by Dean James
“Very civil of you, Dr. Kirby-Jones,” she said gruffly. “Nothing like this has ever occurred at Kinsale House, and certainly not during one of my writers’ weeks. But that is by the by, now. Can’t refine too much upon that! We’ll have to do what we can to minimize the upset. Once the police have the mess tidied up, we can go about our business.”
“Yes, of course, Lady Hermione,” I replied. “But it might take a while for the police to figure out who the murderer is. In the meantime, I’m not sure there’s much we can do. The police might wish to send everyone home, after they’ve all been interviewed, of course.”
“Nonsense!” Lady Hermione barked. “The police can investigate, and we shall go on with our program.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” I said, though privately I wasn’t certain just what Robin would think of such a plan. He might be happy, however, to keep all his suspects in one place for a few days.
Lady Hermione looked up as the door opened and Isabella Veryan entered, in considerable agitation.
“Hermione! What is this I hear about that wretched woman being found dead—no, murdered!— out on the terrace?” Isabella collapsed on the sofa next to me, and I turned to her with sympathy. Her skin had lost all its color, and her lips trembled.
“Afraid it’s true, Belle,” Lady Hermione said, her voice oddly gentle. She and Isabella stared at each other, engaged in some sort of silent communication. I could read desperation and fear in Isabella, stoic calm in Lady Hermione, neither of which emotions was of much help in figuring out what they were trying to keep hidden from me.
“What can this mean?” Isabella cried. “Who among us would do such a thing? And why?” This melodramatic turn on Isabella’s part made me curious. She hadn’t seemed the type to indulge in histrionics of this nature.
“I haven’t the least notion, Belle,” Lady Hermione responded, her tone becoming brisker. “Buck up, girl; don’t let this overset you! We shall weather the storm; never fear.”
Isabella almost literally stank of fear. I recalled the cryptic threat with which Dorinda had taunted her, and I wondered what skeleton in her closet Isabella didn’t want revealed. Surely it couldn’t be anything that terrible. But she was of a more in-tensely private generation, after all, and while I might think her peccadilloes not all that titillating, she could very well see them in a different light. Ostensibly, Nina wasn’t the only one with a motive to want Dorinda out of the way, but would Isabella have killed to safeguard her secret?
Before I could think of a way to ask a question, the door once again opened, and Giles strode in.
“I beg your pardon, Lady Hermione, but I must speak urgently with Dr. Kirby-Jones.” He stood, waiting.
“Certainly, young man.” Lady Hermione positively beamed at Giles for his show of good manners.
I got up from the sofa and approached Giles. He led me a few steps away from Lady Hermione and Isabella, who fell into a low-voiced conversation the moment they thought we were out of earshot I wanted to listen to them, but Giles’s manner was too urgent.
“Yes, what is it, Giles? Have you found out something?”
We had paused near the door, and Giles opened his mouth, about to speak, when the door opened. Norah Tattersall strode in, literally dragging the local constable by the arm.
She came to a halt just inside the door and pointed at Giles with a flourish worthy of Sarah Bernhardt.
“There he is, Officer! Arrest him immediately! ”
At first I couldn’t discern whether she was pointing at me or at Giles, but from the way Giles suddenly turned pale, I knew he was the target of Norah’s accusation.
“What on earth are you gabbling about, Miss Tattersall?” I asked, striving to keep my tone mild. “Are you accusing my assistant of something?”
Norah’s mouth widened in a triumphant grin. “I saw him on the terrace not an hour ago, arguing with that poor woman. He killed her! ”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Giles tensed beside me, and I laid a reassuring hand on his arm. He might be impetuous, but he is not a killer. He very well might have been arguing with the late unlamented on the terrace, but he hadn’t killed her. I would have been able to read his guilt—he’s still not terribly sophisticated at hiding his deepest emotions, particularly from me.
“Nonsense!” I said, my voice at its deepest and most authoritative.
Norah Tattersall blinked and took a step backward. “But I saw him!” Her tone was much less firm.
“You might have seen him talking to her,” I said, “but you did not see him attack her or harm her, did you?”
“Well, no,” she said with great reluctance. She made an effort to reassert herself. “But he was very angry with her!”
By now Giles had calmed down. “Yes, I’ll admit I was arguing with her,” he said in his best young- lord-of-the-manor manner. “But I never touched her. When I left her on the terrace, she was still alive. Someone came along after that and harmed her. It wasn’t I who killed her, I can assure you!”
“Of course not,” I said, eyeing Norah Tattersall with great disfavor. She wilted under such strong opposition to her absurd claims.
“Moreover,” Giles said loftily, “I shall be quite happy to inform Detective Inspector Chase of the subject of my conversation with the so-called Dorinda Darlington.” He turned to me. “I found out who she really is, Simon.”
Both Norah and the young constable perked up at this. “Oh, really?” Norah asked, moving closer.
“What’s that, Mr. Blitherington?” Lady Hermione called from where she had been conversing with Isabella Veryan. “What have you learned?”
“I beg your pardon, Lady Hermione,” Giles said smoothly, “but I fear I must disappoint you for the moment. I believe I should wait and tell the detective inspector what I’ve learned, and then he may inform everyone as he sees fit.”
“Fustian!” I muttered, and Giles shot me a sideways grin. He would tell me what he had found out, even if he was reluctant to share it with the rest of the room.
“Very well.” Lady Hermione frowned, but she made no attempt to dissuade Giles from his intention to keep mum.
“Trust you, Norah, to make an ass of yourself,” Isabella Veryan observed acidly.
Norah Tattersall flushed a most unbecoming shade of red. Without another word, she turned and fled the room. The young constable she had dragged into the room stared at the floor, uncertain what to do. Should he follow her, in ignominious defeat, or stay and listen?
“If you would be so good, Officer,” I addressed him, and he perked up, “please let the detective inspector know, as soon as you can, that we have some important information for him.”
He nodded, relieved at having something to do. He ducked his head in the direction of Lady Hermione and Isabella, then left us.
Before Isabella or Lady Hermione made an attempt to question Giles or me further, I, too, nodded in their direction. “If you’ll excuse us, dear ladies, Giles and I will now seek out the detective inspector.”
Lady Hermione inclined her head. “Certainly, Dr. Kirby-Jones.”
Once the door was closed safely behind us, I drew Giles into an alcove in the hall and demanded that he tell me what had happened before we went to talk to Robin Chase.
Giles grinned. “I decided, Simon, to take the most expedient route to finding out just who she was.”
“And what expedient route was that, Giles?”
“I let myself into her room when I knew she was elsewhere, and I had a look through her things.”
“Certainly expedient, if less than ethical. If I weren’t so interested in what you found, I’d reprimand you,” I observed wryly. “And pray tell, what did you discover?”
“She had made no attempt to hide her true identity. With very little effort I found her driving license and several other papers.” Giles paused, drawing out the revelations.
“Yes?” I said impatiently. “Who was she?”
“Her name was Wand
a Harper,” Giles responded, still grinning. “And according to what I found in her purse, she had quite a healthy balance in her building society account.”
“Blackmail payments,” I suggested.
“Perhaps,” Giles said. “Or it could simply be her salary from her job.”
“Which was?” I feared my tone was getting quite testy by this point.
“She was an employee of the Yaknova Literary Agency.” Giles reached into a pocket and withdrew a card, which he handed to me.
There, in black-and-white print, was the truth. Wanda Harper had been, according to the card, an associate of Nina’s.
I muttered a few words that were less than complimentary to Nina’s forebears.
“Precisely,” Giles said with great satisfaction. “The bloody cow must have set this whole thing up deliberately.”
“But why?” I could think of several reasons, all of which reinforced my desire to sever my business relationship with Ms. Yaknova.
Giles shrugged. “Perhaps your favorite copper can get her to confess.”
Giles is not overly fond of Robin Chase, since he suspects—quite rightly—that I find the detective inspector an attractive enigma. An enigma, I might add, that I would enjoy investigating further, given the chance. Alas, however, Robin has thus far firmly resisted my attempts to delve into his dating preferences.
Someone coughed nearby. I had been so intent on what Giles and I had been discussing that I had not heard anyone approach us. The local bobby stood waiting.
“Yes, Officer?” I asked.
“Detective Inspector Chase will see you now, sir,” he said, stepping back and indicating that I should follow him.
“Thank you, Officer,” I said as Giles and I came along obediently behind him.
Dingleby, the butler, had set up Robin and his sergeant, whose name I couldn’t recall for the moment, in the library of Kinsale House. A spacious chamber with high ceilings, it must have contained some twenty or thirty thousand volumes. It was also one of the few rooms I had thus far seen in this monstrous pile that didn’t make me shudder at the appalling taste of the Kinsale family. This room, unlike any other chamber I had seen, was actually attractive and looked like what one expected the library of an aristocratic family should.
Robin sat behind a huge mahogany desk, scribbling away in a notebook, but he put his pen aside and rose as Giles and I approached him. Robin nodded a greeting at Giles. “I believe, Sir Giles”—Robin always insisted on using Giles’s tide, which courtesy Giles detested—“that you have information you wish to impart?”
“Yes, Detective Inspector Chase,” Giles said, his tony accent become slightly more upper class and nasal, “I do. I have discovered the true identity of the murder victim.”
Robin waved a hand at us, indicating that we should have a seat.
“Yes, I believe her real name”—Robin made a pretense of consulting his notebook as he seated himself—“was Wanda Harper. She lived in Chelsea.”
Giles was not completely deflated at having his bit of thunder stolen. “You found her purse, I see.”
Robin vouchsafed a small smile. “Naturally, Sir Giles. That’s the first thing my men looked for, after we had secured the crime scene.”
I had had enough of this little pissing contest— if you’ll pardon the vulgarity. “Did you also see, Robin,” I said impatiently, “that Miss Wanda Harper was an employee of Nina Yaknova’s literary agency?”
Robin regarded me with a bland gaze. “Yes, Simon, we had noted that as well. In fact, I talked with Miss Yaknova about that in my interview with her. She confirmed that Miss Harper was indeed an employee of hers.”
Nina had apparently done an abrupt about-face. “Did Nina happen to explain to you, perchance, why Miss Harper had embarked on this impersonation of Dorinda Darlington? And why she was playing along with it?”
Robin glanced down at his notes. “According to Miss Yaknova, Simon, this charade was all part of a publicity campaign for the forthcoming new novel by Dorinda Darlington.” He paused for a moment, to let that sink in. “Moreover, Miss Yaknova claims that you, the real ‘Dorinda Darlington,’ had agreed to the plan.”
“Preposterous! I did no such thing,” I contested hotly. “Whatever little scheme Nina had cooked up with this Wanda Harper person, she did so without any encouragement or approval from me.”
“Bloody cow!” Giles muttered, just loud enough for Robin to hear.
Robin ignored him. “Also according to Miss Yaknova, you, Simon, were unaccountably failing to play your role in the scheme. Instead, Miss Yaknova claims, you suddenly became confrontational, which was not what Miss Yaknova had wanted.”
Nina was more slippery than the proverbial eel. What a farrago of nonsense she had fed Robin! I still hadn’t figured out completely what her objective in all this had been, but at the moment, most likely, she was doing her best to divert suspicion away from herself and toward me or Giles.
“Nina’s full of it,” I said bluntly.
Robin quirked an eyebrow at me interrogatively.
“I never agreed to any such plan,” I reiterated. “Whatever little scheme Nina had dreamed up, she was executing it without any prior knowledge or approval on my part.”
“Simon knew nothing about any of this,” Giles asserted, his voice rising in anger.
“As far as you’re aware, Sir Giles,” Robin qualified.
Giles was about ready to launch himself across the desk at Robin’s throat, but I laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Temper, temper,” I said softly. Giles subsided in his chair, but I could feel him still boiling mad beside me.
“Nina is playing some deep game of her own, Robin,” I said in as quiet and authoritative a manner as I could. “Perhaps when you discover just what that game is, you might be closer to knowing who killed Wanda Harper. I didn’t do it, and neither did Giles.”
“We do have a witness who places Sir Giles on the terrace not too long before the victim was killed.” Robin addressed me, but he was watching Giles very carefully while not appearing to do so.
With great effort Giles had mastered his temper. “Yes, Detective Inspector Chase, I freely admit that I talked with Miss Harper on the terrace. We did indeed argue, and if anyone were listening, he or she would have heard raised voices. I confronted her with her true identity, and she responded angrily.”
“Did she attempt to strike you, Sir Giles?” Robin queried smoothly.
“No,” Giles said. “Why would she do that?”
“Perhaps she struck out at you, and in attempting to defend yourself, you struck back?”
I hadn’t seen this side of Robin before. While it was most definitely professional, it was not attractive. I didn’t like to see Giles treated this way, but I knew I had to let him answer for himself.
Being able to trace one’s aristocratic lineage back nearly to the Conquest does pay off sometimes, and this was one of those occasions. With all the dignity of generations of noble Blitheringtons behind him, Giles said, “I have never in my life struck a woman, Detective Inspector. I did use harsh language with her because I found her deceit appalling, but I did not accost her physically.”
I could read the reluctant admiration in Robin’s eyes. Almost against his will, I think, he believed Giles. “Very well, Sir Giles,” he said. “We will continue interviewing witnesses, and perhaps we will find someone who saw Miss Harper alive after you left the terrace.” He stood up. “Until then, gentlemen, if you will be so kind as to refrain from sharing any of what we have discussed with anyone else here at Kinsale House.”
With that, we were dismissed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lady Hermione’s program for the remainder of the day had to be scrapped, though Lady Hermione herself would, I think, have been perfectly happy to continue as if nothing untoward had occurred. One would prefer not to acknowledge the fact of a murder on the premises of one’s stately home, of course, but the rather pesky presence of the authorities meant that
Lady Hermione had perforce to follow Robin Chase’s wishes in the matter. We thus spent much of the afternoon twiddling our thumbs idly in our rooms while we waited for the police to finish interviewing everyone in the house.
I spent quite some time in speculating upon just what Nina’s role in this brouhaha was. Had she engineered the whole scenario for some devious purpose of her own? Or had it started that way, and someone else had come along and hijacked her plot, so to speak?
Giles was spending the time more profitably. He had brought along his laptop computer and was busy roaming through cyberspace, finding out what he could about some of our fellow guests. I had expressed my doubts that he might find something truly useful among all the wealth of disinformation out there, but he merely smiled and told me to wait and see. I went back to my endless ruminations.
By the time the summons came for tea, Giles had amassed a stack of papers for his labors. “Anything useful?” I asked.
“I trust you will find it so eventually, Simon,” he said, shutting down his computer. Standing and stretching, he smiled at me again. “All of your fellow authors have various Web sites devoted to them, and I’ve found a number of interviews here and there on the Web for each of them. Not too many surprises, but I did find a few inconsistencies here and there. They might come to nothing, but I’ll do a bit more checking. We shall see.”
He refused to give me any other hints, so I decided not to force the issue. He had appointed himself Watson to my Holmes; so be it.
Downstairs, we found the group assembled for tea rather sparse in number. “I suppose many of them elected to have tea in their rooms or to skip it altogether,” Giles said in a low voice as we surveyed the room.
“Perhaps they feared someone would poison the tea,” I suggested half-seriously.
“Very likely.” Giles snorted. “No doubt they think there’s a mass murderer on the loose, just looking for his or her next victim.”