Free Jam and Jeopardy by Doris Davidson

and I warned her she’d been stupid . . . she could be putting ideas into their heads, but she just laughed .’
    Again, Mrs Wakeford paused, as if unwilling to say more. ‘Then she said she hoped they’d try to poison her.’
    David Moore looked up from his note-taking with interest, but the inspector signalled to him with his eyes and he bent over industriously again.
    ‘I was worried about it for a while, but I came to the conclusion she must have gone out of her mind and was speaking a lot of nonsense. But after Stephen and his wife left on the next
Sunday – this past Sunday, the twentieth – she came in and said her nephews had tried to poison her. Both her flour and sugar bins had been tampered with.’
    The two CID men glanced at each other, then McGillivray asked, ‘How did she find that out? Did she say?’
    Mabel shook her head in doubt. ‘I don’t know if she was telling the truth, or if it was something she’d dreamt, or even made up to make me feel sorry for her.’
    ‘Let me judge for myself, Mrs Wakeford. What did she say?’
    ‘She said she’d put a crumb of toast on both bins, and the one on the flour had gone after Ronald had been on Saturday. She’d put on another one and the two crumbs had
disappeared after Stephen left on the Sunday. She said that both men had made an excuse to be on their own in her kitchen.’
    She took a shivery breath and leaned back as if glad that she had got it all off her chest.
    ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ McGillivray wasn’t often surprised by any information he received, but he’d never heard anything like this before. ‘I’m sorry,
Mrs Wakeford. It just slipped out.’
    ‘It’s quite all right, Inspector.’
    ‘She was a devious one, wasn’t she, if she actually laid traps for her nephews?’
    ‘It seems like it, and she laughed about them doing it, and said they were going to be disappointed. She didn’t tell me why. But she did say she was looking forward to seeing their
faces the next weekend, this weekend of course, when they discovered that she was still alive.’
    The inspector was silent for a moment, going over what he had just been told, then he leaned forward. ‘Just a minute, Mrs Wakeford. If Miss Souter said she knew about it, and didn’t
use the stuff, how do you think she died?’
    She clutched at her pearls, and hesitated briefly. ‘I think she must have used some of it by mistake, before she threw it out, or whatever she meant to do with it. Her mind must have been
going mustn’t it, it she was laying traps for people? It’s too awful to think about, really, but she kept on about them having tried to poison her. She even said she was going to give
them some home-baked cakes the next time they came down, so that she could watch their faces. Of course, she didn’t live to carry that out, but she was glorying in the idea. A wicked, wicked
woman, Inspector.’
    ‘With a twisted mind, it seems.’ McGillivray ran his fingers through his short hair, each curl springing back into its original position.
    ‘But remember, Inspector,’ Mabel went on hastily, ‘she may have been imagining it all, or making it up out of spite. I told you she was a nasty person, and I just can’t
think that either Ronald or Stephen would have done anything like that. They looked such quiet men. And yet . . .’
    ‘And yet?’ McGillivray waited expectantly.
    ‘And yet, she’s dead, isn’t she?’ She buried her face in her hands.
    ‘Yes, she’s dead, Mrs Wakeford, but don’t upset yourself. We’ll find out who murdered her. Now, is there anything else you haven’t told us?’
    ‘No, that’s everything. Sergeant Black knew on Thursday that I was holding something back, and he made me tell him.’
    ‘You couldn’t have kept that to yourself, anyway. It would have preyed on your mind, and you’d have had no peace.’
    ‘It’s just that . . . I didn’t want to cast suspicion on Ronald and Stephen, when her story was maybe a pack of