Murder At Wittenham Park (18 page)

“He could always let us go home.”

“Not a hope, my love. Morton is a very methodical man. Now let's go downstairs. Your astute father has a feeling that something dramatic is about to happen.”

When they reached the Great Hall, Jim's prediction proved accurate. A TV crew, with arc lights and cameras, was in action in the drive outside, while Priscilla gave one of the performances of her life from the front steps, as though she were the chatelaine of Wittenham.

“That poor dear keeper,” they heard her declaiming, “such a terrible way to die. Torn to pieces by a lion. It could be ancient Rome. And as for Mr. Welch's death! It's like a House of Horrors.”

Lady Gilroy was watching through the open windows with frozen detachment.

“How did the agency find that woman?” she asked. “She's crazy. Anyone would think she owned the place.”

From outside came Priscilla's silvery tones, mixing theatrical despair with brave honesty. “The police are investigating. They're marvellous. I don't know what we would do without them. Of course, as a tourist attraction we're ruined.”

“Oh shoot!” Dee Dee muttered. “I guess anything's better than our being interviewed. Buck's practically gone into hiding. But how do we get her offstage again?”

“May I try?” Jim suggested.

“Can you?” Dee grasped at his offer as if it were the last lifebelt on the
Titanic.

“Come on, Jemma,” Jim said. “We're the men in white coats, okay?”

He led his daughter out of the front door and down the steps, straight into the TV cameras' vision.

“Hey,” the interviewer shouted, “get outta the way. Can't you see we're shooting?”

“Time for your medicine, Mrs. Worthington,” Jim said, grasping Priscilla's elbow, “you can't have forgotten.” He propelled her away from the cameras and back towards the front steps.

“What the hell's going on?” demanded the interviewer.

Jim waved cheerfully as he and Jemma marched Priscilla back into the house. “Sorry, boys. You had the wrong lady.”

Once they were inside the house, Jim released Priscilla and told her, “You're being extremely naughty. Why?”

“Oh, but darlings.” Priscilla was unrepentant. “They so wanted an interview. Nobody else was around.”

“Apart from the entire household,” Dee Dee said savagely. “Mrs. Worthington, you're fired.”

“You mean I can go?”

“Unfortunately not,” Jim said. “We're all in the same boat.”

“Then stuff the lot of you,” Priscilla said with spirit. “Can't pay, won't go.” She left them a little unsteadily, heading for the library.

“What do we do with her?” Dee Dee asked, “Trust my husband to hire a weirdo.”

“There's nothing you can do until Morton lets us all off the hook.”

“So we have a murderer and a madwoman on the loose together.” Dee Dee groaned. “There are moments when I feel I'm losing my grip on reality.”

“They could be the same person,” Jemma suggested.

“I doubt it,” Jim said, then turned to what had been on his mind before this TV extravaganza. “Does anyone know what went wrong with the lion?”

“There's a vet at the Lion Park now,” Dee Dee said, her mind on other things, specifically on finding her husband and delivering a few choice words about his responsibilities.

“Would you mind if I go down there?” Jim asked, aware that Lady Gilroy was barely listening.

“Sure. Go ahead. Anything you like.”

“Feel like a walk?” Jim asked his daughter, who looked doubtful.

“I think I'll stick around here,” Jemma said.

“The inspector's sure to liven up your day,” Dee Dee said, coming back into the conversation. “He likes to question everyone. Often. Anyway, it's time for elevenses.”

“Elevenses,” was an old country-house tradition, which Dee Dee had revived at Wittenham, basically coffee or tea and biscuits or cake, half-way between breakfast and lunch. Today it would be a useful way of killing time as everyone waited. And waited.

Dee Dee rang a bell and Dodgson appeared with a tray, as if he had been waiting for the summons. Jemma noticed that he was looking more than usually lugubrious. There seemed to be no spring in his step at all. However, her speculation as to the reason was cut short by Adrienne arriving, full of indignation about Inspector Morton.

“It's not as though everybody doesn't know George left me well provided for,” she complained. “But that man makes it sound like a crime. He must have had detectives talking to the neighbours too. How else would he know George liked going to the pub?” She shook her head vexedly “Or that he'd taken a fancy to the barmaid?”

“They'll have sent out a ‘victim-inquiry team,'” Jemma said knowledgeably. “They'll have interviewed your neighbours.”

“Without so much as a ‘by your leave' from me, I suppose,” Adrienne snapped, then burst into tears and stood with her shoulders hunched, sobbing. “All I've ever done was defend him, no matter what he did to me.”

“Don't worry, they'll know that.” Dee put aside her own problems and stepped forward to comfort her. “Sit down and have some tea.”

As Adrienne sat trembling on a sofa, trying to wipe away her tears with a tiny handkerchief, Priscilla reappeared.

“Oh, the poor darling,” she exclaimed at once. “I don't blame her for being in a state.”

“How can you possibly know what's been happening to her?” Dee Dee reacted furiously, “when you've been queening it in front of the cameras?”

“But I saw her going to Morton's room. He put me through the hoop too.”

“I'm delighted to hear it.”

Priscilla disregarded this. She had another little drama to unfold and she was not about to be upstaged. “They even dragged up a load of old gossip about my being a pyromaniac,” she said, hopeful of causing consternation and fully succeeding.

“A what?” Dee Dee almost screamed, totally forgetting Adrienne as the spectre of the house being set on fire rose before her. That really would set the seal on the weekend. And this madwoman was probably capable of imagining that she had murdered Welch and of then setting the place on fire to destroy the evidence. “What did you just say?”

“It was a total lie, darling. It was nothing to do with me that the theatre caught fire. If I'd had the money I'd have sued them for sacking me. What I mean is, the police drag up everything.”

“I put up with more than a woman can bear from George,” Adrienne moaned from the sofa, trying to regain everyone's attention. “Reely I did.”

To Jemma's surprise, Hamish reacted to this blatant piece of self-pity. He deserted Loredana, with whom he had just come in, and went straight across, sat down on an adjacent chair, and listened attentively to Adrienne's various woes. Loredana was evidently not amused and manoeuvred herself into a conversation with Dee Dee.

When Dulcie returned, Jemma decided she was definitely surplus to requirements and set out for what she called a “think walk.” This took her through the Great Hall, past the guardian policeman and the police van in the drive, to the park. She found it clarified her mind to take walks alone, and she had plenty to think about.

For a start there was something about Adrienne's dramatic collapse that didn't quite ring true. One minute she was behaving with a self-control that few women could genuinely feel, the next she was overplaying the bereavement role.

As Jim had remarked, it was a well-known fact that the majority of murders are domestic ones; and many of those are never revealed for what they are. If one was looking for motive and opportunity, then Adrienne qualified richly on both counts. When she left the breakfast table on Saturday morning, saying it was odd for her husband not to have appeared, everyone assumed that she had not yet been to his room. But she could have gone there any time between the mock murder and breakfast. As she walked in the bright sunshine, Jemma decided to talk this over with her father and wondered what he was doing.

Jim was doing little except listen to others at the Lion Park, where the great tawny cadaver of Caesar lay stretched out on the laboratory floor, already giving off a sickly smell. The specialist vet had just finished examining the body and was questioning the staff. He was a small, dark-haired, rather pugnacious man, who was working with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, revealing muscular forearms.

“You say that Ted made up the tranquillizer solution himself?” he was asking.

“That's right, sir,” Gary confirmed. “He did it in his workshop. Very particular he was about the amounts, too. They had to be just right.”

The vet grunted. “Sounds to me as though the lion wasn't fully tranquillized.”

“Wouldn't be like Ted to make that kind of mistake, sir.”

“Can you tell from a blood test?” Jim asked.

The vet eyed him suspiciously. “Do you work for his lordship?”

“No, no. So sorry. I'm just a visitor up at the house.” Jim made a show of being apologetic. “It's simple curiosity.”

“I see.” The vet was wary of the strangers who invariably gathered round after any incident with animals, then decided that this one looked honest enough. And if he was staying with the Gilroys, he was not a total outsider. “A toxicologist could tell, but it's an expensive series of tests. I doubt if Lord Gilroy would want to spend the money. When all's said and done, the lion's dead, and so, tragically, is Ted. What would be the point of proving he made a mistake?”

“He wouldn't have done, sir,” Gary insisted. “Meself I reckon the dart fell out and he didn't see it had.”

“Has it been found yet?”

“No, sir. No one's had time to look properly. Could be anywhere.”

“Excuse my asking,” Jim interrupted, “but what's the significance of the dart falling out?”

“If it hit a bone, for instance,” the vet said, “it could fail to inject the tranquillizer at all, although”—he bent down over the lion's haunches and pointed to a puncture in the hide—“it wasn't in a bad place. But it unquestionably did fall out. Darting isn't a very exact science, not like injecting a human.”

Jim looked down at the lion. Was he imagining blood caked on the fur around its mouth? He shuddered. What had Ted told them? There were good lions and bad lions, but no safe lions. The last time he'd seen this one it had been busy mating. It hadn't looked particularly noble then and it didn't now, which confusingly reminded him of Adrienne's revulsion at seeing the sex act. Why had that upset her? Probably the thought of her husband's activities with other women.

As the vet continued his discussion, Jim looked around the laboratory, at the benches, the shelves of medicaments and small bottles for injection fluids. Although he knew nothing of veterinary science, the set-up here seemed totally professional.

He was still thinking about that when he walked back to the house. Two deaths in twenty-four hours—it was an extraordinary coincidence. Yet Inspector Morton didn't seem to think so. Perhaps the inspector was shrewder than he appeared.

Up at the house, Morton himself was closeted in his interview-room and not feeling shrewd at all. He had now assembled files on everyone in the house. Their names had been run through the police national computer. Altogether the inquiry teams had collated an astonishing amount of scandal; at least an amount that would have been astonishing to anyone unfamiliar with the perversities of other people's lives.

There was dirt on practically everyone, from Jemma's rock-band boy-friend to Priscilla's pyromania. Gilroy had lost his licence for speeding two years ago. Dee Dee was occasionally seen at Annabel's night-club in London with another man. Welch had been suspected of insurance fraud and the man who had blacklisted him was Savage. Loredana was the talk of her village. Dulcie was seen as hard-nosed under a veil of femininity. Local gossip in Wittenham about the servants was multifarious. But Morton was still waiting for news of Welch's will, and none of this miscellany of information left him with a prime suspect. Who was really linked to whom, who had the motive, and who had had the opportunity to murder George Welch?

Morton had made a list, headed by Adrienne, of those who had the most to gain. Next came the Gilroys and their servants. Or possibly the servants first, since they might lose their jobs. Priscilla seemed enough of an oddball to do anything. Hamish McMountdown, he felt, was basically self-interested and untrustworthy. Then there was Dulcie. For what possible reason should she kill her client in the middle of a negotiation? He felt sure a lawyer must have murdered a client before now, if only out of exasperation, but surely not on this occasion.

That left Loredana and the Savages, of whom only Savage had any previous links with Welch. He had one or two things to have out with Savage, notably the inadequately explained behaviour in the passage recorded by Constable Rutherford. Well, he would do that soon. In the meantime what he needed was more information. Faced with this necessity, he resorted to a device that might not directly solve a crime, and might seem out of place here, but that often threw up clues.

When the group finally assembled for Sunday lunch, Morton gathered them together in the library and announced that he would be staging a re-enactment of early Saturday morning. He did not want to wait another day—which drew a few sighs of relief—so it would be held this afternoon. Would everyone try to recall exactly what they had done and repeat it as close to the correct time sequence as possible?

He was not delighted at Gilroy's reaction.

“Oh my God!” the noble peer exclaimed. “Where was I at seven yesterday morning?”

“In bed, you idiot,” Dee Dee hissed. “And fast asleep.”

11

J
IM
S
AVAGE
watched with quiet amusement as Morton outlined the re-enactment requirements. The inspector stood in front of the great stone fireplace, with the guests in a half-circle around him, fully prepared to argue and cajole. The question now was who would fail to do what they had actually done on Saturday morning before George Welch was found dead.