02 - Murder at Dareswick Hall Read online

  ‘Thank you, most comprehensive. I understand from both him and Lord Belvedere that Lord Sneddon’s arrival at Dareswick came as something of an unpleasant surprise to everyone here?’

  ‘Yes. We all knew Isabella would be bringing a guest with her, but no one was quite sure who it was going to be; there was even some confusion as to whether it would be a man or woman. It was something of a shock, I can tell you, to see Lord Sneddon. I never thought to see him again, certainly not here.’

  ‘Quite so. Now, tell me your impressions of the baron. I take it he alone was pleased by the news of the engagement?’

  ‘Yes, I think he was quite determined that at least one of his daughters should marry well. I daresay things like that matter very much to people like him. And, as you know, Lord Sneddon was due to come into a dukedom on the death of his father. The poor man, to lose all your sons to violent deaths before their time.’ Rose paused for a few moments, as she thought of the old duke. He had had to endure his two older sons being killed in the war, and now his youngest son had been murdered. ‘I’ve seen very little of the baron really, certainly not much on which to base an opinion as to his character. I’ve only really spoken to him at dinner and then only to pass the time of day. He seemed loud and jovial then, certainly when things were going his way. But he has quite a temper. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that his children are quite scared of him. He was jolly angry when Hallam spoke out about Lord Sneddon being there. He looked as if he was about to burst a blood vessel. I can’t say I blame him altogether, though. Hallam really shouldn’t have said what he did in front of Lord Sneddon. It was very embarrassing for all concerned.’

  ‘Do you think, if provoked Hallam, might have been violent towards Lord Sneddon?’

  ‘If you are asking me whether I think Hallam would kill him in cold blood, then my answer to your question is definitely not,’ Rose said with feeling. ‘He’s a sweet boy, Inspector. He was concerned about his sisters. He was worried Josephine would be upset by Sneddon’s arrival and he couldn’t understand why Isabella would want to marry the fellow. Hallam’s a romantic by nature. If he was intent on fighting Lord Sneddon, then he would have challenged him to a duel, not sneaked up behind him and plunged a knife into his back when he wasn’t looking.’

  ‘You sound rather like Lord Belvedere.’

  ‘Do I?’ Rose’s eyes sparkled and, quite unreasonably in Deacon’s opinion, he felt a spark of jealousy.

  ‘So you do not see Hallam Atherton as having a tendency towards violence?’

  ‘No.’ She might have said more if she could have been sure that by so doing she wouldn’t betray the sudden feeling of uncertainty she now felt in the utterance of that word. For a picture had floated unbidden before her eyes. Josephine’s scar, not as it was now, half covered by Josephine’s hair, but as it must have looked when just made, large and angry and ugly. She imagined the force that must have been used to create such a wound. And she saw Hallam’s childish face, screwed up and distorted in anger, a knife or some such sharp object gripped in his hand. Her mind drifted inevitably to a picture of Sneddon slumped on the desk, a small gold dagger protruding from his back. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself. Hallam had only been a child when he attacked his sister and all children, when very young, had a tendency to lash out when they could not get their own way. It had just been unfortunate that he had injured Josephine as he had. And he deeply regretted it, Josephine had said so herself. He was ashamed of what he had done, hated to be reminded of it, which was one of the reasons Josephine kept it covered by her hairstyle.

  ‘What about the Honourable Miss Isabella Atherton?’ Deacon enquired. ‘What do you make of her?’ It could have been his imagination, but he could have sworn that he saw Rose stiffen slightly at mention of Isabella’s name, certainly she turned her gaze to the floor as if she were trying to choose her words carefully. He could see that Lane too was looking at her fixedly and, as if aware of both gentlemen staring at her intently, colour began to spread across her cheeks and she seemed flustered.

  ‘I’ve hardly spoken to Isabella since I’ve been here. She’s rather aloof and seems to keep herself very much to herself. She and Lord Sneddon arrived just before dinner on Friday, and yesterday, when we made an excursion to the village she gave her apologies. She went to bed early last night too. Both she and Josephine went upstairs as soon as the coffee and liqueurs were served. I retired myself, a few minutes after. So you see, I’ve hardly had a chance to speak to her. Not that I think she is particularly interested in making my acquaintance.’ Rose sighed. ‘I don’t think she really approves of my being here, she thinks I am rather beneath them all.’

  ‘I see.’ Deacon looked thoughtful. ‘So you can’t explain why she decided to bring Lord Sneddon down with her this weekend in particular, other than for him to ask her father for her hand in marriage?’

  He got up from his chair and walked over to the fireplace, picked up an ornament, looked at it briefly and then put it back. It seemed an age to Rose before he turned and gave her his full attention. The silence that had arisen from his getting up and moving to the fireplace had caused her to look up from the carpet. When he turned to look at her, she met his gaze and though she reprimanded herself for it being a totally inopportune time to think such a thing, being questioned about a murder as she was, she was reminded how handsome he was; in a very different way from Cedric’s good looks, of course.

  ‘It just strikes me, you see, Miss Simpson, as a very odd thing for her to have done. She was aware that Lord Sneddon was likely to receive a very frosty reception from her brother and sister. Indeed, it does not involve much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that Hallam might have punched him. He also led me to believe that there was a time not so long ago when Josephine had hoped to marry Lord Sneddon herself. So her sister must have assumed that Josephine would be distressed at Sneddon’s sudden appearance, especially on being informed that he had switched his attentions and now intended to marry her sister.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that Josephine really was so very fond of him,’ Rose said, stubbornly. ‘Certainly, when she spoke of him to me in the garden yesterday, she gave the impression that she had been merely flattered by his attentions, nothing more. I don’t think she was ever seriously in love with him. It was just that everyone else thought she was or wanted her to be.’

  ‘Even so, it seems a very tactless thing for Isabella Atherton to have done. Mean and rather cruel, I’d say, but most of all, completely unnecessary.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Rose, curious despite everything.

  ‘Why bring Sneddon here this weekend? Why not choose a weekend when she knew her brother would be safely away in Oxford? She might have chosen a weekend when her sister was also away. I understand she visits London not infrequently. Why make it so very unpleasant for everyone when she didn’t need to?’

  Rose said nothing. It occurred to her that Isabella had had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps, on second thoughts, she had chosen this weekend on purpose because she didn’t want to make it easy for Sneddon. She might have felt that she had no option but to submit to his blackmail demands, but Rose doubted that she would have done it willingly. Making him feel uncomfortable was the one act of defiance left open to her. She remembered suddenly how she had been struck by Isabella’s seemingly odd behaviour when Sneddon had been doused in boiling hot soup by the footman. She had been remarkably unmoved by the incident. No, worse than that, she had even smiled a secret, half hidden smile that had confused Rose at the time. Then she had been unaware of the blackmail business. Now she realised that Isabella must have been half hoping that Sneddon had been badly burned by the mishap. She shuddered involuntarily and shifted in her seat to try and disguise the fact.

  ‘You don’t think it strange?’ Deacon was looking at her closely.

  ‘No,’ said Rose, reluctantly. She took a deep breath. ‘You see she was being blackmailed.’

  ‘Blackmailed
!’ It was the sergeant who exclaimed the word and dropped his pencil onto the floor. He scrabbled on the ground on his hands and knees after it.

  ‘Who was blackmailing her, Miss Simpson?’ asked the inspector, quietly, pointedly ignoring the mishap.

  ‘Lord Sneddon, of course,’ Rose said, angry with herself for not being able to keep quiet. ‘Who else?’

  And before Deacon could question her further she had recounted every single excruciating detail of the episode she had unintentionally overheard between Lord Sneddon and Isabella in the library, while she had sat hidden in the chair. She felt herself squirming in her seat as she did so. What must they think of her, these policemen? Anyone else, she thought, would have coughed or sneezed or made some such noise to alert Sneddon and Isabella to their presence before they had embarked too far on their discussion, why hadn’t she?

  ‘I’d fallen asleep,’ said Rose, scrabbling around for an excuse. ‘Reading often makes me feel drowsy and so I’m afraid I nodded off. And it took me a while to wake up fully, and when I did, well it was too late to do anything without making everyone feel awkward. So I thought the best thing for all concerned was for me just to pretend I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Interesting, this blackmail business I mean. It certainly gives us another avenue to explore.’

  ‘Isabella was going to tell you all about it herself,’ Rose said, hurriedly. ‘She still will, of course. Naturally we assumed that you’d interview her first, what with her being Lord Sneddon’s fiancée.’

  ‘We had assumed that Isabella Atherton would be upset at the death of the man she was to marry and were allowing her as much time as possible to compose herself for our interview,’ Deacon said, sounding somewhat annoyed. ‘Now I see we were under something of a misapprehension. I imagine that the death of a man who was about to force her to marry him will not have caused her too much grief. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that she may very well be relieved by the situation, if not absolutely delighted.’

  ‘I think that’s rather unfair,’ objected Rose. ‘She’s awfully upset, as we all are.’

  ‘I find it somewhat strange that a woman, who by your own admission has gone out of her way to have as little to do with you as possible, should take it upon herself to confide in you that she intends to tell us about the deceased’s blackmailing activities. Particularly when as far as she was aware, you knew nothing about the business.’

  Rose bit her lip and said nothing. How she wished that she had had the same self-control ten minutes earlier.

  ‘I take it from your silence that you were the one to broach the subject.’ Deacon did not pause to wait for an answer. ‘You informed her what you had overheard and advised her you considered it your duty to inform us. No doubt you suggested that it would be better for her if she was seen to volunteer the information to us first. Is that right?’

  ‘I am certain that she was going to tell you all about it anyway.’

  ‘Even though it gives her a splendid motive for wanting to have done away with the victim?’ The inspector looked at her somewhat sceptically and sighed. ‘Well, one thing’s for sure, we’ll never know now, will we?’

  Rose could tell he was thoroughly annoyed by her interference, but trying very hard not to show it. She imagined he felt that she had let him down and she couldn’t blame him. She had been instrumental in helping to solve the case at Ashgrove and he had probably hoped that she might do the same here at Dareswick. Instead she had held back information, indeed, she was still doing so even now. She felt wretched. Any moment now the inspector would ask her who else knew about the blackmail business and she would have to …’

  ‘You can go now, Miss Simpson.’ Deacon’s voice broke into her musings. ‘But don’t go far because I’ll want to speak to you again just as soon as I’ve spoken to Isabella Atherton.’

  ‘Sir, excuse me for interrupting you but I thought I would catch you between interviews, so to speak. I’ve just caught sight of Miss Simpson leaving. But I feel it my duty to speak to you on a matter of some delicacy.’

  Deacon looked up from where he was sitting and glared at the butler.

  ‘Can’t this wait, Crabtree?’ he said, irritated. ‘I’ve just asked my sergeant to go and get Isabella Atherton.’

  ‘It won’t take a minute, sir,’ the butler assured him, although the way in which he took a deep breath and puffed up his chest seemed to suggest otherwise.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  It was something akin to relief that Rose felt when she left the study. As she was leaving she had caught Sergeant Lane’s eye and he had smiled at her sympathetically. Deacon had pointedly ignored her, staring down at the sheets of paper spread out on the desk. She had felt like a naughty child. Now, as she walked slowly back to the garden room, or rather dawdled, as her mother would have said, she was reluctant to meet Isabella’s eye, too aware that she had made things worse for her notwithstanding her efforts to make things better. She felt now that she should have kept quiet both in respect of warning Isabella and in telling the police what she had overheard. She could imagine all too vividly the inspector and sergeant standing now, huddled together, deciding that Isabella was their chief murder suspect.

  As it happened, not looking where she was going, she had bumped into one of the housemaids, upsetting her bundle of crisp white sheets. Despite protestations on the part of the maid, she had stopped to help gather up the bedclothes. The task had taken longer than anticipated as some of the sheets needed to be refolded, and so it was that she missed Isabella being collected and shown into the study. Instead she had caught a glimpse only of the back of her head, from where she sat on the hall floor by the staircase bundles of bed sheets in her arms. Even so she had marvelled at how the girl had seemed so composed, knowing as she did that the police would be aware that she had a very good motive for having wished Sneddon dead.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Deacon said, glaring at the butler who in turn was looking rather sheepish. ‘Are you telling me you were drunk when you answered the bell to Lord Sneddon?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, not at all sir,’ said Crabtree hurriedly, looking clearly horrified. ‘A man in my position can never allow himself to become drunk. That would never do at all. What would the master say? I’d be out on my ear, I can tell you, to say nothing of setting a bad example to the junior servants. They look up to me. Why, some of them see me as a bit of a father figure, others as a teacher imparting his wisdom –.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the inspector abruptly, ‘I get the picture man. You were not so much in drink as to fall over and make a fool of yourself, but the stuff may have loosened your tongue somewhat. So what time was this, that Lord Sneddon summoned you to the library?’

  ‘About half past eleven, sir. I thought everyone had retired to bed and that my services would not be required again for the night, notwithstanding that it was rather early. Otherwise I would never have partaken of that glass of whisky, not if I’d known I would be called upon again. Not the done thing at all to have the smell of alcohol on one’s breath when one is attending to the needs of guests or –.’

  ‘Alright, alright,’ the inspector interrupted rudely. ‘Let’s put your drinking, or,’ he added hurriedly seeing that the butler was about to protest, ‘not drinking aside for the moment, shall we? You answered the bell. Lord Sneddon requested another decanter of whisky, which you brought him. Now tell me again what happened next.’

  ‘He asked about the housemaid, Mabel, sir.’

  ‘The maid he got into trouble and who then drowned herself in the lake?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Deacon noticed that the colour appeared to have drained from the man’s face and that he was trembling slightly with emotion.

  ‘A tragic business, indeed,’ the inspector said more gently. ‘It must have been very upsetting for you all.’

  ‘We felt we’d let her down, you see, sir,’ Crabtree said, bowing his head slightly. ‘Mrs Hodges, she’s the housekeeper, she and I, well, we took it
very badly. We blamed ourselves, you see. We should have been there for the girl. She should have felt that she could come to us. We’d have helped her, Mrs Hodges and me, we’d have seen that she was all right. There was no need for her to drown herself in the lake. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it, sir, it does. The water, it must have been icy cold at that time of year. Oh, the poor little mite.’

  Deacon looked beseechingly at Lane who hurried over and helped the butler into a chair, ignoring his protests that he must remain standing.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, making such a show of myself. You won’t tell his lordship, will you? He expects his servants to be beyond reproach. But every time I think of little Mabel and how desperate she must have been to do what she did, well, I’m quite overcome.’

  ‘So how did you feel, Crabtree, when Lord Sneddon asked after Mabel?’ the inspector asked gently, as soon as the butler had regained some composure.

  ‘Angry, sir, and flabbergasted, to tell the truth.’

  ‘Why flabbergasted?’ pressed Deacon, trying at the same time to hide his interest.

  ‘He didn’t know what had happened to her. He didn’t know that she had killed herself because of him. But it was the rage that loosened my tongue, sir. She had meant so little to him that he had even forgotten her name. He thought it was Mavis or Mary. All he could remember was that it began with an ‘M’.’

  ‘I can imagine how you must have felt.’

  ‘Can you, sir? I wanted him to know everything. I wanted him to experience some of the pain that we had gone through. I wanted him to be sorry. I was frank, sir, brutal and cruel now I look back on it. It wasn’t more than he deserved, I don’t regret it. He was upset when I left him, sir, and I thought that was right, that he should be. He even shed a tear or two, you know, sobbed a bit. He wanted me to leave him alone so he could think and weep and no doubt drink himself senseless. I hadn’t held anything back, sir, he could hear the disgust in my voice and I felt it was a weight off my shoulders. Only, as I was walking back to the servants’ quarters, I was afraid that he might complain to the master, and then I’d be dismissed because his lordship wouldn’t have let anything stand in the way of his daughter marrying a man destined to become a duke, no matter how bad he was.’