by J. R. Ellis
‘Be careful what you say or I’ll be calling my solicitor.’
‘The disappointed younger brother,’ continued Oldroyd, undeterred and enjoying this more and more. ‘You never forgave your older brother for being your older brother, did you? It was so unfair that such a lazy, irresponsible man should inherit this estate and the title that went with it. What a much better job of it you could have made! As it was, you’ve had to work for your living and things have not been going too well, have they?’
‘You’ve made these preposterous remarks about me before and if you think I intend to discuss my business affairs with you, you are entirely mistaken. They are completely irrelevant to this case.’
‘I don’t think so,’ insisted Oldroyd. ‘We believe you’d asked your brother for help with your struggling business recently and he’d refused. Was that the final humiliation, Mr Carstairs? The one that really tipped you over the edge? The brother who’d had everything given to him refusing to help his less fortunate brother.’
Carstairs went red in the face and looked as if he might explode. He was so angry he couldn’t get any words out.
Mary Carstairs grabbed his arm. ‘Dominic, pull yourself together; he’s just winding you up.’
Oldroyd, however, was intent on continuing the process and savouring his power over these people. He turned to Mary. ‘And Mrs Carstairs . . . maybe you assisted your husband, though it seems you didn’t feel the same as he did about Lord Redmire.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ She looked very uncomfortable.
‘You were seen by a member of the estate staff coming out of the stables on the evening of the crime, and Lord Redmire followed soon after. It seems that a little tryst had taken place. After we received this information we considered that you were well and truly on the list of suspects – another potentially jealous conquest.’
‘Mary, is it true?’ For the first time, Dominic’s voice lost its loud arrogance. He faltered and sounded distraught.
Mary was looking with great hostility at Oldroyd and then she turned to her husband. For a moment she looked as if she might be considering telling a lie or making an excuse. Then she simply said: ‘Yes.’
Dominic looked away and seemed to be on the edge of tears.
Oldroyd, having inflicted the damage, moved on. ‘And what about the long-suffering wife and her new husband?’
He turned to the Ramsays. ‘The dignified couple who have conducted themselves impeccably throughout. Often the guilty parties are the ones you least expect. What a terrible force of anger and resentment must have built up over the years due to your former husband’s infidelities! And you, Mr Ramsay, must have despised Redmire too and been only too ready to assist your wife in attaining her revenge. Plus, of course – as we’ve pointed out already – the money and the estate have now come to your wife’s children before Redmire could squander any more of them.’
The Ramsays remained impassive. Douglas spoke for them both. ‘Yes, Chief Inspector, if I was you I’d have us down as suspects too – but it’s a no-go, I’m afraid; Antonia and I are not murderers.’
Oldroyd moved on again and then paused dramatically. ‘And now the people who stood to gain most from Lord Redmire’s death, the new Lord and Lady Redmire.’ He gestured with his arm as if introducing them. Alistair and Kathryn sat together silently. He addressed Alistair. ‘Was it too painful to watch your father make a mess of running the estate and use it to finance his gambling? He was even planning to sell off parts of it, wasn’t he? Did you think it was better to act now rather than see him break up the estate or reduce it to bankruptcy – maybe even entertain the unthinkable prospect of having to sell up? No more Carstairs at Redmire Hall after how many hundreds of years? That scenario must have haunted you when you considered your children’s future and their inheritance. Of course, it was patricide, but sometimes you have to think of the greater good. I’m sure your wife understood and was very supportive, and your grandmother.’ He gestured towards the dowager.
‘Steady on,’ said Douglas Ramsay.
Alistair turned sharply to Oldroyd. ‘That is really very offensive, Chief Inspector. Unless you have any proof I suggest you withdraw that. How dare you accuse a woman in her eighties of conspiring to kill her own son!’
‘A son she didn’t have much time for and whom she, like many others, thought was making a terrible mess of things. Tradition is very important to you people, isn’t it? If the line of succession is threatened I think you’d be capable of a great deal.’
‘You’re right, Chief Inspector.’ The dowager spoke in an icy voice. ‘Freddy was a poor custodian of Redmire. And, although it might seem a horrible thing to say, I’m glad things have passed to Alistair and Katherine. However, much as I disapproved of and disliked my son, I would never have contemplated having him killed. Good heavens, you’re making me sound like some monstrous figure from a Greek tragedy.’
Oldroyd did not reply. He walked back up to the now unlocked room and stood looking at them all. He had delivered his thoughts on each one of them in turn. His expression was at its most commanding and hawkish. The suspense was now beyond unbearable as they waited for his pronouncement. There was another great spark of lightning and a tremendous crash of thunder.
‘Well,’ he said at last in his portentous voice again. ‘You will be pleased to know that, unlike in many Agatha Christie stories, the culprits are not here. The family and friends are not guilty.’
Only Steph saw the little glint in his eye that suggested he would like to have added ‘unfortunately’.
The tension in the room collapsed like a burst balloon.
‘Oh, thank God!’ murmured Antonia and gripped Douglas’s hand. All around people were breathing out and shaking their heads.
‘What the—?’ spluttered a rejuvenated Dominic, who got up from his chair. ‘Do you mean to say that you’ve brought us here and submitted us to all this for nothing? How dare you! I shall complain to . . .’
‘Sit down, sir,’ insisted Oldroyd. ‘Unless you don’t want to know who killed your brother.’
‘But . . .’ Dominic turned to the others, looking for support. There was none, so he sat down again.
‘All right, bring them in,’ called Oldroyd. There was short, agonising wait until police officers appeared escorting two figures: David Morton and Andrea Jenkinson. They were brought briskly over to two chairs placed symbolically at either side of the room they had used to commit murder. At the edge of the room Richard Wilkins crept in looking devastated.
‘Morton! What on earth?’ said Alistair.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Alistair,’ said the gardener, who sat down on the chair looking tired and stared sullenly at the floor. Andrea Jenkinson glowered at everyone with defiance and contempt.
Oldroyd continued with his explanation. ‘Tim Groves, the forensic pathologist I work with, started me thinking very early on about the possibility of someone here not being who they appeared to be. When we’d been through all the possible motives of the original suspects, I wasn’t happy that any of them amounted to enough to lead someone to murder a family member or an old friend, never mind people who worked on the estate. And then there was means and opportunity. It didn’t seem plausible that somehow one of you had stumbled upon the secret of the locked room. You were all present in the audience that night, which was consistent with the fact that you would have to have had accomplices, but it would have made the whole thing more difficult and risky. And we kept coming back to the point that we couldn’t really see why any of you would want to use this elaborate method to get rid of Lord Redmire; there were much easier and simpler ways of doing it.
‘No. I decided we had to look deeper and wider to get the answer. What was it that compelled the murderers to use this outlandish method to dispatch their victim? This search took us all the way back to the beginning of this long and tragic story, to a person of little consequence who has long been forgotten. A young woman called Esmeralda.’
&n
bsp; ‘Who?’ asked a bemused Douglas Ramsay. Everyone was looking puzzled.
‘My mother!’ snapped Jenkinson, wiping tears from her eyes with a shaking hand. She was clearly struggling hard to stay composed.
‘Yes, but not yet on that night in 1980, when the illusion was first performed and she played the part of the glamorous assistant to Vivian Carstairs. Maybe you’d like to continue the story?’
Jenkinson looked at Oldroyd with surprise. She hadn’t expected this, but Oldroyd knew she would be keen to tell her story to the people before her and wanted to give her the opportunity.
She turned to the assembled members of the family. ‘Yes, my mother was Esmeralda, or Liliana, or Natalia, or any of the other cheap, exotic names they gave her – the men who exploited her. Her real name was Jane Dawson, an ordinary girl from a poor family. She was desperate to make it into showbiz, as people called it then, but she had no money and no connections. She wanted to be a dancer, but she got no breaks. She couldn’t afford to go to dancing school; the only asset she had was her looks.
‘Vivian Carstairs hired her from an agency. She came here to rehearse her part, which, of course, was all about showing her body and her smile, and it was here that she met Frederick Carstairs. My father!’
There were gasps from everyone in the room.
‘What?’ shouted Dominic.
‘No!’ wailed Antonia and put her head in her hands. Others were shocked by the terrible look of hatred on Jenkinson’s face when she spat out the name of the man she claimed was her father.
‘He used his seductive charms on her, as he did on so many vulnerable women. She was young. She’d been looking to establish herself, and he promised her things. Said he would get her on to the stage in the London shows. Their affair continued when she returned to London but then it all went wrong. She became pregnant and he was the father. The bastard couldn’t get rid of her quickly enough. He couldn’t afford to have any connection with a cheap showgirl. That would have been a scandal. I think he sent her some derisory sums of money and told her he couldn’t marry her because he was expected to marry someone in his own class, and that was you.’ She pointed at Antonia.
‘How does that make you feel? When he married you, he’d already had a child with a poor, weak young woman that he’d just cast off like a petty nuisance.’ She was shouting now and Antonia Ramsay was sobbing.
‘OK,’ said Oldroyd. ‘Stop there. Just tell us what happened.’
‘My mother never recovered. I think she loved him, poor thing. She tried to get him back, writing letters, sending photographs of me and her together when I was a little girl. But he refused all contact. I’d never even seen him before I came here. She got some small parts in variety shows in choruses and stuff, but it never came to anything – partly because she started drinking. We were always poor, living in tiny cold flats. No one helped us; I think her family had disowned her when she got pregnant. I was only in my early teens but I had to cope with a mother who was cracking up. She became delusional; she told me she was convinced that “Freddy”, as she always called him, would come back to help us some day. He probably hadn’t been getting her letters or he was too busy at the moment. It was pathetic. I got her to see the doctor, but it didn’t help.’
Jenkinson stopped talking. Tears were running down her face. ‘One day I got home from school and found her dead.’
‘Oh God!’ cried Mary Carstairs.
Jenkinson was really struggling now. ‘She’d slit her wrists in the bath. The water was red, and her face was white and cold. I was sixteen years old. I never blamed her, though.’ She wiped her face and glared at everyone. ‘No, I reserved my anger for the man who’d destroyed her life: Lord Redmire; Frederick Carstairs, an honourable member of the British Establishment,’ she continued with vicious sarcasm, and then stabbed her finger at various people. ‘Your husband, your lover, your father and your son was a bastard through and through.’
‘I already knew that,’ said the dowager in a deadly voice that added to the visceral intensity of the terrible reckoning now being enacted. Her aged body was almost completely doubled over, as if with an enormous weight.
‘Continue,’ said Oldroyd, the dark orchestrator of these terrible revelations.
Outside, the storm raged on.
‘It’s simple,’ Jenkinson said. ‘I vowed to avenge her, however long it took. I had to go into care for a while, but I attended college and trained in office skills. I spent years planning how I might take revenge. I tracked him in every way I could without appearing to be a stalker. I knew about his business, his clubs in London, his friends and contacts, his family, his gambling and his womanising. I thought at first it might be possible to sabotage him in some way or damage his reputation, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get near him. It affected my whole life, of course. I had jobs and short-lived relationships. I tried to live as normal a life as possible, but there was always this dark secret within me and I remained alone.’
‘But finally you got your big opportunity?’
She smiled grimly. ‘Yes. After years of frustration, I saw he was advertising for a PA. I couldn’t believe it. I was perfectly qualified and he called me for an interview. I knew how to handle it, how he would like women who seemed to admire him. I was very flattering in a subtle way. And I got it.’
‘Wasn’t it weird, being interviewed by your father, and even having to work for him?’
‘I never looked upon that man as my father. I never felt the slightest connection with him. The only emotion I felt was hatred.’ She laughed scornfully. ‘And when I met him he confirmed my image of him. He was arrogant, leered over women and was utterly self-centred. I had wondered whether there would be something about him I might be drawn to, something that might make me pause.’
She closed her eyes and shook her head. ‘But no. The more I saw of him, the more I was determined to rid the world of him.’
‘Using the locked room was perfect for you, wasn’t it?’
She smiled with a chilling expression of satisfaction. ‘There may well have been other ways of killing him, but I couldn’t resist the wonderful poetic justice of it. It was that trick that brought Mum and him together, so how appropriate that it should end him. I imagined Mum closing that door and drawing the curtain on him.
‘Over the years, Mum had told me the little she knew about the trick. She had been under strict instructions not to look behind the curtain, which is very tight-fitting against the wall and covers a big area, as you’ve seen, so she didn’t know about the two rooms. She knew there was a mechanism, but not what it did. The crucial thing was that she identified Harry Robinson as someone who was involved. This was my way in. I had to cultivate a friendship with him and find out how the thing worked. At first it all seemed a long shot, but I was lucky and it all came together.
‘My father was constantly in debt, of course, and he let slip that he had plans to make economies on the estate and even to sell part of it off. He didn’t tell me any details, but I’d seen him in the office with some documents that he’d sealed up and taken to the estate safe in Richard Wilkins’s office. They were clearly highly secret.’
‘So that was your motivation for starting the affair with Wilkins?’
She glanced in surprise at Oldroyd. Richard Wilkins looked down. ‘You seem to have discovered everything, Chief Inspector. Yes, I thought that through him I’d get access to the safe and see what I could find out.’
‘So you stole his set of keys from him, got into the office one night and took the envelope with those documents in it.’
‘It was easy. Men are always off their guard when they’re getting sex. I got the keys from his jacket pocket and returned them the next day. He never missed them. I broke a window and opened it so that it looked as if someone had got in that way.’
‘Andrea, how could . . . ?’ Wilkins cried out and then put his head in his hands.
‘Unfortunately for you, you were seen,’ continued Oldroyd. �
��Although for some time we had no idea who it was who’d been in there. We later found all those stolen documents hidden inside other papers in the desk in your office. I imagine you couldn’t believe your luck when you saw the contents.’
‘No. There was a sheet containing a list of the economies he was considering and Harry Robinson’s pension was listed with a comment in red: “Far too generous, needs to be cut.”’
‘But there was more in those documents that you could use, wasn’t there? Let’s have Mr Morton continue.’
The gardener, who had remained silent throughout, looked up sullenly as if he had no intention of saying anything. Oldroyd spoke first, to prompt him.
‘You told me you’d always been too busy in the garden to get married – and that was true, wasn’t it? The gardens here have been your life: your father and grandfather worked here; the great and rare specimens you’ve nurtured all these years have been so important to you. You’re married to this garden, aren’t you? So what did Ms Jenkinson show you?’
Morton had become animated as Oldroyd spoke about the gardens. His face was full of anger and disgust. ‘She showed me the plans that Lord Redmire had agreed with the developers. The whole of the old kitchen garden was going to be sold off for housing. That part of the gardens is one of the oldest and most beautiful. It would have meant demolishing the old brick walls. The magnolia wilsonii, those abutilons you were looking at and lots of other wonderful plants. They’ve been there for generations and they’d have been killed.’
His eyes gleamed with a fanatical devotion. ‘I couldn’t let him do that. It would have been murder. I’ve known them all my life. Granddad planted some of them there.’
‘They’re your family, aren’t they? And who wouldn’t kill to protect their family?’
Morton looked at Oldroyd with a strange, twisted smile. ‘Yes, Chief Inspector, exactly; you understand why I had to do it.’
‘Andrea Jenkinson knew you’d be horrified and so you started to plan together. The first thing was to get Harry Robinson on your side.’