Lessons for Suspicious Minds

by Charlie Cochrane

  “I rather think we should, assuming Papa’s back by then. We’ll need his calming presence.” Jonty reached across to stroke Orlando’s hand. “That’s why I hoped you might indulge me . . .” He tipped his head towards the bed. “A sort of more pleasant version of Dutch courage.”

  “You must be the most ridiculous creature in the universe.” Orlando squeezed Jonty’s hand. “I’d kiss you if we weren’t in full view of two of the gardeners.”

  “That’s easily solved.” Jonty leaped up, pulling his friend with him. The wide space between the two sets of windows provided an ideal place for both an embrace and a long, languid kiss. A mobile kiss, which seemed to involve them slowly moving backwards, still with arms—and tongues—entwined, until Orlando felt something soft against the back of his legs. Before he could protest, a sharply executed manoeuvre, one Jonty had perfected with practice, had him lying on the bed, with Jonty’s tongue doing something incredible down the side of his neck.

  “Orlando!” The assault stopped abruptly, as Jonty rolled off him and sat up.

  “What? What’s happened?” Orlando looked at the door, convinced—in his romantic stupor—that somebody had walked in on them. Somebody who’d probably taken photographs and was even now arranging sale of the negatives.

  “I owe you an apology.”

  “Is that all you stopped kissing me up to say? I mean, it’s splendid to hear you actually admitting being at fault, but there’s a time and a place for everything.”

  “You’ve changed your tune.”

  Orlando declined to answer, concentrating on making himself decent again and straightening the bedclothes.

  “So you don’t want to know what I’m sorry about?” Jonty looked so smug, Orlando stopped halfway through smoothing the coverlet.

  “You can apologise to your heart’s content. I’m always happy to hear you show some contrition. But if Hayes walks in here and sees the state of this bed, don’t blame me.”

  “If Hayes walks in, he can listen to the apology as well. It may concern him. That blithering business with the bell, for which we’ve come up with a dozen different explanations and I cast aspersions at your lack of evidence for any. I shouldn’t have been so rash, as I’ve one of my own to offer.”

  Orlando, fighting with an awkwardly displaced blanket corner, groaned. “Any evidence for it?”

  “No, but we might be able to find some. With Hayes’s help.” Jonty slapped his lover’s bottom. “I saw that face, even from this angle. Turn round and listen. Come on.”

  Jonty took Orlando’s arm, leading him back to the window seat where they couldn’t further disarray the covers. “We know Hayes couldn’t have mistaken the room bells. But what if Gray’s bell rang, although he didn’t do the calling?”

  “Somebody rang his bell for him?” Orlando thought he saw a glimmer of sense in the theory. “Down at the bell board?”

  “I had something much more devious in mind, something which would kill the twin birds of keeping Hayes out of the way and ensuring that Tuffnell couldn’t ring the servants for help.” Jonty drummed on the windowsill. “Ingenious, particularly if it was done by an Oxford man.”

  “Tell me now. Or I’ll be forced to tip you out of this window.” An empty threat, maybe, but intended to show Orlando meant business.

  “Tuffnell did call, but his bell didn’t ring. Because somebody had rewired them. The same someone who was in on everything. The same someone who probably went back and rewired the board afterwards.”

  “Might I be devil’s advocate?”

  “You may, even though I normally put you on the side of the angels.” Jonty smiled.

  Orlando forced his thoughts to stay with bells and away from beds. “Should we consider whether Tuffnell could have done that himself?”

  “Make that the side of rather dim angels.” Jonty, clearly trying not to laugh, took a moment to compose himself. “Ones who multiply entities unnecessarily. All he’d have needed to do was resist the temptation to ring for help.”

  “Unless he wanted to ensure that he didn’t somehow set the bell going by accident, you know, while he was . . .” Orlando couldn’t quite bring himself to say the words struggling on the rope.

  “I suppose he might, but he couldn’t have changed them back after he was dead, could he?”

  “Changing them over would have had to be at the last minute. Or else Gray—or Tuffnell—might have rung earlier and the whole game would be up.”

  “Timing is indeed crucial, oh king of the chronometer. As would opportunity be.” Jonty looked out at the grounds. “If my idea turns out to be true, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to set foot here again.”

  “We’ll be banned?”

  “I’ll ban myself. I have a nasty taste in my mouth, and I’d rather be rid of it. Remember Lavinia? Down there in the woods? Trying to persuade Clarence that he had to be a man and do the right thing about his tooth?”

  “You’ve lost me again. Is that how Tuffnell convinced Livingstone to kill himself? Because he’d committed some misdemeanour and had to take the honourable way out?”

  “No. I think he wound the man up with stories of how the actress would never have him, and nor would any girl. And how he was useless and might as well commit himself to the deep along with his glorious ancestor.” Jonty took a deep sigh, then seemed to force himself to look at his lover eye to eye. “We both have experience of people who act irrationally under strain or depression. We’ve both seen men kill themselves, almost on the spur of the moment. Did it take much to tip them over the brink? Did logic come into it on either occasion?”

  “No. I suppose not. So where does the ‘honourable way out’ bit come in?”

  “You can have two hours to work that out for yourself.” Jonty shut his eyes and took a deep breath. “Now, if our guardian angels are still doing their jobs today, they’ll arrange for Hammond to be somewhere else, very soon. I think another experiment with those bells is called for and Hayes needs to help us.”

  “Hold on.” Orlando grasped Jonty’s arm as he leaped from his seat. “Are you absolutely sure it isn’t Hayes who changed the bells over? Or simply pretended that it was Gray ringing?”

  “I won’t have a word said against Hayes,” Jonty said, bristling. “You’ve got a bee in your bonnet about him, and it’s clouding your judgement.”

  “We need to consider all the possibilities.” Just exactly whose judgement was being clouded here?

  “If Hayes did it, then he’s the best actor I’ve seen, bar none. And in that case, and if we’re right in our thinking, then people here would be falling over themselves to let him talk to us. To reinforce the official line.” Jonty pulled his lover off the seat. “Come on. This is one of the least unpleasant things you’ll have to do today.”

  The guardian angels—or simple coincidence—had played their part, Hammond having gone into Maidenhead for his afternoon off. They hadn’t even had to brave going through the baize door to establish the fact, having found Hayes answering the door. Some poor caller had come to the wrong entrance and the footman was evidently enjoying sending him round to the servants’ door, with his tail between his commercial traveller legs. Once they’d established that the butler was away, they’d not lost a moment.

  “Hayes, this will sound like the daftest sort of question, but bear with a pair of old buffers like us.” Jonty smiled a bit too brightly for Orlando’s liking.

  Thank goodness Hayes didn’t make any reply along the not old buffers at all, sir lines which could be taken as flirtatious. Instead he simply said—rather patronisingly—“Ask away, sir.”

  “The night Tuffnell died and there was all the palaver with Gray. Is there any chance somebody might have tampered with the bells?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, sir. Rung them at the board rather than from the room?”

  “Not quite. Could we go and look at them, again?”

  With no Hammond to inhibit his inquisitive tendencies, Hayes led the way en
thusiastically below stairs.

  “Here you are.” They’d reached the display of bells, which Orlando eyed carefully before looking at Jonty with a shrug.

  “Hayes,” Orlando turned his attention back to the wall, “we’d been wondering whether somebody could have crossed the wires on these bells, so that you could ring from one room yet it appears to be another one sounding. But there doesn’t seem to be enough leeway with the wires to allow that.”

  Hayes looked at the array as though trying to see it afresh. “No, there wouldn’t be. Although it wouldn’t be that difficult to change the bells themselves over. With a screwdriver and a deft hand.”

  “I told you so!” Jonty slapped his lover’s back.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Hayes cut in, “but I’d only say it was possible. I wouldn’t have thought it likely.”

  “Why?” Jonty looked crestfallen.

  “Because Mr. Hammond doesn’t generally allow visitors below stairs. He doesn’t even like the family coming into his kingdom.” Hayes grinned, although not without a quick look over his shoulder.

  “But surely there’s a huge difference between who isn’t allowed downstairs and who might actually have come here. ‘Shouldn’t’ doesn’t equal ‘couldn’t.’”

  “Point taken, sir.” Hayes bridled at being challenged on his specialist ground and clearly trying to hide the fact. “We’d be bound to notice them, though, and when something happens on the scale of Captain Tuffnell’s death, anything out of the ordinary would get taken out and aired afterwards. We were all on edge.”

  Orlando chose his next words carefully, having suddenly remembered an unconsidered trifle, but not wanting the footman to twig where their suspicions lay. “When you showed us where Tuffnell had died, you mentioned something about Hammond having toothache that night. Did he get up before Gray rang?”

  Hayes wrinkled his brow in thought. “I seem to remember he’d not been able to settle. He’d been prowling around a bit looking miserable for the last couple of days. Even more miserable than normal,” he added in a low voice. “Actually, he must have been feeling particularly bad that night, because he got me to go down to the cellar and fetch some brandy. I’m not normally allowed that privilege.”

  “I’m glad he could trust you to fulfil the task.” Orlando reined in his eagerness. “I’m sure you discharged your duty quickly and efficiently.”

  “As much as I could. It took me longer than I wanted to find the particular sort I’d been sent for, so I thought I’d be for the high jump, but he was just so grateful to have the stuff he let it be. In all the excitement afterwards, I clean forgot about the brandy.”

  “It’s easily done.” Orlando hurried the conversation on. “Perhaps if you were both distracted that would have given someone the opportunity of interfering with the bells.”

  “Would you just have a look for evidence of tampering, please?” Jonty used his sweetest smile again. “You’d be able to spot it better than we would.”

  “My pleasure to help.” Hayes examined both the guest room bells concerned, and the area around them. “There are some marks on the wall, although I couldn’t swear to them not having been here for donkey’s years. Although these screws do seem slightly less clogged across their heads, as if they’ve seen a screwdriver more recently than the others.” He carefully pulled at various of the fittings. “Yes. These two bells feel different to the others.”

  “Looser?”

  “No. More secure. As though they’d been tightened a bit, whereas the others have worked a bit loose.” The footman looked concerned. “Does that help you, sir?”

  “It certainly does,” Orlando said.

  “There’s just one more thing.” Jonty, pale, kept his eyes on the array of bells. “Go back to that time again. When Tuffnell spoke to you so sympathetically about your brother, was that the night he died?”

  “No, sir. It was the first evening he was here. Sorry, no,” Hayes corrected himself. “It was the second evening, as well. He asked me how I was bearing up, and I had to admit it was hard. Our Jonny was the apple of our eye. He—Tuffnell—said that he could understand if I felt like going and joining my brother. How sometimes the heartache could get too much to bear and the only reasonable way forward seemed to be to end it all. I’d quite forgotten.”

  “Grief can make you forgetful. It weakens so many of our defences.”

  “Do you think he might have been trying to give me the hint that he was grieving and contemplating ending it all? Or maybe he was ill, as Jonny had been?”

  “I certainly think he was ill.” Jonty’s voice trembled.

  “Thank you, once more.” Orlando slipped a half-crown into Hayes’s hand.

  Bells and toothache and misplaced brandy and a bright lad kept out of the way? A bright lad—two bright lads—who’d had the virtue of suicide extolled to them? Circumstantial evidence, but that circumstantial evidence was piling up, and in more than one pile.

  Orlando didn’t need the hour and forty minutes left to establish what Jonty had meant by the “honourable way out.”

  By general agreement, the ladies and the gentlemen retired together immediately after dinner. Orlando waited as, for some minutes, the drawing room saw a melee of glass-filling and chair-finding. In the case of murder, all the usual social obligations could be temporarily disposed of. The fabric of society wouldn’t yet come crashing down.

  “We have a story to tell,” Jonty began, when the silence in the room extended beyond the point of comfort. “A poor thing, but our own, and one that may not come as a surprise to some of those present.”

  “We have little proof beyond our own suspicions, and some circumstantial evidence,” Orlando took up the introduction they’d rehearsed before dinner. “A castle of conjectural cards that could come crashing down under the wind of some solid facts to the contrary. In that respect, I’m afraid we’ve failed you.” He turned to the dowager. “If everyone denies what we’ve said . . .” He spread his hands.

  “In that case, will justice be denied Tuffnell?” The dowager drew herself up regally in her high-backed chair.

  “Reggie Tuffnell has had justice, some might say.” Jonty’s face was pale but the avenging-angel voice was strong. “We believe he committed what could be termed the most cold-blooded murder, in a way which would be highly unlikely to be traced back to him. He’d persuaded a man—Charles Livingstone—to take his own life on a certain day, a day when Tuffnell wouldn’t even be in the country. Are we correct?” Jonty turned to Derek.

  The duke didn’t reply at first, rising and moving to the cabinet to refill his glass.

  “Derek?” His mother fingered her jet necklace—her sombre choice of outfit seemed to reflect the solemnity of the occasion. “You know what they’re talking about, don’t you? Have you known along?”

  “Yes.” Derek closed his eyes. “Yes and yes. Ronnie Tuffnell told me that his brother had been unusually agitated when they were in France, especially on St. Valentine’s day. Ronnie had the sense to get him drunk and wrestle the awful truth from him. Reggie swore him to secrecy, of course, but he told me, and I took his advice to meet Reggie and see for myself.”

  Mr. Stewart, who’d clearly been trying to keep quiet, could do so no longer. “And you decided that he had to face the consequences?”

  “Not just me. I consulted the rest of the Ambrosians, including Ronnie himself.” Derek knocked back the rest of his whisky, put down the glass, then returned to the chair next to his wife’s. Beatrice kept her hands in her lap and her counsel to herself. “You must understand. He’d become quite unstable. Not outwardly—he was still the bluff cove that everyone knew, but those madcap schemes of his youth had transformed into something sinister. It’s fine to talk someone into doing something silly in the name of a prank, maybe, but to persuade them to take their own lives . . .” Derek stared into the fireplace, eyes blank. “It wasn’t the first time he’d done it.”

  “Harroway.” Jonty’s vo
ice was hardly more than a whisper.

  “Yes. And maybe others we didn’t know about.” Derek kept his gaze fixed on the fire.

  “Ronnie said he’d have given anything to have ‘the old’ Reggie back. It took us a while to understand the significance of that.” Jonty rubbed his arms, even though the evening was warm. “A dramatic change in personality, we’ve guessed.”

  “Have you any idea why the change came about? The stress of his debts or something?” Mr. Stewart asked.

  “I wish to God I knew. Remember I told you his father lost his marbles in his sixties? I think it was something similar. Although there was little other evidence of it, apart from the usual forgetfulness of age. Still sharp as a pin. Too sharp.” Derek shivered. “We wanted the evil that Tuffnell had done to die with him. Before he got the taste for killing and tried his tricks again.”

  Orlando shivered; Tuffnell had already been flexing his murderous muscles again, surely?

  “He must have been ill. He could have been given help.” Mrs. Stewart held her godmother’s hand, like a small girl seeking comfort. Orlando had rarely seen her so vulnerable.

  “Do you really think so?” Derek looked up, facing each of the company in turn. “I have a cousin who is in an institution. I visit him there once a year. It’s one of the best of its kind but . . . it’s no place for anyone. Tuffnell would have hated it. Reminders all around him, in his sane moments, of what he’d become. We decided it was best to confront him, to show that we knew his game, and ask him to do the decent thing. You’ll think us sentimental, but we wanted his last days to be pleasant ones, so we acted as though nothing was wrong for the first few days.”

  Orlando drew in a sharp breath. Sentimental or callous? How could they have gone about their normal business knowing what was planned?

  “I did consider an alternative explanation,” the duke continued. “That I was being duped.”

  “I don’t understand . . .” Mr. Stewart looked perplexed.

  “I think I do.” Orlando cradled his still half-full glass. “We’ve puzzled this over the last few days, and our conclusion could be tipped on its head. Ronnie might have seen an ingenious way to kill his brother and take all the inheritance. Pretend Reggie had gone mad and was a danger to other people. Take advantage of Livingstone’s suicide. Am I correct?”