15. A Deadly Bottle

Oh dear. An unexpected suspicious death

The local constable ,when he arrived at the house where the elderly lady favoured by Bishop Pyke lived, was approaching retirement, and he clearly knew it. He also knew there was no point in being pleasant if he didn’t feel like being pleasant because in first place promotion was definitely out of the question and in second place his personal dislike for just about every single religion under the sun gave him a somewhat skewed impression of men of the cloth like this pompous Bishop.

“Well,” he barked, “what is it, Bish?”

“I am Bishop Pyke and well in with your Chief Constable, so you be careful how you address me,” barked the Bishop, taking an instant dislike to the man’s irreverent attitude.

“And I’m Constable Whiting, called out to investigate here on my day aff,” came the reply which went some way to placate the Bishop.

“I forgot to mention that it’s my day off too,” he snarled, a little less unpleasantly.

“Then what’s got your knickers in a twist?” asked constable Edward Whiting.

“It’s the old lady who lives here. I was passing and decided to pop by to help her with her prayers, but when I chanced to glance through the window she looked sort of immovable. And the book that’s on her lap… unpleasant, to say the least. So I dialled 999 like a good Christian, and here you are, filled with sunny charm.”

The constable peered through the window and, just as the Bishop had, he knocked on the glass. There was no sign of any movement within.

“I don’t like the look of this,” he muttered, and using his radio asked his control for backup and an ambulance.

Then he tried opening the door, something that Bishop Pyke might have thought of doing but hadn’t, but to no avail.

“I’ll check round the back,” he grunted, “Don’t you go anywhere because if there’s been what looks like dirty deeds here you’re a witness. And even, maybe, a suspect.” He added that last sentence in the hope that it might rattle a man of what was to him a rather dangerous religion.

“I’m a man of life, not death,” almost snarled Pyke.

“That has to be seen,” growled the constable, and at that the Bishop started planning a round of golf with his friend and fellow competitor, the Chief Constable.

It was while the constable was round the back and checking what could be checked that the Bishop spotted two young lads lurking in such a position with hedge and a couple of shrubs in a neighbouring garden, and they certainly looked suspiciously as if they were spying on the him and whatever might be transpiring in the home of the lady who was lying back in an easy chair inside the house.

He’d never actually met the two Scumbag brothers, but in his mind these two lurking but almost in sight must be them. They had the same aura to them, the same deviousness.

He was about to ask himself whether it was right for him to conclude that two Brumpton ne’er do wells would be up to no good this far from their homes when the front door to the house swung open and Constable Whiting stood there.

“The back door was open,” he growled, “would you mind, Bishop, oming this way if you know the lady because if she wakes up and sees me standing by her she might get a heart attack or something equally fatal.”

“So is she alive?” asked the Bishop, surprised because the figure he’d seen through the window looked anything but alive,

“Just come in and keep your eyes open,” advised the constable.

The front room, the one he’d peered into through the window, was entered through a door to their immediate right once they were in a hallway and the constable carefully pushed the door open and tip-toed in, followed by Bishop Pyke who was doing his best to notice everything in order to recount the events of the morning to his wife when he got back home. She had a fondness for this kind of adventure, not that he was fond of the situation nor thought it as any kind of adventure.

He looked at the elderly lady and the publication on her lap. Two things truck him. One was the image on the cover of the magazine was not what he’d at first thought it was, from the distance of the other side of the window. What looked like a badly drawn image of a white haired old woman being knocked unconscious by a large hammer was nothing of the sort: on close inspection it was a man with a bee-keeper’s net, white haired and really quite ancient but alive, and looking at what he’d taken as a hammer buried into the woman’s skull was a low hanging branch of an old oak tree with a balled up swarm of what looked like bees seeming to cling to it.

And on top of that the old woman in the chair was breathing shallowly. He could quite clearly see the rising and fall of her chest as she gently snoozed the morning away.

“Come on, time to leave,” he hissed to the constable

But just in time the howl of a police car’s siren coming ever closer split the air, and added to that an ambulance screeched to a standstill outside.

“I’ve made another c**k-up,” grunted Constable Whiting, glaring at Bishop Pyke.

And at that very moment, as if set by an atomic clock, the elderly figure still reclining on her chair, shuddered, and without opening her eyes to see who was staring at her and without bidding adieu to the world, passed in a single moment from the land of the living to the land of the dead, the publication still on her lap.

Two paramedics rushed into the room and one of them virtually leapt upon the motionless figure, fingers feeling for a pulse and then shaking his head.

Before he could speak the two teenage boys the Bishop had seen lurking behind a hedge came in together.

“What are you doing to my granny?” asked one of them, “we only went out to see if there were any kids around to play with.”

“And who are you, sonny?” asked Constable Whiting.

“Me? Are you a copper or summat? I’m Jed. Jed Scumbag, for my sins, and that lady there is my granny…”

“Your late granny, Jed,” murmured the paramedic gently, “I’m afraid she’s passed away, and I’m sorry…”

Then Constable Whiting demonstrated to one and all that he had been a police officer for all of his adult life and learned some stuff by saying, in a flat and very even voice,

“And, Jed, she was murdered… look at what she’s got in her hand, underneath that farming magazine… she’s been drinking something that looks ever so much like poison in a bottle… Look. It says in big bold writing POISON and someone must have given it to her…”``

© Peter Rogerson 14.04.24