The Stately Home Murder (16 page)

The vicar pointed. “You can jerk the blade forward.”

“We call it a flick knife,” said Crosby laconically. “Next. A godentag. What's that?”

“A club thickening towards the head,” said Mr. Ames, indicating it with his hand, “and topped with an iron spike. Hullo, it's not hanging quite straight—someone must have—”

“Don't touch it,” shouted Crosby, dropping the list and making for the wall.

Mr. Ames' hands fell back to his side, but he went on looking.

So did the pair from the forensic laboratory—only they looked through a powerful pocket lens and they looked long and hard.

“Blood,” said the senior of the two, “and a couple of hairs.”

Inspector Sloan turned to the vicar. “What did you say it was called, sir?”

“A godentag,” said Mr. Ames. “Taken literally it means ‘Good Morning.'”

Detective Constable Crosby caught the affirmative nod from the laboratory technician to Inspector Sloan and interpreted it correctly. “If that's what did it, sir, shouldn't it be ‘Good Night'?”

Charles Purvis had been as good as his word. He came down to the armory to tell Sloan that the four guides were waiting for him in the oriel room.

“They're all there except Hackle and he's working in the knot garden if you want to see him, too.”

Inspector Sloan hesitated. A knot garden sounded like a Noh play. “Where's that?” he asked cautiously.

“Just this side of the belvedere,” said the steward, trying to be helpful. “By the gazebo.”

“And the oriel room?” said Sloan, giving up. It was like learning a new language.

“I'll take you there,” said Purvis. He hadn't finished with the press—he didn't suppose you ever finished with the press—but he had done what he could.

The oriel room had been a felicitous choice on the part of Purvis. It was a room that was never shown to the public, while still not being quite the same as the private apartments. Mrs. Mompson, Miss Cleepe, Mrs. Nutting, and Mr. Feathers were there and Dillow was plying them with coffee.

Pseudo-privilege for pseudo-guests.

The thin Miss Cleepe declined sugar, the tubby Mrs. Nutting took two spoonfuls.

“I know I shouldn't,” she said, “but I do like it.”

As usual, Mrs. Mompson remained a trifle aloof. “Poor little Miss Meredith,” she said with condescension. Mrs. Mompson called other women “little” irrespective of their size. “I do feel so sorry for her.”

“I feel more sorry for Meredith myself,” said Mr. Feathers practically. “Not the sort of end I'd fancy.”

Mrs. Nutting shivered. “Nor me. We must help the inspector all we can.”

It wasn't very much.

Sloan took them through the previous Saturday and Sunday—not so many people on the Saturday, but then there never are—but Sunday was crowded. They wouldn't be surprised if Sunday had been a record. (It wouldn't stay that way for long if it had been, thought Sloan. Not after tomorrow's papers came out.)

Mr. Feathers had noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the great hall. Miss Gertrude Cremond had been along to see the chandelier in daylight, and expressed herself pleased with it. It wouldn't need doing again for the season, otherwise all had been as usual.

Mrs. Nutting reported one small child had got under the fourposter while her back was turned, but had been extricated (and spanked) without difficulty.

“Otherwise,” she said cheerfully, “just as usual. Same sort of people. Same questions.”

Miss Cleepe, as angular as Mrs. Nutting was curved, twisted her hands together. The long gallery had been much the same. The usual difficulty of parties made up of people who really cared about painting and those who neither knew nor cared.

“It's so trying if you sense that they're bored,” she said, “but the Holbein always interests them.”

“After you've told them what it's worth,” said Mr. Feathers brutally.

She sighed. “That's so. They always take a second look then.” She put down her coffee cup. “And of course they always ask about the ghost. Always.”

Mrs. Mompson, who had for some time been trying to engineer an exchange of pictures between the long gallery and the drawing room, said, “That picture doesn't get the light it should in the long gallery.”

“It is rather dark,” agreed Miss Cleepe. “It's such a low narrow room, and the bulb in its own little light was broken. Dillow's getting another for me.”

“I've always said that over the fireplace in the drawing room is where that picture should be,” declared Mrs. Mompson. “Where everyone could really see it properly.”

“I don't know about that I'm sure,” said Miss Cleepe nervously. “After all, too much light might be bad for the picture.”

“It's practically in the half dark in the long gallery where it is. Halfway from each window and not very good windows at that.” Mrs. Mompson had over the fireplace in the drawing room at present an eighteenth-century portrayal of the goddess of plenty, Ceres, that she had long wanted to be rid of. The goddess had been depicted somewhat fulsomely and Mrs. Mompson did not think the artist's conception of that bountiful creature quite nice.

“I think,” she went on, “the Holbein would be seen to real advantage over my fireplace.”

Miss Cleepe flushed. To lose from her showing ground the most valuable item in the house and the ghost at one fell swoop was more than she could bear.

“Oh, dear!” she fluttered. “Do you really? I should be very sorry to lose the Judge. Very sorry. I always feel he's a real interest to those to whom the other pictures mean nothing.”

Inspector Sloan made no move to stop them talking. The policeman's art was to listen and to watch. Not to do. At least not when witnesses were talking to each other, almost oblivious of an alien presence in their midst. Almost but not quite.

Mrs. Mompson, who had no wish for an immediate ruling on the subject of the Holbein from Charles Purvis, said firmly, “Nothing, I assure you, Inspector, out of the ordinary happened in the drawing room while I was in charge.”

Sloan, who would have been surprised if it had, nodded.

“One young woman went so far as to finger the epergne,” she went on imperiously. “But I soon put a stop to that.”

“Quite so, madam. Thank you all very …”

Miss Cleepe had not done.

In a voice that trembled slightly she said, “I really don't think I could possibly manage the long gallery without the Holbein.”

Sloan was ringing back to base. Base wasn't very pleased at his news.

“Someone,” declared Sloan, “has tried to get into the muniments room since we sealed it up yesterday.”

“They have, have they? What for?”

“I don't know, sir. I'd arranged for the county archivist to come over and start going through the records. When Crosby went up there with him he found someone had had a go at the lock.”

“There's something in there,” said Leeyes.

“Yes, sir.”

“And someone's still after it.”

“Yes, sir. They haven't got it though. The locks held.”

“Just as well,” grunted Leeyes. “By the way, Sloan, I've just had the Ornums' lawyer here. He's on his way out to you now. Watch him.”

“Yes, sir.”

“One of those clever chaps,” said Leeyes resentfully. “Said he was representing the Earl's interests. Representing them!” Leeyes snorted. “Guarding them like a hawk, I'd say.”

Sloan was not surprised. People like the Ornums went straight to the top and got the very best. He said gloomily, “I suppose the Earl will be another of those who know the chief constable personally, too …”

They were the bane of his existence, those sort of people, assuming that acquaintanceship was an absolution.

“Be your age, Sloan.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“The Earl wouldn't be bothered with people like the chief constable.”

“Not be bothered with the chief constable?” echoed Sloan faintly.

“That's what I said. The Home Secretary, Sloan, was his fag at school, and the Attorney-General's his wife's third cousin, twice removed.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Exactly.” Sloan heard the superintendent bring his hand down on his desk with a bang just as he did when he was standing in front of him. “So if there's any arresting to be done …”

“Yes, sir.” Sloan took the unspoken point and tried to check on something else. “The rules, sir, aren't they different for peers of the realm?”

“I don't know about the written ones, Sloan,” said Leeyes ominously, “but the unwritten ones are.”

“Yes, sir”—absently. He was thinking about the Tower of London. He and his wife, Margaret, had gone there on their honeymoon. Was it just a museum still or were there dark corners where extra special prisoners lay?

“You could call it a case,” said Leeyes judicially, “where a wrongful arrest isn't going to help the career of the police officer making it.”

“Quite so, sir.” He cleared his throat. “I'm nowhere near that stage yet, sir, but we think we've found the murder weapon. A club called ‘Good Morning.'”

“A club called ‘Good Morning,'” said Leeyes heavily. “You wouldn't by any chance be trying to take the micky out of a police superintendent called Leeyes, would you, Sloan, because if you are …”

“No, sir”—hastily. “It's number forty-nine in the catalogue and its other name is a godentag. The forensic boys have found blood and hair on it but no fingerprints. Dr. Dabbe hasn't seen it yet, of course, to confirm that …”

“That reminds me,” interrupted Leeyes. “Dr. Dabbe. He's been on the phone with his report.”

“Oh?”

“These pathologists,” grumbled the superintendent. “They upset everything.”

“Why?”

“You said, Sloan, that the butler took Meredith his tea at four o'clock and collected the empty tray at five.”

“That's right, sir. He saw him at four but not at five. And Lady Eleanor saw him just before teatime.”

“Teatime, perhaps,” said Leeyes, “but not tea.”

“Not tea?”

“Nothing had passed deceased's lips for three hours before death. Dr. Dabbe says so. Killed on an empty stomach in fact.”

“Somebody ate Meredith's tea,” said Sloan, turning back the pages of his notebook.

“Very likely, but not Meredith,” pointed out the superintendent with finality. “Dr. Dabbe says so.”

13

“So somebody got him in between Dillow taking him his tea and him getting his teeth into it?” concluded Constable Crosby succinctly. He was still in the armory though the vicar and the laboratory people had gone.

“That's right.” There were more elegant ways of putting it, but in essence Crosby was right. “Though after Meredith had made his celebrated discovery and telephoned the vicarage in Ornum.”

“Do we know when that was, sir?”

“Mrs. Ames thinks it must have been about half-past three.”

“Then we're getting nowhere fast,” Crosby said, disappointed, slinging his notebook down on the table that Dillow had provided for them in a corner of the armory. (It was of inlaid walnut and quite unsuitable.)

“Oh?”

“William Murton was seen to get off the 5:27
P
.
M
. Luston to Berebury slow train at Ornum Station on Friday afternoon and I still think he did it,” said Crosby all in one breath.

Sloan regarded his constable with interest. “You do, do you? Why?”

“He's a painter for one thing.”

“That's not a crime. Yet.”

“What I mean, sir, is that he's a bit of an oddity.”

“Nor is that.”

“Suddenly he isn't short of money any more.”

“Meredith wasn't a rich man,” countered Sloan, “and the connection with this case and money is—to say the least—obscure.” It would be there, of course—it nearly always was once you'd ruled out lust—but Sloan couldn't see where it lay.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you arrange for him to be watched?”

“Yes, sir. P.C. Bloggs is tailing him.” He paused. “London came through on the blower.”

“Well?”

Crosby sucked his lips. “From what they can make out he's in dead trouble with a woman.”

The nearest Constable Crosby himself had ever come to being in trouble with a woman was being late off-duty, thus missing the start of the big picture.

There was something almost paternal in Sloan's tone. “If every man who was that, Crosby, committed a murder, we'd never get a rest day.”

Crosby played his last card. “The Earl thinks he did it.”

“I know. It's the best circumstantial evidence we've got that the Earl didn't do it himself. Not that William Murton didn't.”

“The Earl?” echoed Crosby, shocked. “You don't think he did it, do you, sir?”

“No, as it happens, I don't, but he's a suspect like everyone else.”

All people being equal, but some being more equal than others.

Especially earls.

It was a natural step from there to Lord Henry.

“That's another thing I've checked,” said Crosby, “without any joy.”

“What is?”

“His young Lordship's car. There is some blood down between the fan blade and the radiator. I've told those two vampire chaps—”

“Laboratory technicians”—mildly.

“Them. They're going to have a look when they've finished with the ‘Good Morning.'”

“He could have put it there,” pointed out Sloan.

“Yes, sir”—briefly. Crosby flicked back the pages of his notebook. “There are no fingerprints on the ‘Good Morning' by the way.”

“I hadn't expected there would be.”

“And Mrs. Morley, the housekeeper, said she bandaged Lord Henry's hand for him after he cut it. Friday, it was. In the morning.”