Murder At Plums (24 page)

‘I left Mr Erskine happily reciting his part, and moved round the room a little, then came to have a word with you.
Now I was ahead of you up the stairs. Who did you come up with?’

Auguste shut his eyes to remember the scene. ‘Everyone was still, then I pushed towards the door after you. A group of us ran up the stairs, then some turned back. I went on after you and heard the police constable ordering no one else. But who was there –’ He shrugged. ‘I recall you running along the corridor, a woman – Mrs Erskine – then me and many behind me.’

Rose walked outside into the corridor. ‘There’s a problem, Mr Auguste,’ he said at last. ‘There’s only the one door into this study – at least, there’s another, leading through to the day room on the other side, but that’s bolted on the inside. So our murderer had to come out of the study door to escape. So why didn’t we see him?’ He stared along the corridor to the window alcove at the far end, half filled by the telephone cabinet by the study door. ‘He had to get along this corridor somehow,’ he said slowly.

‘He would have been seen from the bottom of the stairs, monsieur. The moment one is outside the dining room one has a clear view up to the first floor and this passage. We were all looking
up
– he would have been seen.’

‘You can’t see the door of the study,’ called out Rose, experimenting from below.

‘No, but then he would have been seen as we came up the stairs. He would have been trapped. There is only that antique chest which is not big enough.’

‘Hide inside the telephone cabinet?’ flashed Rose, racing upstairs again.

‘No door.’

‘Behind it?’

‘It is flush with the wall.’

‘Secret passage,’ offered Rose without much hope.

Auguste laughed. ‘An outside wall, Inspector.’

‘Then he must have been hiding in the room.’

‘Unless it were suicide.’

‘Wouldn’t commit suicide in someone else’s house,’ said Rose, ‘or come to a party with a gun in his pocket. Let’s look at this window.’

On the busy thoroughfare of Curzon Street, Sergeant Stitch was staring up at them.

‘I think, Inspector, he would be noticed hanging from a drainpipe.’

Rose grunted. ‘He’d have to be a monkey anyway.’ His eyes roamed round the room. ‘Then there’s only one answer. He was in here all the time. Risky, but possible. There’s room in that cupboard for instance. Even behind the desk. Jones was lying well away from it. Who was there with you in the room? I have to admit my eyes were on the corpse.’

Auguste always prided himself on his eye for detail. He could remember every detail of a banquet. Let him treat this test like the dinner he gave at the home of the Princess Tatiana for her twentieth birthday. He shut his eyes. Ah, Tatiana . . . He abruptly recalled himself.

‘Peregrine Salt was by my side, Madame Erskine behind me screaming, her husband, too. Mrs Preston and Mrs Salt stood together, Mr Atkins and Samuel Preston were turning over the body. Salt went over to help. The General was there, too. Not his wife. I remember another woman crying out hysterically – Mrs Briton’s voice, I think. Then Mrs Briton heard Erskine and had hysterics all over again, and then somebody shouted that it was Jones. As you know, everyone assumed it was Erskine, with the grey hair, and it being his house.’

‘I tell you, Mr Didier, it’s very careless if someone did shoot Jones instead of Erskine. In fact, Erskine is everywhere in this case.’

‘As someone intends, perhaps,’ said Auguste. ‘For if he were our murderer, he would be foolish indeed. Why should he stage a murder in his own house? Very dangerous. Besides, he cannot have done so because he and his wife were both behind me in the doorway of the study. No one person could do these murders. I think we are certain now it is a husband and wife team. Like Lord and Lady Macbeth. One to lure, one to kill Worthington. One to kill Jones, the other to camouflage his temporary absence and reappearance in the room.’

‘Macbeth,’ said Rose resignedly. ‘That’s all we need. Now what’s put him in your mind?’

‘They spoke of Macbeth in the dining room downstairs, I
think,’ he replied, frowning. A hazy memory, a picture etched on his mind, like that occasion in Plum’s when Rafael Jones had said the clue to Worthington’s murder lay in the past. He had told Rose at the time, and now reminded him.

‘Might have been nothing. Might have been something. Do you see him as a blackmailer? Didn’t seem to need money.’

‘There are other reasons for blackmailing apart from money. For security.’

‘Protection against someone who knew about Rosie, you mean,’ said Rose thoughtfully. ‘That brings us back to Worthington and Erskine, and they’re both out of it. Worthington’s dead and Erskine couldn’t have done it. No, I reckon he was killed because he knew who killed Worthington, and the killer knew he knew.’

‘In blood stepped in so far,’ murmured Auguste. ‘We must seek our Macbeths, Inspector.’

Emma was not in good spirits, having received a message from above from Auguste to prepare hot chocolate for as many of the guests as possible. How fortunate he had brought his
chocolatière
to provide for his own needs to counter the stress of the banquet. Nothing like it for calming the nerves. Did Linnaeus not call it the drink of the gods? Did Brillat-Savarin not extol its virtues?

Calmer the guests might be, thus fortified, but their low spirits continued. General Fredericks cast an anxious look at his wife who was composedly talking to Jeremiah Atkins. His ears caught the words ‘Twenty-fourth Foot’. He was tired. His eyes were playing tricks. He had even imagined he saw his nephew Philip just now. Imagination, of course. Perhaps in deference to his age and eminence, he was first to be called, with his wife, into the day room at the other end of the first-floor corridor.

‘I’m afraid soldiers tend to know little of art. My wife takes a keener interest, but not in Sir Rafael’s works, Inspector,’ he replied composedly to Rose’s first general question.

‘You were in the study after the shot was fired, sir? Did you look round the room at all?’

‘Why should I, Inspector? My – our – attention was on the body.’

‘If anyone had been hidden there, sir, do you think he could
have emerged and joined the group without being noticed?’

Lady Fredericks’ hands were twisting in her lap. General Fredericks paused. ‘I hardly think it likely, Inspector. There was a sizeable group in the room. Surely anyone joining it would have been noticed.’

‘And you, Lady Fredericks, were you in the room? I did not notice you.’

‘No,’ answered her husband quickly for her.

‘Yes,’ she said simultaneously.

He inclined his head. ‘I am sorry, my dear, I should have said I was not aware of your presence.’

‘I thought it was Philip,’ she said simply.

‘Philip?’ said Rose, at a loss.

General Fredericks lost some of his composure. ‘Our nephew, Inspector, who left his home twenty years ago to become an actor. I thought – my wife thought – one of the guests bore a startling resemblance—’

‘But why did you think your nephew might be the corpse – or did you think he might be the murderer?’ said Rose, interrupting quickly.

General Fredericks rose to his feet. ‘This line of enquiry is irrelevant, Inspector,’ he said courteously enough. ‘Come, my dear.’

Generals do not become generals unless steel lies inside the velvet glove.

Egbert Rose, left alone, went to the communicating door and shot it open to find Auguste, nimble for all he was a cook, apparently admiring a cartoon sketch of Erskine as Sydney Carton.

‘Strange, Inspector,’ he said, desperately casting round for something to say, ‘all these pictures are of Erskine as a mature actor. Why nothing of fire, of youth?’

‘Because when you’re young and struggling no one paints your portrait,’ said Egbert Rose. ‘Fact of life, Mr Didier.’

‘True, the apprentice chef has no recipes named after him. His early artistic creations go unrecorded.’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what
is
strange, Mr Didier. We keep getting to what we think is the heart of this little maze, only to find ourselves back at the beginning again. Now did someone want Erskine, Worthington
and
Jones out of the
way? Did someone want Worthington and Jones out of the way and the attempts against Erskine were a blind? Did Worthington find out something that might have stopped the murderer’s disposal of Jones? Did Jones discover something about the murderer of Worthington? I tell you, Mr Didier, this case is like a plateful of your vermicelli – all loose ends.’

Jeremiah ‘Jorrocks’ Atkins was inclined to be rebellious. He did not associate with painter pansies. Time was when Plum’s was a club for gentlemen, who understood about foxes and hunting; anyone would think it was the Garrick, the kind of actor fellows they were letting in.

‘I understand you did not get on well with Colonel Worthington either?’

‘Thought you were investigating the painter chappie’s death, not old Worthington’s?’

‘Both,’ said Rose firmly. ‘Now what was this argument about?’

Sergeant Stitch taking notes in the corner sniffed. Now if
he
were interviewing him . . .

‘Hunting,’ said Atkins mutinously.

‘That all?’

Atkins reddened. ‘No,’ and did not seem disposed to say more.

Rose waited. It often worked. Will against will. He had tried it on at the Three Crows in Stepney once, when Daniel Hardbitter the bit-faker thought he could bamboozle him.

‘Army,’ said Atkins sullenly. ‘Same regiment. Warwicks. Twenty-fourth Foot.’ He said it with an air of finality as though that explained it all.

‘A matter of honour, was it, sir?’ said Rose helpfully. He knew these army types.

Atkins was not grateful for this assistance. He glared at him. ‘Honour be damned,’ he cried, the grievances of years spilling out. ‘He pinched my boots.’

It then transpired that these same boots once purloined from their alleged owner were not only retained but flaunted on the hunting fields of Warwickshire. ‘Worthington’s no damn loss to anyone,’ he trumpeted.

‘Did you know Lieutenant Fredericks, General Fredericks’ son?’ Rose enquired, not entirely idly.

Atkins, caught off guard, stared at him blankly, then said slowly: ‘Anyone in the Twenty-Fourth Foot would have known Lieutenant Fredericks. Fine lad. I’d have done anything to save him.’

‘Did you know it was Colonel Worthington who could be said to have been responsible for his death?’

‘Worthington?’ Atkins roared. But somehow his voice seemed artificial as though the news came as no surprise.

Charlie Briton was equally unobliging. ‘’Course I knew the fellow – painted Gertie once, she insisted on it. Found out later—’ but he bit back this confidence. In fact she wanted it done in order to present to Erskine Gaylord.

‘You were both in the study when we discovered the body. Did you enter together?’

‘No, yes, no, she was having hysterics in the doorway,’ said Briton. ‘She thought it was Erskine,’ he added, aggrieved.

‘I understand she – er – was fond of Mr Erskine,’ said the Inspector. ‘That she announced this fact in public.’

‘Dashed good friend, that’s all,’ said Charlie firmly, old-fashioned ideas of unity, of man and wife, rising to the surface. Privately he winced at the awful memory of that performance of
Hamlet
with Gertie yelling from the balcony. He hadn’t been able to face the Rag or Barracks since. ‘You know what women are.’

Rose was diverted by the thought of Mrs Rose standing up in the Highbury Empire balcony and announcing adoration of another gentleman. Hastily he reverted to the matter of murder, and took Charles Briton through his movements and those of other members of the group in the study.

It turned out they were all dashed good sorts – with one exception. Samuel Preston, it appeared, was not the sort of chap you took a glass with if you could help it.

‘Why’s that?’

‘How’d the fellow make his money?’ asked Charles mysteriously. ‘Answer me that.’

Rose couldn’t.

‘Slave trade,’ Charlie went on with relish. ‘Before the Ashanti war, so the story goes. The Dutch handed over to us their forts at the Gold Coast, and the Ashantis fancied one of them for a slave market. Preston was in the middle of that little picnic. Did very nicely too. But it wouldn’t look too good now, would it? In a prospective Liberal Minister?’

‘Did you get on well with Sir Rafael Jones, Mr Salt?’ Rose began quietly enough, keeping his attention on Salt rather than his flamboyant Junoesque wife.

‘Excellently,’ said Salt heartily. ‘Splendid chap.’

‘So you knew him well?’

‘Not very,’ said Salt, hastily backtracking, perceiving he had made a false step. Caution was the keynote of his explorations.

‘Nevertheless you were concerned enough to help turn over the body.’

‘Naturally,’ said Salt with dignity. ‘I was under the impression it might be our host, for one thing.’

A slight exclamation from Juanita made Rose turn to her. ‘And you, madam, did you know Sir Rafael well?’

‘Sir Wafael painted me,’ said Juanita stiffly. ‘He is not good painter. He do not like women. I do not like him.’

‘And did you think the body might be Mr Erskine too, Mrs Salt?’

Juanita’s breast swelled, an awe-inspiring sight from which Egbert Rose could not take his eyes. Her voice rose. ‘Why should I think eet Mr Erskine? Eet is a body! When I see bodies, I do not think eet is ’im or is eet ’im. I think there is a body. I do not like eet.’

‘And yet you were there in the room. You could have stayed downstairs.’

The Salts’ eyes briefly met and Peregrine went on smoothly: ‘We came to do what we could, Inspector.’

Rose changed tack.

‘I understand you quarrelled with Colonel Worthington recently. You didn’t mention this at the time. Or even that you were related.’

Colour rose in Salt’s cheeks. ‘You did not ask me, Inspector. I hid nothing.’

Rose began to sympathise with Prendergast in the
famous feud, no matter the rights and wrongs.

‘What did you quarrel about, sir?’

‘Colonel Worthington and I did not see eye to eye over the importance of archaeological excavations. However,’ he gave a little cough, ‘I am glad to say that at the end of our discussion we were in agreement as to their value and he was willing to advance considerable funds to me.’