Sick of Shadows

by Beaton, M. C.

  The village hall was packed when Rose, accompanied by Daisy, walked onto the stage and began to sing:

  Birds in the garden, all day long, singing for me their happy song

  Flowers in the sunshine, wind and dew, all of them speak to me of you;

  You that I long for, near or far, you that I follow, like a star,

  Day may be weary, weary and long, you will come home at evensong.

  When you come home, dear, all will be fair,

  Home is not home if you are not there;

  You in my heart, dear, you at my side,

  When you come home at eventide.

  Rose sang with a depth of feeling Daisy had never heard in her voice before. She thought of Becket and wondered whether Rose had been thinking of the captain.

  There was a great roar of applause.

  Rose took Daisy’s hand and led her forward. Then they both bowed, and just as they bowed, a shot rang out.

  Women screamed, Bert blew his whistle, Daisy dragged a trembling Rose from the stage. ‘He’s here! He’s found us,’ whispered Rose.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Why should your fellowship a trouble be,

  Since man’s chief pleasure is society?

  Sir John Davies

  Two days had passed since the attempted murder of Lady Rose Summer. The countryside round about had been scoured for the would-be assassin. All railway stations were watched. Bert had a description of the man. He had called in at the village pub, The Feathers, with a magazine and had shown a photograph in it to the landlord. The photograph had won the annual prize and the story with it said it had been taken by a Dr Linley of Drifton in Yorkshire.

  ‘I didn’t know any better,’ protested the landlord. ‘You didn’t say to tell no one about her. I told him, “Oh, that’s Rose what lives with our policeman.”’

  He described the man as being of medium height, stockily built, with a large red face, a brown moustache and wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat.

  Kerridge had travelled to the village accompanied by Harry and Inspector Judd. Rose and Daisy were confined to the cottage and told not to venture out of doors.

  Kerridge said to Bert, ‘It’s no use you fretting, Shufflebottom. It’s not your fault. How were we to guess that wretched doctor would take a photograph of her? From the description, it’s no one we know. The Honourable Cyril isn’t at all like the description of this stranger in the village.’

  ‘What about Dolly’s brother, Jeremy?’ asked Harry.

  Kerridge shook his head. ‘No, Jeremy Tremaine is thin and tall. What are you getting at? That her own family would kill her? Rubbish.’

  ‘It did cross my mind,’ said Harry. ‘They were so blatantly ambitious.’

  ‘What I can’t understand’, said Kerridge, ‘is why he’s still after Lady Rose. As I said before, he must surely know that she would have told the police everything.’

  ‘Cyril could have hired someone,’ said Harry. ‘I mean, he might blame Rose for his rejection.’

  ‘But she knew Dolly only for a very short time.’

  ‘He might not know that. There was also that speculation in the newspapers that Lady Rose might be keeping quiet out of loyalty to her friend. How did he manage to escape from a hall full of people?’

  ‘He stood by the side door and fired and then escaped out into the night. Everyone was screaming and tumbling about, trying to escape. Lots of confusion. No one really saw him because they were all looking at Lady Rose and Miss Levine on the stage. Lady Rose can’t continue to stay here. What are we to do with her?’

  ‘Her parents are in Biarritz. You managed to keep this out of the newspapers?’

  ‘Yes, clamped down on the whole thing.’

  ‘I see no reason to tell them of this.’ Or poor Lady Rose really will be shipped out to India, he thought. ‘With any luck we will have solved the case by the time they return. I suggest Lady Rose should return to London. My Aunt Phyllis will act as chaperone and I myself will move into the earl’s town house.’

  ‘If you gentlemen would like to discuss this over dinner,’ said Bert. ‘My Sally’s just fed the children and they’ve gone back to school. Lady Rose will take dinner with you and you can tell her your plans.’

  Harry was taken aback to find Rose standing over the cooking pots on the range, wrapped in a long white pinafore. Daisy was laying the table with the help of Sally.

  Rose turned round as they entered. ‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘I am about to serve.’

  She lifted a leg of lamb out of one oven and then a tray of roasted potatoes and vegetables out of the other. She put the potatoes and vegetables in a casserole and placed it on the table and then put the leg of lamb on a large dish and put it in front of Harry. ‘Will you carve, please? I do not have the skill.’

  I will never understand the upper classes, thought Kerridge. Here is the captain, her fiancé, and yet she goes on as if he’s a stranger.

  When they were all seated over plates of lamb, Rose asked, ‘How are your investigations progressing?’

  ‘Not well at all,’ said Kerridge. ‘By Jove, this lamb’s delicious. You will make the captain a good wife. How are you coping with the shock, Lady Rose?’

  ‘I am managing,’ said Rose stiffly, remembering how, last night, she had clung on to Sally and wept.

  ‘We have decided that you should return to London,’ said Kerridge. ‘We saw no reason to alarm your parents with news of this. The captain’s Aunt Phyllis will chaperone you and the captain himself will move into the town house as well.’

  Daisy brightened. Living with the captain meant living with Becket.

  ‘May Daisy and I not stay here?’ asked Rose. ‘He will surely not try to come here again and it is easier to watch out for strangers in a small village than it is in London.’

  ‘There’s miles of places around this village where he could lie in wait,’ said Kerridge. ‘I will arrange for you to make a press statement saying that you only knew Miss Tremaine briefly and she never said anything about anyone. There was only that note about her running away.’

  ‘Lady Rose’s photograph was in the newspapers after the death of Dolly Tremaine,’ said Harry. ‘Maybe one of the locals recognized her and blabbed.’

  ‘If one of the locals had recognized her and it had got about, the press would have been here,’ said Kerridge. ‘No, it was that doctor’s photograph that did the damage. May I have some more lamb?’

  Rose felt tearful the next day as she said goodbye to Sally, Bert and the children. Harry, waiting beside the closed carriage that was to take them to York, saw the way her lip trembled and was amazed that the usually haughty Lady Rose had formed such an affection for these people.

  ‘I shall come back. I promise,’ said Rose, hugging Sally. The children began to cry. Daisy cried as well, although, unlike Rose, she was longing to get to London again and see Becket.

  Rose was silent on the long journey. Harry made several attempts to engage her in conversation, but she only answered in dreary monosyllables.

  But as the train from York was approaching Paddington, Rose suddenly asked him, ‘What is this aunt of yours like? Who is she?’

  ‘She is Lady Phyllis Derwent, widow of Lord Derwent. She is very kind.’

  ‘It is nearly August,’ remarked Rose. ‘Lady Phyllis will not be obliged to do very much chaperoning. Everyone goes to Scotland in August to shoot things.’

  ‘Then you will have time to rest after your horrible experience.’

  * * *

  Aunt Phyllis was waiting for them. Her butler answered the door to them, Brum having gone to Biarritz with the earl and countess. Unlike Brum, the butler, Dobson, was a small round genial man with mutton-chop whiskers and small twinkling eyes.

  They followed him up to the drawing-room. Aunt Phyllis rose to meet them. She was a thin, languid lady, dressed in a sea-green tea-gown bedecked with many long necklaces of pearls mixed with arty lumps of decorated china beads strung with black threa
d. Her long face was highly painted. Her eyes were a pale washed-out blue under wrinkled lids. The hand she extended to Rose was covered in rings.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘I trust you had a good journey?’

  ‘Yes, I thank you.’

  ‘Such a too, too sickening experience. I do not know what Harry was about, to billet you with the peasantry.’

  ‘They were not peasants.’ Rose fixed her with a hard stare. ‘In fact they were decent charming people with no false airs or graces. I was happy there.’

  ‘Dear me. How original.’ Aunt Phyllis turned to Harry. ‘Is Rose to be kept indoors?’

  ‘No, through Superintendent Kerridge a statement is being issued to the press today to say that she knew very little about Dolly Tremaine.’

  Becket entered the room and Daisy wished she could throw herself into his arms.

  ‘Ah, Becket,’ said Harry. ‘Any news?’

  ‘The Tremaine family departed for their home in the country some time ago. The son, Jeremy, is studying divinity at Oxford.’

  ‘I would really like to talk to the Tremaines now that their grief will have subsided a bit. Where do they live?’

  ‘Dr Tremaine is rector of Saint Paul’s in the village of Apton Magna in Gloucestershire.’

  ‘I will go with you,’ said Rose.

  ‘That will not do at all,’ said Aunt Phyllis. ‘I forbid it.’

  ‘You are a guest in my home,’ said Rose coldly, ‘so may I point out you are not in a position to forbid anything.’

  ‘My sweet child! Do not be in such a taking. I was merely concerned for your welfare,’ said Phyllis. She did not want to give up free accommodation and free meals for herself and her servants.

  ‘As it is better I should be with my fiancée every time she ventures out of doors,’ said Harry, ‘then perhaps it would be a good idea if she accompanied me.’

  Lord and Lady Hadshire were basking in the sun on the terrace of the Grand Hotel at Biarritz. The earl was asleep with a newspaper over his face.

  His wife poked him awake with the point of her parasol.

  ‘Brum says you received a telegraph this morning. What was it?’

  ‘Hey, what? Oh, that? Simply Cathcart saying that all was well with Rose.’

  ‘Such a relief,’ sighed Lady Polly, looking out at an expanse of deep blue sea. ‘It is so pleasant to be spared the worry of her.’

  ‘I wish I had a son,’ complained the earl. ‘Boys are less trouble.’

  ‘Oh, go back to sleep,’ snapped his wife, thinking again of all those little graves in the churchyard at Stacey Court. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried and tried. She had given birth to three boys, all of whom had died in childbirth and had gone to join their little sisters in the family grave. Only Rose had survived. Difficult Rose.

  To Daisy’s dismay, the captain had changed his mind about staying at the earl’s town house. He had decided that it might occasion too much unfavourable comment, given that he was only engaged to Rose and not married to her.

  But at least she and Becket were to join Rose and Harry on the outing to Gloucestershire.

  Both wearing carriage dresses and heavily veiled, they climbed into Harry’s car the following day.

  The sun was shining and the shops and houses of London all had blinds and awnings, fluttering in the lightest of breezes. They gave the effect of a city under full sail.

  Harry was driving with Rose beside him. Rose was over-awed by the beauty of the motor car. It was the new Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, the genius of the odd alliance between Charles Rolls, an aristocrat, and Frederick Royce, a working man from very poor beginnings. The Silver Ghost cruised along beautifully, keeping to the speed limit of twenty miles per hour.

  ‘Your business must be doing very well,’ she remarked.

  ‘Because of my Rolls?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Business has been excellent if tiresome. But people are prepared to pay a fortune for me to cover up scandals or even to find their lost dogs. I have told my secretary, however, that I am not taking on any further business until this case is solved.’

  They stopped at an inn in a village outside Oxford for lunch because they had set out early that morning. ‘I wonder if Jeremy Tremaine is at the university,’ said Harry.

  ‘Hardly.’ Rose poked at the food on her plate. She would not confess that she was still nervous and frightened, expecting assassins to jump out from behind every bush. ‘It’s high summer. What college does he attend?’

  ‘Saint Edwin’s.’

  ‘I wonder if this visit to the Tremaines is really necessary. They cannot know anything and they will hardly admit they drove their daughter into trying to run away because they were forcing her into marriage with Lord Berrow.’

  ‘They might just know something,’ said Harry. ‘If you’ve finished toying with your food, we’ll get on the road again.’

  Inspector Judd entered Kerridge’s office looking excited. ‘A man’s been dragged out of the Thames under Westminster Bridge.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He hadn’t been in the water long and he looks like the man from Plomley.’ The police artist had made a sketch of Rose’s would-be assassin from the Plomley landlord’s description, and the picture, prominently displayed on posters, had already been distributed to every police station in Britain.

  Kerridge leaped to his feet and grabbed his bowler hat. ‘We’d best get down there and have a look.’

  The body was lying, covered with a blanket, on the landing stage at Charing Cross. ‘Anything in his pockets?’ asked Kerridge.

  ‘I recognized him from the poster,’ said the policeman, ‘and left him just as he was when he was dragged out of the river and gave instructions that you should be informed, sir.’

  ‘Good lad. Let’s have a look.’

  The constable pulled back the blanket. ‘He can’t have been in the water long,’ commented Kerridge. ‘Who found him? Where exactly was he found?’

  ‘It was low tide and two children found him, half in, half out of the river.’

  ‘That artist did a good job. Let’s see what he has in his pockets.’

  Kerridge knelt beside the body and began to pull out the contents of the dead man’s pockets. There was a gold watch, a wallet containing a wad of notes, a blackjack, and, in one coat pocket, to Kerridge’s delight, a pistol – a lady’s purse pistol. ‘This looks like our man,’ said Kerridge. He turned the body over with the help of Judd. Someone had struck the man a vicious blow on the back of the head.

  Kerridge sat back on his heels. ‘I think that’s what killed him, not drowning, but the pathologist will let us know. Let me have a proper look in this wallet.’

  He carefully extracted the sodden notes, all five-pound ones. ‘I think there’s about five hundred pounds here,’ he exclaimed. ‘Anything else?’

  He fished out a photograph showing the dead man posing on a beach with a pretty woman. ‘I want the police photographer to make copies of this and send it to all the newspapers. Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘Here, sir,’ panted the photographer, running up. Kerridge heaved the body back over. ‘Take a photograph of this, and take this photograph I found in the man’s wallet and see if you can photograph it and send it round to the newspapers. When we know who he is, we’ll know why.’

  Before reaching Apton Magna, they had driven through some very pretty villages, but Apton Magna seemed a dreary, poverty-stricken place. It consisted of a long line of agricultural labourers’ cottages, built like miners’ cottages, directly onto the road and without front gardens. At one end of the row was a village shop and a pub, which was just really someone’s house with a green branch outside to show it sold ale. At the other end was the church with its square Norman tower.

  The rectory was, however, a large handsome Georgian building with a porticoed entrance.

  Dr Tremaine came out to meet them. He was as thin as his wife was fat, wearing black clericals and buckled shoes. He had a cragg
y lantern-jawed face and small hazel eyes which regarded them with alarm.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as Harry stepped down from the car.

  ‘Lady Rose was fond of your daughter and wondered whether on calmer reflection Miss Tremaine had said anything to indicate there was anyone she feared.’

  ‘There was no one. Now, go away.’

  ‘Dr Tremaine, I fail to understand your attitude. You must surely want to know who killed your daughter.’

  ‘That is a job for the police and not for some dilettante aristocrat like you.’

  ‘An attempt has been made twice on the life of my fiancée, Lady Rose,’ said Harry sternly, ‘and all because some madman thinks she may have some knowledge of the murderer, which, believe me, she most certainly has not.’

  ‘You must respect our grief,’ said Dr Tremaine. ‘You must go away before my wife sees you. She is still gravely upset and her nerves are delicate.’

  At that moment, Mrs Tremaine lumbered out of the house. With a cap on her mousy hair and her round figure, she looked rather like the late Queen. ‘Why, Lady Rose!’ she exclaimed. ‘How kind of you to call.’

  ‘They’re just leaving,’ snarled her husband.

  ‘Oh, you cannot go without taking some refreshment. Don’t be such a bear, dear. Do come in, Lady Rose.’

  Under the rector’s glaring eyes, Rose entered the house. Daisy and Becket would have followed, but Mrs Tremaine looked at them in horror. ‘Your servants may remain in the car.’

  She led the way to a drawing-room. It had noble proportions which were lost in over-furnishing. The light was dim because of three sets of curtains on the long windows – net, linen and then brocade.

  Mrs Tremaine pulled the bell-rope and, when the maid answered the summons, asked for tea to be brought in. ‘My poor Dolly was so honoured by your friendship, Lady Rose,’ she said. ‘She was meant for great things and struck down in her prime.’

  ‘Have you any idea who might have murdered her?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I have already answered that,’ said Dr Tremaine.

  ‘There was one person,’ said Mrs Tremaine, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief, although Rose noticed her eyes were quite dry.