Death Around the Bend (A Lady Hardcastle Mystery Book 3)

by T E Kinsey

  ‘That’s enough, Monty!’ said Lord Riddlethorpe. ‘Emily – Monty and I will go back to the house. I need to call Inspector Foister. Please stay here and see what you can see before he gets here. Morgan – don’t let anyone else inside.’

  They both nodded their assent, and Lord Riddlethorpe led his friend away.

  ‘What do you think, my lady?’ I said as we looked at the scene.

  ‘I’m sure the police surgeon will have a clear idea, but obviously we know that he was killed after midnight and before about half an hour ago. We were all in the library together after dinner, and he left for bed at midnight. If he’d been attacked less than half an hour ago, we’d have seen his attacker. Many of the smaller bloodstains are dry, so I should say it was a good few hours ago.’

  ‘He was struck from the front,’ I said. ‘He saw his attacker.’

  ‘Which would seem to suggest he knew him.’

  ‘Or her,’ I said.

  ‘Or her,’ she agreed. ‘Again, the surgeon will have a better idea of the angle of the blow, so he’ll be able to give us a better idea of the height of the assailant. It looks like just the one blow to the forehead, though, not just from the wound, but from the spray of blood on the floor. Do you see? As the murderer swung the wrench downwards after striking him, it left that spray of blood behind it. But it’s neat. Just the one swing. And from this side of the room, I’d say.’

  ‘So Herr Kovacs came down to the coach house,’ I said. ‘Why? To meet someone? Or was he here to sabotage another motor car?’

  ‘Either is possible,’ she said.

  ‘He met someone. He was face-to-face with them when the blow fell. Were they talking? Arguing? Was someone trying to stop him? Did they suspect him of further sabotage and catch him in the act?’

  ‘There are no other signs of a struggle,’ she said. ‘Nothing knocked over, nothing else damaged. It makes a meeting more likely. If he were surprised in the act of sabotage, he would be more likely to have tried to flee.’

  ‘Or to brazen his way out,’ I said. ‘Stand up to his accuser and talk his way out of it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘He might. Morgan, is the back door locked?’

  Morgan made his way to the back of the workshop, carefully avoiding anything he thought might have been evidence.

  ‘Locked,’ he said when he reached the door.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘And the main doors were locked when you arrived?’

  ‘Yes, m’lady. You saw me unlockin’ ’em.’

  ‘So the attacker left and locked the door behind him. What’s the most likely chain of events now, then?’

  ‘It still doesn’t point to either,’ I said. ‘If Herr Kovacs came down here with a key and let himself in, he could have been followed. His murderer would have come in through the open back door, confronted him, killed him, taken the key, and left the way he came. On the other hand, if it was arranged, it would be the murderer who had the key, let himself in, waited for Herr Kovacs, and then locked up after himself.’

  ‘True. But the murderer had a heavy wrench in his hand. The tools are all stored on that back wall. If someone had followed Viktor down here to see what he was up to, they would both have come in through the back door. The murderer would have taken the wrench from the wall, and then come all the way round to the front of the coach house to approach Viktor from this side. Wouldn’t he have grabbed his weapon and confronted him there and then? Why walk all the way round? Why put Viktor between himself and his only exit?’

  ‘In that case, the murderer was here first,’ I said. ‘It was a prearranged meeting.’ I looked more closely at the body on the floor. ‘If Herr Kovacs had the key, he would have put it in his pocket, wouldn’t he? And to get at it, the murderer would have had to search him. But look, his jacket is exactly as it would be if he fell on it. He’s not been searched.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ she said. ‘We really ought to leave all this to the police, you know. But my curiosity is piqued, and as long as we don’t actually get in the way, we can’t do any harm. Morgan, will you be all right here on your own? I want to take a look round in the house.’

  ‘As you wish, m’lady,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait here for the inspector.’

  ‘Good man. Come along, Armstrong, we need to have a quick snoop before that awful Foister fellow gets here.’

  Lord Riddlethorpe was pacing the hall when we entered the front door. He ignored us as we hurried towards the stairs, but Mr Waterford glared at Lady Hardcastle.

  At the landing, we turned left towards Lady Hardcastle’s room, but we passed her room and continued down the passage to the next. Lady Hardcastle tried the door.

  ‘This was Viktor’s room. Let’s have a quick rummage before anyone else realizes they ought to do the same,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know this was his room,’ I said. ‘I think I heard him leaving.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve no idea what time it was, but I heard a door shut in the middle of the night. It woke me.’

  ‘It would make sense. He certainly left his room in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘it’s hard to tell which door is which just by the sound.’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite easy with a bit of practice,’ she said. ‘They all have their own creaks and groans. One becomes quite adept at discerning who’s sneaking about in the night.’

  ‘I’m afraid I only heard the click as it shut. No distinctive creaks or groans for me. I thought I heard two more later, but I might have dreamed it.’

  ‘Viktor leaving, and someone else leaving and returning,’ she mused. ‘Well, well, well.’

  As she spoke, she was hunting around the room. Everything seemed to be in its proper place, though, so there wasn’t very much to look at.

  ‘You’ve got to give Evan some credit,’ I said. ‘He’s clearly taking the role of valet very seriously. This place is immaculate. Look how neatly everything’s been put away.’

  ‘He’ll go far, certainly. And we really need to speak to him.’

  The cluttered writing desk by the window was the only real place of interest.

  ‘What’s this doing here?’ she said as she picked up the photograph of the girls’ school cricket team. ‘He seemed fascinated by it at dinner the other night, and here it is in his room.’

  She continued to rummage through the papers. Herr Kovacs seemed to have brought his work with him, and had clearly given Evan instructions that nothing on the desk was to be disturbed. ‘Cluttered’ was the first word that came to my mind, but it seemed scarcely adequate to describe the chaos on the small table.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I think we can confirm the meeting hypothesis. Have a look at this.’ She indicated a small piece of paper unfolded on the desk.

  Without touching it, I inspected it carefully. It was a piece of Codrington Hall notepaper folded in two. It was of the sort that was placed in every room for the use of the guests. The crease was a little rumpled on one side, as though it had been pushed under the door and had caught on something on its way in. I looked back at the doorway and noticed that one of the floorboards sat a little proud of its fellows.

  The paper bore a short message, written in a neat, rounded hand:

  We need to talk. Meet me in the coach house at two o’clock. The back door will be unlocked. Come alone. R B.

  ‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘You don’t think . . .’

  ‘The only “R B” I can think of is Rosamund Beddows.’

  ‘That’s easily solved,’ I said. ‘Lady Lavinia and Miss Titmus would know Mrs Beddows’s handwriting in an instant. Should we take the note? We might be able to find out what it means before the police see it and jump to conclusions?’

  ‘It’s tempting, isn’t it. But I think not. We can’t interfere. We’ll have to do as Fishy says and “let the cards fall where they may”.’

  I heard the sound of footsteps in the passage and touched Lady Hardcastle’s arm
to attract her attention. I put a finger to my lips and tiptoed to the door. I opened the door a crack and peeped out. I saw the retreating back of Mrs Beddows.

  Lady Hardcastle raised an eyebrow in silent enquiry.

  ‘Mrs Beddows, my lady,’ I said quietly. ‘On her way downstairs.’

  ‘Gracious, she’s late.’

  ‘Betty said she was tired and wanted a lie-in.’

  ‘So she did, so she did. A sleepless night, it seems.’ She stood for a moment in silent contemplation. ‘But we’d best not jump to conclusions ourselves. And we’d better slip away before anyone catches us in here.’

  We stole cautiously out of the room. Once safely in the passage and away from Herr Kovacs’s door, we strolled casually back towards the stairs – nothing says ‘these two women are up to no good’ quite so emphatically as seeing them skulking along a passageway.

  The door to the servants’ staircase opened ahead of us. Mrs McLelland emerged, followed by one of the housemaids.

  The housekeeper was giving the girl strict instructions. ‘. . . but no one – no one – is to go into Herr Kovacs’s room until Inspector Foister and his men have examined it. Do you understand?’

  The girl nodded meekly.

  ‘And take extra care with—’ She stopped talking as she noticed us coming towards her. Lady Hardcastle swept imperiously past, and the two household servants bowed their heads in silence.

  We were part way down the stairs before we heard Mrs McLelland’s voice once more in the distance. The sound of it distracted me, so that I was looking the wrong way as Mrs Beddows came sprinting back up the stairs towards us, her head down. She almost bowled me over.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh, it’s you. Good morning, Emily.’

  ‘Good morning, Roz, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Someone after you?’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. No, just need to get something from my room.’

  ‘Don’t let us detain you, dear. Shall we see you for lunch?’

  ‘Doubt if we’ll be getting any lunch,’ said Mrs Beddows over her shoulder as she sprinted on. ‘Haven’t you heard? Another of Fishy’s stupid friends has been found dead. The police will be here soon, and we’ll never get any blessed food.’

  She was out of sight before Lady Hardcastle could say another word.

  Inspector Foister was a great deal less supercilious and dismissive once he had a real murder to work with. He arrived within an hour of Lord Riddlethorpe’s call, and set to work at once. During a thorough examination of the coach house, he left scraps of paper torn from his notebook, upon which he had written instructions for Sergeant Tarpley when he arrived: ‘Take fingerprints’, ‘Sketch blood pattern’, and the like. (I found them when I went for a snoop after he’d gone inside.)

  Having diligently catalogued even the minutest details of the scene of the crime, he returned to the house, where Lord Riddlethorpe gave him the use of a small, informal room towards the rear of the ground floor. He called in guests and members of staff one by one, interviewing each of them for up to ten minutes.

  I was waiting in Lady Hardcastle’s room when she returned from her own meeting with the newly invigorated inspector.

  ‘I say,’ she said as she breezed in. ‘He’s a good deal more impressive when he’s got something to get his teeth into.’

  ‘He seems to be much more interested this time,’ I said, and I told her about the notes I had just seen in the coach house.

  ‘I’m not sure he’s quite up to the standard of our own dear Inspector Sunderland, but he’d certainly give him a run for his money.’

  ‘Do you feel suitably interrogated?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been more aggressively questioned – that chap in Bucharest with the rubber cosh and the buckets of iced water was more enthusiastic, for instance – but seldom more thoroughly or thoughtfully.’

  ‘I shall look forward to taking my own turn,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad you said that, dear – it’s your turn now. He asked me to send you in next.’

  ‘I shall get down there at once. Do I look presentable?’

  ‘There’s a smudge on your dress from when you were poking about in the coach house,’ she said. ‘But you’ll do for an interview with a police inspector.’

  I went downstairs.

  The inspector was sitting in a comfortable armchair. Opposite him was a chair from the dining room. He invited me to sit. The room itself was uncharacteristically small for the grand house. Perhaps it had been a study in former times, but now it seemed to be a solitary sitting room. The comfortable chair and its companion table were the only other furniture. There was a family photograph on the table beside an ornate lamp. The walls were panelled in oak, giving more credence to the ‘former study’ idea. A sash window gave a view towards the formal gardens at the rear of the house.

  ‘Miss Armstrong, isn’t it?’ said the inspector as I sat. I felt uncomfortably prim in the upright chair while he slouched in the armchair with his notebook.

  ‘Yes, Inspector, that’s right,’ I said.

  ‘And you work for Lady Hardcastle?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  He made a note. ‘For how long?’

  ‘How long have I been working for her? Let me see . . . She first offered me a job as her lady’s maid in ninety-four, so . . . fifteen years.’

  ‘You can’t have been very old,’ he said as he made a note. ‘What were you, fourteen, fifteen? No one employs a fifteen-year-old lady’s maid.’

  ‘I was seventeen.’

  ‘Still far too young, mind you. Not the choice I should have expected someone in Lady Hardcastle’s position to take.’

  ‘People have incurred substantial losses betting on things they expected Lady Hardcastle to do.’

  He didn’t even look up. ‘You arrived on Monday, I believe,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You were billeted in the servants’ quarters with Miss Buffrey?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘And yet last night you were sleeping in Lady Hardcastle’s room.’

  ‘I was. I slipped and bumped my head while I was drawing her a bath. She let me stay in her room rather than moving me. Lady Lavinia arranged for another room to be prepared for her.’

  ‘So I gather. That means you were on the same corridor as Herr Kovacs. Did you see or hear anything last night?’

  ‘I was awakened by the sound of a door closing,’ I said. ‘I thought I heard footsteps in the passage.’

  ‘And what time would this have been?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, I’m afraid. I don’t own a watch, and I couldn’t see the clock in the dark.’

  ‘It was still dark, though?’

  ‘Pitch black, as far as I could make out.’

  ‘So it was certainly before five,’ he said as he made another note. ‘Possibly before four if it really was pitch black. Could you tell which door it was?’

  ‘It was only once I was properly awake that I worked out it had been a door at all.’

  ‘And what about the footsteps. A man, would you say?’

  ‘Impossible to tell, Inspector. I heard the creak of a loose floorboard – nothing more telling than that.’

  ‘And you went back to sleep? You didn’t get up to investigate these strange noises?’

  ‘I was still feeling a little groggy, I’m afraid, so I wouldn’t have felt up to it, even if I did consider it worth the effort.’

  ‘Not worth the effort?’ he said. ‘I’m given to understand that you and your mistress fancy yourselves as amateur sleuths.’

  ‘In my fifteen years as a household servant, Inspector, I’ve learned a few things about the lives of our “betters”. Comings and goings in the middle of the night are nothing out of the ordinary. The unspoken rule is that as long as everyone is back in their own room by daybreak, everyone else will pretend that nothing untoward has happened. To poke one’s beak out of the door and catch someone in the act of slipping into som
eone else’s room would be the height of bad manners.’

  ‘I see,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘But if it were something of that nature, surely you would have heard another door once the sinner had reached his destination.’

  He was right, of course. I already knew full well that I might easily have heard Herr Kovacs slipping out to his fatal rendezvous, but the inspector’s observation made it more certain. If someone had left their room for what Betty referred to as ‘night manoeuvres’, I would probably have heard the click of the door at their destination. Unless . . .

  ‘It’s possible that his destination was in another part of the house,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t on his way to another guest’s room.’

  He turned back a few pages in his notebook. ‘That would make it Mr Featherstonhaugh visiting Lady Lavinia in the family’s part of the house,’ he said, his tone reaching a level of puritanical disapproval I’d not heard outside the chapel in Aberdare.

  ‘I can’t rule it out, Inspector,’ I said. ‘But I’ve known Mr Featherstonhaugh for many years and honestly doubt it would be him. I rather think his intentions are more romantic than lust-filled.’

  The inspector grunted. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I rather think you’re right.’

  ‘Which means I probably heard Herr Kovacs on his way to meet his unpleasant end,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid you probably did.’

  ‘Unless I’m lying,’ I said. ‘I might have heard nothing. I might have been the one who lured him to the coach house and bludgeoned him to death.’

  ‘It’s true, miss, you might,’ he said, smiling for the first time. ‘It would have been a risky strategy to involve yourself in the discovery of the body, though. And your own concussion was real – several people have confirmed it. I don’t believe you were capable of getting out of bed, much less wielding a wrench. Why do you say “lured”, though? Is it not more likely that he was caught in the act of interfering with his lordship’s motor cars?’

  Had he not already searched Herr Kovacs’s room? Had he not seen the note? I decided to say nothing about it. ‘You’re right, Inspector, of course. Just a maid’s romantic fancy.’