Sir Gregory would have been shocked into an early grave to hear his butler being so familiar with his guests, but then he didn’t really know his butler. Crumper was two people. One was the perfect servant, stepping miraculously out of another century to attend to the needs of a gentleman of the old school, in the manner to which that gentleman had been accustomed in his youth.
The other Crumper was a real live human being with a job he enjoyed, a good sense of the ridiculous, and an impressive ability to read people. This last quality was telling him that the American bloke didn’t need a butler, he needed a friend. And since Jim Crumper’s qualities also included a kind heart, he was doing something unusual, though not quite unprecedented. He was stepping out of character.
Tom was not at all affronted, but he was very surprised. He was also tempted. “Why, thanks, Crumper. I don’t know, though . . . does she need a ride home?”
“I don’t really know; but the Tandulkar lads might be busy about the farm, they usually are on a summer’s day; and His Lordship’s car is in Oxford for repairs and he doesn’t really like to call upon Her Ladyship’s chauffeur.”
“I got the first bit all right, but who are this lord and ladyship?”
Damn, thought Crumper. He doesn’t know. This is going to make it worse, not better. Reluctantly he answered, “The gentleman who is called Kit by his friends is Christopher Mallowen, Lord Wallwood. His aunt, the dowager marchioness Lady Wallwood, also lives at Morgan Mallowan.”
This information did not seem to distress Mr. Holder. Mr. Holder, in fact, was jubilant. Once again Providence had flipped his life like a coin. “Yes!” he cried, pumping the air with his fist. He laughed, “She doesn’t know that. I know she doesn’t know that.” He thought a moment and grinned. “But I guess she knows it now!”
Upon Crumper an unlikely light dawned. “Does Miss Koerney have an aversion to the nobility?”
“Don’t know, but she sure as hell has an aversion to being one.” Tom was still grinning. “My name is Tom, by the way.”
The butler grinned back. “Mine is Jim, but I prefer Crump.”
“Well, Crump, old buddy, let’s go for a ride.”
Down the hall in the parlor set aside for the police the mood was considerably less merry. Chief Inspector Lamp had come to Datchworth to assure the Family that everything possible was being done to solve this tragic affair and that progress was being made; he had then gathered his colleagues together and asked them why nobody was doing anything and nothing had been accomplished.
Detective Inspector Griffin was understandably defensive; a great deal, he assured his superior, was being done. The residents and staff of the Castle had been repeatedly questioned. Teams were working in Oxford gathering information on Rob Hillman, Derek Banner, Meg Daventry, and even Julie Crumper, the butler’s daughter, who lived in Oxford, slept frequently with Derek, was in the Castle on the afternoon in question, and was one of the eight people who could not be ruled out as to opportunity.
“And aside from the fact that the heir is banging one of the serfs, you have discovered what?”
“The victim was a homosexual,” announced Griffin, proud of himself.
Lamp’s eyebrows rose. “And?”
“Beg your pardon, sir?”
“Does he like rough trade? Has there been a lover’s quarrel?”
“Uh, not that we’ve been able to discover, sir. You’ll remember I told Sharkar and Preston to go back to a don at Brasenose College called Chris Foley, because Hillman’s emails made it clear there was a sexual attraction there, at least at first, then later it supposedly settled down into just being friends. Well, guess what? Chris Foley is a man. He admits to being Hillman’s lover last autumn, but he claims that, quote, ‘the flames died down’ before Christmas, and since then, well, sir, this is the exact quote.” Griffin flipped open a small notebook and read: “We were wonderful friends, wonderful. But the dear boy would sit home by the fire and I must have the night life or I shrivel up and die, do you understand? Just die. So we decided to kiss and part. All very amicable, I assure you.”
“And you have found evidence to the contrary?”
“No, sir. Friends of Foley’s, other homosexuals, back him up, but then they would. But also people at the college confirm that Hillman and Foley were great mates, sat together at most meals, always laughing, they say. No sign of any quarrel. And I have to say that Foley seemed pretty straightforward,” Griffin admitted, unaware of the pun. “Very upset, didn’t seem to be hiding anything.”
“Alibi?”
“Practicing with the Bach Choir. About a hundred witnesses. Airtight.”
“And of course you asked Foley and all his, ah, homosexual friends, if Hillman had found a new love interest in the last six months?” There was a slight ironic emphasis on “homosexual” but it sailed right past Griffin.
“Of course, sir. Nobody admitted to knowing about one.”
“So in short, you burrowed down this promising rabbit hole and found not a bleedin’ thing of any relevance to the case, am I right?”
“Uh, yes sir.”
“Griffin,” said Lamp with a sigh. “Let me tell you something; it may be useful to you in the future. A great many gay people have amazingly dull personal lives. Try to keep your lurid imagination under control.”
Since Lamp’s further questions elicited the information that apart from the gay red herring, absolutely nothing of interest had been discovered, Griffin was feeling acutely underappreciated when his superior summed up: “So basically, if we don’t come up with a motive, we’re nowhere. Anybody got any bright ideas? Hell, if you’d had a bright idea you’d have spoken up by now. I’m ready for dumb ideas. Let’s hear it. Really stupid ideas, anyone?”
Meera Patel cleared her throat. Lamp shot a glance at the dark Asian face of his favorite Detective Sergeant and Family Liason Officer. The perfect marriage of beauty and brains, Patel was ambitious, Lamp knew, but she was completely lacking—thank God—in that vanity that made George Griffin insufferable. She spoke. “I just had a thought.”
“Wonderful, somebody’s had a thought,” Lamp drawled sarcastically, careful to disguise his mild partiality. “You have the floor.”
“Money is always a good motive, but Hillman didn’t have any, so we’ve been looking elsewhere. But what bothers me is that there’s a huge amount of money connected indirectly with Hillman. It would be a great motive if we could just figure out the connection.”
“This huge amount of money being. . . ?”
“The silver they found here last February. Hillman was here to work on some old manuscripts that weren’t supposed to be particularly valuable, or at least not financially valuable. But the manuscripts were found hidden with some pre–Civil War silver that the Family talks about as if it were the Crown Jewels. One piece, they say, is priceless.”
“But the silver’s all in London,” Griffin protested impatiently. “It’s being pawed over by experts and insurance people. None of it’s here, it hasn’t been here since sometime in March. Hillman never even laid eyes on it.”
He was met with a fleeting dagger glance that reminded him that it was unwise to speak dismissively to Meera Patel. But she replied not to Griffin but to Lamp. “My thought was that Hillman might have discovered something in the manuscripts that has to do with the silver. That would prove it was fake, perhaps, or stolen?” She shrugged. “You said you wanted to hear dumb ideas.”
“So I did. You’re suggesting Hillman might have been killed to keep him from spilling the beans?”
Meera waved a hand. “It’s just that there’s not much else to suggest.”
Lamp considered a moment. “I agree. Duncan, start on the silver. Find out where it is, talk to whoever’s messing about with it and whoever found it and anyone else that can tell you anything at all about it. What’s it worth? What happens to it when these experts are through with it? Is it insured, and by whom? I want to see the policy.” He stood up. “And I suppose I�
�d better go to the university and see if I can dig up someone who can read medieval manuscripts.”
Chapter 20
The Monday Before Rob Hillman’s Death
The door of the muniment room was wrenched open and Rob Hillman came flying out, making an instant’s contact with the top step but leaping over the others. He hit the flagstones at a run and sprinted down the corridor. At the end of it, he all but skidded into the turn, ducked through a low archway, opened another door, took a narrow flight of upward steps two at a time, flung himself across an irregular lobby, and pelted down another corridor.
He reached the old library and stumbled breathlessly to the shelves in the north alcove. His eyes swept over the book titles with a hungry gaze while his fingers pitterpattered frenetically over the spines like dry raindrops.
“Robinson, Robinson, I know you’re in here,” he panted feverishly; “I saw you just the other day, where are you—oh that’s right, you’re not blue, are you, like my Robinson, like everybody else’s Robinson, no, you’ve got a custom leather binding and you are—burgundy, that’s it, you are claret, you are some damn wine color—ah!”
He pulled a gold-tooled leather volume from the second shelf with less care than it deserved or than he normally exercised with books. Striding over to a window for better light, he pawed through the pages until at last he found what he was looking for.
Still breathing in great gulps of air, he cradled the book in his left arm and ran his right forefinger down the columns of text, drinking in the words, the amazing, wonderful words.
“Yes! Oh, by God, yes!” he shouted, clasping the open volume to his chest as if it were a lover and dancing joyfully around the room until he got dizzy. Collapsing on an overstuffed Edwardian chair, he began to chortle quietly.
“Calm down, Hillman,” he ordered himself. “Calm down. Your employer is a very fragile old man. You do not want to give him a heart attack.”
After a while he succeeded in following his own advice. At least the physical manifestations of his excitement waned. Inside him there was still a little boy jumping up and down and waving his hands.
But it was a relatively sedate young man who walked out of the library and made his way back to the muniment room in a manner altogether less precipitate than his previous journey.
Back in the muniment room he placed the elegant leather-bound volume on the table where he worked, opened it once more to the crucial page, and began to read aloud in Middle English. The mellifluous syllables fell easily from his lips; Rob could read fourteenth-century English as effortlessly as he could read the New York Times.
He read seven lines from the book, then moved his eyes to the manuscript that had sent him storming up to the old library. He continued to read, without missing a beat, and as he listened to the regular, unbroken pattern of emphasis and rhyme, unchanged from book to manuscript, his heart once more began to thump so loudly that he could both hear and feel it.
He continued reading until he had finished both columns of verse on the manuscript page. Oh, God, it was so sweet!
He’d been handling it with his bare hands before he’d realized what it was. He went to the end of the table and picked up an old leather briefcase from the floor, rummaged through it, and pulled out a plastic food storage bag sealed with a twist-tie. He undid the tie and removed from the bag a pair of thin white gloves. He put these on, picked up a plain manila folder, and with care bordering on tenderness picked up the piece of parchment and laid it in the folder. He closed the folder, removed the gloves and stuck them in his pocket, and set forth to show Sir Gregory a prize beyond—surely—the Baronet’s wildest expectations.
Calm, Hillman, calm! he told himself as he skipped down the steps from the muniment room. But it was no good telling himself to be calm. His heart was singing and his brain was dancing jigs. He couldn’t wait to see Sir Gregory.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, he had to wait, and there was nothing he could do about it. Sir Gregory was unable to come down to lunch; the Baronet was keeping to his room. Crumper relayed this information apologetically to Rob, who tried not to look as disappointed as he was, excused himself from the family dining room, went back to the muniment room, locked the manila folder away in one of the dark Gothic cupboards, and pocketed the key. Then he went back to his beautifully laid-out lunch and ate it without tasting it.
After lunch he went up to his room for his mobile phone and attempted to call Derek. He got Derek’s message service. Rob swore mildly and hung up. Then he entered Meg’s Oxford number; again a recording. He uttered a cry of mock anguish.
The discovery was hopping around inside him like rabbits. He felt as though if he didn’t tell somebody about it pretty soon, he was going to explode. He couldn’t go back to work on the other manuscripts. Instead, he changed into shorts and went out for a run.
The gardens were glorious in the sunshine, but England’s humidity renders warm summer days uncomfortably steamy. Rob, drenched with sweat, slowed to a walk as he skirted the kitchen garden.
“Blimey! The man’s got legs!”
He turned to see Crumpet lounging on a cushioned bench wearing a halter top and amazingly short shorts. He grinned at her. “Speaking of legs, my dear girl!”
She smiled, lifted the limbs in question, and waved them in the air. “See anything you like?”
Rob passed a hand over his forehead, pretending to feel faint. “Too rich for my blood, fair lady!”
Crumpet lowered her legs and sat up. “You’re in a very jolly mood. Found something nice?”
Rob, reflecting that the girl wasn’t half as stupid as she looked, nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Oooo! Tell, tell!”
She wasn’t the audience he would have preferred, but it had been three hours since he’d come upon the manuscript and he still hadn’t been able to find anybody he could tell about it.
“Crumpet, sitting in the muniment room even as we speak, is a fragment of—” He stopped. This was wrong. Let alone it was pearls before swine, since she couldn’t possibly comprehend the parchment’s significance, it was also disloyal. Derek or Meg he might have told before he got to Sir Gregory. But not Crumpet. He shook his head. “Sorry, Crumpet, I just can’t. I have to tell Sir Gregory first; he’s not well today, so I can’t see him yet.”
Crumpet pouted for a second. “All right then, so don’t tell me. But I guess,” she said, eyeing him carefully, “that you’ve found out it’s worth a lot of money, right?”
“Money?” Rob repeated blankly, as though he were unfamiliar with the word. Then he laughed and shook his head again. “No, Crumpet, I wouldn’t say it’s worth a lot of money. I’d say there’s not enough money in the world to buy it. It’s beyond price.”
Her mouth made a little round “o” as this information sank into her brain. Then she rose from the bench in a sudden hurry, declared that if he wasn’t going to tell her she wasn’t going to talk to him, and flounced off in the direction of the kitchen entrance.
Rob chuckled, and having caught his breath, finished his run, returned to his room, and took a welcome shower.
Derek, meanwhile, was lying on a towel in his back garden in Oxford, toasting himself to the color of mahogany, when the tiny telephone at his side began to chirp. He picked it up and told it hello.
“Derek, it’s me!”
“Hullo, Crumpet; something’s happened?”
“Yeah, I just talked to him. He’s banging on about that bloody fragment again, only now he’s found out how much it’s worth.”
“And?”
“He says it’s priceless. He said there’s not enough money in the world to buy it.”
“Jesus,” Derek murmured.
“So what now?”
Derek took a deep breath. “All right, Crumpet. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to save that thing for Datchworth.”
Crumpet laughed. “You sound like that thing they say, you know, do it for Harry and Saint George and England and a
ll that crap.”
“Crumpet, dear girl, sweet, sexy, wonderful girl, this is no laughing matter.”
“O.K. O.K., I’m not laughing. So how do you think you’re going to do this?”
“Not me, Crumpet. We. Us. We are going to do it together.”
“Are we now?”
“Yes. Now. First you must understand, this is very important: we are not going to steal it.”
“Well, of course we’re not! Don’t be bloody daft!”
“We are going to relocate it. Temporarily.”
“Speak English, will you?”
“The fragment is on the table in the muniment room where Rob does his work. It’s been mounted between two little pieces of glass, like a sandwich, and it sits on a little stand. Have you seen it?”
“Yeah, it’s gorgeous, like jewelry or something.”
“Yes. So you know what it looks like. Great. Now, for the time being it’s in the muniment room, because my uncle said that Rob should be able to enjoy it while he’s at Datchworth because he found it. The idea is that when Rob goes back to Oxford the thing will go to my uncle’s desk, in his library, but meanwhile it’s on a big table that has stacks and stacks of papers and manuscripts all over it. I think there’s a pretty good chance Rob won’t notice if it’s missing. Or at least, not for a while.”
“All right, then, when are you going to nick it? Oh, pardon me, relocate it?”
“I’m not going to do it. You are.”
“Me?” Crumpet screeched. “You’re out of your effin’ mind, you are! What if I get caught, eh?”
“You won’t get caught.” He explained to her how it could be done. It was a simple plan and he’d had months to work on it, so he was able to make it sound so easy that a child could pull it off.
Crumpet wavered. “Well, I don’t know. It does sound a bit of a lark, kind of James Bond, you know, but . . .”
“If anything goes wrong, you know I’ll take the blame for it. You won’t be in any trouble at all. Please do this for me, darling. Do it with me. We need this thing for Datchworth, Crumpet. We need it.”
Thieves Break In Page 17