The Monogram Murders(46)

“Hence the drinking?”

“Yes. It is Walter Stoakley that Walter Stoakley set out to kill after he lost his daughter, and he shall very soon succeed, I imagine.”

“In what possible way could Frances’s suicide have been his fault?”

“Walter didn’t always live in Great Holling. He moved here to be closer to Patrick and Frances’s resting place. You will find this difficult to believe, having seen him as he is now, but until Frances’s death, Walter Stoakley was an eminent Classicist, and Master of the University of Cambridge’s Saviour College. That is where Patrick Ive trained for the priesthood. Patrick had no parents. He was orphaned at a young age, and Walter made a sort of protégé of him. Jennie Hobbs, then only seventeen years old, was a bed-maker at the college. She was the best bedder Saviour had, and so Walter Stoakley arranged for her to look after Patrick Ive’s rooms. Then Patrick married Frances Stoakley, Walter’s daughter, and when they moved to Holy Saints Vicarage in Great Holling, Jennie went with them. Do you see?”

I nodded. “Walter Stoakley blames himself for putting Patrick Ive and Jennie Hobbs together. If Patrick and Frances had not taken Jennie with them to Great Holling, she would not have been in a position to tell the terrible lie that led to their deaths.”

“And I would not have to spend my life watching a gravestone to make sure nobody desecrates it.”

“Who would do such a thing?” I asked. “Harriet Sippel? Before she was killed, I mean.”

“Oh, no, Harriet’s weapon was her toxic tongue, not her hands. She would never defile a grave. No, it’s the rowdy young men of the village who would do that, given half a chance. They were children when Patrick and Frances died, but they’ve heard their parents’ stories. If you ask anyone around here, besides me and Ambrose Flowerday, they will tell you that Patrick Ive was a wicked man—that he and his wife practiced black magic. I think most of them believe it more strongly as time goes on. They have to, don’t they? It’s either that or dislike themselves as heartily as I dislike them.”

There was something I wanted to clarify. “Did Richard Negus sever ties with Ida Gransbury because she continued to denounce Patrick Ive after Richard had come to his senses? Was it following Nancy’s announcement at the King’s Head that he ended their engagement?”

A peculiar expression passed across Margaret’s face. She started to say, “That day at the King’s Head was the beginning of . . . ,” then stopped and changed course. “Yes. He found her irrational insistence upon the virtue of her and Harriet’s cause too galling to bear.”

Margaret’s face had a shut-down look about it all of a sudden. I had the impression that there was something important she had chosen not to tell me.

“You mentioned that Frances Ive swallowed poison,” I said. “How? Where did she get it from? And how did Patrick Ive die?”

“The same way: poison. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of abrin?”

“I can’t say I have.”

“It comes from a plant called the rosary pea, common in the tropics. Frances Ive obtained several vials of the stuff from somewhere.”

“Forgive me, but if they both took the same poison and were found together, how was it established that Frances killed herself first and that Patrick only did so after finding her dead?”

Margaret looked wary. “You will repeat what I tell you to no one in Great Holling? Only to Scotland Yard people in London?”

“Yes.” I decided that, for present purposes, Hercule Poirot counted as a Scotland Yard person.

“Frances Ive wrote a note to her husband before she took her own life,” said Margaret. “It was plain that she expected him to survive her. Patrick also left a note that . . .” She stopped.

I waited.

Eventually she said, “The two notes told us the sequence of events.”

“What became of the notes?”

“I destroyed them. Ambrose Flowerday gave them to me, and I threw them on the fire.”

This struck me as most curious. “Why on earth did you do that?” I asked.

“I . . .” Margaret sniffed and turned away. “I don’t know,” she said firmly.

She certainly did know, I thought to myself. It was clear from her clamped-shut mouth that she intended to say no more on the matter. Further interrogation from me would only consolidate her determination to withhold.

I stood to stretch my legs, which had grown stiff. “You’re right about one thing,” I said. “Now that I know the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, I do want to speak to Dr. Ambrose Flowerday. He was here in the village when it all happened. However faithful your account—”

“No. You made me a promise.”

“I should very much like to ask him about Jennie Hobbs, for example.”

“I can tell you about Jennie. What would you like to know? Both Patrick and Frances Ive seemed to think that she was indispensible. They were very fond of her. Everyone else found her to be quiet, polite—harmless enough, until she told a dangerous lie. Personally, I don’t believe that someone who could produce a lie of that sort from thin air can be harmless the rest of the time. And she had ideas above her station. Her way of speaking changed.”

“How?”

“Ambrose said it was very sudden. One day she spoke as you would expect a domestic servant to speak. The next day she had a new, far more polished voice and was speaking very correctly.”