A Quiet Life in the Country (The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries Book 1)

by T E Kinsey

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I thought they sounded a little less lively after the break.’

  ‘That would be why, miss.’

  ‘Were there signs of a fight in the library, Inspector?’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘Aside from the dead body by the bookshelves, you mean? Some. The room was in some disarray as though it had been ransacked. My guess is that the killer was looking for something.’

  ‘And Mr Nelson caught him at it?’

  ‘Quite possibly. That would certainly account for his being knocked unconscious and left on the deck while the robber fled.’

  ‘It would indeed,’ she said.

  ‘So that’s my working hypothesis at the moment,’ he said. ‘And my next task is to try to establish where everybody was during the course of the evening. I need to know everything you can both remember: where you were, who you saw, when you saw them, and anything else you noticed, no matter how unimportant you might feel it. Can we start with you, please, Lady Hardcastle?’

  ‘Of course. I arrived at about a quarter past eight, as you now know. Sir Hector’s chauffeur, Bert, was kind enough to bring me up the hill. I greeted my hosts, who introduced me to Captain Summers – a frightful bore recently returned from India – and then left me to his oafish attentions. I stayed with him for as long as I thought polite and then slipped away while his eye was roving elsewhere, and circulated. I spoke to Miss Clarissa and her London friends, congratulating the happy couple and whatnot. I had a bit of a wander round, bumped into a couple of the Farley-Strouds’ friends that I’d met at a dinner party when I first moved to the area, and then finally tracked down Armstrong. We chatted briefly, then I was buttonholed once more by Captain Summers whom I managed to outrage.’

  ‘“Outrage”, my lady?’ said the Inspector, looking up from his notebook.

  ‘I revealed that I’d spent some time in India “alone” after my husband had died. He couldn’t quite grasp how a lady might do such a thing.’

  ‘Plenty of ladies end up coping on their own in India after their husbands die,’ said the Inspector, somewhat puzzled.

  ‘But my husband died in China and I made my own way to India with Armstrong. And then stayed for a couple of years.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Out of the ordinary, but hardly outrageous.’

  ‘Not to Captain Summers. He very quickly found someone else to badger. Which actually turned out to be a shame because that left an opening for Sir Hector to bring a rather unpleasant man over. An antiques dealer of some sort.’

  Inspector Sunderland flicked back a few pages in his notebook. ‘Mr Clifford Haddock,’ he said. ‘I’ve already wired Scotland Yard about him. He seems like a very fishy character.’ He seemed very pleased with his own joke.

  ‘Well, quite,’ said Lady Hardcastle, raising an eyebrow. ‘Then I sent Armstrong off for booze – the fizzy wine was quite undrinkable – and after that things got a great deal more merry. I ended up holding court with the youngsters and impressing them with my tales of derring do from Shanghai to Calcutta. Then Armstrong found me and, strongly implying that I was brandified, took me home.’

  ‘You were sloshed, my lady,’ I said.

  ‘I was, as you say, all mops and brooms, but it’s indelicate of you to point it out to the inspector.’

  ‘It shall go no further,’ said the inspector with a smile.

  ‘You’re most kind,’ she said. ‘And that was my evening.’

  ‘Did you notice any unusual comings and goings at around the time Mr Nelson disappeared?’

  ‘No, Inspector, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t the liveliest of parties, but it was a party nonetheless and people were coming and going all the time.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the problem,’ he said, finishing off his notes. ‘And you, Miss Armstrong, what did you see?’

  I recounted the events of my own evening and was describing my meeting with Sylvia Montgomery.

  ‘Miss Montgomery was coming out of the library as you were on your quest for brandy?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So this was during the break?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think the band was still playing.’

  ‘There were some instrumental numbers, I think,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Perhaps it was during one of those?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Do you remember the time of this meeting?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Inspector, I never wear a watch. I have no idea.’

  ‘No matter. Please continue.’

  I told him about my meeting with the tipsy Maud Denton.

  ‘The lazy maid,’ said the inspector. ‘I’m so sorry, I meant to say lady’s maid. What was I thinking?’

  I laughed and continued. I described my sneaking back to the party with the illicit brandy and how I’d had to hide to avoid being seen by someone who was going into the library.

  ‘Did you see this person?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘No, I just heard the door closing. When I peeked round the corner again there was no one in sight so I presumed they’d gone in rather than coming out.’

  ‘Could it have been Mr Nelson?’

  ‘No, the band was still playing when I got back to the ballroom and it was only after that that Mr Nelson slipped away and Miss Montgomery came over to ask about the scotch.’

  ‘Interesting. So that could have been our man,’ mused the inspector.

  ‘Or woman,’ said Lady Hardcastle quickly.

  ‘True, true. Though a man is more likely to clout someone round the back of the head with something heavy. A woman would like as not try to talk her way out of it.’

  ‘Have you met Armstrong?’ she asked with a smile.

  He turned to me. ‘Your reputation precedes you, miss, but from what I hear you’d not need a heavy object to render someone unconscious.’

  ‘No, Inspector. And he’d be able to get up and walk away with a headache when he woke up, too. It shows a considerable lack of skill to kill someone by accident when there are so many effective ways of simply incapacitating them.’

  He looked faintly disquieted but carried on. ‘And what happened when you returned to the ballroom?’

  I told the tale of the rest of my evening but there was little else of any substance to offer him.

  ‘Did no one go into the library while you were tidying up?’ he asked when I had finished.

  ‘No, we were told not to bother with it because the band members were still using it. That’s why Dora was in there first thing, it was to be her job to get the room back in order before the band rose and came in to pack up their things.’

  ‘They didn’t pack up at the end of the party?’

  ‘No, they finished their performance and left their instruments on the little stage. I didn’t see what happened to them after that.’

  ‘They cadged some booze from Miss Clarissa and went off to the rooms that had been set aside for them in the attic,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘Without looking for their friend,’ said the inspector. ‘They’re a strange lot.’

  ‘Oh, I think they wanted to. The one they called Skins was very keen to search for him, but Richman very firmly told him no and he seemed to drop it.’

  ‘Skins... Skins...’ said the inspector, leafing through his notebook again. ‘Ah yes, Ivor “Skins” Maloney. The drummer. “Skins”?’

  ‘Drum skins, one imagines,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘It’s calfskin, I believe, scraped very thin and stretched very tight.’

  ‘Is it? Is it indeed? Well I count it a poor day indeed if I don’t learn at least one new thing, so today is looking up already. So Richman said no, eh? Very interesting.’ He sat for a few moments reviewing his notes. ‘Well, my lady, Miss Armstrong, thank you for your help. I’m going to have to give this one some serious thought. I just can’t seem to get the timings straight. People seem to be in and out of the ballroom, and in and out of that damn library, but no one seems to know when anything h
appened.’

  ‘It’s almost as though they didn’t expect to be witnesses in a murder investigation,’ said Lady Hardcastle, dryly.

  ‘You’re right, my lady, of course. Heigh ho,’ he said, snapping the little notebook shut. ‘I shall have to think of some way of making sense of it all.’

  ‘Might I suggest a little trick I’ve been using,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘I call it my “Crime Board”,’ and she went on to describe her use of the large blackboard in our previous investigations.

  Bert and a footman called Dewi (who swore continually and colourfully under his breath in Welsh and didn’t think anyone could understand him) had been called upon to bring down a blackboard and easel from the nursery and set it up in the large dining room which Inspector Sunderland had adopted as his base of operations. Meanwhile, Lady Hardcastle had been sketching guests and we’d both been trying to recall any details of the previous evening which might be helpful.

  ‘To whom else have you spoken, Inspector?’ asked Lady Hardcastle as she finished off a particularly accurate, if unflattering, sketch of Clifford Haddock.

  ‘Just you and one or two of the staff so far, my lady,’ he said. ‘The majority of the guests left shortly after you and I didn’t want to waken those that had stayed the night. I thought I’d let them lie in.’

  I caught the wicked glint in his eye as well as Lady Hardcastle’s own raised eyebrow.

  ‘I trust you think I’ve been punished enough now for irritating you in the past,’ she said.

  ‘More than enough, thank you, my lady,’ he said with a grin. ‘Perhaps we might work together in the future instead of against one another.’

  ‘In the future, Inspector?’

  ‘Oh, come now. We both know that whenever anything happens in the village, you’ll be first on the scene with your deerstalker and Meerschaum, hunting for clues and trying to solve the mystery before the clodhopping oafs in the Police Force get a look in. I’d just rather not be thought the clodhopping oaf, that’s all. Perhaps you might consider me “that splendid chap from Bristol whom I really should speak to because he’s a professional detective and it’s his job to solve crimes”.’

  She laughed. ‘I never considered you a clodhopping oaf, Inspector, though to be fair, you did arrest completely the wrong man in the Frank Pickering case. Would it have been entirely unreasonable of me if I had thought that of you?’

  ‘Given what you knew at the time, no, I don’t suppose it would. I was, however, dealing with a particularly sensitive case in the city which involved several children being abducted from the streets. They were about to be shipped off to eastern Europe somewhere for who knows what horrible purpose, and time wasn’t something I could spare. I knew Lovell wasn’t our man but I had to keep the gentlemen of the press quiet for a while, and arresting suspects always does the trick. I’d have caught the Seddons soon enough.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, clearly crestfallen.

  ‘“Oh” indeed, my lady.’

  ‘But I’m still not clear on the subject of “in the future”. I’ve moved out here for a quiet life in the country. I don’t anticipate becoming embroiled in any further mysteries.’

  ‘Well, now, my lady, that’s the funny thing. How are you on the subject of statistics and probability?’

  ‘I get by,’ she said, breezily. ‘I read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, but I like to keep up with new developments in mathematics, too, and I like to think I can hold my own if the subject should turn to statistics.’

  ‘I rather thought you might. You see there’s a funny thing about this part of Gloucestershire. There’s those as would say that London would definitely be England’s murder capital. Others are sure it’s Birmingham, or Manchester, or Liverpool. Some even suggest my own home city of Bristol. There’s a cluster of villages in Oxfordshire that regularly vies for the title, but have a guess where it really is.’

  ‘I should suppose, given the devilish twinkle in your eye,’ she said, ‘that it’s here.’

  ‘It is, as you suggest, my lady, right here. There are more murders per head of population in this part of Gloucestershire than anywhere else in the country. A person is more than twice as likely to be murdered here than anywhere else. Did it not strike you that you’ve been here less than three months and you’ve already seen at least eight people killed? It is eight, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is now, Inspector, yes.’

  ‘Most people go their whole lives without knowing of a single murder, and yet you’ve already seen eight since June.’

  ‘I’d known more than my fair share before I even arrived. Perhaps it’s me.’

  ‘Yes, of course, my lady, there was your husband. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t mean to be insensitive.’

  She waved a friendly dismissal. ‘Please don’t worry, Inspector. It was a long time ago now.’

  He nodded and continued. ‘But no, it’s not you, it’s what they call a statistical anomaly and it’s centred on Chipping Bevington.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And so I think “in the future” the probability is very high that there shall be more and that you shall be somewhere at the heart of it, meddling and interfering and generally making a nuisance of yourself. But I hope that now you’ll remember to call me, cable me, or even send a trusty carrier pigeon my way before you go trying to get yourself killed.’

  ‘Right-oh, Inspector,’ she said with a cheeky grin. ‘I promise.’

  ‘That’s agreed, then. And for my part I promise not to send burly constables to your home when you’d probably rather be resting in bed nursing a hangover.’

  ‘It was a rather nasty one.’

  ‘I hoped it might be.’

  I was beginning to warm to this Inspector Sunderland.

  ‘Right then,’ he said decisively. ‘Let’s just start working through them. It’s a tiresome job, but I find thoroughness usually gets results.’

  Lady Hardcastle looked at him as though about to remind him of his lack of thoroughness in the Pickering case, but she thought better of it when he returned her stare.

  He flipped through his ever-present notebook. ‘Miss Armstrong, would you do me a great service and get one of the staff here to fetch Miss Sylvia Montgomery. Let’s see what she has to say about her visit to the library.

  Sylvia Montgomery was only slightly less stunning in her day clothes than in her stage outfit and she sat opposite Inspector Sunderland and Lady Hardcastle, regarding them coolly but without apparent hostility as they asked her about the events of the night before.

  ‘...and then I slipped out to the library in search of something to drink. I’m not needed during the last couple of numbers in the first set apart from to sway around and look gorgeous, so I usually just nick off at that point. I had a good hunt around, looking in the globe, behind the books, under the chairs, in the window seats. Nothing. Not a drop. So I gave it up as a bad job and that’s when I met you.’ She looked over towards me. ‘I went back in to the ballroom and stayed there until we’d finished. We managed to cadge some half-decent scotch from the birthday girl–’

  ‘It was her engagement party,’ the inspector corrected her.

  ‘Was it, indeed? That chinless chap with the wispy moustache?’

  ‘Mr Woodfield, yes. Heir to the Woodfield Engineering business.’

  ‘Really? Good for her. If you can’t land a looker, go for the money. Good girl. But anyway, we snaffled her scotch and went off up to the dingy rooms they’d begrudgingly let us have. We drank until about two and then called it a night.’

  ‘Did none of you wonder what had happened to Mr Holloway?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘At first, yes. Skins was all for looking for him but Roland insisted he’d probably found a doxy to canoodle with and we should leave him to it.’

  ‘Was he the sort to “canoodle with doxies”, miss?’ said the inspector.

  ‘He was a man, Inspector. The prospect of canoodling with doxies at parties was what got him to take up t
he trumpet in the first place.’

  ‘Fair enough, miss. Understood. What did you all talk about?’

  ‘When, Inspector?’

  ‘While you were drinking. I presume you didn’t all sit there in gloomy silence.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Oh, you know, the usual. How the performance had gone, which numbers worked and which didn’t, what engagements were coming up. That sort of thing.’

  ‘I see, miss, thank you. My friends here,’ he indicated Lady Hardcastle and me, ‘haven’t seen the library yet and I think it might help for us all to see it in the company of someone who saw it before the crime took place. See how things have changed, if you get my meaning. Would that be too distressing for you, miss?’

  She favoured him with a withering look and he shrugged in response and stood. Together we trooped out of the dining room and headed for the library.

  The library was a long, rectangular room with three large windows along one of the long walls and a large stone fireplace set in the centre of the other. Apart from that, every other inch of wall space was fitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. There were four comfortable leather armchairs, one in each corner of the room, with the empty globe bar beside one of them and small tables set beside the other three. I could see the bloodstain on the polished wood of the floor near the fireplace and when I looked more closely I could see that there was also a bloody mark on the corner of the stone hearth.

  ‘It looks like he hit his head on the hearth when he fell, Inspector,’ I said.

  ‘Very good, miss, very good indeed,’ said the inspector. ‘The doctor and I rather think that’s what caused the fatal damage to the man’s brain.’

  I felt ever so slightly patronized, but part of me was also rather pleased with the praise.

  At the other end of the room was a jumble of instrument cases. A double bass case lay on its side with its red velvet lining ripped out making it look like another bleeding corpse. Round cases of pressed cardboard, like oversized hatboxes, were strewn haphazardly about, lids and leather straps lying chaotically among them.