The Twelve Clues of Christmas (17 page)

Chapter 27

D
ECEMBER 28

I’ve started counting the days until I can go home, which is silly because I’m with Granddad and Darcy and frankly I haven’t a home to go to.

When I awoke the next morning I looked out at a landscape blotted out by mist and the first thought that came to me was, I wonder who is going to be killed today?

The fact that this came to me so readily was shocking. How could I have possibly come to accept that one person would die every day in this little part of Devon? And anger flooded through me. Right there, as I stared out through the window at the ghostly bare branches of the orchard hovering in the mist, I made a decision. This could not be allowed to continue. Someone had to do something about it, and since the inspector was clearly incapable, it was up to me to use the expertise at my disposal and catch the murderer. I had my grandfather, with all his years of experience at Scotland Yard, and I had Darcy, who worked, I was sure, as some sort of spy. And I had assisted in a small way in some important cases. It was about time we did a little detective work ourselves.

I was already dressed by the time Queenie appeared with a tea tray—more of the tea in the saucer than the cup, I have to say. Her good intentions to be a perfect maid were rapidly slipping back into her normal behavior.

“Blimey, you’re already up,” she said. “I needn’t have bothered to come up all them stairs with the tea if I’d known.”

“You came up the stairs because one of your duties is to bring your mistress her morning tea, whether she wants it or not,” I pointed out.

She gave me a look as she put it down, none too gently, on the table. “Nasty old day,” she said, “and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go home. Do you know what they’re saying in the servants’ hall? They’re saying that there’s a Lovey Curse and one person will get struck down every day until New Year. I tell you, it ain’t half giving me the willies.”

“I don’t think you have to worry, Queenie. It’s only local people who are cursed,” I said.

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then, ain’t it?” A beam spread across her round red face. I wished I could be as easily satisfied as she was.

I came into the breakfast room to find Darcy sitting alone at one end of the table while the Rathbones and Upthorpes were busy working their way through enormous piles of kedgeree at the other. I slid into a seat beside him and he looked up, smiling. “Good morning,” he said.

“Do you think you could possibly borrow Monty’s motorcar today?”

“You want to escape for a tryst?” he asked, his eyes teasing me.

I lowered my voice even though the distance between us and the other diners was considerable. “No, I want to help solve this ridiculous business before any more people are killed.”

He looked surprised and a trifle amused. “You are suddenly turning into the Sherlock Holmes of Rannoch, are you?”

“Darcy, be serious, please. The local detective inspector is a nice enough man but he’s quite out of his depth. You know a thing or two about questioning people and judging who might be lying, and my grandfather—well, he’s dealt with all kinds of gruesome cases during his years on the force. So I thought we might at least take a look for ourselves at the sites where these things happened.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be my aunt’s right-hand woman? Are you allowed to vanish for a day when you should be running skittles tournaments and things?”

I regarded him frostily. “You sound as if you don’t want to come with me. Fine, if you don’t want a chance for us to spend time together . . .” I began to stand up. He grabbed my arm to hold me back.

“Don’t be silly. You know very well that I’d love any chance to spend time with you. It’s just that I’m not sure we should interfere in local police business. We don’t know the people or the territory. I can’t see how we can be of any use whatsoever.”

“Darcy, you haven’t spoken with Inspector Newcombe. I have. He admits that he is flummoxed. He’s been popping in on my grandfather asking for advice every two seconds. Of course he wants help, and if my grandfather had somebody to motor him around he might be able to solve this.”

“Very well,” he said, looking around as if trying to make up his mind. “I suppose I could ask Monty, but I’m none too sure about the lay of the land around here.”

“There are such things as maps,” I said. “I’ll ask Sir Oswald for one.”

“So what are we going to do about this fancy dress ball if we’re gone all day? Aren’t we supposed to be creating costumes?”

“I happen to know there is a whole row of costumes hanging in the attic,” I said. “I suggest you and I slip up there before the others and grab something.”

“Slip up to the attic and grab something. That sounds interesting.”

“Darcy!” I glared at him.

“My, but you’re testy today,” he said.

“Because I’m feeling really angry and frustrated that people are being killed and nobody is doing anything to stop it,” I said. “We have to help, Darcy. How many people will have to die otherwise before Scotland Yard sends someone down to take charge?”

“I suppose the point is that from what we can tell, we have no evidence that any of the deaths was a murder.”

“My grandfather says there is no such thing as coincidence. Do you really believe that so many accidents could happen in one small part of Dartmoor, with a death every day?”

“I agree it does sound far-fetched. Unless you believe in the Lovey Curse.”

“Do you?”

“Of course not.” He gave a half-embarrassed laugh. “But I’m dashed if I can see how these deaths have anything to do with each other. I mean to say, if you were going to kill a chap, would you wait until he was up a tree? And the man who pushed that garage owner off a bridge was most likely the wronged husband, not an outsider. And if someone turned on the gas to kill the old woman, it was probably one of her sisters, tired of being bossed around.”

“But what if it wasn’t? What if it was a clever killer with a motive we haven’t yet fathomed?”

He put an arm around my shoulder. “Georgie, think about it—do you really believe we can do anything that the local police can’t?”

I chewed on my lip, something I tend to do when I’m not sure of myself. “I just thought that if three of us put our heads together and looked at the sites in order, then something would occur to us.”

Darcy stared past me, out the window, then he pushed away his plate. “All right then. I’ll go find Monty.”

“We have to choose costumes first,” I said. “Come on. Let’s see if we can sneak up to the attic without being noticed.”

Darcy gave a reluctant sigh, then took my hand. We crept up several flights of stairs, each one less grand than the one before, until we reached a set of steep wooden steps to an attic. The place was illuminated only by the light coming in from some dormer windows, and items covered in dust sheets looked ominous in the darkness. Having grown up in a really spooky castle, I’m not normally afraid of such things, but the way they stirred in the draft we let in was unnerving and I was glad I had Darcy with me.

“Here they are,” I said and threw the dust sheet off a rack of costumes.

“Let me see, what do I want to be?” Darcy examined them one by one. “Not a gorilla. Too hot. Caveman? I might fancy that. Then I could drag you across the room by your hair.”

“Which, in case you haven’t noticed, is not long enough to do that,” I said. “Besides, there is no cavewoman outfit.”

“You could be a second Wild Sal,” Darcy said. “Look at this airy-fairy outfit. I’m sure you could waft around if you wanted to.”

I held it up. “I don’t think I’m the wafting type,” I said.

Darcy was staring at the floor. “Someone else wanted to get first dibs on costumes, I see. Look at the footprints. Someone has been up here before us.” He pointed at the row of neat footprints in the dust.

“Probably just Lady Hawse-Gorzley or one of the maids sent up to make sure the costumes were brushed and clean.” I put back the Wild Sal outfit.

“Pity there’s no Charles the Second,” Darcy said, “because you could borrow some oranges from downstairs and be Nell Gwynne in this dress.” He held it out to me. “Rather a daring bodice, don’t you think? But then, Nell never did mind displaying her oranges.”

I could see that we were getting nowhere. “Look,” I said. “How about this? We could go as gypsies. I’m sure there are red scarves and big golden earrings in the dressing-up box downstairs.”

“I wouldn’t mind being a gypsy,” he agreed. “I’ve always rather fancied the outdoor life.”

“Good. Then that’s settled.” I handed him an outfit with baggy trousers, lacy white shirt and black waistcoat. “Let’s go find Monty.”

Darcy sighed and followed me down the stairs.

Chapter 28

D
ECEMBER 28

A half hour later we had picked up my grandfather and were ready to embark upon a day of detecting.

“We should start with the first death,” I said. “You don’t happen to know which tree in the orchard it was, do you?”

“Haven’t got a clue, ducks,” my granddad said. “But we could take a butcher’s if you like.”

“A butcher’s?” I asked.

“Butcher’s hook—rhyming slang for look.”

“I’ll never get the hang of rhyming slang,” I said. “It seems to take twice as long to say something as the actual word it represents.”

“Ah, well, the object is that the toffs don’t understand what we’re talking about,” he said.” Rhyming slang and then back slang before it. Private language in a crowded city.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I don’t see any point in going to look at the orchard,” Darcy said. “We know that the police trampled all over it.”

“We could question the man’s servants,” I suggested.

Darcy glanced at my grandfather. “What do you think, sir? Georgie wants to do this, but I don’t want to be accused of stepping on the toes of the police.”

“Well, that inspector has asked for my advice, but I’m not so sure we should go questioning people behind his back,” Granddad said. “And anyway, I heard from the inspector that nobody in the house knew anything. They didn’t hear the shot. They didn’t know he’d gone out. I gather the servants sleep in another wing altogether and he normally didn’t get up before nine.”

“Well, that’s a lot of good,” I said. “I wish we knew who his friends were and whether he’d told any of them that he was planning this prank.”

“What would that prove?” Darcy asked. “He probably told quite a few people that he was planning the prank. If he wasn’t about to carry out some kind of stunt, what on earth was he doing up a tree with a shotgun and wire?”

I sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

“Because if these are murders,” my grandfather said, “then someone has put a lot of thought and planning into making them look like accidents.”

“What kind of person would do this?” Darcy asked.

“Obviously a brainy type,” Granddad said. “A loner. Quiet sort, I’d say. And if he really has planned to kill these specific people, then I’d say he’s the kind who’d carry a grudge, maybe for years. A crime spree like this must have taken months of planning.”

“What if it’s a woman?” I asked. “Wild Sal fits those characteristics, doesn’t she?”

Granddad nodded. “It could be that the farmer’s wife, kicked to death in the dairy, was a genuine accident. We’ll just have to see if there are any more deaths. If there aren’t, then bob’s your uncle. Wild Sal it is.”

“We should be moving along if you want to cover all of the crime scenes,” Darcy said. “The second one—the man who fell off the bridge.”

“We can hardly ask the publican what time Ted Grover left, if he was dallying with the publican’s wife,” I said.

“But we could ask some of the other men,” Granddad said. “There’s a couple of them sitting outside the pub right now.”

We went over and I hung back, letting Darcy and my grandfather do the talking. They joined me soon after. “They say that nobody saw him leave. He definitely wasn’t in the bar at closing time, so he must have left well before that. Could have been round the back with the publican’s missus.” My grandfather paused. “And they were surprised he fell off the bridge because he didn’t seem to be drunk.”

There was a clear footpath from the pub across low-lying fields. It was muddy from melted snow and we picked our way carefully until we came to the clapper bridge—just slabs of granite laid over standing stones across the stream.

“Easy enough to fall off here, if you were unsteady on your pins,” Granddad said.

“But they didn’t think he was drunk,” I said. “And if he fell into the stream, it’s deep enough that he wouldn’t have hit his head on a rock, and the icy water would have sobered him up in a hurry.”

“I suspect the stream is much deeper now than it was a few days ago,” Darcy said. “All that melted snow.”

“That’s true.” I stared down at the swiftly flowing waters, trying to picture a man’s body lying there; trying to spot a rock that could have killed him. We made our way back to the road and went to look at the house of the Misses Ffrench-Finch.

“We do know that Wild Sal was admitted to their kitchen on that night,” I said.

Granddad shook his head. “Do you think she’d know about things like turning on gas taps if she lived wild on the moors? And more to the point, would she have any idea about cross-wiring a switchboard?”

“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “It would take a person with experience of electricity to make sure someone was electrocuted when they plugged in headphones.”

We made our way around the house to the side with Miss Effie’s window, and sure enough there was a very large footprint in the flower bed right beneath the window.

“Looks like a large Wellington boot to me,” Granddad said. “A very large one. Doesn’t that half-witted bloke wear big boots?”

“Willum? Yes, but we know he was here the day before Miss Effie died. He helped them carry in packages and get the decorations down from their attic. He could quite possibly have had to fetch something from the shed.”

“Via a flower bed?” Darcy asked.

“Maybe he wanted to peek in a downstairs window,” I suggested. “He’s very childlike.” I looked over to the shed behind the main house. “Oh, and look. There is a ladder propped against the shed. Perhaps he had to fetch that to put up the Christmas tree.”

Granddad stared at the ladder, then at the wall. “If that was extended, it would reach close to that bedroom window.”

“It would,” Darcy agreed. “Now all we have to do is find out who used it, turned on the gas and came down again without being seen.”

“You’re being sarcastic again,” I said.

“I just think this is a fool’s errand,” he said. “Maybe Sherlock Holmes could look at the smallest of clues and know everything, but we can’t. We can’t question everybody in nearby towns, look through police records, hospital records—all the things one would need to do to come up with possible suspects for a murder like this. And even then—if our murderer is a twisted reclusive chap, brooding and plotting from his bedroom, we may have no way of finding him until he makes a mistake.”

“You think he’ll make a mistake?” I asked.

“They always do in the end,” Granddad said. “He can wipe away fingerprints, work hard to make every death look like an accident, but in the end he’ll slip up.”

“I’d still like to look at the other crime scenes for myself,” I said. “And since we have the car, why not?”

“Because it’s cold,” Darcy said.

After a mile or so I had to agree with him. Monty’s motor was an open-topped Alvis Tourer, so we were exposed to the freezing wind. It wasn’t so bad in the front seat, behind the windshield, but I was perched in the poor excuse for a backseat and the wind hit me full in the face. We sat huddled together as we climbed a hill and then down again into Newton Abbott. I noticed that Klein’s Jewelers had a notice saying
Closed
on the front door. The robbery had clearly upset Mr. Klein enough that he hadn’t felt like opening his shop again. We found the telephone exchange with two girls working at a makeshift switchboard at a table, while the other end of the room was a blackened mess of burned-out wires. We made Darcy our spokesman, sensing correctly that girls like that would be more willing to talk to a handsome man. And after his initial questions they glanced at him shyly and said they’d do anything they could to help “poor Glad.”

“I always said she had it coming,” one of them said, looking at the other for confirmation. “She loved to listen in on the calls and she was a terrible gossip, wasn’t she, Lil?”

The other nodded. “I told her she was going to get in trouble one day for repeating things like that.”

“Did she ever repeat to you any of the things she’d heard?” Darcy asked.

“She did sometimes—you know, if someone was seeing somebody else’s wife. She liked that kind of thing. Crazy about the pictures, she was—romance and drama.”

“So you think that what happened to her wasn’t an accident?” I asked carefully.

“I don’t see as how it could have been,” Lil said. “I mean, who would ever connect up electric wires to a telephone switchboard? Only someone who didn’t know what they were doing, and nobody like that has ever been in here. We ain’t had no kind of work done, or outsiders in here.”

“There was that man about the clock,” the other girl reminded her.

“Oh, right. A man came in the other day—day before poor Glad’s tragedy, it were. Said he was sent to repair the clock. He weren’t here long, fiddled about a bit and then he went.”

“What did he look like?”

“Nothing much. About forty-something, I’d say. Thin bloke. Big mustache. Glasses. Wearing overalls.”

“He didn’t give his name or say who had sent him?”

“We were busy. He seemed to know what he was doing, and he said he’d been sent from the town hall, so we left him to it.”

“Thank you,” Darcy said. “You’ve been most helpful.”

“Do you reckon they’ll ever catch the person what did this?” Lil asked.

“We hope so,” Darcy said. “Oh, and tell me—did Gladys have anyone who might have carried a grudge against her? An old boyfriend, maybe? A neighbor she had annoyed?”

They frowned, thinking. “Like I said”—the other girl glanced at Lil before speaking—“she did like to gossip so maybe that got her in trouble. But she weren’t the sort for boyfriends. Not much of a catch, you might say. She got her romance from the cinema.”

“Should we go to the town hall?” I asked as we came out again to the busy high street. “They’d know who was sent to repair a clock, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t see how that could have any bearing on Gladys,” Darcy said. “If he’d rigged up the switchboard to kill somebody while he was there, he’d have killed one of the other girls before Gladys came on duty in the early morning.”

“You know what I’m thinking?” Granddad commented. “They let us in and chatted to us easily enough. Who is to say that people don’t often pop in for a chat and that they don’t even remember them afterward?”

“Good point,” Darcy said. “Emphasizing that we’re on a wild-goose chase.”

“Fine,” I said angrily. “You’ve made it quite clear that I’m an idiot and we’re wasting our time.”

I started walking fast toward the motorcar. Darcy hurried to catch up with me. “Nobody says you’re an idiot. I just don’t think we have any way of achieving what you hope to achieve. We’re amateurs, Georgie. We have no access to police records.”

“He’s right, ducks,” Granddad said. “The only way to solve this, in my thinking, is to find a local person who has shown himself in the past to be antisocial or warped or hostile. You know, the kind who writes letters to the local newspaper about his neighbor’s radio being too loud or the greengrocer raising the cost of potatoes. I think we’ll find each of the victims teed him off in a way that wouldn’t bother you or me.”

“Then could we go through the past issues of the newspaper and see if anything stands out?”

“That would take days,” Darcy said. “And I expect the police are already thinking along those lines.”

I sighed. “All right. Let’s go home. I give up. There’s no point in looking where the butcher’s van drove off the road because anyone could have hidden behind a big rock and jumped out to make him swerve. And I was the one who found the master of hounds’s horse and the only person I saw up there was Wild Sal and she’s behind bars.”

“Then let’s go back, have a good lunch and forget about it,” Darcy said. “No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not being callous, just realistic. And who knows, maybe we’ll come to the end of the day with no more deaths.”

“We could drive over to that farm and see where the farmer’s wife died,” I said as we reached the motor and Darcy opened the door for me.

“And question the cow?” Darcy said.

My grandfather laughed. For some reason I couldn’t find it funny. I climbed into the car with a haughty “I’m not amused” expression still on my face.

Darcy touched my hand. “Smile, Georgie. You can’t carry this on your shoulders. What could we hope to learn from looking at a cow barn? The only thing that would be interesting to see is whether the doctor agreed that death was caused by a single kick to the head.”

“I wonder whether he has a surgery in this town or was called in from Exeter.” I was already looking around.

“It wouldn’t be right to go and see the doctor without permission from the inspector,” Granddad said. “I’m sorry, love, but I agree with Darcy. There ain’t much more we can do on our own. Best go back to your posh house and enjoy yourselves.”

Darcy revved the motor and we drove back to the hall. I sat fuming with frustration, but I knew in my heart they were right. If only I had something to go on, some vital clue, some thread that linked the deaths. As we drove I tried to rack my brains about things I might have seen. There had been a couple of occasions when a thought had passed through my head, too fleetingly to grab on to, that I had just witnessed something important. But I could no longer remember what those moments were. As a detective, I was a hopeless failure.