Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  Diana’s arrow flew into the gold. Then she turned to us, her face flushed and excited.

  “Now I’ll shoot the golden arrow. We used to do it when we were children. Watch, everyone! Henry, you must watch too!”

  She made the footman come a little way out from the elm tree and join us on the lawn. Everyone must see her triumph.

  She took an ordinary arrow from her quiver and fitted it to the bowstring. “It’ll turn to gold in the sky,” she said.

  Her body bent gracefully back, and she shot straight upward. The dark arrow soared, almost invisible in its speed. The sun had gone down behind the low hill to our west; but, higher up, its rays were still streaming laterally from over the hilltop, so that the arrow was suddenly caught in them, flashed golden, and pursued its course for a little, shining like a gold thread against the sky’s deepening blue.

  For us, it was a strangely fascinating sight, a moment of pure innocence. Like children, we all wanted to do it. But the lower the sun sank behind the hill, the higher we had to shoot.

  After a quarter of an hour only Hector and Diana could get an arrow up into the golden stream. Then Diana failed. Then Hector made a last effort. His arrow just turned gold before it began to wobble, slowly reversed, and streaked down toward the elms just behind us.

  We heard it strike a branch, and fall clattering from branch to branch. The sound of its falling grew and grew, was hideously amplified, as if in a nightmare the arrow had turned into a human body hurtling down.

  A few seconds later, the body of Gervase Musbury crashed to the ground, only half a dozen yards from where we stood.

  It seemed, for a moment, to put into words what we were all thinking, when Anthea Camelot cried out bitterly to Hector, who was standing there, the bow still in his hand, looking stupid and frightened like a child who has broken some treasured ornament. “You’ve shot him!”

  Diana said, in a brisk, motherly sort of voice, “Don’t let’s get hysterical. Of course Hector couldn’t have shot him.”

  Thomas Prew was staring at the body, an expression of white horror on his face, his mouth moving soundlessly. It must have been some shock in childhood, some spectacle like this of blood and shattered bone, which created the pacifist in him.

  Henry was kneeling beside the body, making as if to lift Gervase’s head on to his lap. Then he said, dully, “I think his neck’s broken.”

  “I kept telling him that platform wasn’t safe,” said Anthea, staring up into the treetops. The rooks, which had risen out of them in hundreds, cawing and crawking when the body fell, were beginning to return.

  I stepped forward and put my hand on Henry’s shoulder. I could feel it trembling. We gazed down at the wreck of Gervase. His face was a queer bluish-pink colour. My heart missed a beat. This was too much; it was grotesque and impossible.

  I bent and sniffed at his lips. Then I found, a few yards away on the grass, an object whose fall had been disregarded in the tragic moment—the shattered fragments of a ginger-beer bottle. I picked one of them up. The same scent of peach blossom clung to it as I had smelled on Gervase’s lips.

  I turned angrily to the cluster of people. “The arrow may have struck him,” I said, “and his neck is certainly broken. But what killed him was poison—prussic acid—conveyed to him through that ginger-beer bottle.”

  ***

  An hour later we were all together again, sitting round the table in the dining room. The village constable had taken statements, and was now on guard over the body. A superintendent, police surgeon, and the rest of it were on their way from the county town. In the meanwhile, I had made use of Gervase’s keys and had the run of his study, where I had found out one or two interesting things.

  I looked round the group at the table. Anthea was crying quietly. Thomas Prew’s face remained white, dazed, incredulous. Hector, for some reason, was still holding an arrow and the bow, as though it had frozen to his fingers. Only Diana appeared relatively normal.

  “I thought we might clear up a few things before the Westchester police come,” I said. “Suicide seems to be out of the question. Gervase had no motive for it, he wasn’t that kind of person, and there’s no farewell message. So I’m afraid he was murdered.”

  The four of them stirred, almost as if in relief at knowing the worst. “Somehow the poison was introduced into that bottle,” I continued flatly. “Gervase hauled it up, drank it in the ginger-beer—prussic acid works very quickly—and was overcome just at the moment when Hector happened to send up his last arrow, and toppled off the platform.”

  “But how could the poison—?” began Anthea.

  “I’ve been talking to Amphlett. The ginger-beer is kept in the cellar. Only he and Gervase had keys to the cellar. Gervase’s key was on the ring in his pocket. So it’s unlikely that anyone but he or Amphlett could have tampered with one of the bottles while they were still in the cellar. Amphlett opened the cellar after lunch, gave half a dozen bottles to Henry, who carried them out on a tray, and locked the cellar door again immediately.”

  “But Henry was out there beside the tray the whole afternoon,” said Mr. Prew.

  “Yes. The odd thing is that he admits it. Almost like a sentry on guard, swearing he never left his post. He swears no one could have got at the bottles, except during the couple of minutes after tea when he and Amphlett were carrying the tea-things back to the house.”

  “Well,” said Anthea, “you and I were walking over to the rose garden just then, so we can give each other alibis.”

  “I suppose Mr. Prew, Hector, and I can do the same,” said Diana, in a tone of some distaste, as though giving people an alibi was a vulgar and disgusting thing, like giving them ringworm.

  “In that case, no one but Henry or Amphlett could have put the poison into the bottle,” said Mr. Prew.

  “So it would seem. Logically.”

  “But Amphlett was devoted to Gervase,” said Hector after a pause. “And Henry wouldn’t do it. I mean, he wouldn’t murder his own father, would he?”

  Anthea gave a gasp of astonishment. It was no surprise to me. I had found a will in Gervase’s desk, leaving the bulk of his fortune to Henry Borthwick. There could be little doubt that Henry was Gervase’s long-lost child by the love of his youth, Rose Borthwick.

  The relationship explained his peculiar treatment of the young man. I remembered him murmuring to me, “Youth must have its tests, its ordeals.” There was always method in Gervase’s eccentricity. It was quite in character for him to have tested the young man, like the hero in a fairy tale, given him a period of probation, imposing on him the menial duties of a servant.

  “So it was Henry who was trying to blackmail Gervase,” exclaimed Anthea. She told the others what she had heard that night in the library.

  “But why,” I asked, “should he blackmail Gervase, when Gervase had left him most of his fortune in a will?”

  “Is this true?” demanded Diana.

  I nodded.

  Hector said, “The question about blackmail doesn’t seem important now. The point is, Henry had a motive for killing Gervase. If he knew that Gervase had made a will in his favour, that is.”

  “We’d better ask him.” Before anyone had time to object, I sent Amphlett to fetch Henry. When the young man came in, I asked him, “Did you know Gervase was your father, and was leaving you his fortune?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Henry, gazing defiantly at us all. “But if you think I murdered him, you’re—”

  “What else can you expect us to think?”

  “I expect you to credit me with some brains. If I’d wanted to kill my father, d’you suppose I’d be fool enough to do it by putting poison in a bottle which points to me as the most likely suspect?”

  “There’s something in what he says,” remarked Mr. Prew. “But who else could have had a motive for—”

  “There’s your
self for one,” I interrupted. “You’re a militant pacifist. You heard that Gervase was on the way to perfecting a new explosive. Maybe you wanted to spare humanity the horror of it.”

  “Oh, but that’s fantastic!”

  “Then there’s Diana and Hector. Diana is an ambitious woman, with a not very rich husband and a very rich brother-in-law. Dispose of the latter, and she’d have the means to gratify all her ambitions—at least, she would as soon as Hector’s father dies, and he’s a very old man now.”

  “I think perhaps you had better leave these matters to the police,” began Diana icily.

  I paid no attention to her. “What Anthea heard in the library that night is significant. It fits the theory that it was Hector, not Henry, who was demanding money from Gervase. Gervase said, ‘You’ll not get any more of my money! I’ve a better use for it now.’ A better use for it now, because he had found his son, Henry. No doubt Hector then asked him what he meant by the last phrase, and was told that Gervase proposed to leave his money to his son.”

  “In that case, Nigel, you silly ass, what would be the point of my killing Gervase?” Hector was blushing, yet triumphant, like a boy making a decisive point in a school debate.

  “None. Unless you did it in such a way as to incriminate Henry. He would be hanged for your crime, and Gervase’s fortune in due course would pass to you. And, I must say, if Henry didn’t commit the murder, someone took great pains to make it look as if he did. Why—”

  We all started, as Anthea burst out hysterically, “Oh, for God’s sake stop this! I loved Gervase. Why not say I did it, because—because he wouldn’t look at me? Hell hath no fury—”

  “Be quiet, Anthea!” I commanded. “I’m not finished with Hector and Diana yet. You see, two rather peculiar things happened which the police may well ask them to explain.”

  “Well?” asked Diana indifferently; but I could see her curiosity was aroused.

  “It was peculiar that you two, who—Gervase told me—were hardly on speaking terms with Mr. Prew, should suddenly become so chummy with him after tea and insist on showing him how to shoot with the bow. But not peculiar if you wanted him to give you an alibi for just then—the only few minutes in the afternoon when Henry wasn’t standing by the ginger-beer bottles. Not peculiar if it was absolutely vital for both of you to be able to prove you didn’t go near them.”

  “But, my dear good Nigel, you’ve admitted, only a few minutes ago, that no one but Henry or Amphlett could have tampered with that bottle. Why pick on us?” said Hector.

  “I said that logically it seemed so. But Diana did another funny thing. She became matey also with Henry—Henry, whom she’d been treating like dirt up to that point.”

  Mr. Prew and Anthea had grown tense. They were staring at me as if I was the Apocalypse.

  “Yes,” I went on, “when she was getting ready to shoot the golden arrow, for the first time, Diana called out to Henry to come and watch. Terribly out of character that was, Diana. But suppose you had to get him away from under the elm trees, get him looking up in the sky like the rest of us, following the course of your arrow, for the seven or eight seconds Hector would need to move the few yards to that silver tray under the elms and substitute a poisoned bottle of ginger-beer for the one that stood there? Hector,” I went on quickly, “where’s that handkerchief you fetched for Diana during tea? You never gave it to her, did you?”

  Hector was angry now, but he gave me a queer smile of triumph, reached in the poacher’s pocket of his tweed coat, and took a handkerchief out of it.

  “I see what you’re driving at, old boy. The idea is that I really went indoors to fetch a bottle of poisoned ginger-beer? Well, I didn’t. I just brought the handkerchief. So now,” he advanced on me menacingly, “you’ll kindly apologise to my wife for—”

  I snatched the handkerchief from him and put it cautiously to my nose.

  “As I thought. Since when did you start using a perfume of peach blossom, Diana?” I was round the other side of the table from them now. “You fetched both the handkerchief and the poisoned bottle, Hector. In that nice big poacher’s pocket. The handkerchief was needed to keep your finger-prints off the bottle, no doubt. It was unlucky for you that some of the poisoned ginger-beer leaked out onto it.”

  Hector and Diana were certainly a good team. I had hardly finished speaking when they were at the door, Hector threatening us with the arrow he had notched on his bowstring.

  “If any of you calls out, he gets this arrow in him. Diana, fetch the car.”

  Diana was out of the door like a flash. Prew, Anthea, and old Amphlett were staring at Hector, dazed out of all movement. I felt like one of the suitors in the banqueting hall when Odysseus turned his great bow on them. Then I heard a scurry of movement behind me.

  Henry had snatched up one of the huge, heavy silver dish-covers from the sideboard and, shielding his face and breast with it, was running headlong at Hector. The bow twanged deeply. The arrow clanged against the edge of the dish-cover, ricocheted off, and stuck quivering in the far wall.

  Henry’s charge brought Hector down. He half killed Hector before we could pull him off. He would have been a good son to Gervase, if Gervase had lived.

  I had loved Gervase too. If I hadn’t, I don’t think I should have played that trick on Hector.

  The perfume on the handkerchief I snatched from him was not peach blossom, not the lethal fragrance of prussic acid at all. The handkerchief smelled of nothing more dangerous than fresh linen, though he had used it to hold the poisoned bottle.

  Yes, it was a very long shot on my part—as long a shot in its way, as that last one of Hector’s which had just caught the golden gleam, and then fallen into the treetops where Gervase died.

  Weekend at Wapentake

  Michael Gilbert

  Michael Gilbert (1912–2006) achieved eminence in two very different fields. For many years a partner in a leading London firm of solicitors, he enjoyed an even longer career as one of the most distinguished male British crime writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and received the UK’s most prestigious crime writing award, the CWA Diamond Dagger. His novels are diverse in their subject matter and setting, but the most celebrated of them, Smallbone Deceased, benefits from a wittily evoked background in a law firm.

  Gilbert was a prolific writer of short stories, a number of which featured solicitors; two series characters were Henry Bohun (who also appeared in Smallbone Deceased) and Jonas Pickett. The title of Stay of Execution and Other Stories of Legal Practice is self-explanatory, and “Weekend at Wapentake” comes from that surprisingly little-known collection. The tale is told in Gilbert’s characteristically smooth and readable style.

  ***

  When Kilroy Martensen and his wife died in the Skyliner crash at Prestwick, it brought the family settlement to an end and gave Bohun a lot of work to do.

  The memorandum came to light when he was searching through the old files. It was in a handwriting that he did not recognise, thin, rounded, not educated, not attractive, but extremely easy to read. “The Surviving Martensen of the last generation,” it started baldly, “is Christabel; Of this generation, Kilroy and Harriett, who are the only children of Christabel’s late cousin Alastair. Under the settlement created by the will of Christabel’s grandfather—”

  And so on. It was a clear exposition of a complex set of facts. The man who had penned it had obviously been a sound lawyer with a certain talent for exposition.

  “— Christabel enjoys the family property at Wapentake during her life. The house and estate is in first and second mortgage (see separate files) and would hardly clear these debts on realisation. The property is in a poor state of repair. The contents of the house, apart from the pictures and plate which are entailed, stand at Christabel’s disposition. She lives alone, using part only of the house, with two servants, a married couple called Sherma
n. Mrs. Sherman appears to exercise a greater influence on Christabel than is really desirable. I am visiting Wapentake at the end of next week to talk to her on trust matters. I shall explain to her the disadvantages of dying intestate—” There the memorandum stopped. It was dated “12.×.48”, and was the last paper on that file.

  Bohun stared at the date for a moment, then went to the shelf and opened another fat wallet of papers. From it he extracted a Death Certificate. It stated that Christabel Drusilla Martensen had died, of cardiac distension, on the seventeenth day of October, 1948. Bohun clipped the memorandum and the Death Certificate together and carried them into the next room where his senior partner, Mr. Craine, lived.

  “That’s Sam Tucker’s fist,” said Tubby Craine, as soon as he spotted the paper. “I expect he wrote that just before he retired. He left us notes on all his clients. Not a qualified solicitor at all, you know. Started as an office boy with old Horniman, and worked his way up. Took night classes. People like that are the backbone of any law firm. You don’t find them growing on every tree.”

  “This Christabel Martensen—”

  “Of course, in theory he was only a managing clerk, but actually, in my time, he interviewed clients himself. And they were well advised to see him. Knew more Law than any of us. I remember Martello—the old Duke, I mean, who was a bigger bastard than the present one, and that’s saying something—wanted to raise money on his mother’s reversion. Sam told him he couldn’t do it. The old boy blew his top properly. When he’d finished shouting, Sam said, ‘I’ve told you what the Law is. You can hear it again from a High Court Judge if you prefer. It’ll cost you a couple of thousand guineas, but I guarantee it’ll be just the same law.’ Marvellous, marvellous. No real offence, either. We still act for the Martellos.”

  “You notice that coincidence of dates,” said Bohun, persevering. “He was going down at the end of next week. Christabel died suddenly on the seventeenth.”