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Authors: Carola Dunn

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BOOK: Death at Wentwater Court
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Somehow James must have managed it. Daisy couldn't bear to think that any of the others was guilty.
She was glad to find Phillip in the drawing-room when they all repaired thither for coffee. He looked a bit down in the mouth, but
he bucked up when he saw her. “What-ho, old thing,” he greeted her. “Bearing up all right?”
“I'm perfectly all right,” she said crossly, annoyed by his tactlessness.
“Have you dined, Mr. Petrie?” Annabel asked.
“Yes, thanks. I stopped at a little place on the way when I realized I was going to be rather late. The roads are absolutely foul.” He launched into a tale of motoring through rain and icy slush and narrow escapes from ditches. Daisy hoped Alec's continued absence wasn't due to a motoring mishap.
Coffee and its alcoholic accompaniments were served and consumed. Lady Jo invited her brother to partner her at her inevitable bridge, playing against Sir Hugh and Wilfred. Occasional dismayed exclamations of “Oh, Henry!” suggested that the earl's mind was not on his cards. Geoffrey drifted off in his unobtrusive way and Annabel and Marjorie talked quietly together by the fire.
“Fancy a game of snooker?” Phillip asked Daisy. “Lord, we haven't played together in years. Do you remember when you and I used to team up against Gervaise? He usually beat both of us.” He rambled on in a sentimental vein as they made their way to the billiard-room. “Things just haven't been the same since Gervaise bought it,” he concluded. “Well, my dear old thing, what about it?”
Daisy, who had been trying to remember Gervaise's instructions on choosing a cue, said absently, “What about what?”
“You and me, old girl. Teaming up. Tying the knot. Making a match of it.”
“Oh, Phil, it's awfully sweet of you to ask me again, but I still think we shouldn't suit.”
“Hang it all, I don't see why not.”
She tried to let him down lightly. “For a start, neither of us has a bean. Setting up a household costs pots. What would we live on?”
“I'm bound to make money soon,” he said, incurably optimistic. “It stands to reason, bad luck can't last for ever. You have that
bit from your great-aunt, haven't you? If you go back to live with your mother until we get married, you can save up enough for a rainy day.”
“Phillip, I am
not
going to live with Mother. You know what she's like. She's never forgiven my cousin for inheriting Fairacres and she never stops complaining, as though poor Edgar had any choice in the matter!” She held up her hand as he opened his mouth. “And yes, Edgar and Geraldine have invited me to make my home with them at Fairacres but I'd be mad within a fortnight.”
“They are rather stuffy,” he admitted.
“Stuffy! They're absolutely mediaeval. Geraldine considers the tango debauchery and lipstick the sign of the devil. And I'd always be a poor relation. Thank you, I prefer to work for my independence.”
“What about your sister? You always got on well with Violet. Surely she and Frobisher would take you in.”
“I'd still be a poor relation, though Vi and Johnnie are dears. Even though Violet earned Mother's approval by marrying young, she supports me when Mother starts ragging me about working.”
“You wouldn't have to, if you married me.”
“I
like
earning my living, Phil. I like writing. I wouldn't stop just because I married. You don't understand that, and you'd hate it.”
“Dash it, Daisy, I know I'm a frightful idiot, but I am deuced fond of you.”
“You're an old dear, but it wouldn't work, believe me.”
“You're not still mourning your conchie, are you?”
Daisy flared up. “Don't call Michael that!” With an effort she smothered her anger. “You see, we disagree about practically everything. Let's agree to disagree. Are you going to set up the balls, or shall I?”
“We can still be chums?” Phillip enquired anxiously, collecting the red pyramid balls within the triangular frame.
“Of course, you silly old dear. You have the white ball, you go first.”
They played an amicable game, Daisy sternly holding her tongue when he let her win by a couple of points. He'd have been hurt and baffled if she'd insisted on losing honestly.
Later, lying in bed, listening to the blown rain spatter against her window, she pondered his question. Was she still mourning Michael? She'd never forget him, never forget the breathless joy of being with him, of knowing he loved her. Yet the biting pain of her loss had dulled. Was it Annabel's sympathy, her respect for Michael's courage and dedication, that allowed Daisy to begin to let go?
Annabel, too, had loved a man disdained by society, and lost him. Daisy vowed to do all in her power to protect her new friend from the further troubles Astwick's death was certain to bring upon her.
For the moment, Daisy didn't want to think about the mystery of the drowning. If she tried to work out an answer to the latest complication in the riddle, she'd never fall asleep. Instead of speculating, she proposed to wander through memories of happy hours with Michael.
Somehow Alec's dark brows and keen grey eyes kept intruding.
 
After a restless night filled with agitated dreams, Daisy drifted into a sound sleep shortly before dawn. She woke later than usual. When she went down to breakfast, Detective Constable Piper was talking on the telephone in the hall.
Not so much talking as listening and frantically scribbling, Daisy saw. She lingered, just out of earshot.
At last Piper hung up the receiver. His face was taut with excitement as he stared down at his notes, oblivious of Daisy's presence. “Gorblimey,” he said on a long, exhaled breath. “This'll put the cat among the pigeons, right enough.”
“What is it?” Daisy demanded, her heart in her mouth. “Who were you talking to?”
Startled, he looked up. “Dr. Renfrew, miss, the pathologist.” He was bursting with news. “I got him to tell me in ord'n'ry words this time. That bruising and bleeding? You was right about that. Seems the gash on Astwick's forrid and the bruise on his chin …”
“He had a bruise on his chin?” Daisy recalled the horribly blotched face of the drowned man.
“That's what he says, miss. Seems they didn't look right for if Astwick got dumped in icy cold water right away, so Dr. Renfrew did some more tests, like I told you last night.”
“And?”
“And”—Piper paused dramatically—“he found stuff in Astwick's lungs as looks to him like soap and bath-salts.”
“Soap and bath-salts!” She sank onto the nearest chair. “So he couldn't have drowned in the lake, could he?”
“Reckon not, miss.”
“He drowned in the bath, and his body was carried down to the lake.”
“That's the way I sees it, miss.”
“To make it appear to be an accident.” Daisy shuddered and, with the utmost reluctance, acknowledged, “But he can't have drowned accidentally in his bath or someone would have found him and reported it, not moved him. It must have been murder.”
I
wish the Chief was here,” Piper groaned.
“Oh yes!” Daisy dragged her mind from contemplation of the awful fact of murder. “Did Dr. Renfrew ring up Winchester?”
“No, miss, he said he's too busy to go telephoning all over the country leaving messages with morons.”
“How rude!” She was growing quite fond of Ernie Piper and didn't care to have him insulted. Besides, she was glad of the distraction from her imaginings.
“He didn't mean me, miss. He said so. The bloke he talked to at Winchester last night was”—frowning, he consulted the notebook—“a congenial idiot.”
“Congenital, I expect.”
“Could be. Anyways, I wish he told me yesterday. D'you think the Chief might not've got that message?”
“I've been wondering why he hadn't come back yet.”
“So've I, miss. I ought to've rung up meself, I know I ought.” The young detective looked ready to weep.
“Too late to worry about that now, but you'd better call up the police station at once with the latest.”
Eagerly Piper turned back to the telephone. Without consulting his notebook he gave the operator the Winchester police number.
Daisy listened intently to the cryptic half of the conversation she could hear, trying to guess what was being said on the other end of the wire.
“Hullo? Hullo, give me Chief Inspector Fletcher. It's urgent … Detective Constable Piper here. Where did he? … He did? … You don't … Couldn't you send a messenger after? … I can't tell you what's so … No, I haven't, but … Yes, I know the numbers … Yes, I will, but if they comes back or calls up, you better be bloody sure you ask the Chief to give me a ring! Operator? Operator!”
He gave the exchange another number, and then a third, asking each time for the Chief Inspector. At last he hung up the receiver and turned back to Daisy, his face disconsolate.
“You can't find him?”
“I tried his hotel, miss, and Lord Flatford's place, on the offchance. The copper on duty at the station says Payne's come clean and the Chief and Sergeant Tring went off after them jools—Inspector Gillett, too—but he don't know zackly where. He won't send someone to find 'em acos I won't tell what's so urgent.”
“Quite right,” Daisy approved. “It's to be kept from the local force as long as possible.”
“I'll have to go after 'em meself, miss. The Chief'll want to know right away, for sure. Will you tell him what's what if he telephones?”
“Of course.”
“But don't you let on to anyone else, miss. We don't want to warn the bloke who done it and have him scarper. 'Sides, it might be dangerous if he knows you know there's a murderer in the house.”
Daisy discovered she had lost her appetite. As the constable went off to get the police car from the garages, she started up the stairs. She'd ask Mabel to bring her tea and a bit of buttered toast in her room, and try to get some work done.
A murderer in the house! Who was it? Bits and pieces began to come together in her racing mind.
Stephen Astwick had been drowned in his bath, not long after dinner. Why had he taken a bath in the evening, since he was accustomed
to two, one cold and one hot, every morning? Was he preparing for a seduction?
He had shared a bathroom with Geoffrey. Suppose he had failed to lock the connecting door to Geoffrey's bedroom. Geoffrey had left the drawing-room shortly after Astwick and might have accidentally walked in while he was in the bath. But Daisy simply couldn't imagine Geoffrey cold-bloodedly pushing him under the water and holding him there while he struggled, blew bubbles, and finally grew limp.
In hot blood, then? Could Astwick have boasted about his intention of seducing Annabel, taunting the youth, perhaps, until Geoffrey attacked in a fit of overwhelming fury?
That was a more likely scenario. Not unlikely, in fact, yet Daisy sought for other explanations. She liked Geoffrey and didn't want to believe he was a murderer.
Astwick might not have bothered to lock the other doors. Perhaps someone else had entered the bathroom, through the door to the corridor or through his bedroom. Someone who knew he was there and went deliberately to confront him, if not intending to kill.
James, for instance, might have wanted to press him to reveal Annabel's secret and have been angered when he refused to speak. It seemed an inadequate motive for murder, however, even for the loathsome James. Worse, Daisy had to admit that he couldn't have done it. He'd been in the drawing-room that entire evening, playing bridge with his aunt.
Phillip and Wilfred had gone to play billiards. How much time had passed between Astwick's leaving the drawing-room and their return? Long enough for Astwick to draw a bath and get into it, and for one of them to drown him? How long did it take to drown a man? Daisy wasn't sure.
Either Wilfred or Phillip could have excused himself from their game for a few minutes without the other thinking to mention it. It hadn't been important as long as Astwick was supposed to have died in the morning. They could even have been in collusion, Phillip
cheated, Wilfred blackmailed, finding a common grievance. But neither had been in the drawing-room when Astwick retired. They didn't know he'd gone upstairs.
Conceivably both or either might have gone up to his bedroom, expecting to find it empty, with some sort of mischief in mind, and seized the chance to dispose of him. Not that Daisy believed for a moment that Phillip was guilty. As for Wilfred, was he strong enough to hold down a man who prided himself on his fitness, and then to carry his body all the way to the lake?
The same argument applied to Annabel. She had motive and opportunity; though Daisy was sure she'd never voluntarily go to Astwick's bedroom, he might have forced her; but surely she hadn't the strength to carry a body all that way!
Which left Lord Wentwater: alone in his study or upstairs drowning his rival?
Without conscious volition, Daisy's footsteps had carried her past the end of the passage leading to her room. Lost in speculation, she passed the Wentwaters' suite, turned the corner, and found herself before the door to the fatal bathroom. She turned the handle.
Locked. She hadn't meant to come, but since she was here …
She glanced quickly around. No one in sight. The wall behind her had two doors. One, she worked out, must be to Annabel's bathroom, for use when the house was full of guests. The other was to the back stairs. A maid or footman might pop out at any moment.
Daisy ducked into Astwick's bedroom, closing the door swiftly and silently behind her. The room looked just as it had when she'd seen it before: the bed made up with a chocolate-and-cream-patterned coverlet, a gentleman's toilet articles arranged on the chest-of-drawers, a couple of chairs, the wardrobe where Piper had found passports and tickets. He and Sergeant Tring were neat, efficient searchers, or else a housemaid had tidied after their search.
There was the door to the bathroom. On tiptoe, holding her breath, Daisy made for it. A moment later she was contemplating a vast Victorian bath with brass taps in the form of the heads of a lion
and a lioness. Were they the last things Astwick had seen as water filled his lungs?
Tearing her gaze from the gruesomely fascinating sight, she noted the jar of bath-salts on a low shelf above the tub. The crystals were green—pine or herbal for the gentlemen instead of flower scents. Within easy reach of a bather, a heated towel rail bore an assortment of thick, white towels, matching the bath-mat that lay on the green linoleum floor. A rubber-footed and -topped step-stool stood in one corner, a cork-seated wooden chair in another.
It was just like the bathroom she had shared with Fenella, an innocent setting for a horrible crime. She turned her attention to the doors.
None of the three doors had keys in the keyholes. The one to the corridor was fastened shut with a bolt, but neither of the connecting doors to the bedrooms had a bolt. Geoffrey had easy access at any time. Things looked black for the chivalrous young man.
Daisy frowned as an overlooked snag struck her. Astwick had a jagged gash on his forehead and, according to the pathologist, a bruise on his chin. The latter had immediately reminded her of the bruise on James's chin after its unexpected encounter with his brother's fist. But a blow used to fell a standing opponent made no sense against a man in a bath-tub.
She returned to the bath and stood gazing down into it, trying to picture the scene. Even if Astwick had sat up rather than reclining in the hot, scented water, his shoulders would scarcely have cleared the rim of the deep tub. Biffing him on the chin seemed a peculiar thing to do, especially for a tall chap like Geoffrey. His nose would have made a more obvious target.
Still, Daisy knew nothing about boxing. What about the laceration? She didn't see how either Geoffrey's fist or the smooth, enamelled bath-tub could have caused an irregular wound. Probably the ice had done it, when Astwick's body was dropped into the hole. Dr. Renfrew had implied that it was caused before death, but she wouldn't be at all surprised if Piper had misunderstood his …
Click. The latch of the door behind her. The hinges gave a faint squeak as the door opened. Daisy froze.
“Miss Dalrymple!” Geoffrey's voice, startled, not threatening. Not yet.
Turning, Daisy summoned up a bright smile. “Hullo! This is your bathroom, too, is it? I just asked the way to the one Astwick used. Mr. Fletcher wanted me to … to check that his … his missing boots hadn't somehow hidden themselves in here.” Of all the feeble excuses! “I expect the maid would have taken them away by now, though. I can't see them, can you?”
“No.” He glanced around distractedly, his normally ruddy face pale. “His boots! I forgot …”
She took a step backwards.
His voice shook: “You think I killed him, don't you?”
The dangerous words escaped her against her will: “Did you?”
“I didn't mean to!” he cried, slumping against the doorpost and covering his face with his hands. “I didn't mean to! It was like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from.”
There was no anger in him, only despair. Daisy no longer feared him. She crossed the bathroom to lay a gentle hand on his arm. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“The police will find out anyway, won't they?” he said drearily.
“If I can work it out, you can be sure Mr. Fletcher will.”
“The boots … I forgot he couldn't have walked down to the lake in skates.”
“It seemed unlikely.” She didn't tell him that particular error had led the detectives nowhere. “But there's also new evidence, from the autopsy. Astwick died soon after dinner, and he drowned in his bath, not in the lake.”
“Not in
his
bath. Not in here.”
“Where else?” Daisy asked, bewildered. If Astwick hadn't drowned in this bathroom there was no reason to suspect Geoffrey more than anyone else—except that now he had practically confessed.
He stared at her in horror. “You think I just walked in here and drowned him in his bath? Without provocation? In cold blood?”
“No, I was sure he must have provoked you,” she assured him. “I mean, with something more immediate than his general nastiness. What happened? If it wasn't here, where was it?”
“I'll tell you. I'll explain it all, but I … The detective hasn't come back yet today, has he?”
“The Chief Inspector? Not yet,” said Daisy warily. “He's expected at any moment.”
“Let me tell
you
, before he comes. But I want Father to hear, too. Please!”
“Of course. Let's go and see if he's in his study.”
Without speaking, they traversed the corridors together. Geoffrey had regained his self-control, though his face remained colourless. Daisy thought it had grown thinner since she first met him.
At the top of the stairs, he paused and said in a low, pleading voice, “Will you explain to Mr. Fletcher for me? I don't think I can bear to tell the story twice. If he already knows, he can simply ask questions.”
“I will if you'd like me to, but I can't promise he won't want to hear the whole thing in your own words.”
“I suppose so.”
“Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to wait till he arrives?”
“No! I can't let Father find out from someone else.” His gaze beseeched her. “And … and I'd rather you were there when I tell Father.”
“I shan't desert you.” Whatever he had done, now he was just an unhappy, defenceless, motherless boy. Her heart filled with pity.
They went on down the stairs and across the unoccupied Great Hall. The earl's study was empty, but for Landseer's retrievers gazing down from the wall with aristocratic indifference. No one was in the library next door. Geoffrey turned to Daisy with a lost look.
BOOK: Death at Wentwater Court
13.49Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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