The Stately Home Murder

by Catherine Aird

  “I see.” It was perhaps as well that Dyson had gone in for photography. Knowing all the answers as he did would have got him nowhere on the police ladder of promotion.

  Nowhere at all.

  “He looks peaceful enough to me,” commented Dyson. “Any idea what hit him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Plenty of weapons to choose from.” Dyson made a sweeping gesture that took in the whole collection. “Perhaps it was that one.”

  “That’s a spetum,” announced Constable Crosby, who was close enough to read the label.

  “A what?” said Sloan.

  “Spetum. Honestly, sir.”

  “Is it indeed?” said Sloan.

  “Often confused with a ranseur,” added Crosby, straight from the label.

  “Well,” said Dyson, “I’d rather have that for my money than that nasty-looking piece over there.” He indicated a heavy-headed weapon studded with vicious-looking spikes. “What in the name of goodness is that?”

  Crosby leaned over and read aloud, “That’s a holy water sprinkler.”

  “Well, I’m blessed,” said Dyson, for once strangely appropriate in the phraseology of his reaction. “And the one next to it?”

  Crosby moved a step towards a ferocious iron ball on the end of a short chain. “That’s called a morning star,” he said, “similar to a military flail.”

  Dyson grinned. “Queer sense of humor the ancients had, didn’t they?”

  “They did,” said Sloan shortly.

  Dyson swung his camera back on his shoulder and took the hint. “We’d better be going then.” He picked up the heavy tripod. “Williams?”

  “Coming.”

  “Williams.” Dyson pointed towards the suit of armor with the wrong end of the tripod. “Williams, it’s closing time.”

  Williams obediently moved forward and lowered the visor and they went.

  Dillow put down the heavy silver tea tray.

  Presently he would take away the silver teapot (Ann and Paul Bateman, 1792), the hot-water jug (Paul Storr, 1816), and the tray (unknown craftsman, 1807), clean them and stow them away in green baize in his pantry. For the time being he laid the tray on the kitchen table. Mrs. Morley, the housekeeper, would see to the china (Copeland) and the housemaid would deal with everything else.

  Mrs. Morley looked at the butler. “I expect you could do with a cup of tea yourself, Mr. Dillow, after all that fuss and to-do.”

  He sank into a chair. “That I could, Mrs. Morley, thank you. It’s bad enough as it is on open days, but finding Mr. Meredith like that … oh dear, oh dear.”

  “It’s not very nice, I must say.” Mrs. Morley pursed her lips. “Dying is one thing—we’ve all got to go sometime, Mr. Dillow—but dying in a suit of armor …”

  Dillow shook his head. Seen close, he was not as old as he seemed at first sight. It was simply that his occupation and bearing gave the impression of age. “I don’t like it at all,” he said.

  “The press will,” forecast Mrs. Morley, herself an avid reader of the more sensational Sunday newspapers.

  The butler said, “I got quite accustomed to the press in my last position. My late employer … er … almost encouraged them. Always offered them a glass of something.”

  “Ah, Mr. Dillow, but then he was in business.”

  “Baggies Bearings,” said the butler promptly. “‘All industry runs on Baggies Bearings’—that was their advertising slogan. I think they did, too. No money troubles there.”

  “Business is different,” insisted Mrs. Morley.

  “Free advertising, that’s what he called it every time there was anything in the papers. He used to say even having his art collection mentioned did the bearings a bit of good.”

  “Well I never,” said Mrs. Morley, who could not have said offhand what a bearing was and who knew still less about advertising.

  “Mind you,” said Dillow ominously, “once they got hold of a story there was no stopping them.”

  Mrs. Morley looked disapproving. “I don’t think his Lordship will favor them mentioning Ornum House.”

  “They’ll rake up everything they can lay their hands on,” warned Dillow.

  “I’m sure”—stoutly—“there would be nothing that Mr. Meredith would need to hide. There couldn’t have been a pleasanter gentleman.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Meredith, Mrs. Morley.”

  The housekeeper looked up quickly. “Master William hasn’t been in trouble again, has he?”

  “I couldn’t say, I’m sure, Mrs. Morley.”

  Butler and housekeeper exchanged meaningful glances.

  Mrs. Morley poured out two cups of tea.

  The butler took a sip. “He’s down, that’s all I know.”

  “When?”

  “I heard he was in The Ornum Arms last night.”

  Mrs. Morley clucked her disapprobation. “No good ever came out of his going there.”

  “The police,” said Dillow carefully, “are going to want to know when Mr. Meredith was last seen alive.”

  “Friday,” said Mrs. Morley. “You did a tea tray for him in the library.”

  “So I did,” concurred Dillow. “Just after four o’clock.”

  “Hot buttered toast,” said Mrs. Morley, “if you remember. And fruit cake and petit beurre biscuits.”

  “He ate the lot,” said Dillow. “There was nothing left when I took his tray.”

  “When would that have been, Mr. Dillow?”

  “About five o’clock.”

  “And who saw him after that?”

  “I couldn’t say, Mrs. Morley. I couldn’t say at all.”

  6

  Charles Purvis hurried away from the private apartments and slipped easily through the complex layout of the house until he reached the entrance courtyard. Still parked there was a coach. It was painted a particularly raucous blue and, by some irony too deep for words, it was drawn up by the mounting block used by all thirteen Earls of Ornum in the sweep of carriageway where coaches of an entirely different sort had been wont to go into that wide arc of drive that brought them to the front door.

  Michael Fisher was standing on the mounting block and the coach driver was sitting peacefully at the wheel of his vehicle with the infinite patience of his tribe. Sooner or later the missing passengers would turn up, lost time could always be made up on the open road, and in any case there was very little point in starting off before opening time. Rather wait here than outside The Fiddler’s Delight.

  Charles Purvis walked across to the coach to be greeted with excited waves of recognition from Mrs. Fisher.

  “Ever so nice, isn’t he?” she announced to the assembled coach load, friends and neighbors all, which Purvis was surprised to find annoyed and embarrassed him far more than the deepest insult could have done. “He’s what they call the Stooward …”

  He was saved by Michael Fisher doing a sort of war dance on the mounting block.

  “Here they come …”

  Purvis turned and everyone in the coach craned their necks to see a slightly disheveled and more than a little flushed Miss Mavis Palmer appear, her boyfriend a few paces behind. There were encouraging shrieks from the entire coachload.

  “Come on, Mavis …”

  “Good old Bernard …”

  “Attaboy …”

  The driver started up the engine by way of reprimand to the latecomers—who immediately put on a spurt. Miss Palmer, noted Charles Purvis, outpaced Bernard with ease. He did not begin to contemplate the dance she had doubtless been leading the young man through the park all afternoon, but stood back to let them climb aboard.

  With a final burst of cheering and an utterly misplaced fanfare on the coach horn—tally-ho on another sort of coach horn would have been more bearable—the party from Paradise Row, Luston, finally moved away.

  Charles Purvis watched for a moment, and then walked across to the doorway.

  “Lady Eleanor?”

  “Seventeen, eighteen, ninet
een …” She turned. “How much is nineteen threepenny pieces?”

  “Four and ninepence.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Er … yes … I think so.” He was normally a very sure young man, but Lady Eleanor Cremond was able—with one appealing glance—to convert him into a very uncertain creature indeed.

  “That comes right then,” she said.

  “I don’t see how it can,” ventured Charles Purvis, greatly daring. “You shouldn’t have ninepence at all if you’re charging a shilling and half a crown.”

  She smiled sweetly. “There was a man with one leg …”

  “Cut rates?”

  “I let him into the park for ninepence. I didn’t think he could walk far.”

  Charles Purvis sat down beside her at the baize-covered table.

  “I’ve really come to tell you something rather unpleasant. Mr. Meredith’s been found dead.”

  “Not Ossy?” she said, distressed. “Oh, the poor little man. I am sorry. When?”

  “We don’t know when,” said Charles Purvis, and told her about the armor.

  “But,” she protested in bewildered tones, “he didn’t even like armor. It was the books and pictures that he loved. And all the old documents.”

  “I know.”

  “In fact”—spiritedly—“he wouldn’t even show people the armory unless Mr. Ames couldn’t come up from the vicarage.”

  “I know that, too.” He began toying with a wad of unused tickets. “When did you last see him yourself?”

  She frowned. “Friday afternoon, I think it was.”

  “You’d better be certain,” he warned her. “The police will want to know.”

  “The police?”

  He nodded.

  “It was Friday,” she said slowly. “Just before tea. I went along to the library and he was there on his own.” She hesitated. “He seemed all right then … no … more than all right. Almost exuberant. On top of the world—you know the sort of feeling. Excited, that’s it.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Say anything? Oh no. I just said I thought he usually took tea with the great aunts on Fridays and he said …” She paused.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he thought he had upset them by his discoveries about the earldom.”

  “And that,” said Charles Purvis wryly, “is putting it mildly.”

  To say that Dillow waylaid those returning from the village cricket match would be an exaggeration and tantamount to unsubtlety on the butler’s part.

  He simply happened to be hovering in the entrance hall when they happened to return.

  “We won,” announced Lord Henry as he entered. He was a physical parody of his father, seasoned by his mother’s vagueness. “Good match, though.”

  “I’m very glad to hear it, sir, but—”

  “It’s a help, of course,” chimed in Miles Cremond, close on his heels, “having Henry scoring for us.”

  “Indeed, sir?”

  “Rather.” Miles was a square, thickset man with only some of the Cremond family characteristics. His features would blunt badly with time. Already there was a blur where his chin had been. In contrast, his wife, Laura, was a sharp-featured, angular woman, accustomed to command.

  “Miles, you should go straight up to change now.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Dillow coughed. “His Lordship has asked to see you all as soon as you came back.”

  The Earl and Countess were still in their sitting-room. The Earl got to his feet as the three of them trooped in.

  “Something wrong, Father?” That was Lord Henry.

  “Yes.”

  Laura Cremond said urgently, “What?”

  “Mr. Meredith has met with an accident here.”

  “Good Lord. Poor chap,” said Henry. “I’d no idea he was even in the house.”

  “Neither,” said the Earl of Ornum drily, “had anyone else.”

  “Didn’t think he usually came in at the weekend anyway.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Thought it funny he wasn’t at the match though,” went on Henry. “Haven’t known him to miss a match in years.”

  “Especially the Petering one,” put in Miles, fresh from victory.

  The Earl of Ornum, aided by several tugs at his mustache, told them about the body in the armor.

  Laura Cremond sat down rather suddenly in the nearest chair. “But when did he die?”

  “That, Laura, I can’t tell you.”

  Lord Henry said thoughtfully, “Someone wasn’t expecting him to be found.”

  “No,” agreed the Earl.

  “You couldn’t know that that little stinker—what did you say his name was?”

  “Michael Fisher.”

  “Michael Fisher was going to open up Grumpy like that.”

  “To open up who?”

  “Grumpy.” Lord Henry gave an engaging smile. “You did say the second suit of armor on the right, didn’t you, Father?”

  “I did”—heavily.

  “That,” said his son and heir, “was Grumpy. We called all the suits of armor after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you know, when we were small.”

  “Did you?”

  “Snow White was the puffed and slashed suit,” ventured Miles. “Had a feminine touch about it, we thought.”

  “Indeed?” said the Earl.

  “That was the Decadence,” said Lord Henry. “We all used to play down there a lot, didn’t we, Miles?”

  “Oh yes,” affirmed Miles. “Cut our milk teeth on the armor, you might say.”

  “It was Mr. Ames, really,” said Lord Henry. “He was such an enthusiast he didn’t seem to mind how much we hung about. Taught us a lot.”

  “All the names for the parts,” agreed Miles. “I’ve forgotten most of them. I expect Henry and William have, too, by now.”

  “William,” the Earl sighed. “I was forgetting William played with you.”

  Lord Henry frowned in recollection. “There was Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy—that was the one with the long nosepiece.”

  “I daresay,” said the Earl, “but I don’t see—”

  “Bascinet,” said Miles Cremond suddenly. “I’ve just remembered—”

  “I thought that was something you put a baby in.” The Countess of Ornum, silent until now, came to life like an actress on cue.

  “Bascinet,” repeated Miles. “That was what Sneezy’s helmet was called. A visored bascinet.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Lord Henry. “And Dopey’s was called a burgonet.”

  “A closed burgonet,” added Miles. “That’s what made him look so simple. See, we haven’t forgotten after all.”

  “You do seem to have forgotten that this isn’t a nursery game,” said his wife sharply.

  Miles subsided. “Er … no. Rather not.”

  “There were seven without Snow White,” said Lord Henry consideringly. “I wonder why he ended up in Grumpy?”

  “That’s easy,” said Miles. “Don’t you remember, Henry? Grumpy came to pieces easiest.”

  The Earl’s head came up as he said sharply, “Who knew that?”

  “Everyone,” said Miles helpfully.

  Laura Cremond looked round. “Someone put him in there who didn’t mean him to be found, I suppose?”

  The Earl nodded. “I think so, Laura. And the police want to talk to you all as soon as they can.”

  After his encounter with Lady Maude, Inspector Sloan found it a positive relief to be talking to a trained specialist.

  He met Dr. Dabbe and his assistant, Burns, in the great hall. It hadn’t taken the fastest (living) driver in Calleshire long to get from Kinnisport on the coast to Ornum, veering into Berebury to pick up his assistant. His black bag went with him everywhere.

  “The weather was just right for sailing,” said the doctor reproachfully. “Sunday, too.”

  Sloan said, “If it had been as warm down there as it is up here, I fancy our chap would have bee
n found a bit sooner.”

  “Like that, is it?” The pathologist took in the great hall at a glance and followed Sloan down the spiral staircase. Burns brought up the rear.

  Dabbe waved his free hand. “Did he walk down here or was he carried?”

  “I couldn’t say, Doctor. Not yet. I’ve only seen his face so far.”

  “I see.” Dabbe reached the bottom step. “This the basement?”

  “Dungeon level,” Sloan corrected him gloomily. After all, this was not a department store. “I don’t know if they go lower than this.”

  “Moat?” suggested Dabbe. “They usually had moats.”

  Constable Crosby let them into the armory.

  “Ah …” said Dabbe, looking round appreciatively. “Do I take my pick?”

  “Second on the right,” said Sloan, and not for the first time.

  Perhaps he should have put a fresh notice beside the one that was already there, (MAN IN ARMOR, perhaps, or HUMAN REMAINS, CIRCA NOW.)

  Aloud he said only, “We’ve put a chalk ring on the floor, Doctor, round him … er … it …”

  “Armor for the tilt, circa 1595,” read out the pathologist. “Well, well, well …”

  It wasn’t well at all, though Sloan forbore to say so.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a corpse … er … girded before,” said Dabbe.

  “No.” Neither had Sloan.

  The pathologist advanced and looked the armor over. That was one of the things Sloan admired in him. He came, he looked, he examined—then he spoke.

  “The deceased?”

  “Mr. Osborne Meredith.”

  “Wasn’t a very tall man.”

  “No,” agreed Sloan. The suits of armor—though intimidating—were not large. Both policemen looked down on them without difficulty.

  “Too much school milk, that’s what it is,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “Pardon, Doctor?”

  “We’re all taller now. People were smaller then.” He walked round behind the armor. “It’s a pretty complete job. He didn’t intend to be stabbed in the back.”

  Sloan nodded in agreement. From where he was standing it looked as if the man in armor hadn’t intended to be stabbed anywhere at all.

  “No chinks,” said Detective Constable Crosby.

  Sloan favored him with a withering stare, and the pathologist’s assistant, Burns, who rarely spoke, got out a large thermometer.