Who Killed Mrs. Hogg? (1/3)

In the year 1983, I moved to Minton, a tiny town in South Otago. I was fresh out of Teachers College and it was my first proper job-teaching new entrants at the local primary school.

As usual, there were some kindly locals who invited me, as the new teacher, into their homes to gather a bit of information about the stranger and to offer me a gentle induction into the community.

One of the first to invite me over was Mavis McCurdy. She must have been about seventy-five and was one of those stalwart pillars of the township, the kind you got in most small towns in those days: Vice President of the Farming Mothers Association, Brown Owl, hockey coach and Secretary of the school board. Some people might have called her a busy body, but it was immediately clear to me that there was nothing malicious about her—she was interested in people for their own sake and she wanted the best for everybody, within reason. Not having a family of her own, she considered the community her people.

Her home was small, neat, rather minimal in terms of decoration and knick-knacks. She said that was for ease’s sake—her hands were terribly swollen with arthritis and it was too much fiddle to dust ornaments and things. For the same reason, she didn’t keep a garden. There was just a pocket-handkerchief lawn and a single leggy rosebush over by the mailbox. A man came to clip the grass every second week and when the time came he pruned the rosebush too.

Mavis made a big pot of strong tea, brewed in a teapot with a knitted tea cosy. She then carefully spilled a packet of Krispies onto a nice plate (she wasn’t a baker either).

In a very pleasant way, she interrogated me about my background: where I grew up, who my people were, where I went to school, whether I had a ‘better half’ (I hadn’t). We established two mutual acquaintances and one possibly shared relative. She mentioned, too, that there were a few good looking young men in town. The mailman, for example, was tall and handsome.

Having successfully passed through the interrogation, I changed the subject and observed that it was great to come and live in a peaceful corner of the country such as Minton.

Maud McCurdy looked at me sharply, her eyes were a strikingly pale blue. She put down her cup.

“Peaceful?” she said. “Not at all. There’s nothing peaceful about Minton except maybe the range. In fact, there’s something about this place that gets to people. Puts them on edge, you know, unless they’re already all right in themselves.”

By ‘the range’ she meant the surrounding landscape—an other-worldly vista of tussock, rock and bald dry hills extending in every direction. There was very little good grazing ground so it was really very wild looking. I could have spent hours just watching the changing cloud shadows over the brown hills, or looking for lizards sluggish in the morning cold and absorbing as much heat as they could from a lichen-covered rock.

“Just the other week we had a murder,” said Mavis.

“What’s that?” I thought I’d misheard her, she said it so casually.

“Mrs. Hogg. Bludgeoned to death on her back doorstep, she was. Hers is the house just opposite here. Was, I should say.”

She pointed one of her knobbly fingers at the window and I looked in that direction with some horror. Through the net curtain I could make out the sight of a very ordinary red-brick house with a green corrugated-iron roof. A state house, thousands of them just like it in every small town at that time.

“I was a witness, what’s more,” she said serenely.

“You saw…it?”

“Not the actual killing, but I saw the murderer come and go. It was eight minutes past eight on the Monday before last.”

Then Mavis told me about the victim.

“It was very sad, very sad indeed. Daisy Hogg had had a hard life no matter which way you look at it, poor thing. And when she moved here, she said just what you did, that it was nice to live somewhere peaceful at last. She came here just last April and now we’re in October and she’s dead. Makes you think, doesn’t it,” Mavis shook her head.

The tragedy of her life, said Mavis, was her daughter’s sudden disappearance. Fiona McCurdy was only twenty-two when she vanished from the face of the earth. This was about fifteen years earlier. She left a note saying she was going to Australia and no one saw her again. The police took that at face value and decided there were no grounds for an investigation. Daisy, on the other hand, maintained there was no way in hell that Fiona would have left for another country without saying goodbye to her mum. She said she was bloody well going to investigate the thing herself.

She talked to Fiona’s work mates, her netball team, her friends, her hairdresser, her doctor, even regular grocer. She left no stone unturned.

Fiona’s friends all said she’d been withdrawn of late—they were convinced she was seeing a man and was so secretive about the relationship that they assumed he was married. She wouldn’t introduce him to them and never mentioned his name. Daisy strongly suspected that this mystery man had something to do with Fiona’s disappearance.

Sorting through her daughter’s things, Daisy found what looked like a clue. There was a birthday card signed ‘M.’ and a photograph of Fiona in a house that Daisy didn’t recognize—a nice looking place. Whoever owned it was clearly well off. She looked so hard and long at that photograph that it became burned on her brain. She noticed that there was a Barbie doll on the bench behind Fiona, and a kid’s painting on the fridge.

Probably the most distinctive thing about the house was a distinctive Jake Griffiths painting on the wall—a view of a range in South Otago. She sent the photograph to the artist himself to ask who’d bought it. That led to nothing—it had been bought by a gallery in Nelson in 1978 and was still hanging there. The painting in the photograph must have been a print.

Well, Fiona had lived in Wellington and it was hardly possible to visit every house in a big city to find out who had a Jake Griffiths print. Daisy did what she could though, it wasn’t for lack of trying that she didn’t solve the mystery. She spent years and years and all her earnings on the scent but every trail was a dead end.

One day about five years ago, Daisy and her sister took a tour of the South Island—they’d never been down this way before—and she fell in love with the South Otago area. I believe that it may have had something to do with that bloody painting. It reminded her of Fiona, she said. So this year, after retiring, she moved here to settle down.

I got the sense that she’d finally set the sorrow to rest. She’d accepted that she might never know what happened to Fiona, and it would be better to grieve properly rather than living in hope. The hope that she was still alive, of course, but short of that, the hope of knowing the truth.

“So…what happened?” I asked. “Was it a random attack?” I asked. “Who did it?”

“Well, that’s the question,” said Mavis. “Would you like another cup, dearie?”

I said I would, and waited.

“The thing is,” she said. “That it looked like the mailman. He’s been arrested. Awaiting trial.”

“The mailman!” There was an indignant note in my voice because I remembered her recommending him to me as one of the town’s most eligible bachelors.

“Oh yes, but it wasn’t him.”

“Hold on,” I said. “If it wasn’t him, why did they arrest him?”

“Because three people saw the mailman go in and leave at eight-fifteen. And at eight-thirty she was found with a clutch of letters in her hand. Still warm, by all accounts.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Surely that’s pretty decisive?”

“The mailman delivers his mail on his motorbike, you see,” said Mavis patiently. “He parks it at the end of each street, then walks down popping mail into the boxes. He always wears his uniform: motorcycle helmet, jeans, leather jacket, hessian bag full of mail. That’s how the killer was dressed.”

“But you don’t think it was really him?”

“No, I don’t. In the first place, he’d already done his rounds that day. He did them at six-thirty. I don’t sleep very well, so I was up and about at the time. In the second place, he never hand-delivered mail unless it was something like a big parcel or courier mail. In the third place, he says he’s innocent.”

“Do you know who it could have been?”

Mavis thought, sucking on her Krispie.

“I’ve been racking my brains but you know I don’t. This was quite a tall man. Of course the mailman is tall too. An apart from him there’s no one quite of that build here as far as I know.”

Mavis’s story bounced around in my head for several days. It was very sad and not a little disturbing. I didn’t like remembering that both Daisy and I had come here because it was peaceful. I didn’t like the possibility that a killer could be prowling around the neighborhood, especially since I was a young single woman strange to the area. And, like Daisy, I really didn’t like not knowing.

Then work began and I sort of forgot about it for a while. The reason I remembered it was when I went to the doctor’s office and saw a Jake Griffiths painting. It was hanging there in the waiting room. The receptionist had chatted with me a bit about being new in town, so I decided to ask her about Daisy.

“It’s terrible about that poor woman who was murdered. Daisy Hogg. Something like that really affects a community.”

“It does,” said Daphne the receptionist. “You’re quite right. Daisy Hogg was very well liked here. Even though she was quite new here in town, she’d made a lot of friends. She was just, the salt of the earth.”

“I suppose she came to this clinic herself?” I posed.

“Well, it’s funny. She was quite healthy really. We didn’t see much of her until the week before she died, you know. Even then, there was nothing really wrong, but she wanted to register with the new GP, you know.”

“Oh, there’s a new doctor?”

“Yes. Dr. Forbes just came here last month. Before that it was Dr. Harris but he was ready to retire. It’s nice to have fresh blood in, you know.” I got the sense Daphne never had a bad word for anybody but she was glad to see the back of Dr. Harris.

Daisy Hogg had visited this clinic, seen the painting and less than seven days later, she was dead. Was it a coincidence? I was suddenly very curious to meet this Doctor Forbes…