Why should any of them? It kept coming back to that. Both women were undoubtedly irritating nuisances—pains in the neck, their compatriots would say—but that was scarcely sufficient reason to murder them.
Cui bono? Dix’s repetition of the question was having its insidious effect. A truthful answer had to be: Bramwell Barbour and/or Lettie. It was axiomatic that most murders were domestic affairs. Was Bramwell the worm that had finally turned? Had Lettie chosen the Lady Macbeth rôle, urging him to it, acting as accomplice?
‘We can play Chopsticks,’ Lauren announced as Stan’s card tricks ended and Bertha resumed her seat.
An embarrassed silence followed this revelation, then everyone spoke as one.
‘I used to do Casey at the Bat,’ Norman said. ‘I think I can still remember it.’
‘Perhaps we’ve had enough music for a while, dear,’ Miss Holloway said hastily.
‘I’ll see your Casey at the Bat and raise you The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,’ Asey challenged Norman.
Midge was aware of a sudden movement in the doorway behind her. The back of her neck prickled as the hairs rose. She turned and went limp with relief to find Reggie there.
‘I didn’t like leaving you alone,’ Reggie said. ‘Suddenly, I got nervous about it, so I came back.’
‘I’m glad you did.’ She sank back in her chair. ‘Have you found anything?”
‘Not so far. I’ve had a word with Dad. He’s taking over my part of the search. What’s going on here?’
‘Amateur night, but it’s keeping them amused.’
‘That’s the main concern.’ There were footsteps on the stairs and Reggie turned quickly.
‘We thought we’d come down for a while—’ Evelina T. Carterslee was leading an unseeing Bramwell Barbour. ‘Bramwell had some tea and toast earlier, but I’m sure he could use a drink … or two.’
Evelina looked as though she could use a couple herself. Was it her idea to bring Bramwell down? Or had Lettie, determined to spare no one in her efforts to clear Bramwell’s name, persuaded them to leave Evelina’s suite so that she could also search that?
‘Sit here, Bram—’ Midge rose hastily and guided Bramwell into the armchair. He didn’t look as though he could walk much farther. ‘All right?’
‘Thank you.’ He sank into the chair and looked up at her as though she could supply an explanation. ‘I just don’t understand it. Why should anyone want to kill Mother?’
‘It was a great tragedy.’ Inured by decades of purveying fiction, Evelina was able to utter the line without a visible qualm. ‘But you mustn’t let it crush you. Your mother would have been the last person in the world to wish to see you so upset.’
‘You’re right, of course.’ Bramwell took a deep breath. ‘I’ll try to pull myself together.’
‘Let me get you that drink,’ Reggie said.
‘Hey,’ someone called, ‘is the bar open?’ Several of them fled the recitation as others had fled the burning deck. Reggie was caught and kept busy filling orders. Midge went and collected the drinks for Bramwell and Evelina.
‘We want to play Chopsticks,’ Lauren-Brigid pouted. ‘We won a prize for it at school.’
‘You can do it later, dear,’ Miss Holloway said firmly. ‘It’s the Interval now—and the bar is open.’
The audience retreated en masse to the bar, giving point to her words. Midge made a mental bet that they were not going to reassemble for further entertainment without a fight. Especially if that entertainment were to include Chopsticks.
‘It’s not fair—’ She was not the only one to have come to that conclusion, Haila Bond had also reached it. ‘I didn’t get to do my party piece—and I’m pretty damned good at it.’
‘What do you do?’ Alice Dain asked cautiously.
‘Magic—I’m an amateur magician. And nothing like your lousy card tricks, either. Real mystifying stuff.’
‘What’s wrong with card tricks?’ Stanley was stung. ‘They’re good clean fun—and they don’t need a lot of equipment.’
‘I don’t need equipment. All it takes is just a few simple donations from the audience, things everybody carries around with them anyway. For instance, somebody let me have a lipstick—’
‘Don’t you have one?’
‘Of course I do, Alice. That’s not the point. The idea is to get the audience involved. Come on, give me your lipstick.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Alice rummaged in her handbag and produced a lipstick.
‘Thank you. And now, I need a gentleman’s handkerchief. Come on, boys, don’t be shy. It won’t come to any harm. How about this gentleman here—?’
She reached out and twitched Dix’s handkerchief from his breast pocket. Something fell to the floor as she did so.
‘Oops, sorry—’ She stooped to pick it up. So did Dix.
‘What’s this?’ Norman was swifter than either of them. He retrieved it and held it up with a puzzled expression. ‘Some kind of good luck charm?’
‘No—’ Reggie moved out from behind the bar and snatched the small segment of wire from Norman’s hand. ‘I’m afraid it’s just brought Dix some very bad luck. That’s the piece of telephone wire the murderer cut out of our line to disable it.’
‘That’s the evidence we’ve been looking for!’ Lettie cried from the doorway. ‘Only the murderer could possess it. He killed Brigid and Amaryllis!’
22
‘You mean to say Dixon Carr killed my mother?’ Bramwell was incredulous. In heaven’s name, why?’
‘I came here with the intention of killing you,’ Dixon Carr confessed. ‘However, it did not take me long to realize that she was the real author of most of my troubles.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Bramwell said. ‘How could she be? We’ve never seen you before in our lives.’
‘Aha—of course you’d never seen me. You hadn’t the decency to confront me in person. Instead, you set your lawyers on me to persecute me, to hound me out of my living, to ruin my life.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Stanley Marric wanted to know. ‘No lawyers could do all that to him. Not unless he’d been guilty of something pretty spectacular in the first place.’
‘I was guilty of nothing! I was an innocent man, innocently engaged in my lawful occupation. I was … The Sphinx!’
‘The—what?’ Bramwell said.
‘Is he trying to cop an insanity plea?’ Stan asked.
‘Wait a minute—wait a minute,’ Bertha said. ‘I’ve got it! The Sphinx was that critic everybody kept suing. They finally ran him out of town.’
‘Good God!’ Bramwell said. ‘Was that you?’
‘The same.’ Dix bowed gravely. ‘You will agree, Mr Barbour, that I have every right to carry a grudge against you.’
‘Maybe so,’ Algie said. ‘But why did you kill Brigid?’
‘Aha—because Bramwell had every good reason to want her out of the way. Actually, it needn’t have been her—either one of them would have done.’
Midge looked around nervously and was in time to see Algie and Roberta quietly removing Lauren from the room before she could realize what was being revealed.
‘You were trying to get Bramwell blamed for the murders!’ Lettie accused. ‘And that was why you killed his mother, too. So that everyone would think he’d done it.’
‘Not the sole reason.’ Dix allowed himself a quiet smile. ‘After I had seen the … lady … in action, it was a pleasure to dispose of her. I knew then that she alone must have been the moving spirit behind the lawsuit that lost me my position on the newspaper. Bramwell would never have bothered, if it were left to him.
‘I was able to slip up the service stairs after we discovered that she had been locked in the bathroom and no one was going to exert themselves to rescue her in a hurry. She thought I’d come to let her out. I had the satisfaction of revealing my true identity before I knocked her unconscious. I then filled the tub with water and submerged her. It was very apt, I thought. They always drowne
d witches in the old days. And the beauty of it was that Bramwell was certain to be Suspect Number One.’
‘I can’t believe this—’ Cedric shook his head groggily. ‘Do you mean to tell us that you killed two people so that a third person would be blamed for it? That’s impossible. People don’t do things like that.’
‘On the contrary,’ Bertha said, ‘they did them all the time in the Golden Age. It was a favourite plot. That, and the series murders, when several innocent bystanders were killed just to obscure the fact that one of the victims was intended. That was another drawback about the Golden Age: it was awfully hard on innocent bystanders.’
‘I’ve read them all.’ Dix sighed reminiscently. ‘There were no books like them. They don’t write them like that any more.’
‘They’d never get away with it, these days,’ Evelina said.
‘I’m proud to say—’ Dix eyed her coldly; it was probably as well for her that his activities were now curtailed —‘I’m very proud to say that I haven’t read a book dated later than 1940 since I stopped reviewing. Not in the past fifteen years.’
‘I’m sorry to say,’ Evelina murmured bitterly, ‘there are too many people like you around.’
‘You overdosed on those old books,’ Bertha said. ‘They went to your head. Of course, that was how you knew about the service stairs. You’d absorbed so many country house backgrounds you knew servants’ passages would have to exist in a place like Chortlesby Manor.’
‘Precisely. Poor Brigid was quite thrilled when I offered to share my secret staircase with her.’ He sighed. ‘It was rather a pity, I had nothing personal against the girl, despite her irritating personality.’
‘Brigid… Mother…’ Bramwell was stunned. Lettie put her arms around him consolingly. ‘Was it going to be me next?’
‘Certainly not.’ Dix seemed annoyed at his obtuseness. ‘Haven’t you been paying attention? You were going to take the rap, as they say. Swing for those murders—or, at least, spend a great many years in prison …’
‘Well, hell…’ Stan said into the sudden silence. ‘What do we do now?’
What indeed? They looked at each other uneasily. Dix stood there unconcerned; he seemed to be preoccupied with some private thoughts.
‘You’re under arrest, Mr Carr,’ Reggie said. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
‘Oh yes, yes.’ He shrugged it off as a matter of no importance. ‘That’s quite in keeping.’ He smiled to himself.
Several people standing near him moved back uneasily.
‘Suppose you can’t ask the fellow for his parole,’ Colonel Heather said. ‘Too non compos for that.’
‘Aha—Colonel Primrose!’ Dix winked at him.
Colonel Heather moved back uneasily.
‘I’m going to strike out for town,’ Reggie said. ‘If I can make it to the highway, it should have been ploughed by now and perhaps I can flag down a ride. I’ll bring the police back with me. Meanwhile, we’ll have to lock him in his room.’
‘Mount a guard over the door,’ Colonel Heather advised. ‘I’ll take the first watch myself.’
‘Good idea.’ Reggie took Dix’s arm. ‘If you’ll just come along—’
‘—quietly, I know.’ Docilely, Dix allowed himself to be led out into the lobby, towards the staircase.
He was taking it so quietly that they all began to relax. It was not until he reached the foot of the stairs that he suddenly broke free of Reggie, hurled him back against those immediately behind them, and raced down the corridor towards the kitchen.
‘After him!’
‘Don’t let him get away!’
Amidst much shouting, they disentangled themselves. There were answering shouts and shrieks from the kitchen.
Suddenly the entire Manor was plunged into blackness.
‘The lights!’ Reggie swore briefly and luridly. ‘The bugger’s done for the lights.’
‘We should have expected something like this.’ Bertha spoke with calm reasonableness. ‘I remember reading somewhere that The Sphinx wound up working for an electricity company. He’d have learned all about things like that. I wouldn’t count on getting the electricity working again until morning.’
‘Midge—candles!’ Reggie shouted.
‘Yes. Oh, sorry … Excuse me … Sorry …’ Midge bumped into one after another as she made her way to the bar where they had a small emergency supply. Everyone was milling about. Dix could be back in their midst and they’d never know it. The thought was frightening.
‘What’s going on?’ Roberta called from the top of the stairs. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘He’s gone! He got away!’ Shouts from several throats enlightened her.
‘Oh, really?’ The information did not appear to disturb her unduly. She could be heard beginning a cautious descent.
‘What’s happened?’ A tiny flame wavered towards them down the kitchen corridor. ‘Who was that maniac who rushed through my kitchen?’ Cook hovered between tears and fury. ‘What has he done with Mr Eric?’
‘Eric?’ Midge began lighting candles and passing them to those nearest her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘That madman grabbed him. It was the last thing I saw before the lights went out.’
‘My God—Dad!’ Reggie grabbed a candle and raced for the kitchen at such speed that it nearly blew out. He had to stop and shield it with one hand before proceeding. The others crowded after him.
‘Dad!’ Reggie shouted. ‘Dad—where are you?’
Two faint complaining cries answered him. Reggie ignored the one from Ackroyd.
‘Dad—where are you?’
‘Here.’ Eric came reeling into view from the private wing. Reggie rushed to him.
‘Dad—are you all right?’
‘No. No, I’m not. I’ve just been mugged! Mugged—in my own home!’
‘Here, take it easy, Dad. Sit down.’ Reggie pulled out a chair for him.
‘The cooking brandy!’ Cook rushed to get it. Eric groaned.
‘Did he hurt you, Dad? Where did he go?’
‘He grabbed me and hustled me to my room,’ Eric complained. ‘He’s gone off with my passport, my topcoat and my wallet. He said he’d send everything back to me from Ceylon. I don’t believe him for a minute.’
‘Ceylon! Jeez—he is crazy.’
‘I’m going after him—’ Reggie started for the door.
‘Oh no you’re not!’ Midge grabbed him and held on tight. Norman and Asey moved forward to reinforce her.
‘No point in that, Reggie,’ Asey said. ‘He won’t get far. Especially if he’s trying to buy a ticket for Ceylon.’
‘Let the police worry about him,’ Norman advised. ‘They’ll catch him fast enough, if he’s running around acting like it’s 1935.’
‘But the police don’t even know what’s happened yet. I’ll have to tell them—’
‘Morning is time enough now,’ Roberta said calmly. ‘The police aren’t going to hold you responsible for not notifying them when we’ve been cut off like this. And, as Norman says, they’ll soon catch him.’
‘It’ll be an insanity plea, for sure,’ Stan decided. ‘I may take the case myself.’
It was a very satisfactory conclusion for Roberta, Midge realized. There would now be no reason to delay the tour’s departure. The police had a self-confessed murderer to hunt. Perhaps it was even a satisfactory conclusion for Murder At The Manor. Even without the American tours, the resultant publicity would ensure a rush of bookings to carry them through the next couple, of seasons. Midge suddenly felt more cheerful.
‘But—’ Reggie continued to struggle. Midge looked around for additional help and saw Bertha raise her foot and aim it at Eric’s shin. In the dim candlelight, the move went unnoticed by the others.
‘Aaargh!’ Eric bellowed.
‘Dad!’ Reggie whirled, this time they let him go. He rushed to Eric’s side. ‘You are hurt!’
‘My leg—I think it’s broken,’ Eric groaned.
‘Here—let me see. You shouldn’t have been walking on it—’
‘That’s right,’ Bertha approved. ‘You worry about your Dad and never mind chasing maniacs through the snow. I could help you rig up a splint.’
‘Here we are—’ Cook emerged from the cellar juggling three large dusty bottles. ‘We’ve all had a nasty shock. A nice drop of the cooking brandy is what we need.’
‘Don’t drop them!’ Eric cried. ‘In fact, don’t even open them!’
‘Don’t be silly, Mr Eric—’ The guests were already clustering around Cook; even Ackroyd had joined the hopeful throng. ‘It will do us all a world of good.’
Eric groaned.
About the Author
Marian Babson, born Ruth Stenstreem, is an American mystery writer. Her first published work was Cover-Up Story (1971), and she has written over forty-five mysteries. Babson served as secretary ofthe Crime Writers’ Association and was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library in 1996.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1987 by Marian Babson
Cover design by Amanda Shaffer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5860-5
This edition published in 2019 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
MARIAN BABSON
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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