‘You have been re-examining the grounds, I take it, Peterson, and found something you wish me to know about.’ Peterson nodded, fighting to contain a smile. ‘Sit down, take a moment to regain your breath and tell me.’ Riley beckoned to Salter through the door Peterson had left open, and he joined them. ‘Young Peterson has news for us,’ he said.
‘Something to cheer the chief inspector up?’
Riley sent his sergeant a wry look. ‘One can but hope. Well then, Peterson, we’re all ears.’
‘There was no signs of anyone having come over the walls, sir. Nothing like that. No trampled shrubbery or nothing. Course, what with the hot weather, the ground’s rock hard so there were no footprints to lend a clue.’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Seems to me that if anyone did get in, they must have come through from the mews. We concentrated on that area and found this.’
He handed over a button with a ragged piece of green serge still attached to it.
‘Looks like it’s been torn from a sleeve,’ Salter said. ‘Probably a livery, but there’s nothing distinctive about it. It’s just an ordinary brass button. It could have been lost at any time or fallen innocently from one of the coachman’s coats last night.’
‘Even so,’ Riley said, not wanting to puncture the young constable’s enthusiasm. ‘It could equally be an important clue. And it’s the only one we have. Well done, Peterson.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Now then, since you’ve done so well, I have more work for you.’ He produced the list of coachmen that Salter had compiled the previous night, along with the names of their employers. ‘Leave Mrs Ferguson’s coachman to me, but I want you and Harper to interview all the others. Press them for any details they can recall, anything out of the ordinary that occurred while they were waiting around last night. Someone must have seen something.’ Riley held out the scrap of serge. ‘And see if anyone can identify this. I want to know whose household it comes from, and when you find that out, check all the uniforms for torn sleeves or recent repairs.’
Peterson looked delighted to be entrusted with such a responsibility. Riley didn’t have the heart to tell him that it would likely lead nowhere and he was simply being thorough. Danforth would leap upon any piece of evidence that Riley failed to follow through on, especially if it reinforced the mystery intruder theory.
‘Were we ever that keen?’ Salter asked, smiling as he watched Peterson dash off.
‘Were we ever that young?’ Riley glanced at the clock. ‘Right, come along, it’s almost eleven. Mrs Cosgrove is returning to Ashton House to bear Mrs Ferguson company. I am not looking forward to interviewing that particular lady, but needs must. We shall also be interviewing all three of the young men today. Individually.’
‘They’ve had plenty of time to synchronise their accounts,’ Salter pointed out.
‘With Ashton conducting the orchestra. Yes, I’m well aware of that. But still, one of them just might possess a conscience, or even a mind of his own,’ Riley replied. ‘One lives in hope. There again, perhaps one of them will make a slip. There will be a weakness somewhere and we’ll find it. The vital thing about orchestrated testimony is that it must remain in tune. One discordant note and the entire piece loses credibility. Truth is based on interpretation, not facts, Salter. And you can’t interpret something that didn’t happen, can you? Lies sing such sweet songs…’ Riley looked past Salter, out through the window into the haze that hung over the river. The creak of his chair brought him back to the present. ‘Oh, and by the way, I will need you to take Mrs Cosgrove’s formal statement,’ he continued.
Salter looked surprised. ‘She ain’t a suspect, is she?’
Riley laughed. ‘She would be affronted if she thought otherwise. Be that as it may, she’s a personal friend of mine so I’d best not hand Danforth further rope to hang me with, which I will surely do if I interview her myself.’
‘Fair enough.’
When they arrived at Ashton House a short time later the atmosphere was sombre. Farlow let them in, took their hats and informed Riley that his master and mistress were not available. Nor, it seemed, were their children.
‘So they’re in, but they just don’t want to see us, is that it?’ Salter stood in front of Farlow, rather too close to him for comfort, Riley noted with a smile. ‘Hardly the attitude of people who want to find out who murdered poor Miss Emily, is it? Why don’t you go and whisper that in his lordship’s lug ’ole, there’s a good chap.’
Farlow turned a stiff back on Salter, who grinned at Riley. The butler conducted them to the small salon occupied by Mrs Ferguson and Amelia. The former looked pale and fragile, but despite the red eyes and lines of fatigue compressing her elegant face, Riley could see who her daughter had inherited her looks from. Even though he had last seen Emily in death, the resemblance was still unmistakable. Amelia held her friend’s hand as she tried to persuade her to drink her tea. Riley thought that a shot of brandy would be more beneficial but refrained from making the suggestion.
‘Mrs Ferguson,’ Riley said, inclining his head. ‘I regret the necessity to intrude upon you at such a time. You have my deepest sympathies.’
‘Oh, Lord Riley.’ Mrs Ferguson lifted her head, sending dishevelled blonde curls tumbling around her face, and regarded him through tragic eyes that were swamped with tears. ‘Have you discovered who did this terrible thing to my precious girl?’
‘Not yet, I regret to say,’ Riley replied.
‘But he will, Mary. You must have faith. Riley is terribly good and will get to the bottom of what happened.’
Riley sent Amelia a faintly condemning look, hoping that in her effects to console her friend she had not offered her any unrealistic expectations. He took a seat across from the settee occupied by the two ladies. Salter took another chair at the back of the room and pulled a notebook from the pocket of his coat. He licked the end of his stubby pencil and held it poised above a blank page, ready to take notes that only he would be able to decipher. Despite his appalling handwriting, Riley was confident that the record his sergeant presented to him would be a comprehensive and accurate account of what was said. Neat and legible too, despite the initial scribble that only he could decipher.
‘Will you take tea, Riley, and you too, Sergeant?’ Amelia asked. ‘I expect you’re parched if you walked here on such a hot day.’
Both men accepted and Amelia adopted the role of hostess, pouring for them both and handing out cups, chatting about nothing in particular in order to break the uneasy silence that would otherwise have prevailed. Riley used the short amount of time it took for the tea to be served to study Mrs Ferguson. He wondered how she would cope with the tragedy. She seemed to be one of those women who couldn’t manage anything for herself. A beautiful woman who had never had to worry about practicalities.
Until now.
Would she go into decline, or find in her darkest hours an inner strength that she was unaware she possessed? Riley was unable to decide. For now, in her initial grief, it was already obvious that she was channelling all her hopes into his finding an explanation for the inexplicable. Riley sighed, resigned to the pressure.
‘Now then,’ Riley said, crossing his legs at the ankle and making himself appear to the ladies to be as relaxed as he could make himself on what was an excruciatingly uncomfortable chair. A concession to style, Riley suspected, with no thought spared for comfort. ‘I apologise in advance if my questions seem inappropriate, Mrs Ferguson, but in order to discover who committed this terrible crime it is necessary for me to build up a full picture of your daughter’s life. Her friends, her aspirations, that sort of thing.’
‘But…but, I don’t understand.’ Mrs Ferguson raised her glance towards Riley in bewilderment. Her eyes were red and swollen but remained mercifully dry. ‘None of her friends would do anything so wicked. They all loved her.’
‘You were in the drawing room, I understand, and your daughter and the other young pe
ople were walking in the grounds.’
‘Yes, the musical part of the evening was over, and so was supper. Everyone was hot. I thought…I didn’t think there was any harm in their all walking out together.’ She sniffed, dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. ‘How could I have been so neglectful?’
‘No one could have anticipated what happened,’ Amelia said soothingly. ‘You are not to blame.’
‘The dining parlour is across the entrance hallway, where you took supper?’
‘Yes.’ It was Amelia who answered him since Mrs Ferguson was occupied with blowing her nose.
‘All of you?’
‘Well, yes. I didn’t count the numbers and we didn’t sit down to a formal meal. It was a finger buffet, we helped ourselves and just milled around chatting. So I suppose someone might not have been there.’ Amelia looked confused. ‘If you tell me who you think might not have been there, I shall try to remember if I saw that person.’
‘I have no one in particular in mind. I am simply trying to gain a picture of where everyone was.’ Riley put his empty cup aside and shook his head when Amelia lifted the teapot. ‘The doors between the music room and drawing room were open, I imagine, during the recital.’
‘They were. I remember. It helped to create a little through draft, although precious little of it,’ Amelia said. ‘There was really no breeze to speak of at all.’
‘And when you finished supper, the servants cleared the music room and closed the doors?’
‘Yes, I know that had because I looked into it when I was walking outside and remember thinking that the music might never have happened. I know it did happen, of course, because I accompanied Emily on the harp.’
Riley nodded, aware that Amelia was a talented harpist. ‘You didn’t happen to notice two stray glasses left on a side table?’
Amelia shook her head. ‘No. Sorry.’
‘I understand your daughter was considering matrimony,’ Riley said, turning his attention back to Mrs Ferguson, who had recovered what little composure she had previously possessed. He kept his statement deliberately ambivalent in the hope that her response would direct his enquiries in the appropriate direction, uncomfortably aware that he was clutching at straws.
‘Every young men she met seemed bewitched by her.’ Pride glowed briefly in Mrs Ferguson’s otherwise dead eyes. ‘Ask anyone. We were besieged with visitors day in and day out and flowers never stopped being delivered. We ran out of vases to put them in.’
‘Your daughter didn’t accept any of the offers that came her way?’
‘She was waiting for her heart to be touched. Well, all young girls dream of being swept off their feet by a handsome suitor, do they not? I know that I did.’ A hint of pathos clouded her tone. ‘But now…now it’s too late.’ Rivers of tears ran down Mrs Ferguson’s cheeks.
‘Riley,’ Amelia said in a mildly censorious tone.
‘Lord Ashton raised the alarm, I believe,’ he said, happy for either lady to respond.
‘Yes.’ He was surprised when it was Mrs Ferguson who did so, her expressive eyes now flashing with anger. ‘I imagined at first that he had interrupted one of the young men attempting to take liberties, which would have accounted for his anger.’
‘He was angry?’ It was the first Riley had heard of it and the first useful information he had thus far extracted from the grieving mother.
‘I thought so, yes. I definitely heard a lot of shouting before he came into the drawing room to tell us the terrible news.’
Riley sent Amelia a questioning look but she shook her head. ‘I was outside, on the far reaches of the terrace. I heard no shouting. Sorry.’
‘Do you know who he was shouting at?’ Riley asked Mrs Ferguson.
She spread her hands in a helpless gesture, appearing to recede into a corner of her mind where Riley couldn’t reach her. At that point, he knew he would get little more from her, suspecting that she wouldn’t be able to tell him anything useful about her daughter’s private aspirations anyway. His own mother frequently complained that she had been the last to know what secret attachments his three sisters formed when they had been Emma’s age.
‘It’s very important that we know as much as we can about Emily’s thoughts and desires,’ he said softly. ‘All young girls have secrets that they don’t share with their mothers. Would you mind very much if my sergeant went to your house and looked through her things? She might have a journal or letters that will throw light on the identity of her attacker.’
‘Lord Ashton insists that it was an intruder,’ Mrs Ferguson said, appearing to think that Ashton’s word was gospel. ‘No one we know would do such a thing.’
‘That is possible, but by no means certain. Sergeant Salter is unobtrusive and won’t disturb anything. Will you let him look at her room?’ It was vital that Salter get there before Mrs Ferguson recovered her senses, went through it herself and removed anything that she considered to be indiscreet.
‘Well yes, if you think it will help. But I fear it will be a waste of your time.’
‘We were planning to return home and could help to—’ Amelia abruptly stopped speaking when Riley sent her a warning scowl. ‘But that will not be until this afternoon. I expect you want to move things forward immediately.’
‘Stay here for now, ladies, if you will,’ Riley said. ‘Your coachmen are here, Mrs Ferguson. I will have Jute return to your house with Salter and he can show him where to look.’
Mrs Ferguson gave a distracted nod, but Riley was unsure if she really understood what he had just said to her. He felt immense sorrow for the delicate woman who’d had the heart, the entire focus of her life, ripped from it in the cruellest imaginable manner. That fact reinforced his determination to get to the truth. But now wasn’t the time to press her for more particulars. He trusted Amelia to take good care of her until she was strong enough to answer some of his more probing questions.
‘Thank you, ladies. That will be all for now.’
‘She received a telegram from her husband this morning,’ Amelia said in an undertone, walking to the door with Riley. ‘Thank goodness we can now communicate so rapidly with that continent, and that Mary’s cable got through.’
Riley nodded, aware that telegraphic communications had only been established with India earlier that year and was still sporadic in terms of success.
‘I don’t like the man, but he deserved to hear such devastating news before it became public gossip. Anyway, he’s making plans to return immediately to England but offered few words of comfort for his grief-stricken wife. It’s as though he holds her responsible, which is hardly fair, although his attitude doesn’t surprise me.’ Amelia tutted, her green eyes flashing with indignation. ‘The man is quite without heart. Poor Mary is already distraught enough and needs her husband’s support, not condemnation.’
‘All his aspirations rested upon his daughter’s slender shoulders,’ Riley said. ‘I imagine Ferguson has debts that he hoped to clear if only she married well.’
Salter sniffed. ‘I don’t like the sound of him either, Mrs Cosgrove. He was using his daughter like a commodity.’
‘That he was, sergeant. That he was.’
‘At least we can cross him off from the list of our suspects,’ Salter said. ‘He had every reason in the world to keep his daughter alive.’
‘Unless she fancied herself in love and had decided to marry a pauper,’ Riley suggested.
‘You made that suggestion before but we don’t know that she had reached any such decision. And even if she had, how could her father have found out when he’s in India?’ Salter asked. ‘More to the point, he would hardly have arranged for her to be killed in the middle of a society party.’
‘I doubt he’d have been able to, Salter, but you know me. I like to keep my options open.’
‘He does an’ all,’ Salter told Amelia, pulling a hard-done-by expression. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much but half the time his wild sugge
stions prove to have merit.’
‘He always was too clever for his own good.’ Amelia flashed a disarming smile, which faded with her next words. ‘I think Mary regrets doing as her family asked and marrying Ferguson,’ she whispered. ‘Which probably accounts for the fact that she didn’t insist upon Emily accepting the most advantageous offer that came her way, and gave her time to reach her own decision.’
‘Ashton’s offer?’ Riley suggested.
Amelia shrugged. ‘Presumably so. Anyway, I will remain with Mary and let you know if she reveals anything else. I expect you will want to talk to her again, Riley, once she is in better control of herself.’
‘It can wait. It’s more important that we look at the girl’s things.’
‘I thought so. There’s bound to be a journal of some sort. I have yet to meet a young girl who doesn’t commit all her secret thoughts and aspirations to paper. I know I did.’ Amelia bit her lower lip, presumably to contain a smile, but the translucent glow in her eyes defied her best efforts to remain sombre. ‘I still do, so let’s hope I don’t get murdered or a lot of people could be very embarrassed by my confessions.’
‘No one would be foolish enough to try and bump you off, Amelia.’
Her eyes sparkled. ‘I sincerely hope you are right about that,’ she said as she returned to sit beside Mrs Ferguson.
‘Poor woman,’ Salter said, nodding towards Mrs Ferguson. ‘Doesn’t sound as though she’ll get much support from her husband.’ For a hardened policeman, Salter had a soft heart. ‘What now?’
Death of a Debutante (Riley Rochester Investigates Book 1) Page 7