Scold's Bridle

*2*

A week later the receptionist buzzed through to Dr. Blakeney's office. "There's a Detective Sergeant Cooper on the line. I've told him you have a patient with you but he's very insistent. Can you speak to him?" It was a Monday and Sarah was covering afternoon surgery in Fontwell.

She smiled apologetically at the pregnant mother, laid out like a sacrificial offering on her couch. She put her hand over the receiver. "Do you mind if I take this call, Mrs. Graham? It's rather important. I'll be as quick as I can."

"Get on with you. I'm enjoying the rest. You don't get many opportunities when it's your third."

Sarah smiled at her. "Put him through, Jane. Yes, Sergeant, what can I do for you?"

"We've had the results of Mrs. Gillespie's post mortem. I'd be interested in your reactions."

"Go on."

He shuffled some papers at the other end of the line. "Direct cause of death: loss of blood. Traces of barbituates were discovered in her system, but not enough to prove fatal. Traces also discovered in the whisky glass, implying she dissolved the barbiturates before she drank them. Some alcohol absorbed. No bruising. Lacerations the tongue where the rusted bit of the scold's bridle caused the surface to bleed. Nothing under her fingernails. Slight nettle rash on her temples and cheeks, and minor chafing of the skin beneath the bridle's framework, both consistent with her donning the contraption herself and then arranging it with the nettles and daisies. No indications at all that she put up any sort of struggle. The scold's bridle was not attached to her head in any way and could have been removed, had she wished to do so. The wounds to the wrists correspond precisely with the Stanley knife blade discovered on the bathroom floor, the one on the left wrist made with a downward right-handed stroke, the one on the right with a downward left-handed stroke. The knife had been submerged in water, probably dropped after one of the incisions, but there was an index fingerprint, belonging to Mrs. Gillespie, one-point-three centimetres from the blade on the shaft. Conclusion: suicide." He paused. "Are you still there?" he demanded after a moment.

"Yes."

"So what do you think?"

"That I was wrong last week."

"But surely the barbiturates in the whisky glass trouble you?"

"Mathilda hated swallowing anything whole," she said apologetically. "She crushed or dissolved everything in liquid first. She had a morbid fear of choking."

"But your immediate reaction when you saw her was that she was the last person you'd expect to kill herself. And now you've changed your mind." It sounded like an accusation.

"What do you want me to say, Sergeant? My gut feeling remains the same." Sarah glanced towards her patient who was becoming restless. "I would not have expected her to take her own life, but gut feelings are a poor substitute for scientific evidence."

"Not always."

She waited, but he didn't go on. "Was there anything else, Sergeant? I do have a patient with me."

"No," he said, sounding dispirited, "nothing else. It was a courtesy call. You may be required to give evidence at the inquest, but it'll be a formality. We've asked for an adjournment while we check one or two small details but, at the moment, we aren't looking for anyone else in connection with Mrs. Gillespie's death."

Sarah smiled encouragingly at Mrs. Graham. Be with you in a minute, she mouthed. "But you think you should be."

"I learnt my trade in a simpler world, Dr. Blakeney, where we paid attention to gut feelings. But in those days we called them hunches." He gave a hollow laugh. "Now, hunches are frowned on and forensic evidence is God. But forensic evidence is only as reliable as the man who interprets it and what I want to know is why there are no nettle stings on Mrs. Gillespie's hands and fingers. Dr. Cameron began by saying she must have worn gloves but there are no gloves in that house with sap on them, so now he thinks the water must have nullified the reaction. I don't like that kind of uncertainty. My hunch is Mrs. Gillespie was murdered but I'm an Indian and the Chief says, drop it. I hoped you'd give me some ammunition."

"I'm sorry," said Sarah helplessly. She murmured a goodbye and replaced the receiver with a thoughtful expression in her dark eyes. "It'll be old Mrs. Gillespie, I suppose," said Mrs. Graham prosaically. She was a farmer's wife, for whom birth and death held little mystery. Both happened, not always conveniently, and the whys and wherefores were largely irrelevant. The trick was coping afterwards. "There's talk of nothing else in the village. Awful way to do it, don't you think?" She shivered theatrically. "Slitting your wrists and then watching your blood seep into the water. I couldn't do that."

"No," agreed Sarah, rubbing her hands to warm them. "You say you think the baby's head has engaged already?"

"Mm, won't be long now." But Mrs. Graham wasn't to be sidetracked so easily and she'd heard enough of the doctor's end of the conversation to whet her appetite. "Is it true she had a cage on her head? Jenny Spede's been hysterical about it ever since. A cage with brambles and roses in it, she said. She keeps calling it Mrs. Gillespie's crown of thorns."

Sarah could see no harm in telling her. Most of the details were out already, and the truth was probably less damaging than the horror stories being put about by Mathilda's cleaner. "It was a family heirloom, a thing called a scold's bridle." She placed her hands on the woman's abdomen and felt for the baby's head. "And there were no brambles or roses, nothing with thorns at all. Just a few wild flowers." She omitted the nettles deliberately. The nettles, she thought, were disturbing. "It was more pathetic than frightening." Her probing fingers relaxed. "You're right. It won't be long now. You must have got your dates wrong."

"I always do, Doctor," said the woman comfortably. "I can tell you to the minute when a cow's due but when it's my turn," she laughed, "I haven't time to mark calendars." Sarah linked arms with her to pull her into a sitting position. "Scold's bridle," she went on thoughtfully. "Scold, as in a woman with a vicious tongue?"

Sarah nodded. "They were used up until two or three centuries ago to shut women up, and not just women with vicious tongues either. Any women. Women who challenged male authority, inside the home and outside."

"So why do you reckon she did it?"

"I don't know. Tired of living perhaps." Sarah smiled. "She didn't have your energy, Mrs. Graham."

"Oh, the dying I can understand. I've never seen much sense in struggling for life if the life isn't worth the struggle." She buttoned her shirt. "I meant why did she do it with this scold's bridle on her head?"

But Sarah shook her head. "I don't know that either."

"She was a nasty old woman," said Mrs. Graham bluntly. "She lived here virtually all her life, knew me and my parents from our cradles, but she never acknowledged us once. We were too common. Tenant farmers with muck on our shoes. Oh, she spoke to old Wittingham, the lazy sod who owns Dad's farm, all right. The fact he's never done a hand's turn since the day he was born, but lives on his rents and his investments, made him acceptable. But the workers, rough trade like us-"she shook her head-"we were beneath contempt." She chuckled at Sarah's expression. "There, I'm shocking you. But I've a big mouth and I use it. You don't want to take Mrs. Gillespie's death to heart. She wasn't liked, and not through want of trying, believe me. We're not a bad lot here, but there's only so much that ordinary folk can take, and when a woman brushes her coat after you've bumped into her by accident, well, that's when you say enough's enough." She swung her legs to the floor and stood up. "I'm not much of a churchgoer, me, but some things I do believe in, and one of them's repentance. Be it God or just old age, I reckon everyone repents in the end. There's few of us die without recognizing our faults which is why death's so peaceful. And it doesn't really matter who you say sorry to-a priest, God, your family-you've said it, and you feel better." She slipped her feet into her shoes. "I'd guess Mrs. Gillespie was apologizing for her vicious tongue. That's why she wore her scold's bridle to meet her Maker."

Mathilda Gillespie was buried three days later beside her father, Sir William Cavendish MP, in Fontwell village churchyard. The coroner's inquest had still to be held but it was common knowledge by then that a verdict of suicide was a foregone conclusion, if not from Polly Graham, then from a simple putting two and two together when the Dorset police removed their seals from Cedar House and returned to headquarters in the nearby coastal resort of Learmouth.

The congregation was a small one. Polly Graham had told the truth when she said Mathilda Gillespie wasn't liked, and few could be bothered to find time in their busy lives to say goodbye to an old woman who had been known only for her unkindness. The vicar did his best in difficult circumstances but it was with a feeling of relief that the mourners turned from the open grave and picked their way across the grass towards the gate.

Jack Blakeney, a reluctant attendant on a wife who had felt dutybound to put in an appearance, muttered into Sarah's ear: "What a bunch of white sepulchres, and I am not referring to the tombstones either, just we hypocrites doing our middle-class duty. Did you see their faces when the Rev referred to her as 'our much loved friend and neighbour?' They all hated her."

She hushed him with a warning hand. "They'll hear you."

"Who cares?" They were bringing up the rear and his artist's gaze roamed restlessly across the bowed heads in front of them. "Presumably the blonde is the daughter, Joanna."

Sarah heard the deliberate note of careless interest in his voice and smiled cynically. "Presumably," she agreed, "and presumably the younger one is the granddaughter."

Joanna stood now beside the vicar, her soft grey eyes huge in a finely drawn face, her silver-gold hair a shining cap in the sunlight. A beautiful woman, thought Sarah, but as usual she could admire her with complete detachment. She rarely directed her resentment towards the objects of her husband's thinly disguised lust, for she saw them as just that, objects. Lust, like everything in Jack's life apart from his painting, was ephemeral. A brief enthusiasm to be discarded as rapidly as it was espoused. The days when she had been confident that, for all his appreciation of another woman's looks, he wouldn't jeopardize their marriage were long past and she had few illusions left about her own role. She provided the affluence whereby Jack Blakeney, struggling artist, could live and slake his very mundane cravings, but as Polly Graham had said-there was only so much that ordinary folk could take.

They shook hands with the vicar. "It was kind of you both to come. Have you met Mathilda's daughter?" The Reverend Matthews turned to the woman. "Joanna Lascelles, Dr. Sarah Blakeney and Jack Blakeney. Sarah was your mother's GP, Joanna. She joined the practice last year when Dr. Hendry retired. She and Jack live at The Mill in Long Upton, Geoffrey Freeling's old house."

Joanna shook hands with them and turned to the girl beside her. "This is my daughter Ruth. We're both very grateful to you, Dr. Blakeney, for all you did to help my mother."

The girl was about seventeen or eighteen, as dark as her mother was fair, and she looked anything but grateful. Sarah had only an impression of intense and bitter grief. "Do you know why Granny killed herself?" she asked softly. "Nobody else seems to." Her face was set in a scowl.

"Ruth, please," sighed her mother. "Aren't things difficult enough already?" It was a conversation they had clearly had before.

Joanna must be approaching forty, thought Sarah, if the daughter was anything to go by, but against the black of her coat, she looked only very young and very vulnerable. Beside her, Sarah felt Jack's interest quicken and she had an angry impulse to turn on him and berate him publicly once and for all. How far did he think her patience would stretch? How long did he expect her to tolerate his contemptuous and contemptible indifference to her beleaguered pride? She quelled the impulse, of course. She was too trammelled by her upbringing and the behavioural demands of her profession to do anything else. But, oh God, one day... she promised herself. Instead she turned to the girl. "I wish I could give you an answer, Ruth, but I can't. The last time I saw your grandmother she was fine. In some pain from her arthritis, of course, but nothing she wasn't used to or couldn't cope with."

The girl cast a spiteful glance at her mother. "Then something must have happened to upset her. People don't kill themselves for no reason."

"Was she easily upset?" asked Sarah. "She never gave me that impression." She smiled slightly. "She was tough as old boots, your grandmother. I admired her for it."

"Then why did she kill herself?"

"Because she wasn't afraid of death perhaps. Suicide isn't always a negative, you know. In some cases it's a positive statement of choice. I will die now and in this manner. 'To be or not to be.' For Mathilda 'not to be' would have been a considered decision."

Ruth's eyes filled. "Hamlet was her favourite play." She was tall like her mother but her face, pinched with cold and distress, lacked the other's startling looks. Ruth's tears made her ugly where her mother's, a mere glistening of the lashes, enhanced a fragile beauty.

Joanna stirred herself, glancing from Sarah to Jack. "Will you come back to the house for tea? There'll be so few of us."

Sarah excused herself. "I'm afraid I can't. I have a surgery in Mapleton at four thirty."

Jack did not. "Thank you, that's very kind."

There was a small silence. "How will you get home?" asked Sarah, fishing in her pocket for her car keys.

"I'll beg a lift," he said. "Someone's bound to be going my way."

One of Sarah's colleagues dropped in as evening surgery was finishing. There were three partners in a practice serving several square miles of Dorset coast and countryside, including sizeable villages, scattered hamlets and farmhouses. Most of the villages had small self-contained surgeries, either attached to the doctors' houses or leased from patients and, between them, the partners covered the whole area, boxing and coxing in neat rotation. Mapleton was Robin Hewitt's home village but, like Sarah, he spent as much time out of it as he did in. They had so far resisted the logic of pooling their resources in one modern clinic in the most central of the villages, but it was doubtful if they could resist for much longer. The argument, a true one, that most of their patients were elderly or lacked transport, was far outweighed by the commercial pressures now existing inside the health service.

"You look tired," said Robin, folding himself into the armchair beside her desk.

"I am."

"Trouble?"

"Only the usual."

"Domestic, eh? Get rid of him."

She laughed. "And supposing I told you, as casually, to get rid of Mary?"

"There's a small difference, my darling. Mary is an angel and Jack is not." But the idea was not without a certain appeal. After eighteen years, Mary's complacent self-assurance was so much less attractive than Sarah's troubled seeking after truths.

"I can't argue with that." She finished writing some notes and pushed them wearily to one side.

"What's he done this time?"

"Nothing, as far as I know."

Which sounded about right, thought Robin. Jack Blakeney made a virtue of doing nothing while his wife made a virtue of supporting him in idleness. Their continuing marriage was a complete mystery to him. There were no children, no ties, nothing binding them, Sarah was an independent woman with independent means, and she paid the mortgage on their house. It only required the services of a locksmith to shut the bastard out forever.

She studied him with amusement. "Why are you smiling like that?"

He switched neatly away from his mild fantasy of Sarah alone in her house. "I saw Bob Hughes today. He was very put out to find me on duty and not you." He fell into a fair imitation of the old man's Dorset burr. " 'Where's the pretty one?' he said. 'I want the pretty one to do it.' "

"Do what?"

Robin grinned. "Examine the boil on his bum. Dirty old brute. If it had been you, he'd have come up with another one, presumably, lurking under his scrotum and you'd have had the fun of probing for it and he'd have had the thrills while you did it."

Her eyes danced. "And it's completely free, don't forget. Relief massage comes expensive."

"That's revolting. You're not telling me he's tried it on before."

She chuckled. "No, of course not. He only comes in for a chat. I expect he felt he had to show you something. Poor old soul. I bet you sent him away with a flea in his ear."

"I did. You're far too amenable."

"But they're so lonely, some of them. We live in a terrible world, Robin. No one has time to listen any more." She toyed with her pen. "I went to Mathilda Gillespie's funeral today and her granddaughter asked me why she killed herself. I said I didn't know, and I've been thinking about that ever since. I should know. She was one of my patients. If I'd taken a little more trouble with her, I would know." She flicked him a sideways glance. "Wouldn't I?"

He shook his head. "Don't start down that route, Sarah. It's a dead end. Look, you were one person among many whom she knew and talked to, me included. The responsibility for that old woman wasn't yours alone. I'd argue that it wasn't yours at all, except in a strict medical sense, and nothing you prescribed for her contributed to her death. She died of blood loss."

"But where do you draw the line between profession and friendship? We laughed a lot. I think I was one of the few people who appreciated her sense of humour, probably because it was so like Jack's. Bitchy, often cruel, but witty. She was a latterday Dorothy Parker."

"You're being ridiculously sentimental. Mathilda Gillespie was a bitch of the first water, and don't imagine she viewed you as an equal. For years, until she sold off Wing Cottage to raise money, doctors, lawyers and accountants were required to enter by the tradesman's entrance. It used to drive Hugh Hendry mad. He said she was the rudest woman he'd ever met. He couldn't stand her."

Sarah gave a snort of laughter. "Probably because she called him Doctor Dolittle. To his face, too. I asked her once if it was by way of a job description and she said: Not entirely. He had a closer affinity with animals than he had with people. He was an ass."

Robin grinned. "Hugh was the laziest and the least able doctor I've ever met. I suggested once that we check his medical qualifications because I didn't think he had any, but it's a bit difficult when the bloke in question is the senior partner. We just had to bite the bullet and hang on for his retirement." He cocked his head on one side. "So what did she call you, if she called him Dr. Dolittle?"

She held the pen to her lips for a moment and stared past him. There was a haunting disquiet in her dark eyes. "She was obsessed with that wretched scold's bridle. It was rather unhealthy really, thinking about it. She wanted me to try it on once to see what it felt like."

"And did you?"

"No." She fell silent for a moment, then seemed to make up her mind to something. "She called her arthritis her 'Resident Scold' because it caused her so much nagging pain"-she tapped the pen against her teeth-"and in order to take her mind off it, she used to don the bridle as a sort of counter-irritant. That's what I mean about her unhealthy obsession with it. She wore it as a sort of penance, like a hair shirt. Anyway, when I took her off that rubbish Hendry had been prescribing and got the pain under some sort of manageable control, she took to calling me her little scold's bridle by way of a joke." She saw his incomprehension. "Because I'd succeeded in harnessing the Resident Scold," she explained.

"So what are you saying?"

"I think she was trying to tell me something."

Robin shook his head. "Why? Because she was wearing it when she died? It was a symbol, that's all."

"Of what?"

"Life's illusion. We're all prisoners. Perhaps it was her final joke. My tongue is curbed forever, something like that." He shrugged. "Have you told the police?"

"No. I was so shocked when I saw her that I didn't think about it." She raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. "And the pathologist and the policeman latched on to what I said she always called the geraniums inside the beastly thing. Her coronet weeds. It comes from the speech about Ophelia's death and, what with the bath and the nettles, I thought they were probably right. But now I'm not so sure." Her voice tailed off and she sat staring at her desk.

Robin watched her for several seconds. "Supposing she was trying to say that her tongue was curbed forever. You realize it has a double meaning?"

"Yes," said Sarah unhappily, "that someone else curbed it. But that doesn't make sense. I mean, if Mathilda knew she was going to be murdered she wouldn't have wasted time donning the scold's bridle in the hall when all she had to do was run to the front door and scream her head off. The whole village would have heard her. And the murderer would have taken it off anyway."

"Perhaps it was the murderer who was saying, 'Her tongue is curbed forever.' "

"But that doesn't make sense either. Why would a murderer advertise that it's murder when he's gone to so much trouble to make it look like suicide?" She rubbed her tired eyes. "Without the scold's bridle, it would have looked straightforward. With it, it looks anything but. And why the flowers, for God's sake? What were they supposed to tell us?"

"You'll have to talk to the police," said Robin with sudden decision, reaching for the telephone. "Dammit, Sarah, who else knew she called you her scold's bridle? Surely it's occurred to you that the message is directed at you."

"What message?"

"I don't know. A threat, perhaps. You next, Dr. Blakeney."

She gave a hollow laugh. "I see it more in terms of a signature." She traced a line on the desk with her fingertip. "Like the mark of Zorro on his victims."

"Oh, Jesus!" said Robin, putting the receiver back. "Maybe it's wiser not to say anything. Look, it was obviously suicide-you said yourself she was unhealthily obsessed with the damn thing."

"But I was fond of her."

"You're fond of everyone, Sarah. It's nothing to be proud of."

"You sound like Jack." She retrieved the telephone, dialled Learmouth Police Station and asked for Detective Sergeant Cooper.

Robin watched with gloomy resignation-she had no idea how the tongues would wag if they ever got wind of Mathilda's nickname for her-and wondered disloyally why she had chosen to tell him before anyone else. He had the strangest impression that she had been using him. As a yardstick by which to measure other people's reactions? As a confessor?

DS Cooper had already left for home and the bored voice at the other end of the wire merely agreed to pass on Sarah's request to speak to him when he arrived the next morning. There was no urgency, after all. The case was closed.