillespie has a daughter living in London and a granddaughter at boarding school," he said. "Can you give me their names and tell me where I can contact them?"
"She kept her papers very neat," said Mrs. Spede eventually, after receiving some sort of permission to speak from her husband. "It'll all be in the papers." She nodded towards the desk and an oak filing cabinet. "In there some place. Very neat. Always very neat."
"Don't you know her daughter's name?"
"Mrs. Lascelles"," said the man after a moment. "Joanna." He tugged at his lower lip which drooped oddly as if it had been tugged many times before. With a petulant frown his wife smacked him on the wrist and he tucked the offending hand into his pocket. They were very childlike, thought Cooper, and wondered if Mrs. Gillespie had employed them out of compassion.
"And the granddaughter's name?"
"Miss Lascelles," said Mrs. Spede.
"Do you know her Christian name?"
"Ruth." She consulted with her husband behind lowered lids. "They're not nice, either of them. The Mrs. is rude to Mr. Spede about his gardening and the Miss is rude to Jenny about her cleaning."
"Jenny?" he queried. "Who's Jenny?"
"Jenny is Mrs. Spede."
"I see," said Cooper kindly. "It must have been a terrible shock for you, Jenny, to find Mrs. Gillespie in her bath."
"Oh, it was that," she howled, grabbing her husband's arm. "A terrible, terrible shock." Her voice rose on a wail.
With some reluctance, because he feared an even louder outburst, Cooper took the polythene bag containing the Stanley knife from his pocket and laid it across his broad palm. "I don't want to upset you any more, but do you recognize this? Is it a knife you've seen before?"
Her lips puckered tragically but she stopped the wailing to nudge her husband into speech. "The kitchen drawer," he said. "It's the one from the kitchen drawer." He touched the handle through the bag. "I scratched an h'aitch on it for 'house.' The one I keep in the shed has a gee on it for 'garden.' "
Cooper examined the crude "h" and nodded as he tucked the bag back out of sight into his pocket. "Thank you. I'll need the one from the garden for comparison. I'll ask an officer to go out with you when we've finished." He smiled in a friendly way. "Now, you presumably have keys to the house. May I see them?"
Mrs. Spede drew a string from around her neck, revealing a key that had lain within the cleft of her bosom. "Only me," she said. "Jenny had the key. Mr. Spede didn't need one for the garden." She gave it to Cooper and he felt the warmth of her body seeping into his hand. It repelled him because it was damp and oily with sweat, and this made him feel guilty because he found them both deeply unattractive and knew that, unlike Mrs. Gillespie, he could not have tolerated them about his house for even half an hour.
Mathilda Gillespie's nearest neighbours lived alongside her in a wing adjoining the house. At some stage Cedar House must have been one residence, but now a discreet sign indicated the door to Wing Cottage at the western end of the building. Before Cooper knocked on it, he walked along a gravel path to the rear corner and surveyed the patio at the back, neatly bordered by tubs of everlasting pansies, beyond which a clipped box hedge separated this garden from the expanse of lawn and distant trees that belonged to Cedar House. He felt a sudden envy for the occupants. How dreary his own small box was by comparison, but then it was his wife who had chosen to live on a modern estate and not he. He would have been happy with crumbling plaster and a view; she was happy with all mod. cons and neighbours so close they rubbed shoulders every day. It was a policeman's lot to give in to a wife he was fond of. His hours were too unpredictable to allow him to impose his own yearning for isolation on a woman who had tolerated his absences with stoical good humour for thirty years.