“I’ll try,” said Pickett, giving his mount a dubious look.
“I was talking to the horse,” Julia said, then gave him a wink and turned to allow her father to boost her into the saddle.
For the first several minutes, Pickett had no thought but maintaining his balance in a saddle that seemed impossibly high off the ground. As he grew accustomed to the horse’s gait, however, he began to relax and was able to look about at his surroundings.
“It’s a pretty place your father has here,” he observed to Julia, who had drawn up alongside him.
“I have always thought so,” she agreed. She might have added that, since the property was unentailed, it would all be his someday, married as he was to Sir Thaddeus’s only surviving offspring, but she wisely refrained from making this revelation just yet; the four hundred pounds per annum had been enough of a shock to him for the nonce.
As they skirted a copse of trees, Pickett noticed a small stone cottage nestled in the woods.
“Who lives there?” he asked Sir Thaddeus, nodding his head in the direction of the house without releasing his white-knuckled grip on the reins.
“No one, now,” was his father-in-law’s answer. “It’s actually the gamekeeper’s cottage attached to Greenwillows, the old Layton estate—the woods there mark the southern boundary—but old Mrs. Layton didn’t hunt, so the place has stood empty for years.”
Pickett had been almost certain he’d seen a curl of smoke rising from the chimney, and started to turn in the saddle for a closer look. Lucifer, however, had no very high opinion of this maneuver, so he was obliged to abandon the attempt.
“Mrs. Layton,” echoed Julia. “Isn’t she Jamie’s aunt, the one who died and left her estate to him?”
“Aye, she was the vicar’s sister. Since she and Layton never had children of their own, she left everything to Jamie. All this belongs to him now.”
“It’s a pity he intends to sell it,” Julia said. “I should have thought he would want to sell his commission and settle down here someday.”
Sir Thaddeus cleared his throat with the awkward air of a man fighting his own emotions. “Maybe he finds it too painful. After all, your sister ...”
Determined to give his thoughts (and indeed, her own) a happier direction, Julia said brightly, “Come, Papa, let’s race! John, you don’t mind, do you?”
Pickett shook his head. “So long as I am not expected to participate, no.”
“Very well, Papa, let us race to that tree.” She raised her crop and pointed it in the direction of a single oak crowning a distant hill.
Sir Thaddeus agreed readily, and they were off. Pickett had a bad moment or two with Lucifer, who was much inclined to join in the fun, but having at last gained control of his mount, he proceeded at his own pace and reached the tree some minutes later.
“Who won?” he asked cheerfully.
Julia, still on horseback, turned to regard him with an expression of such horror that the smile was wiped from his face.
“My lady?”
He clambered down from the saddle none too gracefully, and hurried toward her. She kicked her foot free of the stirrup and slid off the sidesaddle and into his arms.
“Oh, John! Oh, John!” she cried, burying her face in his chest.
“Sir Thaddeus?” Pickett turned toward his father-in-law, who was bending over a large rock which proved, on closer inspection, to be no rock at all.
“It’s Tom, my missing groom,” Sir Thaddeus said. “He’s dead.”
Chapter Six
In Which John Pickett Pays a Call
and Discovers a Clue
Pickett gently but firmly set Julia aside and joined her father beside the body. At first glance Sir Thaddeus’s groom appeared to be the happiest corpse Pickett had ever seen; a closer inspection, however, revealed that the man’s hideous grin was actually a gash: his throat had been slit from ear to ear, and the gaping wound was caked with blood. In fact, blood was everywhere. It covered the corpse from chin to chest, and soaked the ground where the body lay. Pickett stooped and swiped a finger across the man’s throat, but found nothing save for a few tiny reddish-brown flakes; clearly, the groom had lain here for some time if such copious amounts of blood had had time to dry. With his other hand, Pickett withdrew a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his brown serge coat and wiped his finger clean.
He rose and turned to his father-in-law. “Sir Thaddeus, if you will take Julia back to the house—”
“No, John, please don’t send me away,” she protested. “I am quite all right, now that—now that you are here. Please let me stay. I promise I won’t faint on you, or have hysterics, or anything of that nature.”
He smiled at her. “No, you won’t, will you?” he noted with more than a trace of admiration. It was not the first time she’d come face to face with death—nor the second, for that matter—and although she had not been bred for such grim scenes, she had risen to the occasion every time, even being of enormous assistance to him more than once. “Very well, my lady, you may stay if you wish.”
The matter being settled, Pickett turned his attention back to the issue at hand. He studied the ground around the body, and circled the tree, pausing occasionally to nudge a large leaf aside with the toe of his borrowed boot.
“You are looking for the knife,” Julia guessed.
“Yes, or any other weapon that might have produced such a result,” Pickett said. “Probably a knife, but I can’t rule out a hatchet, or a sword, or anything else with a sharp edge.”
Having completed his circuit of the tree without success, he arrived back at the body, and looked down at it for a long moment. “I should think it unlikely that he fell on top of it, but I can’t ignore the possibility. Sir Thaddeus, if you will assist me?”
Sir Thaddeus stepped forward at once to take the dead man’s legs while Pickett lifted his shoulders. Together they moved the man out of the dried puddle of his own blood, but it was as Pickett had expected. They found no knife, or indeed any other weapon, lying beneath him on the ground.
“And you say he was your groom?” Pickett asked his father-in-law. “Do you know if he had a quarrel with anyone? Or any reason why someone would want him dead?”
Sir Thaddeus shook his head. “Not that I ever heard. A bit too fond of spending his evenings at the Pig and Whistle for my liking, but not so much that it interfered with his work. I’d have thrown him out on his ear if it had,” he added darkly.
Having discovered all he could from the site, which was little enough, Pickett turned his attention to the body itself. He folded back the front of the blood-encrusted coat, plunged his hand into the pocket, and withdrew his clenched fist.
He opened his hand, and let out a low whistle. “You must pay your staff well, sir,” he remarked to his father-in-law.
“Well enough to prevent anyone else from making them a better offer,” Sir Thaddeus admitted. “ ‘The laborer is worthy of his hire,’ and all that, you know. What makes you say so?”
Pickett held out his hand to reveal a pile of coins, including a number of golden guineas.
The older man’s eyes bulged. “I don’t pay them as well as all that!”
“Have you any idea how he might have come by such a sum of money?”
The squire shook his head. “No, none.”
“Are you aware of any ways a groom might earn such a sum on the side in ways that were perhaps less than ethical?”
Sir Thaddeus frowned as he considered the matter. “I suppose he might pocket a bit under the table in illicit stud fees.”
“How so?” asked Pickett.
“Someone who wanted to breed my Lucifer there, for instance, with one of his own mares might slip Tom a tidy sum to allow Lucifer to escape into his own pasture while his mare was in season.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have offered Tom such an arrangement?”
“Well, there’s Griggs whose property borders mine to the south. He’s had his eye on L
ucifer for his Andromeda for years, but I’ll have none of it, and so I’ve told him more than once. His Andromeda is as sway-backed a nag as I’ve seen in many a long day. Any offspring of hers would be no credit to Lucifer.”
“Have you any reason to believe this Griggs might have offered Tom such an arrangement as you describe?”
Sir Thaddeus shook his head. “Griggs is no judge of horseflesh, but I’ve never heard anything said against his morals.” He paused and gave a discreet cough. “I don’t suppose he could have done it himself?”
Pickett, correctly assuming this question to refer to Tom rather than the absent Griggs, looked down at the body. “I should have thought anyone trying to commit suicide in such a way would lose consciousness before he could make a cut so wide, or so deep. And then there’s the money. That means something; I’m sure of it. Why would a man who’d just come into a windfall suddenly decide to do away with himself?” He frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose the coroner will have to be called, and the—tell me, Sir Thaddeus, who is the local Justice of the Peace?”
“That would be Lord Buckleigh. Good thing he’s back from his honeymoon, what?”
“Indeed it is, although it’s not much of a start to his married life.” Pickett sighed. “Mine either, for that matter.”
“I expect I should be the one to break the news to Tom’s wife,” Sir Thaddeus said with all the eagerness of a man about to have a tooth drawn. “His being in my employ and all.”
Pickett would have preferred to perform this task himself, for a great deal could be learned about the state of a man’s marriage by his widow’s reaction to the news of his death. But he suspected his father-in-law was correct in claiming a sort of noblesse oblige where this somber task was concerned, so he merely nodded in acknowledgement and turned to his wife.
“My lady, will you return to the house with your father and send word to Lord Buckleigh and the coroner?” Anticipating her objection, he added, “I promise, I will be fine. It won’t be the first time I’ve been alone with a body.”
She gave him a rueful smile, and allowed him to make a stirrup of his hands and toss her into the saddle. A moment later, father and daughter were cantering away across the downs, and Pickett was left alone to examine the site where the groom had met his death. Apart from the spot where the body had lain, there was very little blood, and this in itself was surprising; whoever had done the deed must have been liberally splattered, and although Pickett did not expect him to leave a trail which might be followed—in his experience, murderers were rarely so obliging—there would certainly have been bloodied garments to be disposed of. Pickett paced off an ever-widening circle, searching the ground for some sign of a hole having been dug, or a ditch which might have been invisible from the spot where the murder had occurred. He found neither, but he did identify one feature that he had not noticed before: just over a ridge to the east he could glimpse the slate tiles of a roof. The scene of the crime was not quite so isolated as he had first imagined.
He glanced uncertainly back at the body. He disliked leaving it there, but he wanted to do a little investigating before word of the groom’s death spread throughout the neighborhood like wildfire—which it would do, he had no doubt, as soon as Julia and Sir Thaddeus reached Runyon Hall with the news. Taking the horse Lucifer by the reins, he heaved himself into the saddle (an ungainly process he was only thankful his wife and her father were not present to witness) and set out for the house below the ridge.
He found it strangely quiet. A very pretty residence built during the previous century of golden stone from the nearby Cotswolds, it seemed somehow frozen in time, with no signs of life anywhere. Pickett directed his borrowed mount to the stables behind the house and, when no stable hand came forward to meet him, called for assistance. No one answered.
“Well, Lucifer, it looks as if it’s just you and me,” he muttered under his breath.
He dismounted with relative ease, having gravity on his side, and led the horse from the pale sunshine of early spring into the shadowy gloom of the stables.
“Hullo?” he called. “Is anyone here?”
There was no reply, and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized the stalls were empty. Now that he thought of it, the building lacked the odors of horse and fresh hay that had assailed his nostrils at Sir Thaddeus’s stables. Apparently there had been no horses stabled here for some time. Seeing he could expect no assistance from a stable hand, Pickett looked about for something to which he might tether Lucifer’s reins, and his eyes alighted on a pile of clothing in one corner.
Dropping the horse’s reins, he went to investigate, and found a caped greatcoat liberally splashed with blood. The dark patches were stiff, but when he raised the garment to his nose, he found the metallic scent still strong; although the blood had had sufficient time to dry, it was a fairly recent addition. Perhaps even more interesting, however, were the cut and cloth of the garment. They were not at all what one might expect a groom or stable boy to wear, but the fine wool and skillful tailoring typical of a gentleman’s wardrobe. And while he knew from his aristocratic bride that servants sometimes were given their masters’ or mistresses’ castoffs, this particular garment appeared too new to have been already replaced.
He let the greatcoat fall, then rose and turned his attention back to the horse, only to find himself alone in the stable; Lucifer, it seemed, had abandoned his unfamiliar rider and bolted. Resigning himself to a long walk back to the Runyon property, Pickett decided to delay this exercise until after he’d made inquiries at the house. Forsaking the stable, he walked to the front door, and found the iron knocker wrapped in the black crape indicative of mourning. He rapped sharply on the wooden panel.
After several long minutes, during which Pickett began to wonder if the house were as empty as its stables, the door swung open with a creak of neglected hinges, and an ancient butler rasped, “Yes, sir?”
“I should like to speak to the master or mistress of the house, if you please,” Pickett said.
“So should I,” the butler replied, sizing up at a glance Pickett’s brown serge coat and borrowed boots. “Unfortunately, Mr. Layton has been dead for this decade and more, and Mrs. Layton followed him just after Twelfth Night.”
Pickett glanced past the butler, and found confirmation of his words in the white Holland covers draped over the hall furnishings, giving the room a ghostly appearance. “Then the house is empty?”
The butler inclined his head. “But for myself, sir, yes.”
“And the stables?”
“As Mrs. Layton rarely left the house after the master’s death, the horses were sold years ago.”
“I see,” said Pickett, his mind working rapidly. It appeared that the Layton stable would be an excellent place to hide incriminating clothing; had it not been for his own presence in the neighborhood and his knowledge of criminal investigations, the telltale garment might have lain there undiscovered for years. “Are there no visitors to the house, then?”
“None, sir,” said the butler, shaking his head. “Only the young master.”
“The young master?”
“Young Mr. Pennington,” the butler explained. “He was the mistress’s nephew and godson. He inherited the estate upon her death.”
With a sinking heart, Pickett wished his wife were not quite so fond of Major Pennington. For if this was Jamie Pennington’s house, then it was also Jamie Pennington’s stable—and, quite possibly, Jamie Pennington’s greatcoat, hidden in the corner and drenched in blood.
* * *
Upon entering her parents’ house, Julia headed straight for the writing desk in her father’s study. Lady Runyon, hearing footsteps in the hall, followed the sound and discovered her daughter, quill pen scratching urgently over paper.
“Have you returned already?” Then, seeing her pale face, “Why, Julia! What has happened? Where are your father and Mr. Pickett?”
“Papa and Mr. Pickett are quite all right, Mama. In fact,
there has been a—an accident. Your groom, Tom, is—is dead, and Papa has gone to break the news to his wife.”
“And you?” Lady Runyon asked, her gaze shifting to the half-finished letter on the desk.
“I am writing to Lord Buckleigh—and to the coroner.”
Lady Runyon nodded slowly. “It is very thoughtful of you to notify Lord Buckleigh, since poor Tom was once his stable boy. But why the coroner?”
“Because,” Julia took a deep, steadying breath. “Because Tom’s death was not—not an accident, precisely.”
“Julia!” exclaimed Lady Runyon, her meager bosom swelling. “Has that boy exposed you to violent death again?”
“First, Mama, Mr. Pickett is not a ‘boy,’ and second, he did not ‘expose’ me any more than Papa did! In fact, I was in Papa’s company when we discovered the—the body. We were racing to the old oak at the corner of the Layton property—you remember the one, it stands all by itself at the top of the ridge—and when we got there, well, there was Tom.” She grimaced at the memory. “Or all that was left of him.”
“So, if you are here writing letters, and your papa has gone to Tom’s house, then where, pray, is this Mr. Pickett of yours?”
“He stayed behind to investigate.” Seeing disapproval writ large upon her mother’s countenance, she added hastily, “You must agree that there is no one in Norwood Green more qualified to do so.”
“I must do nothing of the kind! Your Mr. Pickett should remember that he is a guest here, and behave accordingly. Norwood Green has both a Justice of the Peace and a coroner. He should allow them to do their jobs.”
“They can hardly do so until they have been notified, can they?” Julia said, and turned back to finish her correspondence with shaking hands.
An uneasy peace reigned while the footman was dispatched to deliver these messages. When they were alone again, Lady Runyon picked up the thread of the unfinished conversation. “I don’t mean to criticize, my dear. Perhaps it is unfair, but I can’t help comparing your new husband—” She all but shuddered on the word. “—with poor Fieldhurst. He, I know, would never have embroiled you in such an unsavory business.”
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