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

by Benison, C. C.

  He turned back to the audience, unfurling the undamaged neckwear. “This tie.”

  “You’ve gimmicked the bag,” Hector spoke sharply. Bonzo’s head rose.

  “Yes, I have. One of these ties, the undamaged one, was found in the tunnel that runs between the Eggescombe Hall here and the stable block. It—”

  “Tunnel?” Bliss interrupted. “What tunnel?”

  “As the vicar said, Inspector, there’s a tunnel—”

  “I know that now. Why wasn’t I told before?”

  “You didn’t ask.” Hector bristled. “And I didn’t think of it. We might open it as an attraction, but in the meantime the only one in the family with any interest in it is my son.”

  “And he found the tie?” Blessing spoke from the back of the room.

  “Yes,” Tom replied. “It was tucked behind some fallen bricks.”

  “Then am I to presume it was hidden by Lord Morborne’s killer—someone who knew of the tunnel’s existence?”

  Tom could see the inspector surveying everyone in the room. “No, it was left in the tunnel by someone else,” he answered.

  “Who?”

  “I left it.” Anna spoke for the first time.

  “I thought I glimpsed a fair-haired woman in the Labyrinth early Sunday morning,” Tom explained.

  “You’re telling me this now?” Bliss’s eyes glinted ominously.

  “Forgive me, Inspector. I didn’t mean to withhold. I wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light or not. Anyway, it was Anna. I followed the dew path she made to Eggescombe’s service entrance.”

  “You were in the Labyrinth at the time of Lord Morborne’s death? You told me nothing of this in our earlier conversation.” Bliss turned his frustration onto Anna.

  “She’s been protecting me.” John took her hand.

  “You don’t look like you need protecting,” Lucinda purred.

  “Anna thought I might have been responsible for Oliver’s death,” John continued, ignoring Lucinda. “Didn’t you, darling Anna? It’s all right to say so. I can’t fault you. I would have thought the same thing. Inspector”—he preempted Bliss, who had opened his mouth to speak—“my family here all know about the time I spent in gaol for my brother’s death. What Anna has known for some few years, what you learned from her earlier, but what my family—apart from my brother and sister-in-law—doesn’t know is that there is good evidence that Oliver ended Boysie’s life.”

  “What!” Hector roared. “But—”

  “You can’t know what it’s like to realise you’ve spent your days in prison unwittingly protecting someone like Oliver,” John cut in. “Then to learn he’d run down Anna’s brother in the road.”

  “Really?” Dominic and Lucinda exclaimed as one.

  “You seem somewhat unsurprised by this revelation, Hector, my dear.” Marguerite—Tom could see—had been searching her son’s face.

  Hector’s cheeks flushed. “And you, Mummy, seem unsurprised by everything.”

  “I spend more than a fortnight a year at Eggescombe, Hector. One learns much.”

  “Hector, do you know something about David’s death?” John bent to stroke Bonzo, who had padded across the carpet towards the open doors.

  “Of course I bloody don’t!”

  John flicked a glance at Anna as he unbent and continued. “Anna knew how … how incandescent I was. I’d gone for a walk in the late afternoon to cool down, but then I came back to our cottage for a time. I suppose when Anna didn’t find me at home later—”

  “Saturday evening?” Blessing looked up from his notebook.

  “I left to work a shift at the Pilgrims,” Anna said, nodding. “I needed the distraction terribly. I was to have been here, to help Mrs. Gaunt, but I couldn’t bear to be anywhere near Morborne.”

  “That evening I saw him pass our cottage window in the village with a few other men.” John picked up the story. “It was getting dark, but Oliver was wearing that kufi hat you’d see in press photos. I didn’t stop to think: I dashed out and shouted his name. He didn’t recognise me at first, but perhaps something in my voice stopped him. He told the others to go on to the inn. Our … conversation was brief.”

  “Seeing you in Abbotswick after so many years must have rattled him.” Jane frowned.

  “I saw a flicker of caution in his eyes when he realised who I was, but only a flicker. Bombastic Oliver, of course: He was hardly going to be crushed by anything I, his disgraced little cousin, had to say. There were no preliminaries: I told him I was sharing my life with a woman whose brother had been killed only days earlier by a hit-and-run driver. ‘Pity,’ he said.”

  “ ‘Pity’? That’s all?” Jamie asked.

  “Short shrift, but I took it as admission. A blameless person would show at least a little concern or curiosity. But there was a look in his eye—I know it—another sort of wary flicker. The night was drawing in, but there was a glow from the cottage sitting room window and I could see an uneasiness in his face. He didn’t linger. You’d think he might—he hadn’t seen me in a dozen years, more.”

  “But,” Tom began, “if this … intelligence passed between the two of you, he must have realised that you also suspected the truth about your brother’s murderer. One leads inevitably to the other, does it not?” He paused, as John nodded. “I wonder what he planned to do. You and Anna were surely a threat to him now.”

  “He wasn’t so troubled that he didn’t go to some barmaid’s for the night,” Jamie remarked.

  “So.” Bliss cleared his throat noisily. “You, Mr. Allan, bogged off to this monastery in the pitch black of Dartmoor for a bit of a think—”

  “The light lingers in the summer. I had a torch. I know the moor well. I’ve walked it for years.”

  “I think we’ve established that there’s proof that John did as he says,” Tom reminded the DI.

  “Did Mr. Allan tell you he was leaving?” Bliss turned to Anna. “Leave a note? Send a text?”

  “John’s absences don’t surprise me, Inspector,” Anna replied.

  “But you didn’t know for certain his whereabouts between—what?—seven o’clock Saturday evening and about an hour ago.”

  “Which is why I unthinkingly snatched up that tie—that tie, the one Mr. Christmas is holding in his right hand—from the Labyrinth. I recognised the tie pattern. John had gone to Shrewsbury. I know it’s mad, John with his old school tie, but I had lost my mind in those moments. I was frightened that he had—” She paused and reiterated her encounter with Oliver that Sunday before dawn.

  Bliss and Blessing exchanged glances. Blessing spoke: “But once the boy—Max—came across the tie, this vital piece of evidence, so claimed, why wasn’t it passed immediately to—”

  “To you? Because we got rather caught up in events,” Tom responded. “The moor and such.”

  “Much is my fault, Inspector,” Jamie continued. “When I was shown the tie Max had found, I couldn’t fathom how it had got into the tunnel, when I’d seen it that very morning in our bedroom—my wife’s and mine—so by the time I returned from a recce of my bedroom, we were, as the vicar says, caught up in other events.”

  “You see,” Tom explained, “this tie—this undamaged tie.” He displayed it. “Was taken by Max on Saturday evening from Jamie’s bedroom. He hoped that I would be able to do a trick, but I was missing, as I said, a few necessary accoutrements and I was indisposed on the terrace.” Tom gestured to the open French doors through which richly filtered evening light poured. “Disappointed, Max returned indoors, here, into the drawing room and left the tie, as children do, thoughtlessly somewhere—on a chair, on a table …”

  “Then Max must have it tucked behind that Meissen bowl over there.” Marguerite gestured towards an ormolu cabinet on the other side of the room. “I noticed it after Oliver announced his engagement and thought it odd, as none of the men was dressed with any formality.”

  Tom glanced at her sharply. “Did you see anyone … pick it up? Put it i
n—?”

  “No. I would have said by now. And I should point out”—she turned her attention to Bliss—“that neither I nor Roberto was witness to this aborted magic trick on the terrace. So despite your … attentions to him, he had no involvement in Oliver’s death, did he?”

  “He claimed not.”

  “Claimed? You still believe otherwise.”

  “I understand that Mr. Sica—and you, Your Ladyship, more or less invited Lord Morborne into the Labyrinth to view the new statue.”

  “We didn’t quite schedule a dawn appointment, Inspector.”

  “Mr. Sica was witnessed crossing the south lawn sometime before sunrise Sunday morning.”

  “By a child.”

  “He told us, Your Ladyship, that he’d spent much of the night working in his studio, later taking a walk in the grounds, which contradicts your claim that he had been with you.” Bliss frowned. “And it appeared a red thread from a piece of his clothing had caught in the branches of the Labyrinth.”

  “The jacket had been worn by someone else.”

  “We know that now.” Bliss flicked a glance at Anna.

  “And surely final proof of Roberto’s innocence is that he’s dead.” Marguerite raised her head and surveyed the room, as if challenging anyone to contradict her.

  And now, but for the whisper of the breeze billowing the curtains on the French doors, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Hector lifted his eyes from his coffee cup to glance miserably at his mother, almost, Tom thought, as if he was seeking succor from her—she sat directly across from him—but she had turned her attention to a point above Tom’s head, to the Triumph of Death and its harsh, unforgiving imagery, her fine fingers tracing the curve of the brandy glass. Ignored, Hector turned his head to his guests, but no one met his glance, nor did anyone meet anyone else’s—except Madrun, who regarded Tom from behind her glasses with a barely suppressed avidity that he wished she would suppress. Dominic frowned in intense concentration, his long, elegant fingers pressing a cat-like rhythm into Lucinda’s shoulders until she, drawn from her own thoughts, winced and shrugged his hands off. Breaking the silence, she said:

  “I know this sounds like something out of a detective novel, but hasn’t it been established that the butler did it? I thought Gaunt had been trying to escape on the moor and you’d assembled us here simply for a jolly sort of wrap-up.” She appealed to Bliss, who chose the moment to leave the fringes of the drawing room and reclaim the fireplace and the centre of the enquiry, DS Blessing following, chair in hand.

  “As Dominic already told you, he saw Gaunt from the Gaze Tower sneaking around the stables this very afternoon, didn’t you, darling?” Lucinda tapped Dominic’s resting hand with her fingers as her eyes followed the moving figure. “Surely that—”

  But a disdainful glance from Bliss quelled her. “The other tie, Vicar,” he said, “the one found in Lord Kirkbride’s drawer, the one you cut up—”

  “Gaunt’s,” Tom replied, then amended, “in Gaunt’s possession, I should say. For many, many years. But once upon a time the tie was Oliver’s.”

  “Oliver’s?” Marguerite echoed. “But I don’t understand …”

  “Something sordid happened when Oliver was a student at Shrewsbury, Lady Fairhaven, though fewer than a handful of people ever knew about it—until this weekend.” Tom looked to DI Bliss. “Shall I or shall you?”

  With Bliss’s permission, Tom summarised events on The Wrekin more than a quarter century ago. “Of course,” he added, “Oliver’s role in this crime isn’t absolutely certain, without proof, yes, Inspector?”

  “But if Gaunt believed it so,” Marguerite interjected, “then surely you have a motive.”

  Tom demurred. “There may be proof. What none of you know—including you, Inspector—and what Gaunt told me earlier on the moor is this: Oliver used his school tie—and you must forgive me, Jamie, for asking you to wear the thing this evening—to silence Kimberly’s screams as … he raped her.

  “You see,” he continued, as one of the women—Anna—released a short, sharp cry, “he stuffed the tie in her mouth.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Am I to understand,” Jamie said after a moment, “that Gaunt kept the tie from this appalling incident on The Wrekin for all these years as a sort of … memento?”

  “I’m not sure memento is the word,” Tom responded. “Talisman? Fetish? Goad? I doubt he was thinking rationally at that moment. It was only later, quite a bit later, after certain scientific advances, that he realised it very well could contain DNA evidence. I’m not sure anyone’s noticed, but he’s been setting about here, this weekend, gathering other things that might contain Oliver’s imprint, a glass, laundry, a facial tissue, a cigar stub.”

  “I saw him collect that last one.” Lucinda pushed to the edge of her chair. “Well, there you have it, Inspector—Gaunt had a motive, he had the opportunity, and—now—the means. Have I got the traditional three correct? Yes? Case closed, then. May we leave this horrid place now? Sorry, Hector, darling, Eggescombe’s really quite lovely—in other circumstances.”

  “I think you’ve missed something entirely, Lucy,” Jamie cut in. “There are two ties. As Tom’s suggested, that tie—the cut-up one, the one I found in my drawer this afternoon—is the one Gaunt kept all these years. My tie is this one.” He held it up. “This is the one Max pulled from my drawer Saturday evening and left in this room. This one is the tie that … strangled Oliver. Isn’t that right, Tom?”

  Tom nodded. “I think the question is—” He paused as he might in the pulpit at St. Nicholas, to reclaim the congregation’s attention. “—I think the question is, how did the tie manage to travel from this drawing room to the Labyrinth between Saturday evening and the early hours of Sunday morning?”

  No one responded. Silence descended again, this time like a pall, the atmosphere now charged with unease and foreboding energy. Tom found his eyes drawn helplessly to Lucinda as she resettled herself in the chair she’d been keen to vacate a moment earlier. She reached up to her shoulder to touch Dominic’s hand, patting it gently, almost regretfully, and released a thin sigh. He watched her lips part, sure she was to give voice to his question, hoping that if she did, the contents might spare him humiliation, but Hector, as if unwilling to have anyone supersede him, interrupted:

  “Well, it wasn’t me walking about in the middle of the night with a silly bloody tie. I told you before, Inspector, that I was in bed with my wife.”

  “Hector, please don’t take this amiss,” Jane responded, “but I would swear I saw you outside on the lawn sometime in the night. You were wearing that white terry-cloth robe of yours.”

  “How dare you.”

  “Hector, we must get to the bottom of this, if we’re all going to carry on.” Jane shifted impatiently on her feet. “I was going to have to tell Inspector Bliss sooner or later anyway. How can I not? I know it doesn’t look good: You’ve never cared for Oliver and the two of you had been snapping at each other in the last days, I don’t know why. We had to watch the two of you hitting each other at twenty thousand feet in the air and—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Hector’s cup hit the saucer with a nasty crunch. “I couldn’t sleep. I went out for some air, that’s all. That’s all,” he repeated, turning his attention to Bliss. “I landed up on the terrace around … I don’t know the time—before dawn. I sat for a while and went back to my wife.”

  “Hector,” Lucinda drawled. “Don’t put on middle-class airs. You don’t share a bedroom with Georgie, never have. You sleep with Bonzo.”

  “Be quiet. I’ve had quite enough of you these last days.”

  “Hector, like my wife”—Jamie glanced over his whisky glass—“I don’t want you take this amiss, but this afternoon you were late for our meeting in your office and you arrived … well, I can only describe your state as ‘shambolic.’ ”

  Lord Fairhaven was silent for the beat of a heart before his face filled with b
lood. He sputtered: “Are you accusing me of … what? what was it? electrocuting that … that …”

  “Roberto is his name, Hector.” Marguerite cut in with words as icy as her stare. “Was, rather. And he was a splendid artist with a promising future.”

  “Mummy, for God’s sake! I’m your son. I didn’t particularly care for … Roberto.” He battled a frown. “But who you choose to—”

  “That’s not the point, Hector,” Marguerite snapped. “I think it’s fairly obvious that Roberto might have seen something, witnessed something, heaven knows what, in his night wanderings and—”

  “Well, he didn’t bloody see me!”

  “Lord Fairhaven.” Bliss exercised a neutral tone. “Would you care to account for your movements this afternoon.”

  Hector exploded. “I was doing exactly what I told James and Jane and Mr. Christmas I was doing. I missed my morning run, so I thought I’d take one after lunch.”

  “In the heat of the day?” Bliss’s tone was sceptical.

  “Have you noted Eggescombe’s many shade trees, Inspector?”

  Bliss grunted as Blessing noisily turned a page in his notebook.

  “You didn’t,” Tom interjected, “miss your morning run Sunday, however.”

  “My lord?” Bliss frowned as Hector shot Tom a daggered gaze.

  “Then let me be completely frank about Sunday morning: I couldn’t get back to sleep. I went out for some air. I returned to my bedroom. I still couldn’t sleep. I gave up. I went for a run. I came back. Had a shower. Then found Jane at my door with unexpected news. There you have it.”

  “And why weren’t you frank about your movements earlier?”

  “I forgot … well, it didn’t seem important. I didn’t think anyone had seen me anyway.”

  “Evidently someone had, my lord.”

  “Mrs. Gaunt.”

  “Who kept it to herself.”

  “I expect the Gaunts take the non-disclosure clause of their contract seriously,” Hector responded airily.