Three Jars Too Many

By Sunday the village had three theories and Beatrice had a kitchen table. She found the table more useful. She laid the notebook's facts upon it in the form of index cards, because a fact you cannot move around is a fact you do not yet understand, and Beatrice moved facts the way a chess player moves pawns — provisionally, watching what threatened. Card one: Cuthbert Aimsley took private payments. E.C., R.T., and Pebble. E.C. was surely Edith Crane. R.T. she did not know. Pebble — well. There was only one Pebble of consequence in Lower Tilbury, and that was Hyacinth Pebble, chairwoman of the fete, who had been so very quick to call it a heart. Card two: this year, the payments had a gap. Edith Crane's £40 stopped in March. The notebook recorded no spring payment from her at all. Card three: someone had removed Edith Crane's jar from the display before toppling the rest. Removed it carefully. Set it aside. Lid down. Beatrice stood over the cards with a cup of tea going cold at her elbow and felt the shape of the wrongness before she could name it. It took her until the tea was quite undrinkable. If Edith Crane had poisoned the jar, Edith Crane would not have rescued it. She would have wanted it smashed with the others, anonymous, gone. The killer who saved that jar was not protecting themselves. They were preserving the evidence. They *wanted* the jar found whole. They wanted it found, and labelled, and traced straight back to Edith. "Someone," Beatrice told the cards, "is not trying to get away with murder. Someone is trying to get away with murder *and* hang it on Edith Crane. That is greedy. And greedy people, in my experience, leave a third thing lying about that they were too pleased with themselves to tidy." There was a knock at the door. Edith Crane stood on the step, grey-faced, twisting her gloves, and behind her — at a respectful, witnessing distance — stood Constable Drupe. "Beatrice," said Edith, "they think I did it. They've been to my house. They've taken my pans." Her voice cracked clean across. "I didn't pay him this year because I *couldn't*, Beatrice, Robert's been ill and there wasn't the money, and now they're saying that's my *motive*—" "Robert," said Beatrice, very gently, the way she had once said *try that sum again* to a frightened six-year-old. "Your husband. Robert Crane." "Yes." "R.T.," murmured Beatrice — and then heard herself, and stopped. *R.T.* Not R.C. She had assumed. She had let an initial sit on a card for a day and a half wearing the wrong name. "Edith," she said. "Who, in this village, has the initials R.T.?" Edith Crane wiped her eyes. "Only the one I can think of. Reginald Thorne. The man who's judged second to Cuthbert these eleven years and never once got the gold." She frowned. "But Reginald wasn't even in the marquee. He was out in the field. Everyone saw him at the duck race." "Did they," said Beatrice Mott, and reached, slowly, for a fresh index card.