Missing Susan Read online

  They turned to stare at a monocled man in a tuxedo, who had been introduced to them as the baron, director of the vampire film. He was berating a mousy old woman in rimless glasses and a shapeless brown dress. Apparently the woman was the company secretary, and the baron had caught her going through his desk. Alice MacKenzie dutifully made notes of the accusations. In a few minutes the scene was over and a horse-faced woman in a tweed suit approached them, shaking her head. “Those two will bear watching,” she said.

  “She’s a plant,” muttered Susan Cohen, when the woman was out of earshot. “Too Miss Marple to be real. She’s probably going to be the troupe’s detective.”

  “What about that tall blond man by the door?” asked Maud Marsh, looking elegant in a short dress of white satin. “He looks rather theatrical.”

  “I heard him talking to the secretary,” said Nancy Warren. “He says he’s playing the leading man in the film.”

  Martha Tabram, coolly elegant in a two-piece outfit of green silk, sipped her wine and eyed the door. “Do you suppose they’ll try to keep us in the hotel all weekend with this foolishness?” she asked. “I want to see Exeter again.”

  “I checked my schedule,” Elizabeth told her. “It says that after this we’re free until one o’clock tomorrow, when the baron is rehearsing a scene with his actors. Tomorrow morning our group is supposed to have a tour of the city at ten with one of Exeter’s volunteer guides.”

  “Good,” smiled Martha. “I may not return for the rehearsal.”

  “You might miss a murder,” Nancy warned her. “But it is tempting to shop, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” said Elizabeth. “Now that we haven’t got Rowan Rover barking at our heels every time we stop at a postcard rack.”

  The escape plans were interrupted by a stir in the crowd near the punch bowl. The buzz of voices suddenly fell silent. People began to back away from the baron’s mousy little secretary, who was coughing violently into her handkerchief. Thirty seconds later she dropped her wineglass and crumpled gracefully to the floor, unconscious. Kate Conway, her nurse’s instincts aroused, rushed to the body, but the baron waved her back. On cue, her fellow actors flocked around her. She was carried from the room, while the baron and his leading lady expressed their shock and dismay to the rest of the party.

  The Snoop Sister in the tweed suit reappeared. Her eyes sparkled with interest. “I am Miss Eylesbarrow,” she told them. “And I must say I find this very suspicious indeed! Did any of you see anyone tampering with that lady’s drink?”

  The mystery group members admitted that they hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Oh, but you must watch everyone very carefully!” the woman chided them. “You can’t trust anyone, you know!”

  “I hope she did it,” muttered Elizabeth, as the woman walked away.

  “Not a hope,” said Susan Cohen. “When it’s time to reveal the killer, she’ll run the confrontation scene. But she’s much too brash. They need somebody who’s gracious and charming to be the amateur sleuth.”

  “Like Angela Lansbury on Murder She Wrote?” asked Kate.

  Susan shook her head. “I was thinking more of Charlotte MacLeod.”

  Maud Marsh was ready to try her hand at solving the case. “What do you suppose she was killed with?” she asked the others. “Poison in the drink?”

  “So they would have us believe,” said Elizabeth. “We mustn’t forget that it’s 1928.”

  “This has been done in a lot of books,” said Susan, with the air of one beginning a lecture. “There’s The Mirror Cracked, and Murder in Three Acts. Of course, both those murders were done the same way…”

  Nancy Warren pretended to hear her husband calling and wandered away, followed by Martha Tabram, stifling a yawn.

  “Well, I guess the evening’s drama is over,” said Alice. “People are beginning to sit down to dinner. Let’s go and sit by the baron, shall we? He looks suspicious.”

  “As long as we don’t have to sit with Miss Eylesbarrow,” muttered Elizabeth. “I wish Rowan were here. We’d show him detective work!”

  Despite the watchful anticipation of the mystery weekend guests, no one pitched forward into his soup during the dinner. The members of the acting troupe stayed perfectly in character and chatted with the guests. The older leading man, Sir Herbert, seemed quite taken with pretty Kate Conway and he spent much of the meal urging her to go into film work, while she giggled prettily in response. Susan Cohen and Elizabeth MacPherson sat beside the actor playing the baron. In a German accent that was on the horizon of plausible, the movie mogul talked amiably with the young women, inquiring where they were from and what they planned to see on their tour of England.

  “You should come and see Minneapolis,” Susan Cohen told him. “It’s the most beautiful city. Very clean and crime-free.”

  “I have never had any interest in visiting the United States,” said the baron at his most Teutonic. “I have always wanted to go and see… Russia!”

  Elizabeth, remembering that it was supposed to be 1928, quipped, “Oh, I expect you will! Give it ten years or so.”

  The baron caught this reference to the Russian front and managed to stifle a laugh just in time to stay in character. He hastily changed the subject, telling them about the film company and the new talkie they were making, about his investments, and all the problems that he was having with his actors; but Elizabeth was having too much fun pretending that it was 1928 to pay much attention to any clues he might have offered. When he mentioned that he was contemplating buying a country house, she advised him to purchase a place called High Grove.

  “You will profit enormously from selling it again in fifty years’ time,” she assured him, approximating the year that Prince Charles acquired the property. “It will sell for a bundle!” What fun it was to parade her Anglophilia!

  She was pleased to note that the baron was as clever as he was talented. One fleeting expression showed that he had caught that reference, too, but he was quick to play dumb-and to resume less prophetic topics of conversation.

  When the meal was almost over, Mr. Scott, the handsome young leading man, excused himself from one of the other tables, announcing that he wanted to telephone the hospital to ask after Miss Jenkins, the secretary who had been taken ill. This sparked fresh speculation about the cause of her attack, but the baron refused to be drawn by Susan’s declaration that the woman had been poisoned.

  “I expect it was something she ate for lunch that didn’t agree with her,” he said.

  Alice MacKenzie made a note of his remark in her book.

  Ten minutes later Mr. Scott reappeared in the doorway looking properly, if not convincingly, stricken. “I’ve just had word from the hospital that poor Miss Jenkins is dead,” he lamented. “The doctors say that she was poisoned with arsenic!”

  A shocked silence fell over the assembly, broken two seconds later by Elizabeth MacPherson, who proclaimed, “She certainly was not.” This bit of unscheduled improvisation on a carefully rehearsed scenario left all the actors speechless.

  “I am a doctor of forensic anthropology,” said Elizabeth, more pompously than usual. “And I assure you that we can rule out arsenic as a cause of death.”

  “Why?” gasped the baron in spite of himself.

  “Because she just fell quietly to the floor and passed out,” Elizabeth informed him. “That is not what you do if you have been poisoned with arsenic. To begin with, she should have been puking her guts out-”

  Kate Conway nodded vigorously. “From both ends,” she said with medical authority.

  “Not before my dinner,” murmured Martha Tabram.

  Elizabeth continued. “She should have been having tonic and clonic convulsions, dizzy spells, and she would have been in incredible pain from the cramping of the stomach muscles. Also, death would not occur so quickly. If you look at the Maybrick case…” Elizabeth was thinking how pleased Rowan Rover would have been at this evidence of her detecting ability.<
br />
  The actors were thinking that a little arsenic in the wineglass of Miss MacPherson wouldn’t be amiss. Too bad they only had sugar cubes for poison.

  “This is such fun!” said Frances Coles happily. “I wonder what Rowan is doing this weekend without us?”

  In a picturesque village in Cornwall, the last pirate of Penzance was plotting his perfect crime. At eight o’clock Friday evening Rowan Rover had got off the train at Penzance and returned to his nonaquatic residence, the family home a few miles from the city.

  After an omelet supper, washed down with liberal quantities of Scotch, he had retired to his study to read his mail. There was the usual assortment of politely worded threats from his creditors, and a dutiful scrawl from his offspring Sebastian which managed to impart no information whatsoever, except a weather report for the vicinity of his school, which Sebastian always included in lieu of any information about his grades, his interests, or his most recent misdemeanors. The air mail letter bearing a Sri Lankan stamp began with the salutation Dear Insect. A salvo from a former wife. He tossed that one in the pile with the Inland Revenue forms and the Stop Smoking pamphlets he received regularly from meddling friends. A royalty statement from one of his publishers, written as usual in Sanskrit, contained a check for the beggarly sum of seven pounds, forty-three pence. You could hardly call it a royalty statement. Why couldn’t those buggers manage to sell the foreign rights to the bloodthirsty Americans, or sell the movie rights for a fat fee, so that he could make a living off crime without having to practice it!

  He resigned himself to the prospect at hand. Now that he had actually gotten to know the murder group, he could refine the general plans he had sketched out in London. He settled down in his leather chair and surrounded himself with piles of guidebooks and volumes on true crime.

  He decided that one good plan would not suffice. Since he was an amateur, he should not rely upon success on the first venture. Accidents were tricky. People often survived the most lethal situations, while others succumbed to a fall over a footstool. The more accidents he could arrange, the better his chances for eliminating… the victim. Now that she was a real person to him, he hesitated to think of her as Susan when planning her demise. A study of the itinerary suggested several possibilities to the hopeful murderer. Beginning on Sunday, when he would rejoin the group in Exeter, he hoped to schedule one potential accident per day.

  If that failed, there was always poison. But which one? Thallium was too slow and not completely reliable. Even the most doddering G.P. ought to be able to spot arsenic these days. Using lethal germs was out. He wasn’t such a fool as to risk contaminating himself. And the rest of the party, naturally, he amended, somewhat belatedly.

  The real question, of course, was what could he get unobtrusively. Most of the Victorian murderesses got into trouble when their names appeared on a chemist’s poison register. He wouldn’t make that mistake. An inventory of the medicine chest might prove helpful.

  He was mulling over the toxic possibilities of soaked cigarette butts (nicotine poisoning) when the telephone rang. He answered it at once, wondering what trouble the group had managed to get into on their own.

  “Is that you, Rover?” said a familiar Yorkshire voice. “Not playing nursemaid this weekend?”

  Rowan groaned to disguise the fact that he was moderately glad to hear from his fellow crime writer Kenneth O’Connor. Although O’Connor could be a nuisance-always coming unexpectedly to London and wanting to stay on the boat, when Rowan was planning to use it to entertain more nubile companions-he did have the virtue of being the only other crime expert of Rowan’s acquaintance who did not earn his living as a policeman. All the other crime historians had nasty suspicious minds which came of dealing with an unsavory element of society day after day in their police work. If Rowan asked them about a poison and then someone on his tour went and died of it, they might jump to the most uncomplimentary conclusions about his own character and motives. Even a perfectly executed accident after such a conversation with them might arouse suspicion. O’Connor, though, was usually too wrapped up in book deadlines and new projects to care who poisoned whom socially. Rowan decided that he could use a second opinion and Kenneth O’Connor was the ideal person to provide it.

  “Good evening, Kenneth,” he said pleasantly. “I’ve just had a nice royalty statement on my third book. How are things with you?”

  “Chaotic, as usual. I wanted to know if you’re going to be using your boat this week. I have to go to London to meet with those maniacs at the film studio-”

  “And you infinitely prefer my hospitality to paying hotel rates?”

  “I particularly enjoy your hospitality when you’re not there to dispense it in person, Rowan.”

  “Well, as long as you’ve called, I have one or two questions for you.”

  “I take it that this means I get the boat?”

  “Yes, but if you put any more cigarette burns in the seat cushions, I’ll be using you for an anchor in future. Now-first question: do you know where Constance Kent lived?”

  “Rode,” said Kenneth O’Connor without a moment’s pause. “Do I win a prize?”

  “A box of chocolates from Christiana Edmunds,” snapped Rowan. A laugh from the other end of the phone told him that Kenneth recognized the name of nineteenth-century Brighton’s lovelorn lady poisoner. “Everybody knows Constance Kent lived near Rode, Kenneth. We want to know if the house is still standing. Can it be seen from the road? One of my tourists wants to go there.”

  “I’ll see if I can find out for you. When will you be home again?”

  “Monday night. There’s one other matter.”

  “Yes?”

  “One of the group fancies she’s a mystery novelist,” he lied. “Can you recommend a good poison?”

  The next morning dawned sunny and warm, a fact observed by the mystery tour members at varying times between six and nine o’clock, when they either stumbled groggily or sprinted happily into the hotel dining room for breakfast. By ten o’clock everyone was fed and armed with sweaters, comfortable walking shoes, and credit cards, ready for an enlightening tour of Exeter.

  Alice MacKenzie observed that for the first time on the tour, Elizabeth MacPherson was also carrying a pen and notebook. “Are you especially interested in Exeter?” she asked.

  “It is Saturday morning,” said Elizabeth cryptically. “And Rowan is not within a hundred miles of here.”

  A tiny and earnest-looking woman wearing a red blazer met them in the hotel foyer and introduced herself as Mrs. Lacey, their city guide. She captured Elizabeth’s attention at once by explaining that the hotel parking lot had been built on top of an old city plague pit. Elizabeth was still staring down wistfully at an immovable expanse of asphalt when the less ghoulish members of the party moved along toward the remains of the old city wall, just behind the hotel. As yet, she had written nothing in her notebook.

  As they walked down the narrow lane that ended beside the cathedral green, Mrs. Lacey pointed out the well-preserved medieval houses, still in use, and began her recital of city history, beginning with the Roman occupation in 55 A.D.

  “We will end our tour with the cathedral,” she explained as she led them past the West Front, with its beautiful carved Image Screen of saints. “It is within sight of your hotel and I am sure that you can all find your way back from there. Just now we will go to another quaint old street, where the BBC filmed some scenes in one of its Dickens dramatizations.”

  This television reference set Susan off on a litany of her favorite British imports, and it took them another block and a half to shut her up.

  As they walked through the bustling streets, Mrs. Lacey pointed out historic buildings, mentioning that the city was home to Sir Walter Raleigh, and that Queen Henrietta, wife of Charles I, had been sent here for safety during the Civil War. (Susan’s response in kind left the guide silently wondering who Hubert Humphrey was.)

  “There was once a statue of Henry VII,
but it was destroyed in the bombing in World War II. The statue was in honor of Henry’s entry into Exeter in 1497, after the city had withstood a siege by the pretender Perkin Warbeck.”

  “The statue was never restored?” asked Martha Tabram, who probably chaired similar civic committees in Vancouver.

  “Well, there is another statue of Henry,” said Mrs. Lacey. “I wouldn’t call it a restoration.” With some misgivings she pointed to a fiberglass image of a knight in armor on the façade of a department store.

  Susan Cohen spoke up. “In Minneapolis we have an outdoor sculpture garden that has an enormous red cherry poised on the end of a giant spoon. It’s called the Spoonbridge, and it’s about twenty feet tall!”

  Gravely the guide looked up at the fiberglass likeness of the first Tudor monarch. “Well,” she conceded, “I suppose it could be worse at that.”

  They continued their walk through the crowded streets past the ruins of a church destroyed by Luftwaffe bombing and into a newer-looking part of the city, all built on the sites of the historic ones lost in the war. Finally they came to Princess Elizabeth Square, an open promenade lined with shops, newly constructed after World War II to replace the buildings destroyed by enemy bombing. “The present queen-Princess Elizabeth she was then-came down and dedicated the square as the first step toward the rebuilding of Exeter.”

  During this part of the tour, Susan Cohen had little to contribute by way of comparison with her hometown, since Minneapolis had never been bombed by enemy forces. (Though certain members of the party were beginning to wish that it had.)

  Elizabeth was scribbling furiously in her notebook, adding diagrams and arrows to her text. Alice leaned over to catch a glimpse of the writing, but she was unable to decipher it. The tour proceeded at a brisk pace, without shopping breaks, and without backtracking. Mrs. Lacey was a wealth of information on historic buildings, medieval celebrities, and dates. She said very little about the mercantile aspects of the city, past or present.

  Nearly an hour later the group stood once again at the west front of Exeter Cathedral, arriving there by a circular route that did not involve the retracing of their previous paths. Elizabeth’s note-taking had been steady throughout the latter part of the excursion, although Alice had been unable to determine any correlation between the guide’s remarks and the fervor of Elizabeth’s note-taking.