Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

“I must admit they pay me as well,” the vicar said with a fleeting smile at Laura.

Their return across the frost-white fields was spoiled by a blue police light snaking through the lanes. Laura said, “I just know it’s going to stop at The Withers.”

She was right.

When they got there the inspector was looking smug. “You might be thinking the forensics lab was closed over Christmas, but I happen to know one scientist who is a perfect Scrooge, can’t stand the parties and the eating and only too grateful to earn double overtime. It’s bad news for you, I’m afraid, Mrs. Thyme. The late Douglas Boon was poisoned. My scientist found significant amounts of taxin in his body.”

“Toxin?” Laura said.

“Taxin. It comes from the yew,” Rosemary murmured. “Just like taxol, only this is no help to anyone, not to be taken in any form.”

“You’re well informed,” the inspector said.

“I’m a plant biologist.”

“And Mrs. Thyme? Are you also an expert?”

“Only an amateur,” Laura said.

About as amateur as a million-pound-a-week footballer, if the inspector’s look was anything to go by. “I’ve got a warrant to search this house.”

“Here? What are you looking for?” Rosemary asked.

“We know from the stomach contents that the last food Mr. Boon ingested was a mince pie. In your statement of Christmas Eve, Mrs. Thyme, you admitted administering a pie to the deceased.”

“Administering?” said Rosemary. “She handed round a plate of pies, that’s all.”

“And we’d like to have them examined, if they aren’t already destroyed.”

This was a defining moment for Laura. Should she confess to changing the lids on Gertrude’s pies? She glanced towards Rosemary, who nodded back. “Inspector,” she said, “there’s something I ought to tell you, something I didn’t mention last time.”

The inspector raised both hands as if a wall was about to collapse. “Don’t say another word. I’m going to issue an official caution and you’re going to accompany me to the police station.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” Rosemary said. “The pies were made by someone else, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t put ideas in her head, Miss Boxer. She’s in enough trouble already.”

As Laura got into the police car, Wilbur whimpered. The hand pressing down on the back of Laura’s head felt like an executioner’s this time. They kept her waiting more than an hour while the house was searched. The plate of mince pies, wrapped now in a polythene evidence bag, was carried from the kitchen in triumph.

Rosemary watched in silence, sickened and infuriated by this turn of events. She could see Laura’s troubled face through the rear window of the patrol car as they drove away. She thought about following in the Land Rover, and then decided they wouldn’t let her near the interview room. She’d be more useful finding out precisely what had been going on in this sinister village.

By asking around, she tracked Colin Price (the little man Laura knew as Caspar) to the garden behind the village hall. He was up a ladder pruning a huge rambler rose. The clippings were going into a trailer he’d wheeled across the lawn.

“What’s that — an albertine?” Rosemary asked, seeing how the new shoots sprouted from well up the old stems.

“Spot on.”

“Late pruning, then?”

“It’s a matter of getting round to these jobs,” he said. “I can only do so much. It’s mostly grass-cutting through the summer and well into autumn. Other jobs have to wait.”

She introduced herself and mentioned that she was Laura Thyme’s friend. “Laura had the unpleasant job of driving poor Mr. Boon to hospital on Christmas Eve. You met her earlier, of course.”

“That’s correct,” he said. “And now she’s been picked up by the police, I hear.”

“Word travels fast,” Rosemary said.

“Fields have eyes, and woods have ears, as the saying goes.” He got down from his ladder. “But all of us can see a police car with the light flashing. What do you want to ask me?”

“It’s about the man who died, Douglas Boon. Could anyone have predicted that he’d take one of the mince pies my friend offered round?”

He shrugged. “Doug liked his food. Everyone knew that. I’ve rarely seen him let a plate of pies go by.”

“So he had one at every house that evening?”

“Every one except Miss Appleton’s.”

“Gertrude’s? Was there a reason for that?”

A slow smile. “Have you met the lady?”

“No.”

“Have you sampled her cooking?”

“No.”

“If you had, you’d understand.” He closed the pruning shears in a way that punctuated the remark.

She said, “I thought you all exchanged pies with her.”

“We do, but we don’t have to eat them. My wife always makes a batch and I prefer hers any day.”

Rosemary ventured into even more uncertain territory. “Did Douglas have any enemies around here?”

He mused on that for a moment. “None that I heard of.”

“His dairy farm was the last in the village, I heard. What will happen to it now?”

“Kitty isn’t capable of running it alone. Likely it’ll be bought for peanuts by Ben Black and turned into another nursery. That’s the trend.”

“Sad to see the old farms disappearing,” Rosemary said. “It happened to yours, I was told.”

“Bad management on my part,” Colin said without hesitation. “I’ve no one to blame but myself. Doug acquired the herd and my three fields.”

“Would you buy them back if they came on the market?”

“I’m in no position to. Ben is the only winner here.”

She asked where Ben was to be found.

“This time of day? I wouldn’t know. Last I saw of him was yesterday morning.”

She decided instead to call on the village Lucretia Borgia.

The cottage could have done with some new thatching, but otherwise it looked well maintained. Gertrude Appleton must have seen Rosemary coming because the door opened before she reached it.

Tall, certainly. She had to dip her head to look out of her door.

And she was holding a meat cleaver.

“What brings you here?” she asked Rosemary. The eyes fitted Laura’s description of them as about as sympathetic as wet pebbles.

“I’m staying next-door.”

“You think I don’t know that? What do you want?”

A little Christmas cheer wouldn’t come amiss, Rosemary thought. “My friend Laura has been taken to the police station for questioning about the death of Mr. Boon.”

“So?”

“So she can’t keep her promise to bring you a mince pie. We had some left, but the police have seized them.”

Those cheerless eyes widened a little. “She baked me a pie?”

Rosemary sidestepped that one. “She was saying it mattered to you, something about good luck for next year.”

Gertrude’s face lightened up and she lowered the cleaver to her side. “Did she really?”

“She said you generously made her a present of some pies of your own, and advised her that the carol singers were coming round.”

Abruptly, the whole look reverted to deep hostility. “Was it one of my pies she fed to Douglas Boon?”

“I believe it was.”

“And now they’re saying he were poisoned? Are you accusing me?” Suddenly the cleaver was in front of her chest again.

Rosemary swayed out of range. “Absolutely not.”

“You said the police seized some pies. Were any of mine among them?”

“Actually, yes.”

Gertrude took in a sharp breath. “I’ve made pies for twenty years and more, and never a whisper of discontent.”

“So we’ve got to find out how some taxin — that’s from a yew bush or a tree, the seeds, the foliage, or the stems — found its way into that pie, which apparently killed him.”