The Donaldson Case Read online

“Hello?” Janet called as she squinted into the dimly lit building.

  “Hello,” a voice called back.

  Janet smiled as she recognised the voice of their neighbour from the semi-detached house across the street. Stuart Long looked after the grounds of Doveby House for the sisters. He was a retired gardener who loved working with plants and flowers. The sisters paid him a nominal sum for a huge amount of work and supplemented the payments with as much tea as the man could drink.

  Stuart used the carriage house for storing the many garden implements that he seemed to need. He kept his things in a very tidy pile by the door. The rest of the carriage house was still the same mess that the previous owner had left. Janet planned to tackle it once she’d finished with the library, but now, as she looked at the piles of haphazardly stacked boxes, she didn’t feel in any rush to get started on the job.

  “Ah, Stuart, how are you doing?” Joan asked.

  “I’m fine, thanks, how are you?”

  “We’re well,” Joan told him. “But we found this piggy bank and we’re anxious to get it open.”

  “That’s easy enough,” Stuart said. “He looks as if he’ll smash without any difficulty.”

  Janet shook her head. “I don’t want to smash her,” she said. “There’s a rubber stopper in the bottom of her. We need to find a way to remove it.”

  She handed the bank to Stuart, who turned it over in his hands. “I see,” he said after a moment. “Let me see what I have here that might pry that out.”

  Janet watched anxiously as he tried a couple of different things, but nothing seemed to shift the stubborn stopper.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to just break it open?” he asked, giving the pig a shake. “There’s definitely something in there.”

  “I really don’t want to break her,” Janet said. “I quite like her.”

  Stuart’s look suggested that he didn’t agree with Janet’s opinion of the pig, but he turned it over again and went back to work on the stopper.

  “Ah, there you go you little bug…, um, ahem, that is, I think I’ve got it,” he said a short time later. He held up the troublesome rubber piece and then handed the pig back to Janet.

  “One of you should turn it over and shake the contents out,” he said, sounding as eager as the sisters to see what was inside.

  Janet moved a few boxes into a new pile to make a reasonably flat surface to work on. She shook Piggy gently and grinned.

  “Coins,” she said as the first few items tumbled out of the bank. “What else would you find in a piggy bank?”

  A further shake answered her question for her. “A key,” she said excitedly. “I wonder what it’s for?”

  Stuart looked the small pile of coins and the key and then shrugged. “Nothing too exciting in that lot,” he said. “I suppose one or two of the coins could be valuable, but if they were you’d expect them to be kept properly, not in a piggy bank.”

  “Maybe Maggie Appleton didn’t know they were valuable,” Janet suggested.

  Stuart laughed. “You wouldn’t say that if you had known Maggie. She knew exactly what every single thing she owned was worth to the penny. We used to have long conversations about house prices and she tracked every sale in the village so she had a good idea what Doveby House was worth at all times. If those coins were very valuable, she’d have put them in her safe.”

  “She had a safe?” Janet asked, pretending she didn’t know about the wall safe in the office. She was intrigued to find that Stuart knew about it and she couldn’t help by try to find out how he’d come to learn of it.

  “She had a big old safe that sat on the floor in the storage closet in the sitting room,” Stuart replied. “The charity that inherited the house from her probably took it if it isn’t there now.”

  “It most certainly isn’t there now,” Janet said, trying to hide her disappointment. “I wonder if this key is for that safe?”

  “The safe had a combination lock,” Stuart told her. “Maggie let me store a few things in that space once, that’s why I know,” he explained quickly, answering the question Janet had been about to ask.

  “I don’t suppose you knew the combination?” Janet asked, wondering if Maggie would have used the same combination for both of her safes.

  “No, I certainly didn’t,” Stuart replied. “But if the safe isn’t there anymore, why do you want to know?”

  Janet shrugged. “Just curious, I suppose,” she said. “Sometimes people use combinations that are made up of numbers from their birthdays and the like, and I just wondered if Maggie Appleton did that, that’s all.”

  “She might have,” Stuart replied. “But I never knew the combination, or when her birthday was, either.”

  “Never mind,” Joan interrupted. “Thank you for getting the bank open for us. We’ll have to have the coins checked out, but I expect they won’t be worth any more than their face value, if they’re even worth that.”

  “They’re all foreign,” Janet said. She was looking through the small pile. “I’m not even sure what country or countries they’re from.”

  “Maggie loved to travel,” Stuart told them. “She probably just threw random leftover coins in the pig when she got back from her travels.”

  “Probably,” Joan agreed.

  “And you don’t know what the key might be for?” Janet asked, holding it up.

  “It’s just a key, isn’t it? I imagine I could be for just about anything,” Stuart replied with a shrug.

  Janet took the rubber stopper from Stuart and gently wiggled it back into place in the bottom of the bank. “There, good as new,” she said happily. “I think I’ll put all my change in her every night. It shouldn’t take long for me to fill her up.”

  “She’s going in your room,” Joan reminded her as they walked back towards the house.

  “Oh, yes,” Janet agreed. “I wouldn’t dare leave her in the public areas. She might get broken.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  Janet could hear the sarcasm in her sister’s voice, but she didn’t care. There was something sweet and loveable about the odd little piggy, and she was going to give her a good home no matter what Joan thought.

  “What about the key?” Janet asked once they were back in their sitting room.

  “What about it?” Joan replied. She’d put the handful of coins and the key into her pocket for the walk back to the house; now she pulled them all out and put them on a small side table.

  “We should work out what it’s for,” Janet said. “There are some numbers and letters stamped on it, but they’re really hard to read. Maybe it opens another wall safe, one we haven’t found yet. Or a safety deposit box at a bank. Or a trapdoor hidden in the floor somewhere.”

  “Or the back door to the house,” Joan added. “Or even the front door. Maybe you should start there before you go on another of your flights of fancy.”

  “It doesn’t look like the front door key,” Janet argued as she picked up the key.

  “It could be a key to one of the guest rooms, perhaps,” Joan suggested.

  Janet opened the front door and tried to slip the key into the lock. “It doesn’t even come close to fitting,” she told her sister happily.

  “There are lots more doors you can try,” Joan reminded her. “Meanwhile, I’d better get some dinner started. At least we have leftover apple crumble for pudding; I don’t have to worry about making that as well.”

  Janet grinned. “Apple crumble for lunch and dinner? It must be my lucky day.”

  “I think I’ll just do spaghetti Bolognese for tonight, if that’s okay?” Joan asked. “It’s quick and easy.”

  “That’s fine,” Janet agreed. “In the meantime, I’m going to try this key in every door in the house.”

  “And then you can get back to cleaning the library,” Joan suggested.

  “Yeah, sure,” Janet muttered as she headed towards the stairs. Cleaning the library was much less interesting than investigating the mysterio
us key. On her way out of the sitting room, she’d grabbed her new piggy bank.

  In her room, she took a minute to rearrange the top of her dresser to make room for the new addition. She dug around in her handbag and found a handful of coins, which she dropped inside the bank. “Can’t have you getting hungry,” she told the little pig. After patting the pig’s head gently, she turned to her door.

  When the key didn’t fit into the keyhole, she felt a rush of relief. It would have been a shame to find that the key Maggie Appleton had gone to all the trouble to hide inside the pig, inside a hidden wall compartment, was simply a spare to one of the bedrooms in the house.

  Feeling as if the key was the wrong shape for the internal doors at Doveby House, Janet nevertheless tried it in the locks on the two guest bedrooms. Back downstairs, she tried it in the door to the library itself, as well as in the house’s back door and even the French doors that opened off the sunroom. It didn’t fit into any of them.

  “Did you try the carriage house?” Joan asked when Janet joined her in the kitchen.

  “Not yet. I thought I’d try that after dinner. And I’ll try it in the small lock on the gate that opens into the back lane, as well.”

  There was a low fence that ran around the large garden that surrounded Doveby House, with a small gate at the back. While there was a lock on the gate, the sisters didn’t have a key for it and neither did Stuart Long.

  “It would be good if it opened the gate,” Joan said. “I’ve never wanted to go out that way, but it would be nice to have the option.”

  Janet grinned. There was something weirdly frustrating about having a gate but being unable to use it, even though, like Joan, she’d never yet actually wanted to get through it.

  “I can’t help but feel that it’s the key to something more important than that gate, though,” Janet said.

  “That’s because you have an overactive imagination,” Joan replied. “I’d much rather have a key to the gate than a mystery key taking up space in a drawer.”

  Janet sighed. Joan was always so boringly practical. Neither sister had ever married and they’d always lived together. Just sometimes Janet wondered what her life might have been like if she’d separated herself from her sister when they’d been younger. Joan was two years older and she’d always seemed to feel responsible for her younger sister, which had allowed Janet to enjoy being less responsible and more whimsical. Perhaps both sisters could have benefitted if they’d lived apart rather than together.

  “Anyway, dinner is ready,” Joan interrupted her sister’s thoughts. “You sit down and I’ll serve.”

  Janet smiled to herself as she sat down at the small kitchen table. As a steaming plate full of spaghetti was put in front of her, she remembered why she’d lived with Joan for all these years. Joan was an excellent cook.

  “There’s garlic bread,” Joan told her, opening the oven.

  The smell of melted butter and garlic made Janet’s mouth water. The bread was Joan’s own homemade loaf, split lengthwise and covered in a very generous layer of butter mixed with garlic and herbs. Joan sliced it into several pieces and Janet grabbed a slice the moment Joan set it on the table.

  “This is wonderful,” Janet said after her first bite of the crunchy and buttery bread.

  “Make sure you leave room for the apple crumble,” Joan reminded her.

  “I always have room for apple crumble,” Janet said with a laugh.

  After dinner and crumble, Janet helped her sister load their plates into the dishwasher before heading out into the garden with her key. Although Joan insisted she didn’t really care what the key was for, she did follow Janet out into the garden.

  “It’s a lovely night,” Joan said.

  “It is,” Janet agreed. “It feels far too warm to be early November. Are you going to sit in the garden for a while?”

  “I thought I might,” Joan replied. “Michael said he might stop over, and I thought I might just wait for him outside. We won’t have many more warm nights.”

  Michael Donaldson lived in the other half of the semi-detached property across the street from Doveby House. He was widower in his sixties, and both sisters had been surprised when he’d begun courting Joan. While Janet had dated extensively in her youth, Joan had been content to focus on her career as a primary schoolteacher, so this was her first experience with dating.

  Janet was enjoying watching the relationship between her sister and their handsome neighbour develop slowly. Michael was a retired chemist, and just lately he’d been filling in at the local chemist’s shop for a sick colleague. Janet knew that Joan had missed the man when he’d been too busy to stop by and visit.

  “He’s done working in Doveby Dale, then?” Janet asked.

  “He worked until midday today and then a proper substitute arrived to cover until Owen is back on his feet.”

  Janet nodded. She’d only met Owen Carter a few times when she’d called into the small local chemists for plasters or headache tablets, but he seemed like a nice man. She’d been shocked to hear that he’d needed a rather serious operation at the young age of forty-seven.

  “You enjoy the weather, then,” Janet said. “I’ll just check the carriage house and the back gate.”

  Joan settled on a bench while Janet made her way towards the carriage house. It really was an unseasonably warm night and Janet decided that she’d join her sister on the bench once she’d tried the key. They’d be stuck indoors soon enough when the winter weather arrived.

  The carriage house was locked up tightly. Janet had already compared the key she’d found in Piggy with the actual carriage house key and she knew they were nothing alike, but she tried the mystery key in the lock anyway, mostly to satisfy Joan. It didn’t fit.

  It wasn’t far from there to the back gate, but Janet took her time, enjoying wandering through their gardens. Stuart did an excellent job maintaining the many flowerbeds and grassy areas and keeping the paths neat and tidy. Janet didn’t like to think what they’d have to pay someone else if he ever decided he didn’t want to help them anymore.

  The lock on the gate was rusty and Janet wondered if she’d manage to get the key to fit, even if it was the right key. When she tried the key in the lock, though, it was quickly apparent that the key was much too small for the lock on the gate, rusty or otherwise. She sighed and then turned and headed back towards the house.

  As she walked, she saw something over the low fence that had her quickening her pace. When she reached Joan she took a deep breath before she spoke.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on,” she told her sister. “But there are two police cars at Michael’s door.”

  Chapter Three

  “I didn’t know we had two police cars in Doveby Dale,” Joan said after a moment.

  “No, I didn’t either,” Janet agreed. “But what could they want with Michael?”

  “Are you sure they’re at Michael’s? Maybe they are visiting Stuart and Mary,” Joan suggested.

  “I suppose they could be,” Janet admitted. “Although the cars are parked at Michael’s end of the street. I couldn’t see anyone in either house, though.”

  “I’d much rather think they’re talking to Stuart and Mary than Michael.”

  “Yes, me, too. And if someone is in trouble, I do hope it’s Mary and not Stuart.”

  Joan nodded. The sisters didn’t dislike Stuart’s wife, Mary, but they didn’t exactly like her either. This was a second marriage for both Stuart and Mary, and Mary seemed to spend a great deal of her time visiting one or another of her three children from her first marriage who were scattered around England. From what they could gather from Stuart, her children appreciated the frequent visits, but their various spouses were less enthusiastic.

  Joan and Janet often felt like they’d done little more than say the odd “hello” to the woman. Her regular absences allowed Stuart more time to work in the Doveby House gardens, for which the sisters were grateful, but they also meant that the sister
s ended up giving Stuart breakfast, tea breaks and sometimes even evening meals while she was away.

  “Perhaps we should take a short stroll around the neighbourhood,” Joan suggested now. She stood up from the bench and stretched. “We really haven’t been taking nearly enough exercise, have we?”

  Janet hid a grin. Joan was trying not to appear nosy, but Janet knew her sister was burning up with curiosity. As that exactly mirrored Janet’s own feelings, she didn’t argue.

  “I was just thinking we should be doing more walking around our lovely neighbourhood,” she replied. “Especially on these last few nice nights of autumn.”

  The sisters linked arms and walked slowly around Doveby House. Although it was highly unlikely that anyone was paying any attention to them, they deliberately strolled the long way around, as if they weren’t the least bit interested in what was happening across the road. They walked slowly down the path at the front of their property, trying hard to not to stare at the two police cars that were still in place.

  “Where to now?” Janet whispered as they reached the corner where their short cul-de-sac met a slightly busier road.

  “I suppose we could walk up towards the main road,” Joan suggested. “There’s a pavement.”

  And that path would take them behind the semi-detached properties, perhaps affording them a look in their back windows.

  They’d only just crossed the road when they heard a door opening. Janet gasped as she realised it was Michael’s front door that they’d heard. She and Joan stood still and watched as their local neighbourhood constable, Robert Parsons, walked out of Michael’s house. There were two other men with him, one in a police uniform and the other in normal clothes, like Robert. The trio stopped next to the two cars and chatted for a moment before the two strangers got into one car and drove slowly away.

  Robert climbed into his own car and followed them slowly back towards the main road. At the corner, he stopped suddenly and put down his window.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he called. “Out enjoying the last of the warm weather?”

  “We were,” Janet agreed. “I do hope everything is okay,” she added, earning a stern look from her sister.