01 - Murder at Ashgrove House (19 page)

‘Right, Lane, let’s get the alibis sorted out,’ said the inspector,
looking at the list of guests that Sergeant Lane had jotted down. ‘We’ll have
another talk with Miss Simpson later, when she’s got over the initial shock.
She may find that she remembers something that may prove useful. I’d like you
to go to the servants’ hall and interview the servants. We need to get a feel
for the people in this house, who got on with who, who disliked who, that sort
of thing. We need to know exactly who we’re dealing with. Pick up any gossip
you can, I know you’ve got a certain way with cooks and parlour maids; it must
be those youthful good looks of yours. Maids want to flirt with you and the
cooks want to mother you. Just don’t take too long about it and try not to eat
too many cakes, I don’t want you to be too stuffed with food to run after the
murderer in case he tries to make a run for it!’

Sergeant Lane laughed and grinned mischievously. This was a part of his
job he enjoyed, the harmless flirting with the young servant girls, impressing
them with highly exaggerated tales of his exploits as a policemen. In his
experience, servants tended to know everything that was going on in a house
like Ashgrove, all the secrets and idiosyncrasies of their masters and
mistresses, and gossip about the guests. And if he was lucky, he’d manage to
sweet talk the cook into giving him a cup of tea and a homemade sausage roll
just fresh from the oven, he could feel his mouth watering just thinking about
it, and then perhaps finished off by a large slice of Victoria sponge, light as
anything ...

‘Stop daydreaming, Lane, you’re not stuffing your face yet,’ Deacon said.
‘Listen, man, I want to find out who found Miss Simpson in the woods and what
she was doing. Was she crouched over the body crying her eyes out or some way
away trying to hide the gun? And what sort of state was she in? Did she run
back from the woods herself or did someone have to bring her back and, if the
latter, who was it and what were they doing there? The more I think about it,
the more I realise how little we got out of Sir William or Miss Simpson, the
first time we interviewed her, as to what exactly happened ... Good God, man,
what’s that noise?’ Deacon broke off abruptly from what he was saying, swinging
his head around violently to stare in bewilderment at the library door. There
was a banging on it which seemed deafening after the detectives’ quiet
deliberations. ‘They’ll have the door off the hinges if they’re not careful, or
at the very least put a hole in it if they go on like that much longer.’

Sergeant Lane leapt across the room and opened the door. Rose collapsed
into his arms.  After a moment of indecision, Deacon took the girl from
him and led her into the library where he seated her gently on the settee. He
strode to the door and whispered urgently to the sergeant. ‘You go on, Lane,
see what you can get from the servants.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘The girl
still seems distraught and I don’t want to lose any more time. We must crack on
and interview Lady Withers and the house guests.’

Lane nodded and departed, although he was very tempted to stay and hear
what Miss Simpson had to say. Deacon had just closed the door behind him and
was making his way back into the room when the door swung open and a very
excited young constable stood in the doorway, hardly able to contain himself.

‘Good God, man,’ said Deacon, annoyed at yet another disruption, ‘haven’t
you heard of knocking.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ replied the constable looking slightly abashed at the
ticking off. ‘It’s just that we thought you’d want to know straight away …’

Deacon held up his hand to silence him and walked over to the constable
so that he could tell his news out of ear shot of Rose.

‘What is it, man, for God’s sake tell me quietly, there’s no need to
broadcast it to the whole house.’

‘It’s the gun, sir,’ said the constable in an excited whisper. ‘As you
instructed, we were making a search of the woods for the murder weapon and
we’ve found it, sir. We found it in some undergrowth not far from the scene of
the shooting.’

Sergeant Lane found himself seated comfortably in a chair in the
servants’ hall. Initially his arrival had caused a flurry of excitement with
maids of all description – house, kitchen and scullery – staring at him in awe
of a real life Scotland Yard detective being in their kitchen, marvelling at
his good looks, giggling and nudging each other, trying to catch his eye and
being rewarded with a wink or a grin when they did. Albert, the footman, who
was used to having the girls’ undivided attention, and Mrs Palmer, had been
less delighted to see him, although the latter was being grudgingly won over by
his charm and his saying how his mother had once been a house maid herself in a
large house like this and he knew the amount of hard work that went into making
sure that the household ran like clockwork and if only the master and mistress
of the house knew the full worth of their servants they’d double their wages in
a trice. Soon she was beckoning him be seated at the vast well-scrubbed wooden
table and, wiping her hands on her apron, was pointing at the kitchen maid and
scullery maid for one to quickly pour the gentleman a nice strong cup of tea
and the other to cut him a generous slice of Victoria sponge, fresh baked that
morning before all the kerfuffle, as she called it. And as light as a feather,
the detective had assured her, quite melted on the tongue it did and, though he
would never admit it to her face, it tasted even better than the cakes his
mother made, if such a thing was possible.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it,’ Mrs Palmer had said, rolling up her
sleeves in preparation for starting her next cooking task, revealing to Lane
two mighty forearms in the process, muscular from years of beating and
whisking, ‘what with all that’s happened, I’ll doubt them upstairs will be
wanting their afternoon tea and I do so hate to see things go to waste, don’t
you, not though that it will with all these greedy young mouths,’ she said
indicating the maids and footman. ‘Mr Stafford and Miss Crimms have got something
of a sweet tooth themselves so I dare say there’ll be nothing but a few crumbs
left before the day’s out.’

It had seemed to Lane an awful lot of servants for a household of just two
to have, especially as the general view was that since the war it was hard to
get good domestic staff. It appeared that, as a result of fair wages and good
working conditions, and because generations of the same families had been
employed there, Ashgrove enjoyed an almost unnatural sense of loyalty amongst
its staff, so that although all the able men had joined up as soon as war had
been declared, and some of the women staff had become ambulance drivers, nurses
and the such, as soon as the war was over those who were able to had returned
and had been received back to jobs kept open for them. The sergeant looked at
Mrs Palmer, called such because of her status as cook-housekeeper, not because
she had ever been married. He wondered idly whether she had chosen to be a
spinster, to devote her life to the service of her employers, or whether she
had lost a sweetheart in the Great War as so many women had done.  Instead
of fretting over a soufflé for Sir William and Lady Withers, was she wishing
instead that she was fussing over a husband, to say nothing of the offspring
they might have produced. Instead she immersed herself in her cooking and
running a large house, a poor substitute for loved ones, he thought. 

Lane, noting her harsh words to them, wondered whether Mrs Palmer
resented the kitchen maid and the little scullery maid for the love and
happiness that might await them but had eluded her. If she had been affected by
the war, she had not been the only one. Lane himself had lost a cousin and an
uncle, and Deacon, he knew from police station gossip, had lost his only
brother.  He knew also that it was only because of the dearth left by a
generation of men lost in the Great War, rather than by personal merit that
both he and Deacon had been promoted so quickly and at such a young age to fill
dead men’s shoes. He felt always a sense of guilt that he had benefited in this
way from the death of others, that his career had been propelled forward while
those of others had sunk in the blood and mud in France. Instinctively, he knew
that Deacon felt the same although they had never spoken of it, that the only
thing that kept the two of them going, assuaged them from the guilt that they
had survived while others, better men, had perished, was the belief that they could
bring justice to the Britain that these men had fought for, could make it a
land worth dying for. It did not matter that he and Deacon had not been old
enough to fight, they carried the guilt with them like a heavy bag, men born a
few years too young. Lane had known a few lads the same age as him who had lied
about their age. They had signed up and gone to France and most had died, but
one or two had survived although they had never been quite right. Williams was
in a home and recognised no-one but sat and shook all day, his mind all blown
to pieces, while Brown’s body had been blown apart, he had lost his legs and an
arm and sat in a chair with his only arm resting over a blanket knitted by his
mother, a former shadow of himself, but with his mind intact so that he could
witness the life he had lost, the kind of man he could have been.  

‘I’d just like to get an idea if I can, Mrs Palmer, as to the guests, get
a feel for their characters,’ began Lane. ‘We find if we get an idea about the
types of people involved, their likes and dislikes, what kind of people they
are and such like, well it helps us to find out exactly what happened. And I
know from the stories that my mother used to tell me, there’s nothing that goes
on in a house like this without the servants knowing, particularly in a
well-run house like this one.’

‘You’re quite right, Sergeant,’ agreed Mrs Palmer, ‘although I won’t have
it said that we tells tales, because we don’t.’

‘Quite so, Mrs Palmer. But you’ll have nothing against helping the police
with their enquiries, will you? But before we go into all that, there’s
something that’s been puzzling me. Sir William was called away otherwise we
would have asked him. It was Miss Simpson, I believe, who was out walking in
the woods with Lady Belvedere when she was shot. I was wondering whether she
made her own way back to raise the alarm. The inspector and I have been to the
woods where the incident took place and it’s a fair distance from the house,
quite a trek over the parkland and through the gardens. She must have been
shocked and distraught; I’d be surprised if the young lady could find her way
back unaided. We had some difficulty ourselves finding our way back onto the
path.’

‘You’re right, Sergeant, she was in no fit state to do so. She was found
by Archie Cutter and his son, Sid. Crouched over the body she was, so they
said. Screaming for all she was worth, as you’d expect. Had to prise her away,
they did. Archie stayed with the body while young Sid led her back here to
raise the alarm and get someone to look after her. An awful job he had too.
First she wouldn’t leave the body, kept talking a lot of odd nonsense so Archie
Cutter told me later. Said as how it was all her fault that Lady Belvedere was
dead, said as how she’d killed her! Poor lass didn’t know what she was saying,
poor thing. I doubt whether she had ever picked up a shotgun in her life let
alone shot anything. Anyway, in case you start wondering and adding two and two
to make five, Archie assured me there was no gun anywhere. He checked the
undergrowth and bushes nearby. Talking nonsense, he told me, he thought she
must have been delirious with the shock like. Anyway, once they had managed to
tear her away from the body, quite a two man job it was and Sid such a little
fellow even for his age, she kept stumbling like and trying to turn back.

‘But the two of them managed to get here eventually. Sid brought her to
the servants’ entrance and we brought her in here and sat her down on that
there chair where you are sitting now, Sergeant. Quite a state they both were
in, I can tell you. Could get no sense out of either of them until Mr Stafford
had given Sid a drop of the master’s brandy. Miss Simpson was as pale and white
as a ghost and shivering as if she would never get warm again, so I gave her a
nice hot, weak cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it, because of course she was
suffering from shock.  Young Sid seemed to pull himself together first,
although his words came tumbling out on top of each other. Anyway, eventually
we could just about make out a garbled message about a lady lying dead in the
woods. Sid was awful scared about having left his father guarding the body,
kept saying that he was afraid that he’d get shot, that he was sure the man was
still out there and we had to hurry.   

‘Mr Stafford and me, we didn’t know what to make of it all, I can tell
you. Something dreadful had obviously happened, but we didn’t want to waste the
police’s time.’

‘Very considerate of you I’m sure,’ said Lane, trying to look impassive
while taking in the news of the confession. He wanted desperately to scribble
down all the information he could, but, not wishing to appear too excited,
limited himself to writing down the general gist in a slow and methodical
manner. 

‘Well in the end, because young Sid was in such a state about his father,
Mr Stafford got Albert to telephone for the police while he and Bridges, that’s
the head gardener, set out for the woods to see for themselves what had
happened. They took a couple of spades with them just in case, although what
good they’d have been against a man wielding a gun, I’m not sure. Anyway they
found Archie standing guard over the body and Lady Belvedere dead as a dormouse
just as Sid had said. And Archie had the same story as to how he and Sid had come
across Miss Simpson crouching over the body and what she’d said but he said as
how she was talking gibberish and that he’d put it down to shock.’