Who Killed Mrs. Hogg? (2/3)

“Your blood pressure is a little higher than I’d like for someone your age, but otherwise things look all in order.” Doctor Kate Forbes was a tall woman with curly, sandy hair. She wore crimson lipstick and matching nail polish, an unusual sight in small-town South Otago in those days—it definitely marked her as a city slicker.

On a whim, I decided to raise the subject of the painting. “I, um, noticed that you have a Jake Griffiths in the foyer. I’m a big fan of his work,” I gushed.

“Are you?” she said, surprised. “Most people haven’t even heard of him But I grew up not far from here so his work always reminds me of home.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “He really captures the light.” As if I knew!

“I was lucky actually,” she said. “My ex was threatening to take half of the collection in the divorce. I wasn’t having that. Hired a lawyer and said he could have the Jag.”

“Jaguar?” I said, gobsmacked.

“Yes. I’m fond of my sports cars but Jake Griffiths has sentimental value for me, you know?”

“Right,” I nodded. “Completely.”

Doctor Forbes regarded me thoughtfully and must have decided I was a friendly face.

“You’ve just moved here, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m a new school teacher.”

“Then we’re both newbies. I grew up in Invercargill but never got up this way much. It’s a bit of a strange place, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is really. The murder you mean?”

“No, not just that,” she twisted her mouth in thought. “It’s more…well, everyone seems a bit suspicious of me somehow. I feel like I’m an alien or something. I tell you what, why don’t you come round to my place for dinner tomorrow night? We can compare notes on Minton and I can show you my Jake Griffiths pieces.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, “I’d love to.”

 ***

The following evening I arrived at Kate’s house—a big property surrounded by a massive macrocarpa hedge. I was carrying a bottle of wine and a bowl of gooseberry fool—a recipe my mother had cut out of Women’s Weekly once and that I had inherited. As soon as I got through the rusty gate, a big black Labrador bounded over to meet me and jumped up, nearly knocking the dessert out of my hand.

“Felicity!” Kate growled from the porch of a big wooden villa. “Get down!”

Felicity got down but continued to wriggle impulsively, barely able to contain her excitement.

“Sorry,” said Kate as I reached the porch. “She loves people. It’s been a bit lonely for her since the divorce.” She bent down to scratch Felicity behind the ear. The lab tolerated the attention but kept looking over at me, clearly expecting great things.

“We could take her for a walk before dinner?” I suggested.

“Oh that would be great. Anything to calm her down a bit,” Kate said.

We decided to walk around the lakeside, which would mean several swims for Felicity.

 ***

“I must say, I don’t think much of the local talent in Minton,” said Kate after flinging the stick into the water for the third time. “The only available men are either ancient or tongue-tied gargoyles.”

I agreed regretfully.

“People were trying to set me up on my third day here.”

“It’s the curse of the small-town singletons,” she sighed. “Everyone wants to ‘fix’ the situation. In fact, they’ve been recommending the principal of your school.”

“Who, Gordon?” I asked, amazed.

“That’s the one,” she grinned.

“He’s completely gay,” I said.

“Thought so,” she said.

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked.

“Three months. Separated for a year before that, though. Thank goodness my daughter Sam is grown up and we don’t have to do the co-parenting thing. Anyway, who were they trying to set you up with?”

“Mike Fisher,” I said, smiling ironically.

“What, the mailman who brained the old lady?” Kate said. “You’re joking!”

“Mavis McCurdy doesn’t believe Mike did it. She was singing his praises to me.”

“Of course he did it,” Kate snorted. “There were witnesses!”

“I don’t know, Mavis said she saw him do his rounds earlier in the morning. She thinks the killer was someone else disguised as Mike. I mean, he was wearing a motorcycle helmet so no one saw his face.”

“It’s possible I suppose,” she shrugged.

The dinner was uninspired but pleasant because of the conversation. Kate had made a sweet-and-sour casserole and mashed potatoes.

There was a fire going and Felicity stretched luxuriantly in front of it to dry off and sleep away her exertion. We shared some wine after the dinner and Kate must have been feeling sentimental because she ended up showing me pictures of her daughter from the family photo album. Now twenty, Samantha Forbes was an athletic young woman with curly red hair and freckles. Kate was clearly very proud of her and showed me photos from when she was still just a five-year-old. There was one photo in particular that almost made me cry out loud, though I suppressed the impulse.

The photo showed five-year-old Sam and her Mum cuddling on a big couch in the very same house I’d seen in the photo at Daisy Hogg’s place: It was unmistakable: same carpet, same fridge covered with kid art, same painting by Jake Griffiths.

“Beautiful! So where was this?” I asked as casually as possible.

“This was our place in Karori, Wellington. Sam grew up in that house. We were there for nearly twenty years.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think maybe I did the wrong thing, splitting up with Tim. But we’d grown so much apart. And then, with the divorce he got really nasty.”

“Is this him?” I asked. I pointed to a rangy looking man in one of the photos. He was a tall red-head, with a moustache. His eyes were brown and warm. He wore a polo-necked T-shirt and trackpants. I stared at it, realizing I was most likely looking into the face of Fiona Hogg’s murderer. It was hard to imagine that smiling face as that of a murderer.

“He looks like he’s in good shape anyway,” I forced myself to say.

“He takes care of himself,” she agreed.

“What does he do for a living?” I asked.

“He’s a cop up north.”

“Did you keep his surname?”

“I never took it to be honest. I’ve always been Kate Forbes. His last name is Randall. Samantha is Sam Randall.” She closed the album. “Anyway, that’s enough of that. Would you like to see the Jake Griffiths paintings?”

The next day was a Saturday. I hadn’t slept very well after the dinner. I was wondering what to do. Was my mind playing tricks on me? I had to talk to someone. I baked a kiwifruit loaf and took it round to Mavis McCurdy’s place.

“What a nice surprise, dear,” she said. “Come in, come in. I’ve just put the kettle on.”

“There’s one thing I’ve been wondering,” I said once we were settled.

“What’s that, love?”

“Why you were so convinced that it wasn’t Mike who killed Daisy. It can’t just have been because he was there earlier. I think you must have noticed, subconsciously, some detail that struck you as odd at the time.

Mavis nodded.

“You’re dead right, you know. It was the Waterfords’ dog, Rocky. He didn’t bark.”

“Who are the Waterfords?”

“Steve and Lynley, just on the right side of Daisy. They have a big mongrel, Rocky, and he’s a good sort of pooch but every time a coconut he will bark at Mike. No one else, mind you, just Mike. And that was true as usual the first time he came by, early in the morning. But the second time, just before Daisy was killed, well—you could have knocked me over with a feather! That bloody dog was sitting on his haunches wagging his tail. Not a peep.”

“The man wasn’t giving him food?”

“Not that I could see. Besides, that never worked with Mike. Don’t think he hadn’t tried it! Rocky has a fixation on that lad.”

I explained my predicament, how I’d recognized the house as the one where Fiona Hogg had been photographed by a mystery boyfriend shortly before her disappearance.

“Are you sure it was the same house?” she asked, spreading butter on her slice of loaf.

“That’s just it—I’m not sure. I was wondering if I could see the photo again. Would you mind?”

“I’ll go and fish it out.”

She went to get the carboard box where she kept Mrs. Hogg’s things. She extracted an envelope and took out the photograph.

“Here it is. Now, take a good long look and don’t rush.”

Again, I looked at the photograph. There was Fiona Hogg—about the same age as Samantha Randall was right now, but so vulnerable in comparison. Samantha seemed confident and bursting with health. Fiona seemed much more shy and fragile. It was awful to think about what must have happened.

“Oh Mavis,” I said. “There’s no doubt at all. It’s exactly the same house.”

She took a sip of tea, her hand shaking so much that it spilled into the saucer. I think she was as shocked as I was.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Well, I think you already know that dear,” she said gently. “Don’t you.”

Senior Constable Hal Scott was digging in his veggie garden when I bowled up to his house. It was his day off but the village had his phone number for emergencies. This wasn’t exactly an emergency, but he’d been kind enough to invite me over anyway.

After he’d washed his hands and put the cabbages and potatoes on his kitchen bench, he ushered me into his home office. He sat in an armchair, put his hands comfortably on his massive stomach and gave me his full attention.

“So you mentioned this is to do with Mrs. Hogg?”

“Yes,” I said. “Long story short, I think whoever killed Daisy Hogg also killed her daughter, Fiona.”

“Fiona Hogg…Doesn’t seem to ring a bell,” he said. “Remind me what happened with her?”

“She disappeared 15 years ago, in the summer of 1968 from Wellington. It was never actually reported as a disappearance because there was a note saying she’d decided to Australia. The Karori police judged it a personal decision and never even investigated. But Daisy always maintained that the note was forged and that something was wrong. She never heard from Fiona again.”

“What makes you think the two things are linked?” asked Hal, frowning.

“Daisy said that Fiona had been seeing a man at the time of her disappearance, but no one knew who it was. All Daisy had to go on was this photograph she found in her daughter’s things, together with a birthday card.” I handed him the photo, card and envelope.

“Then, yesterday, I visited Kate Forbes, the new doctor, and she was showing me photographs of her daughter. One of them looked just like this: it was the same house, with the same Jake Griffiths print, the same furniture. It made me wonder if Fiona Hogg was Tim Randall. It would make sense that she wouldn’t tell anyone his name if he was a married man.”

Hal Scott scratched the back of his head, clearly discomfited.

“Oh look, I dunno…this seems a bit wishy-washy to me. Just on the basis of a photograph. One house can look a lot like another, you know.”

“You’re not going to do anything?” I asked, dismayed.

“Nah, I didn’t say that. I just mean it’s not much to go on and it was a hell of a long time ago. Howsoever…I’ll contact a detective up in Wellington and get his opinion, see if he thinks it’s worth pursuing. After all, Fiona Hogg might be alive and well in Adelaide for all we know. There’s no evidence of a crime in that quarter.”

“Except for a mother’s intuition,” I retorted. I realized I should come clean about my suspicions. “There’s something I haven’t told you, something that might tip the balance. A week before she died, Daisy Hogg went to the doctor’s office. She saw the Jake Griffiths print, the same one that was in the photograph.”

“Right?” said Hal, waiting.

“Well, it’s possible, isn’t it, that Daisy recognized it and started interrogating Kate to get more info--if she’d ever lived in Karori, what her husband’s name was, that sort of thing. And maybe Kate Forbes mentioned to her ex that a woman named Daisy Hogg was asking questions…”

“Awful lot of ‘maybes’ in that scenario.”

We sat in silence for a while, he staring intently at a Rotary Club ashtray on his desk, I staring at his hands, which still had traces of dirt under the nails where he’d dug for the potatoes.

He let out a breath, as having to come to a decision.

“Have you talked about this with anyone else?” he asked.

“Only Mavis McCurdy,” I said. He winced a little. I couldn’t exactly blame him. After all, Mavis was Minton’s Central Communication Hub.

“She’s very discreet,” I added defensively, though I didn’t know that for sure. After all, I hardly knew the woman.

“Look, don’t get your hopes up. The likelihood is that there’s nothing tangible to link Randall with Fiona’s disappearance or Daisy’s death. That said,” he added, “If he did it—and we don’t know he’s done anything—then you can count on the fact that he won’t want it brought to light.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, noting his eyes boring into mine.

“I’m saying don’t tell anyone else about this. If Daisy Hogg was murdered for getting too close to the truth, then you’re running a hell of a risk coming to me.”

The shock of this was like a bucket of icy water thrown over my head. He was right. Why hadn’t I considered that before?