by L. C. Tyler
‘Do you know where the others are?’ I asked.
‘Others?’ he said.
‘The other guests. You all cleared off, then Annabelle came back saying something had happened to Robert.’
‘Robert?’
He wasn’t really being much use. I wondered if I should give him a good shake and start again. It works with Ethelred sometimes.
‘Haven’t you been with the others?’ I asked.
He gave me a guilty look. ‘No-I sort of lost them,’ he said. ‘I was . . . looking around.’
Then I heard a voice in the distance yelling: ‘Robert!’
‘Let’s go that way,’ I said, pointing in the direction of the distance. Another couple of turns of the corridor took us to a little gaggle of people in evening dress, standing on what was clearly the wrong side of an oak door. They looked worried.
‘Robert!’ Colin was calling through the keyhole.
‘Has he moved?’ asked Gerald.
This seemed to be an ongoing conversation, because Colin just shook his head briefly. ‘All just as before. Maybe . . . how much had he had to drink?’
‘What’s Annabelle doing?’ asked Felicity in an irritated manner. ‘Surely she’s got round to the window by now? It’s ridiculous that a key can’t be found.’
‘I should have gone with her,’ said Colin. ‘I said that at the time.’
‘She’s got Ethelred with her,’ I said.
They all turned and looked at me at this point. Felicity said: ‘Fat lot of good he’ll be.’
‘You should have gone with Annabelle,’ said Fiona.
‘I said that at the time,’ said Colin.
‘Did you?’ said Fiona.
‘Did I what?’ asked Colin.
Yes, in a crisis, this was precisely the conversation we were having. We were, frankly, a total shower and (with one exception) all drunk enough to believe that we alone had the solution.
‘Somebody should phone for an ambulance now,’ said Felicity. ‘This is getting ridiculous.’
‘There’s a doctor here already,’ said Fiona, slurring her words only slightly. ‘Two actually.’
‘No, somebody phone,’ said Colin, still kneeling by the door. ‘He must have had a heart attack or something. And if Annabelle doesn’t appear in a moment, I’m breaking the door down.’
‘That’s a pretty solid door,’ said Clive, studying it for the first time.
‘There must be something we could use as a battering ram,’ said Colin. ‘Somebody should go and look for an oak bench.’ That Muntham Court might contain an oak bench was a reasonable theory, but nobody seemed capable of carrying out the necessary empirical research. Gerald glanced around vaguely as though a bench might suddenly appear. If Robert wanted manly action, he had wined and dined us a little too well.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
‘Just arrived,’ said Colin. ‘We sort of got lost. But Annabelle and the others must have been here for five minutes or so.’
‘We were being shown round,’ said Jane, slightly diffidently. ‘We got lost, too, then we found Annabelle here outside the library. She tried the door, but it was locked, so we knocked, obviously. When nobody opened it, we looked through the keyhole. Robert’s in there, but slumped over his desk. Annabelle said that the quickest thing was to break in through one of the windows.’
‘Is anyone calling an ambulance?’ asked Colin.
‘I’m onto it,’ said Fiona, tapping numbers into her mobile. ‘Damn – this is a whole lot easier when you’re sober,’ she added. She tried 999 again, but this time very slowly.
‘Let’s smash the door down then,’ said Clive, with a confidence that marked him out as the drunkest of the party. The oak bench had not appeared, but he was still up for it – a shoulder charge against a solid oak door obviously seemed to Clive both prudent and likely to be effective.
It was perhaps as well that, at that very moment, we heard the sound of breaking glass somewhere inside the room.
‘That could be the cavalry arriving,’ said Clive, with more than a trace of disappointment in his voice. The chance to kick a door in comes rarely to most people.
‘I can see two figures at the window,’ said Colin, who had refused to give up his vantage point by the keyhole. ‘One of them has got the window open and is climbing in – that’s Ethelred. Good man. Now Annabelle’s in.’
‘Ambulance on its way,’ said Fiona, snapping her phone closed, ‘but it’s likely to be ten minutes or so.’
‘Excellent work all round,’ said Colin.
‘What on earth are they doing?’ asked Felicity. ‘They need to get this door open fast.’
‘Annabelle’s over by the desk with Robert,’ Colin reported. ‘Can’t see what she’s doing exactly. Ethelred’s heading this way.’
And finally, after the metallic rasping noise of bolts being pulled back, the door opened. We all pushed past Ethelred and stood in a sort of loose circle round the desk looking at Robert.
Then we all rather wished we hadn’t. Colin and Fiona asked us all to give them space while they tried resuscitation, and we were happy to give it to them. But they didn’t look that hopeful.
Strangled. With the rope. In the library.
Six
It all happened so quickly.
When Annabelle hurried me out of the dining room, leaving Elsie behind, I was not quite sure where we were going – only that we needed to get there fast.
I was led at a brisk trot out of the front door and round the side of the house. It was now almost dark and I stumbled once or twice on the uneven surface. There were rose bushes under the windows, which snagged my trousers at least once as we squeezed between them – but there was no time to check for possible damage. We stopped on the soft earth, by a tall, well-lit window. The interior of the library could be seen clearly – the book-lined walls, the armchairs, the large antique globe and, in the centre of it all, Robert slumped, face down, on his desk, as though he had pitched forward in the middle of writing something.
I tried pushing the window, but it wouldn’t budge. It had been securely fastened from inside.
‘We’ll have to break the glass,’ said Annabelle. She handed me a large flint; this was, in her view, quite clearly Men’s Work.
It was an iron casement window with leaded panes. That we should not break windows is something so firmly instilled in us from childhood that I paused for a moment, flint in hand, before striking the centre of the pane closest to the latch. I felt a brief moment of exhilaration as I heard the glass fracture and fall inwards. I knocked away some of the jagged fragments still clinging to the lead beading, then gingerly put my fingers through, opened the window and hauled myself in.
‘Give me a hand,’ ordered Annabelle. ‘I can hardly be expected to climb up there in this dress unaided.’ I quickly apologized and pulled her in after me.
We stood for a moment by the window, my hand still holding Annabelle’s. Robert had not stirred at all. In the stillness of the library, there was no sound of breathing, no rhythmic movement of Robert’s back as his lungs drew breath. It was not looking good. We glanced at each other, then at Robert, lying face down, a whisky glass beside him, his favourite pen neatly capped and lying beside the blotter on the vast mahogany desk. There was something odd about his neck, but I couldn’t immediately see what. While I was still wondering what to do, Annabelle took charge.
‘Let Colin in,’ she said, relinquishing my hand and heading towards Robert.
The door was not in fact locked, but was bolted at the top and bottom. The bolts were stiff and it took me a few seconds to push them back. Once I did, and the door had swung open, the rest of the dinner party surged past me. At the same moment I heard Annabelle behind me give a gasp and turned to see her, white-faced, looking helplessly in my direction. I looked again at Robert and now saw what had been odd about his neck. A thin cord had been wound several times around it and then tightened by means of a pencil, inserted in
to the cord and twisted. Fortunately at this point Colin and Fiona took over. Fiona untied the ligature and together they lowered Robert to the floor. Colin checked Robert’s pulse, then listened to his chest.
‘No signs of life at all,’ he muttered. ‘How long since we called for the ambulance?’
‘Two or three minutes,’ said Fiona.
‘How long do you think he’s been lying here?’
‘Ten minutes? Could be twenty – absolute max.’ They looked at each other doubtfully.
‘If it’s twenty . . . shit . . . OK, we’ll try CPR anyway,’ said Colin.
But even before the ambulance arrived, it was clear that this was going to be a murder inquiry. If any guests had plans to go home early, they were going to have to cancel them.
The police interviewed us one by one. While awaiting our turn, I sat in one corner of the conservatory with Elsie. She had consented on this occasion to drink brandy.
‘How’s Lady Muntham taking it?’ she asked. That she did not call her Mrs Shagger spoke volumes. We were all in a state of shock.
‘Clive Brent and the McIntoshes are looking after her,’ I said. ‘I think Colin’s given her a sedative.’
Elsie nodded. ‘It’s all a bit of a puzzle though, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what I was thinking. The door was very firmly bolted. I had to break a window to get in. It would have been easy enough for a murderer to get into Muntham Court – doors have been wide open most of the evening. Somebody could have hidden until Robert went to the library and then gone in after him. But how did they lock everything up afterwards? It’s a classic puzzle – a man dead in a locked room.’
‘And the answer is?’
‘Suicide or a very ingenious murderer,’ I said.
‘Not suicide,’ said Elsie. ‘You can’t strangle yourself. You’d pass out before you could do any permanent damage. It has to be murder and it has to be one of the guests. I reckon there must have been fifteen to twenty minutes between Robert leaving the room and our finding the body. During that time Annabelle, the Hooper woman and the Smiths left the room for five minutes or so. I think Fiona McIntosh did as well. Clive Brent claims he got lost during the tour. Then both McIntoshes were out of sight of the main party for a while.’
‘I’d be careful what you say to the police,’ I said. ‘I think you’ll find they’d prefer you to stick to the facts. All we know is that Robert was found strangled in a locked room. And, as for it being one of the guests, it would have been very easy for anybody to break in while we were at dinner . . .’
By the time the police got to me, they had already put together an account of the evening and I could add almost nothing to what they knew. Early on, we had all agreed, it would have been straightforward for an intruder to enter Muntham Court and hide in the library or close by. Doors and windows had been left open with staggering generosity. Robert’s speech, with hindsight, was regarded by everyone as a little odd, but nobody could put their finger on why. The time between Robert leaving the room and the discovery of the body was adequate for a killer to strike. Meanwhile, all of the guests had been out of sight of the others at least briefly. In addition to the guests, there had been two members of staff at Muntham Court that evening. Diana Michie, the house-keeper, had been in the kitchen. The idiot boy proved to be called Dave Peart. He was precisely what he had appeared to be – the assistant gardener, pressed into service as a kitchen assistant and waiter. The gardener himself, John O’Brian, had been working late, but had not been seen inside the house by anyone – when the police arrived he had already gone home, apparently unaware that anything unusual had happened. Gillian Maggs, the cleaner, had finished her work that afternoon and had left hours before the guests arrived. That might have given the police some sort of shortlist but, bearing in mind the general level of security at Muntham Court, half the population of Sussex (East and West) had had the opportunity to murder Robert. The problem was how any of them – guests, staff or casual intruders – could have got out of a room that had clearly been locked from the inside.
I suppose it must have been around three o’clock when I decided that nobody could reasonably object if I stretched my legs in the garden, and I opened the front door to be surprised (as one always is slightly surprised) by the bracing chill of a late-summer night. It brought back memories of other times when I had been awake at this hour at this time of year – usually early-morning journeys to the airport with Geraldine, driving down to Gatwick to board charter flights leaving for Alicante or Goa or wherever she had decided we should go that year. The clean freshness of the air and the silence recalled past nights, past relationships, past departures. At the moment, however, nobody was going anywhere. My car was still parked for the quick getaway that Elsie had planned, should the evening prove dull. The once-clear path was however now blocked by a police car and a van, beside which there were, for some reason, two portable floodlights, their dormant cables coiled round their bases. There was also a pile of what appeared to be plastic sheeting. I wondered if I should take notes for my next book. Probably not. These things were easy enough to make up.
The official investigation was still proceeding somewhere inside Muntham Court, and I could be doing no possible harm admiring the stars from where I was, but a vague feeling that I should not be there made me wander round to the side of the house. It would be good to sit on a bench for a few minutes, away from other people, to gather my thoughts. A bench was there, but somebody else had had much the same idea. A hat-less policeman was already lounging on it, the red tip of an illicit smoke glowing in the dark. On hearing my approach he started to his feet, his cupped hand poised to lob the offending butt into the bushes. He saw me and dropped back onto his seat, the cigarette still in place. He should probably have looked the guiltier of the two of us – nobody had actually told me that I couldn’t leave the house, but he was almost certainly forbidden to smoke on duty. He simply smiled, however, and nodded.
‘Nice evening, Joe,’ I said.
‘Almost morning, Ethelred,’ he replied.
We had met before. A little late in my career as an author of police procedurals I had taken to consulting my local police station on points of detail. He had recently briefed me, over coffee, about scene-of-crime investigations. The plume of smoke that he calmly exhaled suggested that he thought I owed him one – at the very least that I would not dare mention this to his inspector.
‘Did you know Mr Muntham well?’ he asked me.
‘Sir Robert Muntham,’ I said. ‘I’d known him a long time. I’m not sure I knew him well.’
‘Very sad, anyway. I mean, sad that he decided to kill himself. It’s a bit like that Simon and Garfunkel song. You know the one . . .’
‘“Richard Cory”?’ I looked at the policeman. I hadn’t got him down as a Simon and Garfunkel fan. I adjusted his age upwards a few years. ‘Interestingly, the song was based on an earlier poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.’
‘Who?’ he said.
Well, I had thought that it was interesting anyway.
‘It’s odd though,’ he continued. ‘Mr Muntham had everything, didn’t he? Money, a title, this place . . . And yet he chose to end it all.’
‘Are you saying it must have been suicide?’ I asked. ‘Is that what Lady Muntham has been told?’
‘Of course, the investigations aren’t complete. You obviously shouldn’t repeat what I’ve just said . . .’
‘No,’ I said.
He turned away and deftly flicked the remains of the cigarette onto the lawn, where it remained glowing for another minute or so. We watched it until the last small dot of red faded to nothing.
‘I’d probably best be getting back,’ he said at length. ‘Good to see you again, Ethelred.’
‘Good to see you, Joe,’ I said.
The first hint of dawn was already in the sky when we were finally told we might leave. Felicity Hooper, the McIntoshes and the Smiths elected to stay on in various corners of Muntham Cour
t. Elsie consented to walk back, in the light of the amount of brandy we had both consumed. Clive Brent came to her rescue, however, and offered us both a lift back into the village. He proved to be the owner of the green Jaguar. We sank back gratefully into the deep leather upholstery, and nobody mentioned carbon emissions.
Elsie insisted on a cup of hot chocolate before wandering off to occupy my bed. Just as the village was waking up and going about its business, I finally fell asleep on the sofa.
I seemed to have dozed only for a few minutes when I opened my eyes and saw Elsie sitting in front of me, drinking coffee.
‘I thought you were awake,’ she said cheerfully.
‘You’ve just woken me,’ I said.
‘I was right then.’ She took a big slurp of coffee.
‘Don’t you need to sleep?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The post has arrived. It looked interesting.’
‘I doubt that. It will just be bills and junk mail,’ I said, sitting up and taking the bundle from her. ‘You could have opened any of it, if you were curious – just so long as it prevented your waking me up.’
‘I’m glad you said that,’ she said, producing an opened envelope. ‘You might like to read this one yourself then. It’s from your dead mate, Shagger. And he’s asking for your help.’
Seven
Dear Ethelred,
Without beating about the bush too much, there are two possibilities. If nothing out of the ordinary has happened in the past few days, then destroy this letter and forget you ever received it. If conversely you have noticed anything untoward (and you’ll know if you have) then a second message awaits you and I will sadly not be able to deliver it personally. You will find it in my library at Muntham Court, in the middle right-hand drawer of my desk amongst the stock of envelopes. It’s not addressed to you but you’ll recognize it when you see it.
I am also enclosing a letter to be posted to my solicitor, Gerald Smith – again only under the circumstances I describe. You can read it if you wish, but it will look better if you just passed it on unopened. It’s not urgent, but he needs to have it if things go as I envisage.