I sent my letter off to Mr. Holmes that afternoon and then prepared myself for dinner. As the guest, or one of the two guests, I felt it was important that I look my best and put on a good impression. I had found Mr. Lawton to be as miserable and manipulative as his daughter-in-law had said. It was unfortunate, to be in the presence of such a person. But needs must and I was not about to make Louisa look bad by presenting myself as anything less than a lady.
At this point I would like to say that I do hope the reader will excuse my use of people’s first names—it would be too unbearably confusing to call all the men save one “Mr. Lawton” and all the women save one “Mrs. Lawton.”
I had been making careful notes of everyone’s movements throughout the day. Earnest was downstairs playing the pianoforte while Miss Grant turned the pages for him. Earnest had been at the pianoforte for some time. He and Mary should have got along well. I could hear Miss Grant singing snatches of songs here and there, although not terribly loudly. Possibly she was ashamed of her voice, or perhaps she simply wished not to disturb anyone.
Louisa was overseeing things in the kitchen. I could tell that she was nervous that all should go well. Fanny I had heard go into the room she was staying in with her husband, and from time to time, I heard her barking orders at her maid.
It was a rather quiet day, all things considered. Everyone had been avoiding one other. I could sense this general air of suspicion about the house. Everyone had their own theory as to what was going on and who had taken the pearls. It was not, as one might say, a happy family.
The only disturbance during the day had been a knock at the door about halfway through my letter to Mr. Holmes. I noted the time on the clock—three in the afternoon. Dinner would be in about two hours, I thought, and rose to see who the visitor was.
Louisa invited him in. I caught only a glimpse of him before he entered into the private study of Mr. Lawton.
“That’s Lt. Henry Crawley, an officer of the militia stationed at Meryton” she told me in a whisper. “Here about the pearls.”
“But I thought Mr. Lawton didn’t want anyone to look into it?”
“Perhaps he changed his mind.”
I was a little concerned about another investigator being brought in, but I said nothing. It was not my place to question what the head of the household was doing when he didn’t even know my true reason for being there.
At five o’clock, everyone was in the same place they had been before. It fascinated me that Fanny Lawton could spend over two hours simply playing dress-up in her room, letting her sister-in-law slave away preparing everything for Easter dinner, which must be even more elegant than usual dinners.
I was just exiting my room to go down the hall when I heard raised voices. I paused, my curiosity getting the better of me.
It sounded like Charles Lawton, the eldest son, and George, his brother. They appeared to be speaking in the drawing room at the bottom of the stairs. I couldn’t see either of them, but I could hear them quite clearly.
“This has got to stop. Don’t you see that?” Charles was saying.
“Oh, yes, after all this time, you’ve finally gotten an opinion of your own. Well done brother,” George snapped back. “I would congratulate you more heartily, except that it comes at the expense of treating me as if I were a child.”
“You are behaving like a child and therefore must be treated like one. A spoilt child, in fact. Father should have refused to bail you out years ago. To mismanage things as you do—”
It was not my place to continue to listen, especially as their conversation seemed to have nothing to do with the pearls. It confirmed for me that George was in financial trouble, and so I passed onward down the stairs and into the main dining room.
Louisa was overseeing the servants setting up some plates. “Oh, Miss Bennet, if you would be so kind as to fetch Mr. Hillford? I’m quite at a loss as to where he might be.”
“Certainly.” According to my last notes, Mr. Hillford was in the library, reading some old letters that his father had sent to Mr. Lawton when they were children. He hadn’t stirred from it, unless he had managed to do so without making the rather loud floorboards of the library, which were directly beneath my bedroom, squeal.
Louisa disappeared through the doorway on the other side of the room.
I had scarcely made my way out of the dining room and into the drawing room when I heard it. The whole household, I believe, had to have heard it, for it was a most awful sound.
It was a scream.
A horrible scream, a kind of wailing scream—and I was suddenly reminded of when I was a child and would hear tales of banshees from Mother’s maid, an Irishwoman. The banshees were great, wailing ghosts of women on the Irish moors. I’d never heard one, of course, for such things didn’t exist, but if they did, I could well imagine that they sounded just like this scream did.
I froze, and indeed I felt the entire house seem to freeze, everyone pausing to listen to that awful scream.
The moment it died out, in a kind of odd gurgle, I began to run. It was obvious where the scream had come from—Mr. Lawton’s quarters, the part of the house that belonged to him and him alone. I had been instructed from the beginning not to go into those quarters, and had adhered to it, but I knew where they were, and specifically, where his study was located.
The door was right between a series of white statues, which Mr. Lawton had bragged to me on the evening before he had brought straight from Italy. I tried the door at once—only to find it locked.
A moment later, I was surrounded by everyone else. The five men—the brothers Lawton and Mr. Hillford—then tried the door.
“It was the most awful scream!” Fanny said, looking quite ready to faint. “It was like—like a squealing pig!”
“Or a soul going to Hell,” Julia said, her tone not mean as I would have expected, but awed in a fearful, hesitant sort of way.
“It won’t unlock, the blasted thing!” George said, thumping on the door uselessly.
“It’s solid oak. I don’t see how it should give way easily,” Peter pointed out, almost jovially, as though this was a game.
“The bench outside of the kitchen,” I said. “There is one, is there not? I saw the cook shelling peas there yesterday morning. It ought to serve as a kind of battering ram, oughtn’t it?”
The men hurried and procured the bench, which was used posthaste to burst open the door.
There was a knocking at the front door, but I was certain that I was the only one who had noticed it. The others were all staring into the room—and well they should stare, for it was a sight.
Poor Mr. Lawton was lying on the floor, his throat slit. Blood was absolutely everywhere. It glistened a bit in the dying light of the sun. It was enough to make a person ill, even me, and I had seen death and violence before.
The knock sounded at the front door again.
“I’ll get that,” I said. “Louisa, you must get the other women into the drawing room, please. There’s no need for them to see this. Gentlemen, do not touch anything.”
“And you speak with such authority because?” George Lawton asked.
“Because I am the partner of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the London detective,” I said. “And if you would be so kind as to listen to me, I can help you figure out who did this, or at the very least, prevent you from destroying the evidence of the crime scene.”
I then hurried to the front door.
When I opened it, I saw to my surprise that it was Lt. Crawley. “Lieutenant,” I said. “I had thought your business here was conducted.”
“It was, but I—good Lord, what is all the fussing?” he asked, looking over my shoulder and seeing Louisa and Julia leading a weeping Fanny into the drawing room. The woman’s nerves were either quite frail or she was putting on a bit of a show for everyone.
“We’ve had a terrible occurrence,” I said, knowing that if I lied, the truth would only come o
ut through some other means. “Mr. Lawton, the man of the house, has just been murdered.”
“Murdered? Good Lord.” Lt. Crawley stepped inside and strode over to the men. “When did this happen?”
“Just now,” I said. “There was a scream and then we found him in his study.”
“I shall have to see it at once.”
“It was a horrid scream,” Fanny said. “Not a proper human scream at all. A devil scream, like the devil he was!”
“Please, Fanny, do calm down,” Louisa implored.
“Who had the keys to the room?” Peter asked.
“I did,” Charles said, the eldest. “And my wife.”
“But I do not have them on me, they always hang by the door, anyone could have locked it,” Louisa said.
Earnest hurried out of the room. A moment later he returned, keys in hand. “They were on the nail as they are usually,” he said, “but it would be the work of a moment to pick them up and then return them. I don’t think that any of us use them regularly.”
“You have your own set on you at all times, do you not?” Lt. Crawley demanded of Charles.
“Yes, but—why on earth should I have reason to kill my father?” Charles spluttered.
“Oh, come now,” Peter said, leaning nonchalantly against the fireplace. “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Father was a rotten old—”
“There are ladies present,” Charles reminded his brother.
“—egg,” Peter finished.
“He was rotten,” Earnest admitted. “He was a beast. But there’s no reason to talk about it now, not now that he’s dead.”
“On the contrary,” I said.
Everyone looked at me.
I cleared my throat, feeling a little self-conscious now that everyone in the room was staring at me. “Somebody killed Mr. Lawton. It’s now important that we figure out who. That can only happen if we talk openly and honestly about what we know of him and how we felt about him and the facts of the day.”
George snorted. “As if we should talk about such things—and with whom should we speak of them? You? I mean no offense, Miss Bennet, but last I was aware, it was far from the realm of a lady to investigate such gruesome matters as these.”
“Miss Bennet is a detective,” Louisa said, standing up and squaring her shoulders. “She is here at my request. She works with the great Mr. Holmes in London, as she said before. I asked her to come so that she might discreetly look into the matter of the stolen pearls.”
Charles walked over to the mantle, gently rearranging an ornamental teapot sitting on it. “My dear, you failed to inform me of this.”
“You could hardly keep a secret if you were paid to do it, Charles,” Louisa replied. “I thought it best that as few people as possible know of Miss Bennet’s true errand in visiting us.”
Charles moved away from the mantelpiece—rather quickly, I noted. “Well, I don’t see what good she could do for us now.”
“Surely you would rather have her investigate than drag the police into this,” Louisa said.
“Miss Bennet has my vote,” Julia piped up.
“She’ll get no assistance from me,” George said. I really should have expected such resistance from the men. Earnest didn’t look too resistant to the idea, but the other three brothers and Mr. Hillford all appeared rather agitated—I could tell by the way that their left fists clenched at their sides.
“Really, my dear brother,” Peter said with a smile, chuckling a little behind his hand. “There’s no reason to be quite so put out about the whole thing—unless of course you were the one to do it? What were those money troubles that Father so kindly brought up at dinner yesterday?”
I saw Earnest and Mr. Hillford flash lopsided smiles, the left-hand sides of their mouths turning up—but quickly they smoothed their faces into seriousness when George looked at them.
“I can conduct interviews, as to everyone’s whereabouts,” I said. “I can start with the ladies if you’d like.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” George replied.
“Perhaps I could help,” Lt. Crawley said quietly. “It might be that the men will take me more seriously—no offense meant to yourself, Miss Bennet, but you know how some people can be.”
I supposed that there could be no issue in that. Lt. Crawley was a military man, and in my experience, such people were generally automatically respected. I nodded at him, and Lt. Crawley gave me a small smile.
“Gentlemen, please,” he said, stepping forward. “If you should be so kind as to follow me, I would like to take your statements. If we can all cooperate, this will be much easier for the police and they will have less involvement—which I am certain is what you all would prefer.”
“Perhaps the ladies would like to go on a walk to Meryton,” I said. “I have a letter to post anyway. And some fresh air, I should think, will do us all some good.”
“Oh, that does sound wonderful,” Miss Grant said. She took the pale Fanny by the hand. Fanny still looked to be in quite a bit of shock from the whole ordeal. “Some shopping about the town will do you some good, won’t it? I shall pay, of course,” she added quickly, most likely upon seeing the thunderous expression on George’s face.
George chuckled amicably behind his hand, as if to cover up the anger he had been exhibiting the moment before. “Of course, you ladies would need something to work off your shock.”
“Then it’s settled,” Louisa said. “We shall go into Meryton, and the gentlemen shall speak to Lt. Crawley.”
“Go on and get ready,” I said.
Everyone dispersed, and I took the opportunity to quickly re-enter the study.
The matter of the blood concerned me. There was so much of it. Why on earth would someone go to all the trouble of splattering all that blood?
I checked the carpet most minutely, but there was nothing that the blood was hiding, no message or secret pattern in the rug or piece of paper that the blood was covering up. There was nothing…
Except…
I peered down. By the window, which was ever so slightly ajar—but not large enough for someone other than perhaps a small child to climb through—there was a small piece of rubber on the floor.
I picked it up and examined it. It was a rather thin piece of rubber, light pink in color. It felt flimsy, but it had a bit of stretch to it. What could it have been used for? Surely it did not belong to anything in the study. There was no large piece of rubber or furniture that it could have come off of, and it did not belong to an article of clothing. I supposed that it might have blown in from the outside…but surely that was ridiculous. No, it must have something to do with the murder.
When I returned, the ladies were all assembled, and we proceeded onto the walk.
“Horrible!” Fanny declared. “Absolutely horrible! I shall never forget that sound or that sight for as long as I shall live. I am quite inclined to tell George we must leave the house immediately! I cannot spend a night more in there knowing what has occurred and who might still be lurking about to kill one of us next!”
“The old man was murdered because of his horrible nature,” Miss Grant replied. “I doubt that you shall be the next target, or indeed that any of us shall. What have any of us done to provoke one another? We were all trapped in that suffocating house with him and he has no one except for himself to blame now that his awful behavior has come back to bite him.”
“You really should not speak such ill of the dead,” Louisa said quietly.
“And why not? It’s true, isn’t it? And nobody dared to say it when he was alive to get at them, so we might as well relieve ourselves and say it now in the fresh air.”
“George is more like his father than he would like to admit,” Fanny said. “He has a temper—but nothing, not nearly as bad, that is not what I mean. I just think… that perhaps the sons did not help when it came to the father.”
“Earnest is nothing like his father,” Miss
Grant said loyally. “Of course, there are the little physical tells, like that smile.”
“Such a charming smile,” Fanny said. “I quite fell in love with George when he first smiled at me like that.”
“And they all have a rather strong fondness for roast chicken with lemon,” Louisa added, smiling fondly.
“It is strange, is it not, how all such different people can show the same behaviors—but not in the ways that matter?” Miss Grant mused. “Earnest is gentle as a lamb and I feel I must protect him half the time, if I am honest. And Peter is reckless and jovial, quite the good-natured rogue, if I may say so. Charles is patient. Poor Earnest isn’t; he gets quite agitated if his meals are ever served late. None of them are at all like their horrible father, and yet they all laugh the same way and show their irritation in that little hand clench—yet where it truly counts, they are all as different as if they were strangers!”
“No wonder I have been feeling quite confused lately,” I confessed. “They all do rather look alike, do they not?” I laughed. “After studying with Mr. Holmes, it is in my nature to observe the small physical ticks of the people around me so that I might understand them. With so many men behaving in a similar manner, it has quite confused me at times. I feel as though I’m seeing things I’ve already seen.”
“Is that so? I never thought of it that way.” Louisa laughed. “It is fortunate then that they are all so different in character.”
“I cannot believe that one of us would murder Mr. Lawton,” Fanny said quietly. “It was a horrible thing.” She shuddered. “Horrible. I have found Peter to be bothersome and Earnest is too quiet for me—I beg your pardon, Miss Grant—and yet I cannot fathom any one of them to be a killer. A thief for the pearls, yes, I have wondered who among us could have done that and I quite well think it should be any of us but…to slit a man’s throat…”
The Case of the Patriarch Page 3