Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery

by Benedict Brown

  That notwithstanding, just seeing the little blighters hopping about in the bushes filled me with calm. You might think that taking a large, waggy dog with me would not be the best idea, but I swear that Delilah was just as keen on my hobby as I. She was perfectly happy to hide in the undergrowth with me for an hour to spot the family of woodpeckers. In fact, her big, soulful eyes lit up with joy whenever mine did.

  We cut through the Italian gardens, around the lake and were in the woods in no time. In fact, we were just gearing up for a nice long sit on the ground, when I noticed something at the foot of one of the ancient oaks. There were papers strewn about the place. Wax wrappings from the butcher’s, along with a trail of crumbs that the birds were yet to get to. I followed them a way, hoping that they would lead me to whoever had dropped them, but sadly they went in a circle through the trees and back to where we’d started.

  I recognised the wrappings from Cook’s larder. There were all sorts of goodies in paper parcels there, from pies to cold meats and… well, that was the bulk of it actually. I’d been known to raid it myself for afternoon snacks. I didn’t have to think long to work out who had been hiding in the woods.

  I planned to abandon my stint of ornithological observation but then I spotted a nightingale, which turned out to be a sparrow, and that slowed me down a tad. But five minutes later, with one of the wax papers pocketed as evidence, we returned to the house in search of Grandfather.

  I found him looking maudlin in the library. He was slumped in an armchair in the corner with books strewn all around him. I had a quick peek at the titles but they weren’t the kind of thing I was interested in. There was no fiction at all, in fact, and they appeared to be largely scientific in nature. Most had long Latin sounding titles which I couldn’t decipher.

  “Chin up, Grandfather,” I told him somewhat inappropriately, but he was too distracted to pay me any attention.

  The library at Cranley was the real gem of the estate. It was started by… well, one of my ancestors no doubt, and had been expanded over the centuries by each successive generation. Whatever your area of interest, you could find a trove of information there. The uppermost shelves were housed on their own floor, which was accessible by a moveable staircase that spiralled around towards the heavens (appropriately, this was where we kept the religious literature.)

  I loved the sight and smell of all those books. The green and red spines recalled memories of the first time I was allowed in there aged five. I’d just mastered the simpler books at school and the thought that there were so many tomes still left for me to enjoy was both joyous and frightening. I’d read my way through the meagre children’s section several times over before I turned nine and discovered my love of Charles Dickens.

  I had never noticed before, but perhaps the one thing missing from the collection were detective novels. I could only assume that Grandfather preferred real life to fiction, which would explain all the dry books he was surrounded by.

  “I thought I had it cracked,” he told me, his gaze now off through the window. “I felt sure that, after two murders in a short space of time, the killer would have made a wrong step. With such a short list of suspects, how can I still be so lost?”

  It was hard to see him like that. He’d been passing in and out of sorrow all day of course and I was worried this would be the straw that broke the camel’s proverbial.

  “Please don’t be so despondent,” I tried again, though I knew that a few empty words couldn’t bring his children back. “I’m sure you’re close.”

  He shook his head but did not reply. He was watching the tiny dabs of cloud gliding over his estate and I could only imagine the thoughts coursing through his mind. Perhaps he could have borne the strain of Belinda’s death. But to lose two of his children in such a short space of time, was too much even for a man of his resilience.

  Unlike my grandfather, I’d run away from the scene of the crime. I didn’t have to witness the life draining out of poor Maitland, didn’t have to hear my uncle’s last words, which were surely still echoing about the antechambers of the old man’s mind.

  When he spoke again, his change of topic surprised me. “Did I ever tell you about the Bow Boys gang?” he blurted out and I took a seat beside him.

  “No, Grandfather. You’ve never told me about any of your cases.”

  He looked at me, narrowed his eyes uncertainly and started on his tale. “Tommy Bow was a savage. A real monster of a man, as tall as an elephant and almost as broad, there were rumours he’d once ripped a rival’s head clean off its shoulders. And though we knew what he was capable of, and believed him responsible for any number of crimes, we never had enough evidence to convict him.”

  He took a breath in and held it for a moment before continuing his story. “Back in those days, the police didn’t always do things by the strict letter of the law. My colleagues tried everything they could to frame the fellow, but Tommy was too clever. For five years of my career, I thought of little else but sending him to the hangman’s noose, when all I needed was to bide my time.”

  He came to a halt, so I urged him on. “And how did you catch him in the end?”

  “He made a mistake of course. I’d had a man in his gang for a few months, he managed to get wind of an attack they were planning on another gang and we got there just in time to arrest everyone involved.”

  I allowed his story to play out in my head but couldn’t understand its purpose. “Grandfather, why are you telling me this?”

  He looked straight at me, his sombre expression temporarily lightening. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  This was a ridiculous question to put to me as I rarely find anything obvious, even if it’s inches from my face and covered in flashing lightbulbs.

  When I failed to reply, he continued regardless. “Maitland was supposed to have died last night, so what happened this morning couldn’t have been planned ahead of time. The killer is bound to have slipped up somewhere, but I can’t see it. I can’t even tell you for certain why he would have murdered Belinda and Maitland but not Fellowes.”

  This surprised me somewhat. “So you’re sure that Fellowes was poisoned?”

  “Yes, of course he was. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise, and I do not believe in coincidences. I can’t say exactly what he ate, as there are too many toxic plants in the gardens alone, but it wasn’t in Cook’s dinner last night that, or else the rest of the staff would have come down with it too.”

  “Couldn’t it have been from the champagne? Mightn’t he have had a snifter to try for himself?”

  Grandfather shook his head witheringly. “I’ve already told you, boy. Cyanide would have killed him outright. Whatever Fellowes consumed must have been far weaker or he’d be lying in the mortuary with Belinda and Maitland. The question is whether he was ever meant to die in the first place. Had the killer run out of cyanide and made do with whatever substance was at hand? Or did he only wish to keep our faithful butler quiet for a while and not actually hurt him?”

  I considered his questions. “We spoke to Fellowes last night and he swore he had nothing of note to report. We know he went outside with Cora but surely, if either of them had seen anything out of the ordinary, they would have told us.”

  Somewhat petulantly I thought, Grandfather kicked one of the leather-bound books on the floor. “You’re probably right. But I know there’s something I’m missing in all of this and I should be able to see it.”

  Delilah walked over to comfort her master by plumping herself down on his feet and I remembered what I’d discovered in the woods. “Grandfather, I went for a walk and found this.”

  He stared back blankly at the wax paper I’d produced. “Yes, very nice.”

  “It’s from the butcher’s,” I explained, but he still didn’t understand why I was bringing him a piece of litter. “I think that Marmaduke Adelaide has been stealing from the larder a
nd camping out in the woods. If he wasn’t here to kill Maitland, it could explain why he was in the house when Cora saw him.”

  “Or it could be from a poacher’s lunch. They’re not known for their good habits and we get plenty of them on the estate.” He bit his lip and looked once more at my grand discovery. I think he must have relented a little as, when he spoke again, it was in a gentler tone. “You may be on to something though. And if you’re right, and young Adelaide is still around, we’ll find him before long.”

  I thought I’d try to make myself useful and went to pile up the abandoned books that Delilah wasn’t using as a nest. “Do you think he could be involved after all?”

  He brought his hands forward to form a pyramid. “It’s possible, Christopher. We still can’t rule anyone out.”

  “Except poor Uncle Maitland,” I replied, with the books now stacked beside his chair.

  Though my Latin is not the best, I could see that the titles were all related to chemistry. From what I could tell, they were largely on poisons and toxic substances. I had to hope that they’d found their way to our library because of my grandfather’s profession, rather than any nefarious motivation my ancestors had possessed.

  “That’s right.” He paused and his face fell once more. “If only we knew what he saw before I made my toast.”

  I thought for a moment about what my uncle had told us. “He said he saw Fellowes leaving the petit salon, but we know why that was. Fellowes had been to see his secret girlfriend. It’s another red herring.”

  “That was only the beginning. What if Maitland had more to say? I think that my son witnessed something he shouldn’t have, which is why the killer took a risk to keep him quiet.” Grandfather delivered this last sentence with such gravity that it was clear he considered it to be the linchpin to the whole case.

  “So what do we do now?”

  He shuffled his feet under Delilah and took his time to reply. “Now, I sit here and think for as long as it takes for the solution to come to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I had some thinking of my own to do, so I retired to my room without another word to my family. In the seclusion of my chilly quarters, I took out my book of ornithological observations and wrote, “Possible nightingale, definite sparrow.” I like to keep a record of my sightings and it’s really quite fascinating to go back and read the names all the birds I might have, though probably didn’t see. There are wheatears and golden orioles (which I’m more or less certain was a starling catching the light of the sun) firecrests and yellowhammers.

  There was no time for my favourite hobby right then though, as I had urgent matters to attend to. I cracked open a fresh page at the back of my notebook and wrote down our list of suspects. Just looking at the names helped me focus on what I knew about each person. I tried to write an account, not just of the things I’d discovered that weekend, but relevant facts I had always known.

  Marmaduke Adelaide could be summed up in two simple words: absolute thug. But the others were more complex. To begin with, my second cousin Cora was an odd case. She’d been quite the darling of the family in her teenage years. She’d excelled in school, not just academically but in arts, sports and cookery too. She’d represented Surrey in archery competitions for years, had one of her paintings displayed by a London gallery and been offered a place at Cambridge after she finished boarding school. I never discovered what caused her to cut her hair short, swap her elegant dresses for masculine suits and loiter around London instead of making the most of her talents.

  Everyone had an opinion on her transformation, of course. My father put it down to the negative influence of the flapper movement on young women – not that such a movement actually existed outside of the lurid minds of Fleet Street journalists. My mother claimed that Cora had woken up to the possibilities of the fairer sex, though I don’t see what this had to do with her hairstyle, and Albert said that Cora was very pretty with long or short hair, and she could do whatever she liked.

  I don’t suppose my opinion counts for much, but, if you ask me, she was a very sad person. Her parents had lived abroad through her childhood and died of typhoid when she was still young. Most young men her age had gone off to war and either come back scarred by the horrors they’d seen, or failed to return at all. So it’s not really surprising that Cora would have struggled through all of that now, is it?

  I moved on to my cousin George, who was just young enough to have missed out on the war himself but would have felt the same pressures in different ways. He belonged to a generation which had been hacked through before it could reach its prime. With all that expectation on the remaining few, it only made sense for them to rebel. I was more of a conformist myself, but I sometimes wished I had the courage to stand up to my father and say, I’m not going to be the person you want me to. Flappers and war veterans, tomboys and playboys were the ones changing the world. Albert and I just did as our parents told us.

  Naturally, there was a dark side to George which I’d have been a fool to ignore. As good as he was at getting his own way, he didn’t always seem happy to succeed. Perhaps it just came too easily. For years, his mother had idolised her only son and wouldn’t hear a word against him. His father was dead, his friends had followed their illustrious forebears into city jobs or family life and George had opted for a more scandalous existence; spending every night in a different bed, living for the roll of the dice and the spin of the roulette wheel.

  He had been the second in line to the family fortune and had by far the most to gain from his mother’s death, as Cranley Hall would pass on to him once our elderly grandfather died. Perhaps her patience had run out and she’d finally taken him to task for his aberrant behaviour. Perhaps this wasn’t the first time he’d crossed the line of what was strictly legal and his mother had found out. Or perhaps…

  My mind ran with vivid imaginings of just what George might have got up to before planning to murder the whole Cranley clan. Arms dealing, opium addiction, gangsters and blackmail – there was no evidence for any of it of course, but it was exciting to consider the possibilities.

  I was getting carried away, so I lit an extra candle for warmth and got into bed. The technological advances of our burgeoning century, such as central heating and electric lights, were yet to reach my quarters at Cranley.

  I tried to think dispassionately about my cousin, to examine the hard facts. George was friends with a criminal – that much was certain. He’d brought Marmaduke Adelaide to the party as a favour to his father, who had made his fortune from petty crime on a massive scale. Had George helped Horatio Adelaide to exact revenge upon the legendary Lord Edgington? And, if they were to blame for the murders, what part did Marmaduke play?

  An image came back to me then, of Marmaduke at the ball after the police had arrived. His clothes were unkempt, just like after any fight at school. There was a bloody bruise on his cheek, which certainly hadn’t been there when he’d arrived at the ball, and his flaming red hair was dishevelled.

  But, perhaps most significantly, Marmaduke had begged for help. He’d been shaking as he spoke to me, terrified in fact. It was hard to imagine that he could have switched from budding murderer to frightened schoolboy in such a short space of time. Perhaps he’d seen something he shouldn’t have, or helped in the killing and regretted it. He wasn’t coming to gloat or tease, he’d needed my help and I’d sent him packing. Even the black eye he’d given me didn’t warrant that.

  With my head growing ever heavier, I moved on to the evidence against Great-Aunt Clementine. She had been set to inherit Cranley before her husband died and had to make do with the modest existence she’d enjoyed. She’d raised Cora as her own daughter, so the two could have been accomplices. She wasn’t in the ballroom at any point on the evening of the murder, so maybe she was distancing herself from the crime, and…

  I’ve no doubt I would have done a grand job at
coolly examining the evidence against her (and Fellowes and my own father for that matter) but I’d had two sleepless nights in a row and… well, I nodded off.

  I’m sure that just such occurrences happen to the best of detectives. Sherlock Holmes meditates and smokes all sorts of wicked drugs and no one thinks badly of him. I merely had a five-minute snooze. And while I confess that the five minutes became ten, and the ten became minutes four and a half hours, perhaps my brain was working on the case all that time and the truth we were searching for would miraculously reveal itself.

  Admittedly, that’s not how things turned out, but I did wake up to an unexpected discovery.

  “Chrissy?” The hissed word made it sound as though there was a snake hidden in the darkness. “Chrissy, are you in here?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  My candles had extinguished – as they tend to in such draughty confines – and I could make nothing out in the dim moonlight which cut through the gap in my thick brocade curtains.

  “Chrissy? It’s me, Marmaduke.”

  Despite my previous speculation on the boy’s innocence, his presence there in my quarters made me instantly nervous and I scrambled about on my side table in search of a match. On striking one, I held it like a cross before a vampire. When the light caught him, it positively ignited the shock of red hair atop his head.

  “Why are you here, Adelaide? I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  He didn’t seem particularly frightened of my talisman as he sat on the chest at the end of my bed.

  “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” I’d never heard him so weak or hesitant before. His voice was close to breaking. “I couldn’t exactly walk to the village from here. It must be at least ten miles and there are police cars everywhere.”

  “You could always hand yourself in!” I sounded like a young boy squabbling with his brother.

  Instead of sniping back at me, Marmaduke looked down at the floor. “I didn’t do anything. I swear I didn’t. I know what everyone thinks of me, but I would never kill another person. It’s just not right.”