Episode 23 - The end is the beginning

Saturday 

With all the crime-solving keeping Dorothy busy, she found it quite hard to concentrate on the Spiritual Revue and was glad that the cast had taken over and were ready to enthral the audience.

Episode 22 - The conquering cop returns

Friday

Thursday was spent enjoyably touring Dijon with Pierre after Gary had left his colleagues at the Gendarmerie with a good feeling of them all having found Mortimer’s corpse together.

Episode 21 - France

Wednesday April 2

It took Gary most of Tuesday to get to his hotel in Dijon. He phoned home, ate something at a nearby brasserie and went to bed early to think about strategies, but fell into a deep sleep that lasted until he heard tradesmen banging around at 7 a.m.

Episode 20 - Gary tackles Monday

Monday

After phoning Cleo very early on Monday morning, Gary forced himself to go to HQ and concentrate on his job. It would include interviewing a Mr Mortimer, though it was not quite clear which brother the French police had sent while he was becoming the father of four.

Episode 19 - A weekend to remember

Saturday

Cleo and Gary were admittedly squeezing their nuptials in between solving crimes, but there was a good reason for hurrying things along, of course, and that was the impending birth of Cleo’s twins.

Episode 18 - Take your pick

Friday

Cleo and Gary would be getting married on Saturday, but that did not prevent Friday from getting off to an aggravating start. There was no time to think about the wedding when they had to get through an interview with Mrs Spencer first, hoping she would admit to stabbing Ali Lewis, thus sparing them any further speculation.

Episode 17 - Chewing it over

Thursday cont.

By four fifteen Cleo and Gary were on their way to see the registrar at the Town Hall. Cleo wondered if Mrs Colby would also want to consult her on some private issue or other and hoped Mrs Colby kept private and business separate. She did not want her weekend to be thwarted by a morose registrar and a promise of worse to come.

Episode 16 - Victims can be suspects

Thursday

To add to the puzzlement about Polly’s desperate visit during the night, Cleo and Gary could not explain why she could have absconded from what she had said was a safer place than home. What had she meant and was she now in acute danger?

Episode 15 - Finding is not keeping

Wednesday cont.

With only weeks to go before the Spiritual Revue was performed publicly, Dorothy could not skip a rehearsal even for dinner with Roger. She had to keep the peace between the cast and the ambitious and widely disliked stage director and generally supervise the evening. Mr Defoe was not for the first time to be prevented from causing half his cast to walk out. His demonstration walk-outs had always ended with him returning, since he needed the money.

***

Episode 14 - The investigative cloche

Wednesday

Cleo and Dorothy finally met a day or two late for their weekly breakfast consultation. Frank was busy, so he could not attend. In a week or two he would be taking over office duties while Cleo concentrated on her expanding family.

Episode 13 - The Spencers II

Tuesday cont.

Gary’s first mission at HQ on Tuesday should have been to question Polly’s father, but a series of incidents at HQ kept him busy until lunchtime. He phoned Cleo to tell her that his morning had gone awry mainly due to technical hitches and he could not get home for lunch after all. At Midday he ordered pizzas for himself and Nigel from Romano and read Chris’s latest forensic reports.

Episode 12 - Pooth, Harry and Lizzie

Tuesday

Frank phoned Chris Marlow as early as politeness allowed. Chris was an early riser who often started work before seven in the morning and often carried on till the very late, so Frank encountered a cheerful forensic expert who was happy to send him the current report on Harry Palmer.

Episode 11 - The Spencers I

Monday cont.

Cleo knew they would have to find Polly and question her as soon as possible. It only took a few minutes to get to the address of the Spencer abode on the edge of Huddlecourt Minor village. The road was on the edge of the village and suburban, with tidy gardens and red brick garages to match the houses.

Episode 10 - Molly Moss

Monday cont.

The workmen at Cleo’s cottage were taking their lunch break. Their radio had blared away all morning and did not stop blaring when the hammering took a break.

“Funny guys, those builders,” said Gloria.

Episode 9 - Introducing Frank Wetherby

Monday March 24

Cleo took PeggySue to nursery early before going to the office. Gloria had begged the morning off everything after an exhausting weekend (she said), but she would collect the little girl and take her home at midday. Gary was driving his other daughter to school in Middlethumpton. He wanted to do that every morning, but Charlie would not hear of it. She liked driving on the bus and anyway, Helen and Cecilia needed her.

Episode 8 - 27 Lilac Way

Sunday 

Gary did not want the night to end, but eventually he forced himself to get up. He showered to the sound of his own unmelodic caterwauling accompanying the hymn-singing on the waterproof radio, swathed himself in his bath-towel and attended to PeggySue. Then he made coffee for himself and cereal with banana for his daughter and they sat down together to enjoy their breakfast.

Episode 7 - Job's Comforters

Friday night cont. then Saturday

The task for Chris’s team was a difficult one. They had to collect any fresh prints or other evidence and even with arc lights it was probably going to be a wild goose chase. Ali had lost a lot of blood. Polly, Gary and the killer had carried some of it up the crypt steps on their shoes, but Chris did not think they could do much with the faint shoe prints, though they had made a record of Gary’s, just in case. 

Episode 6 - The dead don't talk

Friday night.

Gary was strolling home from escorting Dorothy home when he got a call on his mobile.

“Hurley speaking. Can I help you?”

“It’s Molly Moss from the pub.”

“Hi ,Molly. I thought you were line-dancing with Gloria.”

Episode 5 - Naming the day

Friday cont.

It was a pleasant walk to Middlethumpton Registry Office from the HQ carpark. Cleo and Gary were still affected by the gruesome scenario at the vicarage, but not talking about it. Cleo knew that Gary had problems witnessing violence, but at least he had not fainted, she mused. How could such a sensitive guy have become a cop?

Episode 4 - The end of an era

Friday cont.

The patrol car arrived at the vicarage before Gary and Cleo, but the patrol officers were loath to go upstairs to Edith’s utility room without Gary’s authority.

“I’m Beatrice Pope. It’s been quiet all night,” Beatrice told them. “I expect my sister-in-law was exhausted after her antics. She’s upstairs in her room and I locked her in.”

The patrol officers did not know what Beatrice was talking about, since they had only received an emergency call to go to the vicarage and collect a woman named Edith Parsnip for questioning at HQ. The woman they were talking to was obviously not the person they were to collect.

Beatrice did not appear alarmed that the officers did not go straight upstairs to investigate. They did not particularly want to do anything on their own initiative and were glad to accept Beatrice’s offer of a cup of tea . The house was quiet. There was no hurry, they decided, and that would be their story.

***

Gary was of quite a different opinion. He and Cleo were now seriously worried. Gary was irate when he found the patrol officers sitting quite cosily in the vicarage kitchen drinking tea and dunking biscuits.

“Is the key of the room in the door, Beatrice?” Cleo asked.

Beatrice nodded.

“This is not a bloody tea-party,” Gary remarked, and Cleo could hear strains of the old Gary dealing with people he considered inept.

The patrol officers looked dismayed.

“Have you been up there to investigate?” Gary asked in a softer tone and they shook their heads. Babes in the wood, he thought. Young guys straight from college. He could not blame them for wanting senior guidance. He commanded them to follow him.

“I’d better go in first,” said Gary, climbing the stairs two at a time, with Cleo and the tea-drinkers close behind.

Beatrice watched from the bottom of the stairs, but eventually climbed them as curiosity overcame her.

Cleo‘s hunch was justified. The room was chaotic. The contents of shelves and drawers and a big sewing box had been thrown onto the floor. Edith lay sprawled on the daybed, bleeding and looking more dead than alive. It looked as if she had tried to kill herself.

“She could have jumped out of the window,” said Gary. “That would have been less messy and more effective.”

The young patrol officers looked horrified. They would have been even more horrified if they had known what the vicar’s wife had been up to.

”She was probably not in her right mind,” Cleo said quickly.

“Phone for an ambulance,” Gary shouted to Beatrice, who was now standing aghast in the utility room doorway. “She’s still breathing. The breathing is shallow and she’s lost a lot of blood, but she’s alive if we act fast.”

Beatrice hurried downstairs to phone from the house phone. She needed a moment to digest the horror of the scene she had just witnessed.

“It would almost be better to let her die,” said Cleo.

“You know we can’t do that, Cleo.”

“Sure. I wasn’t suggesting it, but life will never be the same for her again.”

“That’s probably just as well,” said Gary.

Blood was trickling out of jagged cuts on her wrists and spreading across her stomach.

Cleo found some cord, cut two pieces off and tied them tightly above the wounds. Then she held Edith’s arms in an upright position. The stomach bleeding continued unabated.

One of Edith’s hands was still clutching an instrument that looked like half a pair of scissors.

“So she didn’t just use a bread-knife, did she? I assume that the wrist-cutting had not satisfied her sex lust so she jammed the scissors in her stomach.

An officer was called to take over Cleo’s job of keeping Edith’s arms stretched up. His face was averted and he wished he was somewhere else.

Cleo prised free the small tool with a white mother-of-pearl handle out of Edith’s left hand. “These tools are used to cut through seams that need to be opened.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” said Gary.

“It’s called a seam ripper. I did not know it was also a wrist ripper,” said Cleo. “They are razor sharp, like craft knives, and often part of sewing machine equipment. Every seamstress needs a seam ripper now and again, but not usually to cut her wrists.”

The patrol officers gasped. They had never been confronted with Cleo’s kind of bluntness before.

“It’s possible that Edith realized that the wrist-cutting was not working fast enough, so she grabbed that tool instead,” Cleo continued.

Beatrice squeezed past the group and opened a window. She thought Cleo was being too brutal for the young patrol officers, who looked nauseated by the scenario.

The paramedics arrived quite fast. Soon after, the doctor on duty was on hand to see what had happened and attend to the patient.

“She has not been like this very long,” he said. “She did not lose all this blood from those cuts in her wrists.”

“She has a stomach wound,” said Cleo. “Perhaps that’s the cause.”

The wound in her stomach was bleeding copiously, but it had not been deep enough to kill her, the doctor reported.

“Typical for self-injury,” he said. “More dramaturgical than suicidal”.

“Aren’t you being rather cynical?” said Gary.

“You would be if you got to see so much human nature in the raw,” the doctor retorted.

“My husband sees worse cases than those of physical injury,” said Cleo in defence.

Gary smiled a wan smile at Cleo. She knew how hard he found it to confront physical injury. She went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. She could feel the deep sobs that were threatening to overcome him and often asked herself what had happened in his life to make him so vulnerable.

***

“That silly woman must be tough,” said one paramedic, meaning Edith.

“Tough or mad,” said the other.

“It’s just as well those craft scissors Edith used to stab herself had blunt ends,” said Cleo.

“They are used by children to cut paper and are not meant to be dangerous. But in the wrong hands, even a blunt instrument can do a lot of damage,” said the doctor. “I can’t say how much, but deep enough here to cause extreme blood loss.”

“There is no doubt that she knew how sharp a seam-ripper is. I’m surprised she didn’t use it on her stomach,” said Cleo.

“So she used the kiddies’ scissors on her stomach, did she? said Gary. “It may not have been a suicide attempt, after all?”

Gary was now that Robert might have found his way back to deal with Edith and used those scissors himself.

“It was not Robert, in case that’s what you were thinking, Gary,” said Cleo. “She will have used those blunt scissors herself. That and the fact that she wounded herself, would explain why the stab-wound was not very deep.”

The doctor looked at Cleo with astonishment.

“No, Doctor. My PhD is in sociology,” she said. But I know Edith Parsnip well enough to know that she did not want to commit suicide. She was enjoying life after being freed from her marriage.

***

The paramedics bandaged Edith’s wrists and after getting the stomach bleeding to stop temporarily, packed her onto a stretcher and got her downstairs and into the ambulance. Then they fixed drips and left, sirens howling, for the next best hospital.

The doctor left after complimenting Cleo on her sensible reasoning. The utility room door had been locked all night. Even if there were suspects, intervention by another person was unlikely. The doctor would report an attempted suicide. That would be enough to satisfy the powers that be.

***

Beatrice had watched the scenario and decided she would rather not accompany Edith. She could not leave the vicarage empty and Mary Baker unaware of what had happened.

Gary mused that it really did not matter if Edith was crazy or not. She was a danger to herself and others. The doctor’s approach was sensible. Accusing anyone of injuring her would have been speculative. No one would want to hurt Edith except herself. At least, that’s what Gary hoped.

***

Cleo commented that trying to end her life was Edith’s final attempt to escape from reality, which contradicted what she had told the doctor, but left space to find out if someone else – Robert, if anyone -  had been a witness or even hurt Edith himself.

Cleo wondered if Edith realized what she had done to Robert? In manic phases of mental illness, victims could easily turn into offenders and then back into victims, and that could have happened to Edith.

***

“What a mess, Cleo,” said Gary.

“You’ll have to tell Robert,” said Cleo.

“Not before I’ve complied with his wishes. He wanted an official complaint and he’ll get one dated honestly before this incident. That’s the least I can do and it is in the right order.”

“You won’t have to deal with his complaint, will you?”

“No, but I know the facts so far. I’ll pass it on to the vice squad a.s.a.p.”

“Vice squad?”

“Rape.”

“It might not be necessary if Edith does not survive.”

“Rape is not a petty crime,” said Gary. ”It has to be reported even if the victim does not want that. Many don’t because they are ashamed or know the rapist. Admittedly, a rapist who tries to kill himself or herself is unusual. They normally have more respect for themselves than for their victims. That is one indication of Edith’s unstable mental condition. Let’s get away from here now.”

I’ll just talk to Beatrice for a moment,” said Cleo.

“I’ll wait in the car,” said Gary.

Cleo went into the kitchen, where Beatrice was very distressed and keeping herself busy to stop herself from even thinking of what had happened under the vicarage roof while she was responsible.

“What if my brother was treated the same way by her?” she said. “I’ll have to ask Clare what she thinks.”

“Siblings don’t always know what goes on in other siblings’ minds, Beatrice.”

“Someone must look after her,” said Beatrice, “and it won’t be me. It’s up to Clare now.”

“You will still be here when the new curate gets home, won’t you? She needs to know what has happened. It’s her house now, after all.”

“Of course. I had already decided to do that. I wonder what will happen to Edith now.”

“The paramedics will deliver her to A & E and from there she is sure to be treated for the wounds and put in the recovery ward.”

“I’ll strip the boys’ beds and get the washing done.”

“Don’t touch anything in the utility room, will you?”

“Of course not, but it’s a clear cut case of self-inflicted harm, isn’t it?” said Beatrice.

If Beatrice had only disliked Edith before, she was also disgusted now. Why hadn’t her brother got away from her sooner? Beatrice was now sure that her brother had been on his way to Africa to escape from his marriage.

“We don’t know that for sure, Beatrice. She has a stomach wound and cut wrists,” said Cleo. “She may have been the victim of an attack. Did Robert come back last night?”

“Not that I know of, Cleo. Surely you don’t suspect him?”

“I don’t know what to think. The doctor will report the incident as attempted suicide and it’s technically possible.”

***

Left alone, another terrible thought occurred to Beatrice. Bearing in mind that there was evidence that Edith had organized the finances of the vicar’s Africa trip, it was on the cards that Edith had wanted to be rid of him. Whichever way you looked at it, you met with desperation and abhorrence.

***

Cleo had kept Gary waiting until he felt he should go and collect her.

“You will stay here, Beatrice, won’t you?” he said. “Until the pathologist has confirmed that Edith tried to take her own life, there is a possibility that someone else was involved.”

“I asked Beatrice if Robert had been here again after leaving, Gary, but she can’t say.”

“He could have come in unseen,” said Gary. “That makes him a suspect, Cleo.”

“But there’s no evidence that he did come back, Gary,” said Cleo.

“OK. I won’t pull him in just yet, but you have to admit the possibility. He might not be as innocent as he seems.”

***

It was not easy for Gary to infer to Cleo that her ex-husband might have stabbed Edith, but it had to be done. Cleo felt the same.

Cleo hugged Beatrice. What a nightmare for her. Beatrice did not even know if her sister-in-law had meant to kill her brother. Although Edith had been cleared of that accusation thanks to a farcical legal error and the compassion of a judge, it would be left to Beatrice to tell the boys where their mother was now, though she would not find the right words to describe Edith’s conduct. How could she?

“I’ll stay here until the police have finished their investigations,” said Beatrice. “I should think that the new curate will be glad of company tonight. Oscar is taking care of the boys. He can cope.”

Thank goodness for Beatrice’s long-suffering husband, thought Cleo. He was worth his weight in gold, she told Gary.

Cleo and Gary drove back to HQ. Gary phoned Chris and asked for the forensic team to examine Edith’s room for fresh prints in case there had been an assassin.

“I should call Dorothy, Gary.”

“There’s no hurry. Chris and a team are on their way to the vicarage and I don’t want Dorothy snooping around there, Cleo. There’s nothing anyone can do. I hope the new curate will counsel Beatrice.”

“Do you really think anyone else was involved?”

“Only a medical expert can answer that with any certainty.”

***

“It’s still early, Gary. Let’s go to the registry office now.”

“Happiness is going hand in hand with grief again, Cleo.”

“I don’t mean to be heartless.”

“I know that, my love.”

***

Gary had told the patrol officers that they could leave the vicarage when the forensic team arrived. They would hand in a report of their participation in the incident. He phoned the office from his car and told Nigel there was a change of plans and he would not be in the office till later, if at all that afternoon.

***

Back at the vicarage, Beatrice went outside and lit a cigarette. Vicarage life would go on as usual, but with the subtle difference that Mary Baker was now the householder and the Parsnips would have to move out, however hospitable Miss Baker was.

A home would have to be found for the Parsnip boys if Edith was detained or did not live. Beatrice was sure that Oscar would want them to stay with them indefinitely. Was that what her younger brother would have wanted? Would she ever forgive Edith for her conduct? Did it matter? 

The Parsnip era was over, once and for all.

Episode 3 - Including the Daniels case

Thursday con, then Friday.

The file Gary now had in front of him held a familiar name: Daniels. He would get Nigel to ask Colin Peck, who was in charge of the police archives, to look up the name and fish out any relevant documents or files. He recalled that Cleo’s agency had been involved in a similar case a while back, so she would also have data. Cleo wrote down everything of any importance about all the protagonists she encountered and included structured character analyses. In the current case, Daniels had almost beaten his wife to death and kicked her in the stomach so long that he had killed the baby she was expecting. It was a repeat of what Cleo had suffered in her first marriage, so bringing the guy to justice was especially important to her.

Episode 2 - Brass

Wednesday cont. into Thursday

Gary was quite relieved that Cleo was not going to be called out on someone’s wild goose chase. It was Brass, the copper he had head-hunted from Frint-on-Sea. Things had been chaotic in North Wales and Brass had found it impossible to get away sooner, he explained.

Episode 1 - The rehearsal

Wednesday cont.

Robert, family butcher par excellence and not so excellent Cleo Hartley’s ex-spouse was standing centre stage oblivious to the shouting and screaming that accompanied any instructions dished out by Mr Defoe, who was moving the cast around while they commanded Moses to go down to Egypt’s land. 

Preamble 2 - Getting started

Thursday March 20

Rehearsals for the Revue were held in the church hall on Wednesday evening. The church was used by the Muslim congregation, but their did not take place during a rehearsal. The church hall backed onto the church, so the rehearsal noise would have been disturbing.

Preamble 1 - (How not to write a book)

Wednesday March 19

“If I were going to write a book, it would not be about Upper Grumpsfield. I would not know where to start.”

“I did not know you were even planning a book, Dorothy,” said Cleo. “Have some more coffee.”