Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (42 page)

“Oh, Mrs. Gaunt …”

“—and murdered.”

“I’m so terribly sorry.” Tom shuddered. “I simply can’t imagine the horror of this. You must have been very young yourself.”

“I’m ten years older than my sister. She was fourteen when she was killed.”

Tom’s hand pushed reflexively into the coarse wicker. The girl’s tender age made the crime all the more repellent. Miranda would be fourteen in a mere four years, a spell of time so fleeting he couldn’t bear thinking about it.

“Her name was Kimberly. Her body was found by hikers in a hollow in a wooded area on The Wrekin. Police thought she had been lying there …” Ellen’s face hardened as if to suppress corrosive grief. “… two or three days. We had been frantic with worry, my gran and I. Our grandmother brought us up, you see. ‘Teenagers go missing all the time,’ the police told us when we went to make a missing persons report. ‘You watch. She’ll be along with some lad and a guilty grin before you can say Jack Robinson.’ But she wasn’t like that—boys, staying out late. She was a good girl.”

“I see,” Tom said, not quite seeing—despite the story’s piteousness—its relevance. “Was—?”

“The rapist was never found, Mr. Christmas.” She seemed to anticipate his question.

“But … these days … DNA analysis …” Tom stumbled over the words, recalling his own experience in the wake of his wife’s death—the taking of daubs, the swabbing of cheeks.

“Kimberly was killed before such a thing was common.”

“But sometimes—”

“Did the police keep something, some bit of clothing tucked in a back room, that might be useful now? I wondered that years after, Mr. Christmas. I don’t know. You …” She looked at her hands cradled in her lap. “You let yourself forget, don’t you. You have to, if you’re to go on.”

Tom studied her strained features in the cruel light, allowing a new and certain and very ugly and unwanted awareness to seep into his soul. He paused to take a cleansing breath before giving voice to his thoughts: “You’re going to tell me that Oliver fforde-Beckett—Lord Morborne—did this terrible thing. He—” The words felt like bile in his mouth. “—raped and murdered your sister.”

Her eyes returned to his, her mouth sagging. “My husband is certain.”

“Certain. But why—?”

“Because he was there.”

“What?” Tom jerked in his chair. “You can’t mean he was a participant! Mrs. Gaunt, that is …” He groped for an apt word—
shattering, appalling, criminal
—but she interrupted him before any fell from his lips.

“No, no! Not as a … as a participant. As a—” She pulled a
handkerchief from under her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. “Oh, Mr. Christmas, God has seen fit to turn my whole world upside down this weekend. I’ve learned the most horrible things. I’m not sure I can forget or forgive.”

“Take your time.”

Ellen twisted the handkerchief on her lap. “I met Mick in a graveyard.”

“Oh?”

“At All Saints Wellington, near Telford. It was perhaps a year after Kimberly’s death. I was working at a country hotel and taking care of my gran, who had taken a turn after Kim’s death. I would go as often as I could to bring flowers to her grave. One day, I fell into conversation with a young man, Michael—Mick—who was visiting his mother’s grave. She had died in childbirth.” Ellen looked away. “Before long, we were married. And we’ve been happily married, Mr. Christmas … until …”

“Until?”

“Until Mick insisted we leave the Arouzis’ employ last year and join Lord Fairhaven’s household. I couldn’t understand why he was so insistent. The Arouzis were very good employers. We were well established with them. I was always grateful for their kindnesses. As I said, before the Arouzis we were with Lord Anthony fforde-Beckett, Dominic’s father. Mick was very young to be butler-valet. I suppose I was young to be the cook-housekeeper, but it was a household in a wretched state. Lord Anthony couldn’t keep staff, and we were keen to establish ourselves.

“You may know of the … 
theft
of Lord Anthony’s wife by his brother and the trouble it caused. I’m afraid Lord Anthony
behaved very badly as well. He became alcoholic, neglected his son—terrible given that his mother had virtually abandoned him to chase after his uncle—then drowned in that foolish sailing adventure. We stayed on in Ladbroke Square for a time. Dominic was still in his teens. Someone to come home to on school holidays. We had learned earlier we wouldn’t be able to have children, so Dominic became …” She stopped, lifted an unsteady hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry, my mind has …”

“You were talking about how you met your husband,” Tom prompted.

“Yes.” She paused as if to gather her thoughts. “When I visited my sister’s grave in those months after she’d died, I’d often find blooms left, small bouquets, though no name attached. Friends or schoolmates, I thought. Perhaps some lad had … admired her or perhaps they came from others in town who felt sorry, as it did get attention and cause strong feeling.” Despair etched her features. “Mick left them, Mr. Christmas. He told me yesterday, in the kitchen garden. Kimberly had been … his lover. I didn’t know. It never crossed my mind.”

“How extraordinary. But surely someone else knew? Can you really successfully keep a relationship a secret?”

“Kim was fourteen, Mr. Christmas. Mick was nineteen.”

“Oh …” Tom groaned, sensing already the unfolding of events. The lovers stood each the other side of that sexual Rubicon: the age of consent.

“My grandmother wouldn’t have worn it, if she knew. She was a bit of a Tartar. And Mick’s father was worse. He was valet to Lord Rossell, proper as you would expect to His Lordship, but brutal to his son. He would beat Mick.”

“I am sorry,” Tom said, pausing to reconsider Ellen’s earlier testimony. “When you say your husband was
there
—at your sister’s death, you mean he was … witness in some fashion, but—what?—too frightened, too intimidated to say or do anything?”

“Not witness—”

“I think that would be unforgivable.”

“He says he and Kimberly had had a row about something—he can’t remember what now. It was autumn, they had been walking on The Wrekin. They went there because it was too easy to be seen in Telford or Shrewsbury or one of the villages. There are lots of secluded places in the woods along The Wrekin. Do you know it?”

“Only in name.”

“After the quarrel, Mick stalked off in a sulk, leaving my sister alone—he believed. He realised soon how stupid and immature he was being—darkness was beginning to set in. He had one of Lord Rossell’s motors—which he hadn’t been authorised to take and only added to his worries—and thought that if he didn’t drive her, she had a very long walk off The Wrekin back into town. So he turned back to find her, and saw her aways with two boys, which he says put him off, made him jealous.” She shuddered. “If only he had …”

“He walked away again.”

She nodded. “Then he drove a time before having another pang of conscience. He went back, but he couldn’t find her. He called, but nothing.”

“No response?”

“The Wrekin seemed deserted. It was a school night, supper hour for many, not warm. Finally, he retraced his route to
their ‘secret place’—it was sheltered, he wondered if she was hiding there, making him come to her to punish him.” She regarded him bleakly. “He found her there.”

“Oh, my.”

“Then he left her there. I don’t know if I can forgive him for that, though I know the Lord says I must.”

“I wonder if he can forgive himself, Mrs. Gaunt.”

Her face hardened. Tom considered the agonies of being young and in love and in being terrorised by a disapproving parent. And then he had another thought:

“Why,” he asked, “does your husband think Lord Morborne—well, the boy who would become the Marquess of Morborne—would be the perpetrator of this appalling crime? Could he identify him?”

Ellen shook her head. “He couldn’t. Neither of them. He only glimpsed two young lads in dark clothing—but then the light was fading, wasn’t it. He thought one of them might be coloured.”

“Coloured? You mean … African or Asian?”

“Mick wasn’t certain. It was growing dark.”

“Then what—”

“It was the whistling, Mr. Christmas. Lord Morborne’s queer whistling. Mick heard him on The Wrekin that day. And he never forgot it.”

T
om lifted the map left open on a low table in the Gatehouse sitting room. It was a detailed but—judging by the frayed folds—not a new Ordnance Survey map of Dartmoor, the bottom half expanded to set out the demarcations of the southern fringes of the moor, with web-like clusters of lines for Abbotswick and variegated squares for Eggescombe Park. Someone had spilled tea, recently it appeared—liquid pooled in a saucer by the map; the cup sat apart on a tray in its own ring of wet—leaving a damp golden splash, but marked with a whitish puckered trench as if Gaunt had forcefully traced a path through the paper with his finger along a footpath from Eggescombe up into the moor around Hryre Tor.