Death at Dartmoor (35 page)

“I'm sorry, but this b‘ain't none o' yer business, Richard,” Mrs. Redman said, straightening her shoulders. “This way, gen'lemen.” She turned to go up the steps again, beckoning Charles and the constable to follow her. When they had passed through the door, she closed it behind them.

The workroom they had entered was the same size as the shoemaker's shop in front but much brighter, owing to two large windows on either side and to the walls and ceiling having been freshly whitewashed. Two or three cloth bonnets were displayed on shelves, and a neat little straw sailor hat sat jauntily on a hat stand. Charles knew very little about fashion, but even to his untutored eye, the hat upon which Mrs. Redman was at work—a wide-brimmed white straw fitted with a bright pink ostrich feather, a heap of improbably pink artificial roses, poufed with masses of pink tulle—had a country look. It was the sort of thing that a pub owner's wife might wear on Sunday, perhaps.

Mrs. Redman herself was a strikingly attractive woman in her middle years, her hair chestnut brown, her eyes hazel, with a thoughtful, forthright look. She was wearing a blue dress, her hair was tied back with a black ribbon, and there was a twist of black around one arm.

“Ye've come about Sir Edgar?” she said, going to stand behind her workstation. The light fell on her face, and Charles saw that she was quite pale. “Wot c'n I tell ye 'bout him?”

“You knew him, I understand,” Charles said. He looked around. “He helped you establish yourself as a millineress?”

At that moment, a side door opened and a little girl of five or six danced in, carrying an orange kitten. “See, Mummy, here her be! Her was hidin' in the—” She stopped, seeing the strange men. She wore a blue stuff dress with a white pinafore, and her gingery braids were tied with black ribbons. Still holding the kitten, she went to stand behind her mother, clutching at her dress.

“Yes, Sir Edgar helped me get started,” Mrs. Redman said, and the sadness was apparent both on her face and in her voice. But when she raised her eyes, she was defiant. “He wuz very kind when I wuz in desp‘rate need, after me husband left me an' our lit'le girl. And him nivver asked nothin' o' me in return, no matter what my brother sez. Nothin' !” It was clear from the set of her jaw that she was conscious of all she was saying.

“I see,” Charles said. The kitten had leapt out of the little girl's arms and landed on the worktable, where it was batting the ostrich feather with one paw. “When was your last communication with Sir Edgar?”

Mrs. Redman scooped up the kitten and returned it to her daughter's arms. “Go outside an' play, now, Sarah,” she said. When the girl had obediently closed the door behind her, she turned to face Charles. “Commun‘cation, ye asked? Sir Edgar sent Sarah a doll fer her birthday, but him had no call to write me letters. An' him b'ain't here in the last fortnight.”

The next question was awkward but necessary, and the blunter the better, Charles thought. “Did you and Sir Edgar have a plan to go away together?”

“Go away?” Her hazel eyes narrowed, her voice was sharp with righteous indignation. “T‘gether? Wot 're ye sayin', sir? Sir Edgar wuz a married man! An' I be still a married lady, 'spite o' my husband bein' gone.”

Her look and the sound of her voice were all the answer Charles needed. “I'm sorry if I've offended you, Mrs. Redman,” he said, feeling embarrassed. “The difficulty is that, just prior to his death, Sir Edgar wrote to his wife, saying that he was leaving the country in the company of a woman. Given his murder, it is necessary to inquire into the identity of—”

“Rot!” Mrs. Redman's fists had dropped to her hips, her eyes blazing.

“I beg your pardon,” Charles said, startled.

“Wot ye said. It's rot, rot, rot, that's wot ‘tis!” she cried hotly. “Sir Edgar wuz th' kindest, truest gentl'man who ev‘r lived on this earth, an' whoever sez anything opp'site is a liar!”

The constable stepped forward. “But ye see, Mrs. Redman,” he began, “Sir Edgar wrote—”

“Who sez, I wants t' know,” Mrs. Redman interrupted fiercely. She stamped her foot. “Who sez him wuz runnin' off? Who
sez?”

Charles stood still, suddenly humbled before the woman's fierce anger. He frowned, going back in his mind over the sequence of events. Who
had
reported the letter? The vicar, of course, and then Kate—but both of them had been told about it by Lady Duncan. And Lady Duncan could not produce the letter for verification, for she had burned it.

“It is his wife who says that he wrote the letter,” he said after a moment. “It was posted from Yelverton.”

“I doan't care if her sez ‘twas posted from th' moon,” Mrs. Redman said angrily. She had folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin. “ 'Tis all a lie, an' told for her own reasons. Her's not any better 'n her should be, t' tell the plain truth.”

Charles frowned.
No better than she should be?
“Is there ...” He paused and cleared his throat. “Did Sir Edgar give you any reason to think that his wife was not... that she—”

He stopped, at a loss as to how to put the question to a woman who, despite the fact that she worked to support herself and her daughter, was obviously a lady. But Mrs. Redman knew what he was thinking and answered his unasked question.

“Not in so many words,” she said. “Him wudn't talk ‘bout his wife that way. But 'tween the lines, I understood.”

“What did you understand?”

Her face grew stern. “That him was sorry him 'ud married her down there in Africa, when him wuz so sick that the doctors give him up fer dead. That him suspected her o' hocus-pocus.” She stopped. “Now, that was a word he used. The very word.”

“Hocus-pocus?” The constable frowned.

“Sir Edgar thought Lady Duncan and Mr. Westcott were engaging in some sort of spiritualist fraud?” Charles asked. “Or perhaps a... dalliance?” But surely a gentleman would not accuse his wife of such things to another lady? On the other hand, even a gentleman may say more than he intends to say to a tenderhearted woman who listens to him sympathetically, who understands his feelings and feels for him. He had the idea that Sir Edgar had found such a listener in Mrs. Redman, and perhaps in Mrs. Bernard, as well. Mrs. Bernard, however, could tell them nothing more—or rather, he thought uneasily, had told them all she could.

“Dalliance?” Mrs. Redman pressed her lips together. “Him didn't say
that,
mind. All him said was ‘hocus-pocus.' Ye c'n make of it wot ye will.”

Charles was silent for a moment, considering what he had just heard. At last he said, “Did Sir Edgar mention to you anything connected with his cousin, Jack Delany, of Stapleton House?”

Mrs. Redman gave him a blank look. “No, not that I recall.”

“And your brother. I noticed that he is using a crutch, but I wondered whether he might have taken any trips or made any journeys in the last four or five days, even short ones.”

“Journeys?” The lady smiled slightly at the impossibility of this. “Richard's foot has been bad fer near on a month now. Him c'n hop t'wixt home an' his bench on that crutch, but him can't go no farther.”

“And his doctor?” Charles asked. “Who's treating him?”

“Dr. Lorrimer, o' course. Ye c'n ask him, t' be sure, if ye doan't believe me.”

Charles continued to press the woman, but Mrs. Redman kept to her tale, and none of his questions or prodding did anything to shake her conviction that Lady Duncan had lied about the letter and that Sir Edgar, the truest and kindest gentleman on earth, would not have betrayed his wife, no matter how he felt about her or how deeply distressed he might be by her behavior. But of course, there was no immediate means of checking the woman's claims with regard to Sir Edgar or of discovering whether her perceptions had any validity, other than confronting Lady Duncan, that is, and Charles was understandably reluctant to do that. He would ask Dr. Lorrimer about Richard Lyons's injured foot, but other than that, they seemed to have come to a dead end, at least for the moment.

There was little talk between Charles and the constable on the way back to Princetown. Charles felt discouraged and somewhat disheartened, since the whole day had been given over to fumbling up blind alleys, or rather, following moorland tracks that meandered here and there but led nowhere in particular. Jack Delany certainly had motive and opportunity and was the most likely suspect, but there was no evidence to connect him to the crime. Mrs. Redman appeared to have neither motive nor opportunity, and while her brother might have been concerned enough about her reputation to speak to Jack Delany about his sister's friendship with Sir Edgar, it didn't seem likely that he had a motive strong enough to compel him to commit murder—or an opportunity, given his crippled condition.

That left Lady Duncan. She had seemed to Charles nothing more, and certainly nothing less, than a grieving widow whose distress at her husband's untimely death was complicated by her understandable indignation at his betrayal. Was there something, some grain of truth behind Mrs. Redman's assertion that Sir Edgar distrusted his wife? And what sort of hocus-pocus—if that was indeed the word he had used—did he suspect? Did it have to do with her interest in spiritualism? Or was there something else?

And what in the world did any of this have to do with Sir Edgar's death?

“A
h,
there
you are, Sheridan!” Doyle exclaimed, as Charles alighted from the brougham outside the Duchy Hotel. “I've been looking for you. I'm gratified to report that my researches in Yelverton have proved productive, quite productive, indeed!”

“Well, that's good,” Charles said. He spoke dispiritedly, but he was glad that someone, if not himself, had managed to learn something significant that day. He bade good-bye to the constable, who drove off to return the hired rig, and climbed up the steps to join Doyle.

“It must be getting on to tea time,” he said. “Shall we see whether they have laid tea in the hotel lounge?”

The tea tray held an admirable assortment of sandwiches, cheeses, and sweets; the fire was blazing brightly; and what was even better, the lounge was unoccupied. Charles filled his plate, poured his tea, and pulled a wing chair as near to the fire as possible.

“Well?” he asked, settling into the chair and stretching out his stiff legs. He was beginning to feel better already. “What have you learned today, Doyle?”

“I have discovered,” Doyle said with an air of importance, “Sir Edgar's horse and gig, in the livery stable in Yelverton.”

“Indeed!” Charles exclaimed, crossing one leg over the other. “Capital, I must say, Doyle. Worthy of Sherlock himself!”

Doyle took the other chair. “I have driven the rig back here to Princetown, since I thought you might want to have a look at it. For fingerprints,” he added, with a wave of his hand, “or cigarette stubs or ash or something of the sort. My cursory examination revealed nothing, but I had not the assistance of a hand lens nor the time to use it. You might turn up something else with a good going-over.”

Charles withheld the comment that it would have been better to have left the gig in Yelverton than to risk a contamination of the evidence. But he said only, “We'll go over to the stable in a bit and have a look. What else were you able to learn in Yelverton?”

Doyle leaned forward, smiling under his mustaches. “I have learned the identity of—” He paused. “Well, I shouldn't go so far as to call him ‘our murderer' just yet, for the evidence is chiefly circumstantial. However, it appears that, whatever intention he may have announced to his wife, Sir Edgar may not have left the moor after all.”

“You're suggesting that someone else drove his horse and gig to Yelverton and left them there?”

“Exactly, old chap! Precisely.” He dug into his pocket and took out a packet of cigarettes, lighting one. “Someone else, indeed, as you say. Someone who wanted to create the illusion that Sir Edgar had left the moor, and even that he had left the country.”

“But who?” Charles asked, feeling, he suspected, as Dr. Watson must have felt on many occasions.