‘This is all surmise, though, isn’t it?’
‘Certainly it is, but it fits the facts so far as we know them.’
Dr Mortlake was brought before the magistrates and, after the hearing, committed for trial. A police search of his house revealed Dr Rant’s old hat and coat and also his ‘black bag’. Bryony was questioned about the contents of this, but was unable to give a detailed list. She was obliged, however, to admit that the scalpels had disappeared. Shown the receptacle which Laura had found on the cliff, she identified it as having belonged to her father.
In spite of this, the prosecution felt that they were on anything but safe ground with regard to the Rocky Valley murder, although, at Dame Beatrice’s suggestion, Adams was brought forward to testify that Goodfellow had been his lodger and that he had taken his usual evening stroll on the evening of the murder.
‘Did you not wonder what had happened to him when he did not return that night?’ asked Harrow.
‘I reckoned he had dropped in at the Crozier Arms.’
‘Was it not one of your nights to go there, too? I am told you were a regular customer.’
‘I was on the slate, not being too flush at the time, and they wouldn’t serve me till I’d paid off me arrears.’
‘Wouldn’t Goodfellow have treated you?’
‘Him? Scrooge could have learnt a thing or two from him. There was I giving him grub and shelter when, for all I knew, I could have landed meself in dead trouble. When he never come back that night I reckoned either as he couldn’t find his way, being too plastered, or else as he had welshed, owing me money. Then, of course, I heard subsequent, as the poor bastard couldn’t have come back, whether he intended or not.’
Mortlake, however, defeated justice and the law. He left a confession and was found dead in his cell long before he could face a judge and jury. The verdict was suicide. He had taken cyanide.
‘He can’t have been properly .searched,’ said the Chief Constable, when he heard what had happened.
‘He was a doctor, sir, and up to all the dodges, ’ said Harrow.
‘I’m not sure they did much searching,’ said Laura, when the news broke. ‘Anyway, however the verdict was to go at the end of his trial, he was finished professionally and he knew it. You can’t get yourself accused of murdering people and, even if you are acquitted, expect a surgery full of trusting patients. How have Bryony and Morpeth taken the news of his confession and suicide?’
‘With equanimity. The two men he murdered meant nothing to them. As for Mortlake himself, Bryony told me that it was an embarrassment to have him in the neighbourhood after she had refused his offer of marriage.’
‘Cold-blooded young spinsters, aren’t they?’
‘More so than you imagine, perhaps. I am pretty sure that it was only a question of time before one of them murdered their father. Dr Mortlake put parricide beyond their reach.’
‘Well, it seems that Dr Rant would have died from his own excesses sooner or later,’ said Laura.
‘I think Mortlake and the daughters feared it would be later and I am sure all three knew that they were to gain under Rant’s will, and so cupidity, as it often does, settled the issue.’
‘I suppose Bryony would be your choice of murderer if Mortlake had not forestalled her.’
‘Impossible to say which of the women it might have been, particularly as it seems to have been Morpeth who did most of the cooking,’ said Dame Beatrice.
Laura looked at her distrustfully and then observed, ‘Well, perhaps it is easier to believe that Morpeth added arsenic to Dr Rant’s soup than to think of another doctor adding it to his medicine.’
‘In his confession Dr Mortlake alleges that Dr Rant paid him very poorly, when it was obvious that the practice — and the Rants’ comfortable style of living — would not have survived without his, Mortlake’s, tireless dedication and personal sacrifice. He was pressed for money and was in debt. In the words of a BBC commentator describing the losing player in a game of snooker, he needed “to negate his arrears”,’ said Dame Beatrice.
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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
[A 3S Release— v1, html]
[November 14, 2006]