A Three Book Problem, page 17
“It wouldn’t hurt to see what you can find. Maybe he’s bluffing. Maybe you can counterattack with a headline in the size of font papers are saving to announce an alien invasion. Something like ‘Did ghosts in haunted Suffolk Gardens House,’ the name all in caps, ‘kill a paying guest?’”
Irene gave me a weak smile. “I like the way you think, Gemma Doyle. I’ll let you know what I find.” She glanced around the store.
“Are you looking for something?”
“I’m thinking a deerstalker cap would be appropriate to wear when I’m investigating Daniel Steiner.”
“We have plenty in stock.”
“Then again, I don’t need a hat when I have a computer. Bye, Gemma. Bye, Moriarty.”
Chapter Eleven
Once Irene had left, without buying a hat, I closed up the shop and ran through the usual end of day routine, which included filling Moriarty’s food and water dishes and emptying the litter box. I texted Jayne and asked if she needed anything.
Thx but no. Under control. Late date with Andy.
Enjoy. See you tomorrow.
As I swept the floor, tidied the puzzle and games table, surveyed the day’s sales record, and shut down the computer, I thought about Irene and Daniel Steiner. I briefly wondered if he might have had something to do with the death of David Masterson, but I dismissed that idea almost immediately. I need to avoid the natural tendency to assume that because someone is nasty in one circumstance, they’re responsible for other nasty things. Although, once I got home, it wouldn’t hurt to check to see if Mr. Steiner has any involvement in Sherlockian societies. Or if he’d been in West London at the time of the murder.
“Now, remember,” I said to Moriarty as I let myself out the back door, “be on guard. I’m leaving my livelihood in your capable paws.”
He yawned.
I locked the door behind me, got my car, and drove straight to Leslie’s house to collect my dogs.
I found Leslie in the yard watching Violet and Peony romp with her dog Rufus. The dogs and I greeted each other with much enthusiasm, and I was privately thrilled at how excited they were to see me. Leslie handed me the bag containing their things. “I was distressed to hear about a death at Suffolk Gardens House. You and Jayne weren’t involved, I hope. You weren’t mentioned in the papers.”
“Nope. Nothing to do with us.”
She gave me The Look, the exact expression Jayne uses when she doesn’t believe me. “Did you hear anything else, other than what the paper put online?” I asked her.
Leslie Wilson had lived in West London her entire life. She was involved in half the charities and social clubs in town, and the half she wasn’t actively involved in, her friends were. She shook her head. “Nothing worthwhile. Lots of gossip, of course, including the possible involvement of the resident ghost.”
“The house has a resident ghost?”
“Not that anyone heard of until today,” Leslie said. “There’s always been gossip about that house. Locals never being allowed inside gets the rumor mill working overtime. The Steiner family kept strictly to themselves when they were at the house, and had almost no interaction with the townspeople at all. They didn’t even shop at the supermarket but brought all their groceries with them. Which didn’t do much to endear them to West London merchants, as you can understand. The garden club tried several times to get them to allow the house to be part of the spring tour, and they were always politely, but firmly, shown the door. The door in this case being an expression, as they weren’t invited to come around and discuss it in person. It’s been a long time since the club even bothered, although they’re hoping the new owner, if there ever is one, will be friendlier. How did the man die? Natural causes?”
“They’re not sure yet,” I said. Ryan told the people at the house David had been murdered. With the exception of Donald, who loved keeping secrets, the guests at Suffolk House this morning were not members of this community, so word might not get around as quickly as it would otherwise. Irene had been told by Miranda that the police were regarding David’s death as a murder, but until the word was officially out, the paper wouldn’t say it.
I thanked Leslie for looking after my dogs and she gave me a hug. “Any time. They’re a joy to have. Rufus seems to like having them, although he’ll be ready for a long nap as soon as you leave.”
Violet and Peony leapt eagerly into the car. I fastened them into their harnesses, and we drove home.
West London faces east so we don’t get the sun setting over the ocean, but when I turned into Harbor Road the dying light behind me threw shades of purple and dark pink into the clouds. I passed families carrying dripping ice cream cones, groups of rowdy teenagers, and couples with their arms around each other, oblivious to everything going on around them.
Andy’s restaurant, the Blue Water Café, sits on the edge of the pier, leaning out over the water. Lights were switched on and portable heaters glowed. The deck overflowed with conversation, laughter, and the tinkle of glasses and clink of cutlery. Soon it would be time to fold up the umbrellas, bring in the cushions, and stack the tables and chairs in preparation for the long quiet winter to come.
Maybe then Andy and Jayne could get on with planning their wedding.
My phone rang, and I used Bluetooth to answer. Ryan.
“Good evening,” I said.
“What are you up to this fine evening?”
“I’m on my way home. I just picked up the dogs. I’m passing the café. It’s busy tonight.”
“Gotta get that last dockside meal in before winter arrives.”
“Great minds do think alike. That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
I heard his smile come down the line. “As you’re on your way home, any chance of a meal for a hungry cop?”
It didn’t take long for me to mentally inventory the contents of my fridge when I’d last seen it. “If that hungry cop doesn’t mind a tuna sandwich and a bowl of canned tomato soup.”
“I’ll order us a pizza. Be there in ten.”
He was there in eight. His car pulled into my driveway as I was watching Violet and Peony cavort across the lawn, checking to see who’d been on their property while they’d been away.
Overjoyed to see him, they ran to greet him, and he bent over to give them both hearty pats and scratches. They ran off once again, now overjoyed at the chance to bark at a squirrel taunting them from high in the branches of an ancient oak. Violet’s a cocker spaniel, all flying ears, and has been with us since she was a puppy. She’s Uncle Arthur’s dog; he named her after the four Violets of the Sherlock Holmes Canon. Peony’s a bichon frise, little more than a ball of curly white fur, and he’s lived at my house for only a few months. I adopted him on the death of his owner, who was a keen gardener, thus his name.
Dogs suitably greeted, Ryan gave me a light kiss.
“Dare I hope you’ve solved the case and can spend the night?” I asked.
“No such luck. I need a break, and then I have to get back at it.”
We walked into the house with our arms around each other. The back yard’s enclosed and I left the dogs outside so they could run around for a while longer. After Ryan left, I’d take them for a long walk.
Ryan dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. The dark stubble was thick on his jaw, the delicate skin under his eyes purple, and those eyes were red and tired. “No sleep last night?” I said.
“Not much. I have to confess I’m here for more than dinner. Anything happen after I left yesterday I need to know about?”
“Didn’t you ask Louise?”
“Louise, as you well know, is a highly competent detective. She is,” he cleared his throat, “not Gemma Doyle.”
“Whatever that means.” Outside Violet barked, and a second later Peony joined in. A second after that, I heard the sound of a car engine slowing and then a door slam. “Hold that thought. Dinner’s here.”
I met the deliveryman at the door and accepted a heavy cardboard box emitting marvelous smells. Violet and Peony danced eagerly around my feet as I opened the box, put it on the table, and got out two plates and the roll of paper towels. Plus one knife and fork. Ryan eats pizza like an American, with his hands. I do not, although I’ve often thought it looks more fun that way. Particularly the licking the fingers part.
“They’re a strange bunch.” I filled Ryan in on the group’s activities Saturday night and this morning. “Are you aware that Rebecca Masterson and some of the others are staying on at the house for a few more days?”
“I am. I have no comment as to whether or not I find that inappropriate. It’s her business, and I get the feeling she and her husband weren’t particularly close, despite them not having been married for long.”
“That’s my impression also.” Ryan knows how I like my pizza, and he’d ordered this one to suit my taste: topped with mushrooms, onions, and peppers. He likes his with the more pepperoni and sausage the better.
I helped myself to a generous slice, trailing a long ribbon of melted cheese after it. “What’s your take on Jennifer Griffith?”
Ryan took two slices. “She came all the way from California for this weekend. She doesn’t fly, so she took the train, and she was planning to stay in the east for a while. She’s a keen Sherlockian, and she and Donald seemed to have hit it off.”
“Nothing more?”
He peered over the top of his pizza. “According to Louise, Jennifer’s upset at the death of David. At dinner last night, Jennifer was the only one who appeared genuinely distressed, and that includes the wife and the niece and nephew.” He took a big bite of pizza.
“In Annie’s defense, she was originally upset, as you put it, but otherwise … Jennifer and David were having an affair and he’d told her he was divorcing his wife to marry her.”
The pizza went down the wrong way. When Ryan recovered, he said, “You know this and Louise and I do not?”
“They were being discreet, in her words. In fairness, I did have my suspicious that something was up, but it was only when I was in Jennifer’s room that I put together all the signs. That’s what she told me they were planning at any rate. Whether David was intending to do anything of the sort, I can’t say. Now, I’ve been wrong before—”
Ryan muttered something and took another bite.
“—but I believe Rebecca knows nothing about the situation, although the penny finally dropped for Miranda. Rebecca could barely be bothered to insult Jennifer, much less accuse her of stealing her husband.”
“What’s your take on the others?”
“Annie and Billy were treated as the poor relatives, dependent on Uncle David for his largesse. Annie grieved, genuinely I believe, but more than one killer has come to regret what they did immediately after doing it. Some don’t regret doing the deed, but they do regret being forced into it, as they see it. Steve and Cliff weren’t grieving, but I never thought they were friends of David’s in the first place, more like casual acquaintances with a common interest. I don’t know why Miranda was there, other than that she and David were friends of a sort, and had been for some years, I believe. She has not the slightest interest in Sherlock Holmes. As for Kyle, also not a Sherlockian in any way. He was invited to this weekend by Rebecca, not by David, as Rebecca hoped David could help his musical career. Which seems highly unlikely to me.”
“You think Kyle and Rebecca had something going?”
“No, I do not. He was wary, very wary, of Louise. I’d check into his record if I were you.”
The edges of Ryan’s mouth turned up. “I’m doing that, Gemma, for all of them. Kyle has, shall we say, come to police attention before.”
“As I suspected. I assume you’re not going to tell me under what circumstances he earned this attention, so I won’t ask. My overall impression, even before David died, was that most of these people didn’t know each other, and if they did, they didn’t like each other much.” I told Ryan what I’d overheard on Friday evening, someone complaining they wouldn’t have come if they’d known someone else would be there. Ryan didn’t dismiss my observation as quickly as his partner had.
“You think it’s possible David was not the intended victim?” he asked.
I leaned back in my chair, steepled my fingers, closed my eyes, and pulled up a mental picture of the scene in the library Saturday morning. David behind the desk, Jayne and I in front of it facing him. Him standing up, rounding the desk, coming toward us. The low murmur of conversation in the rest of the house, the creak of floorboards overhead, the drapes moving in the soft wind. “No. Unless they were aiming at me or at Jayne and missed, which isn’t worth considering. Not Jayne anyway. Once David came around the desk, the view from the window was unobstructed. The killer had to have clearly seen what he, or she, was aiming at in order to make the hit.” I then told Ryan my theory as to why the killer had made his or her move when other people were in the room.
I opened my eyes to see Ryan smiling at me. “What?”
“It’s incredible watching you think.”
“I have not the slightest idea what that means.” I picked up my half-eaten slice of pizza. “Everyone thinks, Ryan. Speaking of poisoned darts …”
“This is confidential …”
“Understood.”
“Only because you’ve helped us so much in the past am I telling you.”
“Also understood. Does Louise know I know? Or rather that I am about to know?”
“She does, as does the chief. First, we easily found the probable weapon. No attempt had been made to hide it: it had been tossed into the bushes, close to but not in the kitchen garden.”
“They must have tossed it as I chased them.”
“There were no fingerprints on it, meaning this person had worn gloves. No prints at all, meaning the weapon had been wiped clean before being used. When we searched the guests’ rooms we found exceptionally long gloves in Miranda’s and Jennifer’s.”
I nodded. “Part of the costume. I wore gloves the first night.”
“That’s what I thought. Considering the time of year, anything else would have been suspicious. Several pairs of cleaning gloves were under the sink in the kitchen and in the storage closet. Some of them had been used, but it’s impossible to tell how long ago. On the other hand, our killer might have simply wrapped a scarf or even the edges of a sweater or other piece of cloth around their hands.”
“Miranda likes to accessorize her clothes with a scarf, and these nights are cool enough that anyone would have brought a sweater. I did.”
Ryan licked pizza sauce off his fingers.
I had a brief moment of wishing I’d been the one to clean them off, before I focused on what he’d pulled out of his jacket pocket. It was a photograph of a long, thin metal instrument resembling a tube. The ruler laid beside it showed it was eighteen inches in length and about an inch in circumference.
“Goodness,” I said.
“Good word for it.”
“I assume that’s a blowgun.”
“It is.”
“Excellent. All you have to do is find out who recently purchased, or had made for them, such a rare instrument.”
“And therein lies the problem, Gemma. This isn’t rare at all. You can buy one on Amazon for fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents.”
“You can? Why would anyone want such a thing?”
“They come in all sizes and all prices. Ones this size are used for shooting birds—”
“Why would anyone want to shoot a bird?”
“Irrelevant, Gemma. They can, and are, used as kid’s toys also. A set of darts comes as part of the set. We’ve contacted Amazon and other suppliers to get their sales records. It’s possible our killer was kind enough to leave a trace of the purchase, but I’m not counting on it. Of interest, these blowguns are illegal in New York City and in California.”
“Sensible of them,” I said.
“Which means little, as the purchaser could have used a temporary address for the delivery or visited a store outside of those areas.”
I studied the picture for a long time. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. If I had, certainly if I had this weekend, I would have remembered. The traditional English country house weekend, which David was trying to re-create in West London, Massachusetts, included a shooting party for the gentlemen, while the ladies wrote letters and then gathered for afternoon tea and vicious backbiting gossip. Sometimes the ladies ventured out of the house to meet the men in the fields for a picnic. All terribly civilized. No shooting party was planned for this weekend, which was just as well as the property’s no larger than five acres and they’d have been shooting at the windows of the house or each other.”
“Your point is?”
“I don’t know if I even have a point. Did someone drop their blowgun into their suitcase expecting a round of shooting, and was this person so disappointed at there not being something like that organized that they took revenge on their host? Unlikely.”
“Meaning malice aforethought.”
“Yes. It had to have been brought with the express purpose of using it. And not to shoot birds out of trees.” I picked up the photograph again. “This would fit easily into a suitcase, and could have been carried into the house without anyone noticing. Annie’s job this weekend was as housekeeper and maid. She made up the rooms. You need to ask her if she saw something like this. I know you’re trying to keep the cause of death to yourselves, but you’ll have to ask them all.”
“Louise has a copy of this photo, and she’s paying a call on Donald now, then she’ll go to the house. Unfortunately, we have to ask Irene also.”
“And then the cat will indeed be out of the bag.”
“It hasn’t escaped my notice that firing a poisoned dart from a blowgun is a mighty complicated way of killing someone,” Ryan said. “Why not just shoot the man or climb in the window and knife him?”
“The advantage of the blowgun, of course, is that it’s completely silent. I was standing no more than a few feet away and I didn’t hear anything. A knife attack can be messy, leaves traces on the attacker, and is not always reliable if the victim has time to react. David, we must remember, wasn’t in particularly good shape, but he wasn’t old or frail.”
