A Dreadful Murder by Minette Walters Page A

o’clock? I need to talk to you in private, Mr Farrell.’
    The man looked uneasy. ‘Why?’
    ‘You seem to know so much about Mrs Luard’s murder.’ He tipped the brim of his hat to the other men at the table. ‘I’ll be calling on you all in the next few days, gentlemen. We can’t hold a second inquest until we have all the facts.’
    As he left, he was amused by the sounds of dismay that broke out behind him. He trod out his cigarette and double-checked the last name on Sarah Anderson’s list. ‘
John Farrell
,’ she’d written in neat handwriting. ‘
He punches his wife and children when he’s drunk.
’
    * * *
    Taylor tapped on the tradesmen’s entrance to Ightham Knoll because he didn’t want to disturb Charles Luard again. Jane Pugmore, the housemaid, let him in and took him to the kitchen, where Cook and Harriet Huish, the parlourmaid, were still red-eyed from weeping.
    Cook showed him the Major-General’s uneaten lunch. ‘He’s hardly touched his food since Mrs Luard died,’ she said. ‘He’s that low, he’s making himself ill.’ She picked up the plate and made to scrape the contents into a slop bucket.
    Taylor put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t waste it,’ he begged. ‘I haven’t had a decent meal since I arrived in Kent.’
    The three women threw up their arms in horror and bustled around to take his coat and lay a place for him at the table. Jane pressed the Superintendent into a chair and gave him the list she’d made of people who had attended the first inquest. It was much longer than Sarah Anderson’s and, while he ate, Taylor asked the three women to mark which of the names would be most likely to write poison pen letters.
    He was surprised at how easy they found it to agree. They picked only women, and the comments they made while they did it told him why. ‘Bitter old spinster’ . . . ‘guzzles sherry in secret’ . . . ‘jealous as sin’ . . . ‘man-hater’ . . .
    One or two were ladies who claimed to have been friends of Caroline Luard, but most were what Jane Pugmore described scornfully as the lower middle class. ‘They think they’re above us servants,’ she told Taylor, ‘but it eats away at them that they’re not in the Major-General’s league.’
    He ran his finger down the page. ‘I wonder why poison pen letters are usually written by women,’ he murmured.
    ‘Because they marry husbands they don’t like and spend the rest of their lives picking fault with them,’ said Cook bluntly. ‘It turns them nasty.’
    ‘So why marry them in the first place?’
    ‘To give themselves airs and graces. The man who owns the shop that sells the cabbages is higher up the ladder than the one who grows them . . . which is what their fathers did.’ Cook poured water into the sink. ‘Most of the cats on that list are no better than I am, but you wouldn’t think it from the way they look down their noses at me.’
    It was the second time in three hours that Taylor had heard a woman express discontent about the way her society worked. Yet he wondered if either of them would have voiced her thoughts out loud before Caroline Luard’s murder.
    Had Caroline’s friend, Sarah Anderson, always wanted dignity for the poor? Or was it the shock of her friend’s death that had set her thinking about the divide between the classes? Had Cook always resented women who married above themselves? Or was she simply trying to account for the hate mail that kept dropping through the letter box?
    It seemed to Superintendent Taylor that Ightham’s sleepy calm had been ripped apart by a couple of gunshots. As if a close-knit family had turned on itself because no one believed the victim had been killed by an outsider. Instead of peace, there was war. Instead of mutual support, there was suspicion.
    ‘Could it have been someone from round here who killed Mrs Luard?’ he asked.
    There was a brief silence before Harriet Huish spoke.
    ‘Put it this way,’ she said, ‘there’s plenty