Any Given Sundae (Australian Amateur Sleuth Book 5) Read online

  I looked up to see that Mr. Buttons seemed to have rearranged the papers to his satisfaction, although he was clearly displeased with the muddy corners. “You haven’t told me what all this is for,” I said.

  “It’s the paperwork that we have to submit to visit James in jail,” he said. “We need to submit it quickly, because it takes ages to process.”

  I was dismayed. “Ages?” I repeated. “Those detectives will have me in jail by then, and that’s even supposing James does know something, and that’s assuming that Dorothy is the killer.”

  Mr. Buttons smiled. “A journey of one thousand miles begins with the first step.” He waved his hand at me. “We don’t have a Tardis, so this is the best we can do.”

  I had to agree. “Can we pay a rush fee or anything?”

  Mr. Buttons simply looked at me over his glasses by way of response.

  “While we’re here, in the warmth, can we go through the other suspects please, Mr. Buttons?”

  Mr. Buttons narrowed his eyes, but then nodded somewhat reluctantly.

  “His wife, Sally, is a likely suspect,” I said. “I did see her with that man. Then again, the motive could have been jealousy. He was an obvious flirt.”

  “So are a lot of men,” Mr. Buttons pointed out, “and their wives don’t kill them.”

  “Sally and Roland had no children, and there was the money.”

  Mr. Buttons shook his head. “The vic wasn’t a millionaire. He just had a salary, a good salary at that, but that wasn’t enough financial motive for someone to murder him.”

  “Well, she’ll get the whole house and it might be worth quite a bit.”

  Mr. Buttons continued to shake his head. “No millions are involved, and that’s not enough to murder someone for money. Besides, she could just have divorced him if she wanted to get out of the marriage.”

  “Maybe he was so irritating that she didn’t want to go through a divorce,” I said. “Divorce is very stressful and expensive. I’m speaking from experience, mind you.”

  At that moment, the fire popped and a piece of coal flew onto the floor near Mr. Buttons’ foot. He gasped, picked it up in a napkin, and threw both napkin and coal into the fire in one skilled movement.

  I could see him eyeing off the blackened fire grate, and was afraid he would create a scene by scrubbing off the soot, so I tried to divert his attention. “I have to say, Prudence is now the top of my list, after what we found out about her at the seminar.”

  Thankfully, Mr. Buttons left the soot alone and sat back on his chair. “You know, I was beginning to think it was Prudence Paget too, but after thinking about it all night, I’m now convinced it’s Dorothy.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Mr. Buttons, Prudence has a motive. You heard yourself how Roland knocked her back for a big research grant, and that impacted her career badly. That would have to make someone awfully resentful, especially a career academic like Prudence.”

  Mr. Buttons frowned. “I don’t really see how that’s a motive for murder, Sibyl. By all accounts, it happened years ago. If she was going to murder him, she would’ve murdered him back then.”

  “Most likely she hasn’t seen him again for years,” I said. “Perhaps she didn’t have the opportunity, and something could have set her off. After all, you have to admit that it was suspicious how she was flirting so outrageously with him, given that she surely couldn’t have liked the man.”

  Mr. Buttons’ eyebrows shot up and down several times in succession. “Yes, I do find it suspicious, but like I said, it was a long time ago. Maybe she’s moved on and just let bygones be bygones. Haven’t you ever been outwardly friendly with someone that you didn’t actually like?”

  I thought it over for a moment. He did have a point.

  “We didn’t really discuss it in the car on the way home yesterday,” I said. Every time I had tried to bring it up, Mr. Buttons had changed the subject, saying that Dorothy had a guilty face because her eyebrows were asymmetrical, or some such other ridiculous excuse. “I mean, who else could it be?” I silently berated myself for saying such a thing. I knew full well what his answer would be. I pushed on. “You know, it surely has to be Prudence. She does have a motive. She lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding, and she is a career academic after all. Academia is highly competitive, and I’m sure people have been killed for less.”

  Mr. Buttons pursed his lips. “Someone murdered Roland with antifreeze, and tried to set me up to take the fall for the murder,” I added. “Someone tipped off the police with the false claim that I was having an affair with Roland, and that I had been seen in town buying antifreeze. What’s more, they murdered him in my house! Whoever the murderer is, they are doing their best to frame me. It has to be Prudence, or my second choice is Sally.”

  Mr. Buttons waved a hand in disagreement. I watched as he opened his mouth, and I thought that if he said the word ‘Dorothy’ again, I would scream and run out of the café.

  My worst fears were realized. “Dorothy,” he began, but before he could continue, the local postman hurried over to the table.

  “Haven’t you heard the news?” he asked us.

  “What news?” I said.

  “I thought you hadn’t heard the news because you’re both sitting here so calmly,” he said, smirking.

  “Please tell us what’s happened, if you would be so kind,” Mr. Buttons said.

  “It’s your cook, Dorothy,” the postman said. “Haven’t you heard? The police found her DNA on that threatening letter!”

  Chapter 14

  “There is the detectives’ vehicle,” Mr. Buttons said, somewhat unnecessarily. Sure enough, the vehicle was parked directly outside the boarding house. “I had hoped to see Dorothy being dragged away in handcuffs by the time we arrived,” he added in a disappointed tone.

  “Let’s get inside as fast as we can,” I said. “I want to know what’s going on as soon as possible.”

  The very second Mr. Buttons opened the main door to the boarding house, we heard the sound of pots and pans being flung around in the kitchen. We exchanged glances, and then hurried in that direction. I was about to go in, when Mr. Buttons restrained me. He put his finger to his mouth and indicated that we should listen in. It was no hard task, given that Dorothy was screaming and the detectives had raised their voices.

  “I tell you, it was that man at the post office. He was obviously trying to frame me for the murder, but of course I didn’t know that at the time!” I heard Dorothy slam down a pot for emphasis.

  “So, your story is that you were walking up the steps to the post office when a man approached you and asked you to seal the letter for him and post it.” Detective Roberts’ voice held a good measure of disbelief.

  “Yes, he said he’d had just had an emergency call, that his mother had taken ill, and he had to race her to the hospital,” Dorothy said.

  “And why didn’t you tell us this before?” Roberts asked her.

  “I had no idea that the letter I posted for him was a threatening letter,” she said loudly.

  “You didn’t look at the letter?” Henderson asked her.

  “No, I’m not a busybody. Are you trying to say I’m a busybody?” Her words were punctuated by the sound of another pot banging.

  “And what did this man look like?” Roberts asked her.

  “I’ve already told you a hundred times,” Dorothy yelled. “Are you trying to trick me? He looked like someone I’ve seen at Sibyl’s house.”

  Mr. Buttons and I exchanged glances. I was furious. Perhaps Mr. Buttons had been right about Dorothy being the murderer after all.

  “Are you sure?” Roberts asked her.

  “No,” Dorothy snapped. “My eyesight is not good, and my memory is not much better. It’s just that when I saw him, I thought he looked like a friend of Sibyl’s. That’s all.”

  “We need you to accompany us to the station to make a statement,” Roberts said.

  More pots banged, and Mr.
Buttons and I took that as our cue to leave. We hurried back down the corridor and into the sitting room, where we peeped around the door and saw Dorothy preceding the two detectives out the front door.

  I turned to Mr. Buttons, but before I could say anything, Cressida burst into the room. “Why have the police taken Dorothy away?”

  I hurried to speak before Mr. Buttons had the opportunity. “Her DNA was found on the threatening letter, but she says that a man gave it to her to post.”

  “Why would someone do that?” Cressida asked.

  Mr. Buttons snorted rudely. “Exactly!”

  “She said he was in a hurry to leave because he’d just received an emergency phone call, so he handed it to her and asked her to post it,” I explained.

  “Oh yes, that makes sense,” Cressida said.

  “It makes sense?” Mr. Buttons repeated. “My dear woman, it makes not a modicum of sense at all. Dorothy is obviously the culprit, and what’s more, she tried to implicate Sibyl.”

  Cressida turned to me. “She did?”

  “She said that the man looked like a friend of mine,” I said.

  Cressida frowned so deeply that little pieces of her makeup cracked and fell off. “What friend?”

  “Exactly!” Mr. Buttons said. “Dorothy is the murderer, and she tried to implicate Sibyl to the police just then. We know that the murderer has tried to frame Sibyl. First of all, the murderer murdered the poor man in Sibyl’s house, and then she told the police that Sibyl was having an affair with him, and then she told the police that Sibyl bought antifreeze. Now, Dorothy has told the police that the man who posted the letter looks like a friend of Sibyl’s. Case closed!” he concluded with a triumphant note.

  “Lord Farringdon says things are not as they seem.” Cressida stooped down to stroke the cat’s long fur.

  “Now that we know Dorothy’s safely out of the way and has no chance of returning in the next few minutes,” Mr. Buttons said, “this gives us a good opportunity to search the kitchen for antifreeze.”

  I shook my head. “Even if Dorothy is the murderer, she wouldn’t be silly enough to keep antifreeze in the kitchen. She probably keeps it in her car.”

  Mr. Buttons beamed. “So you do think that Dorothy’s the murderer now?”

  I rubbed my forehead. I had the beginnings of a headache. “No, I don’t think Dorothy is the murderer, but I was speaking hypothetically. People don’t keep antifreeze in their kitchen, they keep it in their car or near their car. Besides, every person in town would have antifreeze.”

  Cressida agreed. “No one in their right mind would leave antifreeze out of their cars in this weather. But didn’t they put a bittering agent in antifreeze to make it bitter about ten or so years ago?” she asked. “I saw a documentary on Australian murders recently, and it said that people stopped using it to murder people once they put the bittering agent in.”

  “Yes, I googled it,” Mr. Buttons said. “Though the reason they used the bittering agent was so that children and pets wouldn’t eat it, because it tastes quite sweet without the agent. I also discovered that it takes about a quarter of a cup to kill someone. It’s lucky that the vic had that medical condition, hypogeusia, leaving him unable to taste food properly.”

  “Lucky?” I echoed. “If he didn’t have that condition, he’d probably be alive now.”

  “I meant lucky for Dorothy,” Mr. Buttons explained patiently.

  “His wife of course knew about his condition,” I pointed out. “And so did Prudence, as he told all of us about it.”

  Mr. Buttons nodded sagely. “And so did Dorothy. She was right there when he mentioned it to everyone. And it was a chocolate mint sundae you said you saw next to the body, Sibyl, was it not? That would explain away the green color. What type of sundae did you intend to give Sally, Sibyl?”

  I shrugged. “Just normal chocolate, I suppose,” I said. “To be honest, Mr. Buttons, I hadn’t really considered the intricacies of the sundae that had yet to exist.”

  “Well, that says as much as if you’d planned a mint sundae,” Mr. Buttons announced triumphantly, and I was beginning to think that he was losing his grasp on his deduction. “That meant that the victim, Roland, didn’t know what kind of sundae to expect. So he wouldn’t have been suspicious about a mint sundae.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “What exactly do you think happened? Do you think Dorothy wore a wig and pretended to be me and served him a sundae? Do you think she broke in and left the sundae on the table, and that Roland just ate a strange green sundae he found? Roland wasn’t even the one I invited over for a sundae. This still leaves a whole lot unexplained.”

  “Well,” Mr. Buttons began, scratching his chin. “It’s easy to see that Dorothy could have gotten into your cottage. After all, she has a key to every room in the boarding house, as well as your cottage. Besides, you never lock it—anyone could have walked in. It’s entirely possible that she left a note for Roland that said to meet you in the cottage. The note could have also said that the sundae inside was for him.”

  I sighed. “This is a bit of a stretch, Mr. Buttons. What would the note have said? ‘Hello Roland, meet me in the cottage and eat the first green thing you see. Sincerely, your secret admirer’?” I asked sarcastically. Dorothy was certainly suspicious, but it was hard to believe that she was the murderer based on such flimsy evidence.

  Cressida suddenly spoke up. “I’ve got it! Maybe the real murderer gave her the note to give to Roland, which is why her DNA was on it!”

  Mr. Buttons and I sighed in unison, though I spoke first. “Cressida, Dorothy’s DNA was found on the threatening letter. We’re talking about a note that probably doesn’t exist. We’re just throwing around hypothetical situations to figure out what happened.”

  “Oh,” Cressida said, somewhat deflated. “Well, why do you think your friend was sending the threatening letter?”

  “I don’t have any friends!” I said dramatically. “I mean, wait, no. I do have friends, but none who send threatening letters. Dorothy is either confused or trying to implicate me for it.”

  “Which proves that she’s the murderer, since we know that you don’t have any friends who would send the letter,” Mr. Buttons chimed in, looking quite smug.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I continued, undeterred. “We just know that she’s saying someone gave her the letter and that she thought he was a friend of mine. She could be genuinely confused, but maybe she’s just trying to push it off on to me because she’s scared, whether or not she’s actually guilty. Or, she could even just be using the opportunity to get me in some trouble, since we know she’s not my biggest fan.”

  “We should tell the police that she’s lying,” Mr. Buttons said sternly.

  I shook my head again. “What would that do? We can’t actually prove anything, and neither can she. It’s all hearsay either way. Honestly, at this point I think that actively denying her claims to the police might make us seem even more suspicious. If she’s guilty, the police should figure it out.” I hoped to get Mr. Buttons off the topic of Dorothy’s guilt for once. He’d say she faked the moon landing if he could figure out a way to implicate her. “Besides, the police can’t arrest me until they find proof. And as we all know, no evidence of my guilt actually exists, because I’m innocent,” I said, swallowing nervously. While what I had said was ostensibly true, I wasn’t quite so confident that I wouldn’t be arrested. All the police would really need was something that appeared to be evidence, even if it was unrelated. It had been my experience that some police officers weren’t too worried about the specifics of law if it meant catching somebody who they thought was a murderer.

  Besides, even going to court could be a disaster, whether or not I was convicted. If I were dragged into a court to prove my innocence, it would cause all sorts of other issues, such as huge legal fees, time away from work, and garnering a bad reputation. None of those were things I wanted to go through, much less the chanc
e of going to jail for a crime with which I had no involvement.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Mr. Buttons admitted softly. “Well, we can investigate other suspects if it makes you feel better. Besides, it’s the fastest way to cross them off the list, since Dorothy is the only murderer.”

  “The only murderer?” I asked, thinking. What if there really had been more than one? It was possible that the threatening letter was written by somebody who wasn’t the murderer. That could possibly implicate Dorothy, though I still very much doubted that she was guilty. There wasn’t much to love about the woman, but murder seemed to be well and truly out of her league, even if verbal abuse wasn’t. I sighed, realizing that discovering the identity of a single murderer was hard enough without considering the existence of another. Besides, it didn’t really change the process, since we still needed some kind of evidence.

  “We need to find something that gives us a clue to the murderer’s identity,” I said aloud, hoping that Mr. Buttons wouldn’t bring up Dorothy again. To my relief, he simply nodded, and Cressida busied herself by patting Lord Farringdon.

  Chapter 15

  The first thing I noticed was how thin she was. The word that came to mind was ‘skeletal,’ because she did indeed resemble a skeleton, at least, one that was covered in too much makeup and designer clothing. She was tall to the point of being intimidating despite her otherwise small frame, and it was immediately clear that she was wealthy. Or at least, she had been when she had purchased her clothes and jewelry, but it was entirely possible that she’d spent her life savings on those.

  She had long black hair, which stood in stark contrast to her pale white skin and incredibly bright red lipstick. I couldn’t help but wonder why somebody would make themselves look like that on purpose, though she certainly seemed to have the confidence to pull it off. Speaking of pulling it off, her long, clearly false eyelashes were constantly on the edge of escaping her face.