A Fête Worse Than Death by Dolores Gordon-Smith Page B

paused. Greg was right. Murder wasn’t fun. It was a warm night, but he looked once more at the shadows on the lawn and shivered.
    The next morning, lured by brilliant sunshine and what sounded like every sparrow in Sussex cheeping outside his window, Haldean got up at the indecently early hour of seven o’clock and, leaving the house swathed in Sabbath silence, climbed into his car and went to hear early Mass in Lewes, where the words of the offertory went home with unusual force:
Illumina oculos meos, ne unquam obdormiam in morte: nequando dicat inimicus meus: Praevalui adversus eum. Enlighten my eyes, that I may never sleep in death; lest at any time my enemy say: I have prevailed against him
. Enlighten my eyes: there were worse prayers for an investigator and Boscombe had certainly had an enemy who had prevailed.
    At the same time Superintendent Edward Ashley, who was also thinking of Boscombe but on a more earthly plane, was carrying a cup of tea up the stairs to his wife. Giving her a peck on the cheek, he explained that no, he really couldn’t say when he’d be home, and he’d have his dinner heated up when he got back.
    By the time Haldean had spiritually fortified himself, Ashley was sitting on a dilatory bus wheezing its way to the Talbot Arms, Breedenbrook, where Boscombe’s room had been kept locked until he could look at it in far greater leisure than he could spare on the previous day.
    Arriving back at the house, Haldean shed his suit and, arrayed in elderly, unfashionable but comfortable flannels and an open-necked shirt, spent an agreeable half-hour in, variously, ejecting the kitchen cat from his bed, relieving the housemaid of a cup of tea and leaning over his windowsill, cigarette in hand, whilst the perfect title and rudiments of plot for his next story formed themselves in his mind.
    Descending to the morning room, he armed himself with a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon from the sideboard just as Ashley, in the company of Mrs Dorothy Plaxy, landlady, was ascending the old, oak and lethally polished staircase of the Talbot Arms. She was assuring him at great length that everything had been left just as he had told them to, and re-emphasizing that they’d never had any trouble in their house. No, not even after-hours drinking, which could be checked with Constable Hawley. As she panted on to the landing she was giving forcible and frequent expression to the view that it didn’t seem right to her, not anyhow, that any guest of theirs should go and get himself murdered.
    As Mrs Plaxy opened the door, Haldean was raising his coffee cup to his lips, but what Ashley saw in that room was not only the cause of Mrs Plaxy’s violent hysterics but also the reason why the telephone bell rang in the hall of Hesperus Manor.
    Haldean’s breakfast (which he was looking forward to) remained half-finished on its plate.

Chapter Three
    Albert Plaxy, a big, awkward man, still wearing the old clothes in which he cleaned out the beer pipes every Sunday morning, took the cup of tea and put it with clumsy sympathy into his wife’s hands. ‘Here you are, Mother. Drink this and you’ll feel better.’ He turned to Superintendent Ashley. ‘I don’t know what to say. We’ve never had nothing like this happen before. It’s always been such a quiet house.’ He glanced at the little maid who had brought the tea. She, round-eyed with excitement, was still standing beside him. ‘What do you want, Betty?’
    Betty swallowed and bobbed in a nervous essay at a curtsy. ‘Please, Mr Plaxy, it’s Mrs Jones and Mr Holroyd. They’m saying they won’t stop here a moment longer if this sort of thing goes on.’
    There was a renewed outbreak of sniffing from Mrs Plaxy. Albert Plaxy shuffled, unable to find words to express his irritation with this fresh nuisance.
    â€˜You tell the staff,’ said Ashley, his voice hard with impatience,