The Judge's Notebook

Constable Drupe arrived eleven minutes later, still holding a clipboard of duck-race times, and made the first of what Beatrice privately catalogued as his mistakes: he let everyone stay. "Now then," he said, surveying the marquee. He was a large young man with a kind face and the investigative instincts of a Labrador. "Nobody's to leave the field. We'll want a word with everyone." He looked at the marmalade, the body, the toppled table. "Sad business. Sad business. His heart, do we think?" "His marmalade, I should think," said Beatrice. Drupe blinked at her. He had been in her infant class in 1979 and had never entirely recovered from the experience. "Mrs. Mott." "Cuthbert Aimsley judged preserves for a living, Constable. He tasted from every jar in that final — it's the whole point of him. Eight jars are broken. One is not. And the one that is not belongs to the only competitor in this village with a reason to mind very much who won today." "Edith Crane wouldn't hurt a fly," said Mrs. Pebble. "I didn't say she hurt a fly," said Beatrice. "I said someone went to trouble. Constable, might I see his notebook?" Every judge kept a notebook. Aimsley's was a slim black thing he guarded like scripture, and it was, mercifully, still buttoned into his breast pocket — the one part of the scene the spilled marmalade had not reached. Drupe, who could not think of a reason to refuse a former teacher and could not, under her gaze, locate the energy to try, eased it free with a handkerchief. The last entry was dated that afternoon. Aimsley's handwriting was small and vain, full of loops. *Jar 1 — Pfebble. Pleasant, over-sweet. Jar 2 — Crane. Texture exemplary, peel cut fine, but —* The sentence stopped there. Not trailed off. Stopped, the pen dragged downward in a long uncontrolled streak, as though the hand holding it had simply ceased to be a hand that wrote. "He was tasting jar two when he died," Beatrice said quietly. "Edith's. He had judged one. He was halfway through the second word about the second jar. And then nothing." Drupe looked, for the first time, genuinely unhappy. "That doesn't mean—" "No. It doesn't." Beatrice was pleased with him; she liked a pupil who resisted a conclusion. "It would be the easiest thing in the world to poison a man through a jar of marmalade, Constable, and the easiest thing in the world to frame the woman whose jar it was. Both of those things are true at once, and that is exactly what makes this interesting." She turned the page. Aimsley, it seemed, used the back of the notebook for something other than judging. There were initials there, and small sums of money, and dates going back two years. *E.C. — £40. R.T. — £75. Pebble — £40.* "Constable," said Beatrice, and the pleasure had gone out of her voice now, replaced by something flatter and older. "Did you know that our regional preserves judge was being paid, privately, by at least three Lower Tilbury households?" The marquee, which had been full of murmuring, went quiet. "He was selling gold medals," said Beatrice Mott. "And this year, it appears, somebody stopped paying."