The Last Mrs. Summers

by Rhys Bowen

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “It’s awful. I had to pee into a bucket,” she said. “And I got a bowl of disgusting porridge for breakfast and there is no mirror for me to put on my makeup. I’m sure I look a fright.”

  Only Belinda would worry about her makeup in such circumstances.

  “Did you manage to talk to Daddy?” she asked.

  “He’s away. At your hunting lodge in Scotland, I understand,” I said. “I sent a telegram but I’ve no idea how long it will take to reach him.”

  “Oh damn and blast. That stupid hunting lodge. It’s miles from anywhere.”

  “What about the solicitor? Did you telephone him?”

  “I did and he’s coming down today. I hope he can arrange bail. But how can he do anything? They’ll tell him the facts and he’ll think I’m guilty too.” She reached out to touch my hand but a cough from the attendant made her sit up straight again. “What are we going to do, Georgie?”

  “Well, I have one piece of news. I’m not sure if it’s good or not, but you remember the dotty old man? His body washed up yesterday. They said he was bashed about a bit on the rocks but I wonder if any of his wounds might have been the result of a blow to the head.”

  “Crikey. So you’re saying that somebody killed him? Why would that help me?” she asked.

  “Well, if the person who killed Tony also killed him, you had the perfect alibi.”

  “Not if we don’t know when he was killed. It’s probably hard to tell whether bodies that have been in salt water have been there twelve hours or three days. So who do you think might have killed him? You must have had time to think this through by now, Georgie.”

  I leaned closer to her, although I was sure the policeman could hear everything we were saying. “I’m wondering if Rose planned the whole thing. She was so insistent in inviting you, wasn’t she? And going on about how she was scared of Tony? What if this was all one large and glorious scheme to get what she wanted? What if she had come down before and pushed Jonquil off the cliff and the old man had seen her? Remember how scared he was of ‘her’?”

  Belinda nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of ways that might tie Jonquil and Tony and me together. Was I only brought in as an alibi? And do you really think Rose could have managed to rush upstairs, kill Tony and get back down again?”

  “It’s just possible,” I said. “There is a convenient back staircase. If she came up, spotted him coming down the hall to your room with just a bathrobe on, perhaps she might have stabbed him. . . .”

  “And just happened to have a handy dagger with her?” Belinda said.

  “You know what else,” I said. “The wagon is missing from the nursery. The one with all the toys in it. It was quite big and sturdy for a child’s plaything, wasn’t it? I think it might have been used to transport Tony down the hall from the bathroom. I think it’s possible he was killed in the bath.”

  “But someone would have had to clean up the blood,” Belinda said. “You can’t stab somebody in the bath and not have a lot of blood around.”

  I nodded agreement. “Mrs. Mannering cleaned up that bathroom,” I said, “but that was the next morning. If it was Rose who killed him, she would have had plenty of opportunity to dispose of bloody towels before the police checked bathrooms. There was what looked like a wet towel on the bonfire. I didn’t have a chance to see if there was any blood on it.”

  “We’re never going to be able to prove anything, are we?” Belinda said in a small voice. “We can throw ideas around all we like, but there is absolutely no proof. If Rose killed him, then it’s only natural that her fingerprints would be everywhere in the house. And apparently nobody has come forward to say they saw anything.” There was a silence. The clock on the wall ticked loudly. “I was awake all last night, lying on that hard bed. Trying to make sense of things. And you know what kept going through my mind? The only thing that links the three of us was Colin.”

  “Colin? The boy who drowned all those years ago?”

  She nodded. “We were all partly responsible for his death.”

  “But it was an accident. You didn’t know he couldn’t swim. And you were just a child, following older children. Nobody could have thought you were responsible.”

  “I suppose not,” she said. “Although, according to Tony, Jonquil did say later that she knew he couldn’t swim.”

  “And how many years have gone by? Twelve? If someone in his family wanted revenge, why wait this long?”

  “Because we weren’t in the same place before?” Belinda said. She sighed. “I know, it’s a stupid thought and I don’t know why I came up with it. But at this moment I’m willing to grasp at straws.”

  “What was his last name?” I asked. “The least we can do is see if any member of his family has been in the area.”

  “I can’t even remember that.” Belinda stared out past me. “An interesting name. Different. Huckleberry? Something like that.” She waved a finger excitedly. “Hucklebee, that was it. Colin Hucklebee. I remember Jonquil making some sort of chant about it and Colin going red. They liked to tease him.”

  “And you?”

  “I was sort of a background player. I suppose I went along with it. Jago was the only one who stood up for Colin.”

  “Jago? He’s—” I started to say something, then remembered I was sworn to silence.

  “He’s what?”

  “Remember you thought he was up to no good?” I said. “That night he came to the cottage he was out checking his lobster pots because someone had been helping themselves.”

  “That’s what he says,” Belinda said. “I suppose I had better give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “He was very concerned when he heard about you, you know.”

  “Was he?” She tried to sound unimpressed by this but I knew her well enough to see the spark in her eyes.

  “So back to business. Colin Hucklebee. Where did he live, do you remember that?”

  “The Midlands somewhere. He had a Midlands accent. We teased him about that. Birmingham?” Then she waved her hand. “Look, just forget it. It’s clutching at straws, as I said. It’s all hopeless.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I could see all too easily that the police might question Tony’s friends in London who might remember about Tony boasting about spending the night with Belinda. How could I promise to help her when I had no way of proving that Rose wanted her husband dead? We could hunt for the wagon, I thought. There might be a useful fingerprint on it, or even the fact that it had been hurled into a ravine or hidden beneath the bushes might make the police believe that Belinda wasn’t responsible. But then Belinda could equally have killed Tony elsewhere and transported his body. It seemed hopeless.

  “I’m not sure what to do,” I said. “Should I find a hotel in Truro so that I can be near you, or should I keep on staying at White Sails so that I can be around in case anything useful happens or your father turns up?”

  “You’re staying at White Sails?”

  “Well, I could hardly stay on at Trewoma, could I? Rose and her mother glaring at me suspiciously and a murderer among them too. At least this way I’m close by.”

  “Very brave of you, old thing,” Belinda said. “Especially now we know that anyone can creep in from the cave below.”

  “That is a concern,” I said, thinking of Darcy’s arms around me last night. “But there is nowhere else nearby, is there?”

  “I suppose not. But how will I get in touch with you if I am suddenly taken up to London?”

  “You can telephone Trengilly. Jago knows where I am.”

  “And he’s really concerned about me?”

  “He is,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but you’ve had your allotted time,” the policeman said. “You have to leave now.”

  I hardly thought this
was the right time to tell him that I was “my lady” or at the very least “Mrs.” and not “miss.” It didn’t seem worth worrying about in the grand scheme of things.

  “Am I allowed to hug my friend?” I asked.

  The policeman’s expression softened. “Not really. Well, go on, then. I’ll turn the other way.”

  I was just giving Belinda a hug when heavy footsteps approached and the door was opened. Inspector Watt came in, followed by the sergeant.

  “Lady Georgiana,” he said. “You’re still here. I do wish you’d take my advice and go home.”

  “I’m not leaving until my friend has been proven innocent,” I said.

  “As to that . . .” He paused, frowning at Belinda. “Interesting development.”

  I thought he was going to say what Belinda feared—that the police had contacted Tony’s London friends and someone remembered his affair with Belinda. But instead he said, “They’ve just concluded the autopsy on the dead man, and it seems that someone tried to drown him. Remember he had wet hair? Well, he also had water in his lungs. Not enough to have killed him, according to the police surgeon, but maybe to have rendered him unconscious.”

  “Well, that lets Miss Warburton-Stoke off the hook, doesn’t it?” I said.

  “How do you figure that, Lady Georgiana? The lady has confessed herself that she was taking a bath. So I’m thinking, knowing what these aristocrats get up to, what if they were in the bathtub together . . . what if things got . . . rather playful and she saw her chance to hold his head under the water?”

  “But you still believe that he was stabbed on the bed and not transported from the bathroom already dead?” I asked.

  “From the amount of blood on the bed I’d say he was alive and stabbed there,” he said.

  “Presumably you’d be able to check the bathroom for microscopic amounts of blood that had not been wiped away to confirm this?”

  “We could do so, certainly, but I’ve seen stab wounds before. And if he’d been stabbed in the bathroom we’d also find blood in the corridor. My men did check that out.”

  “So what you are saying,” I began carefully, making sure I presented this perfectly, “is that my friend, having half killed Mr. Summers while in the bathtub with him, decided not to finish him off there and make it look like an accident but dragged him the length of the hall and stabbed him in dramatic fashion on her bed, thus implicating herself and nobody else?” I paused. “Really, Inspector!” I laughed. “Any defense lawyer would make mincemeat of that.”

  His face had gone rather red. “Put like that you do have a point. I suppose the whole thing comes down to how easy it would have been to get him down that corridor. It’s a long way from the nearest bathroom.”

  “It certainly is,” I said. “But I think I might be able to help you.” And I told him what I had observed about the wagon, also about the wet towel on the bonfire. “I think someone might have thrown them out of the window to be retrieved later,” I said.

  “Since you have been doing a bit of deducing and snooping,” he said, “who do you think might be responsible if it is not your friend?”

  “If you are suggesting that Tony Summers almost died, probably passed out, in the bathtub, then we have to look at who would want to implicate Belinda,” I said. “If he’d been found floating in his bath, dead, it could have been perceived as an accident and certainly hard to prove it was murder, so the killer would have got away with it easily. Why risk taking him the length of the hall and stabbing him on Belinda’s bed if not to involve her in the crime? Until now we have thought that somebody specifically wanted to kill Tony Summers, but what if that person equally wanted to kill Belinda Warburton-Stoke?”

  “And who might come to mind, in your opinion?”

  “The only person who had means and motive is his wife, Rose,” I said, and I told him about the strange confession that Tony wanted to kill her, my own encounter on the cliff top and the gleam in her eye when she said she was now a rich widow.

  DI Watt nodded. “Certainly she’d have had the best chance of catching him unawares in his bath, but why would she dislike Miss Warburton-Stoke? You said yourself that she hadn’t seen you since childhood, didn’t you?”

  “I can’t think, Detective Inspector,” Belinda said. “Unless I was the privileged one and she was the servant’s child and that had always rankled.”

  “Or she might be off her head, sir,” the sergeant suggested. It was the first time he had spoken and he blushed scarlet when we all looked at him. “Perhaps she enjoys killing people. Some do, don’t they?”

  “Not many, in my experience,” the inspector replied. “In the cases I’ve followed there has been a compelling reason for murder—fear or greed or vengeance. Not many people kill for the sport.”

  “In any case, Inspector,” I said, “I take it this means that my friend is no longer your prime suspect and is free to go?”

  He scratched his nose, considering this. “I suppose I have to say that she would no longer be our prime suspect, Lady Georgiana, given the facts that have been discussed this morning. However, this case is far from solved. I am willing to release her from custody at this moment but I don’t want her leaving the vicinity for the time being. Is that clear?”

  “Oh yes, Inspector,” Belinda said. “And anything we can do to help?”

  “I think it might be better if you don’t go near Trewoma while we are conducting our inquiries,” he said hastily. “Let’s hope that the lady breaks down and confesses or someone at that house knows something, because frankly this whole thing still is a long way from making sense to me.”

  Chapter 30

  OCTOBER 20

  IN AND AROUND TRURO

  I am so happy. Belinda is free. Now all we need to do is to have Rose confess and we can go home. If there are no further complications, that is.

  “So what do we do now?” Belinda asked as we stepped out into the fresh air. “I have my solicitor arriving from London today and then Daddy may show up as soon as he gets the telegram, if the wicked witch doesn’t burn it first.”

  “Oh surely not,” I said.

  “You don’t know my stepmother. She’ll think with me out of the way she’ll get my inheritance, even though it will probably go to horrid Uncle Francis. In fact if she was anywhere within a hundred miles of Cornwall she’d be my prime suspect. But the Highlands of Scotland are a wee bit far to come and commit a murder overnight.” She sighed. “So do you think I should stay on in Truro?”

  “I think that’s probably wise,” I said. “You’ll have to meet your solicitor from the London train, won’t you?”

  “Oh yes. Gosh, he’s going to be annoyed that he’s come all this way for nothing.”

  “Nonsense. He’ll probably spend a couple of days at a nice Cornish hotel and put it on your bill,” I said.

  “So I should stay somewhere nearby, you think?”

  I nodded. “Remember, the inspector will want to know where you are. We’ll get you settled in but I have something I have to do back near Trewoma.”

  “You’re not going to confront Rose?”

  I laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going near the actual house but there is one thing I have to do.” When she gave me a questioning look I went on, “I can’t tell you what it is yet, but it may be helpful.”

  “You’re being enigmatic. If it’s something to do with the case, why can’t you tell me?”

  “I’ll tell you later, I promise,” I said. “Just trust me.”

  “So I suppose my hunch about Colin is now quite irrelevant? We shouldn’t bother mentioning it to the police?”

  “Let’s hold off for the moment,” I said. “If Rose confesses, then we don’t need to go any further. So why don’t we find you a hotel near the station? You can pop in and tell the police where to find you.”

  “You’ll come
back after you’ve done . . . what you said you wanted to do?”

  “If necessary I’ll stay at White Sails,” I said.

  “That is above the call of duty,” she said.

  “I’ll survive.”

  “What if Jago decides to visit again in the middle of the night?”

  “That could be interesting,” I said and gave her a challenging smile.

  “You’re a married woman.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the occasional middle-of-the-night visit.”

  “I’m getting worried about you, darling,” she said. “I hope you’re not turning into me. Poor Darcy.”

  “Don’t worry. All is well, Belinda,” I said. I had realized, on the way to Truro, that I could not tell her that Darcy was in the area, nor could I risk her seeing him. If I told her he was undercover, she’d probably forget or wave or say something like “nice disguise.” I couldn’t compromise his safety. I was just pondering these things as we walked down the steps from the county court when Belinda gave a little gasp—“Oh, look who’s here”—and I looked up, expecting to see a distinguished lawyer or even her father. Instead, Jago was taking the steps two at a time toward us.

  “They let you out,” he said, beaming at her. “Have they decided you’re not the guilty one?”

  “It seems so,” Belinda said. “So what brings you into town?”

  “I had to drive one of the party to the station unexpectedly so I thought I’d pop by and see how you were doing and if there was anything I could do, as a local, you know.”

  “How very kind of you,” she said. “As you can see, new evidence has come to light and I am free.”

  “So you’ll be returning to London, I suppose, after all this unpleasantness,” he said and I could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  “No, I’m not allowed to leave the vicinity yet,” she said. “And I’m still not sure that I want to abandon my plans for White Sails. It could be made into quite a charming little place, couldn’t it? If I could shut off those stairs from the cave, that is.”