by Tessa Arlen
“Does the coroner believe that the garden spade dug into the earth next to where Captain Bray was lying might have been used as a weapon?”
His wiry brows shot up at her mentioning a weapon—she thought he looked rather like a startled elderly hare. “The coroner said the spade was not the murder weapon.”
“Oh, I see, and why is that?”
“What? Um, because the head of the spade is a flat instrument and the weapon used to kill Captain Bray was narrow; most likely a length of lead piping, or something of a similar gauge.” Having indulged her vicarious interest in the murder weapon, he nodded to the window as he said, “Your rose garden still looks quite splendid, Lady Montfort. It must be the fine weather we are having,” as if hoping to distract her from the ugly topic of murder weapons.
“Thank you, Colonel, the rose garden is such hard work but I believe that it is worth the effort to be thorough when weeding.” Unlike your wretched investigation. “I don’t suppose your policemen found any lead pipe lying around the kitchen garden, did they?” She laughed to dispel some of the tension.
“No, I am afraid not, Lady Montfort, my men searched the garden and the surrounding area very thoroughly. Nothing was found that might have been used.”
“But what about the potting shed?” She managed somehow to conceal her irritation. “The one in the kitchen-garden courtyard, could someone have used a different type of gardening tool and then returned it to the potting shed?” She heard the sharpness in her voice and modified her tone. But she was feeling quite dashed.
Colonel Valentine looked at her with kindness, the sort of patronizing kindness when one must disappoint. “We searched there this morning, Lady Montfort, as we came over to Iyntwood. Nothing was found.”
Well, she thought, at least I have the time of death to work with, and it would seem that a weapon might have been brought along for the job, so that rules out our earlier theory that whoever killed Captain Bray did it on the spur of the moment.
“Did you or your sergeants happen to see a luncheon basket in the kitchen courtyard yesterday, or this morning?” He turned his head, looking first surprised and then annoyed, perhaps that his curiosity had got the better of him.
“A luncheon basket you say—whose luncheon basket?”
Clementine smiled. “It would have been Captain Bray’s, and I am not altogether sure if it was there at all. And if it is significant, I promise you I will let you know.” And she turned away, hoping against hope that they were given at least this day to work things through before Lieutenant Phipps was carted off to Market Wingley jail.
* * *
Clementine’s lighthearted mood that the colonel had come to consult with her now dashed to pieces, she decided to make for her favorite haven, her rose garden. Its tranquil beauty would give her the peace she needed in which to mull over the dangerously precarious situation the hospital now found itself in. She was almost to the terrace door when Hollyoak materialized from the small dining room. “His lordship asked if you would step into his study for a moment, m’lady, Sir Winchell Meacham is with him.”
She suppressed a harrumph of irritation at having been caught before she could make her getaway but dutifully changed course toward her husband’s study.
As soon as she entered the room she understood exactly why she had been summoned. Lord Montfort was sitting behind his desk, well back in his chair with his arms crossed rather defensively in front of him as he watched a rotund and gray-haired man in his middle years pace to and fro on the Turkey rug, talking at him in a high-pitched and fretful tone. Every so often Sir Winchell would pause in his pacing to lift his hands in the air and shake them in emphatic irritation.
“… Every one of them are damned cowards I tell you; every one of them hiding out while brave men are falling left and right for their country. All this rot being spouted by the War Office about shell-shock is complete hogwash. Oh, good morning, Lady Montfort.” Sir Winchell stopped mid-tirade and Lord Montfort turned weary eyes toward her. Clementine had already guessed that she had been summoned to pour oil on stormy waters. Sir Winchell might rave at her husband about the hospital, but he would behave himself with her, as he was particularly sentimental about the fairer sex since the death of his wife ten years ago.
“Hollyoak told me that you had dropped in to see Ralph, and I thought I would just pop in to say hullo.” She waved her gardening gloves at her husband so that he knew she would not stay long.
“My dear Lady Montfort, you are looking remarkably well.”
I wish I could say the same for you, Clementine thought. Sir Winchell had aged in the weeks since she had last seen him. His eyes were sunk deep and ringed with dark shadows, his face was deeply lined, and there was an overall sense that he was physically less robust than he had been two months ago. She felt even greater remorse for their neglect when she noticed that there was a tic working away at the corner of his left eye. We should not be so preoccupied with our own troubles that we overlook Sir Winchell’s misfortunes. We simply must invite him to dine with us more often.
She guessed from the little she had heard when she walked into the room that Sir Winchell knew of the murder and was back on his latest hobbyhorse, that of closing down the hospital and returning every one of what he loved to refer to as “lily-livered cowards” to active duty.
“My dear Lady Montfort, I am so glad I had the opportunity of seeing you before I left,” Sir Winchell said in a far calmer tone. And Clementine glanced over to her husband sitting silently in his chair, his face like ice. “I understand there was a murder at Haversham Hall and I am here to ask Lord Montfort, once and for all, to close the place down. Your patients will regain their self-respect a good deal faster if they are given the opportunity to be real men, and not hide out at your hospital playing croquet and painting pictures—assured as they are of your hospitality.” His tic became more noticeable as he struggled to keep his manner polite. “As I was telling Lord Montfort, I feel it is my duty to write to the War Office and state as much in the most stringent terms.”
“Of course we understand, Sir Winchell. We understand completely. In fact I was just talking to Colonel Valentine about the hospital. He will send a full report of this unfortunate incident to the War Office as soon as he has completed his investigation. You see, this matter is being handled by the chief constable himself—he left just a moment ago. But there is no need for you to worry yourself on our account.” She smiled and put her hand lightly on his forearm. “I was hoping that perhaps you would join us for dinner? We are not entertaining much at the moment. What about tomorrow night—are you by any chance free?”
Clementine was careful not to look at her husband, whose face no doubt expressed nothing but polite invitation, but who would be most unwilling to listen to an evening of fuss and bother from a man he had always found acutely tiresome.
“My dear Lady Montfort, how kind; of course, I would enjoy that.” And Clementine felt a prickle of remorse that in spite of his many acrimonious faults, Sir Winchell was after all grieving for the loss of his only children.
“We will look forward to seeing you tomorrow then, now I must go. I have taken on the care of the rose garden, and it takes up all of my time.” And she left the room, completely aware that this was just a temporary truce and that if they did not discover the identity of the murderer soon, Sir Winchell would more than likely eat up every last piece of her husband’s patience.
Chapter Ten
Mr. Thrower looked over Mrs. Jackson’s bicycle with a critical eye as he spun the rear wheel back and forth a few times and exclaimed at its ruined state. “Yes, Mrs. Jackson, see here, the tire has been ripped, going over something sharp lying in the lane, but it is rather an old tire after all. I might be able to patch it for you, but you’re probably looking at a new pair. Meantime, why don’t you try this lovely machine out?” He wheeled forward Iyntwood’s housemaid Agnes’s gleaming bicycle and they stood admiring it in the bright sun. He tinkled the b
ell and then, taking the bicycle by its handlebars, ran it forward and applied the brake to make it stand on its front end in a most satisfactory way. “Drum brakes,” Mr. Thrower said. “Lovely machine, that.” He stooped and applied oil at several points along the machine’s working parts.
Mrs. Jackson stepped through the bicycle’s frame and raised the right pedal with her toe. “Thank you, Mr. Thrower, I will return it later today. Goodness me, is that the time?”
But farewells were never speedy with Mr. Thrower. He placed a restraining hand on the handlebars and fixed her with his mild gaze. Even though the old man’s shoulders were bent from years of gardening, his calloused hand held the bicycle in place with surprising strength. Mrs. Jackson must listen to a few words of caution before she was allowed to go.
“Whatever you do, Mrs. Jackson, watch out for those Land girls, they cut across the end of the east drive, right there by the Home Farm, in a very reckless way, and the speed at which they drive their tractors is disgraceful: nearly sent Mrs. Thrower to her maker last Thursday.” She assured him she would be watchful, and then, as if it had just occurred to her: “Were you perhaps in the orchard when Lieutenant Phipps came over yesterday morning before luncheon to collect apples?” He stood looking at her for a moment, whistling softly through his teeth.
“He must have, because the apple pile was a good deal lower when I came back through the orchard at half past one; but no, I didn’t see him.”
“And then later on he came back for another load after luncheon at about two o’clock, did you see him then?”
“Dunno that I did, I went over to the orchid house after I drove the geese up from the lake into the orchard. I had planned to work in the rose garden, but her ladyship told me she would take care of that. Oh and by the by, Mrs. Jackson, if any of the VAD girls,” he pronounced VAD as a word and not as an acronym, “must pick beans in the kitchen garden, then ask them please to find me first so I can show them how to do it properly.” His usually kind eyes blinked almost ferociously. There was not much that upset Mr. Thrower, he was the gentlest of men, but careless young women picking beans in his kitchen garden was clearly something he found hard to tolerate.
* * *
Mrs. Jackson arrived in the village on Agnes’s wonderful new bicycle in double-quick time. Is it the fat tires that make the going so true and straight? And whatever have they done to the springs that support the saddle? She had not needed to raise herself up over every bump in the lane; her ride had been downright luxurious in a bouncy feather-bed kind of way. She idly wondered how much this gleaming machine would cost, with its safety brakes, its cushioned saddle, and its shining bell on the handlebars instead of a rubber-bulb horn. She had bowled along at such high speed that she had to spend a good few minutes outside the village tucking her hair back up under her hat before she pedaled sedately down the village high street and alighted outside the post office.
“Good morning, Mrs. Peabody,” she said to the postmistress. “Just four penny stamps if you would be so kind.” She opened her purse for the correct change. “Corporal West wondered if perhaps he left his pipe behind when he popped in here yesterday around noon?”
The postmistress shook her head. “It was a very busy day, Mrs. Jackson, lots of parcels being sent off to France, but it quieted down about midday; I would have remembered the corporal coming in and certainly no one left their pipe in here.” Mrs. Peabody was an angular and authoritative woman who ran the post office with the help of her husband, a small, inoffensive man who was deeply fond of stamping the daily post with a smudgy Royal Mail rubber stamp and lots of violet ink. Together they kept the tiny area of the shop dedicated to post office business in immaculate order.
Mrs. Jackson tucked her envelope of stamps into her handbag and stowed it away in the basket of the bicycle before wheeling it down the village street to the tobacconist. A tinkley bell and a strong waft of peppermint, tobacco, and newsprint welcomed her as she opened the door into the cramped shop.
The proprietor, Mrs. Diggory, was getting on in years but still moved with the energy of a younger woman. Her solace for the long hours she spent standing behind a counter at her age was the chance to gossip—all day. In Mrs. Jackson’s long experience, Mrs. Diggory’s chinwag always opened with routine observations about the weather, and at this time of the year the harvest, before picking a popular topic and expounding on it at length. This morning she exclaimed at the Land girls, not about their driving but about their morals, or what the village perceived as the lack of them.
She folded her arms up high under her bosom, her mouth turned down in a thin, compressed line. “Townies, that’s what they all are—and certainly no better’n they should be.” Mrs. Jackson nodded and smiled, hoping she might be allowed to leave within the next twenty minutes. “And what do you make of Miss Bottomley-Jones being frightened half to death in the lych-gate of the church?” Mrs. Jackson kept her expression bland, dreading what she would hear next. “Oh, you haven’t heard, Mrs. Jackson? Well it was quite a carry-on; the Rev. Bottomley-Jones’s gardener, Mr. Preston, told me all about it.” Mrs. Diggory leaned on the counter, her hands clasped across her forearms. “Miss Bottomley-Jones had been doing the flowers in the church for Sunday service and was leaving just as it was getting dark. As she was walking down the path through the churchyard she thought she heard people talking, but on she went and when she got to the lych-gate she got the shock of her life. Screamed the place down she did.”
“Good heavens, what can have happened?” In spite of herself Mrs. Jackson was drawn.
Mrs. Diggory leaned farther forward and whispered, even though there was no one but Mrs. Jackson in her shop. “A courting couple, that is what she saw. Some little hussy with a man in uniform—such a terrible thing for the vicar’s sister to come across, the poor dear innocent. What do they call it when young girls behave badly, khaki fever? Who would have thought we would see that sort of behavior in the village? Poor Miss Bottomley-Jones didn’t quite understand what she was seeing or what they were up to. And the next morning…” She paused to find suitable words for what was evidently the crowning piece of her gossip.
“The very next morning, guess what the verger found under the bench seat in that gateway?”
Mrs. Jackson was quite sure she did not want to know what the verger had found, it all sounded like the worst sort of music-hall vulgarity. She interrupted the older lady before she could speak her next words. “But there are no uniformed men in the village.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Jackson, excuse me. There are plenty of uniformed men staying up at the Hall. When Miss Bottomley-Jones screamed, she heard the man say as clear as clear, ‘We’d better scarper, Maisie, see you next Friday.’ Now what does that tell you?”
Mrs. Jackson said she didn’t really know.
“Well…” Mrs. Diggory evidently did. “That the soldier was a Londoner, because Mr. Bottomley-Jones’s gardener says that’s the sort of language they use up there. And I’m quite sure that the girl he was with was one of them Land girls. There is no one in the village of that name.”
Mrs. Jackson said nothing; her mind was busily sifting through the different possibilities presented by this information, and Mrs. Diggory, evidently bored with her as a possible confederate in her gossip, resumed her role of shopkeeper.
“So what can I do for you, Mrs. Jackson, a quarter of your usual mint imperials?” She reached for one of the many glass jars on the shelf behind her and carefully weighed out the sweets, and the rich peppery smell of mint intensified in the air.
Mrs. Jackson looked around the shop. “Did Corporal West perhaps leave his pipe, Mrs. Diggory, when he was in here yesterday?”
Mrs. Diggory didn’t even glance around her cluttered counter space as she deftly swung the white paper bag twice to twist its corners closed. “Couldn’t have done, Mrs. Jackson.” Her face assumed deeply furrowed lines of disapproval—no doubt Corporal West was a Townie in her eyes, with his strong East London accent,
and was more than likely the lecherous fellow in the lych-gate. “Mr. West didn’t come in here yesterday, I most certainly would have known.”
Mrs. Jackson held out tuppence for her sweets, wished the shopkeeper a good afternoon, and made a quick exit before she had to hear any opinions about Haversham Hall Hospital and its patients. Outside, she stowed the bag of sweets in the bicycle’s basket before she rode off down the village street, calling out a good-morning to the verger on his way across the green to the church.
The very least I can do is check at the Goat and Fiddle, she thought as she passed the butcher sulking over his lonely side of beef and the greengrocer standing in the entrance to his shop in his brown apron with one bunch of overripe bananas artfully arranged between a generous display of local apples and a pile of King Edward potatoes.
She rode on toward the village green, and dismounting in the alley that ran alongside the Goat and Fiddle to its cobbled backyard, she tapped on the kitchen door of the public house.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jackson.” The publican’s wife opened the door and ushered her into her kitchen, where she was busy making mutton pies for the evening’s customers. “How are things going for you up at the Hall?” Mrs. Jackson assured her that they were going very nicely—if the villagers had heard of the murder of Captain Bray they were all being uncharacteristically silent on the subject.
“I am running a few errands and I told Corporal West that I would inquire for him. Did he by any chance leave his pipe in the snug when he came into the village yesterday at midday? He didn’t say he stopped here, but…” She smiled and shrugged her shoulders at the absentmindedness of men and their enjoyment of a pint in the middle of a day off.
“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Jackson, but I will just ask Fred,” and without moving she called out, “Fred? Fred?,” until her husband’s shining red face appeared around the door, and he peevishly asked her not to shriek, he wasn’t deaf.
“Was Corporal West in yesterday ’bout midday?”