I’ve never ridden a camel, but imagine that it’s a less than comfortable experience. On arriving at my ancestral home, I felt as though I’d crossed the Sahara on one of the wretched beasts. I climbed carefully out of the car and had to check my legs were still functioning. After a few cautious steps, I followed the old man inside.
We might just as well have taken the tradesman’s entrance, as Grandfather headed straight towards the kitchen where the staff were convened for their early lunch.
“No, no, don’t get up,” he commanded, but every last person put their cutlery down and sat up straight out of courtesy. “Somewhere on the property is a young man with curly red hair and a nasty demeanour. The police are after him, but I’d rather that one of you found him first.”
Driscoll, the gardener, cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Milord.” Without looking up from the table – as if he were addressing a communion wafer rather than another human – he said his piece. “I think I might’a seen the fella in the gamekeeper’s hut this mornin. He were bedded down there overnight but I chased him off.”
His employer folded his lips into his mouth before replying. “Oh, well, it’s a sighting at least. I should have realised last night that the boy wouldn’t have been able to get far without a car of his own. Please keep an eye peeled and bring him straight to me if he appears.”
As the unofficial head of the household staff in Fellowes’s absence, it was down to Cook to respond. “We were all terribly sorry to hear the news, Milord. And I just wanted to say…” The bold woman, who had bossed me about and kept me in line ever since I was tiny, was suddenly unsure of herself. “Well, whatever we can do to help, you know that we will.”
My grandfather placed his hands on the back of Fellowes’s empty chair. “Thank you, Henrietta.” He gazed at his staff with thanks and affection. I was surprised he even knew her name. I’d never heard her addressed as anything but Cook before. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you saying that.”
He bowed his head respectfully and left the room. I didn’t follow him. I just stood there with my tummy rumbling, staring at the food. The meal Cook had prepared looked comparatively edible and I would have loved to sit down for a bowl of leek and cabbage soup with thick crunchy bread and salty butter. Sadly, my grandfather had other ideas and poked his head back into the kitchen to admonish me.
“Don’t dawdle, Christopher. You’re as bad as Delilah sometimes.”
To be honest, I was jealous of the dog who had already returned to her basket with a healthy chunk of lamb between her teeth. But it was Alice’s sympathetic expression that my eyes lingered over as I reluctantly trundled from the room. It was almost as if she could sense how hungry I was.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Next stop: Reginald Fellowes,” Grandfather explained as he shot along the corridor away from me.
The doctor had been and gone, but whatever he had administered at least meant that the poor man could sleep. When we got to the butler’s room, Cora was sitting in a chair at his bedside and he appeared to have regained a little of his natural colour, though the scent of sickness hadn’t left the dark, featureless space.
“I spoke to the police,” she told us without prompting. “That Blunt fellow is… well a little odd, but I got the impression that he’s not the type to gossip. He took my statement without the other officers being present and he seemed satisfied that Reginald wasn’t involved.”
Her great-uncle came to place a hand on her shoulder. “That’s good news. And, for all his faults, Inspector Blunt is nothing if not professional. I’ll have a word with his superiors to see if he’s moved the investigation on. He’s a real hound, that one. Doesn’t like to give up on his theories until there’s incontrovertible proof otherwise.”
Cora looked down at the man who most people in the family couldn’t stand but she was apparently in love with. “Thank you.” She stopped speaking and I thought that was all she would manage but then she flicked her gaze back to us. “Thank you for accepting what I told you and not being horrified. I don’t think there are many other people who would have.”
Grandfather nodded and squeezed her shoulder a little tighter.
Once we were back outside, I had a question for him and it might not have been entirely selfless. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”
He was already striding off down the corridor, his long coat flapping in his wake. He didn’t answer until we were back upstairs in the main wing of the house. “I think it will be difficult for them. It’s difficult for any two people from different backgrounds. Cora is a woman of some wealth and Fellowes has a far darker past than many of the men I’ve locked up for life.”
I hadn’t had the opportunity to ask about this until now. “So why did you give him a job in your house? Why do you trust him so deeply?”
He stopped beside the door to the armoury. “That’s not something which he would want me talking about. But I’ll tell you this, the man saved my life once and anything I can do to pay him back is worth it.”
I tried to make sense of this revelation. Fellowes couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old and my Grandfather retired in his sixties which means that Fellowes must have been around my age when he was convicted of whatever offences Blunt had dug up on him. As I processed this new information, I realised that I wouldn’t want anyone to judge me for the rest of my life on the actions I had undertaken up to now. I couldn’t say what sort of criminal activity he had engaged in, but it only seemed right that Fellowes had been given a second chance.
“Come along, boy.” He turned the amber glass handle of the thick oaken door. “I have a question for you.”
Inside the armoury, little had changed but there were signs of police activity. Iron filings had been spilt on the floor and, though I’d seen no footprints when I’d inspected the room, a number of large, dusty treads were now visible on the carpet.
Grandfather looked around the scene meticulously. His quick, inquisitive eyes carried out a topographical study of every chest and fixing. The armoury had never been designed for storing weapons, it was simply that my family had acquired such an extensive collection over the years that they needed a room of their own. There were two suits of armour by the door which gave the place its name. I walked back to have a closer inspection, as I’d barely looked at them on my first visit that day.
“Grandfather?” I didn’t like to interrupt him but the most extraordinary thought had entered my mind. “What if whoever shot Uncle Maitland was hiding inside one of these when I came in and then slipped out when we were distracted?”
He said nothing for a moment and I felt a little pride to know that he was giving my theory the weighty consideration it deserved.
“You know, Christopher, that is one of the most ridiculous ideas I’ve ever heard. There’s a rather large hole in the visor. You’d have spotted the killer instantly. Besides, he’d have had plenty of time to get away before you arrived, what good would hanging around here have done him?”
“Oh… Um.” I didn’t really have an answer to that. “Well, it was just a thought.”
He continued his examination, bending low to sniff the cigar ash, just as I had. With a twitch of the nose and a sidelong glance, he soon moved on. Pausing to examine the empty space where the crossbow had been, and then its twin on the opposite wall, he made a contemplative clicking sound in his cheeks. Finally, he walked over to the window and angled his head to look out. “Tell me something, boy. Did you actually see this window open when Maitland was killed?”
I thought for a moment. “Well, no, I didn’t. I mean, the shot must have come from this general direction but… well, I suppose I saw the crossbow bolt and assumed the killer was in the armoury.”
He hummed in reply and moved to the side of the window to assess the angle required to fire at Maitland, before turning his eyes up to the ceiling. “Yes, a lo
gical conclusion, I have to admit. And obviously our culprit would have come in here to fetch the weapon, but we can’t be sure that this is where he fired from. The window wasn’t open when you got here, for one thing. Who would have gone to the trouble of closing it, knowing that the whole house would be up in arms as soon as Maitland’s cry rang out?”
I had to hope this was a rhetorical question as I hadn’t the foggiest idea. I was once more inclined to think that my role in the investigation could have been filled by a shop mannequin or perhaps a ventriloquist’s dummy. It seemed that my main function was to make it appear as though my grandfather wasn’t talking to himself.
He took another look around the room and distractedly twisted his long white beard around one finger. Apparently satisfied with his examination, he nodded his head and said, “On we go, Chrissy. Time and tide wait for no man.”
I was desperately low on energy by this point and struggling to stand. “Where are we off to next?”
He spun back around to me. “I think you’ll like this.” He let the words run through my head for a heartbeat or two before putting me out of my misery. “It’s lunchtime!”
Did Dickens himself ever transcribe any two words more beautiful than those? Did England’s immortal Bard strike upon any such moving a couplet? I could have jumped into my grandfather’s arms and given him the sort of warm embrace that has never been a feature of Cranley family interaction.
“That doesn’t mean you can let your guard down,” he said, as he marched away. “I expect you to keep your eyes wide open for evidence. You must remember that anyone could be guilty.”
I practically sprinted down the hallway to the dining room then immediately prayed that Grandfather’s warning would not prove prescient. The only guests who would be joining us for lunch were Mother, Father and my lovesick sibling.
“It’s a rum business, no doubt,” my father announced once we were all sitting down and Albert had mopily rung the bell for lunch.
“Darling,” my mother interrupted, before Father could utter any other such inanity. “Belinda and Maitland are dead. I think it’s a little worse than that.”
He looked stunned that his normally deferential wife would have felt the need to correct him. “Oh… um, quite!”
As he helped himself to a good measure of whisky from the corner cabinet, I noticed that my grandfather was looking at his son-in-law through the corner of his eye. No one else saw it but I realised then that, for all that he’d tried to reassure me, he hadn’t dismissed the possibility that my father was the killer.
This also made me question his attitude towards Cora and George. Had he really been as soft on them as I’d believed or was he lulling them into a false sense of security? And if he had crossed them off our list, who did that leave us with? Fellowes who was already sick at the time of the second murder, a batty old woman who could barely look after herself, a missing bully with few ties to the family and…
It was my turn to look at my father in a different light.
“I just meant to say that it’s a thoroughly…” He was ruffled by the stony atmosphere which, in a few clicks of the mantelpiece clock, had occupied the space around us. “Or rather, it’s really very-”
“Thank you, Walter,” Grandfather interrupted, a half-smile on his face. “I appreciate the sentiment.”
The cheeky blighter was at it again. Lord Edgington of Scotland Yard wasn’t the softy I’d mistaken him for. His years in the wilderness had done nothing to dull his instincts and his skill for manipulation was as strong as ever. With one simple look, he’d defused the tension in the room. My father, who a moment before had been pulling at his collar and shifting in his seat, was suddenly at ease.
My grandfather was a true magician.
Our first course was wheeled into the room just then by Halfpenny, the head (and only) footman of Cranley Hall. He was a stooped old fellow who I always felt bad for when he had to carry something heavy. I barely noticed how awkwardly he hauled the tureen from the trolley, though, as I was distracted by the idea that my father was a brutal murderer who wished us all dead.
That still wasn’t enough to put me off my food and, when my bowl of Vichyssoise was served, I had to stop myself from plunging my face into it and lapping up the contents like a dog with poor table manners. Even though Cook had substituted the potatoes in the recipe for cauliflower and, for some unfathomable reason, added sheep’s trotters, it hit the spot nicely.
My mother and brother were engaged in a debate upon how distantly related two people had to be before it was acceptable to consider marriage.
“In the past, cousins used to marry all the time.” He emitted one of his most expressive sighs. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t continue that tradition.”
Mother took his hand across the long dining table which was shrouded in a chintzy white cloth. “We’ve been through this, Albert. People did all sorts of things in the past that today would be frowned upon.”
Once I’d drained the contents of my bowl and my hunger was a little less agonising, I was free to examine the man who had sired me. I’d always considered my father a stuffy, old-fashioned sort of fellow. Despite choosing a wife who was interested in the most modern of social causes – suffrage, helping the poor, rights for dogs and the like – his worldview was firmly rooted in the Victorian age.
For Walter Prentiss, it was as if the twentieth century was yet to arrive. He could normally be found in a black double-breasted frock coat that ran down to his knees, though could just about be persuaded to pass it up in favour of a linen lounge suit at the height of summer. He positively despised modern fashions in fact and I distinctly remember him criticising his father-in-law for dressing like a dandy.
I never blamed my father for his aloof manner, of course. As William Wordsworth said, ‘The Child is father of the Man,’ and I’d add that the parents of the child are therefore the grandfather of the man (which is not so catchy but hopefully the meaning is clear.) I doubt my paternal grandparents came within arm’s length of poor little Walter, so it’s hardly surprising that he struggled to communicate much to his sons beyond the importance of punctuality and clean fingernails.
And though he was no different from many fathers, this coldness suddenly spoke volumes to me. Could his upbringing have imparted a viciousness within him that would make slaughtering his family a simple task? Or perhaps he had been driven to despair by his poor investments and, in his detached, rational way, sought out a desperate solution to dire financial straits.
I wasn’t the only one quietly examining him either. My grandfather was still at it, even as he engaged in conversation.
“Such a relief when spring arrives in earnest, don’t you think, Walter?” There was more weight in the question than he’d have us believe.
My father squirmed under the pressure of the old man’s gaze. I could only imagine what he’d be like if this was a serious interview. Before he could answer, one of the police constables marched past the open door and he practically jumped out of his seat.
“Oh yes,” he attempted. “A lovely time of year… what with the weather and the little birds singing and… um… flowers and such.”
“Flowers?” Grandfather was quick to pounce on this, his voice hardening just a touch.
“Yes, you know, daffodils and crocuses or should that be croci? I’m never sure with that sort of thing. But they’re awfully pretty at this time of year, wouldn’t you say?”
The old man showed no emotion as he ignored the question and replied, “Daffodils are poisonous for human consumption, Walter. They’ll give you the most dreadful digestive problems, though are not generally fatal.”
My brother dropped his spoon into his empty bowl and, once the clatter had died out, no one made a sound.
Grandfather’s gaze shifted off around the wood-panelled room and he finally took pity on his son-in-law. “But su
ch flowers are long gone by now. It’s practically summer already, you can feel it in the air.”
“Yes…” My father swallowed noisily. “Practically summer.”
“We should go down to Brighton for the weekend soon,” my mother intervened, as if the dead bodies of her two siblings hadn’t just been taken away in an ambulance. She was awfully good at smoothing things over, but this was a step too far, even for her.
My grandfather let out a frosty laugh as Halfpenny arrived with the second course. The meal continued in silence with only the odd comment on the food and I was glad when it was over and I could beat a hasty retreat.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Something approaching normality had returned to Cranley Hall. Though there were still police officers poking about the place, and the ballroom was closed off to everyone, a hush had fallen over the house that I hadn’t experienced there for some time.
My mother was eager to get back to our house at Kilston Down, but Grandfather convinced her to stay another day and seemed quite distraught at the idea of her leaving. It was hard to say if this was for her sake or his, but she reluctantly agreed. Albert was in no hurry to go back to university, so sat in the grand salon moping to himself and polishing off Cranley’s stock of ginger wine.
With the police trampling about the place and the staff still busy cleaning up after the ball, I was at a loose end. It presented me with the dilemma of having to decide whether to return to my copy of Martin Chuzzlewit or head outside for a stroll. In the end, I grabbed my binoculars, checked in with Cousin Cora to see how Fellowes was doing and took Delilah with me for a trip to the woods.
As much as I adored birdwatching, I can’t say I was particularly good at it. Take warblers for instance, there are just so many of them and they all look so darned similar to one another that I could never tell a willow warbler from a garden warbler – and don’t get me started on chiffchaffs!
Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery Page 14