Murder in Black Tie

by Sara Rosett

  The gardens were bare of flowers, and the beds had been banked with mulch. The flower beds, a pattern of brown squares, circles, and triangles, stretched out to the line of greenhouses in the distance. We turned down the path that led to the Neptune and mermaid fountain at the center of the gardens. At our backs, the windows of Parkview sparkled in the sunlight. The only sounds were the plink of water as the ice that had coated the fountains and benches melted in the sun, and the crunch of our shoes against the sandy path. The fountain’s swirling mass of movement frozen in marble rose several feet above our heads.

  In the summer, the central fountain with its gentle burble was one of my favorite places, but the harsh winter light picked out the pockmarks in the statues and the traces of mold in the crevices. When we were children we’d toss coins and bits of gravel in the fountain, aiming for Neptune’s trident. Now instead of pennies sparkling under the water, there was only a smattering of dead leaves caught in a thin layer of ice that filled the basin.

  “This should be private enough.” My breath came out in little white vapor clouds.

  Sonia gripped the basin’s edge. “I can’t believe this has happened.” A spark of her usual forceful personality showed for a moment, which I found strangely comforting. With her gaze focused on the carved edge of the fountain rim, she said, “You’re right. I do know something about Mr. Payne. I recognized him straightaway that first moment in the drawing room. He was my husband.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Mr. Payne was your husband? You mean—you’re divorced?”

  My mind spun with questions. Did Father know? He couldn’t. He’d never marry a divorcée. Even though he’d retired from serving as a vicar, I knew there were certain standards he felt an obligation to uphold.

  Sonia jumped as if someone had dropped an icicle down her collar. “No.” Her gaze skittered around the garden. “I’m not divorced.” She’d lowered her voice to a whisper on the word divorced as if the word itself was abhorrent.

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  She threw me an irritated glance as she pushed away from the fountain and strode a few steps. I thought she was about to stalk off and leave me there, but she stopped by a stone bench. “I knew it was Simon the moment he walked into the drawing room.”

  “Simon?” Perhaps she was sick—not physically ill, but maybe something was a little off . . . mentally. “Why don’t we sit down on this bench for a moment?” I’d always found her irritating, but I’d never doubted her sanity.

  She flicked her fingers in an impatient gesture. “I’m not confused. The man who died in the conservatory wasn’t Vincent Payne. He was Simon Adams. Simon was impersonating Vincent.” She blew out another breath as if she had just completed a long hike up a difficult trail. “It’s a complicated story.”

  She seemed to be in her right mind. She was speaking evenly, not ranting or over-excited. I did want to hear what Sonia thought had happened, so I said, “I’m in no rush to get back to the house.”

  “I suppose I’d better start at the beginning—years ago when the three of us were children living in the same village,” Sonia continued in her flat tone. “Vincent Payne, Simon Adams, and I grew up in Clifton Green.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t heard of it.”

  “It’s a tiny village in Surrey. Vincent Payne—the real Vincent Payne—lived with his uncle, who was the largest landowner for miles around. Simon’s father was the greengrocer. My father was a doctor. Vincent was quite shy and reserved. Simon was always joking and laughing, and he could make the silliest faces.” Her expression softened. “When we grew up, Simon and I, we . . . well, we thought we were in love and wanted to marry.”

  Sonia tested the marble bench for dampness, then eased herself down onto it. “My father forbade Simon and me to marry, of course. He would have accepted Vincent Payne as a son-in-law, but not the greengrocer’s son.”

  My mind reeled as I sat on the next bench over, barely noticing the chilliness of the stone. It was difficult to imagine Sonia in a Romeo and Juliet situation—much less as a rebellious young woman.

  “We married,” Sonia said, her voice flat. “We were old enough. We moved to London, and Simon found a job working for a greengrocer.” She stared at the empty flowerbeds for a moment. “Unfortunately, my father was right. We weren’t suited. It became apparent after a few years. We fought constantly. When we were young, I liked his teasing. He used to say he was the only person who could make me smile—and he could. I was a rather serious child.” She gave me a sideways look. The natural downward curve at the corners of her mouth vanished for a moment as a small smile crossed her face.

  Was she making a joke? For a moment I was tempted to reply, “No!” in a scoffing tone, but I refrained. I didn’t want to break the fragile atmosphere and bring her story to a halt. I settled for, “Indeed.”

  “Indeed, I was,” Sonia said. “Simon had a sense of play and fun that I didn’t. I liked that.” She sighed as the tiny smile disappeared. “It was only after we were married that I began to see sides of his personality that I’d ignored. His teasing could have a vicious edge to it, but if that had been all, I could have endured it. But then I learned he hadn’t been faithful. He was too selfish, too short-sighted.” She shook her head and looked away. “Too driven by his own desires.”

  I thought of Gwen’s description of Payne’s pushy insistence she go for a walk with him and of his behavior toward Gigi in the woods. The Mr. Payne I’d met certainly acted like the man Sonia was describing.

  “Eventually, I told him I wished we’d never married.” She gripped the edge of the stone bench with both hands and dipped her head. “It was awful. But the war came, and Simon went off to fight. I’d trained as a nurse and worked for a year before Simon and I married, so I applied for a job in a hospital. Nurses were in demand, and it didn’t take long for me to find work.” Sonia brushed a trace of dirt off the bench. “A few months later I received a telegram. He’d been killed.”

  “I’m sorry.” My heart squeezed in sympathy. I’d known that flare of fear as the telegram boy approached.

  We sat in silence for a few moments. Eventually, I said, “So when you met Mr. Payne a few days ago, you thought he was Simon? Are you sure it was him?” I asked as gently as I could. So many families of men who had been declared missing in action or who had died and been buried on the battlefield grasped at any shred of hope that their loved ones were actually still alive. Without a body to bury and a grave to visit, many people found it difficult to believe their sons or fathers were really dead. They wanted to believe a mistake had been made. The false hope of the war veterans’ families was a fertile ground for conmen and shysters—and that seemed to fit right in with Payne’s apparently fraud-prone personality.

  Sonia raised her head and let out a sharp laugh. “Oh, it was Simon, all right. I knew him immediately. The way he moved, the way he spoke—” My expression must have held a hint of skepticism because she added, “Simon had a small dimple in the center of his chin and a chicken pox scar just at the tail end of his left eyebrow. It was him. Even though he was going by the name Vincent Payne, he was Simon Adams.” Her voice turned bitter. “And when he recognized me and realized I’d married a vicar, he thought it was a great joke, a woman who was still actually married had committed bigamy—and with a retired vicar. He found it extremely entertaining.”

  “Did no one else realize you recognized him?”

  “I didn’t stay long enough for anyone to notice. I was so shocked and distraught, I had to get out of that room, out of Parkview. I told your father I had a horrible ache in my head, and we left straightaway. And all the while, Simon—or Mr. Payne, as he was calling himself—had that smirk on his face. He knew my secret and couldn’t wait to taunt me about it.”

  “But wasn’t he afraid of you? You could call his bluff and reveal he wasn’t Mr. Payne.”

  “I had so much more to lose than he did, though. And he knew it.”

 
I shifted on the bench and tucked my scarf closer around my neck. This information was a lot to take in, and I wasn’t sure I believed Sonia. She was so adamant the man wasn’t Payne, but she was adamant about everything—what was best for Father . . . and me, for that matter. She’d never second-guess herself, so I asked about Payne instead. “Do you know what happened? How this, um, Simon Adams came to be known as Mr. Payne, who was his childhood acquaintance?”

  “With Simon it was always better to confront him, so we returned to Parkview the next afternoon. I sent Simon a message, and he agreed to meet me in the courtyard.”

  So, when I’d seen her from the window, the man in the shadows had been Payne—I couldn’t think of him as Simon, no matter what Sonia said.

  “I demanded to know what he was doing impersonating Vincent. He said, ‘Impersonate? I am Vincent Payne. The British Army says so.’” She gave a little shake of her head in what I thought was irritation, then added, “He and Vincent served together. According to Simon, there was an attack, and a shell went off near him and Vincent. When Simon awoke in the casualty clearing station, the nurses and doctors called him by Vincent’s name. Simon told me he was in terrible pain and didn’t remember much more than that. He said he wasn’t sure what happened, but he thinks Vincent’s identity tag was found beside him, and the stretcher-bearer must have assumed it belonged to him—at least that was Simon’s story.”

  “You don’t believe it?” I asked.

  “I believe parts of it,” she said, picking her words. “The identity discs were terribly flimsy and easily destroyed. The identities of many—um—corpses—were completely lost because the identity discs didn’t stay intact with the bodies. Misidentification was quite common. I even saw it happen a few times at the hospital.” She stood, buried her hands into her coat pockets, and paced between the bench and the fountain. “So, yes, it’s possible Simon’s story is true, but I did wonder if he . . . helped . . . create the situation.”

  “Wouldn’t someone from his platoon have recognized he wasn’t Mr. Payne?”

  “Only two other people from his platoon survived. After the casualty clearing station, Simon would have been sent on to England. He was probably with strangers the entire time.” She shrugged with her hands still tucked in her pockets. “Whatever happened—whether Simon instigated the misidentification, or it was truly a mistake—he was accepted as Vincent Payne.”

  “Which sounds as if it would be a, um, social step up?” Having been in a strained financial situation myself, I could understand the temptation of assuming the identity of someone better off than oneself.

  “From the son of a greengrocer to the landed gentry?” Sonia said. “It was a giant stride up the social ladder.”

  “But what about the uncle and the rest of his family? Surely they would have recognized Simon was an imposter. And Simon’s parents? What about them?” Had he let them think he was dead?

  “Vincent’s uncle had passed away a few years before the war, leaving Vincent an extremely wealthy man. Simon’s parents contracted pneumonia and died before the war began. Simon didn’t have any other family.” She paused a moment, then went on, “Vincent’s only close relative, an aunt, lives in South Africa with her husband, so there was no immediate family to contradict Simon when he became Vincent. I never returned to Clifton Green. My father cut me off when I married Simon. Even if he hadn’t done that, Father retired to a little seaside cottage in Hastings after the war, so I had no reason to return to the village either.”

  “But surely Mr. Payne, or Simon, as you knew him, would run across someone who had known them both and be recognized—”

  Sonia shook her head. “Vincent and Simon resembled each other. They both had brown hair and brown eyes and were of a similar height. Old Mrs. Oglethorpe used to say that Vincent and Simon could have been mistaken for cousins.”

  She paced faster, the fabric of her coat stretching tight over her shoulders as she pushed her hands deeper into her pockets. “Vincent’s money was a tidy little sum, which I’m sure was part of the reason Simon did it. Impersonating Vincent also solved the problem of the estrangement between us. I didn’t want to be married any longer and neither did he. So he became Vincent Payne.”

  “And he let you think he was dead . . . and marry another man.”

  “Yes.” Anger and worry infused the single word. “I’m sure he never even thought of the possibility I’d marry again. Simon was short-sighted. He never thought beyond the next day or week.” She stopped pacing and rubbed her hand across her eyes for a moment, then came and sat on the bench beside me. “You can see why you must find out who killed Simon—or Vincent Payne, as I suppose we should continue to call him now. He’d become Vincent. Your father cannot know. He’d—” Her voice cracked, and she put a hand to her mouth for a moment. She pulled herself together and continued in a measured tone. “Your father is a wonderful man. So kind and gentle, and I never intended to deceive him. I thought Simon was dead. Truly, I did.”

  “You didn’t tell him you’d married before the war and were a widow?”

  “No. I wanted to forget Simon and the war and all that. It’s difficult for me to speak about the war. I only told your father in general terms what I did during that time. It’s too painful to speak of the specifics. I don’t let myself dwell on what I saw. I can’t. And I was”—she drew in a breath before she continued—“ashamed of marrying Simon. He wasn’t an honorable man like your father. I thought that if your father knew about him, he might not want to marry me. You can see, can’t you, that your father can’t know about Simon? Not now. Not after I didn’t tell him. He mustn’t find out.”

  “Oh my.” It was all I could say. Father was the sweetest man, but there were a few things he wouldn’t tolerate—lying being at the top of the list. The only time Father had paddled me and sent me to my room without supper was when I was five and I’d lied to him, saying I’d spent the afternoon in the garden. In reality, I’d slipped away to visit my cousins at Parkview.

  “Please help me, Olive. You’ve handled sensitive things like this before.” Sonia seemed to be so worried about Father discovering she’d been married to Payne that she’d completely overlooked the fact that she had an excellent motive for his murder. I hesitated, and she said, “Oh! You think I could have killed him.” Her surprise seemed genuine.

  “Did you?” I asked. “It would solve one of your problems.”

  “But create so many more.” Her voice was filled with conviction. “No, I didn’t kill him. Believe me, there were days when I wanted to” —she drew herself up—“but I’m a nurse. I don’t harm people. I help them heal and recover.”

  “You were in a precarious situation with Mr. Payne when he was alive. He could have blackmailed you.”

  “He wasn’t interested in money. He had much more than your father and I. No, he didn’t want money. He simply wanted to . . . take pleasure in my discomfort.”

  “You think Mr. Payne would have gone away at the end of the party and left you alone?”

  “I know he would have. He even said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Sonia, I won’t make trouble for you. I’ll go quietly, but I’ll enjoy watching you squirm until I leave.’”

  “What a dreadful man.”

  “Yes, he was. But I assure you I didn’t kill him. Will you help me?”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed her. There were so many layers of deception—Sonia’s and Payne’s—and she was asking me to keep something from Father, to lie by omission. But she’d nursed Father back to health. His improved condition was thanks to her. For that alone, I owed her a debt. “I’ll do what I can—”

  She gripped my hand. “Oh, thank you, Olive. I know you’ll sort it out.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Sonia and I parted, I went to my room and dug through my handbag, looking for a calling card. I knew I’d tucked it away in case I needed it later. I was torn, not sure if I believed Sonia’s story. But why would she make it up? Clearly, she was dis
traught and worried, a state I’d never seen her in. The first thing to do was to verify her story, if possible. If what she said was true, it added a new complexity to Payne’s death. If I took Sonia at her word and believed she hadn’t killed Payne to protect herself, it raised more questions.

  I found the card in my handbag underneath the metal makeup compact in the shape of a small handgun. Jasper had given me the compact to use as a deterrent in case I was ever in a situation where I needed something that looked as if I had a weapon. It had certainly come in handy on one occasion, and I always carried it in my handbag now.

  I took the calling card and went down to Uncle Leo’s study to use the telephone on Mr. Davis’s desk because it was more private than the entry hall, where the other telephone was installed. Uncle Leo didn’t like speaking on the telephone and preferred to have Mr. Davis use “the instrument,” as Uncle Leo called it. I settled into Mr. Davis’s chair at his cluttered desk, which was tucked away in a little alcove in the study. As I drew the telephone toward me, I noticed an envelope with Uncle Leo’s untidy scrawl, Invoice for maps—Payne, which reminded me I still needed to track down Uncle Leo and ask about the maps.

  I pushed the stack with the envelope on top of it to the side. After receiving the maps from Payne, Uncle Leo must have dropped the invoice off for Mr. Davis to file. I wondered what would happen with the maps. I was sure Longly would have the signatures on all the maps, including Uncle Leo’s, checked. Would Uncle Leo’s maps be returned after the investigation? Would he want them back if the signatures were forgeries?

  I lifted the handset and asked to be connected to the number written on the card. When the call was put through, a gravelly voice answered.

  I asked, “May I speak to Mr. Frederick Boggs, please?”

  “I’ll see if he’s around,” the man said, then raised his voice without bothering to move the telephone as he shouted, “Boggs! Telephone for you. Someone posh, by the sound of it.”