“And he’d have spotted the knobkerrie where Owens had discarded it.” Jonty’s tones remained constrained. “I’d hope he picked it up in all innocence, meaning to return it to Seymour once he’d done telling him not to make such a racket, but I fear that may be being too optimistic.”
“I fear so, too.” Sheridan’s unnaturally pale face hardened. “So, he reaches Seymour’s room, asks him to keep the noise down, and presumably gets no response other than a stream of abuse? Is that speculating too far, my dear?”
His wife laid her hand on his arm. “Not at all. It is a likely scenario, so as long as you don’t insist that is definitely what happened, logic is satisfied. And so am I.”
“So are we, too.” Orlando, who’d have liked to give Jonty just such a reassuring pat, kept his hands firmly clasped together. “That’s the scene we have in mind. Poulton-Brown becomes further enraged, and lashes out, then is horrified at what he’s done. Casts down the weapon and flees.”
“Not shutting the door properly as he went?” Panesar clarified.
“Exactly.” Jonty seemed to be rallying. “Possibly because his hands were bloodied and he didn’t want to leave a trail. He’d have had a washing jug in his room, like the others I saw, and could have cleaned himself up easily, disposing of the bloodied water later on.”
“What about the smudge marks, though? Weren’t they made by a gloved hand?” Ariadne, Lady Macbeth like, studied her hands. “If this was a spur of the moment attack, where do the gloves come into it?”
“That is one area over which we aren’t sure,” Jonty had to admit. “As is the matter of whether Owens put on his gloves once more and so smudged the other prints as he disposed of the weapon.”
Dr. Sheridan, who’d been quietly taking in all that was being said, remarked, “In retrospect—and hindsight is a wonderful thing—we should have suspected one of the students on J staircase from the start, given the emphasis we put on the killer being able to come and go unnoticed, and to act on opportunity.”
“And we would have done,” Orlando acknowledged, never one to enjoy having his errors pointed out, “had we not been misled by what we saw. The only one of the five whose movements couldn’t be verified after the argument was Poulton-Brown, but I observed him writing left handed and we knew the blow had been struck with the right. Then I remembered it’s not uncommon for someone to bowl with their left hand but bat right-handed. I checked with the Assumption cricket captain today and he confirms that’s how Poulton-Brown plays, which would make it natural for him to take up the knobkerrie in his non-writing hand.”
Dr. Panesar, who’d almost bounced out of his chair at the mention of cricket, waved agitatedly. “That might solve our problems with the gloves, too. What if a pair fell out of Owens’s pocket when he flung the knobkerrie away, and Poulton-Brown scooped them up at the same time as he picked up the weapon?”
“Ye-es?” Orlando couldn’t be sure where this led.
“Were he so angry he didn’t know what he was doing, he might have donned the gloves automatically.” Being a wily cricketer himself, Panesar’s eyes shone. “A sort of sub-conscious association with the knobkerrie and a bat, a preparation for going out to the crease.”
“Getting ready to go into battle.” Orlando had heard many an analogy between sport and war. As a theory, it was one of the good doctor’s less ridiculous ones.
Dr. Sheridan cleared his throat. “Gentlemen—and my dear lady—we appear to have a viable theory, but where is our proof? The vice-chancellor assured me that he didn’t want to be handed doubts and dissembling.”
His wife, uncharacteristically sombre, said, “We have one piece of concrete evidence, or at least it’s something the police would take as concrete, although we can’t use it.”
“What?” Orlando, having almost dropped his cup, laid it on the table out of harm’s way. “Why?”
“When and how and where and who, while we’re about it.” Jonty shook his head. “I think I can hazard a guess, Kipling’s honest serving men notwithstanding. You were speaking to Thompstone yesterday, Mrs. Sheridan. Did he give you the proof which is not admissible?”
“Not proof exactly, but he hinted that the murderer had confessed to him on Thursday evening.”
“Confessed?” Jonty ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up like a dunderhead’s might as he struggled with an abstruse piece of text. “Then why didn’t the blithering idiot tell me so on Saturday? He had two opportunities to do so.”
“I think he was struggling with his conscience. The sanctity of confession and how far that extended.” Ariadne gazed around her guests. “You should feel complimented that he decided you’d be able to solve the mystery without his input. That’s why he was staring at you as you walked away, willing you to come to the right conclusion.”
“That’s why he knew Owens was innocent all along.” Orlando slapped the arm of his chair. “We could have guessed that.”
“We could, but it wouldn’t have profited us much. And,” Jonty pointed out, “it might have prejudiced our investigation. We went in with open minds.”
Silence fell on the room as the assembly tried to come to terms with both fact and hypothesis.
“Now,” Ariadne remarked at last, “in an attempt to answer all the questions Kipling’s honest serving men might pose, what did Owens actually say as he stood in the court, if not ‘my cousin’?”
“Ah.” Dr. Panesar was not a man to be easily made self-conscious, although in this instance his reticence to answer was plain. “Among the alternatives my friend gave—and there were plenty—was ‘my godson’. I hoped that might be of relevance, but it doesn’t appear to be.”
Jonty laughed. “No, it doesn’t. What about the other options, though? Especially the one you seem reluctant to mention. And before you accuse me of telepathy, I’ve seen that expression on your face before. Shall we ask Mrs. Sheridan to leave the room?”
“You will not!” Ariadne insisted. “I want to hear everything.”
“Oh.” Panesar’s handsome brown cheeks turned ruddy. “It’s just that we were focussing on ‘moccasin’ rather than ‘magazine’, hence the ‘my cousin’ interpretation that seemed to fit so well.”
“Yes,” Jonty acknowledged. “Owens himself, while he couldn’t exactly remember, felt he might have said ‘My God’ or something similar.”
“Or ‘By God’?” Panesar suggested. “Apparently, the letters b and m can be easily confused, especially at a distance. While potentially offensive, the ‘By God’ option is not as offensive as my friend’s suggestion.”
Jonty rubbed his hands together, gleefully. “You have to tell us.”
“He feels that ‘Maga’ could actually have been,” Panesar flushed deeper before whispering, “the word ‘bugger’. Used as the start of some curse.”
To Orlando’s surprise—but not, evidently, either Jonty’s or Dr. Sheridan’s—Ariadne roared with laughter. “We should have surmised that, too. Dyed in the wool cad, that man. I shall be wondering all day what the next bit was. Sin? Buggers sin? Does that make sense?”
“What about ‘Buggers in something or other’?” Sheridan suggested. “The same something or other that the student in the library couldn’t make out?”
“Buggers in trouble?” Panesar proposed. “Buggers infuriating?”
“Buggers—” Jonty stopped in full flow, as a knock on the door heralded the timely arrival of the butler, bearing an urgent note.
“Dr. Stewart, this is for you.” Sheridan passed it across.
“Will you excuse me if I take a look?” Jonty blanched as he read the message, before re-reading it and simply nodding. “I’ll share the contents of this in a moment. Please continue.”
Dr. Panesar, who’d been wriggling in his seat clearly eager to speak, picked up a remaining loose end. “Was Poulton-Brown the mysterious cousin that Owens was trying to protect?”
“No, I think not.” Orlando glanced at Jonty, then continued. “I beli
eve that Owens had come to the same conclusion that we reached at one point. That the man who apparently found the body committed the deed.”
Jonty looked up from where he had the note folded in his hand. “You think Thompstone’s the cousin?”
Orlando, vexed that the contents of the message had not yet been shared, nodded sagely. “I think it’s a possibility. You have a habit of tipping your head to one side when you’re thinking, like a little bird. Your nephews Thomas and George do the same, as does your niece Alexandra.”
“Do I? Do they? How extraordinary.”
“Yes, on all counts,” Orlando laughed, ruefully. “And Owens has a habit of flicking his middle finger against his thumb when under duress.”
“I noticed that,” Dr. Sheridan remarked. “I’ve seen him do it before, in university meetings. Clearly habitual and very annoying.”
“Thompstone does the same. At least, I saw him doing it when I was visiting Assumption yesterday.”
Ariadne nodded. “I can confirm that he’s done that same thing on other occasions.”
“I never saw him do it.” Jonty sounded put out. “Although he did seem to be trying to restrain his hands time and again. Clasping them together.” He replicated the movement. “Perhaps we’ll have to enquire further, when we take up his dinner invitation. Two glasses of wine and Professor Coppersmith would ask anybody anything.”
Orlando almost leapt out of his chair. “What dinner invitation?”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Sheridan raised his hand, “I think we need to put all this speculation to one side for the moment. We know that someone has confessed, but we don’t know that’s Poulton-Brown.”
Jonty raised a finger. “Well, we do, now. Sort of. Before we came here, I went to see our pal the chaplain, to appraise him of our suspicions. We were concerned that Poulton-Brown might suspect he had been found out—especially if he heard that we were asking about his batting style—and either run away or make an attempt on his own life. I asked Thompstone to find some excuse to keep an eye on the lad, at which he seemed neither surprised nor alarmed.”
Orlando nodded. “For which we now have an explanation.”
“Indeed. He’d invited his friend Dr. Daley over, ostensibly to be his guest in hall for luncheon, but actually in case matters took a dramatic turn. Which apparently they have.” Jonty smoothed the note in his hand. “Thompstone had been concerned for Poulton-Brown during chapel. He’d seemed peculiarly intense and distracted, so even before my visit the chaplain had dropped in on the lad, although the student had by then appeared calmer. It was as well Thompstone made a return call, and had Dr. Daley with him. I won’t give the details, although a stomach pump was involved.”
“How awful.” Ariadne shut her eyes, perhaps trying to imagine what would drive someone to such extremes. The choice between suicide and the gallows, perhaps?
“An extreme path to tread, but in freeing one man we were bound to imprison another, whether by bars or by their conscience.” Dr. Sheridan eased out of his chair, placing his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I have people to inform, my dear. Please excuse me if I go now.”
Ariadne patted his hand. “Go with my blessing. Let’s not lose any further time in this case.”
After a few sombre remarks, the other guests departed the lodge, Orlando steering Jonty in the direction of the river for a soothing walk along the backs.
“I always thought this case would leave a bitter taste in the mouth, but not for this reason,” he confessed, as they strode along in the sunshine.
“At least that lad has some of the best people to take care of him, physically and spiritually. Perhaps they will find grounds to say he was provoked beyond reason. Or acted when the balance of his mind was disturbed. That, thank God,” Jonty added, with a wan smile, “is not our problem.” He slipped his arm around Orlando’s shoulders, dispensing a brief hug.
“Perhaps we should have refused to help.”
“You know we couldn’t have. Not only because it would have offended a dear friend. The truth may be painful sometimes but we have to serve it.” Jonty chuckled. “Does that sound like a sermon?”
“Just a touch.” Orlando couldn’t help but join in the laughter. “Although, of all the sermons in the world I’d rather listen to one of yours than anyone else’s.”
“Daft old beggar. Talking of which, what did Owens say? ‘Bugger sin’ makes no sense. I think it really was ‘My cousin’.”
“And what was the rest of it?”
Jonty shrugged. “I suspect it was terribly prosaic.’ My cousin might forgive you but I can’t?’ It’s a shame it probably wasn’t something scandalous. Buggers in something, maybe. Buggers in Cambridge? Bugg—umphphm.”
Orlando wondered why he’d never used Jonty’s scarf to shut him up before now. It proved more effective than a warning finger and more appropriate in public than a kiss. “Will you please keep this speculation for later? Rough talk’s all very well for Mrs. Sheridan’s parlour but there are some delicate ears around here.”
“Hmmmphum.” Jonty wrested the scarf from his face. “Spoilsport. I’ll save my ideas for recounting at our own fireside, although I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for certain.” He leaned closer. “But we’ll come up with the smuttiest possibilities we can. Then every time we see him we can mutter them under our breath.”
“I like that idea. It’ll be suitable reward for taking on this case.” Orlando took a deep breath. “To think that we’ve saved Owens. I don’t suppose he’ll show the slightest gratitude.”
“I don’t suppose he will, either. But Dr. and Mrs. Sheridan are grateful, as is Thompstone.”
“Talking of which, what was the invitation you referred to earlier?”
“Ah. Thompstone and his handsome doctor friend would like us to partake of their hospitality at some point. It’ll be a bit of an eye-opener for you, but it’ll be worth it.”
“Will it?” Was meeting strangers—and not in the cause of investigation—ever worth it?
“Yes. The Daley-Thompstone household is similar to the Coppersmith-Stewart one. It’ll be a rare occasion we can let our guard down in company.”
Orlando halted, gave Jonty a brief smile, then turned his attention to some ducks which were dabbling. “Really? In which case, I’ll look forward to meeting them. I’ve swallowed my pride already. I can do it twice.”
“My hero.” Jonty took his arm and they walked on.
Footnote:
If you wish to read an account of Thompstone’s night under the stars in France with his handsome doctor, it can be found in the story Hallowed Ground, which is part of the anthology Pride of Poppies, published by Manifold Press, for the benefit of The Royal British Legion.
About the author:
Because Charlie Cochrane couldn't be trusted to do any of her jobs of choice—like managing a rugby team—she writes. Her mystery novels include the Edwardian era Cambridge Fellows series, and the contemporary Lindenshaw Mysteries. Multi-published, she has titles with Carina, Riptide, Endeavour, Lethe and Bold Strokes, among others.
A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Mystery People and International Thriller Writers Inc, Charlie regularly appears at literary festivals and at reader and author conferences with The Deadly Dames.
Where to find her:
Website: https://charliecochrane.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlie.cochrane.18
Twitter: https://twitter.com/charliecochrane
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2727135.Charlie_Cochrane
Also by the author:
Novels:
Best Corpse for the Job
Jury of One
Two Feet Under (coming soon)
Lessons in Love
Lessons in Desire
Lessons in Discovery
Lessons in Power
Lessons in Temptation
Lessons in Seduction
Lessons in Trust
&nb
sp; All Lessons Learned
Lessons for Survivors
Lessons for Idle Tongues
Lessons for Sleeping Dogs
Broke Deep
Count the Shells (coming soon)
Paired novellas:
Home Fires Burning
Novellas and short stories:
Second Helpings
Awfully Glad
Don’t Kiss the Vicar
Promises Made Under Fire
Tumble Turn
Dreams of a Hero
Wolves of the West
Music in the Midst of Desolation
Anthologies (contributing author)
Pride of Poppies
Capital Crimes
Lashings of Sauce
Tea and Crumpet
British Flash
Summer’s Day
Lessons in Loving thy Murderous Neighbour: A Cambridge Fellows Mystery novella (Cambridge Fellows Mysteries) Page 10