‘Nonsense! We are doing nothing of the sort,’ retorted Cedric robustly. ‘I see no reason why my wife and I should not speak to the Franklins about what has happened. The crimes occurred on our property and the Franklins were our guests. Indeed, Mrs Franklin is still recuperating in this house. It is quite to be expected that we should be concerned about them.’
‘A very fine speech I am sure, my lord,’ said the commander, rather gruffly. ‘But I’m afraid it simply won’t wash. It doesn’t do to have any meddling in official matters by amateur parties, no matter how well intentioned such actions may be.’
‘My wife is hardly an amateur in this field. She is something of an expert in the art of detection, as your colleague, Innes, will no doubt tell you?’ The chief inspector nodded, eyeing Rose with considerable interest. ‘As I have mentioned to you before,’ continued Cedric, getting into his stride, ‘I regard it as highly remiss that this ludicrous business over the papers took place in my house without my permission. To my mind, it was a poor error of judgment and really you only have yourself to blame if my wife and I have decided to make our own inquiries into the matter.’
Rose gave a sideways glance at their visitors trying to ascertain how her husband’s speech was being received. To her mind, Commander Wrenfield still appeared vexed, though the colour in Chief Inspector Innes’ cheeks had subsided sufficiently to reveal a smattering of freckles.
‘Well, your ladyship,’ the policeman said, catching her eye. ‘You do have something of a reputation in the sleuthing line, I’ll admit. Inspector Deacon speaks very highly of you and, seeing as how you intend to pursue your own inquiries, there’s very little we can do about it in truth other than try to discourage you.’
‘Innes!’ boomed the commander, casting his colleague a thunderous look.
‘Though, naturally enough,’ said the chief inspector quickly, ‘I’ll ask that you tell us what you discover, as it were, if anything. For, like as not, Mr and Mrs Franklin would sooner speak to you and his lordship than to ourselves, what with you being friends, like. Which means they’ll have told you a bit more than they told us, which to be honest was precious little.’
‘Certainly, Chief Inspector,’ said Rose brightly, warming considerably to the policeman due to his liberal views concerning their activities.
She proceeded to give an account of her interview with Iris. It occurred to her as she did so that the woman had been far from forthcoming in her answers. Cedric followed likewise, providing details of his conversation with Raymond, though he took particular care when alluding to the relations between husband and wife.
‘But you think they’re both hiding something, do you?’ commented the chief inspector meditatively. ‘Maybe they made a pact. Decided to work together to do the secretary in. Of course, it’d be highly unusual, but stranger things have happened. Suppose this Miss Casters threatened to take Franklin’s letters, what he was fool enough to write her, to the newspapers. That would give both of ’em a pretty solid motive for wishing her dead. To avoid the ensuing scandal and the like.’
‘A very original theory,’ said Cedric, somewhat coldly from his position by the fireplace. ‘Tell me, Chief Inspector, have you found any such letters to substantiate your theory? No, I thought not. And you seem to have forgotten that Franklin denies there ever was an affair between himself and Miss Casters.’
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He’d be a fool to admit there was anything, what with it giving him a cast iron motive and all. I’m afraid, my lord, you’ll have to prepare yourself for the worst.’
‘Well,’ said Cedric, speaking with slightly more conviction than he felt following his visit to the club, ‘I, for one, don’t believe the man’s guilty.’
‘Well, that’s very good of you, I’m sure, my lord, what with you being a friend of his, but, if, as you say, he’s innocent, what’s he keeping back from us? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Cedric rather sheepishly, a despondent look marring his handsome features.
‘You’re awfully quiet, Wrenfield,’ remarked the policeman, casting his friend and colleague a somewhat suspicious look. ‘It’s not like you to keep silent. Have you a theory you’d like to share with us?’
The commander’s brow became furrowed, as if he had no wish to divulge his theories in front of the earl and the countess. After a moment’s hesitation, however, he seemed to think better of it. With a sigh, he said:
‘Well, there might be something in that pact theory of yours, but not for the reason you suppose. I reckon if such a thing existed it had more to do with the theft of the papers than anything else. I daresay you think I’ve got a bit of a bee in my bonnet about it, but you know well enough I believe the two cases are connected. If for no other reason than I don’t hold with coincidences. Well, happen Mr and Mrs Franklin cooked up the idea of stealing the papers between them and Miss Casters got in the way. Perhaps she found some incriminating evidence and resorted to blackmail. She wouldn’t be the first, and she won’t be the last. And we know her morals were not what they could be, what with the evidence we have that she was a thief. It might go some way to explain this ridiculous charade about swapping costumes in the middle of the ball. There’s something fishy about that, you mark my words.’
‘It’s odd, I’ll give you that,’ murmured the chief inspector nodding.
‘Well, to my mind it doesn’t make sense,’ continued the commander, considerably less irritated now he had an attentive audience. ‘Why did Mrs Franklin go to all that effort of arranging for Miss Casters to attend the ball knowing she’d still have to come and change into the costume at the end of the night? If she had her heart set on having nothing to do with her husband all evening, she could easily have gone and sat in the chaperones’ room. Then she wouldn’t have had to stand out in the lane with her maid waiting till the time came for her to change into her costume.’
It was hard to argue with this last piece of logic. Only Rose attempted to do so.
‘Mrs Franklin has developed something of a fear of large social gatherings,’ she said. ‘In fact, she has become something of a recluse since her marriage. Indeed, Lady Lavinia told me her friend has never been particularly fond of parties. Therefore, while her antics might seem to us rather far-fetched and dreadfully complicated, I daresay they made a great deal of sense to Mrs Franklin.’
It was while they were all reflecting on this explanation that the door was opened, without ceremony, and Lavinia came running into the room.
‘Rose, darling, I must speak with you. You’ll think it dreadfully silly of me but I simply must tell –’
The girl stopped abruptly, her face falling dramatically as she suddenly became aware of the presence of the commander and the chief inspector in the room. Both men regarded her in an interested and expectant fashion.
‘Please, don’t stop on our account, Lady Lavinia,’ said Chief Inspector Innes, his eyes brimming with curiosity.
‘Oh, I’m frightfully sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you,’ replied Lavinia, regaining a little of her composure as she retraced her steps back to the door. ‘It’s only a very trifling matter I wished to speak with Rose about. Certainly nothing to bother you with, or the commander, come to that.’
From the expressions on her audience’s faces, she realised a fuller explanation was required and added, with that artificially bright smile that was a peculiarity of hers:
‘Rose, darling, I’ll speak to you about it later. It concerns my gown for the Denbys’ ball, that’s all. Eliza, the silly girl, has only gone and scorched it with the iron.’
‘Indeed?’ said Rose, trying to maintain a straight face, her own interest piqued as she was tolerably certain that Lavinia did not number anyone of the name of Denby among her acquaintance.
‘Yes,’ said Lavinia, turning tail and dashing unceremoniously from the room before she could be questioned any further.
‘You must forgive my sister,’ said Cedric
, himself highly amused by Lavinia’s hastily concocted story. ‘She’s pretty shaken up by all that’s happened.’
‘Miss Crabbe told me something quite interesting,’ said Rose quickly, attempting to divert their visitors’ attention away from Lavinia’s rather garbled and quite mendacious explanation.
‘Miss Crabbe?’ said the chief inspector, taking up the thread and scratching his head.
‘Mrs Franklin’s lady’s maid. Haven’t you spoken to her yet?’
‘No, I haven’t had that pleasure,’ said the policeman, pulling a face. ‘But I gather from what you’ve said that you have?’
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the commander. ‘Is she another person you’ve been talking with?’
‘Only because she happened to be present when I went to see how Mrs Franklin was bearing up after her shock,’ Rose said, a little untruthfully. ‘She was the servant who stood with Mrs Franklin in the lane. I daresay her mistress referred to her when she was speaking to you?’
‘She did,’ conceded Commander Wrenfield, no doubt thinking it was high time he steered the conversation, ‘though she didn’t mention her name. Well, no doubt you’ll tell me, your ladyship, what the woman had to tell you? A darn sight more than her mistress, I’ll wager?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Rose, and proceeded to tell them about Miss Crabbe having had a very good view of the lane during the period when the two crimes had been committed. She also mentioned that the lady’s maid had heard some objects being thrown over the wall, which she and Cedric had concluded must have been the thief disposing of the remainder of his costume.
Both the chief inspector and the commander picked up on the significance of these facts immediately.
‘Ah, so the thief didn’t come out into the lane to stow his costume in the hedge after all,’ said Commander Wrenfield, thumping one fleshy fist down upon the top of a conveniently placed bookcase making the ornaments on it jump and rattle. He beamed with a sense of triumph, as if the discovery had been his own. ‘It always seemed to me a trifle odd that he hadn’t made a better job of hiding his clothes in the hedge. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to have pushed them further into it and, what with the hedge being so dense and all, it might have taken us a few days to find them. But if he tossed them over the wall, as you’re suggesting he did, and they just happened to land in the hedge, that would go a way to explaining it.’
‘Which means his intention was to return to the ball,’ said the chief inspector, not to be outdone. ‘All he was after was ridding himself of his disguise as quickly as possible before his absence was noted. And you say this lady’s maid claims she saw no one go out into the lane all the while she was there? We’ll have to speak to her ourselves, of course, but, if what you’re saying is correct, it means our murderer couldn’t have left the scene either. That’s the bit that interests me, knowing he returned to the house, same as the thief.’
‘The murderer and the thief might well be one and the same,’ said Cedric.
‘Well, that may be,’ said Commander Wrenfield, a trifle too dismissively in Cedric’s view, ‘but what interests me is knowing what the thief was wearing when he returned to the house. Now,’ he paused a moment to consult a notebook, which he had taken from the breast pocket of his jacket, ‘we’ve got a pretty good description, what with his costume being so distinctive. We all noticed the outfit, even you, Lady Belvedere, if I recall, when you happened to pass him in the hall?’
‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘His costume made quite an impression on both me and my lady’s maid. If I remember rightly,’ she said, her eyes narrowing in concentration, ‘he was wearing a volto mask, a scarlet waistcoat, a gold cravat, a hooded cloak, a hat decorated with an ostrich feather and a pair of long boots.’
‘Very nicely put, if I may say so, your ladyship,’ remarked the chief inspector. ‘No unnecessary frills. You won’t believe the number of people who feel the need to add details and embellishments, half of which is of their own imagination and only goes to complicate matters.’
‘Yes,’ said Commander Wrenfield, as if his colleague had not spoken, ‘that matches my own recollection and also what I’ve written down here. Now, if we compare that list with the items found in the shed and in the hedge, we can see if anything is missing.’ He turned to another page in his notebook. ‘In the shed, hidden behind some watering cans, we discovered the scarlet waistcoat, the gold cravat and the ivory mask. Now if we look at what was found in the hedge … yes, here it is. A voluminous cloak, a hat with an ostrich feather and a pair of boots.’
‘Well,’ remarked Cedric, ‘by my reckoning, that leaves all the items of costume accounted for.’
‘It does indeed, my lord,’ agreed the commander. ‘Now if we assume that most of the men were wearing evening dress and our thief was one of them, once he’d disposed of this little lot,’ he tapped the page of his notebook for emphasis, ‘all he had to do was put on a jacket and maybe a waistcoat, a pair of shoes, tie a bow tie around his neck and put on a less conspicuous mask. That would have taken a matter of a few minutes at most, after which he’d have been in a position to return to the house.’
‘Jolly tricky things, bow ties. Tying them, I mean,’ said Cedric. ‘I’m dreadful at it myself. My valet has to do it for me.’
‘Indeed, my lord?’ said Commander Wrenfield. ‘Well, I daresay no one would have given it much thought if they’d seen one of your guests wearing a bow tie that was tied carelessly. Not at that time of night, or morning, should I say. I imagine he wouldn’t have been the only one of your guests whose tie was looking slightly the worst for wear.’
‘I say,’ said Cedric, a note of excitement in his voice as he was struck by a sudden thought. ‘That means our thief would have needed to visit the house before the ball in order to hide his costume in the shed. I say, that narrows the field a bit.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Rose. ‘He could quite easily have concealed his costume on his person.’
‘Surely that would not have been possible?’ objected the commander, who was rather taken with Cedric’s idea.
‘A lot of the men arrived in cloaks and hats with ostrich feathers,’ said Rose. ‘Our thief could easily have been one of them. And quite a few of the men discarded their hats and cloaks, finding them rather awkward and burdensome for dancing. But, instead of handing his cloak and hat to a servant to hang up in one of the cloakrooms like the other guests, our thief could easily have headed straight out to the shed and hidden them there. I imagine he would have done that as soon as he arrived, together with the boots, because he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to have remembered seeing him wearing them.’
‘But what about his shoes?’ said Commander Wrenfield. ‘He couldn’t have been wearing both boots and shoes; it wouldn’t have been possible.’
‘Well, he could have worn them around his neck if he’d knotted the laces to a piece of string,’ said Cedric, entering into the spirit. ‘And he could quite easily have held his cloak in such a way as to keep them covered. The same goes for the Volto mask, of course. He could have carried it in his hand beneath his cloak.’
‘It sounds jolly cumbersome,’ said the commander.
‘Well, he wouldn’t have had to go around like that all evening,’ said Cedric. ‘Not if he’d headed off to the shed to dispose of the stuff as soon as he arrived.’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ said Commander Wrenfield, somewhat grudgingly.
‘And it would have been easy enough for him to hide the gold cravat in one of his pockets,’ said Rose. ‘I wondered about the waistcoat and then I remembered thinking that the scarlet waistcoat looked particularly bulky. It’s quite possible that he was wearing the other one underneath. In which case, there’s no reason why he couldn’t have been wearing the waistcoats the other way around when he arrived.’
‘The scarlet waistcoat underneath the other one, you mean?’ said the policeman.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, as theories go, it’s as good a
one as any,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Though my favourite theory,’ he added with a twinkle in his eye, casting a sideways glance at the commander, ‘is that the papers were never stolen in the first place and that little foreign fellow of yours still has them on his person. No, it’s not as ridiculous as it sounds,’ said the policeman quickly, as his colleague made to protest. ‘Happen after all the kerfuffle he took fright and changed his mind about giving them to you. He’d have had to come up with an excuse. That they’d been stolen was an obvious one.’
‘Do you imagine the same thought hadn’t occurred to me?’ said the commander grimly. ‘The man was searched within an inch of his life. The invention was stolen, all right.’
‘Well, it was just a theory; one of many,’ said the chief inspector. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, returning to the thief’s outfit, ‘we can be tolerably certain that the thief didn’t arrive in his costume. For one thing, no one remembered seeing a man dressed in such a costume at the beginning of the ball; my men made a particular point of asking your guests about him before they left.’
‘Good man,’ was the commander’s only comment, though he nodded his head several times appreciatively.
‘And for another,’ continued the policeman, ‘your servants don’t recall any of your guests arriving in a mask that covered their entire face nor wearing a gold cravat or a scarlet waistcoat. No, not even those whose responsibility it was to admit the guests and collect the invitations. In my experience,’ he said, ‘footmen and the like are pretty observant fellows and the costume was a distinctive one, so I think it’s safe to assume our thief didn’t arrive in that particular costume.’
‘Then there’s only one outstanding issue,’ said the commander.
‘What did the thief do with the stolen plans?’ said the policeman. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. How bulky were the papers? Could he have hidden them about his person?’
‘We still have the little matter of the murder to consider,’ said Cedric quietly.
Murder at the Masquerade Ball Page 23