"No, I have to go through my aunt's things. I shall be here for a few days."
"Good. You understand the police will probably want to ask some
questions. You don't know of anyone who - well, might have had it in for
Miss Gilchrist?"
Susan shook her head.
"I don't really know much about her. She was with my aunt for some years - that's all I know."
"Quite, quite. Always seemed a pleasant unassuming woman - quite
ordinary. Not the kind, you'd say, to have enemies or anything
melodramatic of that kind. Wedding cake through the post. Sounds like
some jealous woman - but who'd be jealous of Miss Gilchrist? Doesn't
seem to fit."
"No."
"Well, I must be on my way. I don't know what's happening to us in
quiet little Lytchett St Mary. First a brutal murder and now attempted
poisoning through the post. Odd, the one following the other."
He went down the path to his car. The cottage felt stuffy and Susan
left the door standing open as she went slowly upstairs to resume her
task.
Cora Lansquenet had not been a tidy or methodical woman. Her
drawers held a miscellaneous assortment of things. There were toilet
accessories and letters and old handkerchiefs and paint brushes mixed up
together in one drawer. There were a few old letters and bills thrust
in amongst a bulging drawer of underclothes. In another drawer under
some woollen jumpers was a cardboard box holding two false fringes.
There was another drawer full of old photographs and sketching books.
Susan lingered over a group taken evidently at some French place many
years ago and which showed a younger, thinner Cora clinging to the arm
of a tall lanky man with a straggling beard dressed in what seemed to be
a velveteen coat and whom Susan took
to be the late Pierre Lansquenet.
