The Mystery at Underwood House (An Angela Marchmont Mystery)

by Benson, Clara

  Angela hesitated.

  ‘Louisa, you don’t suppose he knew that Guy—’ she stopped.

  Louisa sighed.

  ‘Truly, I don’t see how he could have known who Guy was and not have suspected that he was behind the deaths, but John is a stubborn old fool and, as they say, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Guy was the son of his favourite sister, so naturally John didn’t want to believe he could have been guilty of anything so terrible. I know my husband very well, Angela, and I know that he wouldn’t have let the murders continue had he been fully aware of who was behind them. I simply choose to think that he had shut his eyes to the truth.’

  ‘Has he forgiven Ursula for her outburst the other night?’

  ‘Oh, those two,’ said Louisa in exasperation. ‘Do you know, I believe they enjoy fighting. He knows she is highly-strung and yet he insists on goading her.’

  ‘But you must admit she was wrong about Donald.’

  ‘She was, and I don’t imagine Don will ever forgive her. And yet, she was right about the will, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Angela. ‘She knew about the secret trust, but had merely mistaken whom it was destined for.’

  ‘It was an understandable error, I suppose. Donald’s history wasn’t generally known, and we had been vague about it even to him, as what good would it do him to hear the truth when we are the only parents he has ever known?’

  ‘What is the truth?’

  ‘Very prosaic, I’m afraid. His mother and father were tenants on the estate here, but she died giving birth to him and the father was quite unable to look after the baby alone, so we took him in and promised to look after him. Oddly enough, his mother had something of a reputation in the district for second sight, and I’ve always assumed that that is where he gets his occasional fey fits from. His father died a few years ago, so he has no real family left now.’

  ‘It was an easy mistake for Ursula to make, then,’ said Angela. ‘I had considered the theory myself, but the dates were wrong. Donald is in his early twenties, but Christina’s son was born more than thirty years ago. Guy was far more of an age to fit the description. I suppose they have removed his body by now.’

  Louisa dabbed at a tear.

  ‘Yes, poor boy,’ she said. ‘I wish I had known about him years ago, when he was a little boy. We should have been more than happy to take him in after Christina died and bring him up as we did Donald. What a dreadful end. I feel so terribly sorry for him. If only he had confided in John, then all this might have been avoided.’

  Angela nodded but said nothing. Only Inspector Jameson knew the full truth about how Guy had met his death, and they had agreed that it would be better not to make the knowledge public. Angela was relieved: although she knew herself to be perfectly justified in what she had done, since she had been fighting for her life against a murderer, she felt the blood on her hands and was unwilling to have her actions and motives thrust into the spotlight. The official version of the story was that Guy had fallen into the flames accidentally while attempting to grab the document box, and as far as Angela was concerned the Hayneses were more than welcome to believe it.

  ‘So, then, I suppose that’s that,’ said Louisa. ‘Ursula was quite right when she said that there was a murderer among us. I can’t thank you enough, Angela, for all you have done. The atmosphere at Underwood was growing quite poisonous, but now you have solved the mystery we can start to—not return to normal, perhaps, but at least return to living in some kind of peace.’

  ‘There are one or two questions that I should still like to have answered,’ said Angela. ‘The first is: where was John when Winifred fell? He claimed to have been in his study, but Donald said he wasn’t. Perhaps he was doing something quite innocent, but I am curious to know.’

  ‘I know,’ said Louisa. ‘He told me. He was out walking in the grounds. He had seen Guy return earlier and thought nothing of it, but then when all the commotion began and Guy pretended he had turned up an hour or two later than he actually did, John didn’t want Guy to know he had been seen, and so pretended he had been in his study all afternoon rather than outside.’

  It sounded like a pretty thin story to Angela, and she wondered whether there was something more to it than that. Had John, in fact, seen Guy climbing down the ivy from Donald’s bedroom and chosen to keep quiet about it? Naturally Louisa was reluctant to believe that John had known of Guy’s guilt, but Angela was not so sure. However, there was no use in pursuing the point; Guy was dead now, and John was old enough to look after his own conscience, so she wisely resolved to remain silent on the subject.

  ‘What of Stella and Donald?’ she asked. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that they have made it up.’

  ‘My dear, I shouldn’t have expected it myself either, but strange to tell they seem to have done just that. I don’t know quite how it happened, as the things that go on between young couples nowadays are quite beyond my comprehension, but I shouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the engagement is back on.’

  A day or two later Angela heard the whole story when she received a visit from the girl herself. Stella arrived looking at once embarrassed and pleased, in order (she said) to make certain that Mrs. Marchmont was quite all right after her adventure in the attic, and to thank her for solving the mystery and proving once and for all that Donald was not guilty of killing half his family.

  ‘But how on earth did you get the idea into your head that he was the murderer?’ asked Angela.

  ‘Oh! Wasn’t it ridiculous of me?’ she replied. ‘I hardly know how it started, but just after Philippa died we had one of our usual blow-ups about something or other, and things got rather heated and Don got one of his funny fits and started intoning portentously—idiot that he is—about how we should be careful about quarrelling at Underwood, since the house was susceptible to human emotions and might turn on us.’

  ‘I have heard him in similar vein,’ agreed Angela.

  ‘I tell you, sometimes I think he’s quite mad, but Aunt Louisa says he is just sensitive and needs a practical sort of girl to put him right. Anyhow, of course I told him not to be such a fathead, but that just made him worse and he started talking about how Philippa had disliked the house and had died as a result. Perhaps I was in an odd mood myself, but something about the way he said it made me see him suddenly in a new light and I started to wonder whether these fits of his were quite as harmless as they seemed, or whether there was something more serious behind them.

  ‘Things went on as usual for a month or two, then one day Don started saying that he could feel something not quite right in the air. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying to begin with, but he became quite insistent. He was worried, he said, that something terrible was about to happen, but he couldn’t say what it was. Shortly after that, Winifred fell over the balustrade and died.’

  Angela suddenly remembered something.

  ‘Louisa said that when it happened, you ran over to Donald and cried, “Not another one!” or something like that.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Perhaps you were thinking about what he had said about the house turning on those who disliked it.’

  ‘That’s quite likely,’ agreed Stella. ‘But I didn’t suspect him of having had a hand in it—not then, at any rate.’

  ‘When did you start to suspect him?’

  ‘When Edward died. A week or two before the family meeting he went all funny again, and started saying that he could feel something wrong. It was just like when Winifred died, only this time I listened to what he was saying and began to be terribly afraid. That night, after Edward rushed out of the house, Don left the room and I didn’t see him for the rest of the evening. The next day Edward was found in the lake, and people started asking questions and I didn’t know what to think. The police wanted to know what we had all been doing that evening after the row, and Don told them that he’d gone to sit quite innocently in the library with a book, but b
y that time I didn’t know whether I ought to believe him or not.

  ‘Of course, I didn’t think he had set out deliberately to murder his aunts and uncle, but he had behaved so oddly at around the time of each of the deaths that I thought he might have had some kind of brainstorm and killed them without knowing it. I thought that perhaps he had been working too hard and needed to see a doctor. I tried to ask him gently about it, but he just got cross every time I did and we ended up rowing again. By then I had fully convinced myself that he was the killer, and it was coming up to the date of the next family meeting and I was getting very scared. Oh, Mrs. Marchmont,’ she said, ‘What a fool I made of myself that evening! When Ursula started accusing Don I thought it must be true. I thought he would never forgive me after that night.’

  ‘Then you never cared for Guy?’ said Angela.

  Stella shook her head, eyes wide.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘He was amusing company, that’s all. Of course, I’m sorry about what happened, but he was a murderer—there’s no escaping the fact—and so he deserved it.’

  ‘You don’t feel sorry for him?’

  ‘No,’ she said with decision. ‘I know one ought to feel sympathy for his difficult childhood and all that, but I don’t. Lots of people have difficult childhoods and don’t go about killing people. Murder is wrong and that’s that.’

  ‘That’s that,’ repeated Angela to herself later when Stella had left. She was a little surprised at the girl’s uncompromising attitude, but supposed it was only to be expected given the resilience of young people these days to tragedy and disaster.

  She sat for a while in thought, then stood up and looked about her. She was growing restless after several days indoors and determined to go out.

  ‘What I need is a new hat,’ she said, ‘and perhaps a scarf and some gloves. Now, where did I see that darling little red silk cap the other day? Bond Street, I think it was.’

  She rang the bell for Marthe, but it was William who answered.

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am, but I was coming to return this,’ he explained when he saw her look of surprise. He looked round, reached into his pocket and brought out the little revolver that she had lent him a few days earlier. ‘I guess you need it more than I do,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking it from him. ‘It was one of a pair, but the other is no more so I suppose I ought to try and keep this one safe.’

  He shuffled a little and looked sheepish.

  ‘I’m sorry I failed you the other day, ma’am,’ he said in a rush.

  ‘You didn’t fail me, William,’ she said. ‘It was a miscalculation on my part. I ought to have predicted that he would have doubled back into the house.’

  ‘A whole hour I wasted searching through those woods for him,’ he said angrily. ‘When I got down to the little cove I wondered why the only person I could see there was Mr. Donald Haynes sitting on a tree trunk with his head in his hands. It took me far too long to realize I’d been tricked. You ought never to have had to face him alone.’

  ‘It wasn’t something I’d planned to happen, certainly,’ she agreed, ‘but rest assured it wasn’t your fault. And besides, all’s well that ends well. It’s only a shame that he had to die in such a terrible accident.’

  ‘An accident?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly.

  He met her eyes for a moment.

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  She looked away first, then coughed and waved her hand in a gesture of dismissal.

  ‘That will be all, William,’ she said. ‘I am very grateful for all you have done in the past few days. Come to me next week and we shall see about that holiday of yours.’

  He straightened up and beamed.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to work for you, ma’am,’ he said, then turned on his heels and walked out.

  ***

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  About the Author

  Clara Benson was born in 1890 and as a young woman wrote several novels featuring Angela Marchmont. She was unpublished in her lifetime, preferring to describe her writing as a hobby, and it was not until many years after her death in 1965 that her family rediscovered her work and decided to introduce it to a wider audience.

  Also by Clara Benson

  THE MURDER AT SISSINGHAM HALL

  On his return from South Africa, Charles Knox is invited to spend the weekend at the country home of Sir Neville Strickland, whose beautiful wife Rosamund was once Knox's fiancée. But in the dead of night Sir Neville is murdered. Who did it? As suspicion falls on each of the house guests in turn, Knox finds himself faced with deception and betrayal on all sides, and only the enigmatic Angela Marchmont seems to offer a solution to the mystery. This 1920s whodunit in the vein of Agatha Christie will delight all fans of traditional country house murder stories.

  Titles published in this series

  The Murder at Sissingham Hall

  The Mystery at Underwood House