Peril at Owl Park

by Marthe Jocelyn

  We filed out of the morning room in front of Frederick, along the passage, around a corner and down another corridor. In truth I was not paying attention to where we were because the image of Mr. Corker’s blood-encrusted wound had settled before my eyes and was becoming more grotesque with every step.

  The man’s artery had been pierced; life extinguished in a few breaths. Though his spirit had fled in terror, his body remained in the darkened room, an invitation to more earthly visitors. It was the body—the torn tissue, the blood, the residue of fear—that became a beacon for a near-invisible population of carpet mites and flies, gnats struggling to survive the winter, and maggots already breeding within the corporeal remains…

  “Aggie!” Hector’s hand prevented me from stumbling. We were at the top of three wide steps that led into a room I hadn’t seen before. One whole wall inside was a painted mural of a riverbank, with willow trees and sunlight blinking through silvery leaves.

  “How lovely!” Spring had suddenly arrived in the fluttering reeds and dappled water, despite the snow whirling against the real-life windowpanes.

  “That’s the River Avon.” Lucy plunked herself down on a sofa. “That’s why this is called the Avon Room. Frederick, where is Mrs. Morton?”

  “Madam is coming now.” He held open the door.

  “Thank you,” said Grannie Jane. She had her knitting bag tucked under one arm, creamy white wool peeking out. Under the high ceiling and next to upright Frederick, she seemed to have shrunk overnight. I carefully wrapped my arms around her. A bubble of warmth swelled in my chest and threatened to leak through my eyes in the form of tears.

  “Hello, Grannie,” I said, and then laughed a little. “Merry Christmas.”

  She kissed me and patted Hector’s shoulder. Lucy stood and received a pat as well. “My dears, my dears,” she said. “ ‘Merry’ does not seem quite the right word.”

  “Will you sit, madame?” said Hector.

  “I will,” she said. “Houses of this size are such a nuisance to one’s legs.” She sat on one of the upright chairs, keeping her knitting bag on her lap.

  “I am here now,” she said to Frederick. “You may go.”

  She waited until the door had closed behind him. “Now then.” She turned her attention to us. “You’ve had a morning unlike any other, if what my maid was chattering about is true.”

  “If she told you we found a dead body, Grannie, then her chatter is as true as the sky.”

  “Goodness, Agatha, you’ll get a reputation if this keeps up.”

  We three sat in a row, perched on the edge of the sofa. Grannie extracted her knitting project from the bag, adjusted the stitches to her satisfaction, and began to work the needles.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well, what?” I said.

  “You must be vivid and specific in your descriptions, my dears, as I have not had the pleasure of seeing the crime scene for myself.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A FULL REPORT

  AS WE DID NOT know how long it would be until Detective Inspector Willard arrived, our first telling of the tale to Grannie Jane may have been a bit rushed, but we did our best to please her.

  “It began with the treasure hunt,” I said. “James and Marjorie devised a hunt for us to find our stockings from Father Christmas.”

  “We never did get them,” said Lucy. “Which is not fair, as we’re certainly deserving. It was not our fault we tripped over a body while in pursuit.”

  “The library is gloomy,” explained Hector. “We cannot see.”

  “Only one lamp was on,” I said, “on the little table, where the magnifier lay.”

  Grannie’s gaze shifted to each of us in turn as we added to the story, rather as if she were watching a game of shuttlecock. Her ability to knit without looking at her hands was one of her great skills, in my opinion. We explained how Lucy had screamed and how everyone came running. No one knew, at first, who it was on the floor, because he was dressed as a pirate, and there’d been five of those, though Annabelle hardly counted, being so womanly.

  “Mrs. Sivam thought it was her husband until he appeared, alive and well,” I said. “Though he was quite distraught to see the corpse.”

  “The body is wearing no boots,” said Hector.

  “His boots were beside the chair,” said Lucy.

  “His socks needed a good darning,” I said. “Bumps of bare skin were poking through.”

  “His pockets, they are…what you say, turn outside?” said Hector.

  “Turned out,” I said. “As if someone were searching for something.”

  “And what might an actor wearing a pirate costume be carrying in his pocket?” said Grannie Jane.

  “The Echo Emerald!” said Lucy.

  “Oh, Grannie!” I said. “Have you not heard that the jewel is gone as well?”

  She gave us the satisfaction of a hefty gasp. “This I did not know,” she said. “A murder and a robbery! How engrossing. But such an odd cast of characters. The connections are baffling.” She held up her knitting to inspect her progress. It seemed to be the back of a very small sweater, creamy white like nougat. “Do go on.”

  “A murder, a robbery and, possibly, a disappearance,” I said. “Kitty Sivam has been looking for her husband all morning, but he is nowhere to be found. Frederick is acting as Mr. Sivam’s valet, and he hasn’t seen him either.”

  “Now that is interesting.” Grannie Jane started a new row.

  “I think Mr. Sivam is the killer,” said Lucy. “He found Mr. Corker stealing his gem and stabbed him. And then ran away.”

  Hector walked over to the windows. The draperies were pulled back to reveal the snowy woods of Owl Park.

  “Why does he kill a man and flee through a blizzard,” he said. “Simply to reclaim his own property? Why does he not speak to his host? It is not logical.”

  “An intelligent observation,” said Grannie. I grinned at Hector and he pretended to look modest.

  The door opened and Frederick came in with another footman, each carrying a chair.

  “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Frederick said to Grannie Jane. “We’ve been asked to set up a headquarters for the police. We’ll be right back with a table.”

  “Tell me, young man,” said my grandmother. “Have you been informed as to the removal of Mr. Corker?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Frederick. He and the other footman shared a sideways glance.

  “Is there some mystery?” Grannie’s voice sharpened.

  The second footman flushed, a smile slipping onto and then quickly off his face.

  Frederick tried again. “Her ladyship, the dowager, has requested that the bod—the deceased gentleman be out of her library before dinnertime, it being Christmas and all.”

  Grannie Jane nodded. “A natural wish, I would say.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Only the police haven’t given the say-so yet, and there’s no medics or anyone to move him, like.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, John and me, we’re doing the chairs and table first, and then it’ll be us who’ve got to, er, shift the gent.”

  “You have conveyed the situation splendidly. Thank you, Frederick.”

  “You’re Dot’s brother,” said Lucy. “And one of the pirates.”

  “Yes, miss,” said Frederick.

  “May I inquire…?” said Hector. “Where is the place to which Mr. Corker will be, er, shifted?”

  The footmen again exchanged question and answer in a brief look.

  “He’ll be in the stables for now. Out of the house, but not too far. Cold enough to keep him from…” Frederick paused, with a glance at Lucy and me.

  “Yes, you have supplied enough information,” said Grannie Jane. “We appreciate your candor. You’d best get on with your tasks.”

  “Yes, ma
’am.” And they were gone.

  “Fancy having ‘move dead body’ on one’s list of tasks,” I said.

  Hector made a croaking sound, which turned out to be how he smothered a laugh.

  “I am reminded,” said Grannie Jane, “of a maid in the church hall, long ago when I sang in the choir. Hattie Granger spoke in a whining tone of voice, poor girl, some blockage in her nose. She was accused of stealing money from the alms box. But they found her washing dishes in the church pantry well after the time she might have gone home. The pieces did not quite fit. If she were the thief, why hadn’t she disappeared while she had the chance. Do you see?”

  “Perfectly, madame,” said Hector.

  I was still a step behind in thinking this through.

  “I believe you have a most logical mind, Mrs. Morton,” said Hector, “even if it is occasionally disguised as storytelling. This gives me hope for Aggie. She has the tendency to imagine things, without always inserting the logic.”

  “Do you mean,” I said, “that if Mr. Corker stole the Echo Emerald, it seems odd that he took off his boots and lingered in the library?”

  Grannie Jane, nodding, patted me fondly on the arm. “Why was he in the library at all?” she said.

  “He was drinking,” said Lucy. “There’s a cabinet full of bottles in there, next to the globe of the world.”

  “Do you remember what Stephen said at lunch?” I asked. “Stephen is the boot boy,” I told Grannie, as it was unlikely that she’d had reason to meet him.

  “And what did Stephen say?”

  “He said, ‘The wrong boots in odd places,’ ” said Hector.

  “And dunderhead!” said Lucy. “Someone shouted ‘dunderhead’ when he went past the library.”

  “When did he go past the library?” said Grannie Jane.

  “Late,” I said. “When he collected people’s boots for cleaning, so the party was over and everyone was in bed. I suppose we can ask him precisely when. The person wasn’t calling Stephen a dunderhead. No one knew Stephen was there. And he did not go into the room to see who was shouting,” I added. “Naturally.”

  “What did he mean by the wrong boots?” Grannie asked Hector.

  “We do not know, madame.”

  Grannie Jane thought for a moment, before making an intriguing point. “Unless Mr. Corker was rehearsing his part in an upcoming play that features the line ‘dunderhead!’ it seems almost certain that he was not alone in the library.”

  “Is it imagination,” I asked, “or a logical deduction? To say that the murderer was with him?”

  CHAPTER 16

  A YOUNG INSPECTOR

  THE DOOR FLEW OPEN with such force that it thudded into the wall. First came a stout, red-faced sergeant, one we’d heard through the spy-hole, straining to turn over the corpse. Behind him was Inspector Willard, a tall man, even a bit gangly, as his bony wrists hung extra inches below his jacket cuffs.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Morton,” said the inspector. “And children. Sergeant Fellowes here will be taking notes while we talk, and he himself will not say a word.” It sounded like a warning, as if Sergeant Fellowes had been naughty and was being told to remain in his corner. His red face got redder as he opened his notebook.

  We were asked to sit across from the inspector. His eyes were brown and his hair quite black, except for a shock of white like a feather near the front. Aside from that oddity, he seemed to be near James in age, which is twenty-four.

  “I will begin by informing you that the actor Mr. Roger Corker died last night at about midnight from an assault on his person in the shape of a knife wound to his neck.”

  He paused and looked at us. Too late, I realized he’d expected a gasp of surprise. We who had found the body should know only about a dagger in the back.

  “To his neck?” I said.

  The inspector nodded, seeming a bit miffed that his news had not caused more excitement. “The blade,” he continued, “severed an artery and caused the victim rapid and catastrophic loss of blood.”

  “Really, Inspector, is this necessary?” said Grannie Jane.

  “Better to hear the whole truth from me than uninformed gossip from every which way,” he said.

  Grannie agreed that this was likely so, though I happened to know that she was very fond of gossip from any source at all—as long as “one sifts it as carefully as cake flour,” she liked to say.

  “To proceed,” said the inspector. “You three have been ruled out as suspects. None of you is tall enough to have done the deed, considering the angle of entry. If Mr. Corker had been stabbed in the heart, instead of the neck, you would still be on the list,” he said. “Within easy reach for any of you.”

  “Sir,” protested Grannie Jane.

  “You, Mrs. Morton, are tall enough to have performed the reprehensible deed, but are perhaps lacking the strength. He was, however, somewhat intoxicated, going by the reek of rum coming from the body, so you might have managed.”

  “There was a stink of spirits,” I said. “We noticed that.”

  “What else did you notice, Miss Morton?”

  “I stepped in the blood,” said Lucy.

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “As did Miss Morton, according to our study of the floor. We will need your slippers to confirm which marks are yours, and which may belong to the killer.”

  We both nodded. I’d put mine in the empty bathtub on the top floor. They were likely stiff and dry by now, just like Mr. Corker.

  Sergeant Fellowes scratched away at his notes. Had he washed his hands since flipping the body of the deceased, or only wiped them on his dark trousers?

  “We noted evidence that the victim—or someone else—had spent time in the room during the minutes—or likely longer—leading up to the murder,” said Inspector Willard. “A chair pillow appeared crushed, as if sat upon. A glass on a table had—”

  “Ah, yes,” said Hector, interrupting. “The magnifying glass!”

  The inspector’s expression did not change but he looked at Hector with a new light in his eyes. “I was not referring to a magnifying glass,” he said. “What we found was a drinking glass with a slosh of rum in the bottom, on a table next to the fireplace, where someone had removed his boots and enjoyed a drink.”

  Hector’s chin dropped to his chest.

  “But please,” said the inspector. “Tell me where you saw the magnifier. I am most interested.”

  I remembered Inspector Willard’s careful survey of the library, his monotone inventory of the scene. I closed my eyes, summoning my own view from the secret passage. The upper half of Mr. Corker on the floor, part of a window with green velvet drapery, the dictionary stand with the huge book open, the small table aglow from the reading lamp…and no magnifying glass.

  I turned abruptly to Hector and shook my head. During our visit this morning to the library, the magnifying glass had most certainly been present. But when we were spying from the secret passage, it was nowhere to be seen!

  “It was gone,” I said.

  “I notice this also,” said Hector, voice low and worried.

  “First you see it and then you do not?” said Inspector Willard.

  We dared not say. What we had seen, or rather not seen, had been not seen from a hidey-hole behind the wall. We had sworn an oath to Lucy—and through Lucy to James—that we would not tell of the secret passage. We could not admit that we had spied on the police during their private examination of a crime scene! Hector and I looked at Lucy. Would she confess our transgression to the inspector? But no, she had missed her turn! She did not know what we had noticed. An object not sitting on a table wasn’t something a person could eavesdrop on.

  The silence was becoming more awkward with every passing moment.

  “The magnifying glass,” said Lucy, “belongs on the desk with the silver pens and penknife, all tho
se things with matching owl-y handles. It sits in a box made especially for it and lined with satin so it won’t get scratched.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s nice.”

  That’s nice? My mind was scrabbling to think of how to change the subject. Inspector Willard and Grannie Jane both were watching me. My cheeks got warmer by the second.

  “What I want to know,” said Lucy, “is whether the pirate dagger is the one that belonged to Mr. Corker’s costume? And why was he stabbed in the back if he’d already been killed in the neck?”

  “Lucy,” I said.

  “What makes you presume the cut to his neck was made before the other?” said the inspector. “Are you an infant genius in the matter of criminally induced blood flow?”

  Lucy saw her mistake, and flushed. “He was on his tummy,” she muttered. She glanced at me but then stared at the floor in what I assumed was deserved misery.

  “Why do I have the feeling that I have missed a bar of music?” said Inspector Willard.

  Hector sneezed. A trumpeting sort of sneeze. And then again, Aaa-choo!

  “Goodness,” said Grannie. “The boy is quite unwell. If that is all for now, Inspector? I believe we need to make a lemon-ginger toddy for young Hector.”

  “I am certain he will survive a few more minutes, Mrs. Morton,” said Inspector Willard. “I’d like to—”

  A sharp rap and the door opened. Sergeant Shaw poked his head around, though of course we weren’t meant to know his name.

  “Pardon the intrusion, Detective Inspector. Mr. Sivam does indeed seem to have left the premises. The box that held this famous emerald is empty. There is also some dispute about moving the deceased. Her ladyship wishes it gone, but the footmen are inexperienced with the stretcher—”

  I giggled. “So, there it remains,” I said.

  Grannie Jane clucked her tongue at me, though I knew that secretly she appreciated a good pun.

  “Her ladyship,” said Sergeant Shaw, “is, er, not delighted.”