Dog in the Dark (Three Oaks Book 1), page 19
‘Let’s look at it another way round,’ Beth said. She settled back comfortably again. ‘Mrs Cory thought about it and then decided to defy Mrs Daiches. Mrs D. realised that she’d have an awful job proving anything and even then she’d be risking an action for defamation or something and in the meantime a lot of damage could be done to the spaniel gene-pool and to the reputation of breeders in general. Well, she wasn’t a woman who gave up easily. She put paid to that possibility by poisoning the bitch. She probably meant to kill both of them.
‘And then, I suppose, she said something like, “That’s stopped your little game for the moment. Now you can jolly well give those people back their money and start again with a clean blood line.”
‘That’s what pushed Mrs Cory too far. The perfect time was in the dark that Friday evening, when Mrs Daiches came out to feed her dogs, with Mr Daiches away and Laurie hammering. Nobody was likely to see her crossing between the last two houses in the village, beyond the street lights. But once she’d done the murder, she had another problem to solve. A poisoned dog followed by a murder drew attention back to her; any fool might think about revenge and start putting two and two together. She used the anonymous letters to feed the police anything she thought might keep them busy and looking in all the wrong places. But then she must have thought that two poisonings, one before and one after the murder, would confuse the whole issue and make it look as if something quite different was going on. If the same poisoner had struck twice, it couldn’t have been Mrs Daiches.
‘I dare say that any dog would have done. But she saw us, and Henry, in the hotel, and you annoyed her. She must already have had her knife into you because putting back the adaptor and tipping off the police didn’t seem to have worked. So she paid us another visit.’
‘And the dogs didn’t warn Isobel?’
‘I hadn’t finished,’ Beth said severely. ‘And you’re forgetting the wrong-number phone call. You know what Mrs Cory always carried in that big handbag?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘She made no secret of it. She took a pride in never missing a call from a customer. So she carried one of those cordless telephones around with her. She arrived up here. But the curtains were open and Mrs Kitts was working in this room and the loudspeakers were on. She waited for her chance. And then Mrs Kitts went out to look at Samson.’
‘Isobel should lock the doors when she’s on her own,’ I said.
‘But she never does. She won’t admit it, but I think it’s because she can imagine running away from an intruder and coming up against a locked door. Mrs Cory knew how our system works – you showed it to her when she said she was thinking about getting something similar, remember? But she never bothered. I think she was just being nosy.
‘So, when she got her chance, when Mrs Kitts went out to look at Samson, Mrs Cory nipped into the house and switched off the speakers.
‘Mrs Kitts came back. Mrs Cory went to do the job, found Samson in the isolation kennel and chucked the meat in. If any dogs barked she waited until they settled down again. Then she phoned our number. Isobel had to go through to the office to answer it and Mrs Cory came into the hall and switched the alarms on again.’
‘I thought that you had to be quite near your own house to use those things,’ I said doubtfully.
‘It varies,’ Beth said. ‘My brother has one. Sometimes, especially after dark, he says he can make calls from miles away. Anyway, that’s how I saw it.’
‘So you left out my adaptor but told them all the rest?’ It occurred to me that Beth had already made out a better case than some which result in convictions.
‘That’s right. I told them where the adaptor was and what the motive had been. I thought that they would get proper evidence more easily than we could. Are you going to say that I just made a lucky guess?’
‘Feminine intuition,’ I said.
‘If that’s what you want to call it. Will it be all right about the adaptor now?’
Beth sounded anxious. I felt the same way until I had thought it out. ‘No problem,’ I said at last. A load was being lifted off me, piece by piece. ‘Mrs Cory will have told them that she got the adaptor from here, but that won’t have come as a surprise to them. If I deny ever having had such a thing their case against her will be damaged. To get my evidence, they’ll do a deal.’
‘So you think that I did the right thing?’
I nearly told her that that was a bloody silly question but I caught myself in time. ‘You did very well,’ I said. ‘Brilliantly. Much better than I could have done. You’re what Joe called you – a clever little madam.’
She gave a little sigh of contentment and turned towards me. Our knees got in the way so she hooked hers over mine.
‘You may as well come the rest of the way and sit in my lap,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to squash you.’
‘You won’t.’
‘Suppose Mrs Kitts comes in.’
‘I rather think,’ I said, ‘that Henry and Isobel intend to avoid this room until we come out. If we ever do.’
She wriggled up until she was resting lightly on my knees and leaning against me, deliciously intimate, near and yet far. ‘Are you really going to get better now?’ Her tone left me in no doubt that we had reached what was, for her, a much more important topic than a mere murder between neighbours.
‘So Dr Harper says. He also says that it’ll be a long road to travel. There may be setbacks. Can you be patient?’
She sighed contentedly. Her bosom moved against me. ‘I’ve been patient for a long time,’ she said. ‘But I always knew that it would come right some day. What’s a little longer?’
Ben, waking up and feeling jealous, tried unsuccessfully to force his way between us. But neither of us had any intention of moving. Soon, he gave up and went back to the hearth-rug.
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Gerald Hammond, Dog in the Dark (Three Oaks Book 1)
