Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas)

by Benison, C. C.

  “The word is also generic, Inspector. It can refer to any adult female.”

  “Yes,” Bliss conceded blandly, “that’s true. But I need to consider any information given me. Lord Morborne left Miss Sclanders’s cottage in the direction of Eggescombe Park and he was found in the Eggescombe Park’s Labyrinth. I’m sure of the six women present at Eggescombe—and present here this afternoon—all of you are ladies.” He smiled thinly. “But four of you are Ladies, you understand.” He nodded to each in turn. “Dowager Lady Fairhaven, Lady Fairhaven, Lady Kirkbride, and you, Lady Lucinda.”

  “But that’s nonsense! What would my wife, my mother …” Hector spluttered. “… be doing wandering around the grounds in the middle of the night?”

  “I don’t know, my lord. That’s what I would like to find out.”

  “Rendezvous? The word is outrageous! These woman are family, for God’s sake!”

  “Rendezvous does not mean ‘assignation,’ ” Blessing muttered into his pad, but Hector heard him:

  “I should bloody hope it doesn’t!”

  Tom exchanged a glance with Jane. He sensed they shared a thought born of an earlier discussion: There were five, not four, Ladies at Eggescombe.

  “Inspector,” Tom began, mulling the words over in his mind so as not to unnecessarily shine a light on anyone, “Lord Morborne’s remark about having a rendezvous with a lady may have another meaning—and it may explain why he was in the Labyrinth at such an early hour. You’ve noticed, I’m sure, the sculpture at the Labyrinth’s centre. It’s the Virgin Mary, of course. The Virgin is sometimes referred to as the Lady. We have Lady chapels in our churches, for instance. Lord Morborne’s remark may simply have been ironic.”

  Bliss appeared to digest this, while Blessing looked up from his pad and asked, “But why rendezvous with this ‘lady’ at all? And why at that particular hour?”

  Tom not only felt Jane’s eyes upon him, but sensed a sharpened interest in the others. Keeping his focus on Blessing, whose brow was beginning a familiar furrowing, he said truthfully—for the words were true: “I really couldn’t say.”

  Blessing opened his mouth as if to pursue another enquiry, but Bliss, shifting his stance, interrupted with a bark: “Well, statues can’t shift themselves, so I’m afraid I must ask you all—lords, ladies, and gentlemen—about your movements between the hours of midnight and six this morning.”

  “What movements, Inspector?” Hector snapped. “We were all asleep, of course.”

  “None of you was disturbed by the thunder and lightning on the moor? Lord Morborne was. PC Widger, apparently, too, and a number of others in Abbotswick. It would have been the talk of the village but for …” Bliss cleared his throat.

  “The noise and light woke me,” Jane answered. “I’m not sure of the time. I went to the window, thinking I should pull the window shut against any rain, but I saw nothing worth noting, other than the grounds and gardens suddenly flashing with light.”

  “I slept through it,” Jamie said. “Jump days are usually long days. They tend to take it out of one.”

  “My husband would sleep through Armageddon,” Jane added.

  “I’m the same as Jamie,” Hector said. “Slept like a top.”

  “I take medication to sleep, Detective Inspector.” Georgina looked grave. “I wasn’t aware of any storm. Or anything else, for that matter.”

  “No one awoke?” Bliss’s tone was testy. “No one, but for Lady Kirkbride, went to the window to look out? No one nipped down to the kitchen to get a cup of cocoa to get them back to sleep and ran into someone in a corridor or on the stairs. No one—”

  “Are you suggesting that someone from this household is responsible for Oliver’s death?”

  “No, my—”

  “Because surely the solution is that someone followed Oliver from the village in the early hours of the morning, someone with some … animus against him—and God knows he’s offended enough people in his life—and … well, you know …”

  “My lord, I am conducting an investigation and am making no accusations. I am only interested at this time in people’s possible movements during the night. Those people could be here in the Hall or over in the village.”

  “Well, I was with my wife,” Hector continued gruffly. “I heard nothing until Jane knocked me up about six thirtyish. I had just come out of the shower.”

  “I was with mine,” Jamie added.

  “Your Ladyship?” Bliss turned to Lucinda.

  Tom’s eyes rose, above Bliss’s head, to the massive overmantel and its elaborate alabaster carving of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. He waited with dread while Lucinda hesitated over her answer. Was she delaying to taunt him?

  “Your Ladyship?” Bliss prompted.

  “I was with Dominic.”

  Blessing looked up from his notebook, instantly alert. “The entire night?”

  “I joined my brother,” Lucinda replied with hauteur, “for conversation after the party and fell asleep on the daybed in his room. I’m not sure how well I slept—I had drunk a little more than I should—and perhaps the thunder did disturb me. I can’t recall.”

  “I slept through it all,” Dominic said.

  “Lady Fairhaven?” Bliss turned to Marguerite.

  “I’m at the dower house, Inspector, some distance from here.” She favoured him with a charming smile. “So I can’t really help you. And Mr. Sica was with me.”

  Her tone, her emphasis on the final word, suggested a relationship less sexual and more maternal—Tom watched both Bliss and Blessing’s stony features struggle to suppress bemusement—and designed to nobble further enquiry. Surely, he thought, Marve was being economical with the truth. He recalled their freighted exchange in the stable block: Marve had been keen to remind Roberto he had not been working in his studio all night. Jane had heard this exchange, too. He could see her regarding the dowager countess with frank curiosity. Indeed, everyone regarded Marguerite with some varied emotion—distaste, admiration, amusement.

  “You’re an artist, I understand,” Bliss addressed Roberto.

  “A sculptor,” he replied tonelessly. “Lady Fairhaven is my patron.”

  Bliss blinked. Tom suspected the inspector found the descriptor little clarifying. He seemed to heave a world-weary sigh as he turned to Gaunt.

  “The Gatehouse—”

  “We heard and saw nothing, Inspector,” Gaunt was quick to reply. He glanced past the draw-table to his wife.

  “You rise early, yes?” Bliss pressed. “I’m sure you have things to ready before the household gets up.”

  “Indeed,” Gaunt replied, “Mrs. Gaunt gets up before I do, as she has the morning meal to prepare and usually makes a start on dishes for other meals.”

  “Then, Mrs. Gaunt”—Blessing took up the enquiry—“you would have walked near to the Labyrinth early this morning on your way here. About what time?”

  “About five thirty.”

  “Still fairly dark.”

  “I saw nothing nor heard anything out of the ordinary.” Ellen trained her eyes on the detective sergeant.

  Startled, Tom wondered at her choice of words, supposing out of the ordinary precluded mentioning Hector’s very ordinary early-morning run.

  “Lord Morborne would—presumably—have walked through the Gatehouse gate on his return to Eggescombe,” Blessing continued.

  “Sergeant,” Hector said with a hint of asperity, “Gaunt has said he and Mrs. Gaunt saw and heard nothing.”

  Bliss stepped in. “Mrs. Prowse?”

  Tom regarded his housekeeper. Madrun ran a smoothing hand over her skirt and adjusted her spectacles on the bridge of her nose, as if she were preparing for a longish disquisition to a rapt audience. “Well, Detective Inspector, as it happens, I was troubled by noises in the night. Thunder, of course, but then I was awoken by some rather loud whistling.”

  “That had to be Olly,” Jamie interrupted. “He’s a champion whistler. Usually sort of jaunty and vaguely baro
que sounding.”

  “Yes. That’s it precisely!”

  “Never knew what the tune was. He always seemed to whistle it when he’d completed something to his satisfaction.”

  “James, really!” Georgina frowned.

  “What? What have I said?”

  “Jamie,” Jane said, “consider where Oliver had been earlier.”

  “Sorry, Georgie, I didn’t intend—”

  “I always thought,” Lucinda interposed, “Olly whistled when he was looking forwards to something.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Hector demanded.

  “A rendezvous with a lady?” Lucinda’s tone was arch.

  Bliss ignored Lucinda. “Can you recall what time you heard the whistling, Mrs. Prowse?”

  Madrun reflected. “No, I can’t. Not precisely, no. I neglected to bring my travel clock and I left my watch on the dressing table. After the thunder, as I said, but before dawn, though the sky was beginning to lighten a bit. I believe. Then I heard my hosts rise—my bedroom is above theirs—though I may have fallen back to sleep in between.”

  Bliss appeared to absorb this as Blessing continued with his scribbling. Tom sensed a fruitlessness to this strand of the enquiry. It had been dark. Everyone had been in his or her bed—or at least each could make such claim, because each had an ally—a spouse, a lover, a sibling. Lucinda had been economical with the truth. So, too, Tom suspected, had Marguerite. Madrun had no one to vouch for her, but she had been forthright with her pinch of information. He had no one to vouch for him, though. And yet he did, for at least a part of the night. But what part and how large? He sensed Bliss awakening from his brief reverie, about to turn his large head to him, the last of those assembled in the great hall to be questioned about the night.

  He had once been in an automobile accident with his mother Kate, who, as an American, never really accommodated herself to the narrow lanes and congestion of the small island she made her home. He had been fourteen, Kate speeding him to a football match, when abruptly the car ahead on the A227 stopped—to avoid hitting a dog, it turned out. Kate had taken her eyes off the road in the few seconds it took to light her fag off the lighter of their Volvo. But Tom, staring through the windscreen, could only watch helplessly as the hood sped relentlessly forwards to the inevitable collision. Long after, his memory was not of screaming tires and crushing metal, but of the remarkable sense of time slowing, as in a film, and of himself, growing strangely detached, as the back of the car ahead filled his vision. Only on impact did time snap back and trigger alarm. He felt like that now as he watched Bliss’s heavy lids slide up his eyes and his head slowly begin an arc that would shift his attention to him, Tom.

  And now the thoughts followed on one another like the waves of an incoming tide: his rebuke to Lucinda by the pool, clearly obviated, to be forthright with the police, his felt need to reclaim forthrightness, by contradicting her—and, oh, what that would mean: how the fact of the matter would startle everyone, surprise some, appall a few—and shame him, very much, before these not unkind people, before his housekeeper, the vigilant minder of his days, and spread like a stain to touch his daughter, the village, the Church in ways predictable and unpredictable, dreadful to contemplate. He met Bliss’s disinterested gaze, his slightly red-rimmed, grey eyes—not enough sleep, Detective Inspector?—and then, as if out of a dream, a bell sounded and sounded again, urgently, demandingly, and that gaze veered, deflected towards the source of this irritant. It was Blessing’s phone. A trespasser had been apprehended by the kitchen garden claiming to have vital and urgent information about Lord Morborne’s death. Bliss excused himself.

  There is a God and, Tom thought with provisional gratitude, He uses mobile telephones His wonders to perform.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I might as well be playing with a flamingo,” Tom remarked to Jane as he hobbled a few steps across the croquet lawn with his mallet. “And that,” he gestured to his orange ball, which had failed to clear the wicket, “might as well be a hedgehog.”

  “At least it’s not crawling away.”

  “Our team will lose with me playing.”

  “Your daughter is very good.” They both looked up the sun-dappled lawn to Miranda, who was studying Max as he stalked his blue ball, mallet in hand.

  “We found a wonderful old croquet set under the stairs at the vicarage last summer, so croquet has become all the rage at ours. Miranda has grown quite skilled at it.” He paused as Max aligned his feet before his ball and considered the scene, the manicured lawn, the neatly trimmed boundary hedge, the undulating roof of Eggescombe Hall peeking above the trees. “It’s lovely to have a garden where she can play games. In Bristol, our back garden was a postage stamp.”

  “Oh, bad luck,” Jane murmured as Maximillian’s blue ball stalled in front of the wicket.

  “Worse luck,” Tom added in a lower voice after a moment when Miranda’s red ball, a dead cert to bash Max’s and push on through the wicket, tiddled feebly across the short grass to a sad halt an inch in front of the blue ball. “She seems to have gone off her game suddenly.”

  “Dominic!” Lucinda called across the lawn, diverting their attention to the silhouetted figure under a tree conversing with Gaunt, who had earlier arrived with a drinks trolley. “Your turn.”

  Dominic waved a dismissive hand and continued talking to Gaunt as the latter shook a cocktail shaker.

  “I’m told the Gaunts were once staff to Dominic’s father,” Tom said in a low voice as they waited. He glanced at Marguerite in a wicker sun chair some few feet away from Dominic and Gaunt. She appeared to be sleeping behind a pair of sunglasses.

  Jane swung her mallet idly. “Yes, Georgie mentioned that to me. I think she was a little reluctant to employ them because of their association with the family during an unhappier time, but, well, you know the old saw …”

  “Yes—It’s so hard to find good help these days.”

  “Don’t laugh. It is sometimes. But the Gaunts had excellent references from the Arouzis and of course with Hector’s previous staff having run off to Malta with their lottery winnings, he and Georgie were pretty much up against it.” Jane stopped in her mallet swinging. “Tom?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking about something else: DI Bliss’s remark that Oliver’s mobile is missing.”

  “I’d been having the same thought: If Oliver’s phone has gone walkabout, and if Hector really did remove something from Oliver’s pockets this morning, as I suspect he did, then isn’t it logical that Hector took his phone? Unless Oliver left it at that barmaid’s cottage.”

  “You haven’t spoken about this to the police yet?”

  “No, as I said before, I’d prefer to have a quiet word with Hector first. At least now I’ve a better idea what he may have taken.”

  “Hector’s in hot water anyway, I think.” Jane glanced over the croquet lawn towards Dominic. “Well, I suppose it would have come out before very long in any case. Someone would have mentioned it.”

  “Most likely,” Tom murmured, though he thought Dominic needn’t have made quite such a show of it—It being a video clip of Hector and Oliver’s sky-high punch-up, which had slipped through the sluice gates of social media with the usual unseemly haste. When DI Bliss had exited to attend to the matter of the demanding intruder, Blessing had remained, a damper to ordinary conversation. In the awkward pause, Dominic had pulled his mobile from his pocket, and Tom had watched his face shift from detachment to curiosity to amusement as his fingers danced over the screen.

  “Look at this, Hector,” he’d said, passing the instrument, “you’ve come a cropper on YouTube. Thirty thousand views and it’s not yet five in the afternoon.”

  Lord Fairhaven’s face suffused with blood and his nostrils flared as his eyes held steady to the instrument, provoking his wife to a tentative enquiry as to his health.

  “This is an outrage!” Hector thrust the phone back into Dominic’s hands. “It’s CCTV—clo
sed-circuit television. How could it possibly—”

  “Easy enough to copy and upload, Hector,” Dominic said with a shrug. “Hector and Olly’s bout of fisticuffs up there,” he announced to everyone, gesturing with his thumb, “is now online.”

  “You needn’t take quite so much pleasure in it, Dominic,” Jamie said.

  “I am not taking pleasure.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m simply preparing Hector for the coming brouhaha. It will be on television next. Are you still intending to stand for Parliament, Hector?”

  “Perhaps you can have it pulled off the Internet somehow,” Jamie addressed Hector, who appeared mute with anger.

  “Not bloody likely,” Dominic muttered as everyone, as if pulled by invisible strings, turned to DS Blessing to gauge his reaction to this episode. He looked up from his notebook, as if the same string had yanked at him. The Grand Guignol smile he cast them actually softened his homeliness.

  “And what were Your Lordships fighting about?” he asked.

  “None of your bloody business,” Hector snarled.

  But Tom thought now, as they waited for the match to resume, it very well was their bloody business.

  “Dominic,” Lucinda called again.

  “Play through!”

  “You can’t ‘play through’ in croquet! Where did he get ‘play through’?” Lucinda appealed to Tom and Jane. She had a mallet in one hand and a glass of something pink in the other. “This isn’t golf!”

  “You hit it then.”

  “My dear chap, that is not on,” Max shouted.

  Dominic stepped quickly across the lawn, mallet in hand. Using a quick side-style swing, he sent his black ball rocketing towards the boundary hedge before returning to Gaunt, who was pouring some liquid into a tall glass.

  “Perhaps we stand a chance after all,” Tom remarked to Jane, as Max groaned in disgust. “Your turn.”

  He watched Lady Kirkbride position her mallet and send her yellow ball trailing over the short grass, hitting Lucinda’s green ball with a satisfying click, sending them both scooting through the wicket.