Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) (44 page)

“What other services?”

“I couldn’t say in this instance. Gaunt had … fallen asleep.”

Lucinda’s brow knitted, sending the sunglasses cascading to her nose. She removed them. “I don’t under—”

“Really, Lucinda, all Mrs. Gaunt wanted was for someone to walk her back to the Gatehouse. Too proud to express her fear, you understand. There
is
a murderer at large.”

“And yet Mrs. Gaunt has been allowed to walk back to the Hall all on her own. Curious.”

“She felt more confident.”
I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of lying
.

“Would you care to accompany me back to the Hall, Vicar?” Lucinda spun the sunglasses between her fingers.

“I’m waiting for Jane and Jamie. And here they are.” The
sound of hooves heralded the sight of a man and woman each on a grey gelding, the former leading a third, a chestnut mare, by its reins.

“Are you going riding?” Lucy asked as they walked into the pale light beyond the arch. She glanced at his cast boot, then smiled. “May I come, too?”

“No,” Jane replied, now within earshot.

“How unkind.”

“I don’t mean to be, Lucy. All we’re doing is having a brief trot around the estate—”

“Looking for villains? It’s going to rain, you know.”

Jane flicked a helpless glance at Tom as she handed him down a pair of riding boots. “For some … diversion. It’s been a very tense afternoon. I’m sure you’ve heard.”

“Leaving women and children at home without menfolk?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Tom suggested to me a moment ago that there’s a murderer at large.”

“We can run you back to the Hall, then.” Jamie patted his horse’s neck.

“Oh, don’t be silly.” Lucinda waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be fine. I’ll take the road. I doubt some murderer is going to leap out at me from a hedge. But thank you, darling Jamie. Nice to know that chivalry isn’t completely dead.”

Lord Kirkbride had finessed the horse acquisition with, Tom presumed, aristocratic assurance. Only Roberto’s studio—not
the entire stable block—had been cordoned off by police tape, and the lone PC left to guard had seemed to buy the argument. On the phone Lady Fairhaven had cautioned him—and she was right, of course—that it was not wise to ride a horse even two days after spraining an ankle. But she needed little convincing of the urgency of the task he outlined or the practicality of the transport: By horse, they could roam quickly, efficiently, and unobtrusively over the rough open terrain of the moor in ways they couldn’t on foot or by car. The boots, though: Without gripping heels, his orthopedic cast boot wouldn’t do in a stirrup. He had winced pushing his foot gingerly into the beautiful leather boots. And he winced now, swaying in sync with the jogging animal beneath him, his right heel pressing into the thin metal stirrup.

Jane flicked him a concerned glance. The three of them were riding under a dark leafy canopy of sycamore trees. “You’re sure you’re not in pain? You’ve barely rested that foot since you’ve been here. We could find Gaunt ourselves—Jamie and I.”

Tom chose his words carefully. “I’m not certain of Gaunt’s state of mind, and I feel duty-bound to Mrs. Gaunt. She’s in much distress. My housekeeper has apparently made claims for my powers of … mediation or persuasion.”

Jane frowned. She leaned slightly towards him, as if to ensure she would be heard above the clattering of hooves. “You’re not suggesting Gaunt’s suicidal?”

“I’m afraid it has crossed my mind.” Tom loosened the reins a little—it had been years since he had been on a horse. “But I can’t quite … believe he would—”

“But why, Tom?” Jamie spoke. “His going walkabout has to
be about something more than being upset at the awful events of this weekend.”

Tom considered the question as he found his body falling into the rhythm of the horse’s stride. “I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely candid with Marguerite when I asked for her help, and you’ll understand why in a moment. Mrs. Gaunt begged me to be discreet, but I can’t, if I’m going to have your help.”

He glanced towards a pinhole of open sky at the end of the green corridor, dreading giving the words voice: “Mrs. Gaunt believes her husband killed Oliver.”

“What?” Jane jerked at the reins, startling the horse into a sudden lurch. “Good God, why?” she called over her shoulder.

Unhappily, Tom relayed the story of Kimberly Maddick’s cruel death on The Wrekin decades earlier, glancing from time to time to see both Jane’s and Jamie’s faces in profile stiffen, turning now and again to present to him features stamped with incredulity.

“I don’t know what to say,” Jane intoned when he had finished. “I am absolutely shaken at the depths of Oliver’s depravity. I don’t want to believe it’s true, but if he’s capable of murdering Boysie—even if it was in some fit of rage—and running down a mentally challenged boy with a car, then raping a young woman … a
girl
, my God, seems not—” She paused and addressed her husband, who had remained silent and stern. “Jamie, this must have taken place during that time when Olly’s parents’ marriage was in disarray. He would have to have been … 
fifteen
.”

“Are you suggesting age as a mitigating factor?”

“No! Not at all.” Jane went quiet a moment. “And you say, Tom, that Gaunt was nineteen at the time.”

Tom explained the reasons for Gaunt’s unconscionable inaction at the crime scene. “Then about a year later, he met Ellen Maddick, as she was then. They married, then secured a position together in Anthony fforde-Beckett’s household.

“The Gaunts, at least according to Ellen—although I’m not sure it’s true—didn’t meet Oliver properly until they were working for the Arouzis some years later. That’s when he heard Oliver’s distinctive whistle and, according to Mrs. Gaunt,
knew
. It’s why he insisted on leaving the Arouzis’ employ when a position at Lord and Lady Fairhaven’s became available.”

“Waiting for the moment to wreak revenge.” Jamie frowned. “It’s very melodramatic, Tom.”

“Can it be true?” Jane asked. “
Did
Gaunt kill Oliver? And what about Roberto?”

“The motive’s powerful in Oliver’s case,” Tom reflected.

“Roberto’s murder doesn’t seem to … to match somehow,” Jamie insisted. “Why would Gaunt—?”

“Perhaps Roberto knew something or saw something important, darling.”

“But why didn’t he say something to the police, the idiot?”

“Because he may not have been aware of its significance.”

“Or he was protecting someone,” Tom added. “This is why I couldn’t be completely candid with Marguerite.”

“What? Do you think Roberto was protecting Marve?” Jane turned widened eyes to him.

“I hadn’t thought of that. I meant I wanted to keep faith with Mrs. Gaunt. If Marguerite knew Mrs. Gaunt thought her husband responsible for these awful crimes, she wouldn’t have patience for this exercise. And if Gaunt is responsible,
then he is paying a price, now, wandering in the moor. I’m wondering if he hasn’t lost his mind, at least temporarily.”

“Or,” Jamie said, “simply running away.”

Or he’s running
from
someone
. The second teacup in the Gatehouse sitting room flashed in his brain.

“But all this is based on the memory of someone’s whistling?” Jane asked.

“I realise it seems—”

“There has to be something else, something more substantial …,” Jane interrupted, then paused in thought. “Does Mrs. Gaunt know what her husband used to strangle Oliver
—if
he strangled Oliver.”

“I didn’t think to ask.”

“That would be an uncomfortable question, in any case. But if—”

“You mean,” Tom said, picking up on her thought, “if Gaunt admitted to his wife that he had used a school tie—”

“Then Gaunt would be a certain candidate. After all, only we—you and I and Jamie, and Hector and the kids, of course—know about the tie hidden in the tunnel.”

“And one other person, of course—Gaunt. If it’s Gaunt. He could, I suppose, have pocketed the tie Max left in the drawing room Saturday evening.”

“But then”—Jane looked hard at him, as she spurred her horse forward—“why are there
two
identical ties?”

T
he somber green tunnel ended at an old wooden wicket gate half hidden in the yew hedge demarcating the northern boundary of Eggescombe Park and the margin of Devon’s fertile mosaic of fields. Beyond, bleak Dartmoor curved upward like a ragged, greying brow towards a sky now dark and brooding. Tom shivered, whether from simple, sudden chill or from some unnamed fear he couldn’t be certain. The moor without the blessed sun to soften its coarse carpet of bracken and gorse and warm the great outcroppings of cold granite could hold a malevolent power over an imagination
—his
imagination—stoked by a sickening dread at the violent deaths of two men and new fears for the fate of another. He fought to empty his mind from sinister thoughts—the moor as staging place of blazing-eyed, dripping-jawed hounds and wicked ritual murders—but he sensed himself not alone in his disquiet. Jane, beside him, cast him a troubled glance. Jamie
was silent and grim. The horses, too, seemed to stir doubtfully, whickering and tossing their heads as if their finer senses detected something noxious in the atmosphere.

“Interesting the gate being unlatched,” Jane remarked, twisting back in her saddle to remove a waterproof from its bundle. “Someone’s left it open.”

“It could be some intruder, though.” Jamie pushed his arm into his jacket as Tom released his from the constraining strap by his saddle. “Hector’s private security men may not be up to the job. After all, Anna eluded them. And so have we.”

But like Jane, Tom took this negligence as a hopeful sign that Gaunt had come this way, even if this formally courteous man’s failure to observe country courtesies suggested something more troubling.

Beyond the gate, a narrow grassy track appeared to twist its way up through a thin stand of stunted oak and scrubby fir trees towards a jagged crest. The air was beginning to feel weighted, thick.

“He can’t have got far.” Jamie gestured northward, giving his horse headway with a light kick. “I know there’s a bridleway to the west, but this will take us to a designated footpath. Someone along it must have seen him.”

Tugging their reins to hurry their horses, they cantered briskly up the stone-strewn, hummocky slope through the few trees reaching the wooden footpath sign in a few moments. But a glance up and down the path—north towards the higher reaches, south towards the distant verdant coombes—brought home to Tom with renewed force how swiftly with all the hikers and trippers vanished the moor regained its solemn emptiness. There was nothing to do but to press northwards, along
the summer-hardened mud, through granite-flecked, desiccated grasses, rising higher into the sky, looking left and right for a solitary, eccentric figure. In such a barren landscape only the tors and beacons, weathered crowns of stone, thrust from the thin soil, should be higher than a man, but in the gloom of this darkling early evening the shadows of men and rock might easily blend into blackness.

The path dipped in a crease in the rise where they startled a bony man of middle years in a thin T-shirt, his arm elbow-deep in a backpack, his face downward in furious concentration. He started at the sight of them, the moaning wind of the moor now a cover to the beat of horses’ hooves. He gestured vaguely north when asked if he had passed a man in a business suit. “Strange berk,” he snapped, pulling a blazing yellow waterproof from his bundle.

Reassuring as was the man’s sighting, no sign of such clothed figure on the footpath presented itself when they crested the next rise. Jamie shouted Gaunt’s name, as if the man might burst from behind the single gnarled and nipped oak tree, but each call was sucked into the whipping wind. Flummoxed, disbelieving the possibility that someone could come so far on foot and vanish from the path, they separated, each taking a different direction into the wild heart of the moor. Tom, feeling the horse surge beneath him as he tugged at the reins, rode northeast, towards a castellated mass of stone, thrust like a giant’s cloven toes through the moor’s earthen coverlet. He bent his head, squinting against the first splatters of rain to see a spectral transformation cast upon the looming tor, Hryre Tor—he knew it from an earlier visit to the moor, the one Gaunt’s finger had crossed on the OS map.
He glanced over his shoulder to catch streaks of brightness straggling through fissures in the clouds in the west sweep across the plain, silvering for a moment stone and stunted tree. He fancied he caught a movement, yes! and his heart surged, to be dashed by the dismaying sight of a beefy Dartmoor pony trotting like a thing possessed across the field of his vision—sensing with animal prescience before Tom’s poorer powers could the explosion in the heavens, the violent tearing of the sky with the first jagged flash of lightning, the imminent barrage of thunder. Tom looked higher to see illuminated in the few bars of western sun a silver curtain of rain advancing swiftly from the northeast upon the tor and waited, pulling the hood over his head, for the drenching to come. But in that moment, as feeble sun and violent lightning once again conspired to blaze the great crown of stone before him, a narrow chevron of blinding white near the bottom of the tor, unnatural in its symmetry, met his eyes. He knew what it was in an instant and spurred the horse forward into the veil of rain.