The Scent of Murder (21 page)

Florence yawned and looked around her. ‘Is it morning already?’

Dody drew back the curtains on a pewter-grey sky before moving to the fire, which had been kept going all night.

Florence bent over her beloved and wiped his forehead. ‘He’s so much better. We had quite a conversation last night, didn’t we, Tristram? We’ve decided to get married.’

Dody felt her heart would break.

Florence stroked Tristram’s cheek. ‘My, but you need a shave.
I’ll
have to do something about that.’

When Tristram failed to stir — which would be expected if he had heard Florence’s threat! — Dody pulled her stethoscope from her bag and lifted up his nightshirt. A terrible wheezing and rattling in his chest reached her ears. Pneumonia, undoubtedly. She put the stethoscope away and slipped a thermometer under his arm.

‘He’s still on the hot side though, isn’t he, Dody?’

Dody nodded, took his pulse, and found it much faster than it had been yesterday. She removed the thermometer after a few minutes, glanced at the mercury and shook it down quickly before Florence could see the extent of the fever.

‘He needs a cooling bed bath and his bladder needs attention.’ Dody’s male catheter set — several curved silver tubes of varying sizes — lay in a leather box next to her Gladstone bag. ‘Please fetch his aunt, Florence. Then you deserve a bath yourself and a lie down.’

‘He’s going to be all right, isn’t he, Dody?’

Dody could not look her sister in the face. ‘Lady Fitzgibbon, please,’ she reminded her.

Before she left, Florence reached into her pockets and put a small package into Dody’s palm. ‘While you’re waiting for Lady Fitzgibbon, you might as well have a look at these. Tristram gave them to me before he fell asleep. I have no idea why, or what they mean.’

Dody opened the package and rolled the objects in her hands. She saw four crude wooden buttons, their eyes clogged with rust-coloured dirt. There was some kind of inscription on them too, but it was barely decipherable. She scratched some of the dirt off one with her thumbnail, making out four letters: HMdO. What on earth did they stand for? She puzzled over the buttons’ significance as she cleaned the dirt from under her nail, then stopped abruptly, put the buttons back into the brown paper and placed them on the mantelpiece. She examined her thumb again, more closely this time. The dirt under her nail was the same unusual colour as the soil from which they had extracted the murdered girl’s skeleton: glimmering with tiny fragments of iron pyrites.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Pike had anticipated Sir Desmond’s obstruction and carried in his coat pocket a search warrant issued by the local magistrate that morning. He could only hope that word of the police interest in the hamlet’s armaments had not filtered through to the Hall and given Fitzgibbon the opportunity to dispose of any incriminating weapons.

He stared briefly at the Hall’s grey façade. The heraldic beasts above the door and on the battlements were much paler than the rest of the stonework: newer and doubtless placed there to impress. Leering gargoyles and vicious apes, originally meant to repel evil spirits, were recent additions also.

He craned his neck to the candle-snuff turrets and the strange mix of windows, from bay to arched to arrow-slit, and wondered which one Dody was behind at this moment.

His musings came to a halt when a well-pressed butler answered the front door and told him he would see if the master was at home.

‘I don’t care if Fitzgibbon’s at home or not. I have a warrant in my pocket granting me access to all the guns in the Hall.’ Pike pushed past the butler.

‘Alistair, who is it? Is there a problem?’ a thin, female voice called.

Alistair stepped aside. ‘A policeman, M’Lady. Says he needs to search the gun room.’

The woman before him was even more petite than the McCleland sisters, and dangerously thin, her gown of grey gabardine seeming to stand up by itself.

‘As if we don’t have enough problems right now.’ She put a delicate lace handkerchief to her nose and dabbed at it.

Pike removed his bowler and introduced himself. ‘I’m sorry, Lady Fitzgibbon, I will be as unobtrusive as possible. I am not singling out your household. All of the hamlet’s dwellings are being searched for firearms.’

‘My husband will wish to join you, I am sure. I will fetch him. Alistair, stay with Mr, er … pardon me, I have forgotten.’

Pike bowed. ‘Chief Inspector Pike, M’Lady.’ And I don’t need a guard, he thought to himself. I am not here to steal the silverware.

It was some time before Sir Desmond joined Pike in the cold hallway. He looked Pike up and down. ‘I can’t say it’s a pleasure to see you again,’ he said dismissively. He demanded to see the search warrant and gave a grunt of satisfaction as he read it. ‘It says here you’ve got to give them back in forty-eight hours.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Pike said, not allowing his disappointment to show. The time limit meant he was unable to send anything he might find to the Yard for analysis. Pike suspected that was what the magistrate was counting on. Was the magistrate a friend of Sir Desmond; were they in league, perhaps? There was something about the authorities in this close-knit community that smelled higher than a barrel of herrings in the sun.

Sir Desmond was as irascible as Pike had expected him to be, muttering to himself as he led Pike down a confusion of rooms and stone-flagged passages to the thick, stone-arched door of the gun room. Alistair unlocked it with a heavy key, lit the gas sconces — electricity had not yet encroached upon the lower reaches of the house — and then stood back to hover at a distance.

Pike took in the room before him. Antique guns were not the only weapons to which his gaze wandered. Several lethal-looking crossbows were mounted on the wall, as well as pikes, spears, shields and assorted pieces of armour.

‘You are a collector, sir?’ Pike remarked, doing his best to adopt a friendly manner.

‘Just get on with it, will you? The newer guns are in the cabinet.’ Fitzgibbon pointed to a large piece of mahogany furniture resembling a glass-fronted double wardrobe, positioned alongside a workbench bearing a neat array of tools and clamps. Sir Desmond obviously liked to tinker with his toys. ‘It’s unlocked,’ he added.

Pike asked Alistair to take the weapons from the racks one by one so he could record their type and make in his notebook. At one stage the butler removed a military revolver from the top shelf, holding it out to him by its trigger guard as if it were contagious. The butler did not appear to share Sir Desmond’s taste for firearms.

‘A naval model Colt .22 calibre,’ Pike repeated as he listed it. ‘I’ll take this if I may, sir.’

‘I don’t have much choice, do I?’ Sir Desmond said, face reddening. ‘If it comes back with so much as a scratch, I’ll have your head, Pike. My uncle used that in Khartoum. He was killed alongside General Gordon, don’t you know. It was found underneath his body; the fuzzy-wuzzies would have snatched it otherwise.’

While Pike held no respect for Fitzgibbon or his ilk, he could appreciate the revolver’s significance and the sacrifice it symbolised. The weapon had been well cared for and recently cleaned. He took a moment to breathe in the smell of gun oil and relive the memories it evoked. He had enjoyed his time in the army — until South Africa.

Next, Alistair removed a fine brace of Purdeys with gold-engraved walnut stocks. Pike barely looked at them. After these came two heavy elephant guns, which received a similar cursory scan. Lastly the butler removed a half-sized .22 rifle.

Pike examined it carefully. ‘What do you use this for, sir? It is surely too small for you.’

‘I had it made for Tristram when he was a child. Taught him to hunt rabbits with it.’

‘I’ll take it, too.’ Pike placed the two guns in a canvas bag he found in the bottom of the cabinet, along with the relevant ammunition. ‘I’ll return the guns to you as soon as I have tested them.’

‘You’d damn well better, sir. Alistair,’ Fitzgibbon boomed, ‘show the “gentleman” out.’

The front door closed behind Pike with a heavy bang. Again he stepped back and stared up at the Hall’s windows, hoping to get a glimpse of Dody.

One of the curtains twitched and suddenly there she was, her face as pale as the window coverings. She must have heard the front door closing. He lifted his hat to her. She did not wave back, but he liked to think he saw a smile ghosting her face. God, he’d give anything to know why she had suddenly become so distant.

In fact, the whole of this damned Gothic monstrosity hissed with suppressed secrets, he reckoned: the skeleton found on its lands, Dody’s baffling behaviour, Tristram’s accident. The confiscation of Sir Desmond’s guns made him at least feel that he might be making headway with the murder, but when it came to Dody, he had so damned little to go on.

The high, watery sun gave out little heat. A cold wind wound the bottom of his trousers around his ankles and passed straight through his overcoat. He turned up his collar and continued to ponder recent events as he trudged towards his hitched trap.

A horse neighed from the stables behind him and triggered a thought: what had happened to Tristram’s horse? It had not been injured, if the way Florence had ridden it to get help was anything to go by. Some small comfort to Florence, he supposed, that Tristram’s favourite mount had not been given a bullet to its head.

The thought stopped him in his tracks. Surely the grooms would keep a firearm to dispatch injured or gravely ill animals. Of course they would. Spinning on his heel, he headed towards the stables.

The cold weather meant that most of the stalls were occupied. He lingered outside Warrior’s and patted the fine-looking animal on the neck, pleased to see him unscathed and well cared for, despite the tragedy. Several pairs of soft equine eyes followed his movements as he continued his way down the sheltered walkway. The quality of the animals and the orderliness of the place were impressive.

One of the stables was empty, its tenant out being exercised, he supposed. A young lad, his back to Pike, raked at the sawdust with a fork, tossing dung into an overloaded barrow. Pike walked softly past him. He’d prefer not to have anyone breathing down his neck during his search this time.

He found the tack room, a converted stable, towards the end of the walkway, its upper and lower doors both open. Cold though it was, the smell of oily, well-kept leather mingled with horse sweat added a certain warmth to the room, conjuring memories of a time slowly dwindling into the past. Florence often accused Pike of being conservative and old-fashioned. If that meant savouring these kinds of sensory impressions in preference to rattling machinery and belching fumes, then he supposed he was.

A workbench covered with bottles of polish, various leather-working tools and a small basket of clean rags stood near an unlit combustion stove. On the floor beside the stove sat a larger wicker basket containing worn-out tack and old pieces of leather as dry as the biltong the Boers loved to eat. Stamping his feet to keep warm, Pike admired the rich patina of the saddles resting on the wall racks, horses’ names engraved on plaques beneath them. The bridles, similarly labelled, hung on brass hooks on the opposite wall.

He located Warrior’s saddle. Unlike the others, it had no girth looped through either of its run-up stirrups. Pushing his bowler further back on his head, he briefly reflected upon this. He’d have liked to have a look at that missing girth, but he must not allow for distractions. Back to the task at hand, and that was his search for a .22.

The search didn’t take long. There were no cupboards in the tack room in which to conceal a firearm, and nothing but horse medicines, bandages and sundry articles for animal husbandry on the open shelves.

Back in the yard, he spied the lad he’d seen in the empty stable earlier, now pushing his teetering barrow away from the walkway. Pike hastened to catch up, following him towards a half-frozen dung heap situated behind the stables.

He showed the stable hand his warrant card and asked the name of the head groom and where he might be found. Mr Philips lived above the barn, he was told. The boy was helpful, and pointed the place out to Pike, but seemed reluctant to take him there himself, so Pike made his way over to the barn unaccompanied. It made sense that the stable gun was probably locked somewhere safe in the head groom’s quarters, away from mischievous or malicious hands.

The barn was as orderly and as clean as the tack room, with barely a straw out of place. A cat watched Pike from a pile of hay bales, yellow eyes following his every move, tail nonchalantly flicking. From above his head Pike heard the
hoik
of someone expectorating, followed by a low groan. He left the canvas bag of guns tucked safely out of sight behind the hay and cautiously ascended the ladder to the loft, calling out to Mr Philips as he climbed, his city boots sliding on the worn wooden rungs.

Pulling himself up through the opening in the barn ceiling, he found himself in a tidy space furnished with an ageing armchair, a small table, a wardrobe and a sea chest at the foot of a sagging brass bed. The bed was positioned beneath a skylight which illuminated a dozing man of late middle age, his face a swollen mass of purple and glistening pink. The contents of an offal bucket sprang to Pike’s mind.

He stood above the man on the bed. ‘Wake up, Philips. Police.’

One eye prised itself open, the other remained glued shut.

‘Police? What? Why? I ain’t done nuffin’. It were me was attacked. You should be talkin’ to ’im what done it.’

‘Where do you keep the stable gun?’

The groom paused, as if this was not what he had expected to hear. He gave Pike a puzzled look, then raised a veined hand towards the wardrobe. Pike creaked the door open, groped among the hanging clothes and extracted a rifle that was propped against the back wall. He checked the calibre. It was a .45 — much more practical for dispatching a horse than a .22. That being so, he was still glad he’d checked.

He was curious to find out more about this groom. After he’d replaced the rifle, Pike turned back to the man in the bed. ‘Do you care to press assault charges against your employer?’