The efficient matron of a Home.’
‘You really have got your knife into that woman. I always liked her.’ ‘I daresaypeople have liked murderers,’ said Tuppence very reasonably. ‘It’s like swindlers and confidence tricksmen who always look so honest and seem so honest. I daresay murderers all seem very nice and particularly soft-hearted. That sort of thing. Anyway, Miss Packard is very efficient and she has all the means to hand whereby she could produce a nice natural death without suspicion. And only someone like Mrs Cocoa would be likely to suspect her. Mrs Cocoa might suspect her bemuse she’s a bk batty herself and can understand batty people, or she might have come across her somewhere before.’ ‘I don’t think Miss Packard would profit fmandally by any of her elderly inmates’ deaths.’ ‘You don’t know,’ said Tuppence. ‘It would be a cleverer way to do it, not to benefit from all of them. Just get one or two of them, perhaps, rich ones, to leave you a lot of money, but to always have some deaths that were quite natural as well, and where you didn’t get anything. So you see I think that Dr Murray might, just might, have cast a glance at Miss Packard and said to himself. ‘Nonsense, I’m imagining things.’ But all the same the thought stuck in his mind. The second case he mentioned would fit with a domestic worker, or cook, or even some kind of hospital nurse. Somebody employed in the place, a middle-aged reliable woman, but who was batty in that particular way. Perhaps used to have little grudges, dislikes for some of the patients there. We can’t go guessing at that because I don’t think we know anyone well enough ‘ ‘And the third one?’ ‘The third one’s more difficult,’ Tuppence admitted.
· ‘Someone devoted. Dedicated.’ ‘Perhaps he just added that for good measure,’ said Tommy.
He added, ‘I wonder about that Irish nurse.’ ‘The nice one we gave the fur stole to?’ ‘Yes, the nice one Aunt Ada liked. The very sympathetic one. She seemed so fond of everyone, so sorry if they died. She was very worded when she spoke to us, wasn’t she? You said so – she was leaving, and she didn’t really tell us why.’
‘I suppose she might have been a rather neurotic type.
Nurses aren’t supposed to be too sympathetic. It’s bad for patients. They are told to be cool and efficient and inspire confidence.’ ‘Nurse Beresford speaking,’ said Tommy, and grinned.
‘But to come back to the picture,’ said Tuppence. ‘If we just concentrate on the picture. Because I think it’s very interesting what you told me about Mrs Boscowan, when you went to see her. She sounds – she sounds interesting.’ he was interesting, said Tommy. ‘Quite the most interesting person I think we’ve come across in this unusual business.
The sort of person who seems to know things, but not by thinking about them. It was as though she knew something about this place that I didn’t, and that perhaps you don’t. But she knows something.’ ‘It was odd what she said about the boat,’ said Tuppence.
‘That the picture hadn’t had a boat originally. Why do you think it’s got a boat now?’ ‘Oh,’ said Tommy, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘.Was there any name painted on the boat? I don’t remember seeing one – but then I never looked at it very closely.’ ‘It’s got Waterlily on it.’ ‘A very appropriate name for a boat – what does that remind me ‘I’ve no idea.’ ‘And she was quite positive that her husband didn’t paint that boat – He could have put it in afterwards.’ ‘She says not – she was very definite.’ ‘Of course,’ said Tuppence, ‘there’s another possibility we haven’t gone into. About my coshing, I mean – the outsider somebody perhaps who followed me here from Market Basing that day to see what I was up to. Because I’d been there asking all those questions. Going into all those house agents. Blodget & Burgess and all the rest of them. They put me offabout the house. They were evasive. More evasive than would be natural.
It was the same sort of evasion as we had when we were trying to fred out where Mrs Lancaster had gone. Lawyers and banks, an owner who can’t be communicated with because he’s sort of pattern. They send someone to follow car, they want to see what Iarn doing, and in due course I am coshed. Which brings us,’ said Tuppence, ‘to the gravetone in the churchyard. Why didn’t anyone want me m look at old gravestones? They were all pulled about anyway – a group of boys, I should say, who’d got bored with wrecking telephone boxes, and went into the churchyard to have some fun and sacrilege behind the church.’ ‘You say there were painted words – or roughly carved words?’ ‘Yes – done with a chisel, I should think. Someone who gave it up as a bad job.