The Monogram Murders Read online

  The villagers gasped in shock. Some started to whisper. Some people covered their mouths with their hands, or clutched the arm of whoever was next to them.

  Nancy waited for the hubbub to subside before she continued. “We were wrong to meet in secret and put ourselves in temptation’s way,” she said, “but we could not stay apart. When we met at the vicarage, all we ever did was talk—about our feelings for one another, and how impossible they were. We would agree that we must never be alone together again, but then Frances would go somewhere and . . . well, the strength of our love was such that we could not resist.”

  Someone shouted out, “All you did was talk, was it? My eye and Betty Martin!” Once again, Nancy assured the crowd that nothing of a physical nature had taken place between herself and Patrick Ive.

  “I have now told you the truth,” she said. “It is a truth I would rather not have told, but it was the only way to put a stop to the vile lies. Those of you who know what it means to feel deep, all-consuming love for another person—you will find yourselves unable to condemn me and unable to condemn Patrick. Those with condemnation in your hearts—you are ignorant of love, and I pity you.”

  Then Nancy looked straight at Harriet Sippel and said, “Harriet, I believe you did know true love once, but when you lost George, you chose to forget what you knew. You made an adversary of love and an ally of hate.”

  As if determined to prove her right, Harriet Sippel rose to her feet and, after a swift dismissal of Nancy as a lying harlot, began to denounce Patrick Ive more vociferously than ever before: not only did he profit from selling fraudulent encounters with the souls of the dead, but he also consorted with women of loose morals while his wife was away. He was a heretic and an adulterer! He was even worse than she, Harriet, had suspected! It was an outrage, she said, that a man so steeped in sin should be allowed to call himself vicar of Great Holling.

  Nancy Ducane left the King’s Head halfway through Harriet’s rousing speech, unable to bear it. A few seconds later, the Ives’ servant girl ran for the door, red-faced and in floods of tears.

  Most of the villagers did not know what to think. They were confused by what they had heard. And then Ida Gransbury spoke up in support of Harriet. Though it was unclear what was rumor and what was true, she said, it was surely beyond doubt that Patrick Ive was a sinner of some description and that he could not be allowed to remain in his post as vicar of Great Holling.

  Yes, agreed most of the villagers. Yes, that was true.

  Richard Negus said nothing, even when called upon to speak by Ida, his fiancée. He told Dr. Ambrose Flowerday later that day that he was worried by the turn events had taken. “A sinner of some description,” while apparently good enough for Ida, was not, he said, good enough for him. He declared himself disgusted by Harriet Sippel’s opportunistic attempt to portray Patrick Ive as guilty twice over, of two sins instead of one. She had taken Nancy Ducane’s “not this but that” and turned it into “this and that” without evidence or justification.

  Ida had used the words “beyond doubt” at the King’s Head; what now seemed to Richard Negus to be beyond doubt, he told Ambrose Flowerday, was that people (including himself, to his shame) had been telling lies about Patrick Ive. What if Nancy Ducane had also lied? What if her love for Patrick Ive was unrequited, and he had met her in secret at her insistence, only to try to explain to her that she must desist from harboring these feelings for him?

  Dr. Flowerday agreed: no one knew for certain that Patrick Ive had done anything wrong, which had been his opinion of the matter from the start. He was the only person the Ives would admit to the vicarage, and on his next visit, he told Patrick what Nancy Ducane had said at the King’s Head. Patrick simply shook his head. He made no comment on the truth or falsehood of Nancy’s story. Frances Ive, meanwhile, was physically and mentally deteriorating.

  Richard Negus failed to persuade Ida Gransbury to see things the way he saw them, and relations between them became strained. The villagers, led by Harriet, continued to persecute Patrick and Frances Ive, shouting accusations outside the vicarage all day and night. Ida continued to petition the Church to remove the Ives from the vicarage, the church and the village of Great Holling, for their own sakes.

  And then tragedy struck: Frances Ive, unable to bear the ignominy any longer, swallowed poison and put an end to her unhappy life. Her husband found her and knew straight away that it was too late. There was no point summoning Dr. Flowerday; Frances could not be saved. Patrick Ive knew, also, that he could not live with the guilt and the pain, and so he too took his own life.

  Ida Gransbury advised the villagers to pray for mercy for the sinful souls of Patrick and Frances Ive, however unlikely it was that the Lord would forgive them.

  Harriet Sippel saw no need to allow the Lord any discretion in the matter; the Ives would burn in hell for ever, she told her flock of righteous persecutors, and it would be no more than they deserved.

  Within a few months of the Ives’ deaths, Richard Negus had ended his engagement to Ida Gransbury and left Great Holling. Nancy Ducane left for London, and the servant girl who told the horrible lie was never seen again in the village.

  In the meantime, Charles and Margaret Ernst had arrived and taken over at the vicarage. They quickly became friendly with Dr. Ambrose Flowerday, who forced himself to relate the whole tragic tale. He told them that Patrick Ive, whether or not he had made the mistake of harboring a secret passion for Nancy Ducane, had been one of the most generous and benign men he had ever known, and the least deserving of slander.

  It was his mention of slander that gave Margaret Ernst the idea for the poem on the gravestone. Charles Ernst was against the idea, not wishing to provoke the villagers, but Margaret stood her ground, determined that Holy Saints Church should display its support for Patrick and Frances Ive. “I would like to do considerably more to Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury than provoke them,” she said. And yes, when she uttered those words, murder was what she had in mind, though only as a fantasy, not as a crime she intended to commit.

  AFTER SHE HAD TOLD me the story, Margaret Ernst fell silent. It was a while before either of us spoke.

  Finally I said, “I can see why you gave me the name of Nancy Ducane when I asked you who might have a motive. Would she have murdered Richard Negus, though? He withdrew his support for Harriet Sippel and Ida Gransbury as soon as doubt was cast upon the servant girl’s lie.”

  “I can only tell you how I would feel if I were Nancy,” said Margaret. “Would I forgive Richard Negus? No, I would not. Without his early endorsement of the lies told by Harriet and that wretched servant girl, Ida Gransbury might not have believed the nonsense they were spouting. Three people drummed up hostility towards Patrick Ive in Great Holling. Those three people were Harriet Sippel, Ida Gransbury and Richard Negus.”

  “What about the servant?”

  “Ambrose Flowerday doesn’t believe that she meant to start what she started. She was clearly unhappy as soon as the bad feeling toward the Ives took hold in the village.”

  I frowned, dissatisfied. “But from a murderous Nancy Ducane’s point of view—purely for the sake of argument—if she can’t forgive Richard Negus who later saw the error of his ways, why would she forgive the girl who told the lie in the first place?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t,” said Margaret. “Perhaps she has murdered her too. I don’t know where the servant ended up, but Nancy Ducane might have known. She could have hunted her down and killed her too. What’s the matter? Your face has turned rather gray.”

  “What . . . what was the name of the servant girl who told the lie?” I stammered, fearing I knew the answer. “No, no, it can’t be,” said a voice in my head, “and yet how can it not be?”

  “Jennie Hobbs. Mr. Catchpool, are you all right? You don’t look at all well.”

  “He was right! She is in danger.”

  “Who is ‘He?’ ”

  “Hercule Poirot. He’s always right. How is tha
t possible?”

  “Why do you sound cross? Did you want him to be wrong?”

  “No. No, I suppose not.” I sighed. “Although I am now worried that Jennie Hobbs is not safe, assuming she’s still alive.”

  “I see. How strange.”

  “What is strange?”

  Margaret sighed. “In spite of everything I have said, it’s hard for me to think of anyone being in danger from Nancy. Motive or no motive, I don’t see her committing murder. This will sound peculiar but . . . one cannot kill without immersing oneself in horror and unpleasantness—wouldn’t you say?”

  I nodded.

  “Nancy liked fun and beauty and pleasure and love. All the happy things. She would want nothing to do with a business as ugly as murder.”

  “So if not Nancy Ducane, then who?” I asked. “What about drunk old Walter Stoakley? As Frances Ive’s father, he has a powerful motive. If he laid off the drink for a day or so, it might not be beyond him to kill three people.”

  “It would be quite impossible for Walter to lay off the drink even for an hour. I can assure you, Mr. Catchpool, Walter Stoakley is not the man you’re looking for. You see, unlike Nancy Ducane, he never blamed Harriet, Ida and Richard for what happened to Frances. He blamed himself.”

  “Hence the drinking?”

  “Yes. It is Walter Stoakley that Walter Stoakley set out to kill after he lost his daughter, and he shall very soon succeed, I imagine.”

  “In what possible way could Frances’s suicide have been his fault?”

  “Walter didn’t always live in Great Holling. He moved here to be closer to Patrick and Frances’s resting place. You will find this difficult to believe, having seen him as he is now, but until Frances’s death, Walter Stoakley was an eminent Classicist, and Master of the University of Cambridge’s Saviour College. That is where Patrick Ive trained for the priesthood. Patrick had no parents. He was orphaned at a young age, and Walter made a sort of protégé of him. Jennie Hobbs, then only seventeen years old, was a bed-maker at the college. She was the best bedder Saviour had, and so Walter Stoakley arranged for her to look after Patrick Ive’s rooms. Then Patrick married Frances Stoakley, Walter’s daughter, and when they moved to Holy Saints Vicarage in Great Holling, Jennie went with them. Do you see?”

  I nodded. “Walter Stoakley blames himself for putting Patrick Ive and Jennie Hobbs together. If Patrick and Frances had not taken Jennie with them to Great Holling, she would not have been in a position to tell the terrible lie that led to their deaths.”

  “And I would not have to spend my life watching a gravestone to make sure nobody desecrates it.”

  “Who would do such a thing?” I asked. “Harriet Sippel? Before she was killed, I mean.”

  “Oh, no, Harriet’s weapon was her toxic tongue, not her hands. She would never defile a grave. No, it’s the rowdy young men of the village who would do that, given half a chance. They were children when Patrick and Frances died, but they’ve heard their parents’ stories. If you ask anyone around here, besides me and Ambrose Flowerday, they will tell you that Patrick Ive was a wicked man—that he and his wife practiced black magic. I think most of them believe it more strongly as time goes on. They have to, don’t they? It’s either that or dislike themselves as heartily as I dislike them.”

  There was something I wanted to clarify. “Did Richard Negus sever ties with Ida Gransbury because she continued to denounce Patrick Ive after Richard had come to his senses? Was it following Nancy’s announcement at the King’s Head that he ended their engagement?”

  A peculiar expression passed across Margaret’s face. She started to say, “That day at the King’s Head was the beginning of . . . ,” then stopped and changed course. “Yes. He found her irrational insistence upon the virtue of her and Harriet’s cause too galling to bear.”

  Margaret’s face had a shut-down look about it all of a sudden. I had the impression that there was something important she had chosen not to tell me.

  “You mentioned that Frances Ive swallowed poison,” I said. “How? Where did she get it from? And how did Patrick Ive die?”

  “The same way: poison. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of abrin?”

  “I can’t say I have.”

  “It comes from a plant called the rosary pea, common in the tropics. Frances Ive obtained several vials of the stuff from somewhere.”

  “Forgive me, but if they both took the same poison and were found together, how was it established that Frances killed herself first and that Patrick only did so after finding her dead?”

  Margaret looked wary. “You will repeat what I tell you to no one in Great Holling? Only to Scotland Yard people in London?”

  “Yes.” I decided that, for present purposes, Hercule Poirot counted as a Scotland Yard person.

  “Frances Ive wrote a note to her husband before she took her own life,” said Margaret. “It was plain that she expected him to survive her. Patrick also left a note that . . .” She stopped.

  I waited.

  Eventually she said, “The two notes told us the sequence of events.”

  “What became of the notes?”

  “I destroyed them. Ambrose Flowerday gave them to me, and I threw them on the fire.”

  This struck me as most curious. “Why on earth did you do that?” I asked.

  “I . . .” Margaret sniffed and turned away. “I don’t know,” she said firmly.

  She certainly did know, I thought to myself. It was clear from her clamped-shut mouth that she intended to say no more on the matter. Further interrogation from me would only consolidate her determination to withhold.

  I stood to stretch my legs, which had grown stiff. “You’re right about one thing,” I said. “Now that I know the story of Patrick and Frances Ive, I do want to speak to Dr. Ambrose Flowerday. He was here in the village when it all happened. However faithful your account—”

  “No. You made me a promise.”

  “I should very much like to ask him about Jennie Hobbs, for example.”

  “I can tell you about Jennie. What would you like to know? Both Patrick and Frances Ive seemed to think that she was indispensible. They were very fond of her. Everyone else found her to be quiet, polite—harmless enough, until she told a dangerous lie. Personally, I don’t believe that someone who could produce a lie of that sort from thin air can be harmless the rest of the time. And she had ideas above her station. Her way of speaking changed.”

  “How?”

  “Ambrose said it was very sudden. One day she spoke as you would expect a domestic servant to speak. The next day she had a new, far more polished voice and was speaking very correctly.”

  And using correct grammatical constructions, I thought to myself. Oh, please let no one open their mouths. Three mouths, each one with a monogrammed cufflink inside it: grammatically satisfactory. Confound it all, Poirot had probably been right about that too.

  “Ambrose said that Jennie altered her voice in imitation of Patrick and Frances Ive. They were both educated, and spoke very well.”

  “Margaret, please tell me the truth: why are you so determined that I should not speak to Ambrose Flowerday? Are you afraid of his telling me something you would rather I didn’t know?”

  “It would be of no help to you to speak to Ambrose, and it would be a great hindrance to him,” Margaret said firmly. “You have my permission to terrify the life out of any other villagers you come across.” She smiled but her eyes were hard. “They are scared already—the guilty are being picked off one by one, and deep down they must know they are all guilty—but they would be even more afraid if they heard you say that, in your expert opinion, the killer will not be content until all who helped to destroy Patrick and Frances Ive have been dispatched to the fiery pits of hell.”

  “That’s rather extreme,” I said.

  “I have an unorthodox sense of humor. Charles used to complain about it. I never told him this, but I don’t believe in heaven and hell. Oh, I believe in God, but not t
he God we hear so much about.”

  I must have looked nervous. I did not want to discuss theology; I wanted to return to London as soon as I could and tell Poirot what I had found out.

  Margaret continued: “There is only one God, of course, but I don’t believe for a moment that he wants us to follow rules without questioning them, or be unkind to anybody who falls short.” She smiled then with more warmth and said, “I think that God sees the world in the way that I see it, and not at all in the way that Ida Gransbury saw it. Would you agree?”

  I gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “The Church teaches that only God can judge,” said Margaret. “Why didn’t pious Ida Gransbury point that out to Harriet Sippel and her baying flock? Why did she reserve all of her condemnation for Patrick Ive? If one is going to present oneself as a model of Christianity, one should strive to get the basic teachings right.”

  “I see you are still angry about it.”

  “I will be angry until my dying day, Mr. Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality—that’s something worth raging about.”

  “Hypocrisy is an ugly thing,” I concurred.

  “Besides, one could argue that it cannot be wrong to be with the person you truly love.”

  “I’m not sure about that. If a person is married—”

  “Oh, fiddlesticks to marriage!” Margaret looked up at the paintings on the parlor wall, then addressed them directly: “I’m sorry, Charles, dear, but if two people love one another, then however inconvenient it is for the Church and however against the rules it might be . . . well, love is love, isn’t it? I know you don’t like it when I say that.”

  I can’t say I liked it much either. “Love can cause a whole heap of trouble,” I said. “If Nancy Ducane had not loved Patrick Ive, I would not now have three murders to investigate.”

  “What a nonsensical thing to say.” Margaret wrinkled her nose at me. “It is hate that makes people kill, Mr. Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.”