Having made the jibe, Brian was now silent, apparently deep in thought, while the unfortunate Eloise, who had asked him to go easy on her, had withdrawn to the toilet. Eloise was not having a good evening; not only had her inexperience showed while playing bridge but now, at the chess table, her white forces were being ripped apart by the marauding black army commanded by a far superior player. All this was on top of her having been sick three times during the evening. After the first bout she had admitted to being pregnant; news that seemed to have come as an unpleasant surprise to David. Francesca knew from looking after him that Paul, the Deeds’ one-year-old son, was enough of a handful by himself.
Eloise emerged from the toilet looking ashen and retook her seat opposite Brian, who said nothing and did not even look up. Andrea was silently going about her task of making four spades, so the steady tick of Brian’s clock was the only sound in the room.
Francesca saw Eloise’s expression change as she looked at the clock.
“Brian, your flag has fallen”, Eloise whispered.
When he did not react she pushed his shoulder gently, adding, “Brian, you have lost on time”.
Francesca saw Brian fall forward and Eloise’s face show panic, concurrently. She was out of her chair before she heard Eloise’s scream and attempting to take the pulse in Brian’s neck before it ended. The other players had no time to complain about the cards being sprayed everywhere as they found themselves reacting to the unfolding drama. Clifton headed for the ‘phone as David arrived at his wife’s side to comfort her. Andrea, having no obvious role, decided that fetching a glass of water for Eloise was the correct course of action.
“He’s dead”, Francesca announced in a faltering voice, “and you had better call the police. Before you ask why, it is because there are two holes in his shirt with matching puncture wounds in his chest.”
Inspector Graves found Sergeant Phillips and the incident room at Oxford police station at the same time. “You can tell me about the victim on the way to the crime scene“. Graves was a man of few words and no small talk, but he had gained a reputation for success at New Scotland Yard. Phillips was happy to have his case taken over by such an experienced officer from whom he knew he could learn a lot.
As Phillips drove them along the road that followed the Thames downstream towards Sexton, he recounted what he had learned. Bayford, a bachelor, had retired from the Sexton Agricultural Research Centre five years earlier, on grounds of ill health. He had not seen his younger brother Andrew, his only living relative, since Andrew emigrated to Australia in 1960. Since retirement he had worked as a writer of articles on steam engines, bridge and chess. He was highly involved in the local community, being chairman of Sexton Rural District Council; a keen environmentalist and member of the Ramblers’ Association; captain of the Oxfordshire Chess Team and Captain, Chairman and Secretary of Sexton’s bridge and chess clubs. Bayford had lived at number seventy-eight since he moved to Sexton on taking up his appointment at the research centre in 1965.
“Our Brian was quite the pillar of the community and liked to get involved, then?”
“Oh yes, and I omitted to tell you that he was trying to set up the Sexton Branch of the Society of Left Handers but that he was the only member. I am sure that he would have recruited the others at the party but that they were all right-handed.”
So who would want to kill him? Will it have been somebody at the party?”
“That seems the most likely explanation, sir. He was killed by two tiny darts fired from the chess clock. When he pressed his button it released the darts rather than switch on the other clock. The real beauty of this device was that it had functioned normally for four games before being activated to fire the darts by a radio signal generated by one of the bridge pencils. The pencil worked by pressing on the eraser on its end. To the casual observer it would have looked like the user was just rubbing out an error, but the extra pressure would force together two contacts inside the pencil to generate a signal that would not have been audible.”
“So one of the bridge players activated the clock?”
“That seems the most likely explanation, sir, but it could still have been Eloise Deeds. We found an identical, but unmodified, chess clock and another pencil stuffed into the back of the sofa. I suspect that the killer intended to switch them for the incriminating equivalents in the confusion that followed Bayford’s death.”
“Then why did the killer not do that?”
“Because Francesca saw the puncture wounds in Bayford’s chest and was immediately suspicious of how he died. She raised the alarm before the killer could act. She worked in Africa before the war and recognised a look and pallor that reminded her of snake bite victims and she was right. The post mortem result was death by poisoning with cobra venom”.
“So Francesca is not our typical old biddy playing a few cards short of a full deck, then. I think that we will start with her. What have you discovered already?”
“She is a retired schoolteacher who learned nursing skills when she was attached to a hospital whilst studying in Kenya. She and her husband Horace come from East London. They moved to number eighty-four when Horace got a job as a security guard at the research centre.”