‘You did say murdered?’ she asked.
‘No doubt about it.’
‘It couldn’t possibly have been suicide? She did threaten it when she left here.’
‘The police don’t think it was anything but murder.’
‘But a mistake was made in identifying the body?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘That must be very unusual. Who…?’
‘The mother.’
‘The mother? Oh, but surely, of all people, a mother would know!’
‘There were good reasons, in this case, for making a mistake, but I’m afraid I can’t disclose them.’
‘Of course not, of course not! I just wanted to be quite sure it wasn’t suicide. Not that I should feel the moral responsibility of it. I mean, people must expect to be dismissed if they show they can’t be trusted. But—well — ”
‘I quite understand. Well, it doesn’t seem that you can help us. Still, thank you, all the same.’
‘You could have a word at the village post office if you wanted to know any more about Miss Palliser. Mrs Pock is renowned for being indiscreet and loquacious.’
‘Thank you very much.’ This time Laura was not called back at the front door. She strode down the gravel drive to the waiting car and told the man to drive into the village and stop outside the post office.
The post-mistress turned out to be a brisk, grey-haired, bright-eyed little woman with a Suffolk accent so pronounced that Laura, waiting while she conversed with a woman who was buying bacon at another counter, wondered whether she would be able to make head or tail of any information about Carrie Palliser which might be forthcoming. She discovered, however, that Mrs Pock’s conversation was not, after all, very difficult to follow. Laura opened the floodgates by buying a book of postage stamps and asking to be directed to the school. She was coming away from it; must have passed it, she was told; not that that was any wonder, for the board saying it was a school was almost hidden by that laurel hedge, and, anyway, it looked like a gentleman’s house, which is what it had been throughout Mrs Pock’s girlhood and almost up to the time that Pock was taken. Of course, it brought trade to the village. There were the children, just twenty of them, poor little things, with their pocket-money to spend, and then there were the parents coming down to see them, and take them out, which was why the Devil’s Advocate had been able to build on a dining-room and call itself an hotel, and then there were the sales of paint-brushes and crayons, exercise books and pencils…
Laura wanted to keep the school in the foreground as a subject of conversation, but could perceive no opportunity of stemming the tide of Mrs Pock’s reminiscences long enough to put the questions she wanted to ask. Her opportunity came with the entrance of another customer. Mrs Pock broke off in mid-sentence to wish the newcomer good afternoon. It was not long before Laura gathered that this customer was the vicar’s wife. She wanted a packet of macaroni, and appeared to be able to cut short Mrs Pock’s remarks by addressing her sternly as Lizzie and adding that she was in a hurry.
‘And who’re you?’ she demanded, turning on Laura. ‘Don’t seem to know your face.’
‘It would be extraordinary if you did,’ retorted Laura, whose worst instincts (she told Dame Beatrice later) were aroused by the vicar’s wife. ‘This is the first time I have ever been in Seethe.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Looking for a murderer.’
‘What!’
(So the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were sisters under their skins, thought Laura, as both her hearers made the same exclamation.)
‘I am helping to investigate the murder of a certain Mrs Coles, sister to a Miss Carrie Palliser, who, I am credibly informed, once taught at the How Red the Rose School in this village.’ (It was better to stick to the newspaper reports in talking to these two, Laura thought.)
‘A chair, Mrs Pock,’ said the vicar’s wife, ‘and another for the woman police-constable.’
Mrs Pock, apparently hypnotised by the incumbent’s spouse, disappeared into the room behind the shop and came back with two dining-room chairs. These she brought round and placed one at each end of the counter.
‘Now!’ she said, beaming at Laura. ‘This is something like!’
It seemed a good plan to Laura to accept this as an invitation to speak, so she plunged in before Mrs Pock could continue.
‘There has been nothing in the newspapers about Miss Palliser,’ she said, ‘but you may have seen that the body was identified by a Mrs Palliser. She is the mother of the Miss Palliser who taught for five terms in the private school here. I have been commissioned—perhaps I should say that I have had occasion to commission myself—to investigate Miss Palliser’s past life in order to find a clue which will lead to the identification of her sister’s murderer.’
‘But this is incredible!’ exclaimed the vicar’s wife. ‘Somebody’s sister murdered… from our village!’
‘Well, that’s only partly true,’ Laura pointed out. ‘Miss Palliser wasn’t exactly a native of Seethe, was she?’
‘All who live and work in Seethe are our flock,’ said the vicar’s wife. ‘How did she come to be murdered?’
‘But that’s what we want to find out,’ said Laura. ‘We particularly want to trace Miss Palliser, who seems to have disappeared. We want to know where she went and what she did during school holidays, for which, I am assured, she was not paid.’
‘I never did see why teachers were paid for school holidays,’ said the vicar’s wife. ‘At least three months in every year are unproductive of education.’
‘The teachers would be nervous wrecks, otherwise,’ retorted Laura, who had been trained for teaching but who had never embraced that profession. ‘Doesn’t that ever occur to their critics?’
‘Beside the point. What about this Miss Palliser? You want to find out where she spent the holidays?’
‘And what did she do besides serve in a shop which I have already visited. Yes, please.’
‘She stood-in during one holiday at a college for gentlemen-farmers, a place called Walborough,’ said Mrs Pock. ‘I do know that. The secretary left, and the term wasn’t finished.’
‘Walborough? You mean Highpepper,’ said Laura excitedly. ‘Think! Think, Mrs Pock!’
But Mrs Pock shook her head.
‘I read all the telegrams, hers and theirs,’ she said definitely. ‘Walborough Agricultural College it was called. She sat-in to take phone calls and the pay was nineteen and sixpence a day.’
‘Where was this place? In which county, I mean.’
‘It was somewhere in Berkshire.’
‘Berkshire?’
‘Yes. They paid her fare there and back. It was all in the telegrams I handled.’
There was nothing more to be gained from Mrs Pock, and Laura fled very soon from the vicar’s wife who literally talked her out of the shop. She returned to the waiting car and said, ‘Ipswich.’ In the train, going back to London, she suddenly threw off the feeling of depression which Mrs Pock had engendered, and said aloud, to the consternation of two women who were sharing her compartment, ‘Blimey! I see it all now! It’s the one thing Mrs Croc. doesn’t know! I bet she’s guessed, but she can’t know! After all, the course at one agricultural college must be much the same as at another.’
chapter fourteen
The Counterfeit Patient
‘ “The pig, with his large fat belly, will have no trouble in supporting himself… I own that I would willingly sacrifice the pig to save the others.”’
Ibid.
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