Read by Louisa Gummer
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. “You,” I say out loud, “are an innocent woman.” I take a good, hard look at my reflection. Do I look truly innocent? Maybe my blood red lipstick is a touch on the vibrant side? I could possibly do with showing a little less collarbone.
All of the suspects in the murder investigation have been told to assemble in the drawing room at two. It is now three minutes past. My thinking is that it might be an idea to arrive slightly late. It would be the guilty who’d be desperate to appear keen and arrive early.
I tone down my make-up and don a plain and unthreatening neckerchief. After one final look at the angelic face in the mirror, I slowly make my way to the drawing room. Given the size of Grandchester Manor it’s quite a walk.
As I’d hoped, I’m the last to arrive. Absolutely everyone related to the crimes is here. All the potential suspects. As I enter the drawing room, they all turn to me with grave and silent faces. I have a moment’s panic that somehow they all know something about me. I grab my clutchbag tightly, and through the crocodile skin exterior I can feel the stiletto knife still in there. This is a relief; at least they’re not going to announce the discovery of the missing murder weapon.
The Detective Inspector stands in the centre of the drawing room, a lower middle-class master of ceremonies. He welcomes me to sit down, with his usual mixture of class deference and suppressed resentment at the way us toffs carry on. Especially the women.
I’m surprised to see that also in the room is the batty old lady that’s been hanging around since the murder. I forget her name, but the face is instantly recognisable to everyone in the room given how annoyingly nosey she’s been. Not quite sure what she’s doing here in the drawing room though. She can’t possibly be a suspect, and she obviously isn’t a lawman. Yet for some reason the Detective Inspector allows her to start talking and then the old lady just won’t stop.
She’s droning on about having once known the late Professor many years ago and well, at that point I tune out of her senile reminiscence. I need to focus as much as possible on not looking guilty. Out of the corner of my eye I see the handsome Edgar DeVilliers puffing on a cigarette. Good lord, I want one now. The cigarette, not the boy. One deep, warm comforting drag on a handsome gasper. But I must resist. Not here and definitely not now. Good girls, as everybody knows, do not smoke.
“Dash it! I DON’T have to put up with this!” I’m jolted from my tobacco-centred thoughts by the angry words of Colonel Clitheroe, “This stupid old biddy is as good as accusing me of murdering my oldest friend.”
Ooh, this is getting interesting. She thinks the Colonel did it.
I must not grin… Must. Not. Grin.
“Oh Good Lord,” I gasp as convincingly as possible. “Not the Colonel?”
Too much? Perhaps, but I think everyone bought it.
The old lady starts talking about how the Colonel might have done it. How he snuck into the Professor’s study during the middle of the night. How the sharp blade of a vintage stiletto was taken from the victim’s own personal collection. And how he waited for the notoriously insomniac Professor to visit his study in the small hours. I have to admit she’s very good at this. Her descriptions are incredibly evocative, I can almost see the events unfurling in front of me. And she’s getting practically everything right. Apart from making the fat lump of the Colonel the murderer.
“That’s all very well,” interrupts the Vicar. “But how did the Colonel manage to undertake the murder of Meadows?”
Ah yes, Meadows the gardener. The second murder victim at Grandchester. I’m not entirely happy about that one. It wasn’t so well planned. Not that I feel in any way guilty about it. The man had been out in the gardens checking for foxes the night of the Professor’s murder and happened to see everything. Fortunately for me, the greedy fool didn’t go straight to the police but instead attempted blackmail. Unfortunately for him, he made the error of telling me his numerous demands while we were in his own tool shed. He probably didn’t expect a member of the weaker sex to be quite so beastly with a scythe. It was a tad messy, but got the job done.
“Ah yes,” the old lady responds wistfully, “well, that was the problem I had, you see. The Colonel was at the Rotary Club dinner at the time Meadows was murdered. So in the end I realised he couldn’t have been responsible for either murder.”
At this news the Colonel seemed to lose all his bluster and began to deflate like a slowly leaking balloon, collapsing back into his chair.
I tense up again. So she doesn’t think the Colonel did it. I’m not in the clear. Not yet.
“Of course,” she begins, “there were people here who were not particularly friendly with the gardener.”
To my surprise, Edgar DeVilliers leaps up at this. “Now look here,” he snaps angrily, “I didn’t like the man, but I certainly didn’t hate him enough to murder him.”
There then follows a rather interesting tale about an inebriated Edgar driving his fancy car through the Grandchester garden’s floral clock and, following a particularly violent bout of fisticuffs with Meadows, having to spend a week in the village police station’s solitary jail cell.
All rather exciting but, speaking as someone who now knows a thing or two about this, it’s hardly reason to murder. And the old lady doesn’t seem too convinced because she doesn’t dwell on it as a motive and moves on to tell us that the Vicar had never really forgiven the professor for stealing the heart of one Mabel McNulty from him when they were young men at Oxford together. Then she points out that the Professor’s only daughter had frequent arguments with both men over the merits of the suffragette movement.
Jesus wept, what sort of sadist is this women? She’s just going round the room, toying with us all. I prepare myself for the inevitable and when she finally mentions my name I gasp again. I think’s it’s even more convincing this time now that I’ve had practice.
“You’d been his secretary for several years now, hadn’t you?” the old lady asks me.
I nod and begin to try and say something incredibly innocent and convincing when she drops the bombshell.
“And, of course, one hates to use the word in the modern sense, but the two of you were ‘lovers’”
Uh-oh.
It’s the Vicar’s turn to gasp in girlish shock as every face in the room turns to me.
My brain races in panic. What else does she know? The rather scurrilous nightclub in London where I met the professor and all his lovely wealth? How I managed to convince him to hire me as his secretary so that I could join him at his fabulous Manor without arousing suspicion?
Dear God – maybe she knows even more? About how I’d secretly forged a new will, with yours truly as the main beneficiary?
“It’s true,” I put on my saddest little girl voice, “I loved dear old Pookie, he was so kind to me.” I try and cry at this point, but dash it, no tears will come out and I think I end up looking rather cross-eyed.
I notice the Detective looming behind the old lady and scratching his head. “Hang on a second here, you mean the doddery old grey-haired professor? With this very pretty young lady?”
Hear that? “Very retty”. Still got it.
“We were so very much in love.” I simper, hoping I’m not overdoing it. “It was difficult having to live here, pretending to be his secretary. But he promised me that one day, when the time was right, we definitely would get married and I’d be an honest women.”
“Yes, well,” the old lady gives another of her terribly weary sighs at this point, “Men will be men, and flighty stupid girls will fall for everything they tell them.”
Everyone’s looking at me with a tinge of pity now, and I do my absolute best to look like a flighty, stupid little girl.
“Which is why,” she continues, “You weren’t the killer.”
YES! Result.
This is no time to let my performance slip though and I turn dramatically to face the window, touching my forehead and seeming to sob forlornly. Inside my head, though, I’m dancing a jubilant Charleston round the old Grandchester fountain.
“Of course,” the Inspector chips in, “there is the matter of the new will. We found it under a pile of papers in the study. Turns out shortly before he died, the Professor left most of the estate to his secretary.”
At this the old lady seems to sit back satisfied, “Which he clearly changed because he disapproved of his daughter’s radical politics. And that was why she killed him.”
We all turn to the Professor’s dear little daughter. The look on her face is priceless, but this is probably not the time and place to have a good laugh over it.
“I.. I .. but.. I… I.. loved papa!” she blurts out. It’s far too overdone. I was much more convincing.
The old lady begins spinning an elaborate yarn about how it was done, and once again we’re transported to the scene as the young lady, secretly a hot-headed revolutionary, murders her father, angry at losing all that money that might help the cause. And then, driven by a now untempered Bolshevik passion and madly in love with Edgar DeVilliers, she murders Meadows in bloody revenge for getting her heart’s desire imprisoned. It’s all thoroughly convincing balderdash.
“Edgar!” the daughter turns to the young man, who seems genuinely affected by the revelation of her amorous feelings towards him.
“Flossie!” Edgar responds, his chest puffing with pathetic schoolboy chivalry. “I’ll help you through this. In the name of your unmatched beauty, I’ll wait for you.”
Gone off him now.
The falsely accused daughter is led out by two constables, her admirer in hot pursuit. There’s a few seconds of quiet, broken when the Detective Inspector hands me a copy of my own forged will. “Well, dearie – thanks to this little document it looks like the Professor did right by you in the end and left you a considerable amount of money.”
Ah. Money. What a lovely word that is. Money, money, money, money, money, money, gorgeous lovely, sexy fabulous money.
“Oh Inspector,” I reply sadly, “It was never about the money.”
More folk leave the drawing room and eventually I’m left alone with the old lady.
“Well,” the old lady says, searching in her own handbag for I imagine some knitting. “I imagine after all that terrible business, we could all do with a holiday.”
“I suppose so,” I humour her, “maybe I could come and visit you in that lovely little village you come from?”
The old lady stares calmly at me for a second, then pulls out of her handbag a small pearl-handled revolver. Slowly she points it right between my eyes.
“Fuck that, you murdering little hussy,” she smiles. “You’re taking me to Rio.”
(c) Alan Graham, 2017
Alan Graham studied "Creative Writing" and "Economics" at UEA and is still unsure which discipline relies on make-believe the most. More of his stores can be found at alangrahamwords.com
Louisa Gummer is a highly experienced actor and voiceover. Recent work includes several roles in the new Audible comedy series Slaving Away, and the audio guide for the Rotterdam Maritime Museum. Audiobooks include A Jane Austen Daydream, and can be heard saying "Pig Museum" on the Stuttgart City Open Top Bus Tour.
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