Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (41 page)

“No, no! Jane is right,” Anna cried. “If we tell the police everything now, they’ll suspect John of Morborne’s death right away. And maybe Roberto’s.” Her face pinched. “That he’s … gone off somewhere only makes him look guilty.”

“He’s not guilty,” Jane declared. “The last time, when Boysie was killed, John gave himself up immediately, and
he was innocent
.” To Tom and Jamie, she added, “Let’s give John a little time. He’ll come back. Of course he will.”

Tom caught a flick of uncertainty in her voice. He glanced at Jamie, whose lips had pinched to a thin line.

“Besides,” Jane continued, noting their doubt, “if the police chase after John, the papers will, too. On the other hand, if
Macgreevy
chases after John and
The Sun
prints a story, the police will get the wind up and
they’ll
be manhunting John. However, getting Andrew chasing after Oliver as hit-and-run driver will keep him out of our hair, and he may find the proof that the police need.” Jane tapped her forehead. “Genius, don’t you think?”

Jamie gave her a sidelong glance. “Perhaps. But how might Olly have arranged it?”

“The hit and run?
If
he arranged it,” Jane responded. “He might have simply taken the chance when he saw it. Sorry, Anna, if this is disturbing to you.”

“But, darling, his hire car, in the Hall’s forecourt, is pristine.”

“Jamie, he set out from London in his silly Cadillac and it broke down—he said—in Salisbury.”

“Which could be true.”

“But that doesn’t mean the hire car here is the one he hired
in Salisbury. Hector! Hector knows something, I’m sure. Remember, Jamie, when we arrived on Thursday, Hector talking in the forecourt with a uniformed policeman—PC Widger? Hector said later it had something to do with Saturday’s constituency meeting, but when Bliss and Blessing interviewed us in the great hall yesterday, Hector was strangely forgetful about PC Widger’s mission that day, which was examining cars on behalf of the hit-and-run investigation.”

“Darling, no. Hector’s a busy man. He can’t remember everything. You’re getting a bit carried away, don’t you think?” He glanced at Tom as if seeking moral support.

“Stolen a car?” Tom supplied.

“It would have to be an older model,” Jamie said. “Cars are such bloody complicated machines now. Hard to break into.”

“This can’t be that difficult.” Jane continued on her own track. “The investigators just haven’t given David’s death priority. Oliver had another car—a car in between his Cadillac and the car here at Eggescombe—which he … destroyed, or something, to cover up what he had done. He was Oliver Quinton fforde-Beckett—clever, amoral, selfish, destructive Olly—of course he would get away with it! It’s all so suspicious. Olly never did lazy days in the countryside. He worked all the time. He rarely participated in the Leaping Lords, did he, Jamie?”

“Well, not this year. He wasn’t at a practice this year, I don’t think. And he missed the charity event we did last month in Yorkshire. I’m not sure how current his logbook would have been.”

“So on this occasion, he leaves his fiancée in London and drives down to Devon days in advance—to do what?”

“Darling, it’s too tawdry.”

“Jamie, your cousin’s done worse, much worse.”

“Of course. You’re right. Good Lord, Oliver must have been desperate. What on earth drove him to kill Boysie in the first place?”

“I don’t mean to interrupt.” Marguerite put her head around the door. “But your housekeeper has arrived at last, Tom. I’d invited her to your birthday tea. And she’s with Mrs. Gaunt. They’re both in a bit of a state, I would say, and asking for you.”

Startled, but not concerned, Tom followed Lady Fairhaven back into the dower house through the mudroom. An empty hook claimed his attention. He had earlier asked Miranda to affirm that the ghost she had seen had been wearing white, not red. Now, breathlessly, as they were moving with some urgency, he said:

“I must ask you this, Marguerite, while it’s on my mind: The red jacket that was hanging here Sunday morning, when Jane and I visited you—that’s the one the police removed earlier today, yes?”

“Yes.” Marguerite drew the word out.

“But Roberto wasn’t wearing anything red, if he was the ‘ghost’ my daughter saw on the lawn that night.”

Marguerite halted in her stride. A murmur of voices drifted from the corridor. She studied his face a moment. Hers was a study in resolve. “I had to choose, you see,” she said finally.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“Anna wore the jacket, the hoodie, whatever it’s called. I lent it to her in the spring on a day that had turned suddenly chilly. She forgot to bring it back and it completely slipped my mind. It’s Roberto’s. It’s an old Arsenal jacket. Roberto is … was mad about football, rugby—all that. But he wasn’t missing the jacket. On Sunday, when Anna went chasing after Oliver, she put it on against the cool of the morning.”

“But, Marguerite, why didn’t you tell the police that Anna has been wearing it, not Roberto?”

“I couldn’t. I have no idea why the investigators had glommed onto the hoodie, but I couldn’t tell them Anna had been wearing it yesterday morning. Any mention of Anna leads quickly to John, don’t you think? And Anna has suffered too, too terribly in the last week.”

“Would Roberto have known you’d lent the hoodie to Anna?”

“I’m not sure. And, of course, I can’t know now.”

Tom bit his lip. “You’ve made a kind of sacrifice, I think.”

“I assumed Roberto would bear up. He was a big boy. I know he had every reason to loathe Oliver, but I didn’t think—”

“I don’t mean sacrificing Roberto. I mean sacrificing something of your own, something more … fragile.”

“Ah.” Marguerite’s lips wavered into the shadow of a smile. “I understand. Well, my dear man, I would have been a fool if I imagined it would last forever. And in the end, it didn’t. But not in quite the way I imagined.”

W
ith growing impatience, Tom rubbed his thumb and forefinger over a waxy leaf from the potted orange tree nearest his hand, breathing in the pungent graveyard scent of upturned soil and damp foliage. Lady Fairhaven had suggested the conservatory for privacy, believing perhaps that plants living their faithful silent lives would be somehow restorative, but Tom felt the warm moist air settling along his skin more as a smothering shroud than a warm and welcoming blanket. With the afternoon ceding the sun to gathering cloud, the sky seemed to fall towards the glass panes, amplifying the sensation of confinement. The plants along the periphery fused to form a dense shadowy tangle. He might be in a walled garden at dusk, all colour leached away, but for an oasis of light wrought by a fat bulb below a lazily turning fan high in the glass dome. Under this tiny sun, the nearest leaves and branches, tendrils and petals, emerald bright, pink and orange
and red, visibly curled and crept and twisted and surged forth as if in arrested attack. It was among them, in a green nook, on one of two facing white cane chairs, that Tom waited for Ellen Gaunt to speak. Madrun had stepped into the conservatory with them, but Ellen had asked if she might be alone with the vicar. He had accommodated her bowed head and silence for several moments, sensing her summoning the strength for some vital and immanent exchange. Finally, she raised her eyes from her lap where her clasped hands had been pressing against the soft folds of her white blouse, as if she were trying, literally but ineffectively, to hold herself in.

“My Mick did it, Mr. Christmas.”

In her eyes, in the glittering black pupils, Tom could see a mixture of horror, entreaty, and disbelief, shocking as much for its intensity as for its actuality. His heart went out to her. There was no need to ask,
Did what?

“Can you be certain, Mrs. Gaunt?” he asked gently, removing his hand from the orange tree. “Surely your husband had no business at the stables this afternoon.”

She stared at him with mute puzzlement.

After a second, the penny dropped. “Oh, Mrs. Gaunt. You don’t know, do you?”

“I know there was an accident, Vicar.”

“Mr. Sica’s death doesn’t appear to be an accident.”

Ellen’s hands flew to her mouth. “No! You can’t mean—?”

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Gaunt. Police believe the electrocution deliberate.” He paused as Ellen digested this newest horror. “When you referred to your husband … doing it, you meant, of course, Lord Morborne.”

“Yes,” she replied softly.

“Mrs. Gaunt, look at me. Did your husband
tell
you that he did? Did he say,
I strangled Lord Morborne
?”

She blinked. “No.”

“But clearly something has brought you to that conclusion.”

“My husband wasn’t in our bed when I woke Sunday morning, Mr. Christmas.”

“I’m not sure I see the—”

“I always rise first, always. Always have. When I opened my eyes I could see him leaving our bedroom in the Gatehouse, in the T-shirt he wears to bed—not his suit, as he would properly wear, you see.”

“Yes, but—”

“And when I opened the door to the Gatehouse to go up to the Hall to start cooking breakfast, there he was! Oh, Mr. Christmas, the look on his face. I can’t describe it. And he couldn’t speak, couldn’t get any words out. He dashed past me, up the stairs. I’ve never seen him in such a panic. I knew something was horribly wrong, but …”

“Duty called?”

She acknowledged the truth with a little nod. “Then, later, you arrived in the staff quarters, Mr. Christmas, and said that Lord Morborne had died, been murdered, I …”

“Has Mr. Gaunt a … history of violence?”

Ellen seemed to stare through him. “No. No, he doesn’t—a mercy given what his father was like. But that look on his face! And then when he did arrive at the Hall to begin work, he asked me … 
told me
not to say anything. To say, if I was asked, that we’d spent all night in the Gatehouse, as usual, that I’d gone up to the Hall at the usual hour and that he’d followed
later, after he’d fetched the newspapers from the village shop as he’s done since we’ve been here—that we honed to our usual routines.”

“And he wouldn’t say why, I presume.”

Ellen shook her head miserably. “I felt so ashamed lying to the police. But as he’s my husband—”

“I understand, Mrs. Gaunt. I do. Your loyalty is not misplaced. But wouldn’t there be a question of your husband’s motive? Would he—would either of you—know Lord Morborne sufficiently well to want to …?” He pinched his lips over the dreaded word.

A shadow seemed to cross Ellen’s face. “Not well, no. We were, Mick and I, valet-butler and cook-housekeeper to Lord Morborne’s uncle, Lord Anthony fforde-Beckett, Dominic’s father. It was our first appointment together. But I’m sure you’ve been told about the great estrangement between the late Lord Morborne—Frederick, Lord Morborne, that is—and his brother. I believe both Mick and I met Oliver at Lord Anthony’s house in Ladbroke Square, perhaps once, but my memory of it isn’t strong.

“I was more aware of Lord Morborne when we were in service to the Arouzi family. He’d gone to school with their son, Kamran. They were great friends and he would come around to the Arouzi house in Lowndes Square. Young Mr. Arouzi later took his own life. He was a very troubled lad.”

“But more recently you’ve been in Lord and Lady Fairhaven’s employ? Georgina and Oliver are siblings, of course.”

“But we rarely saw Lord Morborne. He lived a different sort of life, didn’t he. And you know he and Lord Fairhaven cared little for each other.”

“Then why, if I may press the point, Mrs. Gaunt, would you think your husband had a particular … animus against Lord Morborne?”

Her cheeks flushed suddenly, splotchy in the unflattering light of the overhead lamp, stirred by anger or shame he could not determine. Her eyes glistened with incipient tears, and when she finally spoke, it was with a great weariness.

“You wouldn’t know this, or remember: It was in the papers, but it’s near thirty years ago now; you would have been a lad—but my sister, my younger sister, was raped—”