“Come with me, Aggie,” Marjorie said. We left the others and went along for another goodbye.
“Thank you for seeing me, your ladyship,” said Annabelle. She looked at me with the glimmer of a smile. “Good morning, Miss Morton.”
Her face was scrubbed clean, her hair swept back in a low knot. She wore a plain gray dress as if she were playing the part of a nurse or a nun.
“I understand that Mr. Sivam is regaining his health more quickly than the doctor expected. That is good news, and perhaps due to the good care you seem to offer all your guests,” said Annabelle. “I want to thank you for your kindness to me, and your patience with all of this, Lady Greyson. And for making arrangements with the school in Tiverton to accept our caravan full of props and costumes in the new year. And for feeding me! Even when you all thought I was crooked, and—”
“Oh, Miss Day,” said Marjorie. The injustice of Annabelle’s situation was like a fishbone in her throat, I knew. “You were wrongfully accused and kept confined. I would not be so gracious in the same circumstance.”
“I have a confession to make,” said Annabelle. She wrung her hands and looked at the fire and took an age to continue. “I had a horrible suspicion about Sebastian from the first moment I saw Roger lying there in a pool of blood. I pretended to faint, so that I could talk to him before I said or did anything in public that might lead to more trouble.”
“Goodness,” said Marjorie.
“That was acting?” I said. “You were very convincing.”
Annabelle shot me a half-smile. “Sebastian carried me upstairs, where I meant to learn the truth. But then Mrs. Sivam was there too, so I had to keep pretending that I was conked out.”
She sighed. “None of it seems real. We came as a merry band of troubadours, playing make-believe for our livelihood. I’m leaving with one friend dead and the other suspected of his murder. How can I…” Her poise faltered as her eyes welled. She shook her head so hard that tears flew, one landing on my hand. Marjorie and I both put our arms around her to make a warm and awkward embrace.
“The thing is…” Annabelle pulled away. “I’ve been thinking about Mrs. Sivam pacing about my room while I lay on my bed, pretending to be in a dead faint—”
A tap at the door and the butler spoke. “Sergeant Shaw is here to accompany Miss Day to the rail station, my lady. She’s catching the four fifty to Paddington and the snowy road will make the going slow.”
“Thank you, Pressman,” said Marjorie.
Annabelle used a hankie to dry her eyes. “I wish I’d met Miss Truitt,” she said. “It’s dreadful that Sebastian chased her off, while she has no one to share her anguish.”
“Goodness, I feel the same way,” said Marjorie. “Please let us know if you locate her! We’ll provide a stone for the poor man, but I’d like to give her—”
“I expect Miss Truitt has gone away,” I said. And will not be seen again.
“My lady,” said Pressman. “The train.”
Annabelle left. Marjorie stoked the fire and settled down to think about tomorrow’s menus.
I went to find Hector and Lucy, who were playing Schoolmaster in the conservatory. Lucy was keeping score using the pencil and notebook from her stocking. Hector wore a stupendous false mustache, which I knew Marjorie had ordered for him especially from a theatrical costumer, at my suggestion.
Grannie sat knitting on a bench, apparently ignoring them.
“Who was Henry the Eighth’s third wife?” said Lucy.
“Jane Seymour,” said Hector. “In what country is invented the saxophone?”
“How would I know that?” said Lucy. “Awful, squawky thing. Hello, Aggie. How did it go, saying goodbye to Miss Day?”
“It was sad,” I said.
Hector tugged off his mustache. “It tickles,” he said. “I will trim for better comfort.”
“Where was the saxophone invented?” I asked.
“In Belgium, naturellement,” said Hector. “Also, roller skates and cricket—though the English, they argue with this claim.”
“I should think so!” said Lucy, hands on hips. “It is our national sport!”
“Hector knows everything,” I reminded her. “Not wise to play Schoolmaster with someone who has all the answers.”
“Alas,” said Hector, “I am occasionally confounded by certain matters, such as the mystery of the Echo Emerald.”
“Stop worrying,” said Lucy. “Mr. Mooney has practically confessed to stealing it!”
“And yet,” said Hector, “we do not know where it is. How does he steal a jewel and still not possess it?”
Grannie’s needles stopped moving for an instant before continuing without quite the same racket.
“I agree,” I said to Hector. “We have too many wrong-shaped pieces in this puzzle.”
“Mr. Mooney is eating soup when Stephen is pushed,” said Hector. “Who does the pushing?”
“Mr. Corker’s boots fly magically away from his body,” I said, “and land upstairs. He is killed with one knife and stabbed with another.”
“Mr. Mooney is not arrived at Owl Park when a thief in the night attempts to steal the emerald,” said Hector. “Who is this thief?”
“Frederick?” said Lucy. “But didn’t the police decide he couldn’t have?”
“Maaaybe,” I said, “Mr. Sivam woke up in a strange house and decided—just the way Mr. Mooney guessed—to put the fake emerald in the fancy box and keep the real one in his pocket. Only he accidentally disturbed his wife while he was creeping around and she began to scream. He was too embarrassed to tell the truth. What do you think of that idea?”
“There was a boy in my church choir,” said Grannie Jane, “whose name was Arnold Hollow.” She peered at the row she was knitting. “Quite an apt name, if you had known him.”
She pushed stitches along her needle and got distracted counting them.
“Grannie?” I nudged. “You were telling us about Arnold?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was going to mention the imaginary bully.”
We waited.
“It suited Arnold very well to be the victim of an aggressor who had always just departed or who was waiting by the bridge out of our sight, you see? The bully often took the paper sack containing his sandwich, or threatened to make off with his cap after lessons.”
“But he wasn’t real?” I said.
“It took a long while for us to realize,” said Grannie Jane. “We would share our lunches, or walk him across the bridge all the way to his lane, and he would go his merry way until the next time.”
“He was hungry,” said Lucy.
“It is the boy’s method of having an extra portion of food?” said Hector.
“It was the boy’s method of having more than his share of attention,” said Grannie Jane. “Though why he elected to cringe for the sake of momentary pity, I do not understand.”
“Maybe he was lonely,” I said.
Grannie smiled and nodded. “Yes. A lonely boy who wanted so badly to have people care about him that he invented a threat.”
“Madame Morton,” said Hector. “This is a most useful observation.”
“I’m not certain I…” I said.
“If we think back…” He rubbed his temples with his fingertips. “If we look at only the facts, I believe there is no attempt to steal the jewel on the first night of our visit.”
“But that’s—” I caught myself before using the word impossible. Hector waited for me to catch up.
“If there was no attempt to steal the emerald…” I said, “that means Kitty Sivam was mistaken. She awoke from a nightmare and fancied there was an intruder lurking in the shadows of an unfamiliar room…”
“Or…” said Hector.
“Oh dear,” said Grannie Jane. The clicking of her needles had slowed down
considerably. “Arnold Hollow.”
I closed my eyes, remembering what Marjorie had told me about a girl named Oinks who squealed and squalled about an intruder in the greenhouse who no one else had seen—so that she might feel the warm glow of attention.
“Or,” I said, “Kitty Sivam is a liar.”
CHAPTER 37
AN UNEXPECTED TURN OF EVENTS
THUNDER RANG IN my head. “Does this mean…that Mr. Mooney and Kitty Sivam were…accomplices?”
Mr. Mooney’s last words to me suddenly took on a different color. I did not kill Roger Corker. What if that were true?
“Do you suppose…,” I said, “that Kitty Sivam is also a murderess?”
“Kitty Sivam?” said Lucy.
“The men, they are having an argument,” said Hector, “but not expecting it to become deadly, as they are longtime friends…”
“Except that Kitty doesn’t know or care about Mr. Corker,” I said. “To her, he is merely an obstacle. She stabs him with the paper knife and a heart of ice.”
“Mr. Mooney puts Mr. Corker’s dagger into the back,” said Hector, “because he wishes to disguise the real weapon and to confuse the police.”
“The wrong boots were upstairs,” I said, “because Kitty put them there! Was she trying to make her husband look guilty? And then, moments before he is to speak with the detective about seeing boots in the wrong place, Stephen is pushed down the stairs by a woman…”
“Kitty and Mr. Mooney are adorned with blood,” said Hector. “So Mr. Mooney kindly burns such evidence in his little grate.”
“He leaves his own boots with Mr. Corker,” I said, “not thinking about bunions, because wouldn’t it look odd to have a sock-footed corpse with no boots nearby?”
“Very odd,” said Lucy.
“He uses the magnifier,” said Hector, “and discovers that the jewel is false. He wishes so much to know where is the true emerald that he abducts Mr. Sivam, but does not tell the wife.”
Grannie Jane stopped knitting altogether and put her needles and wool back into their bag. “I wonder…” She squinted down at the watch pinned to her bodice. “Is Mrs. Sivam assisting her husband to heal while we sit here discussing her motive? Or is she extracting from him the location of the real Echo Emerald?”
Hector and I, with Lucy following (for a change), raced to find James and Marjorie, who were drinking tea with Inspector Willard in the drawing room.
“Please excuse that we are intruders,” said Hector. “But it is an urgent matter.”
“Listen! Listen!” Lucy hopped from foot to foot.
“We have a dire idea,” I said.
“Whatever can it be?” Marjorie plunked down her teacup.
“You must come with us,” I said.
“Now, Uncle James,” said Lucy, pulling on his arm.
“Is this a game of some sort?”
“Non, non!” said Hector.
“You mustn’t let Kitty leave,” I said. “She is part of the plot.”
“She what?” Inspector Willard rose from his chair as if its seat were suddenly alight.
We told them the quickest version we could manage.
Marjorie’s eyes got wider and wider. James’s eyes narrowed almost to slits.
They both began to mutter, “Of course! You’re perfectly right! It all makes horrible sense!”
The inspector was already at the door. I galloped after him, heart a-pounding, as Marjorie said she would go to sit with Grannie Jane. Hector and Lucy and James pursued us toward the Juliet suite.
Inspector Willard and Constable Worth were the only policemen who remained at Owl Park after the departure of Mr. Corker this morning. The constable stood at the top of the stairs and came to sharp attention at the sight of his hurrying superior.
“He seems to be awake again, sir,” murmured Constable Worth.
Indeed, as we approached in stealthy silence, I heard Mr. Sivam speaking—or rather, growling, for his voice was not yet his own, still having a rasp to it. We now were a clump of five, hovering just beyond where the Sivams could see from inside the room.
“Only you and I knew where the two stones were hidden,” Mr. Sivam was saying. “This confuses me, Kitty. If I had not been inspired to exchange one for the other—”
“I don’t know what you mean, Lakshay,” came Kitty’s voice, higher than usual, brittle almost.
James shooed us down the passage, where we stood beside the door to the second bedroom of the Juliet suite, Kitty’s door. This turned out to be a fortunate banishment.
“May I have a word, Mrs. Sivam?” The inspector tapped abruptly on the door frame. “Out here, if you will, to let your husband rest?”
We heard her say, “Certainly, Detective Inspector, I’ll be right with you.” We heard her footsteps click across the floor. We heard the connecting door between the two rooms whine slightly as she went through it.
Inspector Willard politely greeted Mr. Sivam, with James close behind.
“Lakshay, my friend!” cried James. “It does my heart good to hear your voice.”
The door beside us, right beside us, flew open. We startled; she flinched. Our presence was a nasty shock for Kitty Sivam. She pushed Hector aside in a desperate sweep, and stomped on Lucy’s foot so hard that Lucy fell over.
For half a moment, I could not move. But then—using a reliable villain-snaring technique—I put out my foot and tripped her. Hector pounced on her legs and held on while she kicked. I sat on her bottom until Constable Worth and then Inspector Willard stepped in to complete the arrest. James staggered away carrying a howling Lucy, to inform Marjorie that all was well.
All was not well, of course. Frederick and John were rallied to help the police contain a hissing, scratching Kitty Sivam. She was eventually put in the Avon Room and guarded by three men, tied to a chair with her own silk scarf, because her wrists were too delicate for the heavy handcuffs.
* * *
—
We were not permitted to witness the interview, but Inspector Willard was quite generous afterward with the grisly tale that Kitty Sivam had been provoked into telling.
Kitty Cartland first knew Sebastian Mooney five years ago, before she’d met Lakshay Sivam. They acted together in The Taming of the Shrew and then a musical piece where they sang romantic duets. They had a romance, but, as work in the theater meant separation at the end of every production, they eventually said goodbye. Their next encounter was a surprise, last spring, at a weekend party in a manor house near Lyme Regis.
“One of the houses,” Inspector Willard told us, “where a diamond bracelet was reported missing. Not the first in a series of jewelry thefts that coincided with the engagement of a theatrical troupe.”
Kitty was now married but already unhappy, a misfit in the cultured and elegant life that her husband was used to. She and Sebastian were delighted to find each other again, and began to meet whenever they could manage. When the Sivams traveled to Ceylon to visit Lakshay’s dying father, Kitty wrote to tell Sebastian of the priceless family emerald, and her intention of possessing it—with his help.
She staged a robbery attempt before the actors arrived, to avoid their being suspects. The next night, while Lakshay was sleeping, she took the emerald from its box and passed it to Sebastian, waiting at her door. He was set to depart with his theatrical companions the next morning and could easily remove the stolen gem from Owl Park before Lakshay knew it was missing. Her plan had gone exactly as Kitty had imagined, until she went downstairs to say goodbye to Sebastian in the library.
Roger Corker, snoozing in a chair with his boots off, had awoken to find Sebastian holding the emerald, and had challenged him. Kitty came in to find the men wrestling, and saw her careful plan fall apart at the hand of this drunken old actor. In a fury, she scooped up the paper knife from the desk and plunged it in, unkn
owingly accurate in severing the artery in his neck.
Her nightdress was heavily splashed with blood, her dainty bedsocks ruined. Sebastian handed her the dead man’s boots to wear upstairs, so as not to leave smears of blood on the floor. They made a hurried arrangement, and he came a few minutes later to receive a bundle of her bloodstained clothing, thrust into his hands before the door snapped shut. Her things were burned, she assumed, along with his shirt.
It had all gone so terribly, terribly wrong. She avoided a morning encounter with her husband by sitting in the conservatory, wondering whether these were the last flowers she would ever see. When the screams began, she prepared to act her part, of a concerned and loving wife.
Sebastian had pushed the emerald into Kitty’s hand right there in the library, with everyone arriving at the scene of the crime. It’s a fake, he’d whispered. Put it back.
A fake! The fake. Kitty was livid. Her husband, vexed with her for exhibiting the stone at the party, must have taken the precaution of secretly switching the stones—and accidentally outwitted her! It was too late to obey Sebastian’s instruction to return the copy to its box. Lakshay had already announced that it was missing! Putting it back would call attention to herself.
And then Lord Greyson asked her to assist the swooning actress. The moment Kitty entered the dingy little bedroom, she thought to hide the emerald there. She slid the jewel into the toe of Miss Day’s boot, not concerned with what happened next. Worthless to her, the fake gem might cause distracting trouble for Miss Annabelle Day—and so it did!
Kitty did not confess to Sebastian that she had hidden the gem. He was too fond of Miss Day and would object to using her this way. Let him be surprised. Far worse, in Kitty’s opinion, was that Sebastian had abducted Lakshay without telling her. After a day or two, when her husband had not been found, she began to suspect that Sebastian might be responsible. But had he gone so far as murder? There’d been no opportunity to meet privately. She could think of no reason for Lakshay to disappear—except to protect his precious emerald. But from whom? It occurred to her to fear his return, in case he now suspected her of trying to steal the gem. She had to keep up a show of worry for Lakshay, but she had been a professional actress. She was an excellent liar.
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