Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  Sally Bright, it seemed, was also of the second type.

  “Sod off, you,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t think it really was the gardener, though, more’s the pity. I was the one waiting at the table that night, and I think I would have noticed if he lumbered into the dining room and tampered with anybody’s drinks.”

  “Walk me through that night. Before dinner, when the guests were in the drawing room, who poured the drinks?”

  “Colonel Armstrong poured gin and sodas for himself, his secretary, and Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths. The old ladies drank sherry. The doctor only had tea because he knew he might be called away to see to a patient. And the girl—Wendy—had lemonade.”

  “You were in the drawing room the whole time?”

  “I add a decorative air,” Sally said, patting her hair.

  Leo rolled his eyes, but he knew it was true—a pretty, uniformed maid was as much a status symbol as a new car. Templeton had known what he was about when sending Sally here, even if it seemed a bizarre use of manpower. “Could the colonel have added something to one of the glasses?”

  “I don’t see why not. But none of them seemed groggy during dinner, which they would have if they had been given a double dose of Veronal before sitting down.”

  “So, then the phone rang, Dr. Sommers and the housekeeper were called away, and Mrs. Hoggett cleared the glasses and cups from the drawing room while you served dinner.”

  “Right,” Sally confirmed. “You think she took a bit of a tipple from somebody’s glass? But the police inspected those glasses and found nothing. Same for the wine glasses at the dinner table.”

  “It wouldn’t take much for a clean glass to be switched out for the one containing Veronal. At dinner, could anyone have reached over and slipped something into another glass?”

  “I suppose. So, you think the char was killed by accident, that the Veronal was meant for somebody else, do you? That won’t explain how she turned up dead at the bottom of the stairs, though.”

  “It also doesn’t explain why she went upstairs in the first place when she ought to have been in the kitchen.”

  “She was always sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, but haring off upstairs when she ought to have been working was a bit obvious, even for her.”

  “Tell me where everyone sat at dinner.” Leo knew this from the police report, but wanted to hear if retelling the information caused Sally to remember anything.

  “The colonel sat at the head of the table, Edith Pickering to his left, then Norris, then the vicar’s wife. To the colonel’s right were Cora Delacourt, the vicar, Wendy, and an empty seat for the doctor. Nobody sat at the foot of the table.”

  That meant that if Colonel Armstrong had been the intended victim, only the two old ladies were near enough to have put something into his drink without reaching past another person. “And we’re certain Mrs. Clemens didn’t add anything to the food before she left.”

  “Not if she wanted to make sure any certain piece of drugged food land on a particular plate. Besides, you’d taste the Veronal if it were in food. The taste could only be concealed by spirits, wine, coffee. You’d think the wine was corked or the coffee burnt, but you’d probably drink it anyway.”

  Which was why he kept coming back to the glasses and all but dismissing the faint possibility that the housekeeper might have given the victim a poisoned morsel of food to taste. Leo frowned. “Was there any particular drink that any guest would be certain to drink?” Another thought occurred to him. “Did anybody abstain from wine?”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Wendy, but she’s a kid. Edith Pickering had a glass of wine in front of her, but I don’t think she drank any. She’s the sort who likes to talk about the devil living at the bottom of a bottle. As for the rest of them, I didn’t notice, but that doesn’t mean anything. I was busy keeping glasses filled and serving dinner—awful work. On my feet 12 hours a day and nary a soul to spare you a kind word. Mrs. Clemens looks at me like I’m about to run off with the silver. Worst assignment I’ve had, this is.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “By the looks of you, it’s your first assignment.”

  “No, it ain’t.”

  “You can’t be more than seventeen.” Not much older than Wendy, who she had dismissed as a mere kid.

  Sally put her hands on her hips. “And when did you have your first assignment, mate? You look like one who got into it early.”

  “Touché.” He was impressed that the girl was able to see that much. Maybe she wasn’t as green as she looked. Templeton had always been good at picking out canny agents, after all. “Don’t you feel that the cap is a trifle much?” he asked, gesturing at the scrap of white lace perched atop her blond head. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a parlor maid wearing a cap unless it was on stage in a comedy.

  “Nah, it was a stroke of genius, this.” She fingered the edges of the fabric. “It makes his nibs feel like he’s getting something a cut above the ordinary. He pinches every penny, so he went through six housemaids in the year before he hired me. He probably thinks I’m a gift from heaven.”

  “Hmm,” Leo mused. “He’s underpaying Norris as well. What’s your instinct there?”

  She shrugged. “The colonel hollers at him less than he hollers at me, which means he’s probably a good secretary. Two reasons I can think of why a person gets underpaid. Either he offers too little because he has ulterior motives”—here she gestured at herself—“or there’s something about him that makes people not want to hire him.”

  “You think he might have a skeleton in his closet? A secret the colonel knew and hired him in spite of?”

  “I’d bet a penny to a farthing that Mrs. Hoggett thought so.”

  “Sally!” called a voice from the stairs. “The colonel will be wanting his tea. Bring an extra cup. He has a guest.”

  Sally—and it occurred to Leo that Sally was almost certainly not the girl’s name—stood up straight and smoothed her apron as the housekeeper approached. “I’ll be right upstairs, Mrs. Clemens,” she said in an entirely different voice than the bantering tone she had used with Leo. “Mr. Page here was admiring the ruins of the old chapel and came in so he didn’t freeze.” With that, she disappeared up the stairs with the tea tray.

  “Cold weather to be exploring.” The housekeeper regarded Leo with narrowed eyes. She was about forty, with sensible shoes, a no-nonsense tweed skirt, and plain blouse. Her dark brown hair was streaked with gray and pulled back severely. Around her neck hung a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. She had been with Dr. Sommers the night of the murder, so unless she had an accomplice, she was in the clear.

  “It was the only leave I could get from work,” Leo said with an air of a man thrilled to spend his holiday visiting stately homes and thinking about the masonry techniques of long-dead craftsmen. “We’re dreadfully short staffed.”

  “I see.” The suspiciousness of her gaze did not abate by even a fraction, but he couldn’t tell if she didn’t want him poking around the hall or if she simply distrusted any man who flirted with a teenaged housemaid.

  “I heard that the Wych Hall chapel has an especially fine example of—”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said, cutting him off. “If you’ll excuse me, I have dinner to prepare.”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed in tones of rapture. “Of course! You’re not only Colonel Armstrong’s housekeeper, but also the talented cook I keep hearing about. Naturally, I won’t keep you from your art.” Sometimes he marveled at the tripe he was able to say with a straight face. “But I’d hate to bother the colonel himself about a matter as trifling as stone tracery,” Leo said, as if the housekeeper had volunteered Colonel Armstrong’s help. “I’m sure he’s very busy.” He let his voice trail off in a way that begged her to contradict him.

  “Well,” she said, pursing her lips, “I could see if he might spare a moment.”

  “Oh, that’s so very kind of you!” Leo was all effusiveness. �
�People in the country are so terribly considerate, aren’t they?” Some of the hardness of her features softened—not with warmth so much as exasperation, he guessed—so he pressed on. “So very different from London. Are you any relation of the Northamptonshire Clemenses? I went to school with one of them. Freddie. Died in the war,” he added shamelessly. He watched a look of dawning horror spread over the woman’s face as she realized she might be forced to listen to a monologue about the fictive Northhamptonshire Clemenses. She was going to deliver him to the colonel and be happy about it.

  “Ah, no,” she murmured as she led him toward the stairs. “I was born and raised in Wychcomb St. Mary.”

  Leo made sure they walked slowly up the stairs to the library so he could hear as much as she wanted to say.

  JAMES TRUDGED UP TO Wych Hall to check on Colonel Armstrong. The colonel was getting old, and he had trouble with rheumatism and his heart. But when the maid opened the door and showed him into the library, he found the colonel tête-à-tête with Leo Page.

  Page was settled into a battered leather armchair, a cigarette in his mouth and a glass of brandy in his hand. There were several cigarette butts in the ashtray beside him. His long legs were crossed at the ankles, and he had the air of a man who was thoroughly enjoying a talk with a like-minded fellow. James was quite confident that nobody had ever enjoyed a conversation with Colonel Armstrong as much as Leo Page was pretending to. It ought to have put him on his guard, the naked deception of the thing. But instead, James found himself charmed. Charmed, of all things, by a spy and a liar, by a man who existed to stir up trouble and—

  But, no. Page was just a man. He wasn’t the embodiment of the war, and he hadn’t come to discompose James’s mind. He was only here because something about Mrs. Hoggett’s death had caught the attention of somebody at Special Branch. James didn’t want to think too hard about what that something might be, but whatever it was, it wasn’t Page’s fault. And right now Page was Wendy’s best chance at having a life without a cloud of suspicion following her.

  “I think you’ve met Mr. Page,” Colonel Armstrong said to James. “He came to look at the tracery work in the old chapel.”

  “Have you any triskelions here?” James asked innocently. “We’re quite fortunate to have an expert in our midst.”

  “I’ve been looking at the pattern of keyhole arches,” Page said ingenuously. “Quite unique in this part of England.” He spoke with such apologetic avidity that James almost forgot that Page was not, in fact, a devoted enthusiast of stone tracery. “But I’ve taken up too much of your time already, Colonel Armstrong. Thank you so much for the drink. I wonder if I can borrow your Mr. Norris to show me that bit of the chapel you were mentioning?”

  “Yes, of course. Norris!” he bellowed, and the secretary appeared in the doorway of a room that opened off the library. “Norris, show the man that wall, will you.”

  “The wall, sir?” Norris responded diffidently.

  “The east wall, man! The one with the window in it!” He rapped his fist on the arm of his chair as if enraged by the secretary’s inability to follow a conversation he had not been present for. James did not care for Norris—there was something squirrely and wrong about him—but he didn’t envy the man one jot. The colonel was a beast to work for.

  “Ah, quite. I beg your pardon,” the secretary answered, totally unruffled. He probably had a good deal of practice being abused by his employer and no longer thought much of it.

  Page left with Norris, babbling about high Gothic this and early perpendicular that, his face arranged into an expression of such daft avidity that James had to look away to hide his smile. James spent the next quarter of an hour listening to the colonel’s chest and checking his heart, while the colonel complained about the damp, the income tax, and the criminally high price of meat.

  “Were you already acquainted with Mr. Page?” James asked while getting ready to leave.

  “No, never laid eyes on him before that woman’s funeral.”

  James recalled the colonel’s look of shock at the graveside. James had assumed it was seeing Page that had given the colonel such a turn, even though he couldn’t figure out why. But if the colonel had been disturbed by seeing Page, he showed no sign of distress now. When James had entered the library, the two men had seemed quite comfortable. But if it hadn’t been the sight of Page that had upset Armstrong at the funeral, then what could it have been? He tried to recall where the colonel had been looking the precise moment he had been overcome with surprise. He remembered Mary Griffiths trying to make the twins be quiet, Marston glowering on the edges of the group, Wendy offering him the flask she had found in Mrs. Hoggett’s bedroom at Little Briars. But none of that was out of the ordinary.

  “Are you headed to Little Briars, Sommers?” Armstrong asked while James shrugged into his coat. He knew perfectly well that James went to check in on the old ladies after visiting Wych Hall, so James only nodded. “Might as well leave through the french doors,” the man said with an air of great concession, as he did every week during this moment of magnanimity. “Spare yourself a trip around the house.”

  The french doors led to a terrace that sloped gently down to the garden. A previous Armstrong—either Armstrong’s father or grandfather—had used a wheelchair, and this design of the terrace allowed the man to proceed unaided from the library to the garden. By exiting through the french doors, James could proceed across the terrace to the bottom of the garden and then directly along the footpath through the woods to Little Briars.

  “That’s very kind of you,” James said, as he always did. If the colonel wanted to believe that using the french doors was a special privilege, James could indulge him.

  James wasn’t surprised to find Page waiting for him at the edge of the woods, hidden by shadow.

  “You’re going to get a chest cold,” James said by way of greeting, despite knowing perfectly well the weather had nothing to do with the spread of disease. “You aren’t even wearing a muffler,” he added reproachfully. Page had the collar of his coat turned up against the wind, but despite years of medical training, James couldn’t rid himself of the superstition that an exposed neck might worsen tonsillitis. “Did Norris tell you what you wanted to know?” James asked.

  “Now, what makes you think I had an ulterior motive in wanting to spend time with a man who looks like that?”

  “Please,” James scoffed.

  Page laughed softly. “No, my taste runs more to handsome doctors who worry about people catching cold. And he didn’t tell me a damn thing. He was as nervous as a hare. Are we walking back through the village or taking the footpath through the wood?”

  James noticed the easy assumption that they’d walk together, and was aware that he liked it a bit too much. “The footpath,” he said, leading the way. “I want to stop in at Little Briars.”

  “Is today your day for checking on the elderly?”

  “It’s my day for taking walks in the woods with dangerous strangers,” James said, surprised to find he still had the knack for light flirtation.

  “Ha. Will the ladies invite me in for tea?”

  “Good God,” James said. “You’ll be lucky if you get away that easily. They’ll insist on stuffing you with biscuits and regaling you with tales of Cora’s misspent youth.”

  “I think I’d rather like that,” Page said. “It’s been a long time since my work involved grannies and biscuits.” Was that a note of wistfulness in his voice? A gust of wind whipped through the woods, rustling bare branches and causing Page to draw his coat more tightly around himself.

  “Here, take my muffler.” James began unwinding it from his neck.

  “I can’t—”

  “I have three just like it. Edith is forever knitting the things. She started making them for soldiers during the war and never got out of the habit.” James stopped walking and looped the scarf around Page’s neck. Page must have recognized this as the obvious approach that it was because his mouth
quirked up in a half smile as he took a step to close the gap between them. The fronts of their coats were brushing against one another, and James could feel the heat of the other man’s breath on his cheek.

  “I’m not wearing your scarf,” Page said, unwrapping it from his neck and replacing it around James’s but not letting go of the ends. “It won’t do for anyone to notice that I’m wearing your clothes. Even discreet outer layers.”

  “Ah. These are the delicate workings of an intelligence officer’s mind, I see.”

  Page kept hold of the scarf but stepped even closer to James, thereby maneuvering him back against a tree. James let himself be moved. He could feel the cold and roughness of the bark through his coat, while in front of him he was caged in by the hard heat of Page.

  James’s heart pounded in his chest. He tried to tell himself that it was because it had been a matter of years since he had so much as kissed a man, since he had touched anyone for any purpose other than tending to their ailments and injuries. But the fact was that James hadn’t wanted to touch anyone since the war. This kindling interest he had in Page was something of a relief, proof that the war hadn’t taken that from him along with so much else. In every other respect, this attraction was disconcerting: Page was dangerous. James’ sanity depended on believing that the village was a safe and orderly place, and Page’s presence exposed that as a fairy story.

  Maybe Page saw some of that conflict on his face because instead of leaning in to kiss him, he stood perfectly still with a quizzical expression that James couldn’t quite interpret. Then he leaned back fractionally and produced a cigarette seemingly out of thin air. “You’re right,” Page said, lighting the cigarette. “It’s cold. Let’s go drink some tea and be civil.”