Murder in The Smokehouse: (Auguste Didier Mystery 7)

by Myers, Amy

  ‘Then I marry you.’

  ‘Very well, Oliver.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Oliver was taken aback. He had expected at least two more exchanges.

  ‘I said yes!’ she shouted in exasperation at the top of her voice.

  Auguste Didier, glancing from the window to see the cause of the disturbance, smiled at the sight of Laura and Oliver kissing full on the lips. Priscilla Tabor, her attention similarly drawn, did not smile. Etiquette, after all, was etiquette. Private emotions were to be hidden, not indulged in outside the stately portico of Tabor Hall.

  Oliver would marry Laura, and Victoria would marry Alexander, young Alfred would grow up, Gertie and Cyril return gratefully to their home, Priscilla and George would resume their roles in Society. The Gordale beck would bubble on by and all would be as before. He and Tatiana would return to London, there to begin again their married life. No more struggling as to whether he was acceptable to Society as a gentleman, no more expecting his wife to stay upon her royal pedestal.

  Auguste slipped out of the room while Egbert was preoccupied with Cobbold, to escape, to be alone, without even Tatiana. He found himself upon the path to Janet’s Foss. He also found Gertie.

  ‘Oh, I am pleased to see you, Auguste. I haven’t said goodbye. And I wanted to – like this.’ Two hands stole round his neck, two lips were placed on his, as gently as the kiss of a salamander on cream. There was nothing a gentleman – and gentleman he was, he reminded himself proudly – could do but respond.

  ‘There,’ she said breathlessly a few minutes later. ‘Now we can return to the house.’

  ‘No,’ he said hastily, just in case Tatiana should appear at the wrong moment. ‘I am on my way to see Gordale Scar. Mr Wordsworth declared it was as “terrific as the lair – Where young lions crouch”,’ and he escaped, thanking the stars for Tatiana’s guidebook and leaving Gertie staring perplexedly after him.

  The woods by the beck leading to Janet’s Foss reminded him of Rose Griffin’s cottage, the Rose of the World, as Tabor had had written on her tombstone. Fair Rosamund, he recalled, who had been poisoned by the King’s jealous wife in her labyrinth. A labyrinth like Clapham woods. Had Charles Tabor guessed that Miriam had killed his Rose? Perhaps he had suspected, but had lived with the knowledge. He was a weak man. But for Miriam, it must have been the last tragic irony to realise that the man she loved so much had chosen not to validate their marriage.

  Ahead of him across a flat meadow through which the beck ambled its way, the vast limestone cliffs that flanked him to left and right were closing in to meet each other. A limestone mass to his right jutted out in front of him and the path wound around its foot. Round the corner must lie the chasm itself, and its waterfalls. He could hear the roaring water now over the sound of the beck beside him. He followed the path round and found himself in a vast cave, lacking only a roof. The fading light diminished further as the two cliffs met with a crashing waterfall at their junction, shutting out much of the sky. There was no way forward save to clamber up the rocks ahead of him by the side of those waters, tumbling in full spate. The ground under his foot was rocky, nothing green grew there. Where lions roar, indeed; he too felt caged here, glad that a few paces behind him lay easy retreat to the green world of the meadow.

  Caged, just as George Tabor felt in London, according to his mother, just like the Shepherd Lord when he returned to claim his inheritance. In contrast Tom Griffin had only wanted a galloper on the open road, untempted by money and power. Like the Shepherd Lord, he had been sent away for his own safety by his mother, and had later returned to his family. But Tom had not been as lucky as the Lord. He had been murdered for a reason as old as man himself: jealousy.

  The waterfall hurled itself down from a limestone shelf joining the two cliffs, with such force that it split in two around the huge slab of rock in the centre. Curious to see what was above the limestone, Auguste moved under the cliff face, craning his head upwards to see where the water came from. It was gushing through a hole in the rock, yet above it there was another fall, and above that the top of the scar. He felt dizzy, and suddenly very much alone in the gloom. An unreasoning panic seized him and he spun round. Blocking his path to the only way out was a man, not threatening, but solidly there. He was dressed in a suit so well cut he might have been walking down Jermyn Street. But even so Auguste recognised him.

  It was Gregorin.

  ‘Bonsoir, monsieur.’ The Russian stood still, a cat ready to pounce, every muscle taut. A cat ready for its prey.

  Now that the moment had come, adrenalin lent him strength. Auguste nodded coolly, and walked steadily along the path towards him. Towards the only way out. If need be, he could run. Gregorin favoured the knife, not the bullet.

  As if by sleight of hand, for surely no bulge had disturbed the pocket of that elegant suit, Gregorin’s hand came up with a gun in it. So much for the stiletto – unless he had that too.

  ‘Your ear is better, I trust, Monsieur Didier?’

  ‘It is.’ Auguste forced his voice to remain calm. He stopped. There was no way forward, no way back.

  ‘So the time has come.’ Gregorin’s tone was pleasantly conversational.

  He would walk on, call Gregorin’s bluff. This charade was merely to frighten him. There were only a few feet left between them. He had taken three steps forward when the shot rang out, chipping the stone at his head, ricocheting past him.

  ‘I think not this way. Back, Monsieur Didier. Please walk back. You need not fear: you may turn to do so. Walk towards the falls.’

  He had no option. The sides of the scar closed in menacingly on either side as he approached the falls, the crashing water soaking him to the skin.

  ‘Cross the beck to the other side. Do not be alarmed. It is wet, but not dangerous.’

  Auguste obeyed and Gregorin nimbly leapt the stream lower down. ‘And now I will kill you,’ he called joyfully.

  ‘Why?’ Auguste’s voice failed to obey him. The sound came out as a squeak.

  ‘You have your job, I have mine, and like yours, mine is a pleasure.’

  ‘I am a chef,’ Auguste shouted indignantly, forced back against the rock, the water roaring on both sides of him.

  ‘A chef who has married my niece. A Romanov. Most presumptuous. Moreover, already you are unfaithful.’

  Resentment filled Auguste with impotent rage. He had done nothing, nothing, to deserve to die thus in the gloom, surrounded by limestone cliffs and waterfalls with no one to hear or care. Even the sheep grazing at the top would not stop their munching, for the sound of the shot would be drowned in the noise of the falls. He had only married the woman he loved and who loved him. It wasn’t his fault she was a Russian princess. He hadn’t forced her to marry him. She had wanted to.

  Such useless, ridiculous thoughts ran through his head. He remembered Tatiana at their wedding, Tatiana at the wheel of a motorcar, Tatiana at the opera in Paris, Tatiana in his arms – oh, never again would he make love to her. If only he could be spared, what a lover he would prove, what a husband he would be. The pistol was ready, pointing. He found himself shouting, then half singing, to make him understand. ‘Gregorin, can you not understand how madly I love Tatiana?’

  Fractionally the pistol was lowered. Then Gregorin laughed. It was a strange sound to echo round the walls of Auguste’s prison chamber. ‘I have two passions, Didier. No – stay where you are, if you please. One is for cheese, though, alas I have no cheese stall or Yorkshire wife. The other passion is for the music of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. I deduce that you have recently seen Eugene Onegin. It puts me in a tender mood, despite your execrable tenor voice.’ He hummed in a surprisingly deep bass voice a few lines from the same aria.

  The world is gone mad. Auguste’s head spun. What are we doing singing Grand Opera in the middle of Gordale Scar, when he intends to kill me? Or does he?

  ‘I cannot shoot a lover of Tchaikovsky in cold blood, Didier, and these pistols are notoriously unreliable at a di
stance. So I will give you a chance. If you turn and can climb up high enough, while I count to ten, you may yet escape with your life.’

  Auguste glanced upwards. He was almost directly underneath the waterfall. If he could make the corner of that crag somehow he might pull himself behind it, escape out of range. There was indeed a natural path of steps in the rock, he realised, but at this time of year could he climb them with all the rain and the water in spate?

  Hardly knowing what he was doing, he sprang for a foothold up the rock behind him, then another, and another. He slipped, and scrabbled frantically for a foothold as Gregorin burst into an aria from The Queen of Spades, pausing only to count. Up and yet again. Where was the next foothold? There was none. He was lying against the rockface, fear fighting pain.

  Down below, Gregorin laughed once more. The sound determined him: he, Auguste Didier, would not die thus.

  ‘I won’t do it,’ he screamed down over the noise of the water. ‘Shoot me facing you. I won’t die like a frightened chicken.’

  Gregorin shrugged. ‘I am loth to kill one for whom I have now some small measure of respect, but I am afraid it really is necessary,’ he said regretfully. Crouching down like a cat with his cat’s eyes gleaming, he tantalised Auguste by first aiming then lowering the pistol. Then he raised it once more.

  If he was going to die, he would die as a Frenchman should. ‘I ask you, Gregorin, to tell Tatiana how I died and that I love her.’

  The words sounded strange, like a play being acted out, despite the wind howling at one side and the water screaming at his other. If he let go now, the force of the water might kill him anyway, dashing him on to the rocks beneath.

  Gregorin shouted, exhilarated, his finger on the trigger, ‘Your widow, Didier.’

  ‘Wife, Gregorin.’ An almost chatty voice, and a well-aimed stone knocked Gregorin off-balance, sending the gun flying from his hand.

  ‘Egbert!’ Auguste croaked. His eyes had been so fixed on imminent death ten feet below, he had not been conscious of Rose’s slow, stealthy approach. Nor of the four constables who now pounded round the corner in his support, as Egbert dived for the gun.

  Gregorin recovered like a cat, whirling into action, clambering up past Auguste in a flash, knocking him viciously sideways so that he slipped off balance, slithering, then tumbling down the rockface. Gregorin’s lithe figure seemed almost to dance with practised ease up by the side of the falls.

  Auguste hit the ground, lying half on the stones, half in the beck, bruised and stunned. As he lay there he could see high above him, silhouetted against the patch of sky at the top of the falls, a man who paused briefly to wave to those below – and then was gone.

  Egbert Rose was at Auguste’s side, as he painfully eased himself up. There was a choke in his voice as he said, ‘You damned fool, going off without telling me. We’ve had someone tailing Gregorin, but he lost him and ran back to tell me. You’re lucky Mrs Gertie wanted to kiss you goodbye and knew where you were going.

  ‘Only you, Sherlock,’ he continued as he heaved him to his feet, ‘only you could find a Moriarty who tries to push you up the blasted Reichenbach Falls.’