Murder Near Slaughter

by L. A. Nisula

  I took another scone. “I’d like to know why he was here. It would have been much more convenient for him to have gotten himself murdered somewhere else. Did anyone have any ideas besides him coming to meet one of us?”

  Mrs. Albright shook her head. “I don’t think any of them have any proper ideas about what happened, but they do seem to want to suspect us.”

  “I suppose the next best suspect is Mrs. Hoyt, particularly if he was carrying on with Mrs. Avery in Donnington, or she thought he was.”

  “And from the way they spoke about her, she’s well-liked in the village, and all the sympathy has been with her.”

  “So they don’t want to suspect her,” I finished. “I suppose that does make sense. But we have an alibi for most of the day. Once someone determines the time of death, we can figure out who saw us then and be out of it.”

  “I suppose,” Mrs. Albright agreed.

  I wondered if she wanted an investigation during our holiday but decided not to ask. I for one had no desire to work with Sergeant Harris on the case. “Did you hear about anything else interesting in town?”

  “Not really. Just noticed a few shops we might want to have a look at.” She went on to describe them, which distracted us both from discussion of the murder, at least for a little while.

  ~ * ~ * ~

  But we couldn’t ignore the murder for long. Once we’d finished our tea and the washing up, we gathered up the lanterns and went outside, locking the kitchen door behind us. I noticed we both turned the knob before starting around the side of the house. We’d left the front door unlocked so we got in easily enough and left the lanterns on the table near the door in case we needed to get to the other half of the cottage in the night. It was very hard to ignore a murder when the body had been so inconveniently placed. And as we couldn’t use the sitting room or anything beyond it, there was nothing else for us to do but go up to our rooms.

  As we climbed the stairs, I realized we had the best view we were going to find of the hearth rug where the body was found, and paused to have a look. Mrs. Albright noticed I’d stopped and came back to see what I had seen.

  “You didn’t think to bring a telescope, did you?” I asked as I pointed to the string marking where Mr. Hoyt had been found.

  “I’m afraid not. I didn’t think checking murder scenes from staircases was going to be part of our holiday.”

  “Neither did I. Still, we might be able to see something. I wish we had more light.”

  We stood on the staircase and stared down at the hearth rug. “It doesn’t seem too damaged,” Mrs. Albright said, “that’s something, at least.”

  “I suppose, but it is odd that it isn’t damaged.”

  “Go on.”

  I knew Mrs. Albright was encouraging me to finish the thought, hoping that I would get caught up in investigating, and it was working. “There wasn’t much blood on him, and none on the rug that I can see, so he couldn’t have bled much. So he must have been hit with the poker after he was already dead.”

  “We did think the body had been left here.”

  I nodded. “So the question becomes how did he die?”

  “He was soaking wet, that seems to suggest drowning.” Mrs. Albright waited for me to think about that idea.

  “But the rug doesn’t seem to have suffered any water damage either.”

  Mrs. Albright leaned forward for a better look. “Not that I can see. What do you think that means?”

  “That he was only soaking wet on the front? So he was face-down in shallow water?”

  Mrs. Albright nodded. “So he drowned? The river is quite shallow, particularly by the ford. The Eybry ford isn’t that far from here. Perhaps that’s where he was.”

  “But if the water was that shallow, why didn’t he just stand up, or even push up onto his forearms? That would have been enough to keep his head out of the water.”

  “The blow to the head? But no, we decided that was after death. And the poker was here.”

  I nodded. “So maybe he wasn’t drowned either. It will give me something to think about, anyway.”

  I could tell Mrs. Albright was taking that as a good sign.

  The stairs let out into a hallway that separated the first floor of the cottage in half. Mrs. Albright gave me a quick tour of the rooms. “The bath is at the end of the hall, there. I hope you don’t mind, I put you in the room facing front. They’re almost the same size.”

  I took that to mean Mrs. Albright wanted the view of the garden. “I don’t mind at all.”

  “Then have a good night. There’s a good set of fire irons in both rooms if we should need them.”

  I doubted she meant for tending a fire. “That’s something, at least. Although I hope we don’t need them. Good night.”

  My room took up most of the length of the cottage, with two windows facing the front garden and one facing the side yard with a small desk in front of it. The bed that was pushed under the slope of the roof looked comfortable. My luggage had been conveniently stacked near the wardrobe. I opened my trunk and got out what I’d need for the night, then unpacked my books and knitting and arranged them on the nightstand. If it hadn’t been for the corpse that had recently inhabited the sitting room and the policemen that it brought with it, it would have been an ideal spot for a holiday. And of course, the only way to get rid of the policemen was to see the murder solved. With that in mind, I started to prepare for bed. When I’d finished, I sat at the desk and did exactly what I’d told Mrs. Albright I would do, started thinking. That was always the best way to start an investigation, if I was going to investigate.

  It seemed likely that Mr. Hoyt’s body had spent some time in the shallow water near the ford, so it stood to reason he was killed there. But as I thought about what I’d seen, that didn’t seem to fit. He’d been wet from head to toe, but only on the front, as if he’d been dropped face down in the water. Surely if there had been some sort of fight ending with his head being held under water, the top half of him would have been wet, and possibly part of his legs if he’d fallen on all fours, but his torso ought to have been dry. And I was fairly certain any blow to the head had been postmortem. There was so little blood. So how had he died? There wasn’t anything logical for it being the river, unless he’d been hit over the head there by a rock or something and then drowned. And a blow with the poker used to cover up the original wound. That made some sense.

  But then how had he ended up in our sitting room? That was still the question. Had there been something about his placement at the river that pointed to the killer so they had felt the need to move the body? But then why kill him at the river in the first place? Had that been some sort of rendezvous point? Did they think the water would wash away clues? And why drag him all the way to the cottage? I could make pieces of it fit, but none of it made any sense taken all together. But at least now I had an idea. I would go back down to the river and see where there were places shallow enough to have soaked only the front of his clothes and if there were any clues to point to anyone who might have been the killer. If nothing else, finding where he’d been killed should give Mrs. Albright and me alibis and an idea of who would make a good suspect.

  With that decided, I debated whether it was worth the effort to go downstairs and have a celebratory cup of tea, heard the wind rattling the window panes and decided it wasn’t, and climbed into bed with my book and read while rain began pounding against the window until I was tired enough to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS RESOLVED to go out and find out where our body had come from. The river seemed the best place to start, of course, but where on the river? From what I’d seen, the ford itself was really quite anonymous, so no need to move him. If I had a map, I thought, that might help. I considered the question while I dressed, choosing a comfortable tweed walking suit because it had a sensible number of pockets, and my best walking shoes. I filled my pockets with a notebook and pencil and a pocket watch and a small box of ma
tches and brought my small-brimmed blue hat downstairs with me, mainly because it required four pins to keep it in place and I had brought my sharpest ones, as they seemed to come in handy surprisingly often. I paused on the staircase as I went down and looked at the hearth rug, but even in daylight, nothing suggested itself. No clue that would solve it, at least.

  Mrs. Albright was already in the kitchen when I got downstairs, out the front door, around the side of the cottage, and back in through the kitchen door, although she couldn’t have been there long as the kettle hadn’t started boiling yet. She looked up when she heard me close the kitchen door. “Good morning. How was your room?”

  “Very comfortable. And yours?”

  “The same. Now if I could just find the plates, we’d be able to toast the crumpets and have some breakfast.”

  As Mrs. Albright had already made it through half the cupboards, I thought it best to let her finish the hunt for the plates and went to see about toasting the crumpets. Mrs. Albright had managed to find a toasting fork, so it was a simple-enough task.

  “Here they are. Now why would anyone keep plates there? Oh well, here’s a platter for the crumpets. I’ll look for the jam.” Mrs. Albright left a platter near my arm, and I could hear her going through more cupboards. “Did you have any plans for today?” She was trying too hard to be casual, so I knew she wanted to know if I’d decided to investigate.

  “I thought I’d see if I could figure out where Mr. Hoyt landed in the river, if that is where he got wet. It might point to some suspects.”

  “An excellent plan. Have you decided where you’ll start?”

  “I thought I might look at a map first and see where the likely places were.”

  “Mrs. Foster said she would leave a map on the bookshelf.”

  I sighed. “And the bookshelf is in the sitting room, isn’t it?”

  “I would suppose so. Normally, that would be quite convenient.”

  I slid the last of the toasted crumpets onto the platter and went to the sitting room door to lean over the tapes and have a look. “It’s by the window. I don’t think I can reach it from here.” It might have been possible to knock something off of the shelf with an umbrella or walking stick or even the toasting fork, but there would have been the difficulty of pulling it over to the door, and the complication that it was generally not a good idea to take things from a crime scene. I stepped back into the kitchen.

  “If you need a map, I can ask Mrs. Otway if she has one.”

  Which would lead to questions about why I needed it and where I was going. “No, I was just going to have a look at the river. It’s probably better for me to walk along it anyway.”

  Mrs. Albright put a plate of butter down beside the platter of toasted crumpets. “So you are investigating, good. I won’t say a thing about it to Mrs. Otway, at least not until we know if we can trust her with something like that or not.”

  By which I knew Mrs. Albright meant whether or not she could be trusted not to gossip. I slathered one of the crumpets with butter and tried to consider the best way to begin my search.

  By the time we’d finished breakfast, I’d come up with a few questions that I could try to answer. First, why would someone move the body? That was the place to start. If it was in a field or along a walking path, it would be far simpler to remove whatever in the area might connect the killer to the spot. Plenty of people would have walked past before, so with a little care, there wouldn’t be much chance of figuring out who had been past at the moment Mr. Hoyt was killed. That meant the body had to have been somewhere with a connection to the killer that was harder to hide.

  The cottages along the river were the obvious first place to look. The ones near Eybry were fairly close, so that seemed a place to start. Whoever moved the body couldn’t have brought him very far without being noticed, not in the middle of the afternoon, and as he’d still been sopping wet when we’d found him, he hadn’t had much of a chance to dry out, making the closest cottages seem the most likely. That was something that would have been easier to determine with a map, but as I didn’t have one, I’d have to make my best guess. There was a good path between Oakwood Cottage and Eybry. That would be useful for moving a body, and it meant there was little chance of me getting lost on my way to investigate.

  That seemed to be the way to start, then. If the times didn’t work out, I would know the body hadn’t come from the direction of the village. And if I needed to experiment further, I could find something in the house to get wet and see how long it would take to dry. But first I needed to know how long the walk to the village houses took. I arranged everything in my pockets so I could quickly check my watch and note down times as I walked, then got my hat secured with my four sturdiest hatpins, just in case things didn’t go as planned, and went outside. When I got to the gate, I took out my watch and noted the time down in my memorandum book, then started down the lane until it met the riverbank, then followed it along towards what I thought were the closest cottages.

  The river was not what I would have called a river, coming from a place with the Mississippi and Missouri, not that I’d seen either in person. This was more what I would have called a stream or a brook, being no more than five feet across at its widest and probably not much deeper, but still, it was deep enough to drown someone. I kept an eye on the riverbank, but I didn’t see how a body left there could be connected to anyone unless they left evidence behind. Far simpler to clean up the area than move the body.

  After about ten minutes, I approached Eybry. I checked my watch as I walked and noted down the time (nine minutes and twelve seconds since I’d left) and continued on. There was a row of honey-colored stone cottages along the lane in front of me, putting them on the outskirts of the village. That seemed promising. They were near the river, far enough from the main part of the village that, with a bit of care, someone could walk towards Oakwood Cottage without being spotted, but close enough that a dead body would be found there before long. I glanced at my watch and noted the time again, then kept walking to see how far the cottages went before they were too close to the village to be good prospects, trying to keep a steady pace. I could look for signs of recent disturbances once I knew the most likely spots to check.

  It really was a good area for what I had in mind. The riverbank had a good number of trees along the far shore, along with hedges and tall grasses. It would be easy enough to walk along the lane unnoticed from that side, meaning the killer only had to worry about the few cottages I was passing. My theory was beginning to seem very possible.

  I had walked past four cottages in a row, a large stone cottage that could have been a rectory at the curve of the lane and three smaller ones of the same honey-colored stone along the straight bit, when the trees began to thin out on the other side of the river. After the fifth, a good-sized cottage with climbing rosebushes out front and a low wall with Mulberry Cottage painted in ornate script on the front gate, the lane became a more substantial thoroughfare as it approached the place where it crossed the main road into the village. At the same time, the river became quite shallow until it was only a few inches deep, where it formed a shallow ford over the main road. There was a footbridge not far from the ford, connecting a footpath to the lane I was on. I glanced at my watch to note the time then continued on to the ford.

  The area around the ford was much more open than the rest of the lane had been. The road past the ford seemed to lead directly to the main square, and in the few moments I spent looking down it to determine where it went, two different people walked by with what appeared to be market baskets. The killer might have tried passing the ford, but it seemed more likely, if they’d come from the other side of it, they would have gone in the opposite direction, out towards the fields, shielded by the hedges on that side, making the cottages on my side of the ford the most likely candidates. It seemed I had come to the end of my first experiment. I stepped away from the ford and looked down the lane.

  The four cottages alon
g the lane were far enough from the river that a body found there would not be immediately connected to them. At best, they would be called as witnesses. But the large stone cottage at the end of the lane, just past the curve in the road, was a different story. It was at the end of the lane and perpendicular to the other houses, so it was possible its side garden ran along the river. That seemed suggestive. From where I stood, I could see the front garden had planted with a bit of care but no creativity, placing a few plants near the door and doing little else. At some recent point it had been groomed, but, while it had not had time to run wild, it was clearly not being cared for between visits of the gardener, not even to move a branch that had fallen on the path to the front door, or, I noticed, a stocking from the bush near the window. So the cottage was most likely a rental, and whoever was letting it now was not overly concerned about caring for it. That seemed to be one way to be in the area for a murder, to rent a cottage in the same village as your victim. Although not the most sensible, as I was sure there was plenty of gossip about the newcomers. Still, Mrs. Otway would most likely know who lived there, and Mrs. Albright would know how to ask so she would tell us. And I had my first suspect. All that was left was to put my notes into some sort of order that I would understand later, then I could decide if I wanted to try another path or investigate the house further.

  I took out my notebook and noticed that the low stone wall around the garden of the rose-covered cottage had flat-topped finials at the ends, just the thing for leaning a notebook on to write. I hoped the owner wouldn’t mind and proceeded to do just that. I copied my scribbled walking notes into a proper timeline with readable times and notes on the precise places I had made the notes, then added my observations on the area and the possible ways for a body to get from there to Mrs. Foster’s cottage, and even drew a small diagram of the cottages and the ford. It seemed a bit much if I wasn’t investigating, but at least I would have my observations in order.