The Spirit Is Willing (The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries Book 2)

by T E Kinsey

  ‘So it would appear,’ said Lady Hardcastle with a grin that bordered on the indecorously smug.

  ‘How on earth did you know it was there?’ he asked, puling his reading glasses from his pocket and examining the cabinet for himself.

  ‘To be absolutely honest,’ she said, ‘I didn’t. Not for certain, at least. When we first saw that the footprints led back into the storeroom, I’d expected to find the loot hidden in there somewhere, but all we found were Lofty’s boots.’

  ‘Fancy robbin’ his own club,’ said Sir Hector. ‘The bounder.’

  Lady Hardcastle said nothing, but instead fiddled once more with the mechanism and once again made the trophies disappear into the wall.

  ‘Got a plan, eh? Trick Tredegar into giving himself away,’ said Sir Hector.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Does the office of Grand Eternal Poobah entitle you to call extraordinary meetings of the club? Would you be able to get a few of the chaps here this evening at seven o’clock, do you think?’

  Sir Hector’s eyes lit up. ‘I shall give it a jolly good try,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘Be good to have a project. Just tell me who you need and I’ll get Bert on to it at once.’

  ‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek. She took out her notebook and pencil and scribbled a list of names which she tore out and handed to Sir Hector. ‘Just these chaps, if you will, please.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ he said, clutching the torn scrap of paper as though it were vital military orders. ‘Can we give you a lift home?’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ she said, ‘But don’t worry about us; it’s just a short walk home and we need a chance to talk a few things over.’

  ‘Right you are, m’dear,’ he said. ‘Lead the way, and I’ll lock up.’

  We set off for home.

  ‘You’re a sly one, my lady,’ I said as I placed a plate of sandwiches on the cast iron table in the garden.

  ‘Me, pet? Sly? Surely not.’

  The sun was still shining, the birds were singing, the bees were buzzing and there was a proper feeling of early summer in the air. And Lady Hardcastle was very much back to full fitness, both physically and mentally.

  ‘Yes, my lady,’ I said. ‘Sly. I’ve been working with you for… what is it?… fifteen years?… and you still love to do your cards-close-to-the-chest, magician’s flourish, “ta-dah” thing. Sly. Underhand. Sneaky.’

  She laughed. ‘“Ta-dah”?’

  ‘Ta, as you clearly heard, dah.’ I finished pouring the ginger beer and sat down. ‘“I say, Flo, dear, I’ve got absolutely no idea what could possibly be going on. Here, hold my hat while I grub around on the floor for a bit and solve the mystery.”’

  She was still laughing. ‘Sigh no more, Flo. Emilies were deceivers ever. I just don’t like to announce my wilder thoughts until I’m more certain of my footing.’

  ‘Pfft,’ I said, and picked up a ham sandwich. ‘And I suppose you know who the thief is.’

  She grinned. ‘I’ve a pretty good idea now, yes.’

  I looked at her expectantly, gesturing for her to elucidate, but she just carried on grinning.

  ‘Pfft,’ I said again, and tucked in to my sandwich.

  At seven o’clock that evening we were sitting in the committee room at Littleton Cotterell Rugby Club, waiting for our guests to arrive. Sir Hector had been the first and was sipping on the generously sized gin and tonic he had poured himself at the bar.

  ‘Bottoms up,’ he had said as he sat down and waited excitedly with us.

  Next to arrive was club president, Lancelot Treble. He, too, had poured himself a drink and he made small talk while he tried to arrange his tall frame comfortably in one of the committee chairs.

  Winger Billy Flynn arrived, looking troubled and careworn. He didn’t have a drink, but he looked the most in need of one. Things were clearly still not looking good at the engineering workshop.

  The stocky little forward Jim Molson had come in with him but his mood was noticeably brighter and now the gathering was complete.

  Once they were all seated, Lady Hardcastle stood and began to pace around the room as though giving a lecture.

  ‘Thank you all so much for coming,’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘I know it must have been a rush for you to get here so soon after work and I hope not to keep you too long.’

  ‘What’s it all about?’ said Lancelot Treble. ‘I thought Dobson had arrested Tredegar for the burglary.’

  ‘He has,’ she said. ‘But there have been certain… developments… and I believe he has the wrong man.’

  A murmur went round the table. I scanned the faces for signs of guilt or fear, but no one was giving anything away.

  ‘If you’ll all be good enough to indulge me,’ she continued, ‘I’d like to recount the events of Friday evening as we understand them.’

  ‘We all know what happened,’ said Molson, belligerently. ‘We was all here.’

  ‘Quite, Mr Molson,’ she said, evenly. ‘But it shall all make so much more sense if I start at the beginning.’

  He huffed, but said no more.

  She resumed her pacing. ‘On Friday evening, we enjoyed a delicious meal at the Grey Goose and then the ladies retired discreetly while you gentlemen returned here to the club to… to… whatever on earth is it that you do that makes you so ashamed that you can’t bear to speak of it in front of ladies. No matter. You indulged yourselves with drink and carousing until shortly after dawn when you four were the last to leave. You walked home through the village while some unseen and unknown stranger entered the clubhouse through the unlocked storeroom door. He stepped in some oil and left a trail of bootprints as he ransacked the committee room and stole the Wessex Challenge Cup and a few other mementoes. The police were summoned by the caretaker in the morning and bafflement ensued.’

  ‘That much we already knew,’ said Flynn. ‘Big Jim’s already said that we were all here. We know all that.’

  She smiled indulgently. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we all know all that, except that’s not what happened.’

  I swear I could almost hear the whoosh of their heads all turning sharply towards her.

  ‘No,’ she continued, ‘the robbery, if we can call it a robbery, took place earlier that night while everyone was still here. I may have some of the specifics a little wrong, but I believe I have the general outline of things. While the revels and roistering continued, someone – one of you, in fact…’ Another murmur ran through the small group of men. ‘…slipped out to the storeroom and indulged in a little deception. Our thief had been planning this for some little while. Perhaps the idea had come to him when he saw Lofty Tredegar’s old boots in the dressing room and decided to steal them, or perhaps he had formulated the plan much earlier and was just waiting for an opportunity to pinch the boots, but the boots were the key to his plan. On the night of the dinner, he retrieved those distinctively large old boots from their hiding place, put them on, and set about laying a trail. Knocking the oil can over was an inspired choice – oil cans are spilled all the time in tool sheds – but I suspect he had also considered whitewash or paint; anything that would leave a clear trail of size-twelve bootprints would do. With the boots on and the oil spilt, he went straight to the committee room, stood on tiptoes to check that no one was inside, opened the door, removed the booty and made good his escape back out through the store. He left a trail out onto the grass, with his footsteps leading off towards the lane. For all anyone would know, the burglar had headed back into the village.

  ‘Except that this morning, Armstrong and I took another look at those prints and discovered that they turned around and led back into the shed. The thief had not made good his escape, but had instead returned to the pavilion. We searched the shed, where I confess I expected to find the loot hidden in some dark corner but instead we found only the stolen boots. Clearly our thief had changed back into his own shoes, but why would he do that? Why return to the shed in his stolen
boots? Why not get away and change the boots later? It seemed to me much more likely that if he had put his own shoes back on, he was returning to the party. He must have committed his theft during the festivities.

  ‘But then there was another problem. If he had come back to the gathering and hidden his boots, what did he do with the trophies? Surely he would have hidden them in the store to be retrieved and sold later. A former petty criminal like Lofty Tredegar, or someone trying to raise money to, say, rescue their ailing business…’ She looked at Flynn. ‘…would want to be certain of being able to lay their hands on the valuables later. It would be no good hiding them outside – some passing vagabond might find them – so they would want to keep them hidden somewhere safe.’

  ‘Now look here–’ said Flynn, angrily.

  ‘One moment, Mr Flynn,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I’ve not finished yet. I pray your indulgence a little longer. The valuables were not hidden in the storeroom, and this morning, Sir Hector, Armstrong and I discovered why.’

  She stepped over to the trophy cabinet and, with practiced ease, worked the mechanism which made the shelves slide back into place, revealing the Wessex Challenge Cup, the runner-up shield won by the Second XV in the 1908 Severn Vale Tournament, a jersey worn by Ripper Henderson in the Great Brawl of ’98, and the penny the club originally paid for the land on which the club was built in 1895. There was stunned silence in the room.

  Eventually, it was Sir Hector who spoke. ‘I was here when you found it, m’dear,’ he said. ‘But I still can’t think for the life of me how you knew it was all there.’

  ‘To tell the truth, Sir Hector, I wasn’t at all sure that I’d worked it out correctly until the moment I found the lever under the cabinet.’

  ‘But how did you even know to look?’ he said, still plainly baffled.

  ‘Well it had been nagging at me for some time that the two sides of the fireplace are so very different. Look here,’ she said, walking back to the bookshelves to the left of the fireplace. ‘These bookshelves are deep – far too deep for the books you have on them. See here where you’ve even got room to double some of them up? While over here…’ She stepped back to the cabinet. ‘…the shelves in the trophy case are shallow, with barely enough room to hold this magnificent cup. It seemed odd that the niches should be so different, so I wondered if there might be something behind the cabinet.’

  ‘Something like a mechanism to make the shelves disappear,’ he said.

  ‘Something very much like that, yes. We saw in the club diaries that Jester Dunleavy liked to pinch other clubs’ trophies, and then when you told us that he was a designer for stage magicians, I just sort of put two and two together.’

  ‘That’s all very well and good,’ said Treble. ‘And it’s jolly exciting to find that we have such an entertaining piece of furniture, but you’ve made the serious allegation that one of us is responsible for faking this theft and you still haven’t shown that it’s not Lofty Tredegar.’

  ‘Please, Mr Treble, just a little more patience,’ she said. ‘The “thief” had stolen nothing, and was almost certainly someone who had returned to the club to resume his rollicking. I admit that at this point I had to make a bit of a leap, and decided that the culprit was probably one of you – the last to leave. It seemed that it would have been important to someone faking the theft to make sure that they had a handful of witnesses to provide them with an alibi. So it was someone from this group, I thought. But who?

  ‘For a time, Mr Flynn, Armstrong and I thought it could be you. Your business is ailing and even a few pounds from the sale of some stolen silver – which you would certainly be able to smelt in your workshop – might tide you over and enable you to save the firm. But the cup is still here; you can’t sell stolen silver if you don’t actually have any stolen silver to sell.

  ‘Then we found Mr Tredegar’s boots and Sergeant Dobson had no option but to arrest him. But it seemed a little difficult to believe that someone like Lofty, someone with experience as a burglar and n’er-do-well, would be so amateurish as to leave such an obvious trail, even if he were clever enough to use his old boots rather than his new ones.

  ‘With the trophies not actually lost, it now seemed possible that the intention was not the theft itself, but rather to create the appearance of a theft. What if you, Mr Treble, were intending to make a fraudulent insurance claim against the stolen items? The club might be saved by the injection of cash for the memorabilia. But by the time the cup and the shield had been replaced, there would be precious little money left.

  ‘But we kept coming back to the bootprints. Size twelve boots indicate a tall man. Lofty Tredegar is well over six feet tall, and those are his boots. You, too, Mr Treble are very tall; I imagine the boots would be about your size, as well. But neither of you seemed to have a proper motive for simply hiding the trophies. And then it struck me: you’re both very tall. Mr Treble, would you do me a great service and pop out into the passage and look in through the window?’

  He frowned at her but did as she asked. He walked out of the room and as he passed along the passage we could clearly see most of his head as he passed the windows. He stopped and turned, looking in.

  ‘You can see in easily, Mr Treble?’ called Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘Very easily, thank you,’ he said. ‘What are you playing at?’

  ‘Do please rejoin us,’ she said, ‘and I shall explain.’

  He returned to his seat.

  ‘I felt so utterly, utterly foolish when I realized that the most important clue had been on the floor outside the room all along. It was one of the first things we saw. The burglar stood in tiptoes to look through the window. We would see the prints most clearly on the passage floor where he had turned, raised himself up, and then doubled back to enter the room. He wasn’t a tall man, at all. He was a short man wearing big boots.’

  She looked directly at “Big Jim” Molson. ‘I’m fairly certain it was you,’ she said, calmly. ‘But I’m not altogether sure why you might have done it.’

  ‘Absolute rubbish,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Why would I do such a thing?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ she said. ‘Oh, no, wait a moment. I have it. You seemed rather chipper when you arrived this evening. Have you had some good news?’

  He looked surprised. ‘Why yes, as a matter of fact. I’m going to propose to my girl this evening when all this is over.’

  There was a look of satisfaction in Lady Hardcastle’s grey eyes as the last piece fell into place. ‘Your young lady wouldn’t be Winnie Merrifield, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat warily. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You see, Mr Molson, when we spoke to you last you said you were hoping to propose to a girl but you had “a few things to sort out”. And then we spoke to Mr Tredegar and he said he was courting a farmer’s daughter called Winnie Merrifield. And now Mr Tredegar is in gaol for burglary, apparently having returned to his old ways. It would seem that the way is now clear for you to make your intentions known to Miss Merrifield; her father would surely not countenance her marriage to a recidivist criminal.

  ‘I suggest that you faked the burglary to implicate Mr Tredegar to get him out of the way. In February, you stole his boots, hoping that one day an opportunity might present itself. You already knew about the cabinet somehow, and when the team won the Wessex Challenge Cup, you hatched your plan to land Tredegar in gaol.’

  All eyes were on Molson. ‘You can’t prove none of it,’ he said, defiantly.

  ‘No,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘you’re absolutely right, I can’t. But I’m right, aren’t I? Think about what you’re doing for a moment, Mr Molson. You can’t possibly want to marry Miss Merrifield so much that you’d see your friend sent to gaol. And could you enjoy your marriage, knowing that it was based on such a terrible lie?’

  He stared angrily around the room for a moment, but then seemed to deflate as the truth of his situation washed over him. ‘He don’t deserve her,’ he sai
d, sadly. ‘I’ve loved her from afar since we was kids. I got the farm on its feet and I was tryin’ to pluck up the courage to ask her to walk out with me, when some lanky, seasick, fisherman’s son-cum-baker swans in with his good looks and his charm and steals the one girl I’ve ever loved from right under me nose. ’T i’n’t fair. Why should he get her when I’ve loved her all these years? He’d-a been all right in gaol. He wouldn’t have done long for pinchin’ a couple of trophies but by the time he was out, me and Winnie would be wed. It would all have been all right…’ His voice trailed off and he sat staring at the polished table.

  This time it was Mr Treble who broke the silence. ‘I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re most grateful to you for getting to the bottom of this, Lady Hardcastle,’ he said, all trace of his usual levity gone from his voice. ‘We have the trophies back, and we know how they came to be missing. We shall inform Sergeant Dobson of Lofty’s innocence, and leave it to him what should happen next. Whatever the official police response, rest assured that there will be consequences within the club for Molson’s terrible actions.’ He looked sternly at the forlorn prop forward. You have my word that we shall deal with the official matters within the hour, but if I might ask you to leave us now, we have some club business to discuss.’

  Lady Hardcastle nodded, and I stood, collecting our things. I followed her to the door and we left them to their “club business”.

  We were home in plenty of time for an enjoyable supper. After I had cleared everything away and Lady Hardcastle had set up the card table in the drawing room, we sat with our brandies and talked over the events of the past few days.

  ‘I must say,’ she said as she triumphantly laid down her cards to win yet another hand, ‘that it makes a delightful change to solve a mystery that doesn’t involve a cadaver.’

  ‘Other than the rotting corpse of “Big Jim” Molson’s reputation,’ I said, shuffling and re-dealing the cards.

  ‘Well, quite,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Have you ever considered a career in journalism? You have an ear for the melodramatically sensationalist phrase.’