Page 82 of Marble Hall Murders

He was holding an entire plant with spiky dark green leaves and mauve flowers shaped like hoods – obviously the reason for the name. He was holding it out for Pünd to take. But the detective stepped away. ‘I would suggest you drop that immediately,’ he said. ‘You are certainly well informed about the toxic plants that grow in this garden, but even to touch this one can do you harm. Please leave it and clean your hands immediately on the grass.’

‘I’ve handled it lots of times,’ Cedric replied, but he did as Pünd had told him, first wiping his hands on damp grass, and then drying them on the sides of his shorts.

‘You would make an excellent detective,’ Pünd told him.‘But I would also like to test your powers of observation. Did you happen to be out in the garden on Sunday afternoon?’

Cedric nodded. ‘I was out here all afternoon. I went swimming and then I read myArchiecomic.’

‘Can you tell me who you saw?’

Cedric fell silent as he gathered his thoughts.

‘Mummy and Daddy had lunch with Uncle Harry and Aunt Judith,’ he said, at length. ‘Uncle Robert was with them. He’s not really my uncle, but that’s what I call him. He’s always nice to me and everyone likes him, except for his father, who’s always shouting at him. They had cold salmon and boiled potatoes, but they didn’t enjoy it very much. They were cross because Grandma gave all her money to Elmer. No-one likes Elmer any more because he wants to control them, and if they ever want any of the money, they’re going to have to ask him! Grandma left me lots of money in her will, but I’m not allowed to have it until I’m twenty-one.

‘Uncle Harry stayed in the garden after lunch, but only for a bit. Then he went out in his car. Uncle Robert came for a swim and he asked me what I was reading, but then he went inside too.’

‘Do you know what time that was?’ Pünd asked.

Cedric shook his head. ‘I didn’t have my watch because if it gets wet, it won’t work any more. Everybody else went inside. They always drink too much wine and then they go to sleep after lunch. I didn’t see anyone else except Bruno and he was too busy to speak to me.’

Pünd nodded. ‘You have done very well, Cedric, and you have been very helpful. But perhaps it would be best if you did not mention that we talked.’

‘I’d like to be a detective when I’m grown-up. Or a murderer. I think they both sound fun.’

‘I would recommend the former.’

Cedric ran off. Once again, Pünd and Fraser were alone.

‘So, Harry Lyttleton wasn’t here all afternoon,’ Fraser said.

‘He said he drove his wife to a lecture that began at five o’clock – which seems to leave little time to meet with Alice Carling in La Gaude, drive her to a beach and strangle her.’ Pünd walked a few steps in silence. ‘It is interesting that the child should have known exactly where to find monkshood. You know that it has another name, James.’

‘Don’t they call it wolfsbane?’

‘You have a good memory!’ Pünd beamed. It was Fraser, of course, who had typed the chapter on poisons in his book. ‘It is also called leopard’s bane and devil’s helmet, but chemists will know it as aconite.’

‘Is it related to aconitine?’

‘They are very much the same.’

‘So if Elmer Waysmith wanted to poison his wife, he didn’t need to go to a chemist at all.’ Fraser remembered the conversation he had been having with Pünd before Cedric interrupted them. ‘If it was Elmer Waysmith in the Rue Lafayette,’ he added.

Pünd stopped and sighed. ‘It had to be Elmer Waysmith. It should have been Elmer Waysmith. Who else but Elmer Waysmith had a motive to kill Lady Margaret Chalfont and perhaps also Alice Carling, if he had tricked her into helping him with his crime? And yet, James, there is one thing that persuades me that there is more to all this than we are seeing.We are up against a mind of great cunning and ingenuity and the killer has so far made just one mistake.’

‘And what was that?’

‘The empty bottle of shoe polish that was left in the bedroom of the Hôtel Lafayette. It tells us almost everything we need to know and soon, very soon, the puzzle will be solved.’

Pünd walked off. Fraser, as baffled as ever, followed.

The Second Anagram

I had to hand it to Eliot, he liked his cliffhangers. It was almost as if he was deliberately teasing me, reaching a point in the manuscript that made absolutely no sense at all and then jumping into his car to deliver it to me. What relevance could there possibly be in a bottle of shoe polish? Once again, it pointed to Elmer Waysmith as the killer. He had been on his way to the gallery and a smart lunch with his son and would have wanted to look his best. But why, then, would Pünd have made such a big deal about it? ‘It tells us almost everything we need to know.’ My biggest worry was that Eliot was an unknown quantity and he might not be quite as clever as I’d thought. I mean, the book was well written. I was enjoying it. But what if it turned out that Elmer Waysmith really had killed both Lady Chalfont and Alice Carling and that before leaving the Hôtel Lafayette he’d simply polished his shoes?

It’s what makes a murder mystery unique in the world of popular fiction. It may seem brilliant, but an awful lot depends on the last chapter. Only when you get there do you find out if the book was worth reading to begin with.

To give Eliot his due, I thought he’d come a long way since the ill-fated Dr Gee mysteries. I was still unsure about some of the Second World War references. The book was set ten years after VE Day, but Eliot had already referenced millions of deaths and concentration camps, and now we had Voltaire being blown up by a German hand grenade on the Maginot Line and a lengthy subplot about stolen art. I liked both these things – and in particular Voltaire’s growing friendship with Pünd – but I had to ask myself if fans of the first nine books would enjoy these extraneous details. Maybe that’s the difference between the editor and the author. The author lives inside the work. The editor has to keep half an eye outside it.

And then there was the setting. Were the South of France, Cap Ferrat and Saint-Paul-de-Vence helping the plot? I kept on stumbling over irrelevant details. Would you have been able to drink Orangina in Nice in 1955? Would they really have had commercial dustbins sitting on pavements like we see in cities now? The answers to both questions might well be yes, but even asking them somehow made it harder to lose myself in the reality of what was being described. I wondered about La Gaude too. Would it have been quite as populated as Eliot suggested, with a police station and a commercial cinema? Had he visited the place or was he still relying on Google Earth and Wikipedia?

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