Murder at Maddingley Grange, page 20
Still uncertain, half convinced yet unable to really believe, the guests murmured to each other. Fred spoke.
“Look, Simon, a joke’s a joke—”
“No joke,” said Simon. He was silent for a long moment before once more stumbling into speech. “When…When I was at University College…I worked at Guy’s in the long vac. As a hospital porter. Believe me…I know a corpse when I see one.”
At the word corpse Sheila gave a cry and pitched forward. Simon moved just in time and stood, looking nonplussed and deeply unhappy, with her in his arms. Violet came forward to help.
“You’d better get her some tea…or brandy,” said Simon, handing over the half-swooning woman. “Whatever you think best. Fred, bring that cloth thing—over there.”
Fred crossed to the sofa. There was an Indian-print bedspread draped across the back. He pulled it off and took it to Simon, who placed it carefully over Derek. It was a few inches short and his feet peeped out. As Simon bent to pick up the knife, Fred said quickly: “I shouldn’t do that, squire.”
“Why not?” But Simon let it lie and straightened up, frowning. “Ohh…I see. I suppose no one should touch anything. But then I don’t think anyone has…except Sheila of course.”
“You’re right there, Simon. Shurshy la famm. Know what I mean?”
“For heaven’s sake.” Simon lowered his voice almost to a whisper. But Sheila and the rest of the company had departed. Mother, who had showed signs of desiring closer acquaintance with the remains, leaving only under pressure. Fred and Simon moved toward the door.
“Better lock him up.”
“I suppose so.” Simon turned the heavy iron key, tested the door and put the key in his pocket. “God—what a mess.”
They found the others in the second sitting room. Bennet, having made tea for the servants not long before, had already produced a strong sweet cupful for Sheila, who was sipping at it when she wasn’t sipping at an extremely generous measure of brandy. Violet gently mopped the younger woman’s tear-stained face. Simon crossed to Laurie, who looked pale and drawn. She said: “I’ve asked Bennet to make us all tea.”
“Good.”
“You look like death.”
“Don’t.”
“Sorry. What on earth are we going to do?”
It was the butler who returned with the tray. Lurching less but still far from functioning on that perfectly even keel that Blades would consider de rigueur.
“My sister is rather incommoded, madam.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Laurie, who felt pretty incommoded herself. “Put everything down on the coffee table, Gaunt. People can help themselves.”
After everyone had, with more than one guest gussying up the beverage with a spicing of Courvoisier, they all sat around, Mrs. Saville choosing a position near the window where she could keep an eye on the card table. Looks were exchanged. Apprehension, suspicion, uneasy excitement. Fear.
Sheila, head resting awkwardly on Violet’s shoulder, had stopped sobbing but had become alcoholically loquacious. “Poor Derek…” she was now wailing while wringing her hands. “Lying there all alone…in a pool of his own blood… with a knife in his heart…”
People murmured consolingly. Laurie murmured too but, desperately sick and worried as she was, could still rustle up enough irritation to wonder who else’s blood Derek could possibly have been lying in a pool of with a knife in his heart.
At last Sheila became quiet and they all sat very still. Intensely aware of each other and holding themselves rather carefully, perhaps afraid that the slightest movement might reactivate that animus of rioting disorder that had wreaked such havoc in the conservatory. Eventually, Fred spoke.
“Well,” he said, for once understanding the case, “Here’s a turn-up for the book.”
The phrase hit the spot. Most of those present had experienced by proxy precisely such a scene. The suspects gathered together after the crime waiting to be cross-questioned by the detective. Except, of course, in this instance there was no detective.
“A right shame, ain’t it?” Fred voiced the thought. “He’d have loved this—old Derek. A real murder.”
This set Sheila boohooing again and crying, for the umpteenth time: “I can’t understand it…Who would want to kill him…poor darling…”
That of course was the nub. In books it was frequently the widow, especially if, as was the case here, she then came into a generous helping of the ready. But no one, not even Rosemary, who was far from pleased at Sheila’s sudden reentry into the eligibility stakes, was quite crass enough to put this perception into words.
“Well,” said Mrs. Saville, sitting bolt upright and musing once more on the curious discrepancy between the daily routine at Madingley Grange and that of the Royal Georgian Hotel, Bath, “none of this bizarre behavior has anything to do with me. I haven’t moved from the terrace all morning. As Mrs. Gibbs will, I’m sure, confirm.”
“Clears you both, then,” said Fred. “Point of fact, our whole family’s out the bog if we’re talking alibis.”
Alibis! Suddenly people looked more lively, although still carefully holding in place their masks of sympathetic concern. Something wildly out of order might have just occurred but matters were now being eased back onto the correct procedural rails. Once the right questions had been rigorously asked, and honestly answered, the dense clouds of suspicion would lift and the bright truth shine forth.
“Vi and me,” continued Fred, “was on the lake. With Gilly. Right, Gil?”
“Absolutely.” Gilly looked sulky. He had been rehearsing what he thought of as his testimony for the defense—length of time in punt, previous experience in negotiating same, brief description of water wildlife and skill in embarkation—only to have the opportunity of presenting it snatched from under him.
“So that’s five of us sorted—”
“Just a minute,” Simon interrupted. “Didn’t Violet and your mother go into the house just before one? We were halfway through the soup, I seem to remember, before they turned up.”
“We were together all the time.” The foxglove bloom had reappeared. Violet looked across at Mother in what seemed to some of those present a slightly threatening manner.
“Except when I went to the doings,” said Mrs. Gibbs.
“They don’t want to know every sordid detail,” chided Fred. Mrs. Gibbs immediately put on a vague, faraway look suggesting spiritual uplift.
“We weren’t in the cellar five minutes,” said Violet. “It was getting her up and down all them steps that took the time.”
“And while Mrs. Gibbs was…?”
“I waited in the hall. The butler and maid went by a couple of times with stuff for the table, but no one else.”
“I wonder,” said Fred, back in the director’s chair, “if Simon with his bit of medical know-how could tell us how long Derek had…well…been lying there.”
“Not long,” said Simon, staring at his feet. “He was still warm.” Then, as Sheila gave a little cry: “I’m sorry.”
“He couldn’t have been killed before eleven, say, when we had our coffee?”
“I doubt it.”
“I may be able to help here.” Martin spoke for the first time. “Someone knocked on my door mid-morning. It took me a few minutes to open it—I was feeling rather groggy— and when I did I saw Derek at the far end of the landing.” An interested murmur. “I’m afraid I didn’t feel up to conversation so I didn’t actually speak to him. Now I wish I had.”
“Even so, Martin, that’s important,” said Fred. “It’s narrowed things down. When did you come out of your room for good?”
“About twelve.”
“And you didn’t see him again?” Martin shook his head. “What did you do after that?”
Martin frowned. Recollection, even of such recent events, was far from automatic. The realization that the small girl now sitting eyes tightly shut, features frozen into a mask of miserable anxiety, was that same soignée creature with whom he had felt so oddly comfortable the previous evening had pushed everything else aside. They were all looking at him expectantly.
“I wandered round the gardens.”
“Meet anyone?”
“Rosemary and Simon.” Martin reddened then, as the air of expectancy intensified. “I…er…talked to Rosemary for a few minutes. Simon returned to the house—then Rosemary did the same. I sat on a bench till I heard the gong for lunch.”
“You’d confirm that, Simon?” Simon nodded. “And can you tell us what you were doing before then?”
“Teaching Rosemary and Sheila to play croquet. Not very successfully, I’m afraid.”
“Does that mean you were in sight of each other all the time?”
“More or less. I came back around twelve-thirty to see how things were going and saw Bennet on the terrace. She’d just finished laying the table for lunch. She said Laurie had gone to pick some lettuces ages ago so I went off to the vegetable garden—”
“Just a minute, Simon. Are you saying you didn’t go into the house at all?”
“That’s right. When we came back I sat down for lunch with the others. And Laurie went straight to the kitchen. Isn’t that right?”
Laurie nodded. She could not speak. She felt herself to be locked in a bubble of the most appalling unhappiness and despair. How laughable now, how puerile, seemed her previous concern that one of the guests might run off with the family silver. If only that were all they would have to confess to Aunt Maude on her return. Anguished, Laurie relived the scene, so long ago now, it seemed, under the large umbrella on the terrace when Simon had put forward the whole disastrous plan. Why had she let herself be persuaded? She had known in her heart that it was wrong. She had even (she thought now with the advantage of hindsight) felt a definite premonition of disaster. If only she had stood firm. It was the story of her life. Simon says do this, and she did. Never again, Laurie vowed bitterly. Never ever again.
“And I can vouch for Sheila’s return,” said Mrs. Saville in a sharp voice. “She came and stood behind my chair. Most irritating.” Then, remembering, “If you’ll forgive my saying so, my dear.”
Everyone looked at Sheila, who said: “Straight after that I had an aperitif. Then sat down at the lunch table.”
“I did go into the house,” admitted Rosemary, “for urgent running repairs,” adding coyly, “to my lipstick. But just to the downstairs lavatory. I was no more than a couple of minutes.”
Bennet arrived with fresh tea and Fred got his second wind. “Just a sec, love,” he began as the maid was leaving, “and you’ll have to forgive me for this, Sheila, but somebody’s got to put this question—” He turned back to Bennet: “I understand you saw Mrs. Gregory cross the hall looking for her husband.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“How soon, would you say, after she left the hall did she scream?”
“Within a second or two. She wandered down that little corridor that leads to the conservatory; then she screamed. I ran to see what had happened and found her bending down and picking up the knife.”
“You mean…pulling it out of his chest?”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Laurie sprang to her feet. “You’re treating this as if it’s still a game. Someone has died. It’s not up to us to play at finding motives or checking alibis. We have to get the police.”
“Whoops!” Fred leaped across the room and grabbed at Bennet’s teapot. “You’ll have that all over the floor.”
“I beg your pardon, sir.” The maid turned to Laurie. “And miss.”
“Oh, what the hell does a spot of tea on the carpet matter?” said Laurie. “We shouldn’t take something as dreadful as this, Fred, and enjoy it. It’s too terrible.”
“Hang on.” Fred sounded miffed. “Nobody can say any of us are enjoying this. But the murder’s happened and when the police do turn up they’re going to be asking lots of questions. It does no harm to get things clear in our minds. What difference does half an hour make? Rushing around like blue-arsed flies won’t bring Derek back. What do you think, Simon?”
“Well…I agree…I suppose…”
Laurie looked across at her brother and hardened her heart against his tentative smile. This proved surprisingly easy to do. Still she did not persist in her argument. For if there was such a thing as post-murder protocol, she was quite unfamiliar with the finer details. And certainly Fred was right in stating that they had missed the boat as far as calling the police straightaway was concerned. And if half an hour had already passed, a few more minutes would hardly signify. She noticed the maid, still drooping whey-faced against the doorframe, and said: “I should go and sit down for half an hour, Bennet. I’ll see to the tea.” Bennet, after rubbing vaguely at the spilt drops on the carpet with her shoe, disappeared.
“So now we know,” said Fred, before the door had barely closed, “that Sheila could not possibly have struck the blow that killed her husband. Not”—he added hastily as Sheila showed fresh signs of turning on the waterworks—“that any of us thought for a moment that she had.”
“D’you think, Sheila”—Violet sounded very gentle— “he might have done it himself?”
“No.” The widow was quite vehement. “Derek was the last person…Especially today. He was so looking forward to outsmarting you all.”
“So if suicide is out,” said Gilly, “and none of us is the bad hat, who on earth—”
“The prowler!” cried Rosemary. The others looked startled, then sighed, almost en masse, with relief. “Derek must have disturbed him in the conservatory. I expect that’s how the pot came to be broken.”
Laurie didn’t believe a word of it. She understood the relief, the grasping at any straw. Who would not be delighted at the idea that a malign outsider had been responsible for leaving Derek spatchcocked on the tiles? But to Laurie this glib conclusion seemed ill reasoned. For a start, it did not seem to her, in spite of the broken pot, that there had been a fight. The earth had not been scuffed about, as surely it must have been during a struggle? And Derek himself was so calmly and neatly disposed, lying flat on his back, arms by his sides. No one fell just so. The body had been placed in that position after death.
“Or perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Saville, “the butler was lying last night and the prowler actually is one of the servants. They’re bizarre enough, heaven knows.”
“It wouldn’t be the domestic staff,” quavered Sheila. “Derek was very hot on that. The butler never does it.”
“But that’s in books, dear,” replied Mrs. Saville in a “give me strength” voice. “We have to forget our murder game. We have a real crime now.”
“D’you think I don’t know that?” Out came the by now sodden handkerchief. “That’s my husband lying there…”
“Alternatively,” Mrs. Saville swept on, “perhaps the prowler was someone Derek actually recognized. A person from his past determined to settle an old score.”
“Now,” murmured Simon, “I think we really are entering the realms of fiction.”
Martin shifted uneasily in his chair. He was becoming more and more aware of Laurie’s distress. He found himself wanting to offer comfort and wished he had the nerve to cross the room, sit next to her and take her hand.
“I think”—Fred was back in charge—“we should look for clues. P’raps starting with an examination of the body—”
“That’s it!” Laurie got up and made for the door. “I shouldn’t have agreed with you,” she called over her shoulder to Simon. “We should have rung the police the second we discovered this. What are they going to think? How are we going to explain the delay?” She was in the hall now, almost running, Simon close behind calling: “Laurie—wait. Listen.”
“I’ve done listening, Simon.” She picked up the phone. “It was listening to you that got us into this terrible mess.” Laurie dialed a nine. “Anyway, I know what you’re going to say. Everyone’s got to have their money’s worth, haven’t they?” And another. “Have a bit of fun solving things while that poor man…” A third. “Lies there—leave that phone alone, Simon… Hullo?…Hullo?” She paused, staring at her brother, half angry, half alarmed. “What have you done?”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s dead.”
“Are you sure?” Simon took the receiver, wiggled the rest and listened. “My God—so it is.”
“Don’t look so surprised.”
“It’s nothing to do with me.”
The others, who had followed, now started asking questions. Simon’s denials got quite heated. Gilly wondered if someone had simply pulled the plug.
“It’s not that sort of phone,” said Laurie. “It was put in years ago.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” said Violet, “if the line wasn’t down after that storm last night.”
“Oh.” Laurie’s face lightened a little. “I’d forgotten that.”
“You see,” said Simon, defiant and vindicated. “A perfectly natural explanation.”
“Don’t let’s jump to conclusions.” Gilly plainly thought this element of tameness undesirable. “I think we should follow the cord back”—he proceeded to do just that—“and see what we can find…For all we know it may have been deliberately cut.”
Watched by the others, he set off tracing the cord that ran, neatly stapled to the skirting board, through the hall and into the dining room before going up, via the ceiling, to the outside. More than one of those watching him happily running off were uncomfortably reminded of their previous bloodhound in residence. A triumphant cry reached their ears and Gilly was running back.
“I was right! Cut clean through. Underneath that big sideboard. Indicating, of course, premeditation. What a sell.”
Laurie’s accusatory look returned and Simon’s expression of bewilderment deepened.
“Right,” said Fred. “Now we know where we stand. Whoever killed Derek was obviously determined to delay the arrival of the police for as long as possible. And the only reason for that must be so he can get clean away. Which means it definitely wasn’t one of us.”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Saville, her voice crackling with disdain, “no one believed for a moment that it was? After all, apart from the fact that most of us patently do not hail from the substrata of society, there is also the fact that we had never met before this weekend. No one but a madman runs around killing people to whom he has not even been introduced.”
