by R. W. Heber
“Well, I don’t want to stay if everyone else is going,” Loredana said, making it rather too clear that for her only Hamish counted.
“Aren’t you going to wait for Trevor?” Dulcie asked.
“Why should I, when he’s so late?”
As Loredana stalked out of the library they all heard the scrunch of tyres on the gravel outside. The police had arrived. Dodgson excused himself and hurried through to the hall to let them in.
The police consisted of a young uniformed constable in a small car emblazoned with chequered flashes and the insignia of the Thames Valley Police. Twenty minutes later, having been shown the corpse and having talked briefly with Dr. Thompson, he demanded that everyone should remain in the house until the cause of George Welch’s death had been established.
“I’m sure there’s nothing untoward, sir,” he said to Gilroy, “but we have our procedures.”
Jim Savage nudged his daughter. “Lucky I haven’t got a job to get back to!”
“You may not, Daddy, but I do.” A note of resentment came into her voice, which her father knew only too well. As a tiny girl she had gone into fits of the sulks and she had never completely grown out of it.
Jim leaned over and whispered in her ear and Jemma’s face brightened. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “D’you really think so?”
“I’d bet on it. There’s hardly a person here who didn’t have something against Welch.”
6
POLICE Constable Rutherford was puzzled. The police were required to “attend” any sudden death, unless a doctor had been expecting it for three days. The officer then had to compile a detailed report for the coroner, from the date of birth to the time of death. Rutherford had only done this twice before and was being doggedly methodical. But every police officer is at heart a detective, so he was puzzled because Dr. Thompson himself seemed to be.
They were in Welch’s room, looking at Welch’s inert body, still propped up on the pillows.
“What do you estimate the time of death was, sir?” Rutherford asked, scanning the check-list the sergeant had given him before he came.
“Between seven-fifteen and eight A.M. The body was still slightly warm when I first got here.”
“What about the cause of death?”
“That’ll need a post-mortem.” Thompson frowned. “Since there’s no visible cause, it’s most likely to be one of two things. A cardiac arrest, due either to a heart attack or a brain haemorrhage, or a cerebral thrombosis.”
“A stroke, sir?”
“Exactly.”
“If he was conscious for long enough he’d have tried to shout for help.” Thompson looked again at the relaxed expression on Welch’s rubicund face. The pupils of his eyes were narrowed, which could be the effect of a drug, but they usually did become smaller at death. Whatever had overtaken the man must have done so in seconds. A heart attack was the most common reason for sudden death among middle-aged men. But …
“Except, sir?” A query had been implicit in Thompson’s tone.
“Except that heart attacks are not usually instantaneously fatal and his wife says she never knew he had heart problems. There are nearly always early warning signs, like chest pains. Most wives would have known. They’re well aware of health risks these days. And,” he added breezily, “most wives of rich middle-aged men make damn sure their husbands go for medical check-ups. If they’re interested in keeping them alive, that is.”
“Yes, sir,” Rutherford said dutifully, but sharing the doctor’s puzzlement, because he had thought of something else. “They usually share a room with their husbands, too.”
“She told me that the way this weekend was organized made that impossible.”
“Sounds odd, sir.”
“Apparently this was a murder weekend.”
At this point Rutherford began to feel confused as well as puzzled. He was twenty-three years old and anxious to do everything by the book. But his training to date had not encompassed murder weekends.
“What exactly is that, sir?” he asked.
“A gimmick to promote the stately home, I imagine. You’d better ask Lord Gilroy. Now, have you a camera?”
“No, sir.”
“Damn.” Thompson couldn’t really blame the constable for not having one. But he wanted a photographic record of exactly how the body was positioned, which meant he would have to move it as little as possible while doing a further examination to satisfy himself that he had missed nothing external. “Well,” he said, “I’m going to take the rectal temperature and a blood sample.” He began ferreting in his black bag, while the constable went downstairs in search of Lord Gilroy.
In the study Gilroy and Dee Dee were discussing what to do next. Adrienne had recovered sufficiently to join the Savages in the library. The rest were all in their rooms packing.
“How the hell do we entertain them if they insist on staying for the rest of the weekend?” Gilroy moaned.
“We certainly can’t keep a ‘murder’ hunt going,” Dee Dee agreed. “Not with a real corpse upstairs.”
“And they can’t just eat and drink all day.”
“That they cannot,” Dee Dee said with emphasis. “Not on our budget.”
“I could show them round the estate this afternoon.”
“And bore the pants off them about being paid by Europe not to farm? Much better take them down to Blenheim Palace for the afternoon. But I don’t think they will stay. That lawyer isn’t one to waste her time, and as for the fish-faced Hamish, he’s almost as much of a pain as Welch was. I’ve a feeling his wife found him out last night.”
“Why?”
“She wasn’t fooled by his pretending he’d been in the kitchen getting coffee. Nor was I. He’s the sort who phones for room service if the bedcover’s crooked.”
“Our rooms don’t have phones, darling.”
“Then ring the bell till someone comes,” Dee said irritably. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”
There was a knock on the door and Rutherford entered. He didn’t hold aristocrats in much esteem, not when they kept selling their private lives to magazines, and he wasn’t going to address Gilroy as “my lord.” He stood very upright in his summer uniform of white short-sleeved shirt and dark-blue trousers, handcuffs hanging from his belt, and declined to sit down.
“There’s a question I’d like to ask,” he said, compromising his integrity slightly by adding, “sir.”
“Fire away.” Gilroy said amiably, glad to be off the subject of entertaining the guests.
“What was your murder weekend all about?”
Gilroy explained somewhat inadequately, leading Dee Dee to cut in. “Notionally Mr. Welch was involved in poisoning his sister. We gave out clues the night before and at seven-thirty this morning. Mrs. Sketchley—whom I played—was found dead by the maid. Her screams woke the whole household.”
Rutherford thought about this. He might be young and inexperienced, but he was not stupid.
“So there were a lot of people around at that time.”
“Everyone, except for my husband and, of course, Mr. Welch.”
“If the deceased had shouted out, would someone have heard him?”
Dee Dee considered this. “I think so. Yes. We were all in the passage close to his door. Of course, there was a lot of chattering. But I think someone would have heard.”
“No one thought of waking him?”
“The seven-thirty scene was strictly make-believe. Mr. Welch wasn’t much interested in play-acting.”
“Then why was he here?”
“Wanted to buy some land off me,” Gilroy said shortly. “Signing on for the weekend gave him a good chance to haggle.”
“I see,” Rutherford said, deciding there was definitely more to all this than he knew. “And where would I find Mrs. Welch?”
“In the library, most likely. I’ll show you.” Gilroy led him out into the hall and indicated the library door.
Inside the l
ibrary Jim and Jemma Savage were patiently listening to Adrienne Welch unburdening her soul on the subject of her husband.
“People didn’t like George,” she was saying, “I know that. Property isn’t a very nice business. He had his enemies. But he was a good husband to me.”
“Private faces are often very different to public ones,” Jim said soothingly, remembering fraud rumours about Welch of a few years ago. “Some men can be angels to their families and devils to everyone else.”
“That’s right. You understand. You reely do understand.” Adrienne’s gratitude for this sympathy began to overflow into tears, and Jemma, who was sitting next to her on a sofa, put an arm round her shoulders. Adrienne pulled some tissues out of her bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Well, he’s out of all that now.” She indulged in another brief session with the tissues. “You should have heard how rude Lord Gilroy was to George. She was bad enough at dinner, but him! You’d have thought we was something the cat brought in.”
“Was he doing business with the Gilroys?” Jemma prompted.
“It was supposed to be a secret. Well, it never could have been, reely. They needed cash and George needed land. The trouble was they didn’t want to sell the bit we wanted.”
“It’s often the way.” Jim nodded. “Did they agree in the end?”
“I don’t know,” Adrienne said helplessly. “Not when I was with them. But I think that lawyer of his persuaded them. It’ll be terrible if they did, because where’d I find the money? Like that woman said, it’d be legal even though he is dead. But I don’t know where the contract even is.”
“Wouldn’t his company buy the land?” Jim asked innocently, knowing that Welch had probably been a one-man band.
“He was the company!” Adrienne confirmed. “He could go to the bank with a deal and they’d give him loans. None of the other directors counted for a row of beans.”
“So it could affect you personally?”
“It oughtn’t to. I’m just worried that it might.” A note of pride came into her voice. “George left me provided for, praise the Lord. Very nicely provided for. Life insurance.” She smiled weakly, cheered up by this golden lining to the cloud of death. “Oh no, I’ll be all right, just so long as no one lands any debts on my doorstep.”
Jim was re-assuring her that her own assets could not be touched by her husband’s creditors when Rutherford swung open the double doors and marched in.
Even to a cynic about the aristocracy, the Gothic library was impressive. Gloomily impressive, it was true, as if the architect had been dreaming of the ultimate in funeral parlours. But the high ranges of mahogany bookshelves lining the walls, the heavy tables and the high-backed sofas made it inconceivable to think of this as a mere information-retrieval system. Rutherford was momentarily stopped in his tracks. Then he spotted the three people sitting at the far end of the room and advanced on them.
“Mrs. Welch?” he inquired of Adrienne. “Could I have a few minutes?”
Jim got up and motioned Jemma to follow him. “We’ll leave you to it,” he said. “We’ll be in the hall.”
Sitting down rather awkwardly on the armchair Jim had vacated, Rutherford went through his routine of questions, asking finally if Welch had been taking any medications.
“Not regularly. It’s like I told the doctor. He’d take an Alka Seltzer if he had a hangover. He had a high colour, but he was fit.”
“And, pardon my asking, why weren’t you sharing a room last night?”
“That was stupid. I have a huge bedroom, a lovely one. But Lady Gilroy insisted he slept in that little room one night ‘for the murder.’”
So that explanation of Gilroy’s was correct. Rutherford made careful notes. He added one last question, a question that was beyond his mandate, since he was not a detective.
“You didn’t go in to wake your husband when the ‘murder’ happened?”
“He wasn’t interested. He only came on the weekend to see how the nobs live.”
As he wrote this down in his slow, neat handwriting, she wondered if it had been wise to lie about why there were here. Well, she thought, it’s a white lie and he’s only a very young constable.
“It was when he didn’t come down to breakfast that I began worrying,” she added, her voice becoming shaky. “I won’t ever forget finding him there like that. Not never.”
Fearful that she might break down, and inexperienced in consoling the bereaved, Rutherford thanked her and returned upstairs to the doctor.
Thompson was concluding his examination of the corpse. He had found no needle marks, for which he always looked nowadays. Due to Welch not cutting his toenails properly, the nail of one smaller toe had cut into the flesh of the next bigger one. There was absolutely nothing to explain why he was dead, though his complexion suggested he might have had high blood pressure. Perhaps it was natural of his wife to imagine he’d died of a heart attack, but Thompson was unconvinced.
“Rightly or wrongly,” he told Rutherford, “I regard this as an unusual death, if not actually a suspicious one.”
This remark clinched it for Rutherford. He exchanged puzzlement for decision and went straight downstairs again to telephone his police station and explain to the duty sergeant what was happening. The sergeant gave him precise orders and initiated a series of police procedures which could rapidly escalate into a murder hunt if that seemed justified.
When Hamish chanced on Rutherford in the hall and, addressing him as “Constable” in a superior way, asked if there was any reason why he and his wife should not leave Wittenham Park, he received a very firm answer. No one would be leaving until a more senior officer arrived. Rutherford then told Gilroy the same and went back upstairs to keep Welch’s bedroom secure, as the sergeant had instructed him. His role as the leading investigator would very soon be over.
Jim and Jemma Savage were seated in one corner of the Great Hall, a room only fractionally less grand than the library. The staircase with its dragon newels occupied one corner, turning through ninety degrees as it ascended and then through ninety degrees again to the floor above. The front door was at the opposite end, leaving plenty of room for sofas, a substantial oak table, carefully laid out with magazines, and a writing-table with a small rack of headed stationery. Years ago the stag heads at the Lion Park had embellished the walls, or encumbered them, as Dee Dee thought. Now portraits of ancestors—almost all other people’s ancestors, bought at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions—stared down superciliously as the father and daughter debated what was going on.
“The next thing will be the post-mortem,” Jemma said. “Do you think Welch could have been murdered?”
“The police must think it possible.”
“So who had a motive?”
“From what his wife was saying just now, she did,” Jim observed. “A strong one, too. ‘Nicely provided for,’ she said. Only the Lord knows how many wives have slid their husbands down the eternal rubbish chute to get the life insurance.”
“At least Pauline didn’t try that on you!”
“Oh no? You never had to eat her spinach pancakes. Those were terminators.”
“Daddy!” Jemma felt this was mildly unfair. “Just because she thought anything that was an economy could not be disgusting doesn’t mean she wanted to kill you.”
“Perhaps not,” Jim relented. “Doesn’t alter the fact that someone gets away with domestic murder every week. Adrienne Welch must be a suspect.”
“And who else?”
“Who do we know had a quarrel with Welch?” Jim deliberately gave his daughter a lead.
“Gosh! Several people.” Jemma consulted her notes with increasing excitement. “Welch wanted to buy part of the estate. Lady Gilroy said so quite openly. And he infuriated Lord Gilroy by saying the Lion Park would have to be closed down.”
“Do we think the first row, the one we overheard before dinner, was about the land?” Jim checked his own notes. “At six thirty-one P.M. we heard Welch shout, ‘You
bloody well will, or else.’ And the voice we think was the lawyer woman added, ‘You haven’t any option.’ Someone was being pressurized.”
“Couldn’t have been Gilroy. It must have been someone else.”
“But Gilroy was embarrassed when we mentioned it at dinner. And when Lady Gilroy accused Welch of blackmail she most definitely was not play-acting. Welch knew it, too. Remember how fiercely he reacted?”
“That is true, Daddy! She was just using the murder plot to have a go at him. And he was furious. He turned the colour of blueberries.”
“Then we’re agreed.”
“The row had to be with someone else.” Jemma ticked off the guests on her fingers. “The only other man around was that snobby idiot McMountdown. Why should he be involved in the land deal?”
“I’ll pass on that,” Jim conceded. “We don’t know. So the Gilroys are prime suspects. Or rather,” he hastily corrected himself, “they will be if Welch has been murdered. Which leaves the mysterious woman in a dressing-gown you saw this morning. Could that have been Lady Gilroy going into the State Bedroom? Or into Welch’s room?”
“Poison in hand!” Jemma added delightedly.
“Was it her, my dear?”
“I just don’t know. Several of the women had lacy night-dresses. And I’m not sure which door the woman was opening anyway.”
“Very probably it was part of the ‘murder plot.’ Something one of us was intended to see.”
“Could be,” Jemma said dubiously. “But if it was acting it would have been, well, more obvious.” She had an idea. “Why don’t we go upstairs and experiment. You stand by Welch’s bedroom door and I’ll come out of mine into the passage. That might jog my memory.”
Upstairs Police Constable Rutherford was standing manfully immobile in front of Welch’s bedroom, his arms folded across the front of his white shirt, his legs apart. Had he been a more substantial person he would have been a serious human barrier. As it was, he merely looked as if he was trying to impersonate one. His head swivelled toward Jim and Jemma as they emerged from the wide staircase.
“Now you go along…” Jemma was saying, not hesitant about giving her father orders. Then she saw Rutherford. “Oh my God. What’s he doing here?”