The Morbid Kitchen Read online

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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Epigraph

  The Way It Went

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Jennie Melville

  The Morbid Kitchen

  Jennie Melville, a pseudonym for Gwendoline Butler, was born and brought up in south London, and was one of the most universally praised of English mystery authors. She wrote over fifty novels under both names. Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She had one daughter, who survives her.

  Gwendoline Butler’s crime novels are hugely popular in both Britain and the United States, and her many awards included the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The Times.

  Epigraph

  List of Names

  Charmian Daniels

  Humphrey Kent

  Winifred Eagle

  Alice (Birdie) Peacock

  Emily Bailey

  Nancy Bailey

  Jim Towers

  Superintendent Henry Gervaise Horris

  Big Albert

  Eddy Bell

  Margaret Drue

  Madelaine Mason

  The house groaned and moved in the wind; even when there was no wind and the rest of Windsor was still, it seemed as though the house had movement in it. Sometimes the neighbours thought that they heard voices and saw lights. But they knew that the family never came back.

  The street lamp outside shone into the dead, dark windows which gave back no reflection. Somehow this made the house even more depressing to those who lived near. It was a small road of five houses with large gardens at the back. This house, which had once been a private school, had the largest garden of all, stretching back and back into what had once been fields but was now rough open ground.

  The ancient town by the river was changing; a new road was going to be cut through which would touch many lives, but the house was not forgotten. People talked in the town, talked about the house and what happened there. What exactly had happened there? The mystery clung on. There were certain people who spoke of it only in the privacy of their own families. They were all of them people whose lives had been touched by the house.

  In its former life, that is, for the house had no life now, and had not had for some ten years. In this time, the town of Windsor had endured great winds, floods and fire, but the house in the quiet road had rotted on. The years of neglect and avoidance had taken their toll so that the windows let in water and the roof had begun to sag. A sad old house.

  Dr Yeldon said to his wife, a tall, once beautiful woman whom he held in great respect and some awe: ‘I don’t like to think of that dread place, my dear. It’s not better for being empty. Bad, bad.’ She nodded gravely and with dignity; she had once been a dancer and still had great presence. Her husband was not the only one to find her formidable.

  Eddy Bell, who was a builder and although still young was, since the early death of his father, now the boss of the family firm, thought about the house sometimes and then would say: ‘I see her around the town sometimes, the young one. I wonder what she remembers.’ He had his own memories of the house which he preferred not to share, although he alluded to it obliquely to his assistant and mate, Albert. Albert never spoke much to anyone, a lonely soul.

  Maisie Nisbett, who had worked in the kitchen with her aunt when it had been a school, was willing to talk about it, although her aunt, now aged, was not. ‘Auntie, do you ever go back in your mind to Miss Bailey’s School?’

  Archie Rose, a nice old man, a widower living with his married daughter, and who had been gardener at the house, walked past the house once a season to see what the bushes he had planted in the front garden were doing (they needed pruning and cutting back, and he speculated sadly on what must be the overgrown state of the back garden). Then he would go home and make jokes about what might have been buried in that garden.

  Harry Fraser, who had taught music, and his wife Eleanor, who had taught dancing, also spoke about the house and what had gone on there. If it had actually taken place in the house, because some people, although not the police, thought the killing might have been committed elsewhere, say in a van or a car, and the body brought back. ‘A mystery still,’ he said. ‘ I hate to think of it.’

  And then there was Madelaine Mason, who had been the matron as well as a teacher and probably knew more than anyone about everyone in the school, but she never gossiped and had left Windsor. What she knew about it one could only speculate. Young Emily Bailey probably knew her as well as anyone but if asked would have said: ‘ There is something profoundly odd about this lady that I do not want to speak about now.’ She never did want to speak about Maddie. Nor, more than she must, about the woman called Margaret Drue, who had been a teacher at the school at the time of the tragedy, and another player in the game. There was a sense in which Emily spoke as the voice of the house.

  Several other people, including the local postman and a young policeman, had come under some suspicion at first and perhaps it had never been totally lifted from them. ‘You felt it,’ as Harry Fraser said. The postman had died several years ago, still troubled by the finger of suspicion that had pointed at him briefly

  The policeman was still alive and, being a policeman of the new school, was doing some research and getting material together for an article he was going to write for the Police and Forensic Science Journal into ‘ The Place of the Head’ in a murder. He had a lot of material already and was shaping the sentences in his head a lot of the time. His wife did not like it and said so: she was a wife of the new school too, and had her own career and her own strong views on life and death, as well, for that matter.

  And recently Charmian Daniels, a top-ranking policewoman who lived in the ancient and beautiful town of Windsor, had occasion to think about the house. She had not been personally involved, but she was interested.

  But it was the young policeman, knowledgeable about this and that, becoming learned on the history of death and crime, who spoke of the ‘Morbid Kitchen’.

  Chapter One

  ‘So this is the house?’ Charmian Daniels stared upwards. She was a slender, tall woman who had taught herself to be elegant, to wear her clothes well, and to have her reddish hair well cut. Recently, she had known great happiness and great sorrow. The two seemed to run together in her life.

  The house was of four narrow storeys, one in a terrace of five in a small street which ended in a dark passage. The terrace faced the high wall of an old factory. Oddly enough, because the wall was built of good red brick and had weathered well, the effect was not unpleasant. Round the corner there was a large public garden so that there was no sense of being hemmed in. Beyond the other corner was the Maiden Street Police Station. A fine Victorian building and guardian to good behaviour and no crime, you might think. It
was threatened with closure now.

  The house itself presented a thin face to the world, with two windows on each of its three floors. There was also a basement with one shuttered and barred window. At some time back, a long time by the look of it, the house had been painted white from top to bottom, but the years had turned the white to yellow and streaked it with damp. From the overhang of the roof, as well as from the windows, darker streaks ran like tears. The other houses in the road were well cared for with fresh paint and polished brass on the doors and window boxes full of flowers. They were lived in, cared for; this house was not. ‘How long has it been empty?’

  ‘Not as long as it looks.’ Emily shook her head. ‘But Nancy never really lived in it after …’ She hesitated. ‘Not after the tragedy. You can understand that?’ Charmian nodded assent. She could also understand Emily not using the word murder. ‘We couldn’t sell the house then, no one fancied to live in it, so Nancy hung on.’ Emily’s voice was clear and light, a lady’s voice. She was a tall girl, in her early twenties, not pretty but with a sort of gawky charm. ‘But she was away as much as she could be.’

  Which was quite a lot, judging by the state of the house; you could call it neglected.

  ‘After our father died, she took a flat in River Street, a basement flat that flooded in the winter, pretty dreary. I think she knew already that she had cancer … and being lame didn’t help … she had an accident with her leg when she was young and it was never truly right … I’d moved out into lodgings before that. Seemed best. I wanted to be on my own.’

  A thoroughly unloved house, Charmian thought, taking another look at the shuttered basement window. Emily saw her.

  ‘That was where …’ she hesitated. ‘Where the body was found. It was the old kitchen when the house was built, but it was turned into the playroom.’

  ‘I know.’ Charmian had studied a plan of the house, and she had seen police photographs.

  ‘Not that the murder took place in the house. Or so the police thought … Forensic evidence seemed to say not … you’d know more about that than I would, although I’ve tried to learn and understand … but for Nancy, being accused of it as she was …’

  ‘Suspected.’ Charmian made the correction. No one was ever charged or brought to trial about the dead child. She herself had not been living in Windsor at the time, but she had read up about the case, when Emily had asked her to come with her to the house. ‘No case was made out against your sister.’

  ‘Half-sister.’

  Charmian nodded. The same father, but different mothers. There was a big age-gap between the two sisters. Nancy Bailey a grown woman when Emily was born. Mother dead, father an enigma. Clever and lost, that was how he came out.

  ‘People used to drive here and sit in their cars to stare, or walk and stand outside and try to look in through the windows. Murder House, they called it.’

  It was hard to believe that here had once been Miss Bailey’s Nursery School, expensive, exclusive and fashionable. Much sought after because of the style of families who sent their children there. It was good to think your child was sitting next to Lady this or the Honorable Harry so and so, and Little Prince that. Fees proportionately high. An old-fashioned dame school, and therefore highly chic.

  ‘I suppose there are outbuildings?’

  ‘Oh yes. Rows of them, we had a lot of ground at the back. Places to exercise and the dance room. We always had a few boarders too. The basement room was the kids’ own place, where they kept their own toys and treasures.’ That had made the discovery there all the more painful.

  Charmian was curious. ‘Were you a pupil?’

  ‘Oh no, they sent me round the corner to the local state school. I was at the big comprehensive when it happened. I didn’t pay fees, you see, and I took up a place.’

  ‘I tell you what: I don’t think I like your family.’

  Emily laughed. ‘I didn’t always like them myself, but they weren’t so bad, and I did love them. Love and liking are not the same.’

  As I well know, said Charmian to herself, thinking of the lovers she had not liked, and the first early marriage to an older man who had died, and the new husband she liked and hoped that she loved. It certainly felt like love with all its pains and pleasures.

  ‘And money did count. Then too, my school was good. I learnt how to use a computer there which I don’t think Nancy’s babies did.’

  ‘But they were only babies.’

  Emily shook her head. ‘They were never going to learn. Shooting, fishing, riding to hounds, yes. Computing, no.’

  Charmian looked down the basement steps. ‘ How did you and I meet, Emily?’ – I’ve always wondered if you got to know me on purpose. I certainly meant to know you: I was so interested in the murder. The head, ah yes, the head being missing, that was so strange.

  ‘I came to a lecture you gave in St. George’s Hall on “Women and the Law” and you frightened the pants off me.’

  ‘But you came back to ask questions, and I thought you were a very bright girl.’

  ‘And I tried to join up as a policewoman because I admired you so much, but I wasn’t thought to be quite the right material … Well, I suppose they knew about Murder House …’

  ‘They wouldn’t weigh that in,’ said Charmian quickly. But she wasn’t sure. It might have happened that way.

  ‘So I’m a law student doing it through the Open University and meanwhile earning a part-time living in Frobisher and Roberts, Solicitors, as a kind of general clerk.’

  ‘And you will do well. It’s written all over you. Probably take over Frobisher and Roberts. How is Mr. Frobisher, by the way?’

  ‘Long since dead. Roberts too. The senior partner is called Ames.’

  ‘Why am I here, Emily?’ said Charmian. ‘What is it you want from me?’

  Emily looked again at the house. ‘I’m trying to sell this house. While Nancy was alive, she wouldn’t let that happen. By a family trust, it now belongs half to me, half to a cousin who inherited her share from an aunt in Australia, She lives in Scotland and wants to sell.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I don’t know how much you really know of what went on in this house.’

  ‘I know a certain amount.’

  Ten years ago, just as the summer term was drawing to an end at Miss Bailey’s School, one child, a girl, had been missed. Charmian had not been in Windsor at the time, but somewhat later she had arrived in the district as a high-ranking police officer. Since then she had been promoted to be head of SRADIC (Southern Register Documentation and Register of Crime) which meant she saw everything and knew everything. She had also secured for herself a small investigating team. She was a powerful woman. She had recently married a man whose career matched her own.

  Charmian had made it her business to study the records of the death. The records officer had said as she handed over the files: ‘Some of the details are horrible, ma’am.’

  Emily echoed the words. ‘ I wasn’t there when it must have happened. I was at school, but when I got back it was horrible. Someone was screaming and my father was shouting, they had just found the body.’

  What there was of it, Charmian just stopped herself saying, but she guessed by Emily’s face that she had the same thought.

  ‘She was in the basement room, in one of the cupboards.’

  ‘So I have read.’

  ‘They didn’t tell me at the time, I was kept away from it, sent to stay with friends and not allowed to see the newspapers. But I used to go down Peascod Street into the big newspaper shop at the bottom and read them there. So I soon got to know all and more. That’s how I knew that Nancy was under suspicion, my father too, I suppose, but the papers seemed to concentrate on Nancy.’

  It was her school, after all, she was responsible.

  ‘And my father, he was under suspicion at first, but he was in London most of the day, so that let him out when the time of death was established. He was working on his book. As for Nancy, there wa
s no forensic evidence that linked her to the dead child. She had no motive, either. No one had a motive.’

  Those intangible, motiveless cases were always the hardest, Charmian knew. In the end, you usually turned up a motive. But this murder was so far unsolved, although the savagery of the death suggested there was a strong one.

  ‘Of course, once it was grasped that Margaret Drue was missing, she became the chief suspect. She’d worked with Nancy over a year, been trusted, she was such a good teacher, she taught the very little ones. And that made it worse when we found out.’

  ‘It would do.’

  ‘I liked Margaret but once it was learnt that she had a history of mental instability, and something more … well, it looked as though it was her.’ Emily’s voice was sad.

  She liked that woman, Charmian could read the emotion; in that unloving household, they must have been friends. And she was young, the nearest in age to the girl. Emily was so young herself then. What a rotten way to have the adult world forced upon you.

  ‘Strange about Margaret Drue,’ mused Charmian, her eyes on Emily.

  ‘It was the end of term, all the staff were looking forward to a holiday. She was all packed, with her bags ready, and she wasn’t missed at first.’

  Charmian nodded. Such things did happen.

  ‘She was never found. It looked as though she just walked out of the house at the end of her teaching that day and no one ever saw her again. The end of term was always full of confusion. A lot of rush and everyone coming and going … Most of the children had been collected, the boarders long since and the day pupils taken off in the school bus before it was realized that Alana was missing. She was always one of the last to go.’

  ‘Who else was there in the school? Not just your family and Margaret Drue?’

  ‘Oh no, you’re never alone in a school. There was the lady who cooked and her helper, they would have been in the kitchen. There was the music master and his wife, they taught dancing and singing; there had been a little school concert for the end of term, but they had gone home. The gardener was working still and I seem to remember that some repairs were being planned while the school vacation was on and so a workman was there looking things over. But they were never unwatched apparently … Hard to believe, looking back.’