by Evelyn James
Diana was still thinking about the possibility of Richard being a killer. She was not listening anymore.
“Diana, did you see anyone other than Harvey in the corridor?”
Diana blinked as if she had just heard Clara. She opened her mouth, her lips quivering.
“Nothing. I saw nothing but Harvey. Oh! If I had seen the murderer, stumbled upon them, would they have shot me too?”
“Let us hope not,” Clara could see the girl had already persuaded herself that her brother was a killer. “Richard would have no reason for killing Harvey.”
Diana gave a strange laugh.
“Really? Richard hated Harvey!”
“But not enough to kill him, surely?” Clara had suspected Richard’s hate, but she wanted to act astonished to try and wriggle some more information from Diana.
“Richard was so angry after the war, I never could understand it,” Diana stated somewhat naively. “I mean, he survived, so why was he angry? Then one day I heard him have a blazing row with Harvey and threaten to shoot him. And Harvey responded, ‘just like you tried to shoot me that day in France.’ And Richard did not deny it!”
Clara had not heard this story before and she pricked her ears.
“Whatever could he have meant?” she said aloud.
“I don’t know, I never asked. But they were bitter enemies after the war,” Diana sighed. “They should have been like brothers, but Harvey could never accept that he was the overlooked son. It made him so sour.”
“Did you like Harvey?” Clara asked.
Diana took a long time to mull over a question that should have been simple to answer. Most people, when asked if they liked someone, could easily answer yes or no without hesitation. Clara thought the girl’s pause for thought rather curious.
“I think I could have liked Harvey, if he had let me,” Diana said at last. “But he did not want me to like him. He wanted to be hated by everyone, because that was the way it ought to be. He could only hate all of us if everyone was indifferent to him. If one of us actually liked him it would spoil things, you see? Harvey was complicated. I was a Howton and therefore I was not allowed to like him, according to his own rules. Harvey gained a sort of power from imagining he was resented by us all.”
Clara worked that idea around in her head and slowly gained understanding. She did see.
“What a shame,” she said. “He spoiled his own life by harbouring resentment.”
“He had reason to,” Diana shrugged. “I can guess how he felt. This house reeks of the past and of the people who came before. Harvey didn’t just feel resented by his living family, I think he felt resented by his dead ancestors. His mother wasn’t an aristocrat, that was the trouble. Harvey never considered himself a true Howton, and all those dead eyes staring down from the portraits on the wall made it worse, not better. This is a place where the dead are never truly gone.”
Diana gave a shuddered and looked around her room with its furnishings from two ladies of the past.
“Nothing is ever your own here,” she said.
Clara rose from the bed, her questions done. She had her answer and she was reassured that Diana had not shot Harvey. It was time to move on.
“Thanks Diana,” she said. “Try to keep strong and remember the past is just that – passed. The dead cannot hold anything over you.”
Diana gave a bitter little laugh. Her face curled up into an unpleasant grimace and she suddenly looked many years older.
“You really never have lived in a house like this, have you?” she groaned.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Clara went in search of Richard next. With so many accusations flying about, and the missing revolver, he was shaping up to become the prime suspect in the case. Now there was Diana’s revelation that Richard had appeared at the crime scene from downstairs. It was becoming harder to find innocent explanations for all these worrying incidents. Clara wanted to hear Richard’s side of things.
Richard was in his study. Lord Howton and Richard both had their own private studies, Harvey made do with a writing desk in his room. Had he been denied a study of his own or had he never asked for one? Was this yet another blow to his fragile sense of self-worth? The man was dead and could not be asked.
Clara walked into Richard’s study as the door was open. He was not sitting at the table in the middle of the room, but was by the window looking out into the grounds. He turned his head and gazed over his shoulder as he heard her approaching footsteps.
“I never thought I would see policemen in the grounds,” Richard said in a detached tone.
Clara walked into the study and glanced around. The walls were lined with bookshelves and the volumes were largely on history, Richard’s passion. The sons of lords rarely have to work for a living. Lord Howton was one of the wealthiest men in the country, even if that wealth was largely tied up in land. Richard had no need to earn his own money, he was free to work on whatever attracted his attention. This appeared to be the history of the country and the estate.
Richard turned from the window and noted Clara’s interest in his books.
“I am writing my experiences of the war,” he said. “Probably won’t publish them, but I felt the need to jot them down.”
He motioned a hand to the table upon which sat a typewriter. There were various papers scattered around it.
“I’m sorry to disturb your work,” Clara said.
“I can hardly work with all this going on in the background,” Richard waved a hand at the policemen outside. “I know they are looking for my revolver and when they find it I shall be wearing handcuffs.”
“If they find it,” Clara corrected him. “And just because your gun is missing does not mean you shot Harvey. Anyone could have used it.”
“True,” Richard nodded. “But it doesn’t look good.”
He pulled a face.
“Everyone knows my relationship with my uncle was difficult.”
“Could we talk about that?” Clara asked. “You father wants me to conduct my own investigation alongside the police. If you are innocent, it would be wise to speak with me, so I can prove it.”
“If?” Richard frowned.
“I cannot read your heart or go back in time to see what really happened. I don’t know you well enough to judge whether you could do such a thing as this. Which is why I would like to talk to you, maybe then I will know.”
Richard gave a short snort, it was somewhat like a stifled laugh.
“Let us begin with the simplest of questions. Could I kill a man? Why, yes,” Richard shrugged. “I have shot men in the war. I have been in nasty trench skirmishes where you were virtually on top of the enemy. You didn’t need to aim, they were so close, and you could see the life draining from them before your eyes. Am I a killer? The answer is obvious.”
Richard tapped carelessly at a key on his typewriter. The letter A pinged forward on its little arm and marked the clean sheet of paper in the machine. Ping, ping, ping. Three As appeared in rapid succession.
“I think it more prudent to ask if you could kill someone you knew? Someone who you had grown up with? That is a very different scenario to killing a stranger in battle,” Clara countered his statement. “Cold blooded murder is not the same as killing for self-preservation during a war.”
“Why don’t you just ask me if I hated Harvey enough to want him dead?” Richard snapped, tiring of the typewriter and marching back over to the window.
“All right,” Clara agreed. “Did you want your uncle dead?”
Richard stared out the window, his hands clasped behind his back. The autumn sun fell on the side of his face and he looked more like his father than at any other time. He also looked younger, he was, after all, still in his youth. The wisdom of experience and age had yet to come, though the rush of war had forced him to grow up a lot faster than normal. It had also tainted him for life. He was a scarred man, only the scars were on the inside.
“When we were little boys we wer
e pals,” Richard began. “Being near enough the same age we played together and acted like brothers. We were inseparable. No one seemed to mind, well, maybe my mother a little. But my father said nothing. We swore to take care of one another, always. Then we went off to school and things began to change.”
Richard tilted his head forward and breathed deeply.
“That was when the competitiveness started. I can’t remember whether my mother or Angelica was the first to compare our school results, but what began as one cruel remark about one boy doing better than the other, became a terrible feud between our mothers,” Richard briefly shut his eyes, as if the memory pained him. “Slowly, without us realising it, the words of our mothers infected us. Harvey and I started to perceive ourselves as rivals. We wanted to do better than each other, so we could make our respective mothers proud and victorious over the other’s mother. Before long, our friendship was nothing but ashes. We did not even talk to one another.”
“And that rivalry continued after school?” Clara asked.
“Certainly. We were bitter enemies through university. I studied history, Harvey the classics. Despite our differing subjects we still compared marks. It carried on into the war. You wouldn’t believe how petty it became. If we had both been in battle and I came back with more men than he did, well that was a victory to me. If his platoon had managed to gain a fraction more ground in a push than mine, that was his triumph. It went on and on. Whatever we could compete over, we did.”
“Harvey was very popular with the men,” Clara said, bringing up something the under-gardeners had said. “Did you compete over popularity as well?”
Richard hefted his shoulders.
“Harvey would always win that one hands down,” he answered. “I never had the way with the ordinary soldiers. Harvey said I acted too aloof, but I knew no other way to be. He could walk among the men handing out cigarettes and telling stories and they still respected him. If I had done that, I would have looked a fool.
“Whatever anyone has told you, however, I cared about those under my charge as much as Harvey. I might not have sat by the bedside of wounded soldiers or commiserated with the troops about lost brothers, but I cared,” Richard stood a little more proudly. “What no one will tell you is that the men under my command had a far better survival rate than those under Harvey’s. I was the better military leader. I brought more of my men home, but, because I did not swap stories with them and share nips of whisky and rum, I am perceived as the worse leader. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“The human mind is a complicated thing,” Clara agreed. “We don’t always see the truth.”
“Well, it hardly matters now,” Richard watched the dust motes dancing in a beam of sunshine coming through his window. “The war is over. Let Harvey have his glory, I know my conscience is at peace for the efforts I made to keep my men alive.”
Richard fell silent. He became very still as he stood in profile to the window. For an instant, he could almost have been a statue.
“Did you hate Harvey?” Clara asked him bluntly.
Richard moved his head a fraction, the only indication he was still a live man and not a figure carved in stone.
“I was angry with him,” he said. “I suppose, sometimes, that made me hate him. But not in a way that would wish him dead. I have seen enough death to last me this lifetime and several more. In any case, I thought he was dead…”
“Yes, that raises another possibility.”
Richard turned to Clara, his eyes narrowed.
“Another?” he said.
“Perhaps you thought you were shooting at a demon?”
Richard almost laughed and then he realised he would effectively be laughing at himself.
“I did think he was something supernatural,” he said, his words abashed. “I feel a fool now, but at the time it made a sort of sense. I suppose, had I been in such a frame of mind and had come across Harvey in the hall, I might have reacted badly. But then, I would not have had the gun on me, would I?”
“Unless you were worried Harvey’s spirit would enter the hall and you wanted to protect yourself?” Clara suggested.
Richard shook his head.
“But I wasn’t.”
“Shooting a man in self-defence is different to murder, at least in the mind of the shooter.”
“Miss Fitzgerald, I may have been bloody stupid thinking my uncle was roaming the grounds as a woken corpse, but I did not remove my revolver from its case. I, better than any in this family, know how foolhardy it would be to shoot at someone in the darkness of a corridor. How was I to know it was Harvey and not another member of the family or a servant who had been summoned? Many people walk about the upstairs corridors without candles or torches. They know them so well they don’t need them.”
That was a fair point. The corridor had been pitch black and it would have been impossible, even when right on top of a person, to know for sure who they were. Only a person in a panic would shoot out and risk hitting a genuine member of the household. Richard did not look like a person to panic.
“I have been in some dangerous situations,” Richard continued. “I know how to keep my head when trouble brews.”
Clara believed him, but that still left her with one problem.
“Diana tells me that when you ran to her last night, you did not come from your bedroom, but from downstairs.”
Richard showed no sign of being fazed by the question, he truly was a person in full control of himself. If he had shot Harvey, it would not have been some rash act, but something he had planned in advance. The coolness of his demeanour was somewhat disturbing.
“Diana was paying more attention than I would have thought,” Richard’s response to the question was mild, he did not seem worried. “Yes, I was downstairs. Because, you see, Diana was not the one who actually found Harvey.”
Clara was paying full attention now.
“I heard a pistol shot,” Richard explained. “There is nothing plainer to a man who has heard such noises day-in and day-out for two years of his life. I was lying awake in bed, mulling over the fact Harvey had not appeared that evening, and then I heard the crack of the shot. I jumped out of bed and was out of my room in an instant.
“My room is not far from the corridor where Harvey was found. As I came upon him I saw someone hurriedly closing one of the doors that leads to the old bedrooms. I knelt by Harvey first, saw he was dead and then went into the room. It was empty and I saw the window was open. That told me all I needed to know. I ran out of the room, in my haste slamming the door so hard it must have echoed about the hall. I headed for the stairs hoping to get outside and catch the interloper. But I was out of luck. By the time I reached the back of the hall, they had vanished.”
“Then it was the sound of you slamming the door that spooked Diana,” Clara realised. “She said the bang was like a door being closed. She assumed it was the revolver being fired, but I see now it was not.”
“I can’t have been outside more than a moment. Long enough to realise the shooter had gotten clean away. I came back into the hall and as I ran up the stairs I saw Diana and father, so I joined them. I think only then did it dawn on me that it was really Harvey on the floor. That he could not have been dead at all before then.”
“What of the person who fled? The real shooter?” Clara demanded.
Richard spread his hands in an apologetic fashion.
“I saw a glimpse, that is all. They were a shadow moving fast.”
Clara was disappointed. Here was her first clue to the real killer and it was no more than a glimpse.
“Do you believe me?” Richard mistook her grim look for doubt.
“Your story is plausible,” Clara reassured him. “I also find it hard to imagine you would use your own revolver to shoot your uncle, knowing full well that would place suspicion on your shoulders.”
“Despite it all, I never wished Harvey dead,” Richard told her. “He was family, at the end of the day. I wish I knew w
hy he played this strange game on us all. It was a cruel thing, and so very odd. Why did he wish to be thought dead and to play the spectre? Why scare us?”
“I don’t know,” Clara could offer no other solution for the moment. She hoped to get to the bottom of the mystery, but for now she could only guess. “Harvey had a very dark mind, it seems.”
“He was obsessed with death, you know,” Richard explained. “During the war, I was told he had acquired this charm that would protect him from harm. He believed in magic. Sometimes it seemed like a madness with him.”
Angelica had said the same. Harvey’s passion for the supernatural was a factor they had all noticed.
Suddenly there was a shout from outside. Richard glanced out of the window and grimaced. Clara quickly joined him. Down in the grounds a police constable was holding something up in the air and others were rushing to him.
“They have found my gun,” Richard said bleakly. “Now will they arrest me?”
“It proves very little,” Clara reminded him, though she could not say that in the policeman’s mind such a find might lead to unfortunate connections being made.
She was hopeful Inspector Park-Coombs would not be so blind to the other facts in this case.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Clara left Richard and walked into the corridor, intending to head downstairs and speak with Inspector Park-Coombs about the discovery of the revolver. She had barely gone a few steps when Genevieve confronted her in a state of panic.
“They have found a gun in the garden!” she declared, wringing her hands together, her usual self-confidence utterly evaporated. “I know what people are thinking, I have heard the servants whispering!”
Clara placed her hand on Genevieve’s shoulder.
“Calm down, what are they whispering?”
“That I shot him! I know I said all that stuff about winging the fellow and I won’t lie now by saying I didn’t mean it, because I did, but I had no intention of killing him!”
