NO CHOICE BUT MURDER an absolutely gripping murder mystery full of twists (The Oldminster Mysteries Book 4) by NORMAN RUSSELL

Author:NORMAN RUSSELL [RUSSELL, NORMAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Joffe Books crime thriller and mystery
Published: 2022-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

8. The Sad Fate of Charles Deacon

Saturday was takeaway night, and Glyn Edwards and his wife Sandra were enjoying a Chinese, which had been delivered by a lad from the Golden Gate in the High Street.

‘That’s where I interviewed Jack Prosser,’ said Glyn, ‘after he’d discovered the body of Louis Gillette in the Arcade. The Golden Gate.’

‘It said in the Gazette,’ said Sandra, ‘that it might have been a suicide tricked out to look like a murder, though I can’t see why anyone would want to do that.’

‘No, love, it wasn’t suicide. It was murder. His stomach was full of cyanide, but there was no sign of a glass or bottle in the room where he was found.’

Jack Prosser had been able to give the police a very different account of what had been in the room when he discovered the body of Louis Gillette, but Glyn could only tell Sandra so much. Prosser was still a ‘person of interest’.

‘I’ll clear these things away, and we’ll have some tea. Midsomer Murders is on at eight — mind, I don’t want you laughing at the things they do. It’s only a story . . .’ She stopped and thought. ‘Talking of ridiculous murders, how could you make someone swallow a glass of cyanide?’

‘The obvious way is to disguise it as something else. Cyanide has a distinctive smell — think bitter almonds. We found a near-empty bottle of peach brandy laced with cyanide near to a dead vagrant behind the fish market, and we mapped out how it might have got there—’

‘That was on Oldminster Live Radio,’ said Sandra. ‘I felt sorry for that poor man, reduced to living on the streets, and then being poisoned. So, you mapped out how it got there? The bottle in the alley, I mean.’

‘Yes. I had to assume that the bottle of poisoned peach brandy had somehow or other been used to murder Louis Gillette. We know that a man carrying a holdall went into the Rembrandt Gallery, presumably with the bottle hidden in the holdall. After he’d committed the murder, he’d have put the bottle back, and left the gallery. He would have walked out of the Arcade, turned right into High Street, and then sharp right again into Potter’s Lane. That would have brought him to the alley behind the fish market, where he would have got rid of the bottle in one of the commercial bins left out for next day’s collection. Unfortunately, Sam Delaney — that was the vagrant’s name — rifled through the bins, found the half-empty bottle, and drank the contents.’

Glyn had been talking to Sandra while she was making them two mugs of tea in the kitchen. She came in now, carrying a tray. He looked at her and thought of the terrible mental burdens she’d borne for so long, during all which time she had never neglected her appearance, always turned out smartly dressed and properly made up. But she’s got a lot of sympathy for people like Sam Delaney, though they’re different on the surface, he thought to himself.

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