I Saw Him Die

by Andrew Wilson

  “You don’t think that—” He stopped himself as he tried to read my expression. “Surely, you can’t believe that—”

  “I’m afraid I’m not quite sure what to believe,” I replied. “We know that Robin Kinmuir didn’t die of an accidental gunshot wound inflicted by his nephew. It seems as though James Kinmuir had no motive for wanting his uncle dead, as he knew about his enormous debts. But, interestingly, today I learnt that the only other person out there on the moor that day, the same person—you—who was supposedly keeping watch on our potential victim, does have a motive for wanting Robin Kinmuir out of the way. And, significantly, that same person not only had a motive—to silence a man who was on the point of blabbing about his time with the Secret Intelligence Service—but he also had the opportunity.”

  “Have you quite finished?” Davison asked, unable to keep a note of sarcasm out of his voice.

  “Well, I could go on, but—”

  “Yes, I’m sure you could,” he said wryly. “No wonder you’re able to write those fiendish books of yours. Your imagination really is quite something.”

  “So you mean to say that you had nothing to do with the death of Robin Kinmuir?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” said Davison. “It’s a nice theory of yours, and I can see why you put two and two together and got five, but—”

  “I don’t think that’s quite called for.”

  “You’re right, that was rather below the belt,” he said, twisting the cord of his dressing gown. There was a sparkle in his eyes now, a sense of mischief that began to melt away my misgivings. “But you’ve got every right to question me,” he said, more seriously now. “And indeed Hartford did express his displeasure at Kinmuir’s intention to write his memoirs.”

  “Do you know if he’s written anything?”

  “I’m not sure, but clearly we should search Kinmuir’s papers to find out.”

  I looked at him, assessing him afresh. “And neither you nor your associates tried to silence Kinmuir?”

  “No, not at all,” he said.

  “But I don’t understand: If you had nothing to hide, why were you behaving so oddly today?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shifty eyes. Unable to look at me. Acting as if I weren’t there.”

  “Oh, yes, that,” he said. “Those awful sisters, the Frith-Strattons, cornered me after lunch and started asking questions about our relationship. They seemed to have got it into their silly, sentimental heads that we are not cousins. Either that or we are cousins, but we are more than cousins, if you see what I mean.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “There’s something decidedly odd about them, particularly the one who calls herself May,” he said. “Anyway, I could feel their eyes watching me—and you—and I had to put them off the track. I couldn’t risk them finding out about what we were really doing here.”

  “So, you gave me the cold shoulder?”

  “Yes, if you like.”

  “Well, I wish you had told me before embarking on this silent treatment.” I thought it was about time I got my own back. I gave him a flirtatious look and took a step closer. “Perhaps the Frith-Strattons thought we’d had a lovers’ tiff.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s often the way with people in love, isn’t it?”

  Davison had started to blush a little. “Is it?”

  “All that pent-up passion comes out during an argument and then the pair can’t help themselves, which is soon followed by a tremendous sulk.”

  He took a few strides around the bedroom. I had clearly worried him. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I have given them the wrong idea. Oh, dear. I wonder what I should do…”

  The pained expression on Davison’s face, together with the strain of continuing with the tease, proved too much for me and I burst into laughter.

  “Is something funny?”

  “You, that’s all,” I said, clapping my hand over my mouth.

  “Well, I’m pleased I’ve given you a little amusement,” he said rather stiffly.

  “I’m only pulling your leg,” I said. “Anyway, tomorrow I’ll have a word with them and talk a little about my real husband-to-be.” I thought of Max and wondered what he was doing. I would write to him care of his friends, telling him of my relaxing time at the hotel in Broadford. I couldn’t let him know what I was really up to.

  “Tomorrow I’m due to talk to Inspector Hawkins,” said Davison. “I’m sure Hartford or someone from the agency must have told him, but it’s best to fill him in on our true purpose here. Otherwise he might come up with some extraordinary idea that either I, or”—breaking off to look at me with a mock-horrified stare—“God forbid, perhaps even you, might have been responsible for the murder of Robin Kinmuir.”

  I left Davison in good humor and went back to my own room. The night was quiet, the wind nothing but a low murmur outside the house. I settled myself in the chair by the bureau in the corner. From a drawer I took out a sheet of paper and picked up my fountain pen, but just as I was about to start writing a letter to Max, something made me walk over to the window.

  I opened the curtains and saw the moon reflected on the surface of the loch. The water was still, but I had heard that it was at least a hundred feet deep. Perhaps it was this—the contrast between the superficial appearance of the water and the reality of its murky depths—that made me think of another quote from a Shakespeare play, from Hamlet. Just because Davison was charming, just because he made me laugh, did that necessarily mean he was telling the truth? I knew, perhaps better than most, how even the nicest of people could hide deadly secrets. Was Davison lying to me? And what of Mrs. Buchanan? She was an actress, a woman adept at pretending. And what of the other guests? What did I know about them? Practically nothing. The words from the play repeated themselves over and over in my mind. Finally, I took out my notebook and wrote them down at the top of a clean page:

  That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

  NINE

  It had been this very observation—this knowledge that good looks or surface allure could mask something darker—which had made me fearful of embarking on any new love affairs. After what had happened with Archie, who had been both the handsomest and the most selfish of men, I had become nervous. The divorce from him had left me feeling as though I walked about the world bearing an invisible badge of shame.

  When I first met Max Mallowan earlier in the year in Ur, in southern Iraq, I did not see him as a potential mate but merely as a nice, quiet, Oxford-educated young man. I never suspected he would look twice at an old maid such as me. I suppose the fourteen-year age difference between us—and my assumption that we were more like aunt and nephew than anything else—meant that from the very beginning I felt relaxed in his company. I was immediately taken by his polite manner, and when he was given the task of showing me some of the sites of the ancient land, he accepted with pleasure.

  I remember the lack of embarrassment I felt as we stripped down to our underclothes to bathe in that lake in the desert just outside Ukhaidir. After enjoying that blissful swim we dressed and were ready to continue our journey, but the car had become covered by the desert sands during our time in the water and refused to start. There was no point causing a fuss, I thought, and so I waited for the situation to be resolved, taking shelter in the shadow of the vehicle. Later, Max told me that it was during those few unbearably hot hours, when I endured the uncomfortable circumstances without complaint, that he decided that I was the woman for him. Although I had no awareness of this at the time, it was then that he made up his mind that I would make the perfect wife.

  He was considerate, too. There was that awful night at the police post in Kerbala when I needed to use the lavatory. Max, ever the gentleman, had insisted that if I needed any help during the night that I should call on him. Although I was desperate not to, I had no choice, and the dear thing managed to secure a lamp from a policeman and escorted me in the da
rkness, waiting outside until I had finished. But he had shown his real strength of character on the journey home. The plan was for the four of us—Leonard and Katharine Woolley, who led the archaeological expedition in Ur; Max, who was Leonard’s assistant; and myself—to travel back from Iraq to England via Aleppo, Athens, and Delphi. But soon after arriving in Greece I received a batch of telegrams informing me that my daughter, Rosalind, had been taken seriously ill at school with pneumonia. Luckily my sister, Madge, was on hand to care for her at her home, Abney Hall in Cheshire. If that wasn’t bad enough, I then fell over in the street and managed to tear the ligaments in my ankle, making it impossible for me to put one foot in front of the other.

  Max, with that kind, self-effacing manner of his, immediately offered to forgo the delights of sightseeing in Greece and accompany me back to England on the Orient Express. He said he would do everything for me, support me as I hobbled along, bring food from the dining car to my cabin, even bandage my ankle. I was fraught with worry, but he managed to take my mind off my anxieties over Rosalind’s condition. He chatted about his family—his father, Frederick, and his mother, Marguerite, and his grandmother who was the famous French opera singer, Marthe Duvivier. He told me too of his school, Lancing College near Brighton, and his time at New College, Oxford.

  Was there a chance that Max might have met James Kinmuir and Rufus Phillips at Oxford? Max was born in 1904—the difference in our ages still brought a blush of shame to my cheek—and the two young men looked roughly the same kind of age. But even if they had been contemporaries, there was no possibility of writing to Max to ask for more information. My intelligence work had to remain a secret. I just hoped they didn’t know him, or at least speak to me of him. I couldn’t bear the repressed sniggers that surely would come when they realized that one of their acquaintances at university was about to marry an older woman.

  Indeed, I was astonished by it myself. Max had paid me a few compliments during our friendship. I think he enjoyed my company. Yet, when his proposal came—back in England, after I had learnt that Rosalind had recovered—the approach was an enormous surprise. I considered that we were nothing more than good friends. I thought of every reason why we should not marry and told him so. He was so much younger than me. He was a Roman Catholic. Surely he wouldn’t want to burden himself with me.

  Then there were the private reasons I didn’t want to express. My reluctance to allow a man to get close to me. My fears over what had happened with Archie. There was a line in Psalm 55, its words standing as a warning about the sting of betrayal at the hands not of an enemy but “my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.” That was what had happened with my first husband. I wasn’t sure I could endure it if I was forced to experience such a deception for the second time. My sister too had been against the match with Max. The scenes she had caused when I had first told her about the romance… The tears and the raised voices! But, despite everything, and all the arguments—not least those I had rehearsed in my own mind—I had said yes. In a few weeks’ time, on 11 September, we would be man and wife. I smiled at this thought, and enjoyed it for a moment, before a shadow darkened my mind.

  I was living in a house with a murderer.

  TEN

  The method by which someone commits a murder often serves as a clue in itself: for instance, a poisoner will have a different personality to someone who uses a knife or a gun. The choice of poison—whether it’s arsenic or belladonna, cyanide or veronal—can also be indicative. Often the reasoning is banal: what a killer happened to have to hand, such as fly papers from which arsenic can be extracted. However, sometimes this information can help track down the killer. I remembered the 1924 case of the Blue Anchor Hotel murder, which was overseen by William Kenward, the same policeman who investigated my disappearance two years after that.

  The case focused around the universal themes of sex and lust. A Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Vaquier, was having an affair with a married woman, Mabel Jones, and he wanted to dispose of her husband, Alfred, of the Blue Anchor Hotel in Byfleet, Surrey. Each morning Alfred, who was a heavy drinker, was partial to taking some bromide powders in water to help with his hangover. One day Jean-Pierre added strychnine to the drink and Alfred died an agonizing death only hours later. Obviously Jean-Pierre was not that bright a man, because when he bought the strychnine at the pharmacy—under a false name—he wrote in the shop’s register that he wanted the substance for various wireless experiments. The mistake led Kenward straight to Vaquier, who was by trade… a wireless operator. I often thought of this case because the method of murder bore a certain similarity to the one I described in my first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I just hoped that Vaquier hadn’t got the idea from my book.

  It was frustrating to try to begin the investigations into the death of Robin Kinmuir without the knowledge of exactly how he died. Although Davison pressed Inspector Hawkins for details, he refused to give anything away. The detective, however, did accept our presence at the lodge; in addition to the statement provided by Davison outlining his work for the Secret Intelligence Service, it’s likely that he’d received news from higher up. Yet the inspector was professional enough to continue to treat us as ordinary guests. In front of the others, he regarded us with the same level of suspicion that he cast upon the rest of the occupants of Dallach Lodge.

  Hawkins began the process of investigation by announcing that he was going to interview each of the guests, commandeering the library for the purpose. I would have liked to have hidden behind a door to listen to the testimonies, but I couldn’t run the risk of being discovered. Hawkins, however, did promise to share anything of significance with us. Unbeknownst to the inspector, Davison and I intended to do a little detective work of our own.

  “What do you say to taking advantage of these interviews?” Davison had asked during our customary stroll after breakfast.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, it makes sense that while Hawkins is talking to, say, Mr. Peterson, we steal into his room to take a look around.”

  “Do you think that’s wise?” I asked.

  “It may prove not to be so, but I don’t think we’ll get a better chance, do you?”

  I considered this for a moment. “No, I don’t suppose we will. But we’re going to do this without telling Hawkins?”

  “Yes. I don’t think he would understand that some of our tactics are different to those employed by the ordinary police.”

  “Quite,” I said. “But aren’t you forgetting one important thing?”

  “Which is…?”

  “Some of the guests may have chosen to lock their doors. And to open a door, we need a key.”

  “Blast it!” cursed Davison, clearly irritated by his momentary lapse into slow-wittedness. “We’ll have to forget that, then. What a shame. I thought we were onto a rather good plan there.”

  I thought back to something I had seen, something I had heard. “I think I know of a way,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “Simkins, the butler. I’ve seen him around the house carrying a large bunch of keys, which I presume open the doors to the guest rooms. He’s also a drunk—or, rather, a drinker. I noticed when we first arrived that his hands were shaking as he held the tray of champagne. And then the Frith-Stratton sisters said that they noticed that his breath smelt of whisky.”

  “Is that so?” Davison’s eyes brightened. He knew what I was going to suggest. “So, you think that if we leave a little temptation in his way, then perhaps…?”

  “He might take a little too much and forget where he placed the keys to the rooms,” I said. I could easily have added that we could slip a little something into the whisky to make him sleep even more soundly, but I thought it best not to do so at this stage. There was a doctor in the house. And an inspector. And I might need to resort to serious measures such as these at a later date.

  “Now I’ve got a question for you,” I said. I didn’t want Davison to think I knew
all the answers. After all, he was a man. And men—even men such as Davison—could only stand so much female superiority. “How will we know when we should vacate a guest’s room?”

  “I think it’s best to keep the searches brief,” he said, pleased with himself that he was back in charge now. “A quick in and out to look for anything suspicious. And one person should always stand outside the room, serving as a kind of sentinel. Why don’t I do the rooms occupied by the men and you can do the ladies’?”

  “Very well,” I said. “And what about Robin Kinmuir’s room? When will we get a chance to look around that?”

  “That young sergeant who came with Hawkins—Dedham—is still standing guard outside, which is irritating, but understandable.”

  “Do we know whom Hawkins is going to interview first?”

  “No, not yet, but I’ve made a plan of the rooms,” Davison said, taking out a scrap of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  He had drawn a rough plan of the first floor, divided into sections. Each of the squares was annotated with a set of initials to correspond with the name of the guest. Davison ran his finger along the drawing as he continued to explain the geography of the house.

  “If we work anticlockwise, starting in the east wing, we have Eliza Buchanan, then the room used by the doctor, then James Kinmuir. Next are the quarters of Rufus Phillips, which look over the front, as do the rooms of Vivienne Passerini and Simon Peterson. Also at the front there is my room and yours, which is a corner room, and in the west wing we have Robin Kinmuir’s. Then a slightly larger room, which is occupied by the Frith-Stratton sisters. I haven’t drawn a plan yet of the servants’ quarters, which are on the floor above. Up there I believe that, in addition to old Mrs. Kinmuir, we have the cook, Mrs. Baillie; the butler, Simkins; and the two maids. Not only has there been a murder in the house, but they are in need of finding new employment. The inheritances that have come their way will not last forever—that’s if they get anything at all.”