Murder Goes Mumming

by Charlotte MacLeod

With one accord they broke formation and raced for the windows. Sure enough, there was the eerie glow, the blazing spires flickering against the uncertain background of the falling snow, so close tonight that it seemed they could almost reach out and touch the Phantom Ship of Bay Chaleur.

  Val screamed. So did Clara. Aunt Addie, predictably, fainted. Madoc Rhys took one startled glance, then whispered to Janet, “Stay here with the others,” and melted backward out of the room.

  Nobody but herself saw him go. They were all watching the ship as though they’d never seen it before.

  “It’s never been twice in a row like this,” Squire muttered. “Never in all the years I’ve lived here.”

  “It’s coming for you, Squire!” Cyril was hilarious. Surely it couldn’t have been only the liquor that was making him act so wild. “Go on out. I’ll open the door.”

  “Cyril, don’t!”

  Aunt Addie had revived, more quickly than the last time. “Don’t make a mockery. You’re tempting fate.”

  Donald helped the old woman to her feet. She smoothed down her bunchy black velvet skirt and straightened her lace. “I’m going up to Rosa. You’d better let me take that cane, or she may come looking for it herself.”

  Now what to do? Janet stood hesitating. Madoc had said they’d better look after Aunt Addie, but he’d also told her to stay here with the rest of the Condryckes. Which should she do? She took a tentative step toward the doorway, Cyril noticed and sprang to plant himself under the kissing ball, waving Granny’s silver-mounted cane like a great, beckoning finger.

  “Right this way, Janet. I’m puckered and waiting.”

  That settled it. She couldn’t leave the room without passing under the mistletoe, and not for anything in this world would she let herself be pawed by that leering, mouthing, flailing creature. Janet pretended she hadn’t heard and moved closer to the fire as if to warm away the chill the ship had brought to Graylings. Old Adelaide, though, walked right up and shook her head at her great-nephew.

  “Cyril, you’ve got to stop this or something dreadful’s going to happen. Janet’s not for you. I told you that before. You’ve had your fair share and you’re not getting any more. Now come along to bed like a good boy or you’ll wake up to an empty Christmas stocking.”

  Incredibly, Cyril turned to follow her. Squire looked at May.

  “Don’t look at me,” she told him. “He’s your son. Sorry, Squire, but I’ve had all I can take of Cyril for one day. Come on, everybody, pull up your chairs to the fire and let’s get thawed out. Clara, Lawrence. Boys, do something about a chair for your poor old Mum. Come on back here, Babs. Aunt Addie can take care of herself.”

  “I’m not going after her. I need to powder my nose, as we used to say before it was considered acceptable to mention bathrooms in society. Pour me a brandy and save me a place.”

  There was a good deal of milling around for a while. Janet tried to keep track of who was where, but with the flickering firelight, the dim oil lamps with their chimneys sooted up from the drafts caused when the window curtains were drawn on account of the Phantom Ship’s second appearance, and the fact that the batteries in the lantern that had been illuminating the Christmas tree chose this inopportune time to run down, she had to give it up as a bad job. All she could do was find herself a place near the fire, make sure there was room beside her for Madoc, and wish to goodness he’d come back. She let Ludovic talk her into a tiny glass of Cointreau and was sipping at it when she heard Babs screaming from the hallway.

  “Cyril, no! Have you lost your mind completely? She’ll freeze to death out there. Get away from that door! Oh, God, help! Quick, somebody, help me!”

  “Good God!”

  Donald was on his feet, running. Herbert, Lawrence, the whole flock of them charged after him. Janet got caught up in their midst, wedged in between Val who kept tripping over her long skirts and Squire, whose age and girth didn’t make for speed. She could hear Babs still screaming, pleading, struggling. Cyril was making noises like an animal. He must have gone totally berserk.

  “She’s out there,” Babs panted when they got to her. “I can’t make him open the door.”

  Cyril had his back to the thick oaken planks, still flailing away with Granny’s cane. Babs had a welt on her cheek. The elegant gown was half off her shoulders, her wig on the floor, her hair a mess. Donald and the other men waded in regardless of the heavy stick, wrestled it away from Cyril, hurled him away from the door, and wrenched it open.

  “My God! You can’t see your hand in front of you,” gasped Lawrence.

  “Get some lamps,” ordered Squire, back in charge now. “Hold my hand, Herbert. David, Lawrence, make a human chain. For God’s sake don’t let go. She must be right here somewhere. Val, open the curtains. Give us any light there is.”

  There was something majestic in the old man as he wrapped the rabbit-trimmed velvet mantle around him and stepped forward into the slashing whiteness. The blast that came through the open door was straight from the North Pole, but nobody seemed to feel it. Clara and May were tending to Babs, who was in hysterics by now. Janet stood there holding a lamp, praying it wouldn’t blow out. They were all screaming, “Aunt Addie! Aunt Addie!”

  Madoc rushed in from wherever he’d been, snatched the lamp, and thrust Janet out of the worst of the draft. It was probably not more than a minute but it seemed like eternity before the light picked up a black lump in the snow and Squire bent to scoop up the old woman.

  “Change hands with me, Squire. You can’t carry her. For God’s sake hang on to me, Herb,” shouted Donald.

  He picked up the old woman, her arms hanging stiff and her head lolling down, and the human chain dragged them inside the house.

  “Get her to the fire, quick! Val, run up and fetch some blankets. Clara, bring some hot towels, hot-water bottles, any damned hot thing you can lay your hands on. Hurry.”

  May was in charge now, hustling them back into the Great Hall, shoving a chesterfield so close to the fireplace it seemed the upholstery must go up in flames, laying Aunt Addie down on it, chafing her hands, ordering somebody to pull off her snow-filled shoes, her frozen skirt; screaming at Donald to put his coat around Babs and give her some brandy before she caught her death.

  “For God’s sake where’s Val with those blankets? Auntie will get pneumonia.”

  “I don’t think so.” Madoc Rhys was standing behind the sofa, his arms tight around Janet. “I think she’s past it.”

  Nobody paid any attention to him except Janet herself. She twisted around to face him.

  “Madoc, I didn’t know what to do. She went out and I started to follow her, but Cyril got under the kissing ball and was yelling at me to come over and …”

  “Sh-h, darling. It’s all right. Thank God you didn’t wind up out there with her.”

  Babs was standing as close to the fire as she could get, sipping from a glass of brandy Donald was holding for her, huddling his dark green brocade coat around her ruined finery.

  “He just seemed to go crazy. I don’t know what happened. When I realized she was out there he—I tried to make him open the door and he kept hitting at me with that cane. I thought he was going to poke my eyes out. I couldn’t—this stupid arm of mine—I’m afraid I’ve put up a bad show.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mother, you probably saved her life.”

  Val had come back with the blankets and was wrapping one around her mother, who couldn’t stop shivering. “Daddy, I think Mama’s in shock. Can’t we get her up to bed?”

  “No, I’m all right. Truly, darling,” Babs protested. “I have to see if Aunt Addie’s—where’s Cyril?”

  “He was out in the hall when I came through. Roy’s holding him and Uncle Lawrence is trying to get some sense out of him. He can’t even seem to recall what he did.”

  “Herbert, go help them,” snapped Squire. “Get him up to his room and lock him in till he comes to his senses.”

  “Franny and Winny can go,” said May
. “I want Herb with me.”

  Clara brought hot-water bottles. May reached under the blankets and stripped off Aunt Addie’s undergarments, now wet from thawing snow. They rubbed, they slapped, they tried against all tenets of sound first-aid practice to get her to swallow some brandy. The liquid ran out the side of her half-open mouth.

  “She’s not getting warm,” Clara said in a puzzled voice. “Why isn’t she getting warm?”

  “Keep at it,” panted May. “Put some more logs on the fire, can’t you, Herb?”

  “It’s hot enough to roast an ox already.”

  Herbert was sweating, wiping his head with the back of his sleeve. One of his cardboard lobster claws was broken and flapping absurdly down over his eyes, the other wilted and curving backward. May looked like a pictorial nightmare by Hieronymus Bosch. The whole scene was a fantasy: the limp, unresponding figure on the opulent sofa with the leaping fire behind, the wet clothes dropped on the floor, the anxious faces above the frivolous costumes.

  And still Aunt Addie did not respond. Squire tried to put through a call to a doctor in Dalhousie for advice, but the line was dead. Babs thought of taking the old woman’s temperature and found it under ninety degrees. When May tried again a little later it was two degrees lower. Madoc Rhys suggested holding a mirror to Miss Adelaide’s mouth. It remained unclouded. There was no pulse, no heartbeat. Still May wouldn’t give up.

  “I’ve read about people being underwater for half an hour and still coming round. If they’re cold enough …”

  “God knows she’s cold enough!” Clara was getting hysterical.

  “I’m afraid,” said Madoc Rhys, “that people who’ve been revived after long immersion were given special treatment in hospitals. Fluids were administered intravenously and other things done that we couldn’t manage here. There is also the problem of not all the body organs beginning to work at once even if resuscitation begins. If the head warms up before the heart, for instance, brain cells may be killed. Toxicity may destroy the liver before it can begin excreting. Also, I believe the lowest body temperature at which anybody has so far been known to survive is eighty-eight.”

  “I don’t care,” said May. “She’s getting warmer. I can feel it.”

  “That’s the hot-water bottles,” Clara argued. “Oh, God, my arms are ready to drop off. Take her temperature again, Babs.”

  It was eighty-five. May wouldn’t let them stop until an hour had passed and the thermometer registered eighty degrees Fahrenheit. At that she sat down and buried her face in her hands, the red cardboard lobster claws still waving grotesquely over her bent head.

  “She’s gone.”

  “And Cyril’s a murderer.”

  Chapter 13

  THAT WAS LAWRENCE, TYING up the loose ends in his precise, legal way. May flew at him.

  “Did you have to say that? Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  “Exactly what Squire told us to, took him up to his room and locked him in. He was out on his feet before we’d even got him upstairs. Here’s the key, Squire. You’d better keep it. I don’t want the responsibility.”

  “I do, if you don’t mind.”

  Madoc Rhys stepped between Squire and Lawrence, his hand outstretched.

  “You? What the hell for? It’s none of your business.”

  “But it is, you see.”

  Rhys pulled out his wallet and showed his credentials. Lawrence, agape, read them off.

  “Detective Inspector Madoc Rhys, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. What the hell? You said you worked for the government.”

  “I do.”

  “In research,” Donald added numbly.

  “My mother said that. She is embarrassed by my profession. I did not contradict her because it is quite true that I do research. Right now I shall have to start researching the murder of your aunt because that is my job, you see.”

  “My God, a Mountie!”

  Herbert found that funny, for some reason. Maybe he was drunk or hysterical or a little of both. Maybe he just needed a laugh.

  “Now,” said Rhys, “it is the usual procedure for me to take statements from you all. A matter of form, you understand. Janet, is your shorthand up to taking notes?”

  “I can make a stab at it, anyway.”

  “Then, if I could trouble you for paper and a pen, Ludovic?”

  “But surely,” Squire stepped forward, his crimson mantle wrapped around him like a toga, “as Sir Emlyn’s son … you couldn’t … a breach of hospitality …”

  “You and my mother would be in full agreement on that point, Squire Condrycke,” Madoc Rhys replied. “It is a social outrage for me to be doing these things. However, it would be a dereliction of duty for me not to do them. Then I should be fired and what would become of my wife? Also, I must point out to you that it is going to look very strange when that undertaker shows up and finds two bodies instead of one. It will be less awkward for you all, believe me, that this dreadful occurrence should be handled in a proper and official manner. Lawrence will appreciate the force of my argument. Also, being your legal adviser, he can counsel you as to your rights and duties with regard to answering my questions.”

  “The man’s right,” said Lawrence. “Do it and get it over with. We’ve nothing to hide. Babs, you saw Cyril shove her out.”

  “No, I didn’t. Anyway, it was only a … a prank. I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”

  “Babs, if he meant it as a prank then it would be impossible for him not to mean it at all,” said Rhys. “Could you be more explicit, please?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m so bewildered. I suppose what I meant was that Cyril didn’t mean to kill Aunt Addie. He’d been drinking a lot, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. When the Phantom Ship appeared the second night in a row and she went into her usual performance … I’m sorry, that sounds unkind. Anyway, she’d been getting at him about fooling around with Granny’s cane and mocking the dead. You heard her. He—I don’t know what got into him. Cyril hasn’t been himself all day. Has he, May? Have you ever seen him carry on the way he did tonight?”

  “Excuse me,” said Rhys. “I am the one who’s supposed to be asking the questions just now. Your sister-in-law will have her turn. Could you simply describe to me the actual physical acts that took place, without regard to what anybody may have been thinking at the time?”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “What prompted you to leave the Great Hall?”

  “I had to go to the bathroom, since you’re interested in physical acts. Didn’t you hear me say so?”

  Rhys merely continued his questioning.

  “Where were Cyril and his aunt when you made this decision?”

  “In the front hall, I suppose.”

  “Why do you suppose so?”

  “Because they’d left the Great Hall just before me, naturally.” Babs was sounding irritated. “You must remember. Cyril had been standing under the kissing ball trying to coax Janet over to him. If she’d been a bit less prissy about it—but I’m not supposed to engage in conjecture, am I?”

  So now it was Janet’s fault for refusing to be mauled by Cyril and getting him into a temper. No doubt the Condryckes would cling to that belief, especially since Sir Emlyn’s son had turned out a traitor to his alleged class. Two worms in the same bud.

  “You don’t have to write all that down, Jenny love. Just the part about their leaving the room. Did they go together or separately?”

  “Together, of course,” said Babs. “Aunt Addie told him to come along with her and for a wonder, he went. Why do we have to go over all this stuff? You were here, weren’t you?”

  The answer was no, but Rhys was not about to give it. “I am following customary police procedure,” he explained. “This is the pettifogging way we have to operate. Lawrence will tell you how important it is to conform to the letter of the law.”

  “Answer him, Babs,” Lawrence obliged by saying. “You have nothing to be afrai
d of. Rhys is right. The more open we are, the less scandal there’ll be. Even Rhys himself can testify to the fact that Cyril was behaving in a totally irrational way. I’m sure we can get him off on a plea of … well, I shall have to take advice before I commit myself. I’m not a criminal lawyer, you know, despite local gossip to the contrary. Cyril will wind up spending some time in a sanatorium, I expect, which will do him no harm. Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

  The devil in this case being Rhys, from the glares he was getting. Babs went on with her tale.

  “My assumption that Cyril and Aunt Addie were in the front hall when I told May I was going to the bathroom is based on the fact that they went out before me and were still there when I passed them. I was in a hurry, to be as blunt as possible.”

  “What were they doing when you passed them?”

  “I couldn’t say. My impression is that they were standing there talking, but they may have been walking. Auntie moved very slowly sometimes, and she’d have been tired from the mumming and the dinner. But that’s conjecture, isn’t it? I just don’t know. I didn’t look back. I went directly up the stairs—that is, as directly as possible—and along the hallway to the bathroom, where I used the facilities in the customary manner.”

  May emitted a nervous snicker. Rhys asked, “Was anybody else upstairs at the time?”

  “I couldn’t say. You know how the bathrooms are arranged, all together. The first one happened to be vacant, so I used it. I had no reason to go poking into the others, so I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t return to your bedroom to fix your hair or whatever?”

  “I was wearing a wig,” Babs reminded him. “I would have had no occasion to fix my hair. I washed my hands, touched up my lipstick in the bathroom mirror, and came straight back down. Altogether I don’t suppose I was up there more than two or three minutes. It was cold in the hallways and I wanted to get back to the fire.”

  “Would you say it was unusually cold?”

  “I thought so. I put it down to the fact that I was wearing a costume instead of the warmer clothes I’d normally have on. It didn’t occur to me that Cyril might have opened the door, even though he was standing in front of it when I next saw him.”