‘You must know something. Come on, spit it out, or I’ll have to get tough with you.’ Moody had temporarily forgotten about the Chief Constable.
‘I can assure you that you could torture me with red-hot pokers, and I would not be able to deliver any further knowledge than I’ve already given you. You don’t still do that, do you? I don’t think I should like it very much.’
The woman was toying with him, and he’d gone as far as he could with his rudeness. There was nothing else to do but dismiss her from his sight, and hope that one of the other nobs would know more than she did about this whole sorry crew. Moody could be a very jealous man when he chose to be.
Hugo, on the other hand, had nearly driven the inspector into a state where he would have admitted himself as a voluntary patient at the local mental institution, with his tales about pranks and larks they had all got up to as teenagers, stopping to indulge in a wheezy laugh, as he got to the end of each story. He had managed to bumble on for about fifteen precious minutes of the ‘golden time’ after a murder, before Moody had actually stood up and held up his hand to halt the flow.
Without a word of explanation, he had merely said, in a strangled voice, ‘Goodbye, sir. Send in the widow next!’ and Hugo left feeling puzzled and unappreciated. Had he not unearthed every little episode of their early years that could have landed them in quite a lot of hot water? How ungrateful he had seemed, and he’d hardly paid attention at all. The PC, on the other hand, had scribbled away like nobody’s business, sometimes smiling to himself as he struggled to keep up with the flow of anecdotes. Nice young man, that, he concluded, and went off to ask Porky to attend at the inspector’s pleasure.
Mrs Lesley Barrington-Blyss arrived with a handkerchief clasped to her face to staunch the tears that sprang from her eyes. A bonny baby, she had grown into a chubby child, then a tubby teenager. Her weight had made her self-conscious, and meeting Capt Leslie when she had been a portly and definitely on-the-shelf adult, had been the only thing in her life that allowed her not to be distressed about how she looked.
She had never minded being called Porky, because she knew that her husband loved her just the way she was. She was now a majestically large woman, although light on her feet, and seemed to float along the ground rather than walk.
This afternoon she floated into the dining room, weeping copiously, and threw herself down into a dining chair which creaked ominously as she landed. ‘Whatever am I going to do without my Popeye?’ she hooted in distress, like a ship that has been holed below the waterline, and sending the inspector into a panic. What on earth was a ‘Popeye’? As far as he was concerned, it was a sailor man, whose girlfriend was called Olive Oyl.
‘Popeye?’ he queried, wondering if the woman was crackers.
‘My husband,’ she replied through the cotton of her handkerchief. ‘Leslie.’
She was at it again! Surely her name was Lesley. Inspector Moody cleared his throat self-consciously. He was already in the dark as to what a Popeye was, and now she was introducing herself as if she were a separate person from herself, as it were. And where on earth did her husband fit into all this gibberish? His thoughts may have been muddled, and he knew what he meant, but he had no idea what this lady was talking about? ‘Lesley?’ he queried, in a rather worried voice.
‘My husband. We shared the same name, but spelled differently,’ Mrs Barrington-Blyss explained, as if to a fool, without losing her place in her handkerchief.
Now Moody really was flummoxed. Of course they shared the same name. They were married. What in the name of God did Popeye and this other Lesley have to do with the dead man? Maybe she was on some sort of medication and hallucinated, or made up things that couldn’t possibly be true.
He was just about to send her away until she was less hysterical, when Glenister approached him from behind and whispered in his ear, ‘I think you’ll find that they shared the same forename, and that he was called Popeye because he wore an eye-patch, and only had one eye. You may have noticed the patch in the library when we examined the body.’
Moody had done nothing of the sort in his fury at being summoned to Belchester Towers on Boxing Day, but in the situation in which he thought he had been embroiled, this information shone a great light on the events since Mrs Barrington-Blyss had entered the room. He glowered instinctively at Glenister, for having the temerity to interrupt him when he was questioning a possible suspect, but he was nevertheless intensely grateful for this enlightenment, although he would never admit it.
‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ Moody began again, only to produce a fresh howl from the recent widow. ‘And I should be very grateful if you would pull yourself together for a few minutes so that I can question you. I’m sure you want your husband’s murderer caught as much as, if not even more than, I do.’
At the mention of the murder, Mrs Barrington-Blyss’s sobs rose to a howl that suddenly transformed into hysterical laughter. Pulling the handkerchief from her face, she screamed with mirth, rocking backwards and forwards in her chair, tears shooting from her eyes as she did so. Moody was scandalised and not a little nonplussed. What on earth was he to do with a woman who appeared to find her husband’s murder so highly amusing?
Louder sounds penetrated through to the drawing room, the door of which was not completely closed, and her laughter reached the others, foregathered there. ‘I’d better go and give that ghastly little man a hand. He hasn’t the nous to know what to do in a situation like this,’ announced Lady A, rising from her seated position.
In the dining room, the door was suddenly flung open, Lady Amanda marched smartly into the room, stopping by Mrs B-B’s chair, raised a hand and slapped her soundly on her left cheek. The ensuing silence was deafening. ‘This woman is in no condition to be questioned. I am going to summon my own doctor, who can administer a sedative. Your constable here can take her home, and you can question her when she is in a fit state to think straight. Her husband’s body is barely cold, and you expect her to be able to answer questions about it? Disgraceful, I call it!
‘Constable Glenister, I should be grateful if you would drive Mrs Barrington-Blyss home, and I shall get Beauchamp to follow you in the Rolls. He can then bring you back when the doctor has arrived to take care of her. I believe she has a housekeeper, so I assume she will not be alone tonight. Her health and mental state are more important, at the moment, than answering a few silly questions from the inspector here. Follow me, both of you,’ she concluded, and led the way from the room, Constable Glenister and Lesley Barrington-Blyss following meekly in her wake, leaving Moody to twiddle his thumbs in solemn solitude.
Lady Amanda deposited the emotionally charged widow in Hugo’s room, and moved to the hall to call Dr Campbell Andrew away from his Boxing Day festivities. This done, she found Beauchamp, as usual, at her shoulder when she wanted him, and explained the situation to him. All the while, Constable Glenister had stood by, a grin on his face at the way she had bested Moody, without even seeming to try, and in such a situation, that the inspector could hardly argue. What a woman!
As the door of Hugo’s ground-floor bedroom shut behind Lady Amanda, Moody left the dining room and burst in on the rest of the party, demanding to speak to each of the other guests in turn. She could hardly ruin all of his attempts at questioning his prime suspects in the case.
Sir Jolyon ffolliat DeWinter took the lead, and rose to follow the man into the next room. Someone, after all, had to set an example and, most probably, put this uppity oik in his place. Sir Jolyon had gained the impression that the inspector suffered from a shortage of good manners, and anyone who could reduce good old Porky to such a pitiable condition needed to be taught a lesson, in his opinion, but he’d treat him as he found him – for now.
After the preliminary enquiries concerning name, address and contact numbers, of which Moody had, himself, to take note, as Glenister would obviously be gone for some time, the inspector began his questioning with, ‘Have you any idea who
may have had a motive for this murder?’
‘Absolutely none,’ replied Sir Jolyon. (‘The subject answered in the negative,’ scribbled Moody.)
‘Can you tell me what you were doing at the time of the murder?’ he continued.
‘What time, exactly, would that be, old man?’ queried Sir Jolyon, not being in possession of this snippet of information.
‘Between the time the official guided tour ended, and the time Capt. Barrington-Blyss was discovered in a life-deprived condition in the library,’ replied Moody, beginning to let his language blossom into purple blooms, and suspecting that Sir Jolyon was being purposely obstructive and time-wasting.
‘Life-deprived – ha! Is that new police-speak, then? What’s wrong with good old “dead”? And to answer your question, I went to the old ballroom where I spent many a happy hour in my youth. This time of year, and all that, can get one a bit nostalgic and sentimental, and I just wanted to bring back some of the sweet old memories.’
‘I am reliably informed that the free time available to the group of guests was something in the order of an hour. Do you expect me to believe that you stood in an old ballroom reminiscing for a full sixty minutes?’ Moody was well on the way to living up to his name.
‘Believe what you like, old chap. That’s what I did, and whether you choose to accept it as the truth, is neither here nor there. I’m not going to invent things just to make your job more interesting.’
‘Can you produce any witnesses to this pensive period in the afternoon?’ Moody was definitely up for a bit of a rumble with this pompous old twit.
‘NO!’ roared Sir Jolyon. ‘Neither can I produce rabbits out of hats, nor doves out of handkerchiefs. I stood there for an hour recalling the past, and if my word’s not good enough for you, you can take a running jump. You’ve already had poor Porky in hysterics, and now you’re trying to goad me beyond endurance.
‘I’ve know the deceased since Porky married him. We have never been close friends and I know little about him. Why on earth, that being the case, should I want to murder him; and so comprehensively, I might add?’
‘My investigations will reveal anything that you do not admit to me during questioning.’ Moody didn’t think he was winning, but was willing to get a little heavier.
‘You jumped-up little jobsworth! Your threats don’t frighten me! As far as I’m concerned, you can stick your questioning where the monkey sticks his nuts, and bloody good luck to you. I’m going back to the drawing room, and, should you wish to speak to me again, I shall insist on my solicitor being present, if only to restrain me from committing common assault on a very common little man.’
After this uncompromising outburst, Sir Jolyon extracted a fat cigar from the inside pocket of his jacket, clipped the end, and lit it, blowing his first inhalation of smoke across the table, straight into the inspector’s face. Then, without a by-your-leave, he stood up and left the room, his face a picture of someone who is having problems with his haemorrhoids, leaving the inspector unexpectedly alone, without even having been given the opportunity to demand that Sir Jolyon request his wife to attend next for interrogation.
Once more, he betook himself to the drawing room, this time looking cautiously round the door, to make sure that there was no Sir Jolyon there waiting to ambush him, and relieved, to find that there wasn’t, asked Lady Amanda, who had returned to her guests, now that Porky was on her way home, to accompany him into the hall for a moment, where he cravenly asked her for a list of her guests, so that at least he could address, by name, the person to whom he wanted to speak next.
Re-entering the drawing room, a reluctant Moody behind her, Lady Amanda obligingly borrowed Enid’s list, handed it over, and left it to him to make his choice, in front of everyone else. It was sheer bad luck that Lt Col. Aloysius Featherstonehaugh-Armitage was at the top of the list, and Moody’s pronunciation of the name, as it was spelled, earned him a round of hearty laughter from his merry little group of suspects, thus further reducing his self-esteem.
By the time he left Belchester Towers that evening with his newly returned PC, Moody was in a steaming fury at the lack of respect that had been shown him during the afternoon. In fact, had there been a broom handy, he’d have grabbed it and swept out of the property in a demonstration of his state of anger and high dudgeon. He was now determined to take it out on his family when he got home, just by way of re-asserting his authority on his world and making himself feel better. He was a man who, if bested, always looked for someone further down the pecking order to kick, to ease his frustration and rebuild his self-esteem.
Chapter Eleven
Plotting
When the police presence had removed itself, Lady Amanda courteously showed out her guests, and promised to call on them all to get the feedback from their tour, if they would be so kind as to let her. No one demurred, and she felt it was best to leave this part of what she had wanted to achieve for another day, especially as she felt so excited about being involved with another murder, and was doing her damndest not to show it.
Once back in the drawing room with a cocktail apiece, she began to show the true colours of her mood. ‘We’re in business again, Hugo! We’ve got a new investigation, and we’ve really got a head start on Moody, because we know the world these people move in. We’re going detecting tomorrow and I can hardly wait! What say you, old thing?’
‘Oh no!’ exclaimed Hugo, who had forgotten her comment about the mysterious Virginia and Santa Claus, dismissing it as just a throw-away line, and had hoped she could keep her nose out of police affairs this time. If Moody went digging about in the past for motives, Manda’s family had quite a lot of closets absolutely bursting with skeletons.
‘Oh, yes, Hugo! I’ll bet my shirt that it was something to do with that blasted book he’s said to have been writing. If he’s going to blow the lid on the County Set, no wonder someone had it in for him. He was just a social climber, after all’s said and done. That’s the only reason he married Porky when no one else would have her.’
‘But, Manda, if he’s been poking and prying into everyone’s past, has it not crossed your mind that you’ll be a really prominent suspect?’
‘What are you talking about, Hugo?’
Lowering his voice, Hugo hissed, ‘One: your mother not being dead, two: her running a knocking-shop here for the GIs in the war, three: your daddy’s trade on the Black Market, and four: his arms deals after hostilities had ceased.’ This statement of facts was greeted with quite a long silence.
‘Bum!’ said Lady Amanda. ‘I hadn’t thought about any of that. But that’s even more reason for us to get at the truth before Moody. If we can provide him with a murderer, maybe we can get Porky to suppress the book, or take it out of the publisher’s hands or something. What you’ve just said makes it even more urgent that we get on to this murderer’s trail before the police. It’s not just me that will be in deep doo-doos, it’s all my friends as well, and you can bet that their families aren’t all sea-green incorruptible.
‘We’ve got to solve this to save the family honour, not only of the Golightlys, of all our friends, Hugo. Don’t you see that? It’s imperative that we beat that ratty little muff-ball to the solution, for all our sakes. And don’t get all holier-than-thou about your own kin. Daddy used to tell stories about your father that would make your hair stand on end.’
‘What stories?’ Hugo was horrified at the very suggestion that his father had not been the honourable man he remembered and had so much admired and loved.
‘You’ll have to wait until all this is solved. If keeping you in the dark is the only way I can ensure your help, then keep you in the dark I shall,’ said Lady A, with a wicked little smile with which anyone who has ever been emotionally blackmailed would be familiar.
‘And what about your lot, Manda?’ asked Hugo, a twinkle of triumph in his eyes.
‘My lot? What have I got to hide? Apart from what you’ve already pointed out,’ she added, looking rat
her shame-faced at the embarrassment of riches that Hugo had just listed.
‘Surely you haven’t forgotten so soon the main reason you used to send your mother back to her apartment in Monte Carlo? What a great potential for current scandal instead of old news: that fatal car crash, after which they buried a woman who wasn’t dead, under an erroneous name, while the real Lady E made off to foreign climes, to live out the rest of her years under a false name,’ Hugo reminded her. If she could use this fact to send her mother scuttling off back to the continent, then someone else could get considerable mileage out of it in a sensational tell-all book.
‘Oh my giddy aunt! None of those things entered my mind, so used to them was I, as part of my own family history. If he breathes a word, not only will the family name be ruined, but Mummy will be extradited and tried for faking her own death, and no doubt there’ll be something they can prosecute me for, for using a title to which I’m not entitled, even though I didn’t know she wasn’t dead. And as for the shares in the family pharmaceutical company – we’ll be wiped off the stock exchange.
‘Bum!’ She declared this last word again with enormous feeling, then followed it with, ‘Double bum!’ After a few minutes with her chin in one hand, hand balanced on her knee, she looked at Hugo with enormous frightened eyes and intoned soulfully, ‘What am I going to do, Hugo? They’re sure to suspect me as it was in my house that the murder was committed.’
‘Well, I suppose we’ll just have to take on the case and expose the real murderer before that chap Moody has time to uncover what old Popeye had included in his book,’ replied Hugo, with a long-suffering face.
‘Did you say “we”, Hugo? Are you really prepared to help me on this one?’ she asked, hope dawning on her face.
Belchester Box Set Page 27