02 - Murder at Dareswick Hall

by Margaret Addison

  ‘I’m afraid you’re totally confusing me, Miss Simpson. You are going to have to explain yourself further,’ Deacon said, sounding somewhat exasperated. ‘I can’t for the life of me understand what you’re saying, I …’ He broke off abruptly as the study door burst open. ‘What on earth –.’

  ‘Sir.’ Lane was standing there, his hair dishevelled and a look of disbelief on his face. ‘Sir, she’s dead.’

  ‘Josephine?’ Rose cried out, in distress. ‘So we were too late. I should have known, I shouldn’t –.’

  ‘No, miss, not Josephine Atherton. She’s fine. We encountered her just now, just outside the house. She was on her way back from the lake. No, it’s the other one. Isabella Atherton. Her maid’s just found her in her bedroom. It looks like she’s been poisoned.’

  ‘Heaven help us, not another murder!’ exclaimed the inspector, putting his head in his hands.

  ‘No,’ answered Rose, as Josephine Atherton was led into the room. ‘It wasn’t murder, Inspector. I think you will find it was suicide. She knew, you see, that I’d worked out the truth by something I said last night. She realised the game was up and took the only way out.’

  ‘Are you telling me, Miss Simpson, that Isabella Atherton murdered two people?’

  ‘No I’m not, Inspector. Because, in fact, she murdered three people. She murdered Claude Lambert too. Don’t you see? That’s what started it all.’ Rose looked over at Josephine. The girl was pale and looked as if she was about to faint. Sergeant Lane was obviously of the same opinion and hastily pulled up a chair for her to sit in.

  ‘You realised what she had done, didn’t you?’ Rose asked gently.

  ‘Yes. Not at first of course, I was just as much in the dark as the rest of you. It was only after…’ She broke off to gulp back a generous measure of brandy which the diligent sergeant had also seen fit to pour her. Rose was pleased to see some colour returning to her cheeks.

  ‘Suppose,’ said Deacon, ‘that, between the two of you, you tell us the whole story. Miss Atherton looks rather done in, so suppose you start, Miss Simpson, and then you just chip in, Miss Atherton, as you feel able.’

  ‘Well,’ said Rose. ‘I suppose it all started when Josephine met Claude Lambert at her sister’s. He was giving Isabella French lessons. I am assuming there was an instant attraction?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Josephine, ‘I liked him enormously when I met him but didn’t think anything of it. Then, purely by chance, we happened to bump into each other a week or two later when I was next in London for the day. We went to a little tea shop he knew and talked and talked for hours. I rather think he missed a couple of his lessons. After that we corresponded frequently and met up in London whenever we could, on the pretext of my going to visit Isabella.’

  ‘And you kept your relationship secret,’ prompted Rose.

  ‘Yes. I knew Father would never accept Claude as a prospective husband. He doesn’t like foreigners very much I’m afraid, and besides Claude was virtually penniless, eking out a meagre living giving French lessons to the wealthy. Father would have thought him totally beneath us, little more than a servant. He really wouldn’t have viewed it as being any different to my eloping with Brimshaw.’

  ‘And then Lord Sneddon came to stay at Dareswick,’ said Rose.

  ‘Yes. I thought it rather a blessing at first. You see I pretended to everyone that I was rather flattered by his attentions to me. I didn’t think he really meant anything by them. But it was all jolly handy in helping disguise the fact that I was actually in love with someone else. So I just played along. Hugh had such a very bad reputation with women that it never occurred to me for a moment that he might actually fall in love with me, or that I would hurt his feelings or pride so when I rejected his advances.’

  ‘But he did fall in love with you, didn’t he? And, when he realised that his love for you was unrequited, he sought solace with your maid.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Josephine, sadly. ‘I will never forgive myself for what happened to her, not as long as I live. If only I had known what he would do and to what lengths she would go to escape the shame.’

  ‘You weren’t to know, you mustn’t blame yourself,’ said Rose, with feeling. ‘Everyone thought that he had got tired of you, not the other way around, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, you see I wasn’t really his usual type. Not nearly pretty enough for one thing. It also meant that everyone left me alone for a bit to lick my wounds, so to speak. They didn’t regard it as so very odd if I withdrew a bit from everyone. Which meant that I had all the time I needed to plan my escape with Claude so that we could be together. I knew I’d have to run away from Dareswick, never to return. Father would have disowned me for sure, I knew that. I would be saying goodbye to my family forever.’

  ‘This is all very well,’ said Deacon, who had remained silent up to now during the exchange between the two women. ‘But what I’d really like to know, is how Isabella and the letters come in to all this.’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said Rose. ‘The main thing is that Josephine and Claude had made plans to elope, to have taken effect in a few days’ time, I would imagine. It explains why you were so preoccupied, Josephine, on Friday, and why you were sad about the idea of not being here to see the bulbs come into flower.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Deacon, impatiently. ‘But how does Isabella, and Sneddon for that matter, come into all this. What’s the significance of the letters Sneddon used to blackmail your sister? Did Isabella write them to Claude Lambert, or didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she did. Correct me if I’m wrong, Josephine, but I think your sister became rather fixated on Claude Lambert, more so perhaps because her feelings weren’t reciprocated. She was a beautiful and rich young woman. I am sure she was used to getting her own way and having men fall at her feet. I think she viewed Claude Lambert as something of a challenge.’

  ‘Yes, Claude told me one of his students had become rather obsessed with him and was bombarding him with love letters. At first he laughed it off. I think he saw it as just a bit embarrassing to begin with, you know, what with Isabella being my sister and all that, although of course I didn’t know that at the time because he didn’t tell me that the letters were hers. But then I noticed a change in him. He seemed worried, and when I pressed him he said that the letters had started to get rather menacing and threatening. You can imagine the sort of thing. If she couldn’t have him then nobody else would. He said he thought the girl was not quite right in the head. But he vehemently refused to show me the letters, no matter how hard I pleaded with him to do so, and he absolutely refused to go to the police about them. I realise now that he wanted to protect me from the truth.’

  ‘Somehow,’ said Rose, ‘Lord Sneddon managed to get hold of the letters. I assume through the services of that Ricketts fellow of his. The irony was he didn’t know their true value. He thought they were evidence of a love affair that would be damaging to a young woman’s reputation if it became common knowledge. The truth was far more sinister. They were evidence of a decline into a fanatic obsession which led to murder.

  ‘When I overheard the conversation between Lord Sneddon and Isabella in the library, I thought Isabella did not want him to read her letters to Claude out of embarrassment. But later I was struck by two things. One, that she was prepared to go through with the marriage if he promised to return every last letter to her; and second, when she produced them, that she insisted on throwing the letters onto the fire when Inspector Deacon advised that he would be keeping them as evidence. It was obvious then that there was something in them that she did not want known. I think she must have written in one or two of them her intention to kill your Claude, Josephine. The letters were too incriminating to remain to be read by anyone, because that is exactly what she did.’ Rose shuddered. ‘Although you didn’t know Isabella had written the letters to Claude, I think you had a suspicion that she might be the author, didn’t you, Josephine, which is why you looked relieved on Friday nigh
t when Isabella turned up with Lord Sneddon. You thought initially that she must be in love with him and so couldn’t have written the letters to Claude.’

  ‘But I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw them at dinner together and then later when I went to Isabella’s room to find out what she was playing at. It was obvious she wasn’t in love with Hugh. But it was still a shock to me the following morning when you told me about Hugh blackmailing Isabella over the letters. I realised then that she had written them after all, and that made me frightened. You see, I’ve always been a little afraid of Isabella. There was always something a little not quite right about her, even when we were children. She has always had these awful uncontrollable fits of violence.’

  ‘She gave you that scar on your face, didn’t she, not Hallam? I’ve noticed your hand often flies up to it when you’re worried, or when you are anxious about Isabella.’

  ‘Yes. I told you it was a sibling squabble that got out of hand. Because I said Hallam was always telling me that it didn’t look so very awful you understandably assumed that he had given me the scar, not Isabella. And so I just agreed and played along. You see, I have always felt a little ashamed that Isabella could have done such a thing. Everyone assumed that it was an accident. But it wasn’t, it was quite deliberate.’

  ‘But you gave yourself away later in the conversation,’ said Rose. ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, only later when I replayed our conversation in my mind. That was when I went for a lie down yesterday evening. You said: “We were both only young children when it happened, she didn’t mean anything by it.”’

  ‘But whatever made you decide to run off to London in the middle of the night?’ asked Deacon. ‘What made you think that that man in the article could be Lambert?’

  ‘Two things really,’ answered Josephine. ‘One, as I have explained, finding out that Isabella was the author of those awful letters to Claude and knowing that she would stop at nothing if she could not get her way. But secondly because Claude hadn’t written to me. He wrote to me frequently and, of course, I was awaiting news from him as to when the arrangements were in place for us to elope. I hadn’t received a letter from him for quite some time despite my writing to him every day begging him to tell me what was wrong. And all the time he was dead, oh…’ Josephine broke down in tears. It was the probably the first time, thought Rose, that she had let herself grieve properly.

  ‘You have been worried all this time about Isabella, haven’t you?’ said Rose. ‘You didn’t know whether you should hate her and give her up to the police, or whether as her older sister your first duty was to protect her.’

  ‘Yes, and I loved her, you see.’ Josephine said, mopping her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Oh, of course, I knew she was dangerous and had to be stopped. I just couldn’t bring myself to be the one to give her up. I could never have lived with myself. And besides, you see, I wasn’t absolutely sure she was the murderer until I found out Hugh had been murdered. Even then I thought it might have been his servant until he too was killed. I thought he might have had an argument with Hugh or something.’

  ‘So you originally thought Lord Sneddon or Ricketts had killed Lambert?’ asked Deacon. ‘Because he, or more likely his servant, had stolen Isabella’s letters from him, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, I returned from London ready to confront Hugh. You can imagine what a shock it was for me to find out that he had been murdered. I didn’t know quite what to think. I wanted it so much not to have been Isabella. But I suppose even then I thought it likely that she had murdered them both. I was relieved when I found out Crabtree and Mrs Hodges suspected Hugh’s manservant.’

  ‘But you were determined not to give her away, even though your sudden departure to London looked jolly suspicious,’ said Rose.

  ‘I just wanted some time by myself to try and work everything out and decide what to do.’

  ‘What I can’t quite understand,’ said Deacon, ‘is why your sister considered it necessary to kill Sneddon. From what you’ve said, Miss Simpson, it doesn’t look as if Sneddon read more than one or two of the earlier letters. They may have been a bit over the top, contrived, I think you said, but relatively harmless in that she hadn’t resorted to threats in them. And it appears he never had any serious intention or interest in reading them. Besides he returned them to her. So why did she see the need to kill him?’

  ‘Because I don’t think he returned them all to her,’ said Rose slowly. ‘I think he held one back, the last most damning one. When I say Lord Sneddon, I don’t mean him, of course, I mean his servant. No, I think Lord Sneddon honestly thought that he had returned all the letters to Isabella.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Deacon, holding up a hand. ‘Let’s go through this methodically. We’ll start with Sneddon in the library. He summons Crabtree to get him another decanter of whisky. Crabtree, his own tongue loosened a bit by drink, tells him about the fate of the unfortunate housemaid, Mabel, laying the blame clearly at Sneddon’s door. Sneddon, in turn, has a Damascan conversion and is filled with remorse. That’s when you come on the scene, Miss Simpson, to get a book. Sneddon tells you about the maid and understandably, filled with disgust, you suggest that he try to make amends in whatever way he can. Whilst contemplating how he might do this, hot on your heels, Isabella appears. She pleads for him to return her letters. Much to her surprise, he agrees. A few minutes later, Sneddon’s so-called servant, Ricketts, arrives and is dispatched to get the letters and hand them over to Isabella, which he does. Right, what happens next, Miss Simpson?’

  ‘I would imagine that as soon as Isabella is given the letters she runs back to the safety of her room to go through them to make sure that she has all of them. To her horror, she finds that the last one, the most threatening and incriminating one in which she threatens to kill Claude Lambert, is missing.’

  ‘And while Isabella is doing that,’ said Deacon hurriedly, ‘you, Miss Atherton, take the opportunity to rush downstairs with your suitcase and let yourself out of the house by a side door.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ continued Rose, ‘Isabella is panicking about the missing letter. Instinctively she thinks Lord Sneddon has tried to double cross her. In this I think she was mistaken. As I’ve already said, I think Lord Sneddon genuinely thought he had returned all her letters to her. I think the guilty party was in fact Ricketts who, seeing a source of income suddenly being whipped away from him, decided to keep a letter back for his own blackmail purposes.’

  ‘So what happens next?’ enquired Sergeant Lane, speaking for the first time.

  ‘Well,’ said Rose, ‘Isabella’s first reaction is to confront Lord Sneddon. ‘Ricketts probably stayed with him a while so she has to wait for a few minutes to make sure he is alone, which would have done nothing to improve her temper. When she does at last confront him, he denies all knowledge of the missing letter. Unfortunately for him he does not see her as a danger and turns his back on her to sit down at the desk. His intention, I think, is to start writing a list of all the other people to whom he needs to make amends. Isabella, in a fit of anger, picks up the paper knife and stabs him in the back. She can’t have been thinking straight because, of course, that gets her no nearer to getting the letter back.’

  ‘She must have been tempted to search his room,’ said Deacon. ‘But presumably she was afraid of making a noise and waking the whole house.’

  ‘I think she probably was also in shock,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t think she intended to kill him. The next day she probably hoped to keep the blackmail business to herself, only I let slip what I had overheard. I think initially she panicked, but then she realised she could use it to her own advantage. By producing the letters it would seem then that she no longer had a motive for wishing Lord Sneddon dead. All she had to do was hope that Ricketts would hold his tongue about the missing letter. By then she must have been half expecting him to use it to blackmail her. And she knew he also had an additional hold over her now that Lord Sneddon was dead. It wasn’t just a
case of paying him to keep quiet about a romantic indiscretion. No, she would be paying him not to reveal that she was the murderer, or at the very least had a very strong motive for wanting Sneddon dead.’

  ‘So Ricketts had to go,’ said Deacon. ‘You know, I’ve just thought of something that’s explained now. When I asked Isabella whether she had thrown Lambert’s letters to her on the fire, she looked utterly bewildered. My question threw her because, of course, Lambert never wrote her any letters so she had no need to throw them onto the fire.’

  ‘And this all explains something else, sir,’ chipped in Sergeant Lane. ‘Do you remember how that Ricketts fellow looked awfully sly and gave us that crooked grin when we asked him who else Sneddon was blackmailing? He said how he wasn’t blackmailing anyone else, and we didn’t believe him one bit, do you remember, sir?’

  ‘I do, Lane, and I see he thought he had one over on us, because he was telling the truth. They weren’t blackmailing anyone else. What I don’t understand though is how Ricketts managed to get a note to Isabella to inform her that he had the missing letter. He would have had to in order to arrange a time and place to meet for him to return it to her in exchange for money. The other servants were jolly suspicious of him. There’s no way old Crabtree would have allowed him to roam around upstairs unchecked, and downstairs in the dining room or drawing room I imagine Isabella was always surrounded by people.’

  ‘Oh, I think I know how he did that,’ said Rose. ‘Somehow he managed to arrange with Crabtree that he help wait at table last night. He dropped a dish of vegetables when he was serving Isabella and a few of the carrots and beans fell onto her lap. I think it was a deliberate act on his part. In the eschewing confusion, he passed her a napkin so that she could dab at the mess. I remember she looked strangely at the napkin for a moment and then fled from the room. I think Ricketts passed a note to her in the napkin.’

  ‘And the silly fool went ahead and met her,’ sighed Lane. ‘Fellows like Ricketts never learn. That’s why they more often than not find themselves behind bars… or worse.’