02 - Murder at Dareswick Hall (29 page)

‘Because
I don’t think he returned them all to her,’ said Rose slowly. ‘I think he held
one back, the last most damning one. When I say Lord Sneddon, I don’t mean him,
of course, I mean his servant. No, I think Lord Sneddon honestly thought that
he had returned all the letters to Isabella.’

‘Wait a
minute,’ said Deacon, holding up a hand. ‘Let’s go through this methodically.
We’ll start with Sneddon in the library. He summons Crabtree to get him another
decanter of whisky. Crabtree, his own tongue loosened a bit by drink, tells him
about the fate of the unfortunate housemaid, Mabel, laying the blame clearly at
Sneddon’s door. Sneddon, in turn, has a Damascan conversion and is filled with
remorse. That’s when you come on the scene, Miss Simpson, to get a book.
Sneddon tells you about the maid and understandably, filled with disgust, you
suggest that he try to make amends in whatever way he can. Whilst contemplating
how he might do this, hot on your heels, Isabella appears. She pleads for him
to return her letters. Much to her surprise, he agrees. A few minutes later, Sneddon’s
so-called servant, Ricketts, arrives and is dispatched to get the letters and
hand them over to Isabella, which he does. Right, what happens next, Miss
Simpson?’

‘I
would imagine that as soon as Isabella is given the letters she runs back to
the safety of her room to go through them to make sure that she has all of
them. To her horror, she finds that the last one, the most threatening and
incriminating one in which she threatens to kill Claude Lambert, is missing.’

‘And
while Isabella is doing that,’ said Deacon hurriedly, ‘you, Miss Atherton, take
the opportunity to rush downstairs with your suitcase and let yourself out of
the house by a side door.’

‘Meanwhile,’
continued Rose, ‘Isabella is panicking about the missing letter. Instinctively
she thinks Lord Sneddon has tried to double cross her. In this I think she was
mistaken. As I’ve already said, I think Lord Sneddon genuinely thought he had
returned all her letters to her. I think the guilty party was in fact Ricketts
who, seeing a source of income suddenly being whipped away from him, decided to
keep a letter back for his own blackmail purposes.’

‘So
what happens next?’ enquired Sergeant Lane, speaking for the first time.

‘Well,’
said Rose, ‘Isabella’s first reaction is to confront Lord Sneddon. ‘Ricketts
probably stayed with him a while so she has to wait for a few minutes to make
sure he is alone, which would have done nothing to improve her temper. When she
does at last confront him, he denies all knowledge of the missing letter.
Unfortunately for him he does not see her as a danger and turns his back on her
to sit down at the desk. His intention, I think, is to start writing a list of
all the other people to whom he needs to make amends. Isabella, in a fit of
anger, picks up the paper knife and stabs him in the back. She can’t have been
thinking straight because, of course, that gets her no nearer to getting the
letter back.’

‘She
must have been tempted to search his room,’ said Deacon. ‘But presumably she
was afraid of making a noise and waking the whole house.’

‘I
think she probably was also in shock,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t think she intended
to kill him. The next day she probably hoped to keep the blackmail business to
herself, only I let slip what I had overheard. I think initially she panicked,
but then she realised she could use it to her own advantage. By producing the
letters it would seem then that she no longer had a motive for wishing Lord
Sneddon dead. All she had to do was hope that Ricketts would hold his tongue
about the missing letter. By then she must have been half expecting him to use
it to blackmail her. And she knew he also had an additional hold over her now
that Lord Sneddon was dead. It wasn’t just a case of paying him to keep quiet about
a romantic indiscretion. No, she would be paying him not to reveal that she was
the murderer, or at the very least had a very strong motive for wanting Sneddon
dead.’

‘So
Ricketts had to go,’ said Deacon. ‘You know, I’ve just thought of something that’s
explained now. When I asked Isabella whether she had thrown Lambert’s letters
to her on the fire, she looked utterly bewildered. My question threw her
because, of course, Lambert never wrote her any letters so she had no need to
throw them onto the fire.’

‘And
this all explains something else, sir,’ chipped in Sergeant Lane. ‘Do you
remember how that Ricketts fellow looked awfully sly and gave us that crooked
grin when we asked him who else Sneddon was blackmailing? He said how he wasn’t
blackmailing anyone else, and we didn’t believe him one bit, do you remember,
sir?’

‘I do,
Lane, and I see he thought he had one over on us, because he was telling the
truth. They weren’t blackmailing anyone else. What I don’t understand though is
how Ricketts managed to get a note to Isabella to inform her that he had the
missing letter. He would have had to in order to arrange a time and place to
meet for him to return it to her in exchange for money. The other servants were
jolly suspicious of him. There’s no way old Crabtree would have allowed him to
roam around upstairs unchecked, and downstairs in the dining room or drawing
room I imagine Isabella was always surrounded by people.’

‘Oh, I
think I know how he did that,’ said Rose. ‘Somehow he managed to arrange with
Crabtree that he help wait at table last night. He dropped a dish of vegetables
when he was serving Isabella and a few of the carrots and beans fell onto her
lap. I think it was a deliberate act on his part. In the eschewing confusion,
he passed her a napkin so that she could dab at the mess. I remember she looked
strangely at the napkin for a moment and then fled from the room. I think Ricketts
passed a note to her in the napkin.’

‘And
the silly fool went ahead and met her,’ sighed Lane. ‘Fellows like Ricketts
never learn. That’s why they more often than not find themselves behind bars…
or worse.’

‘It
must have been rather awful for you having to sit there and hear us talk like
that about your sister,’ said Rose, as she and Josephine strolled in the
gardens a few hours later.

‘Oh, it
wasn’t so very bad, really,’ said Josephine languidly. She looked as if she
hadn’t slept properly for days and was still walking around in a trance. ‘It
was almost as if you were talking about someone else. I can’t quite take it all
in, any of it. Even now I can’t believe what she did. How could she have killed
Claude? I can’t quite believe he’s really dead. I can’t believe she’s dead,
that I’ll never see them again, I can’t –.’ She broke down finally in a fit of
sobbing and Rose put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

‘It’ll
do you good to cry. I suppose it’s only now that it’s all over that you’re
beginning to take it all in. I say, I’m jolly glad, you know, that you didn’t
drown yourself in the lake.’

‘What? W-why
would I have done that?’ Josephine glanced up at Rose nervously. She looked
frightened.

‘Because
you killed your sister,’ Rose said quietly.

‘H-how
do you know that? Are… are you going to tell the police?’

‘To
answer your first question, because I can’t see Isabella killing herself. She
would have gone down fighting. And, to answer your second question, no I’m not
going to tell the police, and you mustn’t either. I know you did it for her own
sake, to save her from the public humiliation of a trial and ultimately the
gallows. It was only a matter of time until the police worked it all out.’

‘Even
then, I’m not sure I would have given her away if…if.’ Josephine faltered, and
then continued, her voice quiet and strangely free of emotion. ‘Last night,
Isabella asked me if I had any Veronal that she could take as she had had
trouble sleeping. I took some to her room and she told me to mix some in her
glass of water for her. I thought then how easy it would be to give her an
overdose. I thought about it, you know. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
It was only when….’

‘Yes?’
prompted Rose.

‘It was
only when she tried to kill you that I knew I had to do something.’

‘Kill
me? She tried to kill me?’ Rose felt herself grow cold.

‘I’d
brought up her cocoa, and yours too. She was very interested when she heard
that the second cup was for you. I was immediately suspicious, especially
coming as it did after what you’d said about knowing who the murderer was and
telling the police in the morning. She asked me to look for her hairbrush on
her dressing table and, while I was looking for it, I caught sight of her
reflection in the dressing table mirror. I saw her put Veronal into your cup of
cocoa.’

‘So what
did you do?’ Rose found that she could hardly breathe.

‘I
pretended that I hadn’t noticed. Then, when her back was turned I switched the
cups. When I walked out of her room that night, I knew that by morning she’d be
dead.’

‘Rose,
I’ve been thinking,’ said Cedric as they wandered down to the lake. The way he
said the words filled Rose with a sense of dread. He never wants to see me
again, she thought. He associates me with death. Two murders, no, three really
if one counted poor Claude Lambert. It’s too much. He wants to be able to visit
his friends at weekends without being scared that a murder is suddenly going to
crop up.

I can’t
say I blame him, she thought. I can’t say that I blame him at all. Of course
she’d be sad. No, she realised suddenly, she’d be far more than sad; she’d be
devastated. The thought of never seeing Cedric again, why it would be
unbearable. To know that he’d be living his life somewhere, while she was
living her life somewhere else, as if they’d never met. It would be as if
they’d never known each other, as if they were nothing more than strangers. She
must make him change his mind, she must –.

‘I’ve
been thinking, Rose, that next time we meet up it should just be you and me.
What do you say? Oh, I know I’m not very exciting and that you might find it
rather boring without some more company. I’m really rather a dull old thing and
you’re probably used to…’ He turned to look at her. ‘Oh, I say, Rose, have you
got something in your eye? It must be this wind. It’s probably blown up a speck
of dirt, shall I take a look?’

‘Cedric,’
said Rose, throwing herself into his arms. ‘I can’t think of anything nicer
than it just being you and me. And don’t worry, I’m absolutely sure there’ll be
no more murders…’