Jack found the remark fascinating. "I thought you said she looked up to men?"
Joanna smiled. "Only because she knew how to manipulate them."
The news that Mathilda Gillespie had left Dr. Blakeney three-quarters of a million pounds spread through the village like wildfire. The information surfaced after matins on Sunday, but precisely who started the fire remained a mystery. There was no doubt, however, that it was Violet Orloff who let slip the interesting snippet that Jack Blakeney had taken up residence at Cedar House. His car had remained on the gravel drive all Saturday night and looked like remaining there indefinitely. Tongues began to wag.
Jane Marriott was careful to keep her expression neutral when Sarah put in a surprise appearance at lunch-time on Wednesday. "I wasn't expecting you," she said. "Shouldn't you be on your way to Seeding?"
"I had to give my fingerprints in the parish hall."
"Coffee?"
"I suppose you've heard. Everyone else has."
Jane switched on the kettle. "About the money or about Jack?"
Sarah gave a humourless laugh. "That makes life a lot easier. I've just spent an hour in a queue outside the hall, listening to heavy-handed hints from people who should have been diagnosed brain-dead years ago. Shall I tell you what the current thinking seems to be? Jack has left me to live with Joanna because he is as shocked as everyone else that I used my position as Mathilda's GP to persuade her to forget her duty to her family in favour of me. This being the same Jack Blakeney who, only last week, everyone loved to hate because he was living off his wretched wife."
"Oh dear," said Jane.
"They'll be saying next that I killed the old witch before she could change the will back."
"You'd better believe it," said Jane dispassionately. "There's no point burying your head in the sand."
"You're joking."
Jane handed her a cup of black coffee. "I'm serious, dear. There were two of them discussing it here in the waiting-room this morning. It goes something like this: none of the locals had reason to hate Mathilda more than usual in the last twelve months so none of them is likely to have murdered her. Therefore it has to be a newcomer, and you're the only newcomer with a motive who had access to her. Your husband, afraid for himself and Mrs. Lascelles, has moved in to protect her. Ruth is safe because she's at school. And last, but by no means least, why did Victor Sturgis die in such peculiar circumstances?"
Sarah stared at her. "You are serious, aren't you?"
"Fraid so."
"Do I gather I'm supposed to have killed Victor as well?"
Jane nodded.
"How? By suffocating him with his own false teeth?"
"That seems to be the general view." Jane's eyes brimmed with laughter suddenly. "Oh dear, I shouldn't laugh, really I shouldn't. Poor old soul, it was bad enough that he swallowed them himself, but the idea of you wrestling with a ninety-three-year-old in order to ram his dentures down his throat"-she broke off to mop her eyes-"it doesn't bear thinking about. The world is full of very foolish and very envious people, Sarah. They resent your good fortune."
Sarah mulled this over. "Do you think I'm fortunate?"
"Good lord, yes. It's like winning the pools."
"What would you do with the money if Mathilda had left it to you?"
"Go on a cruise. See the world before it sinks under the weight of its own pollution."
"That seems to be the most popular choice. It must be something to do with the fact that we're an island. Everyone wants to get off it." She stirred her coffee then licked the spoon absent-mindedly.
Jane was dying of curiosity. "What are you going to do with it?"
Sarah sighed. "Use it to pay for a decent barrister, I should think."
DS Cooper stopped at Mill House on his way home that evening. Sarah offered him a glass of wine which he accepted. "We've had a letter about you," he told her while she was pouring it.
She handed him the glass. "Who from?"
"Unsigned."
"What does it say?"
"That you murdered an old man called Victor Sturgis for his walnut desk."
Sarah pulled a wry face. "Actually, he did leave me a desk and it's a rather nice one, too. The matron at the nursing home gave it to me after he died. She said he wanted me to have it. I was very touched." She lifted weary eyebrows. "Did it say how I murdered him?"
"You were seen suffocating him."
"It makes a weird sort of sense. I was trying to prise his dentures out of his throat. The poor old boy swallowed them when he dozed off in his chair." She sighed. "But he was dead before I even started. I had a vague idea of trying mouth-to-mouth if I could unblock his airway. I suppose, from a distance, it might have looked as if I were suffocating him."
Cooper nodded. He had checked the story already. "We've had a few letters, one way and another, and they're not all about you." He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her. "This is the most interesting. See what you make of it."
"Should I touch the letter?" she asked doubtfully. "What about fingerprints?"
"Well, that's interesting in itself. Whoever wrote it wore gloves."
She took the letter from the envelope and spread it on the table. It was printed in block capitals:
RUTH LASCELLES WAS IN CEDAR HOUSE THE DAY MRS. GILLESPIE DIED.
SHE STOLE SOME EARRINGS. JOANNA KNOWS SHE TOOK THEM. JOANNA
LASCELLES IS A PROSTITUTE IN LONDON. ASK HER WHAT SHE SPENDS HER
MONEY ON. ASK HER WHY SHE TRIED TO KILL HER DAUGHTER. ASK HER WHY
MRS. GILLESPIE THOUGHT SHE WAS MAD.
Sarah turned the envelope over to look at the frank mark. It had been posted in Learmouth. "And you've no idea who wrote it?"
"None at all."
"It can't be true. You told me yourself that Ruth was under the watchful eye of her housemistress at school."
He looked amused. "As I told you, I never set much store by alibis. If that young lady wanted to sneak out I can't see her housemistress stopping her."
"But Southcliffe's thirty miles away," Sarah protested. "She couldn't have got here without a car."
He changed tack. "What about this reference to madness? Did Mrs. Gillespie ever mention to you that her daughter was mad?"
She considered this for a moment. "Madness is a relative term, quite meaningless out of context."
He was unruffled. "So Mrs. Gillespie did mention something of the sort?"
Sarah didn't answer.
"Come on, Dr. Blakeney. Joanna's not your patient so you're not giving away any confidences. And let me tell you something else, she's not doing you any favours at the moment. Her view is that you had to kill the old lady PDQ before she had time to change her will back, and she isn't keeping those suspicions to herself."
Sarah fingered her wine glass. "The only thing Mathilda ever said on the subject was that her daughter was unstable. She said it wasn't Joanna's fault but was due to incompatibility between Mathilda's genes and Joanna's father's genes. I told her she was talking rubbish but, at the time, I didn't know that Joanna's father was Mathilda's uncle. I imagine she was concerned about the problems of recessive genes but, as we didn't pursue it any further, I can't say for sure."
"Inbreeding, in other words?"
Sarah gave a small shrug of acquiescence. "Presumably."
"Do you like Mrs. Lascelles?"
"I hardly know her."
"Your husband seems to get on with her well enough."
"That's below the belt, Sergeant."
"I don't understand why you're bothering to defend her. She's got her knife into you right up to the hilt."
"Do you blame her?" She leaned her chin on her hand. "How would you feel if in a few short weeks, you discovered that you were the product of an incestuous relationship, that your father killed himself with an overdose, that your mother died violently either by her own hand or someone else's and that, to cap it all, the security you were used to was about to be snatched away and given to a stranger? She seems remarkably sane to me in the circumstances."