Poison in the Pen

CHAPTER 20

It was Florrie’s afternoon out. Her mother worked at the George because Mr. Stokes enjoyed bad health. There were three daughters and a son, and they all lived at home and contributed to Dad’s upkeep. They were a very affectionate family, and if it was fifteen years since Mr. Stokes had earned anything, he was at any rate a very good cook and always had something tasty ready for tea when the family came home. He had a very light hand with pastry, and as Florrie said, though not in Mrs. Glazier’s hearing, he could cook bacon and sausages and fry fish to beat the band. It was well known that alluring offers had been made to him from several quarters, but Mr. Stokes was not to be lured. He had mysterious turns which no doctor had ever been able to diagnose. He had not, in fact, a great deal of faith in doctors, an attitude fully reciprocated, Dr. Taylor going so far as to allude to him as an old humbug. This was doubtless the case, in spite of which the whole family was a very cheerful and united one. When Florrie came in he was reading the paper and sipping herbal tea, a quite horrid beverage the recipe for which had been handed down in his family for a hundred years and was a closely guarded secret. Nothing would have induced any of his children to touch it. Florrie wrinkled her nose at the smell, kissed the top of his head, and plunged into gossip.

“There’s been ever such a row up at the Manor.”

Mr. Stokes allowed his paper to slide onto the floor. It contained nothing as exciting as what might have been termed The Repton Serial. What with the talk there had been about Mrs. Repton-her clothes, her make-up, the rumours about her having been a model, to say nothing of what he stigmatized as her carryings on, and then Miss Valentine’s wedding being broken off-and anyone could guess why that was-and Connie Brooke dying off sudden as she had, and the police looking into it-well, there hadn’t been a dull moment. He enquired with avidity,

“Why-what’s up now? Been any more of that poison pen?”

Florrie shook her head.

“Not that I know of.”

“Miss Valentine had a letter Thursday?”

“I told you she did.”

“And the Colonel too? And Sam Boxer says there was one went to the Parsonage-all of them the spit and image of each other. And the police been at him about them. I told him straight, what he did ought to have done was to face up to ’em and say, ‘I’m a postman, that’s what I am-I’m not a detective. I got enough work to do delivering of my letters. It isn’t no part of my business to be studying of ’em.’ That’s what he did ought to have said and saved himself a lot er trouble. It’s got nothing to do with him, and so I told him. Or anyone else that I can see. Spilt milk won’t go back in the jug, nor broken-off weddings won’t come on again, not for the police nor yet for no one, so what’s the row about now?”

Florrie was bursting with it, but it wasn’t any good for her to start anything till Dad had had his say. You might just have been seeing a murder, but if there was something Dad wanted to talk about, you had to let him get in first.

But as soon as the coast was clear it all came tumbling out.

“Colonel and Mrs. Repton have had ever such a row. I could hear them in the study. Their voices was ever so loud- at least not the Colonel’s but there was something about it- it seemed to come right through the door. I was coming through to draw the curtains, and I could hear him say she could go to Mr. Earle, or she could go to her friend Mamie Foster-that’s the one she’s always writing to-or she could go to hell.”

Mr. Stokes sat with a cup of herbal tea in his hand. He had been going to take a sip, but the movement had been checked. His eyes fairly sparkled and his small monkeylike features displayed the liveliest interest as he said,

“He never!”

Florrie nodded.

“Cross my heart he did! And told her to get out of his house, and the sooner the better-at least that’s what it sounded like-and threw open the door and told her to go and pack.”

“Well, I never!”

Florrie nodded again, even more emphatically.

“And I got caught as near as a toucher. I don’t know how I got out of the way in time, I don’t reelly. I wouldn’t have, only they didn’t come out-not then. And the door stayed open, so I could hear all the rest of it-and my goodness if it wasn’t a Row! There was something about a letter he’d had-and that would be the one that came Thursday morning-and he said it was a filthy letter about a filthy thing.”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, straight! And she screaming out that it was all a lie! And then he said he knew quite well who it was as had written all those letters, and she said who was it, and he said wouldn’t she like to know. And then-Dad, what do you think he said then? He said maybe she’d written the letters herself! It didn’t sound sense to me, but that’s what he said. He said it would be one way of breaking off Miss Valentine’s marriage and getting out of her own, only she’d better make sure Mr. Gilbert would marry her before she walked out!”

Mr. Stokes took a sip of the sickly looking greenish fluid in the cup he was holding and swallowed it with relish. He said,

“Who’d er thought it! Has she gone?”

Florrie shook her head.

“No-nor doesn’t mean to, if you ask me. Said how was he going to make her go if she didn’t want to? And I’d say that brought him up with a bit of a turn, but I didn’t rightly hear any more, because that’s where he shut the door, and I didn’t like to go near it again.”

“Then how do you know she isn’t going off?”

Florrie giggled.

“I’ve got eyes and ears, haven’t I? The Colonel, he banged out-took the car. He just told Miss Maggie he wouldn’t be home to lunch and off he went. Mrs. Repton, she come down as if nothing had happened, and she hadn’t been packing neither, for I looked in her room. And at lunch, when Miss Maggie was talking about poor Miss Connie’s funeral and saying of course they would all go, and had they anything like mourning that they could wear, Miss Valentine said she hadn’t anything but grey, but she could wear a black hat with it. And Mrs. Repton-you know how bright she dresses- she said all she’d got was a smart navy suit which wouldn’t be at all right, but she supposed it would have to do. So the funeral not being till Tuesday, it doesn’t look as if she was thinking of getting off in a hurry, does it?”

“She wouldn’t want to make talk,” said Mr. Stokes. “There’d be a lot of talk if she went away before the funeral. Not but what there’ll be a lot of talk anyway.”

It would not be the fault of the Stokes family if there were not. When Florrie’s elder sister Betty came in the whole story had to be gone over again. And when Ivy was added to the family party, and the son Bob, and presently Florrie’s boy friend and Betty’s boy friend dropped in, it was all repeated. And with each repetition there was a tendency to place more and more emphasis on the fact that Colonel Repton had said he knew who had written the anonymous letters.

Later on that evening Florrie and her boy went over in the bus to Ledlington to the pictures. Waiting in the bus queue were Hilda Price and Jessie Peck. After such preliminaries as, “You know how I am about not talking,” and, “You won’t let it go any further, will you?” Florrie passed from hinting to narrative, the story lasting most of the way over in the bus, with the result that the boy friend, who was not really very much interested in anything except himself and his motorbike with Florrie a bad third, began to show signs of temper. How many people Hilda and Jessie told is not on record, but they were competent news-mongers.

Betty Stokes, who had been going steady with Mrs. Gurney’s son Reg for the past two years and was expecting to be engaged at Christmas, went round with him to his mother’s, where they spent the evening. In the intervals of playing rummy she related the latest instalment of the Manor serial. It was received with a good deal of interest.

Ivy, who was only sixteen, ran over to a girl friend who was also one of a large family. Her version of the row at the Manor was certainly the least accurate of the three, but not on that account the least interesting. She had a lively imagination and a good deal of dramatic sense. Her performance in a play got up in aid of the local Women’s Institute had been noticed in the Ledshire Observer. Her rendering of the Repton quarrel was an exciting one.

“Florrie, she was right next the door and she couldn’t help hearing him tell her he knew all about the way she’d been carrying on, and she could go to hell. Those were his very words, and they didn’t half give Florrie a turn. She came over ever so queer, because she thought whatever should she do if the Colonel got reelly violent. She couldn’t just stand there outside the door and let Mrs. Repton be half killed-now could she? And the Colonel might have turned on her if she’d come between them. Just like something out of a film it was. Florrie said her heart beat ever so. And the Colonel says, ‘Leave my house!’ he says. And she says, ‘How are you going to make me, I’d like to know.’ And they get on to those poison-pen letters, and he carries on something dreadful and he says he knows who wrote them…” And so forth and so on, the girl friend’s family coming in with appropriate responses and a good time being had by all.

It was not until late that night and just before she dropped asleep that the girl friend’s mother was suddenly visited by the thought of Connie Brooke. It was a vague ghost thought without clarity or definition, but it went with her into her sleep and it was still there when she woke in the morning. If she could have put it into words they would have been something like this, “Connie Brooke knew who wrote those letters, and she is dead.”