Mrs. Bolton got to her feet and selected a large red leather-bound ledger, the last in a series, from the bookshelf. She placed it on the table. “Help yourself,” she invited. “Lady Lavinia could never be bothered. I can’t be certain she quite followed the calculations when I insisted on having her signature at the month’s end. I don’t believe she knew the price of a packet of pins! But no—to answer your question—‘Goodfellow,’ as he likes to call himself, among other things, is not on the house payroll. Never has been. ‘It’s a personal contribution, Enid, and none of your business,’ Adam said when I asked him where the buffoon got his beer money. I don’t think Adam knows either.”
“Can you tell me in what ways Mr. Goodfellow bothers the household?” Joe asked as though merely requiring confirmation of knowledge he already had.
“Peeking and prying!” The answer came at once. “The maids don’t like to be working in the dairy and see his ugly face leering at them through the window. They don’t feel free to kick off their shoes these hot days and dabble in the moat to cool off as they’d like to. He’s always drawn by the sight of a bare leg. He pushed Rose off the edge last summer and stood by laughing as she sank under—in the afternoon uniform she’d just put on all fresh from the laundry press. Just as well Ben heard her scream and came running. Pest! It’s like having a hornet buzzing about all the time. Never knowing where it’s going to plant its sting.”
“Don’t the men take some action?” Joe cast a sideways look at Ben, noting his suddenly clenching fists. “Did no one step forward to remonstrate on Rose’s behalf?”
“He’s too slick to do anything when the men are about. Though I do recall that Goodfellow fell into something less salubrious than moat-water shortly after Rosie’s escapade.”
Ben reddened and grinned.
“The men servants work hard for their pay, Commissioner, and they don’t like to see him louting about, pretending to do a bit of coppicing here and a bit of fencing there when all he hangs about for is dressing up, scaring people and getting sozzled down the pub of an evening. But their hands are tied. He has the master’s ear, you might say. Lady L. couldn’t stand him, though she couldn’t get him dismissed either. Heaven knows—she tried often enough!”
“Where did he come from? Anything known?”
“He’s been here since before the old master died. Sir Sidney knew him. From his army days? He fetched up here as a down-and-out … oh, thirty years ago … and Sir Sidney, who was a very generous man, gave him a part time job, helping with estate work, sometimes with the horses. He’s been here ever since. He ‘arrives with the cuckoo, that harbinger of Spring, and leaves the moment Jack Frost returns to crackle the surface of the moat with his icy breath.’ That’s what he tells the guests in his spirit-of-nature way. May to September, in my vocabulary. His sister’s a seaside landlady in Southend. She’d tell you she kicks her brother out at the arrival of the first summer holiday-maker and doesn’t let him back until the last one has left. The man’s a total fraud and an exploiter of the Truelove family’s generous nature. My advice—don’t ever ask him to take his mask off.”
“Too late, Mrs. B.! I have looked on the true face of the nasty, blood-sucking rogue. But I see worse in the mirror every morning.” He grinned as he pointed to his left cheek. “And he hasn’t done much to improve the landscape. I owe him one.”
“Well, if you want to know more, Mr. Styles will inform you. He’s been here longer than any of us.”
Joe thanked her for her help and drained his herb tea. “Now then, Ben,” he said and turned to Mrs. Bolton. “If you can spare this excellent chap for another half hour, we’ll get back to work.”
THE WELL-OILED LOCK clicked and the door swung open on Grace Aldred’s room. Cheerful and well appointed, Joe thought. In many ways a plainer version of her mistress’s boudoir. Everything here was scaled down in size, subdued in colour, less sumptuous in quality. A dressing table (pinewood, not mahogany) was draped in a white machine-made lace cloth and Grace’s brush and comb (tortoiseshell, not silver) were laid before a swivelling mirror on barley-sugar twist uprights. The curtains were of a pretty chintz but of a pattern too large for the room. They’d been cut down to size from some grander space, Joe thought. The bed was pin neat and made up with fresh linen but even here the coverlet showed signs of thrift; it was a patchwork sewn from scraps of silk and velvet. A square of embroidery had been left ready to be picked up again on the footstool by the one comfortable chair set beside the fireplace. To occupy the few quiet moments before the bell he noticed on the wall next to it rang to summon Grace to her mistress a few yards down the corridor.
The personal items were sparse. A photograph of two little girls in their Sunday best. Grace and her sister? A copy of last week’s Film Fun magazine by the bedside, open at a photograph of Cary Grant. There was little of Grace herself here. She seemed to be merely an adjunct to her mistress, herself a faded scrap, a piece of the household patchwork.
Joe stood quietly in the doorway, absorbing the atmosphere with Ben moving in anxiously behind him. Joe recognised that Ben’s loyalties were being stretched again. He was uncomfortable with his own presence in a maid’s room and doubly uneasy that Joe was here, missing no details with his sharp, trained eye.
“I don’t think this is going to take long, Ben,” he said. “Don’t worry—we’re not going to have to search through sock drawers and read entries in diaries. If I’ve got this right, Grace will never know we’ve even been in here. Come in and shut the door. Look around. What was it you suppose Grace wanted someone in authority to see? It all looks perfectly normal to me.”
“Nothing here.” Ben shrugged and took a pace back towards the door.
Joe fingered the key ring. “Hang on. What’s this? Two more small keys. What do they unlock?”
Ben took them, feeling the weight. “This here’s the key to her maid’s box. That’s kept up in the attic with the trunks when it’s been unpacked. This other one …” He glanced around. “It must unlock the wardrobe. That’s where she keeps her uniform and her spare shoes.”
“Have a look, shall we?”
Joe unlocked the large cupboard which, in an earlier, more glorious existence, must have been called an armoire. He was faced by a neat array of uniform, dark blue morning and pale blue afternoon dresses, lined up on embroidered hangers padded out with lavender stuffing. Heavier winter coats and serge dresses lurked behind them, protected from the moth by balls of fragrant cedarwood dangling like rough necklaces from the hangers. He was about to close the door when he smelled it. A base undertone, barely holding its own against the predominant cedarwood and lavender. As he shunted forward a handful of garments the smell intensified. He worked his way beyond the winter clothes to the back of the cupboard and the last item of clothing was revealed. A dark green waterproof cape of the kind ladies used to cover themselves when out riding occupied the space, looking, in its deliberate isolation, rather sinister, Joe thought. He pulled it forward on its hanger and looked around for somewhere to carry out an inspection.
“Not on the bed, sir,” Ben took over. “I’ll put it over here on the floorboards in case something’s in there as shouldn’t be. Cor! What a pong! That’s not mothballs!” He spread it out and held it down by the shoulders as though he expected it to leap up and resist arrest.
“The mistress’s riding-out-in-inclement-weather coat. But what’s it got in its pockets? Sorry about this, Ben.” Feeling rather like the Great Magnifico two minutes into his act, Joe took a pair of rubber gloves, Scotland Yard issue, from his trouser pocket and slipped them on. “Just in case we’re landed with poisons of some nature to deal with …” he murmured apologetically.
He felt in the right pocket and encountered a small hard lump. “Take my handkerchief from my breast pocket, Ben, and spread it here by me.”
The dark brown-grey, slightly crumbling mess he scooped out was greeted with a schoolboy’s exclamation of disgust by Ben. “Urgh! It’s sh—horse-
excrement! What’s she doing with that in her pocket!”
“Not shit, Ben. No, something infinitely more evil! Horse-droppings are ambrosial in scent compared with this stuff.” Joe was beginning to feel queasy and recognised that without Adelaide Hartest’s sound talking-to, he would have been dashing straight for the jug and ewer on the toilet table. “Hard to believe, but that substance was once a slice of Mrs. Bolton’s excellent gingerbread.”
“Where did it get the stink, then? And why?” Ben wanted to know.
“I could give you the recipe for the very special frosting but you wouldn’t want to hear it. I’ll just say it’s a mixture of decayed animal parts—stoat’s liver being one. It’s a magic formula for scaring horses. Yes, scaring them. They’ll take fright and try to run away on catching scent of this.”
“Anyone offering a lump of this to a savage horse …” Ben had got there and his face froze into pale disbelief.
“Anyone standing in the entrance to the horse’s stall will be cleared out of the way in the horse’s instinctive effort to escape,” Joe confirmed Ben’s fears. “It will use its teeth and hooves and frantic strength to obliterate what it perceives as the horror that’s advancing on it.”
Joe reminded himself that it had been Ben, tip-toeing along in his patent-leather slippers, who had come upon the awful scene and had stood guard over the body with a raging stallion crashing about an open stable. “But you were there, Ben. You saw the results for yourself,” he said quietly. He’d noticed that the lad’s teeth were chattering at the memory.
“I was lucky then,” he said when he could get the words out. “Having smashed her up, he went backwards into his stall, shivering. People say I was brave to have stuck it out down there but—the honest truth is—I reckoned that big feller was more scared than I was. Poor devil! Poor lady!”
“Poor silly lady! Where, I need to know, did she come by her recipe? Perhaps she left it in the other pocket.” Joe pulled a hopeless face. “Well, we ought to check.”
“Good lord! What the hell’s this?… These?”
He placed a folded sheet of paper on the floor and opened it up.
“Shopping list? Recipe? ‘Cummin … Rose Mary …’ No, I never saw that handwriting before, sir. Scruffy. Pencil. Not what you’d call educated, is it?”
“Just lists the attractants. No nastiness here. But I’ll show you something that is quite stomach-churning. The second thing Grace had left in the pocket for us to find.” He placed it carefully beside the note.
“Chicken’s wish-bone? That’s for good luck, sir.”
A memory had stirred. Joe had heard of these things but he’d never seen one before. “No. The opposite of good luck. This is magic,” he said. “Black magic. It’s bone all right but it’s from a toad. Method: First catch your toad. Then you kill it and pound the flesh to a pulp and chuck it into a running stream at midnight. Of course, the flesh and most of the bones float away downstream with the current, but one bone—this one—perversely, swirls away upstream. This is the one you want. The piece that’s going to give you magic powers. Over horses. Or warts. Or sharp-tongued mothers-in-law. They do a similar bit of jiggery-pokery with frogs and ant-hills in India …”
Ben was prepared to scoff. “Floats upstream? Naw! How could it?” Gingerly, he picked it up and smoothed it between his fingers. “Light as a dry leaf. That scooped bit looks something like the bottom of a toy boat. That wouldn’t sink, but it would go along with the current.”
“Look at the shape. It’s like one of those Australian weapons that turn and fly back at you—a boomerang—don’t you think? Some winged things do move apparently against the forces of Nature as we know them—winged sycamore seeds … aeroplanes, for goodness sake! I don’t believe in magic, either, Ben. I think the shape must be special. No time to experiment but if we popped this onto the rippling surface of a stream it might well be caught by some rule of … shall we say … aquadynamics and sweep off in the opposite direction to what you’d expect. It would be fun to try. But the men who own one of these things don’t want to test out, cast light and explain. No—they want to believe without question and work in the dark. They also seek power by frightening and manipulating the credulous. ‘Toadmen,’ they call themselves where I come from.”
“Toadmen? I’ve heard of them. Down toward Stowmarket, there’s toadmen. Or used to be. Can’t say as I’ve heard of ’em since I were a lad.”
“Not since they were all given the keys to a shining new tractor,” Joe said, smiling. He took the piece of bone, held it between his finger and thumb and twisted it as he would have turned the starting key of a motor. “There’s more power in the turn of a piece of steel in a Fordson tractor engine than in a brittle bit of bone working inside a darkened mind. But, evidently, there’s still one hereabouts who has the knowledge—and the malice—to pass on this evil piece of equipment to an unsuspecting woman and cause her death.” Joe glanced at the open cupboard door. “We’ll just put it back where we found it for the moment. It seems to be safe there. Did you look in the bottom? Anything else Grace left behind for us to see?”
Ben took a slender house-man’s torch from his belt and shone it around the depths of the cupboard. “Yes, there is. Not much but we ought perhaps to take a look.”
He brought out four blue paper chemist’s bags and put them in front of Joe. “All empty. Shall I read the labels? Well, well! Cummin, coriander, cinnamon and …”
“Fenugreek,” Joe finished for him. “Those bags contained the substance she thought she was marching into the stables armed with. We’ll lock those up in the cupboard again too. But where did she get the bate that caused her death? You can’t summon up a stew of stoat’s liver and rabbit’s blood overnight.”
“G. R. Harrison, Purveyor of Pharmaceuticals. Estd. 1882, it says on the labels. You going to arrest him?”
“For the crime of purveying curry spices to a rich household? No, I don’t think so. Mr. Harrison is about as guilty as the horse in all of this. Which is to say—not in the slightest. But there is someone lurking, someone with very evil intent, working through his own agenda. I wonder how far along he’s got … and whether he can hear us scrabbling down the rabbit hole after him.”
CHAPTER 18
Joe was awake again at five. He bathed, shaved and dressed himself in the hooray-hurrah outfit of flannels, linen shirt and Hermès cravat that he felt a summer Sunday morning in the country called for. He had no wish to undertake his next task looking bleary and unkempt in a dressing gown. ‘Never frighten the upstairs maid’ was another rule of country house living he abided by.
He heard her coming down the corridor at six o’clock precisely and nipped out the moment she drew level with his door. A quick: “Shh! It’s only the Police, miss!” and he’d tugged her, still clutching her dustpan and brush, into his room and shut the door.
He held his Scotland Yard warrant card under her startled eyes to calm or at least distract her. “I do beg your pardon! Are you the maid who normally takes care of the rooms in this guest wing?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you here on duty in April when the mistress was killed?”
“I was, sir.”
“Then I have a few questions for you. This will only take a moment and then you may return to your duties. What is your name?”
“Rose, sir. Rose Nicholls.”
“Known to Ben as ‘Rosie’?” Joe smiled. At last, one thing was going in his favour. “Rose, tell me—the morning of the awful event in April—did you tidy out all the rooms along this corridor?”
“Yes, sir. Nothing interfered with the routine. The guests were still here, all of them, and their rooms had to be seen to.”
“Were you also responsible for the guest in the Old Nursery?”
“I had that duty, sir.” Had he imagined that the reply came less swiftly and was accompanied by a slight upturning of the nose? The very pert nose. Ben had omitted to say how pretty Rosie was.
“
The occupant of the room—Miss Joliffe—was she still in residence?”
“She was. Still abed. Fast asleep when I drew the curtains back. She’d asked me to wake her at six with a cup of tea. No breakfast required. No help with dressing. A very independent young lady. Good as gold, very polite and no trouble. She left me half a crown on the mantelpiece and her copies of True Confessions.”
“All as normal, then?”
The response came more slowly. “Yes, sir.” The eyes narrowed and looked away as she added, “No harm done, I’m sure, sir.”
“Right. That’s enough pussy-footing about, Rose. I want you to tell me what exactly was not normal about that room when you did it out. I have to tell you that Ben and I inspected it last night. I’m pretty sure I know what went on in there—I would be interested to hear your confirmation. And—hear this, Rosie—I usually work in the stews of East London. You can say nothing that could possibly shock me.”
He listened to her brief account. She wasted no time on unnecessary detail or speculation and he realised that she’d rehearsed this speech in her mind before delivering it. She’d clearly been concerned and remained puzzled by what she’d discovered. Joe, on the other hand, believed he now had a clear idea of what had gone on that April night. He allowed himself a grim smile. For possibly the first time ever in what had been a seven-year struggle with Dorcas, he thought he had the advantage of her. What would she choose to feed him? Truth or lies?
“Rosie, your information is secure with me. Thank you for your openness and your clarity. I’ve heard less concise speeches from King’s Counsel in court at the Old Bailey!”
“Lawyers? Oh, sir! I’m just a maid!”
“In this household, I’m surprised to hear that! You must be fast on your feet.” The jovial words were out before he could censor them.
To his relief, instead of the offended splutter he’d deserved, he was rewarded with a gurgle of amusement and a very pretty blush before she bobbed and dashed for the door.
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