Episode 12 - Agnes Peel

Sunday cont.

Grit and Gary were well on the way to organizing supper and bedtime for the five infants they had spent a couple of hours babysitting, though sitting was not the operative word. Gary was rather sorry they had given Toni the afternoon off, and glad when Charlie arrived with Lottie in tow to take over some of the running around.

“I suppose you are going to tell us where you’ve been, aren’t you?” said Gary as he took a large paper bag full of donuts from Cleo and looked inside. “Ah! Compensation, I see. So what was the meeting about? Surely it could have waited until tomorrow.”

”No, and I don’t think it’s over. Vera was hiding something, so Dorothy and I only got half the story.”

“You have a suspicious mind, Cleo,” said Gary.

“Dorothy walked back to the OAP home with Vera and the resident named Margot, who was the reason for the meeting at the bakery. I assume that Dorothy wanted to pick Vera’s brains about Margot.”

“Phone and ask her,” suggested Grit. “I made a big beef stew. There’s plenty.”

Cleo phoned Dorothy without delay and quite innocuously asked her to come for supper as Grit had made one of her now famous and highly approved casseroles. If Dorothy smelt a rat, she did not say so when she accepted the invitation.

***

“Where’s Roger?” Cleo asked Grit, since Roger was usually to be found nearby.

“He’d been reading to PeggySue and needed a siesta,” said Grit. “Reading ‘Pete the Pony’ seven times in a row was as much as he could take. He’ll be back for the stew.”

Mentioning that little book was like a rag to a bull! PeggySue insisted on another reading session, this time with Gary, who soon had the book from memory. PeggySue was reciting it anyway. Eventually bath-time arrived and the big girls helped with Tommy, Teddy and PeggySue while Cleo attended to Max and Mathilda and speculated on how they would cope with the additional new set of twins scheduled for around Easter. Gary laid the table and opened the door to Dorothy when she arrived bearing a large home-made fruit tart that was still frozen and would need half an hour in the oven.

“You shouldn’t!” said Gary, meaning that she should always bring some of her baking. Dorothy’s baking was renowned. The donuts – or what was left of them - would do for breakfast.

Lottie went home to next door to see how her Daddy was getting on. He was laid up with flu for the weekend. Charlie and Dorothy helped to feed the infants, Gary helped in the kitchen by opening a bottle of wine, Roger turned up still yawning and soon they were all sitting round the dining table in front of the steaming casserole.

“I’ll buy you a bigger dining-table as my moving house present,” said Grit. “It’s bit like eating on a train here, all squashed up, elbow on elbow. With your expanding family you’ll have to expand the furnishings. You can’t eat everything just with a spoon.”

“I’ll finance some matching chairs,” said Roger. “How’s the move going?”

“Pavel the handyman and his family are moving in tomorrow with the wallpaper and paint,” said Gary.

“And I’m moving the contents of my office there next weekend so I would be glad of help,” said Cleo.

“That depends on how many felons we nail, Cleo,” said Gary looking pointedly at Dorothy. “I’m sure that Dorothy has something to say about that.”

“You guessed, didn’t you?”

“From what Cleo told me it’s more than just a guess.”

“We did so want to keep the cops out of it.”

“Which cops?” asked Gary.

“I sensed that something remained unsaid at our meeting, Dorothy,” said Cleo.

“How about first revealing the bit you do know about, Cleo?” said Gary.

“I’ll explain,” said Dorothy. “You see, Margot caught Peel and Barclay in flagranti in the library!”

 “Why the library? The place is full of bedrooms.”

“I didn’t ask,” said Dorothy. “Margot would not have known, would she?”

“Unless she was doing a bit of snooping,” said Grit.

“What’s an inflagranti, Daddy? That’s not Spanish! I never heard that in Spain.”

Since Charlie had taken the facts of life beyond the bees and birds at school, Gary felt bound to explain the Italian term.

“That’s when you discover two people….”

“…having it off?” said Charlie.

“Well, yes. In so many words…” said Gary to the amusement of all present.

“Don’t be embarrassed, folks!” said Charlie. “I know all about it and I’m going to watch TV now.”

“Use the headphones please, Charlie,” said Cleo. “We aren’t going to expose any more in flagrantis, but we can do without the dialogue in whatever programme you are planning to watch.”

“I could have a TV in my room at the villa,” said Charlie.

“You could, but you won’t,” said Gary.

Charlie smiled the smile that said she had made up her mind and Gary was no match for it, before finding a TV programme she was allowed to watch and fixing the headphones on. Then she sprawled on the only armchair there was room for in the little sitting room part of the cottage and took no further notice of the grownups.

“You’ve more or less lost control, Gary,” said Roger.

“Yes. He has,” shouted Charlie.

“I’ll buy some more efficient headphones,” retorted Gary loudly. “Now where were we?”

“In flagranti,” called Charlie, and that made them all laugh again. Charlie’s timing was perfect.

“Part of our discussion at the bakery concerned who had a hold over whom,” said Dorothy in a low voice. “Mrs Peel is approaching 50. Margot said that Mr Barclay usually went off with the assistant waitresses who were often still at school during the week, so he must have had an axe to grind.”

“What conclusion did you reach?” Roger asked.

“That he had a hold over her,” said Dorothy.

“If she forced sex on him surely it was the other way round,” said Grit.

“There was no evidence of a struggle,” said Dorothy. “Margot would have said so. We don’t know who got whom into that situation, Grit,” said Dorothy.

“They were probably in it by appointment,” said Cleo.

“The point is that if she had a hold over him he could have sacked her or bought her off,” said Cleo. “I don’t suppose keeping her silent would have been a problem. Money talks.”

“Of course, everyone has a past,” said Dorothy.

“Including Mrs Peel,” said Gary.

“That’s what you have to find out,” said Dorothy.

“I agree,” said Roger. “There’s no point in speculating if you don’t know the facts about that relationship.”

“You could put Nigel onto it, Gary,” said Cleo.

“Why is the Peel woman so important?” Grit asked.

“Because she is a candidate for Mr Barclay’s violent death,” said Dorothy.

“But she slept with him!” said Grit.

“Maybe she had to,” said Cleo. “That’s the whole point Grit. Revenge!”

“In that case, she must have decided that she would be better off if he were out of the way,” said Dorothy.

“How did she do it, then?” Roger asked. “She can’t have thrown the man into that tank unless he was unconscious, and even then she would not have the strength on her own, so she would have to have an accomplice. And if he was unconscious, how did he get up the ladder?”

“There is a solution to that problem,” said Dorothy. “He was in the habit of climbing the fixed ladder rungs to the top of the big wine tanks, opening the lid and looking inside to inspect the level of the wine, Mrs Peel once said. She could have crept unnoticed into the cellar close on Barclay’s heels but out of sight, waited until he started to climb the ladder he seems to have kept nearby for that purpose. She simply climbed up after him. He would be too intent on getting up that ladder to look down. She got as far up as she needed to, grabbed him by the feet and tipped him in. He simply had to lose his balance and tumble head first into the tank, bumping his head in the fall. It was all over in a matter of seconds.”

“Why didn’t you air this theory before?” said Gary.

“I did not know that they had a liaison or that she would have a strong enough motive to actually kill the man,” said Dorothy. “And it could have been an accident, couldn’t it? Did the post-mortem mention a bump on the head?”

“I’ll look,” said Cleo, going to her computer corner and opening her laptop to find Chris’s interim report.

“Half-healed scratch marks as if someone had been fighting him off and yes, a bruise on the top of his head,” she said.

“We’ll never know how the scratch marks got there unless told us by someone that he had been messing around with someone who did not relish his amorous approach,” said Dorothy, “but a bump on the head might indicate that he fell onto it in the wine after being tipped over.”

“He was not drowned, Dorothy,” said Gary.

“Then he died instantaneously,” said Dorothy. “The tank was three-quarters empty, wasn’t it, so there was nothing much to cushion his fall.”

“We’ll check that theory. I expect Chris will have something to say!” said Gary, wondering why any of them had decided that Dorothy should retire.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“To tell the truth, no, Dorothy,” said Gary.

“So what about what Vera told you at the OAP home?” said Cleo.

“Oh that,” said Dorothy enigmatically. “It has nothing to do with Barclay, as far as I know.”

“Spit it out!” said Gary. “Let me be the judge of that!”

“Yes, spit it out,” came an echo from the direction of the TV.

“What makes you think I have something relevant up my sleeve?” said Dorothy.

“Well, do you?” said Cleo. “You just said that you haven’t, but we are not convinced.”

“I don’t think I should break Vera’s confidence.”

“You’ll have to since it’s probably criminal not to,” said Gary.

“Don’t be so harsh with Dorothy,” said Roger. “You can see that she’s having a battle with her conscience.”

“Thank you Roger. I am.”

“Come on, Dorothy! It’s not official here and I think you should share whatever it is,” said Gary.

After due thought, Dorothy proceeded to explain about the shop-lifting gang.

“Well, well. Little old pensioners playing a gangster game. That really takes the biscuit,” said Gary.

“Don’t spoil it for them, will you?” said Dorothy.

“Spoil?” said Gary. “They are criminals.”

“They donate their spoils to a charity shop if Mr Formby didn’t buy it from them.”

“It’s stolen property, Dorothy. That’s acting like Robin Hood, and he is a fictional character. You can’t do that! And selling stolen goods is also a crime, but we can’t get Mr Formby on that.”

“I should not have told you that much, Gary.”

“Do you mean that there’s more?”

“Well, Margot invited Vera to the next outing and it’s tomorrow.”

”Tomorrow? We’ll get them,” said Gary.

“You can’t do that,” said Dorothy. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

Dorothy was distressed, partly because she had betrayed a confidence and partly because she knew that she had done the right thing.

“Please don’t arrest Vera,” said Dorothy as she got up to leave. “I made her promise to back out, but I’m not sure if she will.”

“I’ll walk you home, Dorothy,” said Gary, “then we can discuss the matter further.”

***

“OK, Sheriff. What have you decided?” Cleo asked later as they cleaned up the kitchen after Grit and Roger had left for a jazz club session and Charlie had finally gone to bed.

“I’ll back off for the time being if Dorothy makes sure that Vera does not get mixed up in it,” said Gary.

“I’m sure that’s how she feels, too,” said Cleo. “Maybe it was not such a good idea to let Vera loose on Pensioner’s Paradise.”

“I don’t agree, Cleo. She has moved us on in the Barclay case already, hasn’t she?”

“If it’s all more than just a theory.”

“Did you notice how animated Dorothy was?” said Gary. “No sign of retirement there.”

“Dorothy always needs a challenge,” said Cleo. “The problem is that if there isn’t one, she invents one.”

“I’ll get Nigel onto Mrs Peel first thing,” said Gary. “Can we go to bed while the going’s good?”

“I think we should,” said Cleo.

So they did.