Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (39 page)

T
om looked towards the dower house, its silhouetted roofline looming blackly against the pearly sky. Someone had left the front door open, he noted, but with no illumination trickling from the hall beyond, the house’s entrance looked a dark cavity, a mouth in a frozen scream. No lights warmed the windows, either, despite the peculiar darkening of the late afternoon. Each window appeared as a dead black eye. It struck him that Marguerite’s house looked abandoned, and for a moment crossing the gravel forecourt he felt a sickening trickle of fear. He glanced at Jamie, who had moments earlier emerged from a shortcut through the linden trees bordering the north lawn, avid—at first—with curiosity at the new flurry of activity in the park until he learned the reason for it. Now he returned Tom’s glance with an anxious frown. Only Marguerite showed no sign of concern.

“Where is everyone, I wonder? Hulloo!” Jamie called as he stepped past the lintel.

When he got no answer he added in a comic voice, as if to cover his own anxiety, “And is there honey still for tea?” He poked his head through the door into the front drawing room. “Is there any tea at all?”

“Perhaps they’re in the back garden visiting the chickens.” Tom followed behind a silent Marguerite. With Jamie in front, they had unintentionally formed a phalanx around her.

“Then to the back garden we shall go.” Jamie stepped down the passage that led to the kitchen.

It was as they approached the door that divided the front rooms from the service rooms that Tom’s earlier trickle of fear surged to an adrenaline gush, setting his heart to racing. The hushed house they were passing through in shadow, a sudden skittering noise beyond the door, like that of a small animal disturbed, followed by a faint acrid whiff of sulphur as Jamie pushed through the door: It all came together in an instant and he knew before the room blazed up with light and his heart calmed what was to befall him. He almost bowed his head to the inevitable as Marguerite stepped aside, and the word in a swelling of high voices sounded:

“Surprise!”

“Are you surprised, Daddy?” Miranda asked, her face radiant in candlelight glowing from a large gateau in her small hands.

“I am
thoroughly
surprised!” He looked left and right of Miranda at Anna and Jane, who telegraphed an admixture of
emotions: worry, dread, curiosity—and the strain of carrying on a charade of normalcy.

“It’s too much, Marguerite. It really is.” He turned to the dowager countess, who favoured him with a faltering smile and replied:

“Fun for the kiddiewinks, I think,” adding
sotto voce
, “We must carry on.”

“Quick, Daddy, make a wish! My arms are getting stretched.”

“Give it to me, then. What a splendid birthday cake,” he exclaimed striving for a jollity he in no way felt. “Look what’s written on it! And what a
frightening
lot of candles!” He placed it on a cake stand on the table next to a small stack of cake plates and paused in contemplation, glancing at the faces of the others in its candle glow as they crowded around. Every year on this day, at this very moment, wishes swarmed his mind but after entertaining the possibilities, he wished as always for Miranda to be forever out of harm’s way. He did so again, and never with such urgency.

“Daddy, please!”

The wax from the candles was beginning to sizzle into the cake icing. Quickly, Tom made his wish, then he bent forward into the blaze of heat and sucked in his breath, mindful that a birthday wish only comes true if blown out in a single breath. He exhaled in a noisy blast of air. The candles snuffed out smartly, leaving forty tiny wisps of smoke spiraling towards the ceiling. Everyone clapped and launched into a sweetly inharmonious chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

“Daddy, what did you wish for this time?”

“That would be telling.” Tom tapped the side of his nose as
Marguerite handed him a cake trowel. “Are you really sure you can bear this?” he murmured.

“A useful distraction, I think,” she replied, plucking the spent candles from the cake top.

Tom could see Miranda studying him with frank appraisal. He cast her a wan smile, feeling somehow that his bonhomie was fooling no one, least of all his daughter. Jamie, meanwhile, he could see, was distracted by the presence of a stranger, unintroduced, in the room—Anna Phillips—but directed by Marguerite towards a bottle of champagne cooling in a bucket on the counter.

“Are you sure, Marve?” He heard Jamie echo his own concerns.

“A brandy might be the thing in the circumstances,” she responded, “but this will do.”

Jamie cast his eyes over the dowager countess’s head at Tom, who had let the trowel hover over the cake.

“I say,” Max piped up, reading aloud the message piped in white icing on the chocolate shell—
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOM THE GREAT
—“how did you get
your
title?”

“I inherited it from my father, Iain the Great.”

Maxie peered at him as he pushed the trowel into the moist flesh of the cake. “I very much doubt it.”

“Marguerite, this is astonishing. How did you know?”

“I phoned your mothers yesterday when I knew you wouldn’t be able to get up to Gravesend.”

“And you baked it yourself?” Jamie asked.

“You needn’t sound so surprised, Jamie,” Marguerite said. “I’m quite capable.”

“Would you like a big slice, Max?” Tom asked.

“Apparently”—Marguerite took the filled plate and handed it to Miranda with a ladies-first admonishment to Max—“when Tom was about nine and reading …”

“
The Boy’s Book of English Kings
,” Tom supplied.

“… he was much taken with Alfred the Great,” Marguerite continued. “The only king to be so named.”

“Better than being ‘Unready,’ ” Jamie grunted, pushing at the cork. “Like Ethelred.”

“Can I be Miranda the Great, do you think?” Miranda asked.

“How about Miranda the Good?” Tom suggested.

“By George, I think I shall call myself Maximilian the Magnificent.” Max spread his arms.

“You already have a title, my boy.” Jamie grunted again. “Blast this cork!”

“Daddy had a phase where he was the Great Krimboni.”

“That was not a phase,” Tom said stoutly, placing a slice of gateau on another plate. “That was a job. At any rate, greatness is behind me. I’m now Tom the Terribly Ordinary or Tom the Distinctly Average …”

“I think not,” Jane countered.

“… or Tom the Suddenly Middle-Aged.”

“Nonsense!” Jamie grunted as the cork flew from the champagne bottle with a bang, and the amber liquid poured over the neck. He raised the bottle and regarded them doubtfully, as he realised how ridiculous his next words might be:

“Well … cheers?”

Miranda dropped her plate on the table with an untidy
clatter. “What,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest in a way that reminded him of her mother, “is going on?”

Tom had hoped to relay the fact of Roberto’s death and shoo the children from the room before revealing the dark cause to Jane and Anna, but no sooner had he spoken than Max and Miranda named it with a shared glance: murder. Uncle Oliver’s death had brought only a sniffy curiosity from his nephew, but now Max moved to comfort his grandmother with an embrace. Miranda cast her father a troubled frown: murder for her was never fully an abstraction. When circumstance had forced him to clarify the circumstances of her mother’s death, she had absorbed it piecemeal, doubtful, questioning. But she had been only seven, her eighth birthday but days away that dark November. Now at ten, she could evince an awareness of the implications startling in its maturity.

Jane had gasped at the revelation, but it was Anna’s restraint and the flash of fear in her eyes that drew Tom’s attention.

Did you hear or see anything then?
The words were on his lips, but Marguerite broke away, to make the unhappy phone call to Roberto’s father.

“Marve, I can hardly express my sorrow,” Jane called after her, “but about John—”

“It will have to wait, my dear, I’m sorry.” Marguerite pushed through the door to the corridor. “Come along, you two,” she
added, addressing Miranda and Max. “We’ll … amuse ourselves in the sitting room. I expect the adults want to have one of those conversations adults like to have.”

“John?” Jamie regarded his wife quizzically after the children had reluctantly trotted after the dowager countess.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Jane said, “proper introductions have gone missing. It gives me wifely pleasure to say ‘I told you so,’ but I told you so—this is Anna Phillips, who you knew as Ree Corlett.”

Tom watched husband and wife exchange glances until, reaching for Anna’s extended hand and beginning the customary greeting, the perplexity lifted from Jamie’s expression. “Then it
is
you who … I’m so sorry about your brother.”

“Jamie,” Jane interrupted, “let’s catch you up.”

Jamie’s composure drained like air from a punctured tyre as Anna related her story. “But why?” Jamie’s voice was anguished, “why would Olly kill my brother … his cousin, his friend?
Why?
”

“Why did Kamran Arouzi take his own life?” Jane glanced at her barely touched cake.

Jamie stared at her. “Do you think there’s a connection?”

“I don’t know.” Jane dropped her plate on the table. “It just came into my head. You said yesterday in the library that of the three great friends at Shrewsbury all were now gone—Olly the last. All of them have died before their time, but what you didn’t note—what we haven’t taken into account—is that all of them have died in violent circumstances.”

“And John? Where is my brother?” Jamie’s eyes roved the kitchen as if seeking him in some hiding place. “What
is
he playing at? Ree, you can’t possibly believe—”

“No, no! At least … not now. But when I saw Morborne’s body in the Labyrinth, I couldn’t keep my thoughts from John’s manner the last time I saw him, the frightening silence, the coldness. As I was telling your wife and Tom, at that moment I could think of no one else who would want more to do away with Morborne. John had sacrificed himself thinking he was protecting David and me. Instead, he shielded the man who killed his brother. And my brother! And I thought—
If he has done this thing, then good! I’ll do everything I can to protect him
.”

“You found something on or near Lord Morborne’s body, yes?” Tom asked.

Anna flinched, hesitated. “Yes, how did you know?”

Tom flicked a glance at the Allans. “Lord Morborne was strangled, and not with someone’s bare hands. He was strangled with some
thing
, but so far whatever it is has eluded the investigators. I think,” he continued, “you removed something from the Labyrinth because you thought it might point at John.”

Anna seemed to consider her reply. “Taking it was simple impulse. It made no sense being there at all, but …” She paused. “You see, my torchlight revealed a tie, of all things—a man’s tie. But Morborne wasn’t wearing a suit, and I panicked when I recognised the stripe pattern of the tie. It was a Shrewsbury tie.”

“But—”

“I know your objection: How would I know one school tie from another? I went to a comprehensive in Deeside. But I kept one memento from that last summer at Tullochbrae, though I hid it away for years—a photograph of John taken in Shrewsbury School Chapel, wearing a tie.”

“But John wouldn’t have travelled around with his school tie,” Jamie pointed out.

“I do know that,” Anna responded with unexpected heat, “but you might imagine my state of mind!”

“Of course, I’m sorry.”

“If you’ll forgive the question,” Tom interrupted, “was the tie around Lord Morborne’s neck?”

“No,” Anna replied. “I’m not sure if I could have brought myself to touch it, if it had been. It was in a little pile a foot or so away.”

Jane frowned. “A reasonably intelligent killer would have taken the weapon away with him surely.”

“Perhaps not if he were panicked or frenzied in some fashion,” Tom countered, turning back to Anna. “You thought you had heard someone push through the bushes …”