At nine-thirty on Sunday morning, the rain had stopped, leaving the cobbles of Kirkgate dark and shiny as wet slate.
Detective Sergeant Tunde Bello of North Yorkshire Police stood by the pine table in Hester’s kitchen, looking at the glass jam jar containing the white DO25 tablet, and then at the printout of the executor’s schedule with accomodate underlined in pencil.
He was in his early forties, broad-shouldered in a dark wool overcoat, with a notebook held flat in one large hand and the patient, unhurried gaze of a man who spent half his week listening to farmers argue over boundary ditches.
“Let me make sure I have the sequence straight in my head, Miss Lomax,” Bello said quietly. “Dr Amery certified natural causes on Wednesday morning. No bruises, no forced entry, history of congestive heart failure.”
“And chronic renal impairment, Stage 3,” Kit said. “Which means her kidneys cleared digoxin very slowly. That’s why she was on 62.5 micrograms, the blue tablet in the morning row. The white tablet in the jar is 250 micrograms. There were seven of them in the Wednesday and Thursday evening slots. If four or five were put into Tuesday evening’s slot, she took a lethal overdose at eight o’clock thinking it was her usual evening tablet.”
“Could she have mixed up an old prescription of her own?”
“You can check her PMR, her Patient Medication Record, at the high-street pharmacy in Skelby when they open at ten, or ring their superintendent pharmacist right now,” Kit said. “A patient of eighty-one with her kidney function would never be prescribed 250-microgram tablets. They wouldn’t be in the house. Whoever put them in the dosette box brought them with him.”
Bello looked down at the Morning Ledger and the A3 grid pad lying beside it. “And you’re telling me a man poisoned your aunt, and then sat down and finished her crossword puzzle?”
“He had to,” Kit said. “If the puzzle didn’t arrive at the Ledger at 9.40 p.m., the editor would have raised the alarm on Wednesday morning that Hester had been incapacitated before 9.40. Where was Martin Rook at 9.40 on Tuesday night?”
“That,” Bello said, tapping his pen against his notebook, “I actually know without leaving the village. We had a minor licensing call-out at the Black Bull on Tuesday evening at half-past nine. Martin Rook was standing at the bar from 9.15 until ten o’clock drinking a half of bitter and talking to the vicar about the church roof.”
“An alibi from 9.15 onwards,” Kit said. “And the email to the Morning Ledger was scheduled at 8.47 p.m. to send automatically at 9.40.”
Bello bent over the A3 pad, tracing the fifteen perimeter words with the cap of his biro. “Rook stole from me. Every initial letter around the outside.” For the first time, the scepticism faded from his eyes, replaced by a slow, grim appreciation. “She was fierce, your aunt.”
“She didn’t approve of sloppiness,” Kit said. “And she told me once that the high-street chemist here in Skelby delivers to all the elderly residents on Kirkgate and Uppertown. Martin Rook’s mother died eight months ago in the nursing home on Station Road. Heart failure.”
Bello picked up his radio handset from the table. “Let’s find out what Mrs Rook senior was taking before she died. And didn’t you say Mr Rook was coming back this morning for the laptop?”
“This afternoon, he said. Unless he gets anxious about leaving the spreadsheets here overnight.”
As if summoned by the sentence, the gate latch clicked outside in the lane.
Kit glanced through the kitchen window. Martin Rook was walking briskly up the flags in his Loden coat, without his umbrella today, carrying an empty canvas briefcase to take the laptop.
Kit looked at Bello. “If you step into the cold conservatory off the study and pull the door to, you can hear every word said in the study.”
Bello picked up the jam jar and his notebook, moved with surprising lightness for a big man through the study, and slipped behind the frosted glass door of the conservatory just as Rook knocked twice on the front door and let himself into the hall.
“Morning, Kit!” Rook called out cheerfully, wiping his brogues on the coconut mat. “Thought I’d catch you before you started loading the van. If you’ve found the passwords for the laptop, I’ll take it down to the office now and make a start on the estate accounts.”
“In the study, Martin,” Kit called back.
She walked through from the kitchen and stood behind the captain’s chair. Rook came in, smiling, and reached across the blotter to unplug the power lead from the back of the silver laptop.
“I was doing Saturday’s puzzle last night,” Kit said casually. “After you told me you always solve Magpie on the 8.12 to Leeds.”
Rook paused with the power cable between his thumb and forefinger. “Oh, aye? Good one, was it? I haven’t had a proper look at it yet. Saving it for tomorrow morning’s train.”
“You won’t need the train for the last four clues,” Kit said. “22 Down is Accomodate in a little house, five letters, LODGE. Accommodate has two m’s. Hester taught me that at this desk when I was nine.”
Rook let go of the cable. His pink cheeks stayed pink, and his smile didn’t vanish at once; it simply froze in place like fat setting in a pan. “Is that right? Funny slip for the newspaper printers to make.”
“The printers didn’t make it. You made the exact same spelling mistake on page two of the executor’s schedule you gave me yesterday morning. Accomodate with one m.”
Silence settled over the study, broken only by the drip of rainwater from the overflow pipe outside the conservatory.
“My dear girl,” Rook said, straightening up and putting on a look of pained solicitor’s indulgence, “I don’t know whether lack of sleep or grief has got the better of you, but my typist’s spelling on a probate form has nothing to do with the Morning Ledger.”
“You didn’t have a typist in here at 8.47 on Tuesday night when you scheduled Hester’s email to go out at 9.40,” Kit said. Her voice was steady now; she didn’t feel the urge to apologise at all. “The crossword editor pulled the timestamp headers from the London server last night. The email wasn’t sent at 9.40 while you were drinking in the Black Bull. It was queued at 8.47, a quarter of an hour after Hester died from the 250-microgram digoxin tablets you put in her dosette box.”
Rook’s hand moved towards the laptop lid. “This is slanderous nonsense. Hester died of heart failure, as Dr Amery certified. And why on earth would I harm a woman I’ve looked after for ten years?”
“Because you hold her power of attorney and you’ve taken roughly ninety thousand pounds out of her building society bonds over the last eighteen months,” Kit said, remembering the red ledger she had found under the floorboards of the wardrobe at midnight. “She found out on Monday. She told you on Tuesday that she was going to the police on Wednesday morning, as soon as Saturday’s puzzle was submitted.”
“You haven’t a shred of proof she ever thought such a thing,” Rook snapped, his voice dropping its warm country burr and turning thin and hard.
“Look at the grid on the desk, Martin.”
Rook blinked down at the A3 pad.
“You spent seventeen minutes looking at the bottom right corner trying to write clues for LODGE, EMBER, RED, and MEAT,” Kit said. “You never read the first letters of the answers round the outside edge, clockwise from 1 Across.”
Rook looked at 1 Across. R-O-O-K.
His eyes moved across the top row, down the right-hand side, along the bottom, up the left.
Slowly, the pink drained out of his cheeks, leaving a grey web of broken veins across his nose.
The conservatory door clicked open. DS Bello stepped into the study, holding his warrant card in one hand and his radio in the other.
“And the superintendent pharmacist at Skelby Pharmacy has just confirmed on the phone that your late mother, Mrs Edith Rook, was dispensed two hundred and fifty microgram white digoxin tablets with the imprint DO25, two weeks before she passed away in March,” Bello said evenly. “Martin Rook, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Hester Vane. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.”
* * *
Kit didn’t go back to Leeds on Sunday night.
She rang the Chief Pharmacist at St Jude’s at four o’clock, took a week of her accumulated annual leave without apologising once for the rota disruption, and turned the cottage heating on.
While the coroner ordered the post-mortem and the forensic accountants went through Rook’s client ledger (the missing sum was £91,400, moved in six tranches while Hester’s ankles kept her housebound), Kit unpacked the fourteen volumes of the encyclopaedia and put them back on the sitting-room shelves in alphabetical order.
On Friday afternoon, with a wood fire crackling in the grate and the rain misting the lane outside, she wrote a short note to Clem Danvers in London.
On Saturday morning, the newsagent’s boy slapped the Morning Ledger through the brass letterbox at eight-thirty. Kit carried it into the study with a mug of tea. Above the new cryptic puzzle, set this week by Fenwick in a guest slot that had made Graham Pettifer clear his throat four times on the doorstep before asking if Kit thought the syntax would pass muster, ran a two-line editor’s box:
Solvers who completed last Saturday’s final crossword by Magpie (No. 14,892) may wish to read the initial letters of the perimeter answers clockwise from 1 Across. Hester Vane never missed a deadline, and never left a debt unpaid.
Kit folded the newspaper neatly, laid it aside, and pulled the A3 pad of blank grids into the warm circle of the anglepoise lamp.
She tore off the top sheet, the certified photocopy DS Bello had left her while the original sat in an evidence bag in Northallerton, and stared at the clean white fifteen-by-fifteen square beneath it.
She picked up one of Hester’s cedar pencils, tested the point against her thumb, and wrote five letters into 1 Across at the top left corner: A - T - O - N - E.
Underneath the grid, in neat block capitals, she wrote her first clue:
1 Across: Make amends to every single person in credit (5).
A inside TONE? TO plus ONE? No. Hester would have crossed that out in three seconds. She rubbed the clue out cleanly with the corner of the rubber, thought for a full minute while the clock ticked in the hall, and wrote again:
1 Across: Make amends with a note that’s rewritten (5).
Clean anagram of A NOTE, exact definition at the start.
Then, very carefully, in the bottom right-hand margin of the sheet, Kit drew three small, sharp strokes in 2B pencil: a long tail, a round belly, a cocked head.