Your Secret Friend (Timothy Herring) Read online

  “You would agree, Miss Pomfret-Brown, that the headmistress of a school must know a good deal about the members of her staff?” said counsel for the police.

  “All carefully vetted, of course, before I take them on. Mistaken diagnosis sometimes—poor old Simon Bennison a case in point, no doubt—but usually I’m not far out.”

  “What would you say was the relationship between the defendant and the deceased?”

  “Mother and child.”

  “I must remind you that you are on oath!”

  “No need to remind me. Simon Bennison, poor little man, was a child—a lap-dog, if you prefer it.”

  “A lap-dog? Will you please explain what you mean?”

  “Obvious, I should have thought. He was a helpless, feckless, boneless individual, the sort on whom misguided gals take pity. Alison took pity on him, that’s all, but then, as I’ve often told her, she is a misguided gal.”

  “Miss Pomfret-Brown, you are a maiden lady and—er—in any case, a lady, and you may find my next question distasteful. I must ask you to answer it to the best of your knowledge and ability.”

  “Maiden lady? I didn’t know there were such things nowadays, young man. Nevertheless, fire away.”

  “To the best of your knowledge, were the deceased and the defendant in love with one another?”

  “Are you in love with your poodles? And are they in love with you?”

  As counsel was known to breed poodles and to show them, this thrust produced laughter in court and a reprimand from the Bench.

  “Please! Please! If you have no further questions, Mr. Summerhayes, I think the witness had better stand down.”

  “Please yourself, Henry,” said Miss Pomfret-Brown. “I am available if you need me again. But if you or the police think that that high-minded, incorruptible gal in the dock would enter into a suicide pact with anybody, let alone a niminy-piminy little man like Simon Bennison, you had better see a psychiatrist, and the sooner the better.” She retired with the honours of war. The chairman’s acid reminder that she was not now in her school was lost in a gale of laughter.

  “Well,” he went on, “the medical evidence which we were given at the beginning of this hearing is unchallenged and does not appear to be in doubt. The question before the court is whether the defendant is guilty of the crime of complicity.” He explained the legal meaning of the term and then went on, “There is no doubt about the nature of the poison which was put into the drinks, and there is no doubt that both the deceased and the defendant partook of those drinks. I should like to hear the defendant, if there is anything she wishes to say.”

  “May I confer with my client, Your Worship?” Without waiting for permission her lawyer stepped across to Alison. A few minutes later Alison was in the witness-box taking the oath.

  “Now, Miss Pallis,” said her counsel, “you have pleaded Not Guilty to the charge of complicity in the death of Simon Bennison. Will you tell the court, in your own words, what happened on the day of his death?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Where do you want me to begin?”

  “Well, we seem to have heard that you gave two so-called house-warming parties. Why two?”

  “The second one, of course, was not held, and the first one wasn’t a real house-warming. I had received a letter from the Society to tell me that the restoration of Little Monkshood was completed, so I thought it only polite to go straight away and look at it.”

  “And you invited Mr. Bennison to go with you?”

  “Yes. I thought I would drink a toast to the house, and it didn’t seem much fun to do that alone, especially as I had asked Mr. Bennison, because he is not resident at the school, to get a bottle of advocaat and some madeira wine. I met Mr. Herring as I was on my way to the house, and he offered me a lift. He had previously picked up Mr. Bennison.”

  “So there were three of you at this party?” said the chairman.

  “Not exactly. Mr. Herring would not come in. He sat in his car.”

  “He didn’t want to play gooseberry, I suppose.”

  “I submit, Your Worship,” said Alison’s lawyer, “that that is an unwarrantable conclusion. I think the truth is that Mr. Herring, knowing he had met my client fortuitously and had not been invited to join in the toast to the house . . .”

  “I was only joking, Mr. Carr. Not in the best of taste, perhaps.”

  “My client is facing a serious charge, Your Worship.”

  “Just so. Perhaps you would care to carry on.”

  “Your Worship has kindly laid down a firm line of defence which I had intended, in any case, to follow. It is that there is no case for Miss Pallis to answer. The fact that she had bought this house, that she proposed to occupy it and that she had given the Society for the Preservation of Buildings of Historic Interest a voluntary subscription towards the cost of the restoration proves conclusively, to my mind, that at no time could she have contemplated making a suicide pact with the deceased, or with anybody else, for that matter.”

  “You are leading your client on to dangerous ground, are you not?” asked Summerhayes, for the police.

  “That,” said Alison’s counsel, “is beside the point. I understand you, of course.”

  “Yes, so do I,” said the presiding magistrate, “and I must remind you, Mr. Summerhayes, that the question before the court is whether the defendant is, or is not, guilty of complicity. Nothing more.”

  “I am obliged to Your Worship.” Mr. Summerhayes was young and inexperienced, but not so much of either as to be unaware that the chairman of the Bench was mortally afraid of Miss Pomfret-Brown.

  “Furthermore,” went on Carr, “I can bring evidence to show that neither the deceased nor the defendant need necessarily have added the drug to the bottles of madeira and advocaat. I have evidence to show that any person could have entered Little Monkshood and added a lethal substance to those bottles. I call Joseph Linfield.”

  Timothy had been surprised to see in court the foreman employed by the contractors. The man was sworn.

  “Joseph Linfield, you were employed by your firm to oversee and direct the work which has been carried out in the house known as Little Monkshood in the village of Monkshood Mill?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “How long was the work in progress?”

  “A matter of three months, sir, or thereabouts, perhaps more.”

  “Now when your men had finished work each day, what did they do?”

  “Packed up and went home, sir.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I meant who was responsible for locking the door?”

  “We never locked up.”

  “Really? Why was that?”

  “So as the men could get straight on next morning, whether I was there or not.”

  “But shouldn’t you have been there?” the chairman enquired.

  “Only occasional, sir. Little Monks’ood wasn’t our only job, you see. Sometimes I’d be over to Peterminster, or it might be I was on our new estate—two—and three-bedroom bungalows at—Kings Purcell. It would all depend where I was wanted most.”

  “I understand. Thank you, Mr. Carr.”

  “Your Worship is most welcome. There is very little need, thanks to Your Worship’s intervention, for me to make my next point. I stress that if the house was left unlocked for the reason we have just been given, person or persons unknown, and not the deceased or Miss Pallis, could have added the drug to those bottles of liquor.”

  “I should like to put another question to Mr. Herring,” said the chairman. “Mr. Herring, remembering that you are still on oath, will you tell the court how you came to give a lift to Mr. Bennison and Miss Pallis on the evening of October 31st?”

  “Certainly, Your Worship. I was returning from Little Monkshood when I met first one and then the other of them, as I have already explained.”

  “You were returning from Little Monkshood?” asked Mr. Summerhayes. “How was that?”

  “During the three months that the hou
se was being restored I spent a good deal of my time at the George hotel in Peterminster, and after I had notified Miss Pallis that the bulk of the work on Little Monkshood was completed, I thought I would take a last look over the restoration before I returned to my home in Gloucestershire.”

  “Oh, yes, that reminds me,” said the chairman. “One of the witnesses stated that Miss Pallis visited you twice at your home. That seems somewhat extraordinary if, as you state, you had met her only about half-a-dozen times altogether.”

  “It is susceptible of a ready explanation, Your Worship.” Timothy was at his most bland and amiable. He was furiously angry with Vere Pallis for her backbiting tongue. “The first occasion was also my first meeting with Miss Marchmont Pallis. She came to see me, accompanied by a friend, to find out whether my Society would be interested in restoring Little Monkshood, which she was preparing to purchase. The second time Miss Pallis visited me was at my invitation. I had converted my own house from a posting-inn to a private residence, and I thought she might be interested, before we did very much to Little Monkshood, to see what could be done with an old house.”

  “The two visits she paid you were both, so to speak, on business, then?”

  “Exactly. My other encounters with Miss Pallis might also be said to be on business also, since they were all concerned with the restoration of her house, and took place on those premises.” For the first time he was thankful that Alison had never accepted his invitations to dine with him at the George. “I may add that on some of the occasions when I met Miss Pallis, Mr. Bennison was present, and on at least one other occasion Mr. Parsons and his wife were with me.” If the spiteful Vere Pallis intended to indicate, as she seemed to do, that Alison had been anxious to be rid of Simon because she had formed another attachment, it was desirable to put a spoke in her wheel, he thought.

  “Reverting to a previous point, I take it, Mr. Herring, that, once the restoration was completed, Miss Pallis was provided with the keys of the house?” asked Summerhayes smoothly.

  “Yes,” said Timothy, alarmed by this question.

  “So that, once she had the keys, she presumably locked the door so that no unauthorised person could enter the house?”

  “Oh, yes, they could!” exclaimed Miss Pomfret-Brown, who had seated herself majestically at the pressmen’s table instead of returning to the witness-bench. “Some of my naughty little gals broke into Little Monkshood, and, if they did, there’s nothing to prove that they were the only ones, so let’s have done with all this cock-and-bull stuff about a suicide pact. What you’re looking for, Mr. Superintendent of Police, is some lunatic who turned into a murderer, so the sooner you set about it, and stop pestering this poor gal, the better. Suicide pact! I never heard such a lot of nonsense in my life! Who on earth would want to make a suicide pact with a rabbit like Simon Bennison? Why, he couldn’t even keep a class of little bread-and-butter misses in order, let alone make a strong-minded gal such as Marchmont go to hell with him!”

  With the guile which all headmistresses acquire, she did not explain that, on one all-important occasion, Timothy himself had been instrumental in admitting her “naughty little gals” to Little Monkshood.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Ugly Sister

  The anonymous letters began two days later. The presiding magistrate himself received the first one.

  “Who bribed you and your fellow-magistrates? You won’t get away with letting a murderess dodge her trial.”

  The next letter went to Miss Pomfret-Brown.

  “You won’t get away with it. You may be Wight-Seeley’s godmother, but justice is not defeated so easily. Aren’t you afraid to let a murderess loose in your school?”

  Timothy also received one. It had been sent to the Society’s headquarters in London and Coningsby, the official dogsbody, had re-directed it. As it was marked Personal, he had not opened it. It read:

  “So you and your fancy woman got to Little Monkshood in time to poison Simon Bennison’s drink, did you? What you want with Alison Marchmont Pallis, goodness only knows. What a precious pair of------------------------------murderers you are!”

  Timothy’s first impulse was to hurl the offensive missive on to the fire. His second was to ring up the Society’s solicitor, the man who had instructed the defence before the Bench.

  “I’ve just received a poison-pen letter. I’m pretty sure I know who sent it. What’s the best thing to do?”

  “I’ve had one, too, sent care of Phisbe, as I suppose yours was. Miss Constance Vere Pallis, I assume. Leave me to deal with her. I’ll have to watch my step, of course. Can’t go strewing wild accusations about, just in case it isn’t that lady, but, judging from her demeanour in court, I don’t think there’s very much doubt.”

  “I’d like to go and see her, and scare the life out of her.”

  “Much better not. Send me your letter, and, if you hear of anybody else receiving one, suggest they also get in touch with me. We’ll soon scotch the viper.”

  The next letter Timothy received came from Alison.

  “There has been so much publicity following Simon’s death that I want to resign my post at the school. Miss P.-B. won’t hear of it. Do please come and persuade her. It’s so bad for the school to be mixed up with suicide and murder. That’s an awful word, isn’t it?—but the more I turn things over in my mind, the more sure I am that Simon was killed. I think the lethal dose may have been meant for me, but that Simon drank out of the wrong bottle. It’s all so horrible. Do come and talk to P.-B. Oh, and I’ve had an anonymous letter. What had I better do about it?”

  Before Timothy could answer this, Miss Salter had a short but intriguing conversation with Sandra Davidson.

  “Please, Miss Salter, may I have permission to go and speak to Miss Pomfret-Brown?”

  “What about, Sandra?”

  “Please, Miss Salter, it’s a private matter. I want to ask her advice.”

  “Well, ask mine. Is it to do with school?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Your home, then?”

  “Well, only sort of. Please, Miss Salter! I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Now, look here, Sandra, Miss Pomfret-Brown is much too busy to bother with little girls. Tell me what it’s all about, and then I can decide whether it’s of sufficient importance to trouble Miss Pomfret-Brown with it.”

  “Please, Miss Salter, do let me go to Miss Pomfret-Brown! It’s about Mr. Bennison and Miss Marchmont Pallis.”

  Hildegarde Salter looked at the snub-nosed, freckled little face, at the hot, eager eyes, the determined mouth, and small obstinate chin.

  “Very well,” she said grimly, “thou hast appealed unto Caesar, and to Caesar shalt thou go, and I hope, for your sake, that it’s not some silly rigmarole. Wait outside my door.” Sandra obeyed, and Hildegarde rang up Miss Pomfret-Brown’s quarters on the school intercom. “Will you see Sandra Davidson?”

  “Is she in trouble again?”

  “Not school trouble exactly. I don’t know the details. They are to be confided to you if you’ll see her. She seems very much in earnest.”

  “Bother the wretched child! Very well. Push her along.”

  “Now?”

  “May as well. I hope she’s good for a laugh.”

  “I doubt it. It seems to be something about that wretched suicide.”

  “Oh, Lord, my dear! I’d certainly better hear what she has to say, because, you know, it wasn’t suicide, it was murder, and the wrong person got killed.”

  Hildegarde put down the receiver and opened the door.

  “What is your next lesson?” she asked the little girl.

  “I’ve got a private study period, Miss Salter.”

  “All right. Miss Pomfret-Brown will see you right away.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miss Salter!”

  “Well,” said the head of the school, when Sandra stood before the presence. “What’s all this, eh?”

&nbs
p; “Please, Miss Pomfret-Brown, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve had a funny letter.”

  “Meaning funny-peculiar, I suppose.”

  “Yes, Miss Pomfret-Brown.”

  “Hand it over.” The missive was brief and trenchant. Miss Pomfret-Brown read it twice, once merely skimming it and then giving it a careful scrutiny. “Hm!” she said. “Not one of your friends having a rather unpleasant sort of joke, I suppose?”

  “I don’t think anybody in the school would think that letter was funny.”

  “An unsolicited testimonial! Now you just read this nasty piece of composition aloud to me. I want to know what it sounds like from, as the hymn puts it, the lips of children. Not that I expect loud hosannas to follow. Heaven forbid!” Sandra cleared her throat.

  “Innocent children must be protected,” she read aloud. “Tell your parents that a murderess is at large in your school. Advise them to take you away at once. Nobody is safe at Purfleet Hall. Tell your friends. A Well-Wisher.”

  “Hm!” said the headmistress. “Ever thought of going on the stage? Leave the letter with me. Have you written to your parents about it?”

  “Oh, no, Miss Pomfret-Brown!”

  “Told other gals?”

  “No. I thought you’d better see it first. It’s Miss Vere Pallis, isn’t it?”

  “Now what on earth makes you say that?” demanded Miss Pomfret-Brown. “You’re a very naughty little gal!”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Pomfret-Brown.”

  “So I should think! Here’s half-a-crown for you. Not a word to a soul!”

  “About the funny letter, Miss Pomfret-Brown?”

  “Didn’t think I meant the half-crown, did you?”

  Timothy, having announced his impending arrival by greetings telegram—a gesture which he felt that Miss Pomfret-Brown would appreciate—turned up at four o’clock on the following afternoon.

  “Well, budding Romeo!” said the headmistress.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Timothy, kissing her hand. “I do so much hope you won’t let Alison leave the school at present.”

  “Why?—not that I’m going to.”

  “She tells me she’s had one of these letters. I think she’s safer here than beetling off on her own.”