Fatal Masquerade

by Vivian Conroy

  Jake huffed. ‘The local police have probably never handled a high-class murder. They’ll be so afraid of ruffling feathers they won’t ask any critical questions or do any digging. I’ll be perfectly safe.’

  ‘And the murder will go unsolved? Is that what you want?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘I understand from Hargrove that our dead servant was an unpleasant type. Womanizing, snubbing those better positioned than him. There won’t be any tears shed about Cobb’s untimely departure from this household.’

  ‘But he must have family somewhere, and they’ll be devastated. Besides, there is a thing called justice. We should ask ourselves who wanted Cobb dead.’

  Jake said, ‘And who would dare do it under these circumstances? Consider this. If a fellow servant had wanted to kill Cobb, why not lure him to a desolate place in the woods and stab him, taking his money to make it look like a mugging by some vagabond? I don’t think a servant would dare kill in the boathouse during a well-attended masked ball. It would just be too dangerous.’

  Alkmene pursed her lips. There was the vanished maidservant Megan to consider. The girl had been working at the boathouse. She had been in a position to bring a steak knife along from the kitchens. And she had disappeared.

  But Alkmene didn’t mention that to Jake now. ‘Keegan has a story of receiving a note setting up a meeting at midnight in the boathouse. He claims it was slipped into his pocket, either while he was dining with the rest of us, or later during the ball. Do you believe it could have come from the dead man? Was Cobb in fear for his life?’

  Jake shrugged. ‘Maybe Cobb only believed he was. Being conceited, he might have made more of his position than there really was.’

  ‘Cobb is dead,’ Alkmene said and emptied the glass. ‘That does prove him right in some small way, don’t you think?’

  Jake sighed.

  Alkmene put the glass on the table and said, ‘Tell me why you’re really here.’

  Jake sighed again, then seemed to realize she’d never let go until she had the truth out of him.

  ‘Hargrove wanted me to look into a matter for him.’ Jake sounded begrudging. ‘A private affair, so don’t ask me to tell you what it is. Or was, maybe.’ He looked pensive.

  Alkmene studied him. ‘Did it concern Cobb?’

  ‘Possibly. Hargrove wasn’t sure. But now Cobb is dead, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Alkmene said. ‘We now have a perfect chance to discover the truth. Everybody will have to be questioned by the police. If you reveal yourself as Hargrove’s… uh… private detective, you can demand to be present at the questioning.’

  ‘Demand?’ Jake echoed.

  ‘Yes. You just emphasized how the country police are so afraid of ruffling feathers with local families. If you’re right, a request from Hargrove to have you present at the questioning will be granted. You can hear what all the guests and staff have to say for themselves. We’ll piece together a complete image of the dead man and his position in the household. Then we can understand why Cobb was killed.’

  Jake looked doubtful. Outside, heavy engines approached.

  ‘Must be the police,’ Alkmene said. ‘Run upstairs to tell Hargrove of our plan.’

  As Jake hesitated, she rose and pulled at his sleeve. ‘Do it now. Don’t let any silly ideas of yours about class get in the way of the investigation. We have to know what the people questioned say. I saw Mrs Zeilovsky in the gardens some time before I found Cobb dead at the boathouse. Did she go there? Has she seen something? Could she be the killer herself? She did seem to know a lot about the Steeplechase case.’

  ‘The Steeplechase case might not have anything to do with it.’

  ‘That’s for us to find out. Hurry along now. This could be the easiest chance of gleaning information ever offered to us.’

  Alkmene’s smile widened. ‘Trust me, it’s foolproof.’

  Alkmene had sagely kept her distance when the police arrived, leaving it up to Hargrove and Jake to get Jake in with the investigation. Because she had discovered the dead body, she knew she’d be the first to be called in to give her testimony and was fully prepared to discover Jake there as an observer, or whatever role the local police were willing to allot to him. She was therefore surprised when she walked in and found an observer there all right, with a notebook balancing on his knees and a sharpened pencil ready to take notes. But it wasn’t Jake giving her an imperceptible nod of reassurance, but Theobald Zeilovsky, studying her like she was a rare animal species, newly discovered and ready for further analysis.

  Dissection, Alkmene almost thought.

  She felt cold as she took the seat in front of the chief of police, a short, rotund man with a moustache he kept twirling. He was a former army colonel who had been asked to head up the force here as the old chief had left quite a void, having been a decent, charge-taking sort of fellow. All this was explained by his sergeant, a much younger and nervous-looking man who kept calling her Lady Callender. As Alkmene was nervous enough herself about Zeilovsky’s presence – and Jake’s absence – she didn’t bother to correct him.

  As the aide ended his explanatory remarks and the chief of police cleared his throat for the first question, Alkmene said hurriedly, ‘May I ask why one of the murder suspects is present here?’

  The chief of police sat up at once and looked about the room. ‘Excuse me?’

  Alkmene nodded at Zeilovsky. ‘As your investigation has barely begun, I assume you’ve not yet cleared anybody of suspicion?’

  Both Zeilovsky and the chief of police grew purple.

  The chief said, ‘Indeed we have, Lady Alkmene. Mr Hargrove assured me he was talking with Mr Zeilovsky while the ball went on, from the moment the dancing began until he heard of the murder.’

  Alkmene blinked. ‘Hargrove was speaking with Zeilovsky all that time? That’s hours.’

  ‘Certainly.’ Zeilovsky gave her a cold look. ‘He can vouch for me as I can vouch for him.’

  The latter words seemed to carry a subtle hint of something, but Alkmene couldn’t make out what it was.

  A threat?

  Had Zeilovsky told Hargrove they had to vouch for each other or else the police might suspect him of the murder?

  ‘As Mr Zeilovsky cannot possibly have committed the crime,’ the chief of police said slowly, as if he was explaining something obvious to someone dim-witted, ‘he was asked by me specifically to observe the questioning and discuss with me later if he observed in any of the suspects such signs of distress as might be related to… uh…’

  ‘Guilt?’ Alkmene ventured with a straight look at Zeilovsky. She wasn’t about to let the scheming scientist get on her nerves.

  The psychiatrist was still deep red. ‘Deception,’ he corrected. ‘I can only note when a person is showing signs of lying, of giving misleading or even outright false information. Whatever conclusion should be drawn from that, I leave to the police. They are the professionals, after all, like I am in my field.’

  Alkmene leaned back in her chair. She had nothing to lie about so she should be perfectly safe from Zeilovsky’s probing eyes. But somehow she felt exposed in his presence and vulnerable to suggestions on his part that she might not be telling the complete truth. As she had found Cobb’s body, the police might conclude she had somehow been involved in the murder.

  ‘Lady Alkmene,’ the chief of police began. ‘You came to the boathouse at close to midnight. Why was that?’

  ‘On my way over here, I had heard from my close friend Denise Hargrove that there were gondolas on the waterways and, because I was warm from the dancing and wanted to see the estate from the water, I came out to see if I could find an empty boat.’

  For a moment she remembered seeing Mrs Zeilovsky acting furtively and the man who had followed her. She had also wanted to know more about that.

  She caught Zeilovsky smiling to himself. As if he could sense she wasn’t telling everything.

  Alkmene bet he was enjoying every
minute of this. But he wouldn’t enjoy it any longer if she decided to tell about his wife.

  The chief of police asked what time it had been when she had ceased dancing, how long it had taken her to arrive at the boathouse, and if she had seen the body right away upon her entry.

  Alkmene tried to answer as fully as she could, all the time aware of that quiet man watching her, with his sharpened pencil at the ready like a bayonet, waiting for her to make a mistake.

  ‘Did you touch the body?’ the chief of police asked.

  ‘No, it was clear he was dead. Then I heard someone coming and hid behind the draperies that had been attached to the wooden wall.’

  ‘Was there another way to leave the boathouse other than the door through which you had entered?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Unless by boat, of course. The boathouse faces onto the water where boats can moor to pick up passengers. But there was no boat there at the time.’

  For a moment the image came back to her of a boat leaving just as she was approaching: the gondolier so clumsy with his oar. If the dead servant had been cast as gondolier, had another left in his boat?

  ‘I saw a boat moving away as I approached,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t see clearly who was in it. There was a man propelling it, but whether there was somebody else in it as well, I cannot say.’

  The chief of police twirled his moustache. ‘Could it have been a robbery? Was there anything valuable kept at the boathouse?’

  Alkmene gave him a perplexed look. ‘How likely is that?’

  ‘If it was robbery, we could close the case quickly,’ the chief of police said in a tone that implied he wanted nothing more.

  ‘And you would no longer be a suspect yourself,’ Zeilovsky added with a smug smile.

  Alkmene could have just kicked him, but she tried not to show it.

  The chief of police didn’t seem interested at all in Mr Keegan’s appearance at the boathouse so shortly after Alkmene had found the dead body, or the lawyer’s reasons for coming out there. Perhaps the chief thought he could ask the man himself later?

  The only thing the chief of police did want to know was how long it had taken for them to conclude they had to raise the alarm. When Alkmene admitted they had discussed it for some time, his expression brightened. ‘By the time the alarm was raised, the culprit had already escaped into the night for sure.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Regrettable, but such things do happen.’

  Although Alkmene didn’t hold a particularly favourable impression of the dead man, the callous dismissal of his case did bother her. She asked, ‘If it had been me stabbed at that boathouse, would you also have assumed a robbery and left it at that?’

  The chief of police blinked at her. ‘I assume, Lady Alkmene,’ he said in the same cool tone she had taken herself, ‘that the Hargrove family would have asked me to do the utmost in my power to catch the culprit.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alkmene said, ‘meaning my death would have warranted a real investigation, while the murder of a servant does not.’

  Zeilovsky said, ‘You show a deep concern for this man’s fate, Lady Alkmene.’ His tone suggested something that lit Alkmene’s cheeks.

  But she didn’t look down, facing the annoying psychiatrist squarely. ‘I think we should find out if Cobb was killed by anyone present at the ball, as a guest or family member, instead of just assuming some unknown person penetrated the grounds and killed him, fleeing the scene without leaving any clear traces.’

  ‘How do you know he left no traces?’ the chief of police said sharply. ‘My men are looking at the walls around the estate now, at the footpaths, searching for footprints in flowerbeds or on the grass. Any sign the killer came from the outside, had been lurking under a tree waiting for the right hour to strike. When he assumed there was nobody but this one man at the boathouse, he went in.’

  ‘What for?’ Alkmene asked. ‘There can hardly have been a treasure hidden in the boathouse.’

  There was a knock at the door, and the sergeant went to ask what it was. He listened, then turned and said, ‘You should come to see this, sir.’

  They both left at once, banging the door shut, locking Alkmene in with the staring psychiatrist.

  Zeilovsky smiled at her. ‘The dead servant was a handsome man, Lady Alkmene. Are you quite sure you were only looking for the diversion of a boat ride when you went to the boathouse alone?’

  Alkmene held his gaze. ‘I doubt,’ she said slowly, ‘that you have the means to survive a trial for slander. I also doubt you want to wager your reputation on a whim.’

  Zeilovsky smiled disarmingly. ‘My dear lady, you must understand that this is my work. I probe for people’s motives, I probe into the sordid darkness of their subconscious for the things they may not even know themselves.’

  ‘Not even know themselves?’ Alkmene echoed in surprise.

  Zeilovsky’s smile intensified. ‘The mind is a mysterious thing. We believe we control it, but in fact it controls us. It makes us do things we do not want to do. Or rather we make ourselves believe we do not want to do them. If you were asked if you would ever start a love affair with a servant, just because he was a handsome man and you were lonely or wanted adventure, you would deny it with all force. But deep inside you may long for it. And your secret longing drives you to act. You go to the boathouse around midnight because you are hot from the dancing, or because you want to see the enchanting lit waterways of the estate. That is what you tell yourself, what you believe even. But when this man Cobb is there, offering himself to you...’

  Alkmene laughed softly. ‘I can assure you my life is not lacking in adventure.’ She held his gaze. ‘I can also assure you I’ll find out if you were with Hargrove all that time, as you say you were.’

  His eyes narrowed, something flashing like a glint of drawn steel. ‘I may not have the means to risk a suit for slander. But I do have other means. And I can assure you it’s not prudent to cross me.’

  Alkmene refused to lower her gaze for his, but her insides went cold with the fury in his face. Apparently it was very important to him that his alibi of having been with Hargrove all the time stayed intact. Because he was the killer? Or for another reason?

  The door opened, and the chief of police came back in. ‘Excuse me for the interruption. Now, where were we?’

  Alkmene sat on pins and needles, expecting Zeilovsky to say something provocative, but he did not. He just took his notes and shook her hand as she left, like they were perfect strangers, instead of house guests, staying under the same roof.

  Where murder had occurred.

  To be honest, Alkmene found that the most unsettling of all.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘What on earth has happened?’ she yelled as she found Jake in the music room, absent-mindedly running his lean hands over the keys. ‘You were supposed to be there and help me out, not leave me to be insulted by Zeilovsky.’

  ‘Thank your friend Hargrove for that,’ Jake said sourly. ‘When I explained to him what we had in mind, he said he had been with Zeilovsky all the time and could be sure the man was not the killer. He wanted him present at the questioning to offer a psychological perspective to the local law. He said it was most important to him. He then dismissed me, saying I was a suspect as well.’

  Jake’s veins bulged. ‘Imagine that. He asks me to come here and look into a delicate matter for him. He flatters me by saying I’m the only one he can turn to. Then somebody dies, and all of a sudden I’m a suspect. If I didn’t know better, I’d assume he invited me just so he could charge me with the murder. But as things stand, there were plenty of guests around.’

  ‘Did Hargrove hire you to find something against the murdered man, a reason for dismissal?’

  ‘Oh no, Hargrove already had enough reasons for that. He told me the household was in disarray and... it seems Mrs Carruthers’ health is deteriorating and she’s no longer able to keep an eye on things like she used to.’

  ‘So it was pain I saw in her
face when she was in my room. She must have a bad back or painful joints in general.’

  ‘It also seems she’s a widow whose husband died in the war and she never quite recovered from that shock. Hargrove said he should have replaced her, but he felt sorry for her and couldn’t bring himself to do it.’

  ‘And her relationship with Cobb?’

  ‘She seemed to have been protecting him. When Hargrove asked her about things Cobb allegedly did wrong, she protested and claimed that whoever had complained about him was lying. There seemed to have been tension between him and Megan, the girl who vanished tonight. But Mrs Carruthers claimed that was all Megan’s fault as she was leading Cobb on.’

  Alkmene frowned. She saw the scene on the lawn again: Mrs Carruthers pleading with a servant dressed as a gondolier, probably Cobb, asking him something urgently and him just brushing her off with a superior air. Why would Mrs Carruthers protect a man who treated her so poorly? Wouldn’t it be logical for her to have used her influence in the household to get rid of Cobb? Why protect him, lie for him, keep him on?

  Jake ran both hands down his face. ‘Look, Hargrove confided in me about a painful subject and, even though he’s now disowned me, I need not betray his trust in the same manner. Don’t press me to tell you.’

  Alkmene sighed. ‘Fair enough. For the moment. But Hargrove should never have involved that inscrutable Theobald Zeilovsky. To him, it’s some sort of interesting psychological experiment. A superb chance to see his theories about human behaviour in action. I let him get to me. I responded to his provocation, and he knew it. He was enjoying every moment of it.’

  She clenched her hands into fists. ‘I wish I’d handled it differently, like I couldn’t have cared less.’

  Jake looked her over. ‘It’s not like you to flare and give yourself away. What did the dear doctor have to say?’