‘Clutching at Straws’ 
RUTH RENDELL

OFFICER: Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford 
FORCE: Kingsmarkham Police, Sussex 
TIME: 1979

CASES: ‘From Doon with Death’ (1964), ‘Some Lie and Some Die’ (1973), ‘Death Notes’ (1981), ‘Kissing The Gunner’s Daughter’ (1992) etc.

PROFILE: Comfortably married with two grown-up daughters, Chief Inspector Reg Wexford is in late middle age and while undoubtedly dedicated to his job maintains strong interests outside the Force. He is an intensely domesticated man and close to his wife, Dora, who often provides a respite and ready ear when he wants to escape from the ugliness of a murder enquiry. Described as rather wrinkled and ungainly in appearance, and bulky despite regular bouts of dieting, he has small eyes and curiously shaped, three-cornered ears. A highly moral officer who clings to strong and decent values, Wexford is noted for his tolerance and interest in people, their faults and weaknesses and what makes them commit murder. The Chief Inspector is also never lost for a quotation to offer at any appropriate moment-all drawn from the books which provide another of his off-duty diversions. Apart from the support of his family, Wexford derives a great deal from his strait-laced but determined assistant, Detective Inspector Michael Burden, who is some twenty years his junior.

CREATOR: Ruth Rendell (b. 1930), who has made these two sensitive and complex policemen popular with a huge worldwide audience over the past thirty years, was a local newspaper journalist in West Essex before turning to crime writing and becoming a bestselling author with almost her first book. By Ruth’s own admission, Wexford is based on her father: an intellectual and highly moral man who similarly delighted in quoting from literature with all the erudition of a university don! Apart from the series of Kingsmarkham novels, she has also published a number of other books under the pen name of Barbara Vine which have been highly praised for their brilliant psychological insight. A number have been adapted for television in tandem with stories about CI Wexford, who has been continually played since 1990 by George Baker. ‘Clutching At Straws’ (1979) finds Wexford once again having to use all his powers of tolerance and insight into human nature to cope with the nasty insinuations of local gossip as he endeavours to get to the bottom of what initially seems like the perfectly natural death of a very old lady.

THE STORY:

They looked shocked and affronted and somehow ashamed. Above all, they looked old. Chief Inspector Wexford thought that in the nature of things a woman of seventy ought to be an orphan, ought to have been an orphan for twenty years. This one had been an orphan for scarcely twenty days. Her husband, sitting opposite her, pulling his wispy moustache, slowly and mechanically shaking his head, seemed older than she, perhaps not so many years the junior of his late mother-in-law. He wore a brown cardigan with a small neat darn at one elbow and sheepskin slippers, and when he spoke he snuffled. His wife kept saying she couldn’t believe her ears, she couldn’t believe it, why were people so wicked? Wexford didn’t answer that. He couldn’t, though he had often wondered himself.
‘My mother died of a stroke,’ Mrs Betts said tremulously. ‘It was on the death certificate, Dr Moss put it on the death certificate.’
Betts snuffled and wheezed. He reminded Wexford of an aged rabbit, a rabbit with myxomatosis perhaps. It was partly the effect of the brown woolly cardigan and the furry slippers, and partly the moustache and the unshaven bristly chin. ‘She was ninety-two,’ Betts said in his thick catarrhal voice. ‘Ninety-two. I reckon you lot must have got bats in the belfry.’
‘I mean,’ said Mrs Betts, ‘are you saying Dr Moss was telling an untruth? A doctor?’
‘Why don’t you ask him? We’re only ordinary people, the wife and me, we’re not educated. Doctor said a cerebral haemorrhage’-Betts stumbled a little over the words-‘and in plain language that’s a stroke.
That’s what he said. Are you saying me or the wife gave Mother a stroke? Are you saying that?’
‘I’m making no allegations, Mr Betts.’ Wexford felt uncomfortable, wished himself anywhere but in this newly decorated, paint-smartened house. ‘I am merely making inquiries which information received obliges me to do.’
‘Gossip,’ said Mrs Betts bitterly. ‘This street’s a hotbed of gossip. Pity they’ve got nothing better to do. Oh, I know what they’re saying. Half of them turn up their noses and look the other way when I pass them. All except Elsie Parrish, and that goes without saying.’
‘She’s been a brick,’ said her husband. ‘A real brick is Elsie.’ He stared at Wexford with a kind of timid outrage. ‘Haven’t you folk got nothing better to do than listen to a bunch of old hens? What about the real crime? What about the muggings and the break-ins?’
Wexford sighed. But he went on doggedly questioning, remembering what the nurse had said, what Dr Moss had said, keeping in the forefront of his mind that motive which was so much more than merely wanting an aged parent out of the way. If he hadn’t been a policeman with a profound respect for the law and for human life, he might have felt that these two, or one of them, had been provoked beyond bearing to do murder.
One of them? Or both? Or neither? Ivy Wrangton had either died an unnatural death or else there had been a series of coincidences and unexplained contingencies which were nothing short of incredible.

It was the nurse who had started it, coming to him three days before. Sergeant Martin brought her to him because what she alleged was so serious. Chief Inspector Wexford knew her by sight, had seen her making her calls, and had sometimes wondered how district nurses could endure their jobs, the unremitting daily toil, the poor pay, the unsavoury tasks. Perhaps she felt the same about his. She was a fair pretty woman, about thirty-five, overweight, with big red hands, who always looked tired. She looked tired now, though she hadn’t long been back from two weeks’ holiday. She was in her summer uniform, blue and white print dress, white apron, dark cardigan, small round hat, and the stout shoes that served for summer and winter alike. Nurse Radcliffe, Judith Radcliffe.
‘Mr Wexford?’ she said, ‘Chief Inspector Wexford? Yes. I believe I used to look in on your daughter after she’d had a baby. I was doing my midwifery then. I can’t remember her name but the baby’s was Benjamin.’
Wexford smiled and told her his daughter’s name and wondered, looking at the bland faded blue eyes and the stolid set of the neck and shoulders, just how intelligent this woman was, how perceptive and how truthful. He pulled up one of the little yellow chairs for her. His office was cheerful and sunny-looking even when the sun wasn’t shining, not much like a police station.
‘Please sit down, Nurse Radcliffe,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Martin’s given me some idea what you’ve come about.’
‘I feel rather awful. You may think I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.’
‘I shouldn’t worry about that. If I do I’ll tell you so and we’ll forget it. No one else will know of it, it’ll be between us and these four walls.’
At that she gave a short laugh. ‘Oh, dear, I’m afraid it’s gone much further than that already. I’ve three patients in Castle Road and each one of them mentioned it to me. That’s what Castle Road gossip is at the moment, poor old Mrs Wrangton’s death. And I just thought-well, you can’t have that much smoke without fire, can you?’
Mountains and molehills, Wexford thought, smoke and fire. This promised to be a real volcano. He said firmly, ‘I think you’d better tell me all about it.’
She was rather pathetic. ‘It’s best you hear it from someone professional.’ She planted her feet rather wide apart in front of her and leant forward, her hands on her knees. ‘Mrs Wrangton was a very old woman. She was ninety-two. But allowing for her age, she was as fit as a fiddle, thin, strong, her heart as sound as a bell. The day she died was the day I went away on holiday, but I was in there the day before to give her her bath-I did that once a week, she couldn’t get in and out of the bath on her own-and I remember thinking she was fitter than I’d seen her for months. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I came back from holiday and heard she’d had a stroke the next day.’
‘When did you come back, Nurse Radcliffe?’
‘Last Friday, Friday the sixteenth. Well, it’s Thursday now and I was back on my district on Monday and the first thing I heard was that Mrs Wrangton was dead and suggestions she’d been-well, helped on her way.’ She paused, worked something out on her fingers. ‘I went away June second, that was the day she died, and the funeral was June seventh.’
‘Funeral?’
‘Well, cremation,’ said Nurse Radcliffe, glancing up as Wexford faintly sighed. ‘Dr Moss attended Mrs Wrangton. She was really Dr Crocker’s patient, but he was on holiday too like me. Look, Mr Wexford, I don’t know the details of what happened that day, June second, not first-hand, only what the Castle Road ladies say. D’you want to hear that?’
‘You haven’t yet told me what she died of.’
‘A stroke-according to Dr Moss.’
‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Wexford dryly, ‘how one sets about giving someone a stroke. Would you give them a bad fright or push an empty hypodermic into them or get them into a rage or what?’
‘I really don’t know.’ Nurse Radcliffe looked a little put out and as if she would like to say, had she dared, that to find this out was Wexford’s job, not hers. She veered away from the actual death. ‘Mrs Wrangton and her daughter-that’s Mrs Betts, Mrs Doreen Betts-they hated each other, they were like cat and dog. And I don’t think Mr Betts had spoken to Mrs Wrangton for a year or more. Considering the house was Mrs Wrangton’s and every stick of furniture in it belonged to her, I used to think they were very ungrateful. I never liked the way Mrs Betts spoke about her mother, let alone the way she spoke to her, but I couldn’t say a word. Mr Betts is retired now but he only had a very ordinary sort of job in the Post Office and they lived rent-free in Mrs Wrangton’s home. It’s a nice house, you know, late Victorian, and they built to last in those days. I used to think it badly needed doing up and it was a pity Mr Betts couldn’t get down to a bit of painting, when Mrs Wrangton said to me she was having decorators in, having the whole house done up inside and out-‘
Wexford cut short the flow of what seemed like irrelevancies. ‘Why were the Bettses and Mrs Wrangton on such bad terms?’
The look he got implied that seldom had Nurse Radcliffe come across such depths of naivety. ‘It’s a sad fact, Mr Wexford, that people can outstay their welcome in this world. To put it bluntly, Mr and Mrs Betts couldn’t wait for something to happen to Mrs Wrangton.’ Her voice lingered over the euphemism. ‘They hadn’t been married all that long, you know,’ she said surprisingly. ‘Only five or six years. Mrs Betts was just a spinster before that, living at home with mother. Mr Betts was a widower that she met at the Over Sixties Club. Mrs Wrangton used to say she could have done better for herself-seems funny to say that about a woman of her age, doesn’t it?-and that Mr Betts was only after the house and her money.’
‘You mean she said it to you?’
‘Well, not just to me, to anybody,’ said Nurse Radcliffe, unconsciously blackening the dead woman to whom she showed such conscious bias. ‘She really felt it, I think she bitterly resented having him in the house.’
Wexford moved a little impatiently in his chair. ‘If we were to investigate every death just because the victim happened to be on bad terms with his or her relations-‘
‘Oh, no, no, it’s not just that, not at all. Mrs Betts sent for Dr Moss on May twenty-third, just four days after Dr Crocker went away. Why did she? There wasn’t anything wrong with Mrs Wrangton. I was getting her dressed after her bath and I was amazed to see Dr Moss. Mrs Wrangton said, I don’t know what you’re doing here, I never asked my daughter to send for you. Just because I overslept a bit this morning, she said. She was so proud of her good health, poor dear, never had an illness in her long life but the once and that was more an allergy than an illness.
‘I can tell you why he was sent for, Mr Wexford. So that when Mrs Wrangton died he’d be within his rights signing the death certificate. He wasn’t her doctor, you see, but it’d be all right if he’d attended her within the past two weeks, that’s the law. They’re all saying Mrs Betts waited for Dr Crocker to go away, she knew he’d never have accepted her mother’s death like that. He’d have asked for a post mortem and then the fat would have been in the fire.’
Nurse Radcliffe didn’t specify how, and Wexford thought better of interrupting her again. ‘The last time I saw Mrs Wrangton,’ she went on, ‘was on June first. I had a word with the painter as I was going out. There were two of them but this was a young boy, about twenty. I asked him when they expected to finish, and he said, sooner than they thought, next week, because Mrs Betts had told them just to finish the kitchen and the outside and then to leave it. I thought it was funny at the time, Mrs Wrangton hadn’t said a word to me about it. In fact, what she’d said was, wouldn’t it be nice when the bathroom walls were all tiled and I wouldn’t have to worry about splashing when I bathed her.
‘Mr Wexford, it’s possible Mrs Betts stopped that work because she knew her mother was going to die the next day. She personally didn’t want the whole house redecorated and she didn’t want to have to pay for it out of the money her mother left her.’
‘Was there much money?’ Wexford asked.
‘I’d guess a few thousands in the bank, maybe three or four, and there was the house, wasn’t there? I know she’d made a will, I witnessed it. I and Dr Crocker. In the presence,’ said Nurse Radcliffe sententiously, ‘of the legatee and of each other, which is the law. But naturally I didn’t see what its provisions were. Mrs Wrangton did tell me the house was to go to Mrs Betts and there was a little something for her friend Elsie Parrish. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you. Mind you, Mrs Parrish won’t have it that there could have been foul play. I met her in Castle Road and she said, wasn’t it wicked the things people were saying?’
‘Who is Elsie Parrish?’
‘A very nice old friend of Mrs Wrangton’s. Nearly eighty but as spry as a cricket. And that brings me to the worst thing. June second, that Friday afternoon, Mr and Mrs Betts went off to a whist drive. Mrs Parrish knew they were going. Mrs Betts had promised to knock on her door before they went so that she could come round and sit with Mrs Wrangton. She sometimes did that. It wasn’t right to leave her alone, not at her age. Well, Mrs Parrish waited in and Mrs Betts never came, so naturally she thought the Bettses had changed their minds and hadn’t gone out. But they had. They deliberately didn’t call to fetch Mrs Parrish. They left Mrs Wrangton all alone but for that young painter, and they’d never done such a thing before, not once.’
Wexford digested all this in silence, not liking it but not really seeing it as a possible murder case. Nurse Radcliffe seemed to have dried up. She slackened back in the chair with a sigh.
‘You mentioned an allergy?’
‘Oh, my goodness, that was about fifty years ago! Only some kind of hayfever, I think. There’s asthma in the family. Mrs Betts’s brother had asthma all his life, and Mrs Betts gets urticaria-nettle rash, that is. They’re all connected, you know.’
He nodded. He had the impression she had a bombshell yet to explode, or that the volcano was about to erupt. ‘If they weren’t there,’ he said, ‘how could either of them possibly have hastened Mrs Wrangton’s end?’
‘They’d been back two hours before she died. When they came back she was in a coma, and they waited one hour and twenty minutes before they phoned Dr Moss.’

‘Would you have signed that death certificate, then?’ said Wexford to Dr Crocker. They were in the bungalow that housed two consulting rooms and a waiting room. Dr Crocker’s evening surgery was over, the last patient packed off with reassurance and a prescription. Crocker gave Wexford rather a defiant look.
‘Of course I would. Why not? Mrs Wrangton was ninety-two. It’s ridiculous of Radcliffe to say she didn’t expect her to die. You expect everyone of ninety-two to die and pretty soon. I hope nobody’s casting any aspersions on my extremely able partner.’
‘I’m not,’ said Wexford. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more than for this to turn out a lot of hot air. But I do have to ask you, don’t I? I do have to ask Jim Moss.’
Dr Crocker looked a little mollified. He and the Chief Inspector were lifelong friends, they had been at school together, had lived most of their lives in Kingsmarkham where Crocker had his practice, and Wexford was head of the CID. But for a medical practitioner, no amount of friendship will excuse hints that he or one of his fellows have been negligent. And he prickled up again when Wexford said, ‘How could he know it was a stroke without a post mortem?’
‘God give me patience! He saw her before she was dead, didn’t he? He got there about half an hour before she died. There are unmistakable signs of stroke, Reg. An experienced medical man couldn’t fail to recognise them. The patient is unconscious, the face flushed, the pulse slow, the breathing stertorous with a puffing of the cheeks during expiration. The only possible confusion is with narcotic poisoning, but in narcotic poisoning the pupils of the eyes are widely dilated whereas in apoplexy or stroke they’re contracted. Does that satisfy you?’
‘Well, OK, it was a stroke, but aren’t I right in thinking a stroke can be the consequence of something else-of an operation, for instance, or in the case of a young woman, of childbirth, or in an old person even of bedsores?’
‘Old Ivy Wrangton didn’t have bedsores and she hadn’t had a baby for seventy years. She had a stroke because she was ninety-two and her arteries were worn out. The days of our age,’ quoted the doctor solemnly, ‘are threescore years and ten, and though men be so strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow. She’d reached fourscore years and twelve and she was worn out.’
Dr Crocker had been pacing up and down, getting heated, but now came to sit on the edge of his desk, a favourite perch of his. ‘A damn good thing she was cremated,’ he said. ‘That puts out of court all the ghastliness of exhumation and cutting her up. She was a remarkable old woman, you know, Reg. Tough as old boots. She told me once about having her first baby. She was eighteen, out scrubbing the doorstep when she had a labour pain. Indoors she went, called her mother to fetch the midwife, and lay down on her bed. The baby was born after two more pains, and the daughter came even easier.’
‘Yes, I heard there’s been another child.’ Wexford saw the absurdity of referring to someone who must necessarily be in his seventies as a child. ‘Mrs Betts has a brother?’ he corrected himself.
‘Had. He died last winter. He was an old man, Reg, and he’d been bronchial all his life. Seventy-four is old till you start comparing it with Mrs Wrangton’s age. She was so proud of her good health, boasted about never being ill. I used to drop in every three months or so as a matter of routine, and when I’d ask her how she was she’d say, I’m fine, Doctor, I’m in the pink.’
‘But I understand she’d had some illness connected with an allergy?’ Wexford was clutching at straws. ‘Nurse Radcliffe told me about it. I’ve been wondering if anything to do with that could have contributed to-?’
‘Of course not,’ the doctor cut in. ‘How could it? That was when she was middle-aged and the so-called illness was an asthmatic attack with some swelling of the eyes and a bit of gastric trouble. I fancy she used to exaggerate it the way healthy people do when they’re talking about the one little bit of illness they’ve ever had... Oh, here’s Jim, I thought I’d heard his last patient leave.’
Dr Moss, small, dark, and trim, came in from the corridor between the consulting rooms. He gave Wexford the very wide smile that showed thirty-two large white teeth which the Chief Inspector had never been able precisely to define as false, as crowns, or simply as his own. The teeth were rather too big for Dr Moss’s face which was small and smooth and lightly tanned. His small black eyes didn’t smile at all.
‘Enter the villainous medico,’ he said, ‘who is notoriously in cahoots with greedy legatees and paranoid Post Office clerks. What evidence can I show you? The number of my Swiss bank account? Or shall I produce the hammer, a crafty tap from which ensured an immediate subarachnoid haemorrhage?’
It is very difficult to counter this kind of facetiousness. Wexford knew he would only get more fatuous pleasantries, heavy irony, outrageous confessions, if he attempted to rebut any of it or if he were to assure Moss that this wasn’t what he had meant at all. He smiled stiffly, tapping his foot against the leg of Crocker’s desk, while Dr Moss elaborated on his fantasy of himself as corrupt, a kind of latterday William Palmer, poison-bottle-happy and ever ready with his hypodermic to gratify the impatient next-of-kin.
At length, unable to bear any more of it, Wexford cut across the seemingly interminable harangue and said to Crocker, ‘You witnessed her will, I understand?’
‘I and that busybody Radcliffe, that’s right. If you want to know what’s in it, the house and three thousand pounds go to Doreen Betts, and the residue to another patient of mine, a Mrs Parrish. Residue would have been about fifteen hundred at that time, Mrs Wrangton told me, but considering her money was in a building society and she managed to save out of her pension and her annuity, I imagine it’ll be a good deal more by now.’
Wexford nodded. By now Dr Moss had dried up, having run out, presumably, of subject matter and witticisms. His teeth radiated his face like lamps, and when his mouth was closed he looked rather ill-tempered and sinister. Wexford decided to try the direct and simple approach. He apologised.
‘I’d no intention of suggesting you’d been negligent, Dr Moss. But put yourself in my position-‘
‘Impossible!’
‘Very well. Let me put it this way. Try to understand that in my position I had no choice but to make inquiries.’
‘Mrs Betts might try an action for slander. She can count on my support. The Bettses had neither the opportunity nor the motive to do violence to Mrs Wrangton, but a bunch of tongue-clacking old witches are allowed to take their characters away just the same.’
‘Motive,’ said Wexford gently, ‘I’m afraid they did have, the straightforward one of getting rid of Mrs Wrangton who had become an encumbrance to them, and of inheriting her house.’
‘Nonsense.’ Momentarily the teeth showed in a white blaze. ‘They were going to get rid of her in any case. They would have had the house to themselves in any case. Mrs Wrangton was going into a nursing home.’ He paused, enjoying the effect of what he had said. For the rest of her days,’ he added with a touch of drama.
Dr Crocker shifted off the edge of the desk. ‘I never knew that.’
‘No? Well, it was you told her about a new nursing home opening in Stowerton, or so she said. She told me all about it that day Mrs Betts called me when you’d gone away. Some time at the end of May, it was. She was having the house decorated for her daughter and son-in-law prior to her leaving.’
‘Did she tell you that too?’ asked Wexford.
‘No, but it was obvious. I can tell you exactly what happened during that visit if it makes you happy. That interfering harpy, Radcliffe, had just been bathing her, and when she’d dressed her she left. Thank God. I’d never met Mrs Wrangton before. There was nothing wrong with her, bar extreme old age and her blood pressure up a bit, and I was rather narked that Mrs Betts had called me out. Mrs Wrangton said her daughter got nervous when she slept late in the mornings as she’d done that day and the day before. Wasn’t to be wondered at, she said, considering she’d been sitting up in bed watching the World Cup on television till all hours. Only Mrs Betts and her husband didn’t know that and I wasn’t to tell them. Well, we had a conspiratorial laugh over that, I liked her, she was a game old dear, and then she started talking about the nursing home-what’s it called? Springfield? Sunnyside?’
‘Summerland,’ said Dr Crocker.
‘Cost you a lot, that will, I said, and she said she’d got a good bit coming in which would die with her anyway. I assumed she meant an annuity. We talked for about five minutes and I got the impression she’d been tossing around this nursing home idea for months. I asked her what her daughter thought and she said...’
‘Yes?’ prompted Wexford.
‘Oh my God, people like you make one see sinister nuances in the most innocent remarks. It’s just that she said, “You’d reckon Doreen’d be only too glad to see the back of me, wouldn’t you?” I mean, it rather implied she wouldn’t be glad. I don’t know what she was inferring and I didn’t ask. But you can rest assured Mrs Betts had no motive for killing her mother. Leaving sentiment apart, it was all the same to her whether her mother were alive or dead. The Bettses would still have got the house and after her death Mrs Wrangton’s capital. The next time I saw her she was unconscious, she was dying. She did die, at seven-thirty, on June second.’
Both Wexford’s parents had died before he was forty. His wife’s mother had been dead twenty years, her father fifteen. None of these people had been beyond their seventies, so therefore Wexford had no personal experience of the geriatric problem. It seemed to him that for a woman like Mrs Wrangton, to end one’s days in a nursing home with companionship and good nursing and in pleasant surroundings was not so bad a fate. And an obvious blessing to the daughter and son-in-law whose affection for a parent might be renewed when they only encountered her for an hour or so a week.
No, Doreen Betts and her husband had no motive for helping Mrs Wrangton out of this world, for by retiring to Summerland she wouldn’t even make inroads into that three or four thousand pounds of capital. Her pension and her annuity would cover the fees. Wexford wondered what those fees would be, and remembered vaguely from a few years back hearing a figure of £20 a week mentioned in a similar connection. Somebody’s old aunt, some friend of his wife’s. You’d have to allow for inflation, of course, but surely it would cost no more than £30 week now. With the retirement pension at £18 and the annuity worth, say, another £20, Mrs Wrangton could amply have afforded Summerland.
But she had died first-of natural causes. It no longer mattered that she and Harry Betts hadn’t been on speaking terms, that no one had fetched Elsie Parrish, that Dr Moss had been called out to visit a healthy woman, that Mrs Betts had given orders to stop the painting. There was no motive. Eventually the tongues would cease to wag, Mrs Wrangton’s will would be proved, and the Bettses settle down to enjoy the rest of their lives in their newly decorated home.
Wexford put it out of his head, apart from wondering whether he should visit Castle Road and drop a word of warning to the gossips. Immediately he saw how impossible this would be. The slander would be denied, and besides, he hardly saw his function as extending so far. No, let it die a natural death-as Mrs Wrangton had.
On Monday morning he was having breakfast, his wife reading a letter just arrived from her sister in Wales.
‘Frances says Bill’s mother has got to go into a nursing home at last.’ Bill was Wexford’s brother-in-law. ‘It’s either that or Fran having her, which really isn’t on.’
Wexford from behind his newspaper, made noises indicative of sympathy with and support for Frances. He was reading a verbatim report of the trial of some bank robbers.
‘Ninety pounds a week,’ said Dora.
‘What did you say?’
‘I was talking to myself, dear. You read your paper.’
‘Did you say ninety pounds a week?’
‘That’s right. For the nursing home. I shouldn’t think Bill and Fran could stand that for long. It’s getting on for five thousand a year.’
‘But...’ Wexford almost stammered, ‘I thought a couple of years ago you said it was twenty a week for what’s-her-name, Rosemary’s aunt, wherever they put her?’
‘Darling,’ said Dora gently, ‘first of all, that wasn’t a couple of years ago, it was at least twelve years ago. And secondly, haven’t you ever heard of the rising cost of living?’
An hour later he was in the matron’s office of Summerland, having made no attempt to disguise who he was, but presenting himself as there to inquire about a prospective home for an aged relative of his wife’s. Aunt Lillian. Such a woman had actually existed, perhaps still did exist in the remote Westmorland village from which the Wexfords had last heard of her in a letter dated 1959.
The matron was an Irishwoman, Mrs Corrigan. She seemed about the same age as Nurse Radcliffe. At her knee stood a boy of perhaps six, and at her feet, playing with a toy tractor, was another of three. Outside the window three little girls were trying to coax a black cat from its refuge under a car. You might have thought this was a children’s home but for the presence of half a dozen old women sitting on the lawn in a half circle, dozing, muttering to themselves, or just staring. The grounds were full of flowers, mauve and white lilac everywhere, roses coming out. From behind a hedge came the sound of a lawnmower, plied perhaps by the philoprogenitive Mr Corrigan.
‘Our fees are ninety-five pounds a week, Mr Wexford,’ said the matron. ‘And with the extra for laundry and dry-cleaning, sure and you might say five thousand a year for a good round figure.’
‘I see.’
‘The ladies only have to share a room with one other lady. We bathe them once a week and change their clothes once a week. And if you could please see to it your aunt only had synthetic fabrics, if you know what I mean, for the lot’s popped in the washing machine all together. We like the fee a month in advance and paid on a banker’s order, if you please.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t please,’ said Wexford. ‘Your charges are more than I expected. I shall have to make other arrangements.’
‘Then there’s no more to be said,’ said Mrs Corrigan with a smile nearly equalling the candlepower of Dr Moss’s.
‘Just out of curiosity, Mrs Corrigan, how do your-er, guests meet your fees? Five thousand a year is more than most incomes would be equal to.’
‘Sure and aren’t they widows, Mr Wexford, and didn’t their husbands leave them their houses? Mostly the ladies sell their houses, and with prices the way they are today that’s enough to keep them in Summerland for four years or five.’

Mrs Wrangton had intended to sell her house, and she was having it redecorated inside and out in order to get a better price. She had intended to sell the roof over the Bettses’ head-no wonder she had implied to Dr Moss that Doreen Betts would be sorry to see the back of her. What a woman? What malevolence at ninety-two! And who could have said she wouldn’t have been within her moral as well as her legal rights to sell? It was her house. Doreen Wrangton might long ago have found a home of her own, ought perhaps to have done so, and as Doreen Betts she might have expected her husband to provide one for her. It is universally admitted to be wrong to anticipate stepping into dead men’s shoes. And yet what a monstrous revenge to have on an uncongenial son-in-law, a not always cooperative daughter. There was a subtlety about it that evoked Wexford’s admiration nearly as much as its cruelty aroused his disgust. It was a motive all right, and a strong one.
So at last he had found himself in Castle Road, in the Bettses’ living-room, confronting an elderly orphan and her husband. The room was papered in a silvery oyster colour, the woodwork ivory. He was sure that that door had never previously sported a shade lighter than chocolate brown, just as the hall walls had, until their recent coat of magnolia, been gloomily clothed in dark Lincrusta.
When the two of them had protested bitterly about the gossip and the apparent inability of the police to get their priorities right, Doreen Betts agreed without too much mutiny to answer Wexford’s questions. To the first one she reacted passionately.
‘Mother would never have done it. I know she wouldn’t, it was all bluff with her. Even Mother wouldn’t have been that cruel.’
Her husband pulled his moustache, slowly shuffling his slippered feet back and forth. His angry excitement had resulted in a drop of water appearing on the end of his nose. It hung there, trembling.
Doreen Betts said, ‘I knew she didn’t mean to go ahead with it when I said, “Can I tell the builders to leave the upstairs?” And she said, “I daresay.” That’s what she said, “I daresay,” she said, “I’m not bothered either way.” Of course she wouldn’t have gone ahead with it. You don’t even get a room to yourself in that place. Ninety-five pounds a week! They’ll put you in a bed at eight o’clock, Mother, I said, so don’t think they’ll let you sit up till all hours watching TV.’
‘Quite right,’ said Harry Betts ambiguously.
‘Why, if we’d known Mother meant to do a thing like that, we could have lived in Harry’s flat when we got married. He had a nice little flat over the freezer centre in the High Street. It wasn’t just one room like Mother went about saying, it was a proper flat, wasn’t it, Harry? What would we have done if Mother had done a thing like that? We’d have had nowhere.’ Her husband’s head-shaking, the trembling droplet, the fidgety feet, seemed suddenly to unnerve her. She said to him, distress in her voice, ‘I’m going to have a little talk to the officer on my own, dear.’
Wexford followed her into the room where Mrs Wrangton had slept for the last years of her life. It was on the ground floor at the back, presumably originally designated as a dining-room, with a pair of windows looking out on to a narrow concrete terrace and a very long, very narrow garden. No redecorations had been carried out here. The walls were papered in a pattern of faded nasturtiums, the woodwork grained to look like walnut. Mrs Wrangton’s double bed was still there, the mattress uncovered, a pile of folded blankets on top of it. There was a television set in this room as well as in the front room, and it had been placed so that the occupant of the bed could watch it.
‘Mother came to sleep down here a few years back,’ said Mrs Betts. ‘There’s a toilet just down the passage. She couldn’t manage the stairs any more except when nurse helped her.’ She sat on the edge of the mattress, nervously fingering a cage-like object of metal bars. ‘I’ll have to see about her walking frame going back, I’ll have to get on to the welfare people.’ Her hands resting on it, she said dolefully, ‘Mother hated Harry. She always said he wasn’t good enough for me. She did everything she could to stop me marrying him.’ Mrs Betts’s voice took on a rebellious girlish note. ‘I think it’s awful having to ask your mother’s consent to marry when you’re sixty-five, don’t you?’
At any rate, he thought, she had gone ahead without receiving it. He looked wonderingly at this grey wisp of a woman. Seventy years old, who talked as if she were a fairy princess.
‘You see, she talked for years of changing her will and leaving the house to my brother. It was after he died that the nursing-home business started. She quarrelled outright with Harry. Elsie Parrish was in here and Mother accused Harry in front of her of only marrying me to get this place. Harry never spoke a word to Mother again, and quite right too. I said to Mother, “You’re a wicked woman, you promised me years ago I’d have this house and now you’re going back on your word. Cheats never prosper,” I said.’
The daughter had inherited the mother’s tongue. Wexford could imagine the altercations, overheard by visitors, by neighbours, which had contributed to the gossip. He turned to look at the framed photograph on a mahogany tallboy. A wedding picture, circa 1903. The bride was seated, lilies in her lap under a bolster of a bosom hung with lace and pearls. The bridegroom stood behind her, frock coat, black handlebar moustache. Ivy Wrangton must have been seventeen, Wexford calculated, her face plain, puffy, young, her figure modishly pouter pigeon-like, her hair in that most unflattering of fashions, the cottage loaf. She had been rather plump then, but thin, according to Nurse Radcliffe, in old age.
Wexford said quietly, apparently idly, ‘Mrs Betts, why did you send for Dr Moss on May twenty-third? Your mother wasn’t ill. She hadn’t complained of feeling ill.’
She held the walking frame, pushing it backwards and forwards. ‘Why shouldn’t I? Dr Crocker was away. Elsie came in at nine and Mother was still asleep, and Elsie said it wasn’t right the amount she slept. We couldn’t wake her, though we shook her, we were so worried. I wasn’t to know she’d get up as fit as a flea ten minutes after I’d phoned for him, was I?’
‘Tell me about the day your mother died, Mrs Betts, Friday, June second,’ he said, and it occurred to him that no one had yet told him anything much about that day.
‘Well...’ Her mouth trembled and she said quickly, ‘You don’t think Harry did anything to Mother, do you? He wouldn’t, I swear he wouldn’t.’
‘Tell me about that Friday.’
She made an effort to control herself, clenching her hands on the metal bar. ‘We wanted to go to a whist drive. Elsie came round in the morning and I said, if we went out would she sit with Mother, and she said, OK, of course she would if I’d just give her a knock before we left.’ Mrs Betts sighed and her voice steadied. ‘Elsie lives two doors down. She and Mother had been pals for years and she always came to sit with her when we went out. Though it’s a lie’-her old eyes flashed like young ones-‘to say we were always out. Once in a blue moon we went out.’
Wexford’s eyes went from the pudding-faced girl in the photograph, her mouth smug and proud even then, to the long strip of turfed-over garden-why did he feel Betts had done that turfing, had uprooted flowers?-and back to the nervous little woman on the mattress edge.
‘I gave Mother her lunch and she was sitting in the front room, doing a bit of knitting. I popped down to Elsie’s and rang her bell but she can’t have heard it, she didn’t come to the door. I rang and rang and I thought, well, she’s gone out, she’s forgotten and that’s that. But Harry said, Why not go out just the same? The painter was there, he was only a bit of a boy, twenty, twenty-two, but he and Mother got on a treat, a sight better than she and I ever did, I can tell you. So the upshot was, we went off and left her here with the painter-what was he called? Ray? Rafe? No, Roy, that was it, Roy-with Roy doing the hall walls. She was OK, fit as a flea. It was a nice day, so I left all the windows open because that paint did smell. I’ll never forget the way she spoke to me before I left. That was the last thing she ever said to me. “Doreen,” she said, “you ought to be lucky at cards. You haven’t been very lucky in love.” And she laughed and I’ll swear Roy was laughing too.’
You’re building an edifice of motives for yourself, Mrs Betts, reflected Wexford. ‘Go on,’ was all he said.
She moved directly into hearsay evidence, but Wexford didn’t stop her. ‘Roy closed the door to keep the smell out, but he popped in a few times to see if Mother was all right. They had a bit of a chat, he said, and he offered to make her a cup of tea but she didn’t want any. Then about half-past three Mother said she’d got a headache-that was the onset of the stroke but she didn’t know that, she put it down to the paint-and would he fetch her a couple of her phenacetins from the bathroom. So he did and he got her a glass of water and she said she’d try and have a sleep in her chair. Anyway, the next thing he knew she was out in the hall walking with her walking frame, going to have a lay-down on her bed, she said.
‘Well, Harry and me came in at five-thirty and Roy was just packing up. He said Mother was asleep in her bed, and I just put my head round the door to check. She’d drawn the curtains.’ Mrs Betts paused, then burst out, ‘To tell you the honest truth, I didn’t look too closely, I thought, well thank God for half an hour’s peace to have a cup of tea in before she starts picking on Harry. It was just about a quarter to seven, ten to seven, before I went in again. I could tell there was something going on, the way she was breathing, sort of puffing out her cheeks, and red in the face. There was blood on her lips.’ She looked fearfully at Wexford, looked him in the eye for the first time. ‘I wiped that clean before I called the doctor, I didn’t want him seeing that.
‘He came straight away. I thought maybe he’d call an ambulance but he didn’t. He said she’d had a stroke and when people had strokes they shouldn’t be moved. We stayed with her-well, doctor and I stayed with her-but she passed away just before half-past.’
Wexford nodded. Something about what she had said was wrong. He felt it. It wasn’t that she had told a lie, though she might well have done so, but something else, something that rang incongruously in that otherwise commonplace narrative, some esoteric term in place of a household word... He was checking back, almost there, when a footstep sounded in the hall, the door opened, and a face appeared round it.
‘There you are Doreen!’ said the face, which was very pretty considering its age. ‘I was just on my way to-oh, I beg your pardon, I’m intruding.’
That’s all right,’ said Mrs Betts. ‘You can come in, Elsie.’ She looked blankly at Wexford, her eyes once more old and tired. ‘This is Mrs Parrish.’

Elsie Parrish, Wexford decided, looked exactly as an old lady should. She had a powdery, violet-cashew, creamy smell, which might equally well have been associated with a very clean baby. Her legs were neat and shapely in grey stockings, her hands in white gloves with tiny darns at the fingertips, her coat silky navy blue over blue flowery pleats, and her face withered rose leaves with rouge on. The bouffant mass of silver hair was so profuse that from a distance it might have been taken for a white silk turban. She and Wexford walked down the street together towards the shops, Elsie Parrish swinging a pink nylon string bag.
‘It’s wicked the way they gossip. You can’t understand how people can be so evil minded. You’ll notice how none of them is able to say how Doreen gave Ivy a stroke when she wasn’t even there.’ Mrs Parrish gave a dry satirical laugh. ‘Perhaps they think she bribed that poor young man, the painter, to give Ivy a fright. I remember my mother saying that fright could give you a stroke-an apoplexy, she called it-or too much excitement or drinking too much or overeating even.’
To his surprise, because this isn’t what old ladies of elegant appearance usually do or perhaps should do, she opened her handbag, took out a packet of cigarettes, and put one between her lips. He shook his head when the packet was offered to him, watched her light the cigarette with a match from a matchbook with a black shiny cover. She puffed delicately. He didn’t think he had ever before seen someone smoke a cigarette while wearing white gloves.
He said, ‘Why didn’t you go round and sit with Mrs Wrangton, that afternoon, Mrs Parrish?’
The day she died, you mean?’
‘Yes.’ Wexford had the impression she didn’t want to answer, she didn’t want to suggest anything against Doreen Betts. She spoke with care.
‘It’s quite true I’m getting rather deaf.’ He hadn’t noticed it. She had heard everything he said, in the open noisy street, and he hadn’t raised his voice. ‘I don’t always hear the bell. Doreen must have rung and I didn’t hear. That’s the only explanation.’
Was it?
‘I thought she and Harry had changed their minds about going out.’ Elsie Parrish put the cigarette to her lips between thumb and forefinger. ‘I’d give a lot,’ she said, ‘to be able to go back in time. I wouldn’t hesitate this time, I’d go round and check on Ivy whether Doreen had asked me or not.’
‘Probably your presence would have made no difference,’ he said, and then, ‘Mrs Betts had told the builders not to do any work upstairs-‘
She interrupted him. ‘Maybe it didn’t need it. I’ve never been upstairs in Ivy’s house, so I couldn’t say. Besides, when she’d sold it the new people might have had their own decorating ideas, mightn’t they?’
They were standing still now on the street corner, he about to go in one direction, she in the other. She dropped the cigarette end, stamped it out over-thoroughly with a high heel. From her handbag she took a small lacy handkerchief and dabbed her nostrils with it. The impression was that the tears, though near, would be restrained. ‘She left me two thousand pounds. Dear Ivy, she was so kind and generous. I knew I was to have something, but I didn’t dream as much as that.” Elsie Parrish smiled, a watery, girlish, rueful smile, but still he was totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘I’m going to buy a car.’
His eyebrows went up.
‘I’ve kept my licence going. I haven’t driven since my husband died and that’s twenty-two years ago. I had to sell our car and I’ve always longed and longed for another.’ She really looked as if she had, a yearning expression crumpling the roses still further. ‘I’m going to have my own dear little car!’ She was on the verge of executing a dance on the pavement. ‘And dear Ivy made that possible!’ Anxiously: ‘You don’t think I’m too old to drive?’
Wexford did, but he only said that this kind of judgment wasn’t really within his province. She nodded, smiled again, then whisked off surprisingly fast into the corner supermarket. Wexford moved more slowly and thoughtfully away, his eyes down. It was because he was looking down that he saw the matchbook, and then he remembered fancying he had seen her drop something when she got out that handkerchief.
She wasn’t in the shop. She must have left by the other exit into the High Street and now she was nowhere to be seen. Deciding that matchbooks were in the category of objects which no one much minds losing, Wexford dropped it into his pocket and forgot it.

‘You want Roy?’
‘That’s right,’ said Wexford.
The foreman, storekeeper, proprietor, whatever he was, didn’t ask why. ‘You’ll find him,’ he said, ‘doing the Snowcem on them flats up the Sewingbury Road.’
Wexford drove up there. Roy was a gigantic youth, broad shouldered, heavily muscled, with an aureole of thick curly fair hair. He came down the ladder and said he’d just been about to knock off for his lea break, anyway. There was a truckers’ cafe conveniently near. Roy lit a cigarette and put his elbows on the table.
‘I never knew a thing about it till I turned up there the next day.’
‘But surely when Mrs Betts came in the afternoon before, she asked you how her mother had been?’
‘Sure she did. And I said the truth, that the old lady had got a headache and asked for something for it and I’d given it her, and then she’d felt tired and gone in for a lay-down. But there was no sign she was dying. My God, that’d never have crossed my mind.’
A headache, Wexford reflected, was often one of the premonitory signs of cerebral haemorrhage. Roy seemed to read his thoughts, for he said quickly, ‘She’d had a good many headaches while I was in the place working. Them non-drip plastic-based paints have got a bit of a smell to them, used to turn me up at first. I mean, you don’t want to get thinking there was anything out of the way in her having an aspirin and laying down, guv. That had happened two or three times while I was there. And she’d shovel them aspirins down, swallow four as soon as look at you.’
Wexford said, ‘Tell me about that afternoon. Did anyone come into the house between the time Mr and Mrs Betts went out and the time they got back?’
Roy shook his head. ‘Definitely not, and I’d have known. I was working on the hall, see? The front door was wide open on account of the smell. Nobody could have come in there without me seeing, could they? The other old girl-Mrs Betts, that is-she locked the back door before she went out and I hadn’t no call to unlock it. What else d’you want to know, guv?’
‘Exactly what happened, what you and Mrs Wrangton talked about, the lot.’
Roy swigged his tea, then lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. ‘I got on OK with her, you know. I reckon she reminded me of my gran. It’s a funny thing, but everyone got on OK with her bar her own daughter and the old man. Funny old git, isn’t he? Gave me the creeps. Well, to what you’re asking, I don’t know that we talked much. I was painting, you see, and the door to the front room was shut. I looked in a couple of times. She was sitting there knitting, watching cricket on the TV. I do remember she said I was making a nice job of the house and it was a pity she wouldn’t be there to enjoy it. Well, I thought she meant she’d be dead, you know the way they talk, and I said, “Now come on, Mrs Wrangton, you mustn’t talk like that.” That made her laugh. She said, “I don’t mean that, you naughty boy, I mean I’m going into a nursing home and I’ve got to sell the place, didn’t you know?” No, I said, I didn’t, but I reckoned it’d fetch a packet, big old house like that, twenty thousand at least, I said, and she said she hoped so.’
Wexford nodded. So Mrs Wrangton had intended to go ahead with her plans, and Doreen Betts’s denial had either been purposeful lying to demolish her motive or a post mortem whitewashing of her mother’s character. For it had certainly been black hearted enough, he thought, quite an act it had been, that of deliberately turning your own daughter and her husband out of their home.
He looked back to Roy. ‘You offered to make her some tea?’
‘Yeah, well, the daughter, Mrs Betts, said to make myself and her a cup of tea if she wanted, but she didn’t want. She asked me to turn off the TV and then she said she’d got a headache and would I go up to the bathroom cupboard and get her aspirins? Well, I’d seen Mrs Betts do it often enough, though I’d never actually-‘
‘You’re sure she said aspirins?’ Quite suddenly Wexford knew what it was that had seemed incongruous to him in Mrs Betts’s description of her mother’s last afternoon of life. Doreen Betts had specified phenacetin instead of the common household remedy. ‘You’re sure she used that word?’ he said.
Roy pursed his mouth. ‘Well, now you mention it, I’m not sure. I reckon what she said was, my tablets or the tablets for my head, something like that. You just do say aspirins, don’t you, like naturally? I mean, that’s what everybody takes. Anyway, I brought them down, the bottle, and gave them to her with a glass of water, and she says she’s going to have a bit of shut-eye in her chair. But the next thing I knew she was coming out, leaning on that walking frame the welfare people give her. “I took four, Roy,” she says, “but my head’s that bad, I reckon it’s worse, and I’m ever so giddy.”
‘Well, I didn’t think much of that, they’re all giddy at that age, aren’t they? I remember my gran. She says she’s got ringing in her ears, so I said, “I’ll help you into your room, shall I?” And I sort of give her my arm and helped her in and she lay down on the bed with all her things on and shut her eyes. The light was glaring, so I pulled the curtains over and then I went back to my painting. I never heard another thing till Mrs Betts and the old boy come in at half-past five...’

Wexford closed Practical Forensic Medicine by Francis E. Camps and J. M. Cameron and made his way back to Castle Road. He had decided to discuss the matter no further with Mrs Betts. The presence of her husband, shuffling about almost silently in his furry slippers, his feet like the paws of an old hibernating animal, rather unnerved him. She made no demur at his proposal to remove from the bathroom cabinet the prescription bottle of painkilling tablets labelled: Mrs I. Wrangton, Phenacetin.
Evening surgery had only just begun. Wexford went home for his dinner, having sent two items away for fingerprint analysis. By eight-thirty he was back in the surgery building and again Dr Crocker had finished first. He groaned when he saw Wexford.
‘What is it now, Reg?’
‘Why did you prescribe phenacetin for Mrs Wrangton?’
‘Because I thought it suitable for her, of course. She was allergic to aspirin.’
Wrxrord looked despairingly at his friend. ‘Now hetells me. I’d rather gathered that. I mean, today I caught on, but you might have told me.’
‘For God’s sake! You knew. You said to me, “Nurse Radcliffe told me all about it.” Those were your words. You said-‘
‘I thought it was asthma.’
Crocker sat on the edge of his desk. ‘Look, Reg, we’ve both been barking up the wrong trees. There was asthma in Mrs Wrangton’s family. Mrs Betts has nettle rash, her brother was a chronic asthmatic. People with asthma or a family history of asthma are sometimes allergic to acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin. In fact, about ten per cent of such people are thought to have the allergy. One of the reactions of the hypersensitive person to aspirin is an asthmatic attack. That’s what Mrs Wrangton had when she was in her forties, that and haematemesis. Which means,’ he added kindly for the layman, ‘bringing up blood from an internal haemorrhage.’
‘OK, I’m not bone ignorant,’ “Wexford snapped, ‘and I’ve been reading up hypersensitivity to acetylsalicylic acid-‘
‘Mrs Wrangton couldn’t have had aspirin poisoning,’ said the doctor quickly. ‘There were never any aspirins in the house. Mrs Betts was strict about that.’
They were interrupted by the arrival of smiling Dr Moss. Wexford wheeled round on him.
‘What would you expect to be the result of-let me see-one point two grams of acetylsalicylic acid on a woman of ninety-two who was hypersensitive to the drug?’
Moss looked at him warily. ‘I take it this is academic?’ Wexford didn’t answer. ‘Well, it would depend on the degree of hypersensitivity. Nausea, maybe, diarrhoea, dizziness, tinnitus-that’s ringing in the ears-breathing difficulties, gastric haemorrhages, oedema of gastric mucosa, possible rupture of the oesophagus. In a person of that age, consequent upon such a shock and localised haemorrhages, I suppose a brain haemorrhage-‘ He stopped, realising what he had said.
‘Thanks very much,’ said Wexford. ‘I think you’ve more or less described what happened to Mrs Wrangton on June second after she’d taken four three-hundred-milligram tablets of aspirin.’
Dr Moss was looking stunned. He looked as if he would never smile again.
Wexford passed on an envelope to Dr Crocker.
‘Those are aspirins?’
Crocker looked at them, touched one to his tongue. ‘I suppose so, but-‘
‘I’ve sent the rest away to be analysed. To be certain. There were fifty-six in the bottle.’
‘Reg, it’s unthinkable there could have been a mistake on the part of the pharmacist, but just supposing by a one-in-a-million chance there was, she couldn’t have taken forty-four tablets of aspirin. Not even over the months she couldn’t.’
‘You’re being a bit slow,’ said Wexford. ‘You prescribed one hundred phenacetin, and one hundred phenacetin were put into that bottle at Eraser’s, the chemist’s. Between the time the prescription was made up and the day before, or a few days before, or a week before she died, she took forty tablets of phenacetin, leaving sixty in the bottle. But on June second she took four tablets of aspirin. Or, to put it bluntly, some time before June second someone removed those sixty tablets of phenacetin and substituted sixty tablets of aspirin.’
Dr Moss found his voice. ‘That would be murder.’
‘Well...’ Wexford spoke hesitantly. ‘The hypersensitivity might not have resulted in a stroke. The intent may only have been to cause illness of a more or less severe kind. Ulceration of the stomach, say. That would have meant hospitalisation for Mrs Wrangton. On the Welfare State. No exorbitant nursing-home fees to be paid there, no swallowing up of capital or selling of property. Later on, if she survived, she would probably have been transferred, again for free, to a geriatric ward in the same hospital. It’s well known that no private nursing home will take the chronically sick.’
‘You think Mrs Betts--?’ Dr Moss began.
‘No, I don’t. For two good reasons, Mrs Betts is the one person who wouldn’t have done it this way. If she had wanted to kill her mother or to make her seriously ill, why go to all the trouble of changing over sixty tablets in a bottle, when she had only to give Mrs Wrangton the aspirins in her hand? And if she had changed them, wouldn’t she, immediately her mother was dead, have changed them back again?’
‘Then who was it?’
‘I shall know tomorrow,’ said Wexford...

Dr Crocker came to him at his office in the police station.
‘Sorry I’m late. I just lost a patient.’
Wexford made sympathetic noises. Having walked round the room, eyed the two available chairs, the doctor settled for the edge of Wexford’s desk.
Yesterday,’ Wexford began, ‘I had a talk with Mrs Elsie Parrish.’ He Checked the doctor’s exclamation and sudden start forward. ‘Wait a minute, Len. She dropped a matchbook before we parted. It was one of those with a glossy surface that very easily takes prints. I had the prints on it and those on the phenacetin bottle compared. There were Mrs Betts’s prints on the bottle, and a set that were presumably Mrs Wrangton’s, and a man’s that were presumably the painter’s. And there was also a very clear set identical to those on the matchbook.
‘It was Elsie Parrish who changed those tablets, Len. She did it because she knew that Mrs Wrangton fully intended to retire to Summerland and that the first money to go, perhaps before the house was sold, would be the few thousands of capital that she and Doreen Betts were to share. Elsie Parrish had waited for years for that money, she wanted to buy a car. A few more years and if she herself survived it would be too late for driving cars. Besides, by then her legacy would have been swallowed up in nursing-home fees.’
‘A nice old creature like that?’ Dr Crocker said. ‘That’s no proof, her prints on the bottle. She’ll have fetched that bottle often enough for old Ivy.’
‘No. She told me she had never been upstairs in Ivy Wrangton’s house.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘I don’t suppose she saw it as murder. It wouldn’t seem like murder, or manslaughter, or grievous bodily harm, changing tablets in a bottle.’ Wexford sat down, wrinkled up his face. He said crossly, dispiritedly, ‘I don’t know what to do, Len. We’ve no way of proving Mrs Wrangton died of aspirin poisoning. We can’t exhume her, we can’t analyse “two handfuls of white dust shut in an urn of brass”. And even if we could, would we be so inhumane as to have a woman of-how old is Elsie Parrish?’
‘Seventy-eight.’
‘Seventy-eight up in court on a murder charge. On the other hand, should she be allowed to profit from her crime? Should she be permitted to terrorise pedestrians in a smart little Ford Fiesta?’
‘She won’t,’ said Crocker.
Something in his voice brought Wexford to his feet. ‘Why? What d’you mean?’
The doctor slid lightly off the edge of the desk. ‘I told you I’d lost a patient. Elsie Parrish died last night. A neighbour found her and called me.’
‘Maybe that’s for the best. What did she die of?’
‘A stroke,’ said Dr Crocker, and went.