The Black Cat Murders: A Cotswolds Country House Murder (Heathcliff Lennox Book 2)

by Karen Menuhin

  ‘Eee, ’tis like that sword in the stone, so it is,’ he said, glee in his voice.

  I had to retreat along with Miss Busby and Swift, both of whom were holding handkerchiefs to their noses.

  ‘Graves,’ I said, ‘it is absolutely nothing like the sword in the stone. Not remotely.’

  ‘Hand it over, man.’ Swift demanded.

  ‘’Tis I what found it,’ Graves argued. ‘And a rare thing it is,’ he said, tugging up some grass to wipe the blade.

  ‘Police evidence,’ Swift snapped, and took it from him after a short tussle. He carried it upwind of the opened grave and we gathered around to peer at it.

  ‘It’s rather fine, isn’t it,’ Miss Busby remarked as Swift turned it in his hands. Graves came to join us - I tried to stay upwind of him as he was beginning to whiff a bit.

  Swift cleaned the blade as best he could with handfuls of grass. I sacrificed my handkerchief to the hilt, wiping the pommel clean of soil until we could make out the blazon on the hilt.

  ‘Not the Bloxford family crest,’ Miss Busby remarked.

  ‘No, but the crown and thistle doesn’t make it too difficult to guess which side of the border it came from,’ I said.

  ‘Scotland,’ Swift said. ‘Is it the Braeburn insignia?’

  We all looked at each other.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ Miss Busby answered.

  ‘Better go and find out, then, hadn’t we,’ Swift said quietly, and turned to march towards the Hall.

  ‘Stay and guard the place, would you, old chap,’ I told Graves.

  ‘’Twas I as found it, ye know. Like that mystical sword, that is.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, Graves,’ I told him quite firmly.

  Swift stopped at the mirror pond in front of the Orangerie and dunked the sword into it, scattering the golden carp that had come to see if we had bread for them. He kept plunging it under the water and then rubbing off the foul ordure until it shone clean and bright. Then he carried it to the house, his sleeves wet, his hands dripping.

  We entered through the French windows and went into the hall. Florence was up on the first floor and looked over the balustrade to wave a small envelope at us.

  ‘Hello,’ she laughed gaily and ran down the stairs, pretty as ever in the same peach dress of a couple of days ago. ‘Jonathan, I have just written a note to you, to say thank you for the roses this morning. They’re quite beautiful.’ She smiled at him, but the smile faltered as she saw the look on his face.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked, holding up the sword.

  She came closer to examine the detail on the hilt. ‘How strange.’ She took it from his hands to hold it to the light, and then swung it expertly around. ‘Finishing school,’ she laughed. ‘Fencing was the only thing I was good at, apart from singing.’ She offered it back, the hilt held toward him. ‘The insignia is ours, but I’ve never seen the rapier before. It looks quite old. Where did you find it?’

  ‘Buried in a body,’ Swift replied.

  Well, that dropped a bombshell into the conversation, but then, the mention of corpses tends to do that. Florence stepped backwards.

  ‘You mean it was actually in a body? Someone was murdered? Who?’ she raised one hand to her cheek.

  ‘Probably the old chaplain, Bartholomew,’ Swift replied. ‘Strange that the sword should come from your home.’

  ‘Ah,’ Florence uttered. ‘I see – that makes me a suspect, does it? Well, thank you for having some faith in me. Obviously I would come here with one of our own swords to murder someone I’ve never even heard of.’ She was getting rather worked up. ‘What a simply ridiculous suggestion. I do hope you find your killer, Inspector Swift, because it most certainly was not me!’ With that warm retort she crumpled up the envelope she held in her hand and threw it at his feet. Then she turned and walked upstairs, head held high, back straight, every inch the fine lady that she was born to be.

  The Inspector looked after her for a moment, then picked the paper up, shoved it in his pocket and turned away, rather red-faced.

  ‘I’m going to the station,’ he declared. ‘Need to call out our medical investigators from London.’ Sword in hand, he stalked off, though he had to wait for Benson to pull open the front door, which rather spoiled the drama of the exit.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Miss Busby said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, and pushed my hands in my pockets. ‘Too suspicious and too quick to accuse,’ I remarked.

  ‘Indeed,’ Miss Busby replied.

  We returned to my rooms and sat at the reading table.

  ‘I am sure the body was that of poor Bartholomew,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘Unlikely to be anybody else,’ I observed, and rang the bell for Dicks.

  ‘Who do you think may have done it?’ She was sitting upright, hands held together. The kitten spied her and came to clamber up onto her lap. She stroked it absently.

  ‘Jarvis probably, or von Graf. I expect one of them stole the sword from Braeburn Castle.’

  ‘They were all here, you know, when Bartholomew disappeared,’ she said. ‘Except Jarvis.’

  ‘Oh,’ That rather clouded the issue. ‘Um, could you tell me again what happened, please, Miss Busby, around the time Bartholomew was supposed to have run off with the silver and the lady from Brighton.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘No, wait,’ I told her. I went to my desk for my notebook, pen and ink-bottle and returned better equipped to carry out a proper interview.

  Miss Busby smiled as she watched me fill my pen with ink, blot the stray drops and then look up at her with brows raised.

  Dicks came in with a tray laden with a teapot, cups, saucers and dainty whatnots.

  ‘Mister Benson told me to bring some refreshments, sir,’ he said, spreading the table with a white cloth and placing the items from the tray with his usual precision. He fussed about, though he wasn’t his usual self.

  ‘Thank you, Dicks,’ I told him.

  ‘Hummph.’ He went off, still rather miffed with me.

  Miss Busby poured the tea and began. ’It was late last summer, at the end of September – I remember because the apples were falling from the trees. Caroline had just returned and she had Hiram with her, and his parents, Ford and Ruth, and Florence, too. Von Graf arrived a day or so later, but not Jarvis.’

  I wrote this down; she waited for me to finish as I was rather slow.

  ‘Was this the first visit from Hiram and his parents?’ I asked, taking a bite of Madeira cake, still warm from the oven.

  ‘Indeed it was, and it caused quite a stir. Caroline had met Hiram at Braeburn Castle and subsequently sent a telegram to the Brigadier to say that she was bringing her new fiancé home to introduce him,’ she told me, her eyes thoughtful as she recounted events. ‘That ruffled the Brigadier’s feathers because it wasn’t the right way to do things at all. But a letter from Hiram arrived in the next post. He requested a visit to Bloxford Hall to formally ask the Brigadier’s permission for Caroline’s hand. Well, the Brigadier couldn’t really say no, but he put them off until the following week. In the meantime questions were asked, discreetly, of course, about Hiram’s family background. By the time they all arrived at the Hall, the Brigadier was prepared to receive them.’

  ‘Do I take it that you were the one who made discreet enquiries about the Chisholm family, Miss Busby?’ I asked her.

  ‘Indeed I was,’ she smiled. ‘I have many acquaintances, and they do like to gossip, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And your friends thought the Chisholms passed muster?’

  ‘Very much so. A family of substance and good standing. Which was a great relief to the Brigadier’s mind.’

  ‘Where did they go?’ I asked her. ‘The Chisholms, I mean, when they left here before coming back again recently.’

  ‘London, to visit historical sites and museums, theatres and art galleries. A cultural tour, in effect.’

  ‘Did Caroline go with them?’
/>
  ‘No, good heavens, that would have been most unseemly.’

  ‘And this from one of the Bloxford Beauties,’ I teased.

  She laughed and poured more tea into our cups. ‘It’s a question of perception, Major Lennox.’

  I smiled and jotted down her remarks then turned to the subject of today’s corpse. ’Bartholomew,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Her face fell. ‘What a sad ending, poor man – and I really could not believe he had run off with the silver, or a lady. It seemed so unlikely a tale. He wasn’t the sort at all.’

  ‘Do you know where the letters are, the ones that were found at the rectory after he disappeared?’ I asked.

  ‘I do,’ she said, and suddenly looked quite mischievous. ‘I stole them from my nephew this morning. Wasn’t that naughty of me!’ She laughed and placed the sleeping kitten on the table to retrieve her handbag, from which she drew out a few sheets of paper.

  Must say, that made my eyes open. ‘What on earth made you think to do that?’

  ‘Once I had it in my mind that poor Bartholomew may be lying in that grave, I thought we would need to examine the letters. So I went to the station and while my nephew was distracted I persuaded the clerk, Miller, to lend them to me. I taught him, you know, Bobby Miller; he was very slow to learn his three ‘r’s and I spent a great deal of time instructing him after school.’

  She spread the letters on the table between us. They were signed from a Miss Margaret Pearson. The paper was ordinary, everyday sort of stuff. The hand was well formed and regular, and all were written in the same colour ink, a shade of brownish black. There were no dates and the address had been merely noted as ‘Brighton’.

  I read them carefully and found that they rather lacked heart. No soft words of tenderness or mention of missing the other’s presence, or even reminiscences of times spent together. They were mostly instructions about when they were to elope, which railway station to meet at, and to be sure to bring sufficient funds.

  ‘Where are the envelopes?’ I asked, spreading the papers in front of me.

  ’There weren’t any,’ Miss Busby replied, watching my actions closely.

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as strange?’

  ‘Yes, and I said so to my nephew at the time. But I doubt he’s ever written a love letter in his life and he does rather lack imagination, so he thought nothing of it. I still have all the letters my fiancée wrote to me – they are in their envelopes, tied with ribbon.’

  ‘Precisely – nobody throws away envelopes containing love letters. And the envelopes would require an official post office date stamp, and that would be very difficult to forge.’ I fetched my magnifying glass. There was a splatter of tiny ink drops across the writing on all the pages, I realised. It looked as though someone had shaken a pen that held a drop of ink on the nib. I manoeuvred them until the small blots joined up across the edges of each page. ‘The ink is exactly the same colour as the ink that was used to write the notes,’ I said, staring intently through the magnifying lens. ‘And the spots sprayed across the pages were made when all the letters were together in one place.’

  She caught on quickly. ‘Which should not be possible, because each letter was supposed to have been sent on a different date.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘These are fabrications. This is nothing but a smokescreen.’

  I gave her the glass so she could see for herself and she bent over them, nudging the pages with her fingers and studying each one to examine the colour and texture of the ink.

  ‘It was very carefully devised,’ she added.

  ‘As was the death of Sir Crispin,’ I replied. ‘But the killing of Jarvis was entirely different.’

  ‘I have been thinking about that. Retribution, do you think?’ Miss Busby asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I mused. ‘But for what?’

  ‘The death of Bartholomew?’ she suggested. ‘Someone determined who killed him, and left Jarvis’s body as a sort of “x marks the spot”, don’t you think?’

  ‘Possibly, but if it were von Graf, he may have killed Jarvis and Bartholomew and made it look as though Jarvis did the first murder. Or …’ I paused and looked at her. ‘I think we need to unravel a little more of the knot, Miss Busby, because there is much here to think about.’

  Chapter 17

  ‘Indeed! And I really must be going, Major Lennox.’ Miss Busby smiled at me, her eyes once again bright and shining. ‘Inspector Swift will be asking for these at the station and he will blame poor Bobby Miller if he discovers they are not there.’ She gathered up the letters and returned them to her handbag.

  I rang for Dicks, who must have been lurking nearby, for he arrived swiftly at my rooms. He escorted Miss Busby out, opening doors for her along the way and chatting as they went, because no doubt news of the discovery of Bartholomew would already have begun to spread.

  Despite his sleepy state, Tubbs had returned to my desk and was even now shoving the remaining pen from the tooled leather top to drop onto the rug. I scolded him to his face; he stared back with wide blue eyes and an innocent air. I returned him to the basket, opened the desk drawer, tossed everything into it, including my notebook, pens, pencils and whatnots, and closed it again. Enough kitten nonsense, I decided.

  I knew I should visit the Brigadier and tell him about the latest dead chaplain, but first I wanted to take another look at Lady Grace. I felt under the bed to pull out the wrapped canvas and carried it to my desk in the window embrasure. I scrutinised her carefully in the bright sunshine coming through the mullioned glass. It was still a bit of a shock to see her so young – and déshabillé.

  The pale green paint that I’d managed to smear on my sleeve when Miss Busby and I were at the rectory was quite distinctive. I checked my jacket again and compared it with the artwork in an attempt to find the same colour on the canvas. It wasn’t there. Jarvis may have been restoring Lady Grace, but he must have been painting something else. What was it, and where was it?

  I wrapped the canvas and returned it under the bed and was grovelling about on the floor as Dicks returned.

  ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘Lady Ruth requests your presence in the library.’

  ‘Just a minute, old chap.’ I bent to pick off fluff and bits of Foggy fur from my trousers.

  ‘I have a brush, sir.’ Dicks whipped it out and advanced.

  ‘No, Dicks, how many times do I have to tell you. No brushes.’

  His face fell but then he spotted my vacant desk.

  ‘I say, sir, you tidied up!’ He flashed a wide grin.

  ‘Indeed I did, Dicks,’ I replied, and moved to sit in my chair.

  ‘Um, I think she means now, sir.’

  ‘But I was….’ I looked at his earnest young face, ‘oh, very well.’

  Lady Ruth was sitting at the desk in the cluttered, somewhat dark and masculine room, books lining the shelves almost to the ceiling. Her angular face was bent over a pile of papers. Pen in hand, she was underlining sections of a very neat list with a firm hand. She wore prim spectacles, and the same tartan jacket she’d sported before with a simple cream blouse and high collar – she looked very much the stern aristocrat.

  ‘Ah, Major Lennox, sit down, will you,’ she ordered, her grey eyes made larger by the lenses of her glasses. ‘My grand-niece, Lady Florence Braeburn, is upset. You and your friend Inspector Swift are the cause.’

  ‘Um …’ There wasn’t much I could say, really. Swift was the guilty party, but I’d feel like a snitch if I tried to pin it on him.

  ‘This delving about for bodies has got to stop,’ Lady Ruth commanded. ‘I cannot have Lady Caroline’s and my son’s wedding disturbed just because you have a fancy for sleuthing. You must not cause any further distress to the family. It will not be countenanced. The ceremony is the day after tomorrow and you are wandering about the countryside in search of corpses. It is utterly thoughtless of you, Lennox, and – I must use the word – selfish.’

  Well, that was a bit rich! Her
e we were, doing our best to hunt down a murderer and all she could do was rabbit on about some damn bean-feast.

  ‘I –’

  She cut through the protest I was about to utter. ‘You have already found a dead chaplain, the Reverend Jarvis, who, I may remind you, I had arranged to officiate at the wedding. Now I am to believe you have dug up another one! What next, the parish priest? This will not do, Lennox.’ She raised her voice. ‘I will not have it. I have talked to the Brigadier and he agrees with me. No more police and no more detecting. Really, young man, it is quite preposterous.’

  ‘Mrs Chisholm –’ I began, and received a frozen stare ‘– I mean, Lady Ruth, Inspector Swift and I are trying to prevent any further deaths –’

  She interrupted again – she wasn’t prepared to listen to a word I said.

  ‘You are about to be the best man, Major Lennox, and I expect you to take your duties seriously. I have made a list of your tasks and responsibilities for before, during and after the ceremony. Here it is.’ She pushed two closely written sheets of paper over the desk at me. ‘I want no more of this nonsense and absolutely no more bodies. I hope I have made myself clear. Now, off you go.’ She wafted her hand at me as though I were some minion. ‘And take these with you,’ she added, holding out the papers, which I’d failed to pick up.

  I found myself on the other side of the door rather nonplussed. What the devil did she know about detecting? And why shouldn’t we find bodies? There was a murderer on the loose and someone had to put a stop to it before someone decent was killed. If there were to be another victim, it would jolly well serve her right if it were her.

  I heard the lunch gong ring. I wavered: I had no desire for more of the same company, but I was hungry and having a tray sent to my room would take at least half an hour. Hiram came into the hall as I was dithering.

  ‘Howdy,’ he grinned with a flash of white teeth. He noticed the papers crumpled in my hand. ‘Ma cornered you, did she?’ he laughed. ‘Here, you know the best thing to do with these?’ He took them, crushed them into a ball and tossed them into the empty fireplace. ‘Come have some lunch with me, Lennox,’ he drawled. ‘We’ll go to that old inn down in the village. I don’t fancy another preaching while I eat my grub, and if we stay here that’s just what we’ll get.’