Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery

by Benedict Brown

  “Jealousy!” my father uttered in a bitter tone and I felt a little horrid for contradicting him.

  “Money!”

  “But Cain killed Abel because of-” he began, before my mother put her hand on his and I continued.

  “By putting cyanide in the champagne that had been given to my grandparents on their wedding day, which the whole family knew would be served at the spring ball, the killer had a chance to wipe out my entire family and ensure that this estate would pass on to her.”

  There was some speculative mumbling as I said this, and I realised that I’d rather blown the big reveal I was building up to. “I’m talking of course about Lord Edgington’s great niece, Cora Villiers. The granddaughter of his only brother, Arthur, who died before he could inherit this estate, therefore denying Cora her family birthright.”

  I allowed this scandalous announcement to blow around the room and luxuriated a little in the excitement it had provoked. My partner in crime-detection looked less enthusiastic, but I’d known that would be the case and had to keep going.

  “Such a dastardly plan was the only way to obtain my grandfather’s significant wealth and it was hatched with great skill. From the beginning we knew she was lying about what happened on the night of the ball, but this was explained when we learnt of her love for a butler in the employ of Cranley Hall. Reginald Fellowes, the man who has been serving us this evening.”

  A few eyes turned to Halfpenny, who was pouring gravy at that moment and now wore an uncomfortable look on his heavily lined face.

  “No, sorry, not him,” I had to explain. “The other one.”

  Heads flicked to the shadows by the door where Cora’s despicable accomplice stood listening. He shot me a stare that could have toasted bread, but I wasn’t scared now. Finally revealing the truth had rewarded me with confidence, and I took a moment to soak in the atmosphere.

  Unsurprisingly, Cora looked yet more distraught as she processed the knowledge that her one-way ticket to the hangman’s noose at Holloway Women’s Prison was now confirmed. Inspector Blunt was all ears (and eyes for that matter). He was hanging on my words, and I could tell he would do the right thing and arrest the scoundrels when the moment came. Grandfather still wasn’t giving anything away, but softly tapped the table in front of him.

  I understood his implication and began to lay out the evidence. “Fellowes told us that he had opened the champagne only to swan off with his young lady in the gardens, but this would have deteriorated the quality of a fine wine, and what faithful butler would do such a thing? This was the first point which made me suspicious, but there was more to come. Much more!” I was trying to sound dramatic but ended up with a far too diabolical tone, like the villain in a Christmas pantomime.

  I cleared my throat and continued. “Cora ensured that the champagne was spiked, then returned to the ballroom just before Grandfather made his toast. Only, the two plotters didn’t get their stories straight in advance and their accounts of these events were vague and hazy. Cora claimed to have gone back to the party after her boyfriend. Fellowes said he’d heard a voice through the drinks room window, but Cora never mentioned calling up to him.”

  This was my first major piece of evidence and it had the effect I was hoping for. Blunt raised his chin, clearly impressed by my powers of observation. Mother and Father even looked a little proud of me.

  “Cora?” George murmured, sounding oddly proud. “You devil!”

  I didn’t let him break my concentration. “When Belinda sampled the champagne and died before the rest of the family could drink, Cora and Reggie’s nefarious plan came to nothing. It was not enough to murder one heir to the family fortune if there were another ten waiting in the wings and the two desperately scrambled to cover their tracks.”

  I paused then, knowing that my killer blow was still to come. Thanks to my excessively sympathetic nature, I almost felt sorry for poor, doomed Cora. But, as the old saying goes, he who seeks revenge digs two graves … No, wait, that doesn’t quite capture it. Maybe, money is the root of all evil? Either way, she’d made a terrible mess of things.

  “My uncle Maitland had caught the two of them together on the night of the ball and so he was the next to die. I have to give the murderers credit for what they achieved. They came up with a mechanism to distance themselves from their crimes which almost fooled the great Superintendent Edgington – the scourge of London criminals for half the Victorian age. Unluckily for them, we finally got to the truth.”

  My grandfather himself sat listening impartially. That serious expression was still on his face and his eyes drilled a hole through my head. I could tell he still didn’t believe what I had to say and so I raced to finish.

  “You see, far from contradicting the possibility of his guilt and providing him with an alibi for the second killing, it was Fellowes’s apparent poisoning which gave me the evidence I needed.” Another big pause, as I felt I deserved a moment of glory. “That’s right, our loyal servant poisoned himself!”

  This was the discovery which had changed everything for me. George, Mother, Clementine and, well, pretty much everyone in fact let out an astonished gasp. Emboldened by my success, I was just about to hammer my point home when Grandfather interrupted.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” I bet he wished he’d kept hold of his napkin to throw it down dramatically just then. “I’m afraid I have to interrupt you, Christopher. You’ve got it all wrong.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Our eyes locked onto one another’s, but I wasn’t giving up so easily.

  “I’m sorry, Grandfather, but they’re guilty as sin. You couldn’t understand why the killer used one poison for the family and another for your butler, but that was because it was never meant to kill him. Not only did it make us assume his innocence, it gave Cora – the expert archer – an alibi at the time that Maitland was shot. Think about it for one moment. I saw her running from the armoury immediately after he died, what if she hadn’t been visiting her sickly beau but, in actual fact, was the person who’d pulled the trigger?”

  In the end, it wasn’t my grandfather who contradicted me, but his old rival.

  “Hold on there a second, son.” Blunt raised one finger enquiringly. “But what exactly do you think your uncle saw them doing before your aunt died? You haven’t explained that.”

  “They killed him because…” These interruptions had injected any amount of doubt into my mind and I struggled to get my thoughts in order. “Because… Well, he must have caught them with the poison, mustn’t he?”

  The inspector made a clicking sound with his cheeks. “Nope. I interviewed Maitland Cranley on the night of his sister’s murder and he didn’t say anything about Miss Villiers.”

  When Grandfather spoke, his voice was far kinder than I could have hoped. “If Maitland had caught the killer in the act, he would have told the police immediately.”

  “But I heard them talking this afternoon, Cora said that you were putty in her hands and Fellowes told her he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise their position, I swear-”

  “I was talking about my job here at Cranley, you eavesdropper,” the butler interrupted, sounding more than a little sore that I’d accused him of a double murder. “I was worried about being fired after your grandfather found out about my relationship with his great-niece!”

  This response cut a hole through me (and my argument) and I fell back into my chair. My theory, which had seemed so solid just moments earlier, now lay in pieces. The certainty that I had possessed had deserted me and I had to wonder how I could have got it all so wrong.

  My grandfather addressed the party to cover my embarrassment. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I offered my assistant on this case a chance to present his own, independent solution and I think we can agree that he made an awfully good job of it.”

  No one seemed very impressed by my attempt. George rol
led his eyes and knocked back his wine, Clementine was singing ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy me a Bow-Wow’ and trying to get my father to join in and Cora had broken down in tears to be comforted by her loving (and not the slightest bit murderous) partner.

  “I will now reveal the true circumstances that led to my son and daughter’s tragic deaths,” Grandfather continued. “You see-”

  “I’ll tell you the true circumstances that led to their deaths,” Blunt interrupted, his voice full of disgust as he mimicked my grandfather. “Walter Prentiss murdered them!” He let the accusation bounce from wall to wall before laying out his case. “Your son-in-law is up to his eyeballs in debt and decided that the only way out of it was to access the money you’ve been keeping to yourself like Silas Marner all these years.”

  Such a highbrow literary reference was rather unexpected coming from a man like Inspector Blunt. Not that I thought that at the time. Right then, I was thinking, how dare you say such things about my father!

  “Circumstantial evidence at best, Blunt,” Grandfather told him. “I would hope you could do better than that.”

  The little man leaned forward into the light of the electric chandelier and his hairless dome glistened as he anticipated his response. “How about the crossbow in his room? The room which just happened to overlook the scene of the second murder?”

  “Were there any fingerprints on it?” My grandfather had fired a shot across the inspector’s bow and I could tell there was more to come.

  Blunt wrinkled up his nose. “Well… no there weren’t none, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved. Just means he wore gloves, don’t it?”

  Grandfather adopted a loftier tone, which was only ever going to infuriate his adversary. “Like Christopher, you’ve made a good attempt at making the evidence fit your theory, but it’s not enough. The crossbow under Walter’s bed was not the murder weapon for one thing and the only reason that my son-in-law left the party was to escape his insufferable mother.”

  My father gasped. “How on Earth did you know that?”

  “Anyone who’s spent five minutes in the presence of that woman could have guessed.”

  Blunt wore a chastised frown but wasn’t giving up. “Typical toffs sticking up for one another. I tell you now, you won’t get away with a cover-up.”

  Grandfather was well armed with his reply. “It’s no conspiracy, man. Just eat your pie and listen to what really transpired.”

  George let out a whistle and, despite the fact our butler had his arms around the man’s cousin, he motioned for Fellowes to fill his glass. Like a spider spinning a web, Horatio Adelaide had been biding his time, carefully listening to each new piece of information. His moment had come to pounce.

  “And what about my boy?” he said, as if this was a key piece of the puzzle. “Why has no one mentioned Marmaduke in the proceedings?”

  Grandfather let out a huff of laughter. “Are you putting your own son forward as a suspect, Horatio? Really, that’s low even for you.”

  Adelaide folded his powerful arms across his chest. “I’m merely trying to ascertain the facts. That boy of mine has been running wild for years, so I’d like to confirm that the version of events he described was the truth.”

  “But why would he have killed anyone?”

  The former gangster took a deep breath, as if what he was about to say would be difficult to get out. “I have given Marmaduke every advantage in life, every possible luxury, and yet he has grown up to be the very thing I feared that I myself would become at his age. The boy is a brute. He enjoys nothing more than inflicting pain on others and, if you tell me he was responsible for the murders, I will believe you and remedy the situation myself.”

  I was trying to imagine what the man was implying when Grandfather answered him. “Marmaduke was an unlucky bystander in more ways than one. I’ve spoken to him and can honestly tell you that he is no brute. He is merely a sixteen-year-old boy who has never learnt right from wrong. He’s not the first person I’ve known with such an issue and he won’t be the last.” His eyes flicked over to George, who raised his glass sarcastically in reply.

  Horatio wasn’t convinced. “But he was in the vicinity of both crimes and couldn’t tell me exactly what he was doing during either one.”

  Grandfather shook his head despairingly. “That’s probably because he lives in crippling fear of you and didn’t want to admit that he’d had his head slapped about by the man whose care you’d put him under.” He was shouting by now and leaned across the table to drive his message home. “Spend some time with the boy, show him that you care about him – rather than accusing him of murder – and perhaps he won’t be so wild.”

  The fact that my grandfather could find such compassion for a hopeless soul like Marmaduke surely suggested where my excessively sympathetic nature came from.

  Horatio Adelaide turned away in disgust but stayed right where he was. Like everyone, he was eager to discover what had really happened the previous weekend at Cranley Hall and, like everyone, he was about to find out.

  Grandfather raised himself up to his full height and pulled the cuffs of his sleeves down so that there was not the faintest crease visible on his long silver coat. “Now, if no one else wishes to put forward a theory, perhaps I can begin.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “Though my grandson Christopher may not have reached the right conclusion, he spoke any amount of truth in the case he presented to us. I believe that my daughter Belinda and my son Maitland were murdered for money. Well, money and the oldest reason in the world; jealousy.”

  After the slew of chattering interruptions, Grandfather was easing in to his tale. All eyes were upon him. The only sound was his sonorous voice, which sailed through the still air like music from a gramophone.

  “Had everything gone to plan, I wouldn’t be here today to speak to you. In fact, half the people in this room and most of our immediate relatives would have been wiped from existence.” In one mechanical movement, his eyes flicked to his eldest grandson. “But not you of course, George. You were lucky enough to avoid that possibility when your glass of champagne conveniently slipped from your fingers.”

  My cousin did not seem intimidated by the arch look our grandfather gave him. “Oh, yes, that’s me. Lucky old George Trevelyan!”

  Grandfather gave a sad laugh and continued. “I have to say that there were elements to this case that had me truly baffled. My assistant Christopher must have concluded that it was my old age which held me back, but, in fact, this was one of the most perplexing and contradictory murders I’ve come across.”

  I was so caught up in his story that I barely took the time to notice that he’d read my mind again. Of course, I no longer thought he was a foolish old man. I was willing to believe he was an absolute genius. The fact that I had somehow helped him reach his conclusion was the real miracle.

  “There were certain questions which I simply couldn’t get beyond. For one thing, as we’ve already heard, it didn’t make sense that our killer would happily murder a whole family – men, women and children alike – but stop short of getting rid of a witness to their crime.”

  He picked up a knife from his place setting and waved it through the air as he spoke. “Christopher came up with a number of interesting solutions for why the poison that Fellowes ingested gave him little more than a dicky tummy. He wondered whether an insufficiently strong toxin had been administered in the hope of incapacitating Fellowes and leaving the champagne unattended. I steered him away from such thinking and then, in front of you all this evening, my grandson described how Fellowes could have consumed some weak dose of poison himself to throw us off the scent.

  “While I considered these two possibilities early on, it is wonderful to see that Christopher’s young mind could function almost as efficiently as one with my years of experience.”

  George scoffed at this a
nd gave me a wry look. There was a brief moment of silent tension, which was broken by Great-Aunt Clementine taking up her song.

  “Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow! Bow wow!

  Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow! Bow wow!

  I’ve got a little cat,

  And I’m very fond of that,

  But I’d rather have a bow-wow

  Wow, wow, wow, wow.”

  Inspector Blunt looked impressed once more by her vocal skills, but Grandfather was less appreciative. “Thank you, Clemmie, old girl. I do always enjoy your performances.” His voice was soaked in sarcasm, like a Christmas pudding in brandy. “Now, if I may continue…”

  Clementine tilted her head in humble acceptance, as though she were a famous opera singer ceding the stage to a promising ingénue.

  “Having been acquainted with my butler since he was a child, and for reasons that it is not my place to go into, I knew that Fellowes was no murderer.”

  Still comforting his petite amie, Fellowes signalled his appreciation with a silent nod. Though Cora herself had stopped crying, she let out the occasional whimper as my grandfather continued his explanation.

  “This knowledge reduced our list of suspects, but the killer’s identity still eluded me. While Belinda’s death could be seen as a failed attempt to snatch Cranley Hall, which George, Clementine, Cora and several more distant members of the family would have benefitted from, Maitland’s murder, moments before he was about to reveal a key piece of evidence, was another conundrum which I couldn’t at first solve.”

  He paused then and turned to address the inspector, who was the only one still eating. “Blunt, I imagine that you ran tests on the champagne and found cyanide in both the bottle and every glass which Fellowes poured?”

  “That’s right,” he said through a mouthful of potato and beef.

  “Not a single glass was missed?”

  The little man nodded and shovelled a forkful of green beans into his mouth.

  Grandfather’s moustaches bunched together confidently. “As I concluded, Belinda’s murder was not targeted specifically at her, and so the possible motives were once more reduced. However, I was still stuck with the question of why the killer went on to murder my son and poison my butler. The obvious deduction was that the two men had witnessed something around the time of the first murder, but Fellowes swore that he hadn’t seen anything that would have made him a target.”