“Or have a flaring temper they can barely control…” Leonardo, who sat on the floor, nursing his hurt jaw, shifted uncomfortably.
“Or have blood on their dress.” He glanced past Lady Bantham, to Sir James. “Or a secret worthy of blackmail. But all of them, they say one thing – I did not kill Lady Bantham. I did not kill the person who died in the car. So we’re back where we started. With two murders and no killer to accuse.”
Lord Bantham said, “You’ve taken up enough of our time. You’re past your prime, a good thing you retired. I should really complain about your behaviour, but as you did this as a favour to Sir James, I will not do so.”
“Not so fast, Lord Bantham.” Jasper looked at him and smiled. “You see, despite all the confusion and the puzzle pieces that didn’t quite seem to fit, one thing became very clear to me as I considered the case over and over again. One absolute truth.”
“And what was that?” Lord Bantham asked.
“That there was at least one person in the company who knew Lady Bantham had not died in the car accident. Who knew that she was still alive. The woman in red showed herself for a reason. Now what could that reason be? Wanting money to keep her mouth shut about being alive? She wouldn’t have appeared then and run off to see if anyone happened to follow her. To see if anyone came after her with a purse of money to make her leave again. No.”
Jasper shook his head with emphasis. “That made no sense whatsoever. If she had wanted to surprise people who had no idea she had survived, she should have shown herself to the players, one by one, and see who paid her. She might even have been paid by several and made a bundle from her deceit. Her dramatic appearance at the costume party served another purpose. It was a warning to her accomplice.”
“What nonsense,” Lord Bantham groused, but Jasper pushed on.
“Consider her situation. She had left the estate without much. She needed money to live off. We can reasonably suspect her accomplice to provide her with this money. But what if over time her accomplice had become… less willing to pay? Or perhaps even less able to pay? What could Lady Bantham do? Perhaps she had already threatened to come back from the dead. But her accomplice didn’t take that seriously. Lady Bantham had to convince the other party that she meant it. By a brief appearance which would be shocking, but not prove her survival beyond a doubt.”
He glanced past their tense faces. “After all, we all assumed at first it had been someone pretending to be her. It was a clear warning that payment had to be made. That night. Lady Bantham would not risk a meeting in person. She instructed her accomplice to come to a venue and hide the payment there. She had been to Venice before, she knew her way around. And the Ponte della Musica was perfect. Not because of the vases with roses. I considered whether something could have been hidden in one of those, causing the petals to scatter on the steps when the loot had been extracted. But no. It wasn’t the vase. It was the lions’ heads on either side of the steps. Their gaping mouths are perfect hiding places for small items like eardrops, rings.”
“Olivia’s missing jewellery,” Sir James gasped.
Jasper nodded. “Yes. Only some of it had been pawned off right after her alleged death to give the impression the maid Agnes was still alive. A gem-studded tiara and a heavy gold bracelet. Smaller items, which had also been reported missing by Lord Bantham after his wife’s accident, were never recovered. And Lady Bantham wanted to have these, which were still in the hands of her accomplice. Upon her instructions they were hidden in the lions’ mouths for her to collect. But her accomplice was waiting for her, and after she had collected them, stabbed her to death and overturned her body to take back what she had found in the lions’ mouths, she pulled the jewels from her grasp and put a rose in their place to lay a false trail. With the murder, the blackmail had ended. The blackmail that had started on the fateful day when Agnes died.”
It was perfectly silent as everyone listened to his tale.
“Agnes had told Lady Bantham about the difficult situation she was in. Rose concluded from the letters sent to her that Agnes was after the steward on the estate. But she told me that, when she visited him after her sister’s disappearance, he denied there had ever been anything between them. Logical, as a respectable steward doesn’t want to be involved with a missing maid and the theft of valuable jewellery? Perhaps. But what if Agnes’s baby really wasn’t his? What if she had set her sights on someone higher? A man who desperately wanted a child.”
“This is ridiculous,” Lord Bantham whispered.
Jasper didn’t look at him. “You see, Agnes’s baby was the key to everything. Once I realized that, it was all so clear to see. We thought that Lady Bantham had to die. In the car accident three years ago. Here in Venice. But the irony of it was that it was never about Lady Bantham. She died, twice allegedly, but the person who had to die was Agnes. ‘Silly little Agnes,’ as Lady Bantham often called her. She was not an accidental victim. She was not chosen by coincidence because the killer needed a body, any body, to be identified as Lady Bantham’s after the car accident. No. Agnes’s death was the starting point, and Lady Bantham’s disappearance from the scene came afterwards. The killer wanted to kill Agnes because Agnes was a danger that had to be eliminated.”
“You make no sense at all,” Bantham said. His voice was hoarse.
Jasper looked him in the eye. “What would have happened if word had spread you had fathered a child with your housemaid? If your wife left you, outraged over your betrayal? There would have been a huge scandal. Friends would have turned their backs on you. Clubs would have closed their doors to you. And no woman would have wanted to marry you again. But imagine Agnes leaving the scene, as Lady Bantham. Now we have the complete opposite. You are a grieving widower. A respectable widower who tragically lost both his wife and unborn heir. In exchange Lady Bantham has her freedom. She can start over somewhere else, with you providing her with funds to live a suitable lifestyle. The perfect dissolution of a marriage bond both parties wanted out of. As fond of dramatics as she was, Lady Bantham must have loved the idea of dying and watching from the shadows how everyone mourned her and what the papers wrote about her. I mean, whoever gets a chance to read about their own funeral?”
“This is preposterous!” Lord Bantham was red with rage. “How dare you!” He pointed at Rose. “You suggested all of this, claiming Agnes wrote you letters. It’s nothing but lies.”
Jasper said, “But Agnes was really pregnant. The autopsy on the dead body in the car established that.”
It was perfectly silent. Sir James stared at Bantham with wide open eyes.
Jasper said, “You killed Agnes, staged the accident. Paid your wife to live her life far away from you, so your deception would never be uncovered. At first it was easy enough. You married again and your first wife was nothing but a memory. But something nagged at you. The murder of Agnes was a liability. The late Lady Bantham knew you had killed her. And she wanted more and more money, reminding you constantly that if things got out, nobody would believe she had killed the maid and she would lie that you had forced her to agree to the plan and she had played along out of fear of being killed as well. In reality she wasn’t afraid of you, but got more and more careless. She wanted the jewels which had been reported stolen to the police. When she actually appeared here, you knew you had but one course of action left to you. To kill her and hope someone else would be blamed for it.”
Lord Bantham’s eyes flickered, but he wasn’t protesting any more.
“There were enough people unhappy about her reappearance,” Jasper continued. “Biancci, Marcheti, Larissa, your wife or her brother, there was a choice of suspects. Biancci and Arundell ran after her, which was only good for you. You later stained your wife’s dress with blood so suspicion might fall on her. She discovered the maid Rose was related to Agnes who had died at your hand. Only the better. It would become so complicated nobody would figure it out again.”
Jasper gestured with both hands. “Yo
u counted on me getting no assistance from Vernassi, as he would not want to have any trouble surrounding wealthy visitors to the city. You counted on me accepting things at face value. The stab in the back, the rose in her hand. You staged it all. You were the only one who could do that. You know why? Because you were the only one who knew where to find her. From the start that was the problem niggling at the back of my mind. Regardless of how angry people might have felt at the deception played upon them by the late Lady Bantham, they could not have found her in the middle of the night in a city as large as Venice. But you had agreed on a location for payment. It was a risk to kill her – for the moment her body was found I would know for certain she had not died the first time around. But letting her live was a much greater risk. You had to do it. You had no choice.”
“You can prove nothing of this,” Bantham hissed. “Nobody will believe your ridiculous accusations.”
The clock struck once, a clear chime in the silence, and they all looked up.
Sir James cried out and swayed on his feet.
A woman stood on the balcony, dressed in a red flamenco dress with a black headdress. Her face was masked, and her hand was outstretched. “You cannot make me die,” she called out. “I will always come back. Always.”
“Noooooo.” Larissa cried. Her expression was contorted into a mask of hysteria. “You are dead, dead, dead! You should be dead! You should at last be dead.”
Lord Bantham gaped at her, reaching out an arm to steady her, but she pushed past him and ran out of the room.
“Quickly,” Jasper cried to the two footman who flanked Sir James. “After her!”
He followed the woman who moved too quickly in the tight dress with the tiny roses. She ran through the corridor to the balcony. She tore aside the curtain. There was no one there.
She turned and saw them. Her face had assumed a look of utter bewilderment. “She is gone,” she whispered. “Gone.”
“Yes,” Jasper said softly. “She is gone. You killed her on the Ponte della Musica. Everything I told the people downstairs is the truth except that I said Lord Bantham where I should have said, Larissa Kenwood. You made the plan with Lady Bantham to use the pregnant maid in a staged car accident. You wanted Agnes to die. You could not accept that a mere maid had enjoyed the attentions of a man you longed for, day and night. But if you had poisoned Agnes, or done something else to kill her, the police would have come to the estate. They would have discovered her pregnancy and would have looked at Lord Bantham as the possible father. Once his reputation was tainted, you could no longer marry him and be happy. Even worse, he could be considered the killer and arrested and charged. The man you loved behind bars, hanged? No. Agnes had to die in such a manner that nobody would ask questions. Lady Bantham’s confession that she wanted to vanish, be free, gave you the plan. It was so perfect. It provided you with everything you wanted. Agnes dead, Lady Bantham dead to the world, and the way cleared for you to marry Lord Bantham. Lady Bantham knew that you wanted her husband, but that didn’t matter to her as long as she could get away from him and the depressing life in the countryside. It seemed to go down perfectly. The police were led astray, Agnes was interred in the family crypt as Lady Bantham, and you comforted the poor widower. But he never cared for you the way you cared for him. He went abroad and upon his return he married another, because her name was connected with a gold mine in America. Your love of him turned to hatred. You should have poisoned Agnes and he should have been blamed instead. He should have been hanged for her murder, the lecher.”
Larissa’s eyes sparked, but she didn’t speak.
Jasper pushed on, “And your financial position became desperate. The deceased Lady Bantham was still in touch with you. She demanded money to live off and you had to give it to her. Time and time again. She made fun of you, taunting you that you had never become Lady Bantham like you had wanted, but had to reconcile yourself with the role as best friend. Again. It had to stop. And it would stop here, in Venice.”
He took a deep breath. “You pretended to stop paying. She would then make good on her threat to appear at her father’s party. It was exactly the cruel thing she enjoyed. You sent a dress to the new Lady Bantham, hoping she would wear it and make things even more confusing. Perhaps people would believe the wrong woman had been killed? But all that time you knew what you would do. Kill Olivia and ensure that Lord Bantham would be blamed. His wrong identification of the body back then after the car accident, made in error, as he just didn’t want to look at a mutilated woman’s face, would immediately arouse suspicion. Looking back on it, the police would realize the woman in the car had been the maid Agnes. Pregnant… by whom? Wouldn’t it be obvious Lord Bantham had made the plan to have his maid disappear, and Lady Bantham had only agreed to avoid scandal? Would it not be obvious he had killed Agnes and staged the car accident, identified the dead maid as Lady Bantham, and had later killed his wife as well so she could never betray him? You wanted the man who had never loved you to die by hanging for two murders he had not committed. Just punishment for him having scorned you. Lady Bantham might have died twice, but it was never about her. She was just the accidental victim we all thought Agnes was.”
Larissa looked him straight in the eye, her expression calm now and almost serene. “Did you find it? When you dredged the canal this morning? The fan with the dagger hidden inside? Arundell was right. I did use it. I brought it back with me and cleaned it, put it back among my things. But he stole it from me and threw it in the water and held it over my head, not even knowing I had actually killed Olivia. He didn’t think me capable of that. He is more afraid of my dog than he is of me. He called me a source of income.” Her mouth pulled tight in pain. “Like she had for three years. Pay up, pay up some more. I only wanted her to stop. But it will never end now.”
She lowered her head and repeated slowly, “It never will.”
* * *
After the police had taken Larissa Kenwood away, Sir James asked Jasper, “What did you find when you dredged the canal this morning?”
“I didn’t dredge it. Vernassi would never have given me permission or manpower for it. I merely spread that rumour to see who would bite. I don’t even know what I expected. The killer to try and fish his murder weapon from the bottom of the canal? But I do know suggestion is a powerful thing.”
Sir James shook his head. “You took a huge gamble.” He looked Jasper in the eye. “You were also gambling when you accused me. Yes, you listed everything Olivia bought and I paid for. The things she showed off to me when I came to visit her the next time, so I would understand she wanted more like them. You know all that. But you can’t know my secret. Your assumption of blackmail on her part was based on the payments alone.”
Jasper held his gaze. “Not on the payments alone. On a bit of information I recalled from the case three years ago. At the time my superior said to me that I should treat the affair with utmost care to protect the family, to work with hard facts only and not trust any speculations. I thought he referred to Lord Bantham and the rumours among the servants that Lady Bantham was unfaithful to him. But what if he had meant you? Had there been anything going on with you at the time which might explain his instructions? I inquired discreetly through some contacts I still have and they told me about the young man you were backing for his seat in parliament. The son of one of your best friends. Nothing to it – he had the brains, you the money. But what if Olivia knew the real reason you were supporting him? Because he was your son? By revealing that, she could have ruined his chances for a successful political career and destroyed your friendship with his father. It would also explain why Olivia was so demanding. Not from mere greed. She couldn’t accept she wasn’t your only child after all.”
Sir James rasped, “Why have you not said it in front of all the others? Will you tell anyway?”
Jasper shook his head. “I don’t see the point. Enough harm has been done here. Your daughter, the only child you could ever acknowledge and love
, is dead.”
Sir James stared at him. “You mean that? You will not reveal it?” He reached out and shook Jasper’s hand. “Thank you. You have no idea…” He suddenly seemed to chastise himself for this slip and straightened up, clearing his throat. “Uh, yes, well… who was that woman who impersonated my daughter as the clock struck half past three and where did she disappear to?”
“That is of no consequence,” Jasper said. “I hope you feel your daughter’s death is vindicated like you wanted.”
Sir James shook his head. “Love is a terrible thing,” he said and Jasper wasn’t sure if he meant Larissa Kenwood or himself.
When he came downstairs, everyone had left, except for Rose and Luigi. Rose stared at him with wide eyes. “Do you think Agnes really…? Lord Bantham can’t have been the father of her child. Or he must have forced her. She wouldn’t… Not with a married man. And she wouldn’t have turned to Lady Bantham for support.”
Jasper said, “We don’t know if she turned to Lady Bantham for support or Lady Bantham called her in and said she already knew everything. Her offer to help Agnes solve it may have convinced Agnes to go along regardless of who the father of her baby really was. She must have believed she would be set up somewhere, away from the estate, and paid off for her silence. That she would finally have a better life than she could ever attain in service. She couldn’t have known Lady Bantham and her best friend would kill her to use her body in the car accident.”
Rose hung her head. “Poor Agnes.”
Jasper said, “If you told me the full truth about her letters and what she was up to in that household, she was not the innocent person others believed her to be. But I do agree with you that she didn’t deserve to die. Nobody ever does.”
“Not even that wicked woman, Miss Kenwood?” Rose’s eyes flashed. “I will gladly see her convicted for what she did.”
Jasper shook his head, a heavy weight pressing down on his chest. “Larissa Kenwood also believed others had to die for what they did. When she slipped the jewels into the lions’ mouths that night, she was signing the death warrant, not only of Lady Bantham, but also Lord Bantham who she hoped would die for the murders. She was like those anonymous accusers of old who slipped a note into the lion’s mouth to remove their enemies from the scene.” He shivered. Treason, or someone’s perception of it, was indeed at the heart of this whole affair. He said to Rose, “Who are we to decide about life and death? Forget about this case, and start a new life.”
Under the Guise of Death Page 20