She screwed up her face, staring in at the garments, then she reluctantly shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t say.’ She put a hand up to her face. ‘It seems to me now I might have seen it hanging up at the back of the kitchen door.’ She shook her head again. ‘But there again, I can’t be sure.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Kelsey said. ‘You’ve been a great help to us.’ He closed the wardrobe door. As far as size went, the raincoat could certainly have belonged to the dead man. An ordinary enough garment, quite good quality, nothing special; charcoal grey, a straight unbelted style with raglan shoulders, a dark green plaid lining, a manufacturer’s label inside the front lap, a well-known make.
He stood rubbing his big fleshy nose. It was possible that Elliott had still felt cold after he’d gone back to bed with the extra blankets. He couldn’t be bothered to go into the other bedroom again, he just got out of bed and snatched up the raincoat – the first coat he laid hands on – from the wardrobe or the back of the door. He threw it down on the bed and jumped back under the covers.
He was probably pretty woozy by that time. A bottle of whisky, half empty, stood on the bedside table. Beside it was a beaker and a bottle of lemon juice, one-third full. An electric kettle stood on a metal tray on the floor by the bed.
Elliott’s wristwatch, his keys and wallet, were in a small drawer of the dressing table; they appeared undisturbed. The intruder – assuming for the moment that it was a burglar – could have approached the bedside table, looking for these things. Elliott could have stirred or groaned in his sleep, could have muttered something; the intruder might have struck out at him in panic, thinking he was waking up.
Mrs Cutler wasn’t able to be much more definite about the knife. She thought it was a ham knife but she couldn’t say with any certainty if it belonged to the house. It could be one of the knives from the kitchen drawer. She took the Chief into the kitchen and opened the cutlery drawer. Inside were various knives, none of them very new-looking, some with blades worn from long use and much sharpening over the years.
‘Nearly all the stuff here at Eastwood came from his father’s house,’ she said. ‘There’s some more cutlery in the sideboard in the dining room. That’s better quality, it doesn’t get used very often, Mr Elliott didn’t do any entertaining here.’ She rarely had occasion to look into the sideboard drawer and had only the vaguest idea about what might be in it. She certainly wouldn’t expect to be able to identify any particular piece.
Kelsey followed her into the dining room and looked in the drawer. Everything neatly arranged, of good quality, keen and serviceable. Two of the knives, a breadknife and carving knife, were of a design closely resembling the knife that had killed Elliott, but there was nothing uncommon about the pattern, half the houses in Cannonbridge probably had similar knives.
But Mrs Cutler had no doubts about the murderer. A burglar, of course. ‘I told Mr Elliott he was chancing it,’ she said, ‘keeping all that valuable stuff out on show. The lady at one place where I used to work, she kept everything locked away, she said it was asking for trouble, keeping it out. But Mr Elliott just laughed when I told him.’ She looked up at the Chief with a faintly bleary eye. ‘He said life was too short to worry about burglars.’ She suddenly began to cry, loudly and without restraint. Kelsey made no attempt to stop her. At last her shoulders grew still and she began to draw long sighing breaths; she took out a handkerchief and dabbed fiercely at her eyes and cheeks.
‘I think you’d better make some good strong coffee,’ Kelsey suggested.
‘Yes, I will,’ she said at once. ‘If you don’t mind condensed milk. I always keep a tin in the fridge for myself. Mr Elliott drank his coffee black.’ She seemed glad of a reason for more normal activity and went bustling off to the kitchen with Kelsey following.
While she busied herself he stood reading through the list of missing articles she had dictated. So far the search had failed to discover any trace of them in the house or grounds. She had been able to give a detailed description of each piece. ‘I’ve dusted them often enough,’ she said. ‘If I can’t describe them, nobody can.’ Birds and animals, figurines and groups, Derby, Meissen, Royal Worcester; some Coalport vases, Nailsea and Bristol glass. ‘Mr Elliott knew I appreciated his things,’ she said. ‘He told me what they were, more than once. It was all family stuff, it came to him from his mother.’ Worth a bob or two, Kelsey pondered.
By no means all the objets d’art on show had been taken, about two-thirds still remained. What had gone appeared to be about as much as could be fitted, say, into a sack, no more than a man might comfortably manage on his own; Kelsey had seen no sign that the crime had been the work of more than one intruder.
As Mrs Cutler reached down beakers from an open drawer, the phone rang in the hall. Cannonbridge station again, Kelsey thought; he remained where he was. In the hall a constable lifted the receiver and a minute or two later came looking for the Chief. ‘It’s a Miss Tapsell,’ he said. ‘Mr Elliott’s secretary. She’s ringing from the Cannonbridge office to see why Mr Elliott hasn’t come in to work. She sounds very anxious.’
‘What did you tell her?’ Kelsey asked.
‘Nothing. I just asked her to hang on for a moment.’
Kelsey went along to the hall. He never liked breaking news of this kind over the phone; every sort of consideration was against it. But there was no escaping it now. He picked up the receiver.
Miss Tapsell began to speak at once, firing a rapid string of questions, her voice high and brittle with anxiety.
Kelsey declared his identity and allowed a moment or two to pass so that she might begin to grasp the gravity of what she was about to hear before he told her that Elliott was dead.
She found it difficult to take in; she was deeply shocked, appalled. Then for another minute or two she was clearly under the impression that Elliott had died as a result of the feverish cold that had sent him home early on Friday. Kelsey began gently to disabuse her of the idea. He didn’t go into details of the crime but indicated that there appeared to have been a break-in and that Elliott had met a violent end. After a few moments of horrified silence she said in a high, incredulous tone, ‘You can’t mean he’s been murdered?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Kelsey said. She began to cry, harshly and jerkily.
‘We’ll be along to the Cannonbridge office as soon as we can get away from here,’ Kelsey told her. ‘It’ll be some time a little later on this morning. You’d better say something to the staff. We’ll have to talk to everyone.’
She stopped crying. ‘Mr Elliott’s brother,’ she said. ‘Mr Howard Elliott, over at the Wychford branch, does he know what’s happened?’
‘Not yet.’ Kelsey intended to get over to Wychford as soon as possible to break the news to the brother – or, more accurately, the half-brother – in person.
‘He’ll be ringing through here,’ Miss Tapsell said with dismay. ‘He phones this office a lot. I’m surprised he hasn’t been on already this morning.’ Her voice rose, shrill with anxiety. ‘What shall I tell him?’
Kelsey accepted at once that he wouldn’t now be able to leave it till he got to Wychford. A great pity, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell him myself. I’ll ring him now.’ He had never had any dealings with Howard Elliott, had never even spoken to him, but he had seen him years ago with his father at various functions, when Howard had worked at the Cannonbridge office. He remembered him as a quiet, unobtrusive young man, standing very much in his father’s shadow.
He put through the call right away. Howard was in his office, dealing with the morning post. Again Kelsey had to go through the tricky business of breaking the news by degrees while at the same time trying to assess reactions, a tone of voice.
There was certainly nothing dramatic about Howard’s response, no horrified exclamations, no rapid outflow of shocked