Back in Hester’s study, Kit opened the top drawer of the desk and found the red leather address book under the spare spectacles. Under L for Ledger, written in black ink, was a direct London land line and a mobile number beside the name Clem Danvers (Crosswords).
Kit checked her watch: 6.40 p.m. On a Saturday evening, a section editor wouldn’t be in the office. She dialled the mobile number anyway, already preparing her apology.
It rang twice. “Clem Danvers.” A brisk, low woman’s voice, background rattle of a Tube train or a kitchen extractor fan.
“Ms Danvers, I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday evening. I’m Kit Lomax, Hester Vane’s niece.”
The briskness softened at once. “Kit. Oh, I’m so glad you called. I sent flowers to the solicitor’s office because I wasn’t sure if anyone was at the cottage. We are all gutted here. Forty years without a single missed Saturday.”
“That’s actually why I’m ringing,” Kit said, looking down at the newspaper on the blotter. “Today’s puzzle. Did someone in your office have to finish the last four clues for her?”
A short pause. “Finish them? Good heavens, no. Nobody here would dare touch a Magpie clue. Why?”
“Because 27 Across is an indirect anagram, 22 Down spells accommodate with one m, and 24 Down has no definition at all.”
Silence on the line for three full seconds. Then a sharp intake of breath. “Wait. What did you say about 22 Down?”
“It reads Accomodate in a little house, answer LODGE. One m.”
“Christ,” Clem said flatly. “My proof-reader was off with flu on Thursday and I ran the grid check myself on Friday morning. I only checked that the grid had 180-degree symmetry and that every answer matched the solution list she typed at the bottom. I didn’t parse the last four clues because… well, because it’s Magpie. In twelve years as editor I’ve never once found a technical fault in her copy.”
“When did she send it to you?”
“Tuesday night,” Clem said immediately. “Her email came in on the dot of 9.40 p.m., as always. You could set the Greenwich pips by Hester. Nine-forty every Tuesday evening, attached as a plain text file with the grid numbers and clues. Wait, are you saying she was already ill when she typed it?”
“Dr Amery thinks she died in her armchair on Tuesday evening,” Kit said slowly. “If the email arrived at 9.40, everyone’s assumed she was alive at her desk at 9.40.”
“Look, I’m at my sister’s in Clapham right now,” Clem said, her voice brisk again. “My work laptop is in my bag in the hall. Give me half an hour to boot into the mail server and pull the original message headers and the attachment. I’ll ring you back.”
Kit ended the call and stood in the chilly hallway.
If Hester had been having a cardiac episode or mild hypoxia at 9.30 p.m., as Simon and Graham believed, could she have typed accomodate with one m?
No. Even delirious patients on the post-op ward at St Jude’s didn’t suddenly misspell a word they had spelled correctly for seventy years, and Hester had once sent back a birthday card because the shop had printed it with a misplaced apostrophe. Whoever wrote 22 Down had typed accomodate with one m because they believed that was how it was spelled.
Kit walked back into the kitchen.
The strip light above the sink buzzed once before flickering on. She picked up the seven-day plastic pill organiser from the windowsill and carried it under the light.
She looked at Tuesday first.
Tuesday Morning: empty.
Tuesday Noon: empty.
Tuesday Evening: empty.
Hester had taken her evening medication, which she always took at eight o’clock with a glass of water before sitting down to read over her finished clues.
Kit shifted her gaze to the compartments for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Hester had filled the box every Sunday night for the week ahead. In each of the remaining Morning compartments sat a small, scored yellow tablet (furosemide 40 mg, water tablet) and a tiny oval blue tablet.
Kit knew that blue tablet by heart. She dispensed fifty packs of it every week at St Jude’s. Digoxin, 62.5 micrograms, the standard maintenance dose for an elderly patient with atrial fibrillation and impaired renal clearance. The 62.5-microgram strength was the small blue one; the stronger tablets were white.
Now Kit looked at the Wednesday Evening, Thursday Evening, and Friday Evening compartments.
Hester was only prescribed digoxin once a day, in the morning. Her evening compartment normally held only a single white 10 mg atorvastatin tablet for her cholesterol.
In Wednesday Evening, beside the oval white statin, sat four small, round, flat-faced white tablets.
In Thursday Evening sat three more of them.
Kit snapped open the plastic lid of Wednesday Evening and tipped one of the small round white tablets into the palm of her hand.
She held it six inches from her eyes under the fluorescent strip.
It was circular, biconvex, pure white, scored across the middle on one face, and stamped with the alphanumeric code DO25.
Digoxin. 250 micrograms.
Four times the strength of Hester’s blue 62.5-microgram tablet. And there were four of them in a single evening compartment: one full milligram of digoxin in a single dose, on top of her morning dose, in an eighty-one-year-old woman weighing less than nine stone with chronic kidney and heart failure.
If Hester had swallowed four or five of those in her Tuesday Evening compartment at eight o’clock, she would not have been typing at 9.40. Digoxin toxicity at that level causes nausea, visual halos, and then fatal ventricular arrhythmia within forty-five to sixty minutes. And to a GP arriving the next morning with no suspicion of foul play, a fatal arrhythmia in a patient with long-standing heart failure looks identical to natural death in an armchair.
Kit did not put the tablet back into the compartment. She fetched a clean glass jam jar from the draining board, tipped the white tablet inside without touching it further, screwed the lid on tight, and washed her hands at the sink.
Her heart was beating at roughly a hundred and ten beats a minute. She counted it automatically against the second hand of her watch, breathing out slowly until it dropped below ninety.
Check the batch. Check the source. Don’t jump.
Where does someone in Skelby get white 250-microgram digoxin tablets with an older generic imprint? You cannot buy digoxin over the counter. You cannot walk into a chemist and ask for a cardiac glycoside.
Either the person was prescribed 250-microgram digoxin themselves, or someone in their household had been.
Simon? Simon was fifty-five, flushed, heavy-drinking; hypertension maybe, ramipril or amlodipine, not high-dose digoxin.
Graham Pettifer? Seventy, thin, irritable; maybe he had a heart condition? And Graham’s car had been seen outside Hester’s gate at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening. And they had argued furiously at four.
Wait. Would Graham Pettifer, Fenwick of the Chronicle, who had just circled those four clues in red with genuine physical revulsion, ever write accomodate with one m?
Could Graham have written them badly on purpose, to disguise the fact that a rival crossword setter had faked the end of the puzzle?
Kit frowned. If Graham wanted to fake Hester’s last four clues so that everyone believed Hester was alive at 9.40 p.m., he would have imitated Hester’s style! He knew her style better than anyone alive! Writing four howling, amateurish blunders was the one thing guaranteed to make another crossword solver look twice at the puzzle.
Her phone buzzed on the pine table. Clem Danvers.
Kit snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Kit, I’ve got the raw message source right in front of me,” Clem said. She sounded wide awake now, all London sharpness. “You were right to ask. The email arrived in my inbox at 21:40:00 on Tuesday night. Right on the second.”
“On the second?”
“Zero-zero seconds. Which made me look at the X-Originating-Timestamp in the MIME headers. Hester used a webmail client on her laptop. The email wasn’t sent by a human clicking Send at 9.40. It was queued using the webmail Schedule Send button.”
Kit gripped the edge of the sink. “Does the header show when it was scheduled?”
“Yes. Creation timestamp on the MIME multipart is 20:47:19. Eight forty-seven p.m.”
“Eight forty-seven,” Kit repeated.
“Whoever typed those clues and attached the file did it at a quarter to nine, set the delivery timer for 9.40 p.m., Hester’s regular slot, and walked out. Why on earth would anyone do that?”
“Because at 9.40 p.m. they were somewhere else, making sure they were seen,” Kit said. “Thank you, Clem. Don’t delete that header.”
“Delete it? I’m printing three copies right now. Call me when you’ve spoken to the police.”
Kit put the phone down and walked straight back into the study.
Eight forty-seven p.m.
Hester took her evening pills at eight. By 8.30 she was dying or dead in her armchair in the sitting room. The killer was still in the cottage. Why didn’t he just leave at 8.30?
Because he saw the A3 pad on the study desk and the half-typed email open on the laptop screen. He knew Hester sent her Morning Ledger puzzle every Tuesday night at 9.40; everyone who knew Hester knew her Tuesday routine. If the puzzle didn’t arrive in London on Tuesday night, Clem Danvers would ring the cottage first thing Wednesday morning, and the police or the doctor would know Hester had collapsed before 9.40, right around the time the killer was in Kirkgate.
So the killer needed the puzzle to land in London at 9.40, while he was sitting in a pub or a restaurant with witnesses.
He looked at the laptop screen. Hester had typed out the grid solution and twenty-four of the twenty-eight clues. Four clues at the bottom were still blank because she had gone into the kitchen at eight to take her tablets and make tea before finishing them.
He couldn’t send a puzzle with four missing clues; the editor would ring up immediately. So between 8.30 and 8.47, seventeen minutes of sweating in the quiet study while Hester lay dead in the next room, he wrote the missing four clues himself from the grid answers on her pad.
Simon couldn’t have done it. Simon didn’t even know what a hidden word indicator or an anagram indicator was; he couldn’t have written twenty-four words of crosswordese to save his life.
Graham couldn’t have done it. Graham could have written four flawless Magpie clues in four minutes flat without breaking a sweat.
The person who wrote those four clues was someone who solved cryptic crosswords, who knew vaguely that clues used anagrams (Confused…) and hidden words (Inside…), but who had never set a puzzle in his life, didn’t know that indirect anagrams were forbidden, didn’t realise Inside September lacked a definition, and couldn’t spell accommodate.
I always finish Magpie on the 8.12 to Leeds on a Monday morning.
To accomodate the immediate settlement of funeral and parish expenses…
Martin Rook.
Kit looked down at the A3 pad on the desk.
Why would Martin Rook, respected high-street solicitor and holder of Hester’s power of attorney, murder an eighty-one-year-old client?
And why hadn’t Hester drawn her pencil magpie in the bottom corner of the grid?
Wait. Hester always drew the magpie the moment she finished filling the grid, before she even started writing the clues! Why had she left the corner blank? Because the grid wasn’t finished? No, every square of the fifteen-by-fifteen grid was filled in.
Kit pulled the captain’s chair back, sat down, and stared at the hand-drawn grid on the A3 pad.
When Hester taught nine-year-old Kit about grid construction, she had shown her a party trick that setters used when they wanted to slip a private joke past an editor.
A Nina, Katherine. Hidden in the unchecked letters, or down the diagonals, or round the perimeter. The solver who only looks at the individual clues never sees the wood for the trees.
Kit looked at 1 Across in the top left corner of the grid: ROOK.
She looked at the next answer along the top row, 3 Across: OFFICE.
Next along the top row, 6 Across: OBJECT.
Top right corner, 8 Down: KETTLE.
First letters of the four answers starting along the top border: R - O - O - K.
Kit’s pencil tip touched the paper, tracing clockwise down the right-hand border of the grid, taking the first letter of each word that started on the outer edge, then right-to-left along the bottom border, then up the left-hand border back to the top.
Top edge: ROOK · OFFICE · OBJECT · KETTLE: ROOK
Right edge: STOOLS · TIMBER · ORCHID · LODGE · EMBER: STOLE
Bottom edge: FALLOW · RED · ONION · MEAT: FROM
Left edge: MEDIC · EONS: ME
ROOK STOLE FROM ME.
Fifteen perimeter words. Fifteen initial letters running clockwise round the outside of her final grid.
Hester had discovered that Martin Rook was using his power of attorney to empty her accounts. And being Hester Vane, before going to the police, she had built the accusation into the masonry of Saturday’s Morning Ledger so that forty thousand solvers across the country would have the record in black and white.
And Martin Rook, who boasted about solving Magpie on the train, who had stood over this very pad for seventeen minutes writing four terrible clues for LODGE, EMBER, RED, and MEAT, had never once looked at the first letters around the edge.
* * *
At midnight the cottage was freezing, and Kit was still wide awake.
She lay under the eiderdown in the spare room for an hour, listening to the wind rattle the sash and watching the streetlight throw the wet shadow of the chimney pot across the ceiling. Every time she closed her eyes she saw those fifteen letters marching clockwise around the edge of the A3 pad.
ROOK STOLE FROM ME.
A crossword grid was enough to convince a solver, and the timestamp headers from Clem Danvers would prove the email had been queued at 8.47 p.m., while Hester lay dead or dying downstairs. Still, a police detective was going to ask the same question a hospital auditor always asked: Where is the primary documentation?
At twelve-fifteen Kit threw back the blankets, pulled her woollen dressing gown over her jumper, and walked across the landing into Hester’s bedroom.
She had avoided this room all day. It smelled faintly of lavender water and camphor. The high mahogany wardrobe stood against the chimney breast, its double doors closed.
When Kit was twelve, she had spent a rainy Saturday afternoon helping Hester look for a lost birth certificate. Hester hadn’t kept a safe; she had said safes merely told burglars which box to carry down the stairs. Instead, she had made Kit hold the torch while she lifted the cedar shoe-rack out of the bottom of the mahogany wardrobe and pried up a cut section of the pine skirting board with an old bone-handled butter knife.
Kit opened the wardrobe door. Hangers of tweed skirts and winter coats shifted in the dark with a dry metallic whisper.
She knelt on the braided rug, pushed three pairs of sensible walking brogues aside, and ran her fingertips along the floorboards at the back corner. The wood was cold and dusty. Two inches from the wall, the end of a six-inch plank gave slightly under her thumb.
She went down to the kitchen, fetched a flat table knife from the drawer, and came back up the stairs. Slipping the blade into the seam beside the nail head, she levered the short board up.
Inside the cavity between the joists lay a brown manila envelope containing Hester’s deeds and birth certificate, and on top of it, a slim, stiff-backed red account book with MEMORANDA stamped in gold on the cover.
Kit carried the red book over to the bedside lamp and clicked it on.
The first six pages were filled with Hester’s upright, unmistakable pencil script, arranged in three ruled columns like a pharmacy controlled-drugs register: Date, Bond Account, and Sum Withdrawn.
There were six entries, beginning eighteen months ago in May of the previous year and ending in late October:
14 May · North Riding Building Soc. (Fixed Bond) · £14,500 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
09 Aug · North Riding Building Soc. · £16,000 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
22 Nov · Dales Mutual Deposit · £18,400 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
03 Feb · Dales Mutual Deposit · £15,000 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
19 Jun · North Riding Building Soc. · £12,500 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
11 Oct · Dales Mutual Deposit · £15,000 · M.R. (P.o.A.)
At the bottom of the column, Hester had drawn a double horizontal line with a ruler and written the total:
£91,400. None authorised by me.
Kit turned the page. Near the top of the next leaf were two dated lines, written with a sharper, harder pressure of the 2B lead:
Mon 9 Nov. Checked passbooks at branch. All six transfers signed by M. Rook under Power of Attorney.
Tues 10 Nov. Told him to his face. Coming back tonight at 7.45 to ‘explain’. Police Weds morning, after the puzzle is in.
Kit closed the red book and sat for a long moment on the edge of Hester’s mattress, holding the stiff cardboard cover between both hands until her fingers stopped trembling.