The Good Wife Page 8

  Mickey laughed out loud, then nodded sympathetically at his boss. ‘And the letters written between Martha and her husband? In light of what you now know, do they read any differently?’

  Henry picked them up and studied them thoughtfully. He opened one and handed it to Mickey. ‘It occurred to me last night they could be letters simply between close friends. At the time I assumed that perhaps Dr Mason wished to maintain proprieties. After all Martha Edgerton as she was then was a younger woman and one he had not courted for long. The whole business from meeting to marriage was a mere eight months and while we know that people do marry hastily, considering this was a long-distance relationship I would almost have expected it to take more time to reach the conclusion of marriage.’

  Mickey peered sceptically at him. ‘You do have some strange ideas,’ he said. He skimmed the letter, which was from Dr Mason to his intended and was written some three months before their wedding. ‘Does he always sign off with “fondest regards”?’ he asked.

  ‘I believe so, as does she. She opens her letters more often than not with “my dearest love”, or simply “dearest”, and as you can see the letters are open and affectionate and talk of everyday events.’

  Mickey read a few lines out loud: ‘“Last night we visited the theatre and I have to say that it was not the best performance I have seen. The leading man stomped around the stage and waved his arms in what he no doubt believed was an eloquent manner, but which did look as though he was scaring birds. I would have employed him as a scarecrow but as a romantic lead in an Ibsen play, oh for goodness’ sake, no.”’

  He read on for a little and then said, ‘If this is typical, then I would agree that they do seem to have been close friends. As for affection shown between a man and a woman, you could no doubt look at letters between myself and my wife and see them also as letters simply between friends. We’ve been together long enough for our affections to be known and understood without flowery language. Belle knows well enough she is my right arm, a sounder woman you would never be likely to meet. I’m more interested in what this doctor’s wife would be doing with a solicitor and a private investigator. What would she need a detective for? Why all the secrecy? Hiding money, the gun and now we know having an affair. Though I suppose I’ve answered my question, perhaps she meant to run away with this fella that she was seeing. As for Nora Phillips, d’you think she knew about it? D’you think she knew about the baby?’

  ‘I get the impression she knows about something, but she’s either not certain or not ready to tell. I think we need to get Nora Phillips on her own for her to confess what she knows.’

  ‘Well, I doubt she knew that her husband’s friend was a pansy,’ he said, grabbing a ham sandwich from the thick pile Henry had placed on the chest of drawers. ‘You want more coffee?’

  Henry held out his cup. ‘Both business cards, that for M. Giles, Esq., the solicitor and that for Conway, the private detective, look old and worn. And the addresses are both down south. One in London, one in Brighton, so these cards are likely from her life before. If that is the case, why did she need their services back then and why keep them for all this time? Mickey, does Belle sign her full name when she writes letters to you?’

  ‘You mean does she sign Mrs Isabella Hitchens – no, I can’t say she does,’ he chuckled. ‘Thinking about it, she usually just signs B, with a kiss.’ There were no such kisses on the doctor’s letters or on Martha’s, he observed, but did that actually mean anything? And Martha Edgerton simply signed herself as M, but was that relevant either?

  ‘The big question for me,’ Mickey said, ‘is if the killer knew that she was pregnant. If he did that makes it ten times worse in my book. Whoever the bastard was, he felled her like a cow sent for slaughter, no hesitation. One blow’ – he mimed the action – ‘smashed through the skull and into the brain. Poor woman never stood a chance.’

  ‘Did she go willingly to what turned out to be her death, expecting something else?’ Henry wondered. ‘So what possibilities do we have?’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘The first is that this was a random act, by some equally random thief.’

  ‘An option we can all but ignore,’ Mickey argued. ‘Nothing was stolen so far as we know. Unless she had something on her person that he wanted, of course. Which would still beg the question: how did her bag end up under a bush a good five minutes’ walk from where she was found?’ He took another bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.

  ‘The second,’ Henry continued, ‘is that the husband found out about the affair and had her killed. I think that’s unlikely. I believe that man is grieving and whatever the foundations for their marriage, I believe he cared for her. Besides, if we are simply looking at the evidentiary possibilities, he’s a doctor and I have no doubt that he could find ways of disposing of an unwanted and unfaithful wife.’

  ‘Doctors always come under suspicion if there is the possibility of poison being administered,’ Mickey pointed out. ‘No, but I agree the husband is less likely. I put it towards the bottom of my list. You would have to be a very cold beggar indeed or a much better actor than the one she described in the Ibsen play. So we’ll put him to one side for the moment. Friends likewise, I don’t see that either of the Phillipses would be involved in this, so let’s put those in the same box as the husband and focus on the more likely.’

  ‘The father of her child.’ Henry sat down on the bed, adjusted the pillows and lent back against them, coffee cup in hand. Mickey could almost see the cogs whirring in his boss’s brain. ‘I have requested that the husband and the friends give me a list of other acquaintances and associates. It will be interesting to see how they compare. Speaking of which, have you compiled a list from the address books and the appointment diary?’

  ‘I have indeed,’ Mickey said, ‘and given it to Emory. The locals will contact each name on the list, with instructions to ask when was the last time they saw Mrs Mason and also where they were on the day of her death.’

  Henry nodded. Good enough. This was something that could easily be handed over to the local constabulary and then followed up later when they had the information from the doctors and from Mrs Phillips.

  ‘The lover I would put at the top of the list,’ Mickey said. ‘What’s the betting he is a married man not likely to want to be saddled with an illegitimate child? Whatever Dr Mason says, I can’t see anyone willingly raising the child of another. And that’s the other thing, she must have known that once he found out she was pregnant all of this would come out. She could hardly fool her husband into thinking that it might be his, if they never had relations. I’ve no doubt that a lot of men unknowingly raise such a child as their own, but this is hardly your typical case, is it?’

  ‘Which brings us to the third option. Or possibly even fourth … But the third option is that something has followed her from her past life, into this one. Some misdeed or something she was running from. Dr Mason said something curious, he said that he needed to be married and so did she. They both sought the respectability the married state offered. His need I can understand, but now I think about it, why particularly did she need it?’

  Mickey shook his head. ‘There doesn’t need to be a particularly about it. Life is tough for women unless they have a husband. Not so many can make it on their own, there are still none of the well-paid jobs open to them that a single man could go for. I don’t suppose it is so bad when you’re young, but as you get a little older and can foresee your middle years and your old age, the future can look very bleak indeed if you’re a woman alone. I suspect a lot of women marry a lot less comfortably than this Martha, just for the assurance of keeping body and soul together. How many unfortunates do we meet up with, day-to-day, who have fallen into such a state because the marriage has broken or the parents have died and there are no family members to care for them and they have failed for whatever reason to make shift for themselves in any respectable way.’

  ‘And yet many women do manage it,’ Henry arg
ued. ‘Look at Malina Cooper as an example of this.’ He was thinking about the girl who was now his sister’s private secretary but who, very much like his sister, had fended for herself from her teenage years.

  ‘And she is the exception that proves the rule,’ Mickey said stoutly. ‘For the doctor and his wife to have got together, worked as a team in the way they have, shows each capable of affection and consideration for the other. The obvious friendship. She must’ve valued that and yet she still goes off and finds somebody else. Something doesn’t make sense here.’ He shrugged. ‘But then there is not one of us that can’t be impulsive – except perhaps you. And I’ve known you to be so on occasions.’

  ‘So, something from her past,’ Henry reiterated. ‘Something for which perhaps a solicitor and a private investigator were required. Question is do we go down south immediately to look into these two men, or do we trust local colleagues to do it for us?’

  ‘I think we should remain here for a day or two,’ Mickey said. ‘We can send a telegram to Central Office and ask for investigation to be made, a background search to be done and all papers to be forwarded to us here. We need to talk to friends who are in the here and now, not in the past, eliminate those from our enquiries first. At least that’s my feeling. At least shake this lover loose, see what he has to say for himself. Once we’ve eliminated the easy answers, we can, if it proves necessary, go searching for the more complicated possibilities.’

  Henry agreed that this sounded sensible.

  ‘You said you thought there was a fourth possibility?’ Mickey questioned.

  ‘That she saw something on the day of her death which led directly to it, and which had nothing to do with the lover, the baby, the marriage or the past. You and I both know what goes on during race days. Criminal gangs are everywhere, and Mrs Phillips mentioned that Mrs Mason understood or at least claimed to have understood the signals of the tic-tac men. It is possible she had knowledge of something or someone in the criminal fraternity and that she recognized them or they recognized her or that she saw something untoward.’

  Mickey considered. ‘All things are possible,’ he said. ‘But we should shake down this lover first and if we discover that he is a butcher with his own killing yard behind the shop, and that there is blood that is not from cattle on his poleaxe, then I will go home a happy man.’

  SEVEN

  Sergeant Emory joined them for breakfast the following morning. He had with him the list of contacts, collected from the Phillips residence, and also the preliminary reports from the enquiries that had been made by the local offices the previous day, establishing when Martha Mason’s friends and acquaintances had last had contact with her, and where they had been on the day she had died.

  ‘I’m not sure what you said to Mrs Phillips, but she is in a right mood with you,’ Emory reported. ‘She said something about you questioning her servants without her being present.’

  Henry shrugged. ‘I asked a simple question as I was leaving,’ he said. ‘I received no response that was worth the candle, so I see no harm done. Besides, she does not own her maids.’

  ‘No, but she does own their discretion,’ Mickey observed. ‘You did put the poor girl in a difficult position with her employer. Do you think she knew anything?’

  ‘Of course she did. You know as well as I do that people say things in front of those in service that they would never say to what they consider their equals. Those who serve them become invisible and unconsidered and even the best employer forgets that they have ears and eyes.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Phillips is in a right tekkin’ and that’s no mistake,’ Emory told him. He seemed amused at the prospect. ‘Fortunately she don’t seem to blame the young woman for you asking questions of her. There’s some employers can take even the asking of questions the wrong way and answering would certainly have been a sacking offence.’

  Henry thought about that and then nodded. ‘I should have been more discreet,’ he acknowledged. ‘But there was something in the girl’s demeanour that told me she was aware of what was going on and could have useful information.’

  ‘Well,’ Emory said, ‘I know the family, and I’ll have a word with her mum. If there’s anything to be got out of her, her mother will do it and will do it discreetly enough. She won’t want the girl to lose her place.’

  Mickey was scanning the list that Emory had brought with him. Sergeant Emory had helped himself, as instructed, and now set about his bacon and eggs and sausage with great gusto. Henry poured him some coffee. He took the lists from Mickey and examined them himself.

  ‘To save time, we should divide the list into three. First it needs cross-referencing and then we need some local advice, Sergeant. I propose that as a well-known officer, you choose from the list any names of individuals that are personally familiar to you and you and your constable attend to those interviews. I will draw up a list of questions. Mickey and I will divide the rest between us – and I promise not to question any of those in service without their employers being present.’

  ‘Did anything interesting arise from the preliminary enquiries?’ Mickey asked, helping himself to another piece of black pudding, cutting a section and then dipping it into the satisfactorily runny yolk of his egg.

  ‘There were of course many expressions of concern and horror, as you’d expect, those marked have seen the young woman in the last week and I have put an M for those she met at the charity meetings she attended, and an S for those she met socially or casually. There’s three without alibis for the time of her death, as you see one is a vicar, one is Lord Elliston who cannot remember if he was still at the races at that time and will confer with his wife. He confesses to being three sheets to the wind and that his valet brought him back to his car and his chauffeur drove him home. Not a usual state, it has to be said, for Lord Elliston, but we can probably dismiss him as a man both too easily recognized and also too easily drunk.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘That the third is more interesting, gentlemen. Mr Harry Benson, known to the Masons and the Phillipses and a member of at least two of the committees on which Mrs Mason served. He is a trustee at the workhouse and he is also on the medical board that oversees the local hospital. He is a man of some status and a private income, left to him by his father and also his uncle. He also has a reputation for being fond of the ladies with a particular liking for the married ones.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Mickey said. ‘And he has no alibi for the time of Mrs Mason’s death.’

  ‘He claims to have been at the racecourse with friends all day and then home alone in the evening. It was his housekeeper’s day off, it being a bank holiday and Mr Benson it seems being a model employer. His housekeeper was at the racecourse with her sister and she told me that when she returned home around six her master was nowhere to be seen, so she assumed he had gone out to dine somewhere. She apparently suggested that he could have been asleep in his room – apparently she didn’t check. He’d already told her he needed nothing preparing for the evening so she accepted an invitation to go to her sister’s house. She did not return till after ten, by which time Mr Benson was back home again and definitely in his room. She heard him snoring when she went to her own.’

  ‘And you suspect him of being Martha Mason’s lover because of his reputation alone?’

  ‘And also because Mrs Nora Phillips made certain that I noted the name. She pointed out some special friends of Mrs Mason’s, not saying the names aloud because her husband was present. The other three were female. So I’m not saying … But it is indicative, perhaps.’

  ‘I think my sergeant and I need to attend to that one together,’ Henry said. ‘Was there anything else of note?’

  ‘Two people volunteered that Mrs Mason seemed out of sorts in the past week, not quite her lively self. Mrs Stevens, who also serves on the hospital committee, mentioned that she actually arrived late for a board meeting, which was most unlike her. She is normally the first to get there and help serv
e the tea and the coffee and liked to spend a few moments in conversation with all of the other committee members before they begin. Mrs Stevens hinted that perhaps she had been very unsettled in this last few weeks and had twice felt sick. Of course Mrs Stevens and the other ladies of the committee discussed the matter and speculated …’

  ‘That she might have been pregnant,’ Henry finished.

  ‘Indeed. It’s my experience that women are often aware of these things almost before the mother-to-be,’ Emory chuckled. ‘And as Mrs Stevens observed, the Masons had been married for some years and there had been no sign.’

  ‘You said two people commented that she had been unlike herself,’ Mickey observed.

  Emory poured himself some more tea and nodded thoughtfully. ‘The second subject worthy of a visit is an elderly lady, Miss Georgia Styles, something of a grand dame around here. I believe in her youth she was even presented to the king and had her season in London. Anyway, she rattles around in that great barn of a place called Magpie Lodge just beyond the workhouse, on the way out to Upton, and she told my constable that Mrs Mason called on her last week rather unexpectedly, making some excuse about the arrangements for a charity ball which were going to be discussed anyway at the meeting later in the week. She considered that Martha Mason was on the verge of explaining something to her, and those are the words that, according to my constable, she used. “Explaining something to her”, which seems an odd choice of words, does it not.’

  ‘And she did not elucidate?’ Mickey asked. ‘Would you say she was a precise old lady, which is say that she has all the marbles still?’