Decorated to Death

by Dean James

  “No help for it Sir Giles,” Robin replied. “We have to check out any possible lead, no matter how slender. At least now we can rule out something.”

  “May I offer you something to drink? Whisky and soda? Or some tea?” Giles asked, quite the solicitous host.

  “Thank you, but no,” Robin said. “The SOCOs are packing up, and soon as they’re done, we’re calling it a night. But we’ll be back in the morning.”

  “Yes, of course,” Giles said. “The sooner this is resolved, the better.”

  “Good night then, Sir Giles, Simon,” Robin said, moving away from the fire toward the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just see how the pack-up is going. We’ll soon be out of your way... for the evening, at least.”

  “Good night, Robin,” I said, overlaid by Giles’s own “Good night, Chase.”

  When the door had closed behind Robin, Giles resumed his stance before the fire. “This is bloody impossible, Simon. I’d like to get these people out of my home, but I suppose I’m stuck with them until this is all resolved.”

  “Would you mind if I used your phone for a call to London?” I had been only half-listening to Giles, as I pondered my next step in the investigation.

  “What? Go ahead, Simon. But why do you want to call someone in London right now?”

  I smiled. “I’m in search of information, Giles, and I know just the chap in London who can get it for me. I’ve made use of his services before, and he’s extremely efficient.” There was no need to tell Giles that my London researcher was a fellow vampire who just happened to play private detective from time to time.

  “Be my guest,” Giles said, gesturing toward the phone on his desk.

  One of my more useful talents is the ability to remember telephone numbers, even those I seldom used, and I punched in Gosling’s number. There was a possibility he might be out on a case, but tonight my luck held. He answered on the third ring.

  I identified myself, went through the usual pleasantries, then quickly told Gosling what I wanted. “Righty-ho, Simon,” was all he said. He was phlegmatic, Gosling was. Never said more than was necessary, like one of the laconic private eyes from fiction upon which he modeled himself.

  Replacing the receiver in its cradle, I smiled at Giles, who was looking rather puzzled. “Why are you so curious about Jessamy, Simon? And why do you have this chappie checking birth and marriage records?”

  “A slender possibility, Giles,” I said. “It most likely will come to nothing, but if there’s a connection between Jessamy and Zeke Harwood, that could be it.”

  “You mean she might have been married to him?”

  “That, or perhaps she bore a child by him. Either or both, even.”

  “That’s incredibly far-fetched, Simon.”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but we are rather clutching at straws at the moment, aren’t we?”

  “Then we must hope that this Gosling fellow finds something useful, mustn’t we?” Giles grinned, finally moving away from the fire.

  I stood. “Now, Giles, before I head for home, I do have one request. Would you mind going with me up to your bedroom?”

  “Why, Simon,” Giles laughed, “I thought you’d never ask. I’d be delighted.” He reached for my hand.

  “That’s not what I meant, Giles,” I said, squeezing his hand before releasing it. “Sorry to dash your hopes, but I have investigating on my mind, nothing else.”

  “I might have known,” Giles said, more mildly than I might have expected. “Very well, then, come along.”

  I followed him out of the library and up the stairs to the first floor. I trod down the corridor alongside him. “Where are your guests? All in their rooms?”

  “As far as I know, yes,” Giles said. “Did you want to speak with any of them?”

  “No, not now,” I said, “but I’d rather that they not see us just now.”

  Giles shook his head and continued down the hall. About two-thirds of the way down, the corridor turned at a very slight angle. So slight, in fact, that it was barely noticeable. But, if I had figured rightly, the angle was just large enough to affect one’s vision, if one were standing near the end of the corridor.

  We had reached the door to Giles’s bedroom, and he opened it and led the way inside. I stopped just inside the door and laid a hand on Giles’s arm. “Now, Giles, tell me. When you and Cliff were together last night, were you here in the bedroom? Or were you in the sitting room next door?”

  “We were in the sitting room,” Giles said. “That’s where I was reading when Cliff came and wanted to talk to me. Why?”

  “Then let’s go next door, into the sitting room. I’ll answer your questions in a moment, I promise.”

  Giles’s sitting room was the last chamber on this side of the corridor, and there was a connecting door between it and his bedroom. We entered the sitting room through this door, and I went to the door that opened into the corridor. Motioning for Giles to join me, I opened the door and stepped just outside, into the corridor.

  “Was the lighting in the corridor last night at the same level as now?”

  Giles peered around me, into the hall. “Yes, at night, when we have guests, the lights are kept at half-power like this.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. I stood and gazed down the hall. My eyesight is better than that of most humans, and I can see better in the dark than they can. I focused on the doors on the other side of the corridor, following them down, one by one, until I had reached the final door, near the stairs.

  “That last door there, on the other side—that’s the door to the master bedroom, isn’t it?”

  Again, Giles peered around me. “Yes, that’s it.”

  “And the next door after that?”

  “That’s the bathroom. And the next one is the sitting room. There are connecting doors from the master bedroom to the bathroom to the sitting room.”

  “Just as I thought.”

  “And then the next room after that is the room occupied by Mrs. Rhys-Morgan.”

  “And is there a connecting door between her room and the sitting room?”

  “Actually, there is,” Giles said, “though usually it’s kept locked.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “did Harwood insist that Mrs. Rhys-Morgan be placed in the room next to him? And did he know that the rooms were connected?”

  “He did ask that she be next to him,” Giles said, after thinking about it for a moment. “He didn’t inquire about connecting doors, as far as I’m aware, though he would certainly have discovered their existence pretty quickly.”

  “Good enough,” I said. “Now trade places with me. I want to try a little experiment.”

  We changed places, and Giles stood in the doorway and faced down the hall, toward the stairs.

  “Tell me, in this lighting, if a person were to come out of one of those last two or three rooms, could you be sure which one it was?”

  Giles squinted, peering down the hallway. “Possibly,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just a theory I’m working on,” I said, pulling him back inside the sitting room and closing the door softly behind us. “Do me a favor, Giles. In the morning, when you have a moment to speak with Cliff privately, get him to do what we just did, and ask him the same question. Ask him if he can be certain which door it was he saw Piers Limpley coming out of.” I paused. “And make sure no one sees you doing this, and make sure Cliff doesn’t tell anyone.”

  “Ah,” Giles said. “I see where you’re going with this.”

  “It’s one possibility,” I said. “It’s not much evidence, unfortunately, but it could be quite suggestive. Call me in the morning as soon as you’ve had a chance to do as I’ve asked.”

  “Will do,” Giles said. “Now, Simon, before you go...” He pulled me close to him, and I did not resist.

  The resulting kiss was quite enjoyable, and I smiled all the way home through the unrelenting rain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I had m
uch on my mind that evening, not only the murder of Zeke Harwood, but also the machinations of the adversary I had dubbed Nemesis. I had the glimmerings of a solution to the murder, but I still had not decided how to deal with Mrs. Wickham.

  I considered the actions of Nemesis in bribing or in some other way suborning Violet Glubb to do the dirty work of switching my pills for duds. What had been the point of this little exercise in revenge? Had she intended to do serious harm?

  I thought not. She would have known that sooner or later, I would have sussed out the fact that something was wrong with the pills and taken steps to correct the problem. Before I had done that however, I might have found myself in a terribly embarrassing situation. I imagined myself having to explain to Giles or Robin or, heaven forfend, Jessamy Cholmondley-Pease, just why I was endeavoring to bite one of them on the neck.

  No, I decided, Nemesis hadn’t intended serious harm. Rather, I thought she had aimed to disconcert and embarrass me more than anything else. Had she intended some kind of permanent damage, she would have chosen something less covert and more decisive.

  She had certainly succeeded in disconcerting me. She had also put me on alert. I would be far more vigilant from now on, because I doubted that this would be the only time she attempted to annoy me. Whether she would at some point escalate her campaign into something more serious, I had no way of knowing at the moment. She would bear watching.

  In the meantime, though, what would I do to answer what amounted to a practical joke? I thought about it for a moment and then an appropriate response came to me. Not only had Nemesis had my pills switched, she had also, I was convinced, leaked word of my previous adventures in sleuthing to the press.

  In that case, turnabout was fair play. She would be no more keen to face the scrutiny of the press than I was, and perhaps the best way to answer her little campaign of embarrassment would be to send the press to her own doorstep.

  I smiled again. Yes, that was it. An anonymous tip to several of the leading scandal sheets to the effect that the slain decorator had a secret mistress in Abingdon. That would do it. They would annoy her for a day or two, and the score would be even for the moment. No doubt she would retaliate at some point in the future, but now that I was on my guard, I would be more prepared to thwart any further attempts on her part. That decided, I turned my mind back to the murder of Zeke Harwood. I had an idea, rather starting at first how it was done, and by whom. But before I could hope to prove my theory, I needed to answer several questions. I also thought it might be helpful to map out the events before and after the murder apparently took place. Accordingly, I turned on the computer and began creating a timetable of events.

  Night of the Murder

  7:20 P.M.—Moira Rhys-Morgan speaks to Harwood in his room

  7:25 P.M.—Piers Limpley speaks to Harwood in his room / Lady Prunella overhears the conversation

  7:26 p.m.—Lady Prunella hides in bedroom across the hall

  7:28 p.m.—Piers crosses the hall to his room / Harwood goes downstairs to the drawing room

  7:32 P.M.—Lady Prunella enters the master bedroom, goes down the secret staircase, and watches Harwood for three to four minutes

  7:36 p.m.—Lady Prunella comes out of the secret staircase and confronts Harwood

  7:40 p.m.—Dittany Harwood receives phone call from flatmate in London / conversation ends at roughly 7:55 p.m.

  7:40 P.M.—Piers Limpley and Moira Rhys-Morgan are together in Mrs. Rhys-Morgan’s room until 7:55 P.M.

  7:42 p.m.—Lady Prunella leaves Harwood in the draw-ing room / she is seen by someone who reports this anonymously to the police

  7:43 p.m.—Lady Prunella is in the library, drinking brandy / she remains in the library until others join her later

  7:55 p.m.—Cliff Weatherstone sees Piers Limpley coming out of Mrs. Rhys-Morgan’s room / Cliff has been with Giles in Giles’s sitting room

  7:58 p.m.—Giles and Cliff Weatherstone arrive in the library

  7:59 p.m.—Moira Rhys-Morgan arrives in the library

  8:03 P.M.—Dittany Harwood and Piers Limpley arrive in the library

  8:08/8:10 P.M.—I arrive at Blitherington Hall and proceed to the library

  8:30 P.M.—Giles wonders where Harwood is

  8:35/8:37 P.M.—drawing room door is opened / body of Harwood is discovered

  8:40 P.M.—police are summoned

  8:47 P.M.—PC Plodd arrives / DI Chase and DS Harper arrive a few minutes later, followed by the SOCO team

  I saved the document, then printed it. I sat at my desk and read through my timetable. It was as accurate as I could make it, though there was one item conspicuous by its absence—the actual murder.

  There were two periods of time during which the murder could have taken place. The first was between 7:42 P.M., the time when Lady Prunella had left Harwood alive in the drawing room, and 8:03 P.M., when Dittany Harwood and Piers Limpley had arrived in the library. The second was between 8:03 P.M., the time by which everyone was in the library—excluding me, of course— and 8:35 P.M., when we discovered the body en masse.

  If the murder had occurred during the second time period, it meant that someone else had killed Harwood. Jessamy Cholmondley-Pease was a possibility, though we had as yet no known motive for her to have committed murder. Perhaps my chap in London would turn up something useful in that regard.

  If, however, the murder had taken place during that first time period, there were several possibilities. Either Dittany Harwood had done it and had somehow rigged an alibi, or Piers Limpley or Moira Rhys-Morgan had done it, one providing an alibi for the other. Or perhaps they had acted together. Any of the three of them could have gone down the secret staircase and sneaked up behind Harwood, striking him on the head.

  Dittany and Piers might have done it together as well, I realized. They had arrived in the library together, and no one had seen from whence they had come. They might have come from the drawing room rather than from upstairs. As I had reasoned earlier, the murderer—or murderers, as the case might be—could have taken the key to the drawing room from Harwood, let himself or themselves out of the room, then replaced the key after we discovered the body. In those first confused moments after the discovery, one of them could easily have slipped the key back into Harwood’s pocket under cover of examining the body for signs of life.

  It seemed devilishly convoluted. I wondered how much of it had been planned beforehand, or if it had all been spur-of-the-moment, the killer simply making use of the circumstances that presented themselves. Either way, it took nerve and daring. Which of the suspects possessed the necessary qualities?

  If only the police could determine what the killer had used as weapons. That was also an odd feature of the case, that at least two different weapons had been used. I also had an idea about that, and how the killer might have hidden the weapons. I could have rung Robin then and got him onto it, but the poor man deserved at least this night’s rest. It could keep until the morning.

  Besides, I reflected, by the time I called Robin to share my idea with him, I might have other information that could help us zero in on a suspect.

  I had not been a patient person when I was alive, and now that I was dead, I was just as impatient as before. I hated waiting. I was itching to have this thing resolved, to see whether I was right about my solution to Harwood’s murder.

  It was still too early, however, for Gosling to have dug up the information I had requested him to find. There wasn’t much I could do until then.

  I set aside the timetable and concentrated on my other problem, my plan for getting back at Nemesis. I turned again to the computer, this time using it to connect to the Internet in order to track down the phone numbers to the scandal sheets I wanted to call.

  Within minutes I had the numbers I needed, and I started dialing.

  It didn’t take long to set my little plan into motion. Disguising my voice by assuming a posh British accent, I spun a lurid tale of sordid weekends of sex
and depravity, long enjoyed by Zeke Harwood and the mysterious Mrs. Wickham of Abingdon. I had to “out” Harwood as a straight man playing gay for the sake of publicity, and that took a bit of talking, but by the time I had rung off from the third of the papers I called, I was satisfied that I had convinced them to follow up my lead.

  Now I had to wait. I had done all I could for the moment, until I heard back from Gosling and until the rest of the world was up and about again.

  I slept for about three hours, the most sleep I usually need in any period of twenty-four hours, then sat back down at the computer to write. Energized by the thought that the case would soon be resolved, I worked happily on the latest opus until about eight-thirty the next morning.

  Today was Friday, and Violet Glubb would be reporting for work at Laurel Cottage in half an hour. I went upstairs to dress appropriately for the day. I had to be ready, because I was sure that things would start happening quickly once I heard back from Gosling in London.

  A couple of minutes after nine, I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and admitted Violet.

  “Good morning, Vi,” I said, squinting against the sun. The rain had finally ceased, and we had the promise of a decent fall day. I wouldn’t have minded more clouds in the sky, but no doubt they would soon return.

  “Morning, Mr. Kayjay. How’s tricks this morning?” Vi asked cheerfully, unwinding a gaudy scarf from around her neck, in preparation for removing her coat.

  “Funny you should use that word, Vi,” I said, regarding her unsmilingly.

  “Why, whatever do you mean, Mr. Kayjay?” Vi paused in the act of taking off her coat. “Is summat the matter?”

  “Come into the sitting room with me,” I said, turning away.

  She followed me into the room and sat in the chair I indicated, the uncomfortable one. Perched on the edge of the chair, she watched me, her hands playing with the scarf in her lap. Her eyes grew round as she waited for me to speak, and I purposely held off saying anything for a full minute.

  “Tell me, Vi, did Mrs. Wickham pay you to switch my pills? Or did she threaten you in some way?”