17. A Female Mind

A single clue opens the solution, at least it does to the DI's wife/

THE BODY IN THE BED

17. A Female Mind

My handsome husband Ian rattled the door as he came in, just to make sure I knew it was him. I knew it was him, of course, I could have set my watch by him if I’d needed to, and he might have made a similar comment about my habits before the time for our evening meal. Lovers habits do, I suppose, stay for a long time.

“Daisy!” he called, just as I’d known he would, “are you in?”

“Of course. Usual place!” I responded.

“Then I’d better join you,” was his predictable reply, and I turned the hot tap on because the bath water was getting cool and I know how he likes his bath: nice and hot, especially after a day at the station.

The expression on his face amused me because it was always the same when he put his head round the bathroom door and saw me in the altogether. I always got home from school half an hour before he arrived from the station, which meant I could prepare a nice hot bath and climb in it ready to provide him with a feast for his eyes. That’s what he called it when I was surrounded by fragrant bubbles, and it never failed to flatter me.

Me: a feast for his eyes? At least, that’s what he called it.

By the time he reached the bathroom he was already three-quarters naked with his boxer shorts round his knees on their way down.

“Bloody murders,” he growled. So he wasn’t in the usual chirpy mood. He’d had the sort of day he hated, and I suspected it might have something to do with the shock Miss Penfold had received that morning when she woke from her slumber and found herself lying next to a corpse.

He slung his underpants into the corner of the room and prepared to climb into the bath and join me when there was a knock at the door downstairs.

“Sod it!” he growled.

“I’ll go and see who it is,” I told him and I climbed out of bed and reached for my housecoat cum dressing gown. “You just get a good soak and I’ll soon get rid of whoever it is.”

“You really are an angel,” he told me, “I’ve no idea how I’d cope with another incident today. I mean, two murders and then a third!”

I smiled at him and almost ran down the stairs when whoever it was knocked again, rather firmly.

I opened the door and it was the detective sergeant Megan Braintree standing there. I knew her from earlier that day when I’d bumped into her at the local hospital. Her eyes lit up when she noticed that I was dripping with bath water and she sniled knowingly.

“Is he in?” she asked, “because if he is the pathologist wanted me to pass on a message.”

“I can tell him,” I told Megan, “he’s having a quick bath before we have tea.”

I could tell that she was working out almost instantly that we had tea father than dinner, which we might have been expecting to have had we belonged to a higher echelon of society.

“Is it the sort of thing that you can tell me so that I can pass on to him while I rub his back, or is it one of those dreadful secrets that he so hates?”

Megan smiled at me. “Nothing of thr sort,” she told me, “it’s just that when he took a closer look at the puncture hole made when the young man was injected he found that there was a fragment of a black substance that he analysed and found out that it was a cosmetic.”

“That’s interesting,” I smiled, and my brain raced at supersonic speed to reach what was, to me, an obvious conclusion. “Black, you said? Mascara, maybe?”

“That was my immediate thought,” grinned Megan, “You might need to help the DI arrive at that word, though. Men can be so… blind when it comes to important things like cosmetics.”

“I’ll go and tell him then,” I smiled, and she grinned back and bade me adieu.

“That was Megan,” I said to Ian when I got back to the bathroom just in time to catch him climbing out of the bath.

“Megan?” he repeated, “What on Earth did she want?”

“She’s solved one of your murders. Or at least, she implied that she had. It was a message from the pathologist bloke, What was his name, Grimm? Well, he found traces of black make-up on the puncture hole on your latest victim’s body.”

“Oh no,” he groaned.

“What do you mean by oh no?” I asked him

“Black make-up. It’s just got to send out investigation to Africa where one of our suspects is returning from as we speak.”

“You do know that’s masculine nonsense, don’t you?” I asked him, taking his towel and gently drying his back.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, I doubt there’s much call for black make-up on a continent where the population largely consists of dark skinned people,” I suggested, “and if there is, I shouldn’t think it’s very much.”

“What about here? Who’s going to smear back stuff on their faces?” he asked.

“Hardly anyone,” I told him, “but quite a lot of we women use mascara. You know, to emphasise the beauty of our eyes? And some of it comes in little bottles sealed with some kind of foil to keep it fresh? Let me see: I’ll offer you a possibility, darling. Our murderer is a woman and uses something sharp, shall we say something like a syringe, to pierce the foil on her bottle of mascara. Then she fills the syringe with something nasty and injects said nasty fluid into your victim. So the murderer is a woman, or one of a rare breed of men who use cosmetic make-up. Does your victim have anyone female in hs life?A wife or girlfriend, maybe?”

“No. Just a mother, and mothers don’t go round killing their kids!”

I smiled humorously at him.

“Are you sure of that?” I asked him, “just you check it out, darling. Get the lovely Megan to help and I’m sure you’ll find that your little wifey has hit the nail on its very feminine head!”

© Peter Rogerson 14.06.23

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