The Stately Home Murder

by Catherine Aird

  “Cold but not damp,” observed Dabbe generally.

  “Yes,” agreed Sloan. It was one of the hottest days of the summer outside, but the heat hadn’t penetrated down here. All in all a good place to park a body if you didn’t want it found too quickly.

  Dabbe was still circling the armor rather as a terrier spoiling for a fight will go round and round his adversary.

  “Either, Sloan, they popped him in here pretty smartly after death or else they waited until rigor mortis passed off.”

  “Oh?”

  “Regard the angle of the arms.”

  Sloan took a fresh look at the man in armor. The boy, Michael Fisher, had said something about the arms.

  Dr. Dabbe pointed to—but did not touch—the right arm. It was bent at the elbow in a half defensive position. “He’s still on guard.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Before rigor mortis or after. Not during.”

  “I see.”

  “After, I expect,” said Dabbe mordantly. “By the time you got all this … er … clobber on, it would have begun to set in.”

  That was another thing to think about. Sloan mentally added it to a very long list of matters to think about. Some of them required action, too, but not until the pathologist had finished. Sloan had been at the game too long not to know that the medical evidence was always of primary importance.

  “That’s another thing,” said Dabbe.

  “What is?” Inspector Sloan came back to the present with a jerk.

  “How he got into all this.”

  “Quite so, Doctor.”

  “And how we’re going to get him out.” The pathologist gave a fiendish grin. “I can’t do a post-mortem with a tin opener.”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Of course,” went on Dabbe, “You had an armor-bearer in the old days.”

  “So you did.” Sloan had forgotten that.

  “What you might call a body servant, eh, Sloan?” The pathologist’s morbid sense of humor was a byword throughout the Berebury Force.

  “Quite so”—weakly.

  “I shouldn’t have said he’d got into this on his own though, even in this servantless day and age,” said Dabbe.

  “No.”

  “And I think,” said the pathologist, “that we can rule out natural causes, too. Unless coincidence is stretching out a particularly long arm.”

  “Yes.”

  “That,” said Dabbe cheerfully, “leaves us the usual coroner’s trio. Misadventure, suicide, or murder.”

  “Misadventure?” said Sloan.

  “Commonly known, Inspector, as pure bad luck.”

  “I don’t quite see how …”

  “The trap for the unwary pathologist, that’s what misadventure is,” said the doctor feelingly. “Suppose this chap got into this rigout for some perfectly sound reason, and then found he was trapped in it.”

  “Well?”

  “He could have shouted his head off and no one would have heard him through the visor, let alone through the twelve-foot walls they seem to go in for down here.”

  “That’s true, but I don’t think he did get into it himself and then call for help, Doctor.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “You see, we’ve checked the floor for footprints. It’s all been swept perfectly clean round the armor. Too clean.”

  “Has it indeed? And what about fingerprints?”

  “None of them either. Crosby’s been over the lot. The armor’s been handled all right—but with gloves on.”

  The pathologist nodded swiftly. “In that case we can’t do a lot of harm by going inside.”

  He didn’t touch the visor, but went straight to the helmet, lifting it with both hands from behind.

  There was—after all that—no doubt about how Mr. Osborne Meredith had died.

  The back of his skull had been staved in.

  7

  After he left Lady Eleanor, Charles Purvis went to his car. Ornum House was too far from any of its neighbors to visit them on foot—especially if time was short.

  He drove the mile to the village, went through the ornamental gates and out into the High Street. All of the properties there were in good condition, most belonged to the Earl. He nosed his car gently past the usual Sunday afternoon village traffic and stopped outside the last cottage in a row not far from the post office. Most of the village would be watching the cricket, the rest getting ready for evensong. He was quite sure the occupant of number four, Cremond Cottages, would be doing neither.

  The man who came to the door was older than both Lord Henry Cremond and Charles Purvis and already running to overweight. He was dressed in old corduroy trousers that were none too clean and a shirt so open-necked as to be undone.

  No one could have called his manner agreeable.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Charlie-boy.”

  Purvis stiffened. “Good afternoon, William. Your uncle has sent me down—”

  “I didn’t think you’d come on your own.”

  Purvis tightened his lips. “No, I don’t think I would.”

  Suddenly the man grinned. It changed his face completely. “Fifteen all. Your serve—”

  “Your uncle sent me down,” repeated Purvis stolidly, “to say he wants to see you.”

  “That’s a pleasant change, I must say,” drawled William Murton. “I’ve never known him actually to want to see me before.”

  “Well, he does now”—shortly.

  “Why?”

  The steward hesitated. “There’s been a spot of trouble up at the house.”

  “Has there? I’m sorry to hear that.” William Murton did not sound particularly sorry. He squinted across the doorway at Charles Purvis. “Someone run off with the family plate, then, or something?”

  “Not that sort of trouble.”

  Murton raised his hands in mock horror. “You don’t mean to tell me that some cad has asked for my cousin Eleanor’s hand in marriage?”

  Charles Purvis flushed to the roots of his hair. “No.”

  “Not that sort of trouble either?”—offensively.

  “No.”

  “Well, well, how interesting. I shall come at once.” He paused on the threshold. “Tell me, does this invitation include a meal, do you suppose?”

  “He wants to see you,” repeated Purvis.

  “I see. What you might call a general summons rather than an invitation.”

  What Detective Inspector Sloan could have done with was a ball of string.

  That was what potholers used when they were in dark caves and wanted to be sure of their way back. It was not unlike that in Ornum House. What he was looking for was the door behind which Lady Maude had retreated earlier on. If he could find a large Chinese vase he thought he would be all right from then on.

  He could, of course, easily have asked someone to take him there, but there were risks inherent in the way in which he was announced that might very well disturb the two old ladies with whom he wanted a quiet chat. With whom he wanted a quiet chat before anyone else got to them—which was why he had slipped away from the armory for a few moments.

  He was unlucky with the Chinese vase. He found it all right. Vast, well-proportioned, and delicately colored, there was no mistaking it.

  Except for one thing.

  Its twin.

  It wasn’t until he had opened a whole series of wrong doors that he realized the gigantic vase he and Crosby had seen had been one of a matching pair. He found the other—the right one—at the far end of the same long corridor. From then on it should have been plain sailing.

  He knocked on Lady Maude’s door.

  A thin old lady—the same one as he had seen earlier—appeared. Fortunately she recognized him.

  “I’ve seen you before.”

  “That’s right, Lady Maude. I wanted to see you again. You and Lady Alice.”

  “You did?” Sloan felt himself being scrutinized. “Why?”

  “Someone has killed Mr. Meredith.”<
br />
  She stared at him for a moment. “Have they indeed. You’d better come in. This way.” She turned abruptly on her heel and went back into the room. “Alice, Alice, where are you?”

  Lady Alice was—if that were possible—even older than her sister. Old age, however, had not altered the outline of the Cremond nose, which was planted firmly in the middle of a face that in its time must have been striking. Say about the year the Old Queen died.

  He stood in front of her. “Good afternoon, your Ladyship.”

  A clawlike hand lifted a lorgnette and examined him through it in a silence that soon became unnerving. Sloan hadn’t felt like that since his early days as a very jejune constable—when he was being checked over by his station sergeant before he was allowed out on the beat. Pencil, notebook, whistle … subconsciously he wanted to make sure that they were all there now.

  “Who are you, my man?”

  “My name is Sloan, Lady Alice.”

  “Well?”

  Perhaps, conceded Sloan to himself, that hadn’t been such a good beginning after all. Circumlocution was a device for handling the middle-aged, not the very old.

  “Someone has killed Mr. Meredith.”

  “Ha!” said Lady Alice enigmatically.

  Perhaps, he thought, to the very old death was such a near and constant companion that they minded less.

  “And I,” he went on, “am a police officer who has come to find out all about it.”

  Of course, there was always the possibility that she would have expected him to have been in red. The Scarlet Runners, that was what the Bow Street people had been called in their day.

  Or should he have just said he was Sir Robert Peel?

  “Good riddance,” said the old lady vigorously.

  He had been wrong to worry about upsetting her then.

  “Tryin’ to make out that Great-great-great-grandfather Cremond was a bastard.”

  “Dear me,” said Sloan, conscious of the inadequacy of his response.

  “Thought the title should have gone to someone else.”

  “No?”

  “Yes,” countered Lady Alice firmly. “Said it was all in the archives.”

  The sooner Superintendent Leeyes sent him that dictionary the better. Then he could find out if archives were the same thing as muniments.

  “Always knew it was dangerous to meddle in papers,” went on the old lady. “Told m’brother so.”

  That disposed of the world of scholarship.

  “He should have sacked Meredith when he got past cricket.”

  And sport.

  “Always wanted to die in the saddle myself,” said the old lady.

  Sloan took a second look at Lady Alice. The days of cavalry charges were over, he knew, but in any case surely women had never …

  “A good way to go,” she said.

  Light dawned. Sloan said, “The hunting field …”

  “That’s right. Now, my man, tell me, who killed him?”

  The lorgnette was back again, hovering above the Cremond nose.

  “I don’t know, Lady Alice.”

  “He didn’t break his neck, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Seen a lot of men go that way. Takin’ fences.”

  Lady Alice had obviously taken her own fences well. At the gallop probably.

  Full tilt.

  Which brought him back to Osborne Meredith.

  Full circle.

  “What can you tell me about Friday?” he asked.

  Lady Alice might be older, but she was less vague than Millicent, her nephew’s wife. “On Fridays Maude and I prepare for Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Saturday and Sunday?”

  “We do not leave our rooms until the evening on Saturdays and Sundays and Wednesdays.”

  Sloan blinked. He had heard that Mohammedans observed certain rules of behavior between sunup and sundown—but not elderly English spinsters of the Christian persuasion.

  “All the year round?” he said tentatively.

  With the Mohammedans he understood it was during Ramadan.

  “April to October,” said Lady Alice.

  “And bank holidays,” said her sister.

  “Except Good Fridays,” added Lady Alice.

  “I see,” said Sloan, who was beginning to …

  “My nephew is, of course, head of the family now, but …”

  “But what?” prompted Sloan.

  “But neither my sister nor I approve of the house being open. What our late brother would have thought we do not like to contemplate.”

  “Quite,” murmured Sloan diplomatically. “So when the house is … er … open, you both remain in your apartments?”

  “Always.”

  It was a pity, that, he thought. Lady Alice and Lady Maude were good value at half a crown.

  “Now, about Friday …”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you see Mr. Meredith at all?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do after tea?”

  “What we always do after tea—play ombre.”

  “Ombre?” One thing was absolutely certain about ombre, whatever it was. You didn’t play it for money any more. Inspector Sloan had been a policeman long enough to know all the games you could play for money.

  The old lady nodded. “A game our mother taught us.”

  That took you right back to the nineteenth century for a start. It was the twentieth that Sloan was concerned about.

  “Who won?” he asked casually. That was as good a memory test as anything.

  He was wrong there.

  “Maude,” said Lady Alice promptly. “She always wins on Fridays.” She waved a thin hand. “It’s so much easier that way.”

  “I see.”

  “I win on Tuesday, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”

  “Friday afternoon,” he said desperately. “Did you see anyone about on Friday afternoon?”

  Lady Alice shook her head. “Just the Judge. And that was much later. As I was going along to dress for dinner.”

  “The Judge?” Sloan sat up. He really would have to watch his step if there were judges about.

  “Judge Cremond,” said Lady Alice.

  Sloan sighed. Surely there couldn’t be more Cremonds still? Purvis hadn’t mentioned him in his list of those in the house.

  He said, “He’s a member of the family, too, I take it?”

  “Oh yes.” The old lady laughed. “He’s a member of the family all right.”

  “I shall have to interview him in due course, then. I’ll make a note of the …”

  The old lady’s laugh was a cackle now, and not without malice. “I doubt if you’ll be able to do that, Mr. Sloan, whoever you are. You wouldn’t even see him.”

  “No?”

  “He’s been dead these two hundred and fifty years.”

  “A ghost?” Sloan sighed. There would have to be a ghost, he supposed, in a house like this, but Superintendent Leeyes wouldn’t like it all the same.

  The lorgnette described an arc in the air on its way towards the Cremond nose. “That’s right. Mark my words, young man, someone’s going to die soon.”

  Lady Maude chimed in like a Greek chorus of doom. “The Judge always gets uneasy when someone in the family is going to die.”

  The Reverend Walter Ames, Vicar of Ornum and Perpetual Curate of Maple-juxta-Handling, was not a preacher of long sermons at any time.

  On this particular evening in June he took as his text “unto him that hath shall be given” (a point on which in any case he could seldom think of much to say), said it with celerity, and hurried across from the church to Ornum House.

  He reached the armory just as Inspector Sloan got back there.

  “I’ve just heard the sad news,” said the vicar somewhat breathlessly. “Terrible. Quite terrible.”

  “Yes, sir.” Inspector Sloan took a quick look round the armory. Dr. Dabbe was engaged in contemplating the armor rather as an inexperienced diner pauses before he ma
kes his first foray into a lobster. Detective Constable Crosby was still prowling round the walls looking at the weaponry.

  “I thought something was odd,” went on the vicar, who was gray-haired and patently unused to hurrying.

  “You did, sir? Why was that?” asked Sloan.

  “I blame myself now for not doing more at the time, though I don’t see what more …”

  “For not doing what?” asked Sloan patiently.

  Mr. Ames took a deep breath. “It’s like this, Inspector. Meredith sent me a message asking me to come to see him …”

  “When would that have been, sir?”

  “Friday afternoon. He rang my wife—I was out at the time—and told her that he’d made an important discovery and he wanted my opinion on it.”

  Sloan looked up quickly. “What sort of discovery, sir?”

  The clergyman shook his head. “Ah, he wouldn’t say. Not to my wife. And not over the telephone. We … er … still have a … er … manual exchange here in Ornum, you know. Er … a womanual exchange, Inspector, if you take the point.”

  Sloan did.

  “He just left a message with my wife,” went on the vicar, “asking me to come up to the house.”

  “And did you, sir?”

  “Oh yes, Inspector. That was what was so odd.”

  “What was so odd?”

  “When I got here I couldn’t find him.”

  “What time would that have been, sir?” It was, Sloan thought, for all the world like a catechism.

  “About half-past five. He told my wife he would be working in the muniments room after tea, and that I would find him there. But I didn’t.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Glanced in the library—I didn’t see him there either—and came away again.”

  “Then what?”

  “I decided I’d missed him after all and that I’d call at The Old Forge on my way back to the vicarage. Which I did.”

  “But he wasn’t there,” agreed Sloan.

  “Quite so. No reply at The Old Forge.” The vicar averted his eyes from the armor. “At the time I thought I would be seeing him at the cricket on the Saturday and Sunday—a two-day match, you know, the Ornum versus Petering one—so I didn’t go back to his house again.”

  “But he wasn’t at the cricket,” persisted Sloan.

  “No,” admitted Mr. Ames. “I must confess I was surprised about that—though it is now painfully clear why he wasn’t there.”