Murder at Mondial Castle

by Issy Brooke

  “I need to examine the clothing of Miss Lamb and Mondial. How close were these shots fired from? If there is powder on them, then the robber – or robbers – were very close, and Mondial must have known if there were one or two.”

  “Indeed. Let me speak to the funeral directors to make the initial introduction,” Adelia said hastily.

  “Yes, yes. Now, if there were only one assailant as Mondial suggests, then that raises other questions. I cannot believe the pistol was reloaded so quickly. Even the best shot cannot do that. Therefore the robber had two weapons. A pair of pistols. That would seem unusual. I do not have a great deal of experience with highwaymen or street robbers but while carrying one weapon is par for the course, two seems both excessive and generally unnecessary unless one knew in advance that one would need to fire two shots in quick succession.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Theodore tapped the pencil on his teeth. It made Adelia want to scream but she didn’t want to upset his thought process so she stared out of the window again. Dusk was not yet coming on, and the air continued to be hot and oppressive. “Dido!” she said with a jolt.

  “What of her? Is she outside?” he said, glancing to the window.

  “No – but she should have been. Listen. I was in the upstairs room at the back of the castle with Dido and Miss Lamb. We were making plans for the garden party. Then Lord Mondial came in and asked Dido to walk with him in the garden. He insisted that he had some information to share with her. She left with him. When the shots rang out, I had assumed she was still with him, but she clearly was not. So where did she go?”

  “That makes our daughter a suspect,” Theodore said.

  “No, she is not. She could never be! Dido, firing weapons?” Of all their daughters, she was not the one to do that. Margaret, maybe; she was impossible to work out. And Anne had once threatened violence with a pistol, but it had been her own life she had wanted to take. Adelia shuddered at the memory. Troubled Anne seemed more settled now. Adelia returned to the problem of Dido and said, “Let us speak with her first, and also the servants, as they will have noticed who goes where; they always do.”

  “Do they? They seem remarkably stupid to me.”

  “They have more brains in their heads than many a dinner party guest we’ve had to endure,” Adelia snapped. “I am not saying she is a suspect but she must tell us where she went after going out of the castle with Lord Mondial.”

  “And how did Miss Lamb come to be in his company?”

  Adelia winced. “As to that, I have some suspicions.” She didn’t want to think about them. But she had to.

  “Out with them. Oh – no, not that. Criminal conversation, as they say?” Theodore was shaking his head in a disbelief that matched Adelia’s own feelings exactly. “Miss Lamb and Mondial?”

  “I can scarcely believe it.” Adelia remembered her talks with Philippa. “In all honesty, no. No! She assured me that there was no man in her affections and I believed her. However, she alluded to the fact that she thought she was the object of another’s affections which she did not reciprocate. Could that have been Lord Mondial?”

  “He is married.”

  “Yes, but that does not stop a man from lusting after another woman not his wife.”

  “He is a man of honour! And he is our son-in-law.”

  “And he is a man accustomed to have whatever he pleases. It would be not so unusual for a man of his status to take a mistress or two though he ought to, for decency’s sake, install them somewhere in London and not parade them around his own household.” She sighed heavily. “I fancy now that he might have been pursuing Miss Lamb and perhaps she did not care for it. In fact ... I must speak once more to her companion, for I am sure that Miss Lamb intended to leave this place a few days ago, and I caught her packing to go. Something stopped her. I wonder what it was? Oh, if only she had gone!”

  “I have begun a list for you, my dear,” Theodore said, ignoring his wife’s sudden flood of grief. “You will speak to the funeral directors, and you will speak to Dido and the servants, and also Miss Lamb’s companion. Are you sure I cannot do any of this? It is a burden on you at this time.”

  “Quite sure. I need to be active. Trust me, if you love me.”

  “You know that I do.”

  “Don’t look so hurt.”

  “I was merely adjusting my face.” He began to draw small squares on the paper, doodling idly while his brain worked, which was preferable to tapping the pencil on his teeth. “As well as the companion of Miss Lamb, who else remains in the house?”

  “A multitude of servants.”

  “None of whom will own pistols, surely?”

  “They might, in secret, though it is unlikely. I will get a list from Dido. There is also Sir Henry Locksley...”

  “Ah, yes, the intended groom. Well, he shall have to look elsewhere for his marriage now. Good job for him that proceedings hadn’t got any further, hey?”

  “Theodore! And that is precisely the sort of tasteless comment which reinforces why you must not speak to anyone so bluntly and plainly.”

  “I was simply thinking practically.”

  “Murder is a matter of emotion.” Adelia glared at him until he looked down. Then she said, “Although there is something you must know about Sir Henry ... I saw him go out after Miss Lamb.”

  “When?”

  “Just after Dido had left with Lord Mondial.”

  “So he was in the gardens at the time of the murder?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Anyone else?”

  And Adelia hesitated.

  There had been someone else seen in the gardens over the past few days. Someone who shouldn’t have been there at all. Someone she didn’t want to think about.

  From the description, and the fact that he constantly turned up to plague her, she felt sure that it was her brother Alfred Pegsworth. She was going to have to deal with him now, too.

  “No,” she said firmly. “As far as I know there was no one else.”

  Seven

  It was a strange, sombre and quiet castle which awoke the next day. Even Theodore picked up on it. He took an early morning walk around the misty grounds and allowed himself to remember how Philippa Lamb had been when she was a girl; full of laughter, full of joy. A tear moistened his eye and he felt no need to wipe it away in haste. She had been an innocent young woman and her death was senseless. He felt for her, and for everyone close to him who had been touched by this loss.

  The heat of the sun had hit the cooling earth and brought up an ethereal fog which made the gardens seem large and unfamiliar. There was no hope of stumbling across any clues in such disorientating surroundings. He wondered about the detective that Mondial would reluctantly send for, and an odd flash of something very like resentment rose in him. Adelia could be right, he thought. She often was. This was something that he could solve with no need of an expensive London detective. He didn’t doubt his own intelligence.

  The idea of it tickled him.

  He batted the bubble of pleasure back down instantly with a feeling of disgust that he could experience such contrary emotions like that. No. Be dignified and show some respect, he ordered himself; a dear sweet girl is dead and this should not be a reason to be happy. But the mystery of the thing – that is something else. The mystery calls to me.

  Solving it would be a good thing to do.

  Perhaps even an honourable thing.

  If he could rise to Adelia’s high opinion of him, that was.

  He trudged back up the slope to the castle, his boots leaving dark steps in the silver dew-soaked grass. He popped his head into the breakfast room, where a white-faced girl with red eyes was laying out the plates for the morning meal. He was about to tell her she had conjunctivitis when it occurred to him that she might have been crying. She was startled to see anyone the place about so early.

  “Everything is to go on as normal. Lord Mondial has ordered it,” she said to his enquiry. “We
are not to mention the ... unfortunate matter.”

  “No doubt appearances must be maintained and I suppose that after all, she was not a member of the family,” Theodore replied.

  “But who did it, my lord? They say there is a murderer on the loose. They say a man was creeping about the gardens a few days ago. Will he come back? They say we are not safe here now. Maud has already run away.”

  “You’re perfectly safe,” he told her, hoping to reassure her. “It was a robbery, after all. You’re only a servant and have nothing worth stealing.”

  She blinked at him as if his words didn’t help at all.

  “And worrying can hardly prevent anything bad from happening, so you may as well just get on with your duties,” he added, expecting that would cheer her up.

  It didn’t seem to.

  He shrugged and headed back to his rooms to let Adelia know they would be able to get breakfast as usual. He was hoping for a nicely boiled egg.

  THEY WERE THE ONLY ones present in the breakfast room so they conversed in low voices as the handful of servants – who didn’t count as people being present – flurried around them. Adelia planned to go directly to Dido and to make a complete list of everyone in the house. That did include the servants, of course. Theodore was already looking sideways at all of them, wondering which of them could possibly handle a pair of pistols. Then Adelia planned to approach the funeral director and to try to persuade him to let Theodore in – perhaps they would visit the funeral parlour together. Theodore himself wanted to examine Mondial’s own clothing and he thought he’d be best speaking to Mondial’s valet first about that.

  Thus fortified by a plan of action and a great deal of scrambled eggs, as the boiled ones were “not done right”, they went their separate ways. Adelia slipped along the corridors to see if her daughter was in the morning room and Theodore headed upstairs to waylay the valet, Tobias Taylor.

  Halfway up the stairs he stopped. Sir Henry was coming down. The younger man looked strained and had circles under his eyes. He greeted Theodore with a glum, unsmiling face. “Dashed bad business,” he muttered in a low voice. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Makes you wonder what?”

  “Just – I don’t know. About life. Death. The point of it all.”

  “Now, you mustn’t let yourself sink into such speculations. That’s how people go insane, you know.”

  “Do the mad know that they are mad? For if not, I suspect it’s a preferable state to this horrible everyday knowing.”

  “If you think that you are mad, then you are not mad,” Theodore said. “Look here, Locksley. I don’t know you awfully well but you seem to be a decent chap, if a little melancholic. Take my advice, as a doctor and as a man, and move on as quickly as you can from this affair. Things had not progressed very far with the girl, after all, so you cannot sink into an unseemly grief when you were not even officially – you know – connected.”

  “Thank you, my lord. I shall heed your advice as much as I am able. But does it not affect you, even so, just the mere thought of death? It does me. I find myself looking at quite beautiful things like flowers and thinking, what’s the point when it will all soon be gone?”

  Theodore leaned on the solid bannister and regarded Sir Henry with a growing suspicion. The man was in his late twenties, maybe his early thirties. He looked careworn and far more upset than he should have been, at least to Theodore’s mind. Yet they’d not even been engaged. No understanding between the pair, as far as he knew, had yet been arranged. Perhaps, Theodore thought, there was more to this than met his eyes. After all, hadn’t Adelia told him that she had seen Sir Henry leave the house after Miss Lamb? He must have been in the gardens when the terrible event had occurred.

  “I say,” Theodore said, attempting to sound conversational. He rested one foot on the stair above the one he was standing on, thinking it would make him look casual and approachable. He felt awkward. Sir Henry moved to one side, obviously thinking that Theodore was about to carry on up the stairs. Theodore remained where he was, stuck now in a strange pose. “I say,” he said again, “You are right. Terrible business. I was the first to find them, you know. Where were you?”

  Sir Henry’s eyes opened a little wider. “I was – I was down in the gardens.”

  “Walking?”

  “Yes. Strolling, I should say. I dead-headed a few roses. I can show you because I left them dumped in a pile when I heard the commotion. Are you a detective now? I thought Lord Mondial was sending for someone. They need to get a wriggle on if they hope to be here before the rains.”

  The rush of garrulous over-information interested Theodore. He stored away each of Sir Henry’s sentences in his memory. “I am not a detective in spite of my wife’s fantasies,” he said.

  Sir Henry coughed as if he had said something unintentionally amusing.

  Childish reaction, Theodore thought. “As for the man from London, yes, Mondial intends to send for him as soon as he is able to. He might have already done so. Rain, you say?”

  “Thunder is coming – can’t you feel it? Storms, I should say. The road below the house always gets impassable when the river floods.”

  “You’ve been here before, then?”

  “I – yes, I am relatively local.”

  “I see.” Theodore didn’t quite see, not yet, but he thought it was significant. “So you were dead-heading roses. I didn’t have you down as a gardener.”

  “I am always happier out of doors. Less confining. But don’t look to me as a murderer, sir! I was at breakfast, as usual, as anyone can vouch for, and then I returned to my rooms. I read a little of a book and then engaged in some correspondence in the library. After lunch, which was rather late I seem to remember, I decided to go for a walk.”

  “It was a hot day.”

  “Stifling,” Sir Henry agreed. “But I need to be active. I am a man who needs to move. I headed out through the rose gardens.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  There was a momentary hesitation. “I – I will speak my mind to the detective when he comes.”

  “I ask only as a friend. And, as you know, I was almost as a father to Miss Lamb.” Well, Adelia had been like a mother to her, so that made him father-like even if he had been distant and mostly unconscious of her presence.

  “I don’t like the insinuation that I might be in any way involved in this heinous crime,” Sir Henry said, turning his face away and tipping up his chin. “I don’t see that I have to justify my movements to you or to anyone, quite frankly! I say, if you want to point the finger at anyone, you need to look to Lord Mondial’s valet; that Taylor chap. Yes, ask him what he was doing yesterday afternoon, coming from the stables?”

  “The stables? I had been there, just before the shots were fired.”

  “No, this was afterwards. I heard the shots from where I was but the rose garden is the opposite side of the house to the yew trees and that pond. I wasn’t sure what I’d heard and I didn’t run. I dumped the clippings and headed towards the sound. I was curious, nothing more, so I walked steadily. It was too hot to be running for no reason. I came around the back of the house and across the patios, along the top of the lawn, and then I heard some shouting from the pond but I couldn’t see anything. So instead of sticking to the paths, I risked the wrath of the gardeners and turned right, cutting across the lawns to go more directly towards the sound of the hullabaloo. And that’s when I saw Taylor but he was going away from the noise, you see. He was coming from the stables and heading back to the house. So you should ask him what he was doing. Good day to you, sir!”

  Sir Henry pushed past Theodore. Theodore didn’t mind the slight at all. He was bubbling with excitement. He rushed back to his rooms and grabbed a sheet of paper, and began to sketch out exactly what Sir Henry had described to him.

  THE WAY THAT SIR HENRY had described his movements did make perfect sense, as long as he was not lying. What didn’t make sense was the suggestion that Tobias Ta
ylor the valet was seen coming from the stable area. Theodore had been there before the murder and he was sure that he had been alone. The horses had been curious about him; they would surely have indicated if someone else had been there? He hadn’t even seen any staff – no grooms, no stable-hands, no coach-boys, no one at all.

  However, if Sir Henry was not lying, he might yet be mistaken. He could have seen another man, not Tobias Taylor. Although Theodore had promised Adelia that he would leave the detailed questioning to her, he could not resist following this particular snippet. Anyway, he thought, Mondial’s valet was far more likely to open up to Theodore, man to man, than to his wife, however clever she was.

  It didn’t take much to convince himself it was the right thing to do, and anyway, he wanted to examine the clothes that Mondial had been wearing when he had been shot. Two birds, one stone, he told himself cheerfully and headed off to Mondial’s private suite of rooms in a far wing of the castle.

  He tapped on the door and was greeted by Taylor himself. He was a tall man, with narrow shoulders and a long, thin neck that made him look like a heron. He had heavily-lidded eyes and a sardonic smile, and nothing at all between the ears, as far as Theodore could tell.

  “How is my lord today?” Theodore asking, trying to peer past Taylor. The room behind the valet was a day room, a pleasant private space where Mondial would read or sit or entertain very personal guests. His bedroom lay even further inside the suite, not directly accessible from the corridor.

  “My Lord Mondial is much better, thank you,” Taylor said. “I shall inform him of your solicitations.”

  “Please do. Or might I see him? You know I am a medical man.”

  Taylor opened the door wider to show Theodore the empty room beyond. “I am afraid not. He has ridden into town early this morning.”

  “Ridden!”

  “Exactly so. His arm is bound up and he is an able horseman. I believe there is business to which he must attend.”

  “Of course, of course.” Summoning a detective, informing Miss Lamb’s relatives – it all made sense. Lord Mondial knew his responsibilities. It didn’t matter to Theodore however; the Marquis’s abscence was to Theodore’s advantage. He smiled and said, “I am gathering information to pass on to the detective when he arrives. It seems the best thing to do, you know, while it’s all fresh in peoples’ minds. I wonder if you could tell me where you were when it happened yesterday?”