Murder at Newstead Abbey (18 page)

“You heard the name, but not in that context,” Byron said. “Eggars is somewhat like the mills of the gods. He grinds exceeding slow, but not, I fear, quite so small.” He outlined his visit to Eggars. “Eggars is convinced, but I don’t believe that body was Minnie Vulch’s, missing molar or no.”

“Why on earth would he lie about something that could prove troublesome to himself?” Corinne asked. “Doesn’t the body found so close to where Vulch lives suggest that he killed her?”

Byron gave a frowning shrug. “It would be demmed difficult to prove it after all this time. Innocent until proven guilty. And with the gypsies to blame it on, the scoundrel will get away with it.”

Luten listened and said, “A gypsy might have got hold of a gun.”

Prance considered it and said, “But surely the body being wrapped in a sheet suggests a more bourgeois mentality. If it was to be passed off as a gypsy murder, why not use a shawl, like the gypsy women use?”

“He didn’t think the body would ever by discovered,” Corinne suggested.

“If you don’t think the body is Minnie’s, Byron,” Luten said, “what is Vulch getting away with? The murder of some other girl?”

“Damme, I don’t know,” Byron said, tossing up his hands in frustration. “I just feel in my bones he’s lying. He kept twirling his hat around in his hands in a nervous way, and making patently insincere remarks about how sorry he was and wanting to give her a proper burial. That’s money out of his own pocket, which don’t sound like Vulch.Not that he can’t afford it with all that gold he’s got stashed away. I’d give a monkey to know where
that
came from.”

Luten studied him as he spoke, and thought he was genuinely confused, which didn’t look as if the gold came from Byron. What could be in that letter he had taken from Vulch’s shack? He knew he should ask, but knew as well it would ruin his chance of getting Byron into the shadow cabinet.

The food arrived and they all fell silent a moment. When the waiter left, Luten said, “The obvious explanation is that he’s pretending — for a price I assume — that the body in the grave is his wife’s, to hide the true identity of the victim, and whoever murdered her.”

“He already had the money before he claimed the body is Minnie’s,” Corinne pointed out. “And isn’t there a danger that Minnie will resurface if she isn’t dead? Is there anyone in the neighborhood she might have written to?”

“Murray tells me her parents and uncle are dead,” Byron said. “He doesn’t believe she had any brothers or siblings. If she had any close friends, I wouldn’t know who they would be. I doubt she’d write in any case, lest Vulch found out where she’d gone.”

They mulled this over a moment, then Luten said, “If the body is his wife’s as Eggars thinks and neither Vulch nor a gypsy killed her, who did?”

“As she was found on my island, I fancy that directs suspicion on me,” Byron said. “That’s why I want you all to try to help me solve this.” He turned to Luten. “I’ll be no good to the party if I come trailing clouds of suspicion behind me. The Berkeley Brigade has solved harder puzzles than this.”

“We have no intention of giving up on it,” Luten said. Byron’s request certainly wasn’t that of a guilty man. Whatever was behind his business with Vulch, at least it wasn’t murder.

After a hearty lunch and much discussion, the only conclusion they came to was that they didn’t trust Vulch an inch. If the body was his wife’s, someone had paid him to admit it, and if it wasn’t, then someone had paid him to pretend it was.

* * * *

Coffen had returned from his search for clues and was snuggled up in front of the grate with a glass of wine when the others returned to the Abbey. “They got your window fixed, Byron, and patched up that busted door lock in the library. Any news?” he asked, and was told the tale of Vulch’s visit to Eggars.

After much head scratching and ear pulling, Coffen admitted, “I can’t make heads or tails of that. It must be true. When things don’t make sense, they usually are. I had a word with Tess. She says Vulch was at the Green Man last night, left well before midnight, which would give him plenty of time to ransack the library. Of course that don’t mean he did it, but just that he could have, except that his feet are so big.” When this elicited blank stares, he said, “Didn’t Corrie tell you about the footprint I found on one of the papers in the library?” He drew from his pocket the carefully folded print he’d cut from the paper.

“Sorry about that, Byron,” he said, “but I kept the rest of the page and can glue it back together later. Nothing important, is it?”

Byron glanced at the page. “Only a letter from Oliver Cromwell,” he said in a thin voice. Prance held his hand to his forehead and moaned.

“Good. I wouldn’t want to cut up anything valuable,” Coffen said. “But you can see for yourself that this ain’t Vulch’s or any man’s footprint. Is there any lady in the parish dashing enough to have pulled off this stunt, Byron? Someone you ditched, and she’s having a bit of sport with you?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Byron said stiffly. “I wonder if the man who broke in had a helper inside the house? One of my own maids.”

“Then he wouldn’t have had to pry open the door, would he?” Coffen asked.

Luten said, “He might have done it to direct suspicion away from his inside helper.”

“If that’s a maid’s footprint, it means she stepped outside for some reason,” Coffen said. “Not impossible, I suppose, maybe calling him to let him know it was safe to go in. It don’t seem like a lady’s work, somehow, prying the door open and messing about with old papers, but helping from the inside, I can see that.”

It occurred to Prance that Grace might have done it for money. She had asked him that morning if he wanted to do any more ghost hunting. He disliked to admit he had been paying her, however, and said nothing. He soon became bored with the conversation and led Corinne away to practice the Christmas carols, while Coffen roamed the house, finding excuses to talk to the maids and measure by eye the size of their feet. Other than the cook, who had feet bigger than his own, he felt any one of the girls might have made the mark on the paper.

The other excitement of the day was a visit from the Richardsons. They had been out riding and dropped in to offer condolences to Byron on his break-in. Word of it had spread by the usual country grapevine. Corinne was surprised Lady Richardson wasn’t wearing her new scarlet riding habit to impress the visitors. Not that there was anything amiss with the blue one she had on. The hat she wore with it was tall and black, like an officer’s shako, and would have looked stylish with the scarlet habit. In fact, such an outfit had been featured in a recent lady’s magazine.

“It’s appalling. Just appalling,” she declared, accepting a glass of wine and setting it aside. “I had William call in the locksmith and put new bolts on all the doors. Which probably means they’ll break our windows to get in.” Her voice sounded somehow tense when she asked, “Have you any idea who did it, milord, and what’s behind it?”

“After much consideration we’ve come to the conclusion that it was either pure mischief, or someone’s looking for a clue to where the monks buried their treasure.”

“Ah, the buried treasure!” she cried. “That’s it!”

Sir William shook his head sadly and said, “Folks will do most anything for money.”

“You’ll want to get your servants searching the grounds for signs of someone digging,” his wife advised Byron.

Sir William cleared his throat and said, “We had another reason for calling, actually. You might not have heard, Vulch has identified the body found on your island as his wife. Seems it is not our Nessie after all.”

“It happens we did hear,” Byron said. “Vulch was with Eggars when I stopped in to report the vandalism in the library.”

“We’re so relieved it wasn’t dear Nessie,” Lady Richardson said, drawing out a handkerchief to dab at her eyes. “William now feels the body wasn’t really so very like Nessie. He went to view the remains as I mentioned to you, and thought it
might
be Nessie. But the hair was coarser and duller. We thought her being buried might account for it. One wants an explanation of things, and we were happy to leap to the conclusion that the body was hers.”

“Happy? Surely death is hardly a consummation devoutly to be wished,” Prance said.

“Oh Sir Reginald. Consummation indeed! I’m sure you shouldn’t use such language in front of a lady,” she said, with a flirtatious eye, dry of tears.

“Actually it was death Shakespeare was speaking of in that passage from Hamlet,” Byron pointed out.

“His own death! Suicide,” Prance added. “Not the murder of an innocent maiden.”

Coffen paid no heed when Prance got off on a literary tangent. He kept to the main point. “What I find hard to understand is why Vulch pitched himself into a murder case by admitting the body is his wife,” he said. “Have you any idea about that, Sir William?”

“A change of heart, perhaps,” he said, shaking his head and looking into the grate with his sad, hound dog eyes. “Guilt at having wronged her when she was alive. It would gnaw at him later.”

“Rubbish!” Lady Richardson exclaimed angrily. “If you want my opinion, he wants to marry Tess, at the tavern, and can’t do it while his wife is alive, so he’s preten— that is, admitting that the corpse is Minnie. And it puts the cottage in his name as well. It belonged to the wife, you know.”

Coffen slapped his knee in satisfaction. “That explains it,” he said. “He’s pretending the body is his wife’s. Very likely it is Nessie.”

“No, no!” Lady Richardson said. “I’m sure it’s Minnie. She was carrying on with that handsome gypsy who was here at that time. That’s when she disappeared.”

“That could be why Vulch killed her,” Coffen said.

“And don’t forget the missing tooth! Nessie had all her teeth.”

“You’re right. I was forgetting that.”

Sir William soon arose and directed a look at his wife, who immediately stood up and said, “We have a man coming to see about selling us a pony for Willie. High time he got his leg over a mount.”

“No hurry, surely,” Sir William said, then he bowed all around and led her out.

Corinne watched them as they left. “I can’t make out who wears the trousers in that family,” she said. “The wife does nine-tenths of the talking, yet when the husband does utter a word, she obeys like a well-trained filly.”

“I fancy Sir William’s not much of a talker,” Coffen said. “He lets her rattle on, but he rules the roost. What I was wondering is how they found out about Vulch’s trip to Eggars so soon.”

“News travels fast in the country,” Prance replied. “Didn’t you say Vulch was seeing Richardson’s maid?”

“So he is, but I shouldn’t think he’d visit her during the day time.”

“He might have told her last night,” Byron said. “He actually viewed the body last night. Perhaps the maid’s putting pressure on him to do the right thing by her.”

“Seems to me he’s more interested in Tess,” Coffen said. “He was hanging about last night. If he called on Richardson’s maid after he left the inn, he wasn’t the one broke into the library. About that missing tooth, p’raps Nessie’s murderer knocked her tooth out in a fight or some such thing.”

“A molar?” Prance asked, in a dismissing way.

“Eh? Have I missed out on something? Why do you think the fellow was a mole catcher?”

“Not a mole catcher. The missing tooth was a molar. That’s one of the big ones at the back of the mouth, Coffen. Hardly likely to have been knocked out by a blow to the mouth. It would take a tooth drawer to extract it.”

“What, you think a tooth drawer is the fellow who killed her?”

“No, I do not! I think the missing molar proves the body isn’t Nessie’s.”

“Ah. Yes.” He tugged at his ear and added, “Unless she had the tooth drawn after she ran off on the Richardsons and they don’t know about it. But the same tooth that Minnie had drawn — that’s pitching us into the long arm of coincidence.” Coffen held coincidence to be highly suspicious. “And I’ll tell you what else is a coincidence,” he added. “That rock through the window and the mess in the library happening just now. It’s bound to all be part of the same thing. What we have to figure out is, what thing? What’s at the bottom of it all? I wonder now if it could be the buried treasure. Folks will do most anything for money.”

“Or love, or hatred, or jealousy,” Byron added.

“That as well,” Coffen agreed. They all sat, thinking.

The evening was spent in the great hall practicing Christmas carols. Prance was so vexed with Corinne’s poor playing that he took over the keyboard himself, only to find the carolers losing their way without his guiding hand to direct them. An ensemble group required a master with two free hands; they needed those flourishings of fingers to speed the tempo, that slow lifting of both hands to swell the chorus, a gentle lowering to decrease the volume and a sharp down strike to silence all the singers at the same instant. Tommy, the backhouse boy, was inclined to hold the note after the others had finished, but he had such a sweet voice and made such a beautiful pseudo-angel with his tousle of blond curls that Prance could not like to dismiss him.

“We shall just have to hire a pianist,” he said in frustration. “Whom can you recommend, Byron?”

“Old Tom Langtry plays the organ at church with enough gusto to rattle the windows. He drinks, but if we could keep him sober, he’d do.”

“Oh dear. All we need is a drunken piano player.”

“Mrs. Addams mentioned a retired school teacher who gives lesson?” Corinne said. “She must be competent if she gives lessons.”

“Lessons to merchants’ daughters, no doubt,” Prance sniffed. “I daresay she can at least recognize a minor chord when she sees it. We’ll run into Nottingham tomorrow and ask her to audition for us. We also have to cut the evergreen boughs tomorrow. Let us do that in the afternoon, when it’s warmer. Providing, of course, that it doesn’t rain, snow, sleet or hail.”

No rocks came hurtling through the window that night, nor did the two armed footmen Byron had set to patrol the building report any sign of an intruder. Under such a state of siege, Prance was not in a mood to go ghost hunting, and Coffen confined his to the bed chambers abovestairs which were said to be haunted. As he fell asleep half an hour after he had lay down on the bed to look and listen, he had nothing to report in the morning but a crick in his neck and a jacket even more wrinkled than usual.