Major Marchpane arrived late, breathless and alone, through the French windows, accompanied by Bikram. He looked terrible, grey and worn, as if all the fight had gone out of him. He sat down heavily at the free end of Mr Burns’ sofa.
Inspector Lovelace opened the door, and the solicitor entered and took to the floor in the centre. Mr Proudfoot looked out over the top of his half-moon glasses, Alaric’s Will clutched tightly in his hand:
‘But this won’t do at all! We can’t start!’ Proudfoot objected querulously, looking all around him. ‘Where is Lady Cosima Catchpole? She benefits under this Will!’
There was a collective gasp from around the room and Mr Proudfoot looked beadily at the Major, who had turned bright red and was patting the dog vigorously.
‘It’s important that everyone who is mentioned in the Will is here now,’ Mr Proudfoot said, a trifle pompously.
‘Major?’ whispered Posie. ‘Where is your wife?’ To her horror she saw the big man wipe away a tear from his good eye.
‘She’s gone!’ he mumbled. ‘She upped and left me a few weeks ago! Said she was bored of living down here, cut off from the rest of the world. She said she was bored of me, too! She left me a note saying she wanted a new adventure. I wondered if she had gone off after Alaric, after all. But now I know he’s dead…well, it puts rather a different spin on it, doesn’t it? I don’t know where she is, I’m afraid.’
Posie stared at the Major, feeling tremendously sorry for him. For a tiny second she wondered if she had got all of her conclusions wrong, after all. But Inspector Lovelace cut in, coughing dramatically to make everyone turn in his direction.
‘My men have tracked Lady Cosima down, Major. She is safe and sound and living in a squalid bedsit in London. She’s taken up with a small, very bohemian little theatre group in Soho. I’m sorry to say that she’s taken up with one of their leading actors too. My scouts tell me that she will be playing the role of Lady Macbeth next week, starting on Monday, at a very seedy little venue in the West End. I believe she paid the theatre group a considerable amount to let her act with them. Perhaps that was the new adventure she was craving. Why not go down there for the Opening Night, sir? Surprise her. Work things out? My scouts tell me that after a month of this bohemian lifestyle she is running very low on funds. I’m sure she’d be only too pleased to come home to her previously boring life here in the Cotswolds. If you’ll have her back, that is…’
The Major nodded stupidly, rendered speechless, while the whole room stared at him.
‘So, then!’ said Proudfoot quickly. ‘Let’s press on! First, the bequests!’
He consulted the Will in front of him. ‘The possessions of Alaric Boynton-Dale pass to his brother, Lord Roderick.’
‘NO!’ breathed Lady Eve, almost dropping her cocktail cigarette and staring in wonder at the lawyer. ‘But I thought he’d changed his Will? Gee, it seems he came good after all! See Roddy darlin’? All that worryin’ for nothing!’
But the lawyer cut her off quickly:
‘I am afraid, Lady Boynton, that I am referring to possessions only. Alaric’s personal possessions were worth only a couple of hundred pounds, and consist of his coin collection in the annexe, his clothing, some personal effects and some family papers. Sorry!’
Lady Eve goggled, turning purple in the face. The lawyer continued:
‘Alaric left any plane in his possession at the date of his death to his good friend, Major Marchpane.’
‘But he didn’t own a plane at the date of his death! It was sabotaged!’ exclaimed the Major quickly, confused.
‘Exactly!’ said the lawyer. ‘So you get nothing! Sorry!’
Proudfoot continued reading down the list. ‘And now I come to Lady Cosima Catchpole. She is to receive a priceless ancient bee coin which Alaric wore as a necklace.’
He looked over at Posie, who shook her head. ‘However, I am given to understand that the coin has been given away, so Cosima too gets nothing. Please offer her my condolences, Major. This is all highly irregular…’
He shook out the Will dramatically and stared around the room.
‘Now we come to the rest of Alaric’s estate, which essentially means the Family Trust, the exciting part! It is worth around Two Hundred Thousand Pounds! And can be distributed out almost immediately. And that goes to…’
The whole room waited.
‘Lady Violet!’
The atmosphere in the room could have been cut with a knife. Lady Violet looked at the lawyer with a brief bright stare of incredulous wonder and then promptly burst into tears. Posie moved over to comfort her, squatting on the floor. A strange noise sounded up, and Posie realised that Codlington was emitting a strange growling noise, fighting off the policemen on either side of him with his elbows.
‘I’ve been set up!’ he was shouting. ‘My Lord…’ he turned to Roderick, who was looking as sick as a dog and was emitting low, strange, groaning noises.
‘Help me! My Lord…?’
Just then Bikram started to bark frantically and threw himself at the door of the Library, behind Inspector Lovelace. There was the sound of two loud raps, and then, at some carefully discreet sign given by Inspector Lovelace, the lawyer called for silence amongst the chaos. Proudfoot raised his arms and held the Will out in front of him.
He then made a big show of ripping the Will in half, and then ripped it again, and again and again, throwing the pieces up in the air around himself dramatically, like confetti falling at a particularly strange wedding.
‘It seems however, that we will not be needing this, after all! I am reliably informed that Alaric Boynton-Dale is, in fact, alive and well. And with us this very afternoon!’
Everyone stared at Proudfoot as if he had gone stark raving mad, but just then the door to the Library opened and Alaric stepped through. Bikram threw himself against his legs in a frenzy of barking.
Eve Boynton, clutching the silver photo frame of Alaric, fainted at the fireplace. No-one paid her the slightest bit of attention.
‘It seems you can’t get rid of me that quickly!’ Alaric smiled calmly.
****
Twenty-One
‘Please forgive me, Lady Violet,’ Posie said anxiously, ‘but I couldn’t tell you that Alaric was still alive. It might have foiled the plan, and put Alaric in even more danger than he was in already.’
Lady Violet flung herself at Alaric like a little girl lost and he put his arms around his sobbing sister, leading her to a couch where she curled into his side, burying her face in his shirt. Posie stood in the centre of the room, looking around at everyone assembled there. Inspector Lovelace gave her a barely perceptible nod, indicating that she had his blessing to move matters along.
‘This has been a very strange case,’ Posie said slowly. ‘Very sad too. Due to the actions of one person in this room several innocent people have died.’
She listed off on her fingers their names: Ianthe Flowers, Binkie Dodds, Bernie Sharp, Harry Redmayne.
‘And all because just one person wanted to get their hands on the Trust money in Alaric’s Will. It had become an obsession. They needed Alaric to die!’
Posie continued, looking around. ‘The trouble for me was that three of you in here had a really good motive. And of the three of you, it could have been any one of you.’
The whole room gaped at Posie expectantly. She turned to Codlington first:
‘You, Codlington, are highly suspicious. You have been, by your own admission, covering for Lord Roderick, allowing him to fritter away his fortune. But you do pretty well out of your arrangement too: in fact, you wield far more power than any normal Valet usually does.’
Codlington stared at Posie, ashen-faced. ‘Makes no sense. I told you already, why would I want to kill Mister Alaric?’
‘Perhaps you knew of the money which was supposed to pass to Lord Roderick under Alaric’s Will? And you also learnt that Alaric might be changing his Will. Perhaps you had an eye on self-preservation; that’s w
hat you do best, isn’t it? If Alaric could be killed before he got around to changing the Will you would have been okay – the gravy trail of endless money from Lord Roderick wouldn’t have dried up – you’d be safe. Perhaps you used your horrible contacts in the London underworld to try and kill Alaric and anyone else who just happened to get in your way? Why, you were even caught red-handed dousing Bernie Sharp’s office in petrol and causing his death! If you are capable of that you are more than capable of arranging the threats to Alaric and organising all the other deaths, too. Even those which took place abroad…’
‘What?’ shouted Codlington, his surly face turning white. ‘What are you on about? No! No! I’m already in enough trouble! I never left these shores! I never went abroad. I was hanging out in the East End the last few weeks, I swear it.’
Posie nodded:
‘But you didn’t need to leave these shores, did you? You have so many contacts it wouldn’t have been a problem for you to have someone tail me to Sicily and follow me, and then locate Alaric… And then try and kill him.’
Codlington looked as if he were chewing a wasp and struggled in his cuffs between the policemen. Suddenly Posie swung around and pointed a finger at Lord Roderick:
‘Or you, my Lord. You could have been directing Codlington to act in such a manner, rewarding him for his actions, giving him an expensive pair of cufflinks as part-payment and allowing him to take a cut in your race winnings for now. Perhaps you even promised him a slice of the Trust monies after Alaric’s death? You could have been responsible for his every move. An indirect killer.’
‘No!’ wailed Lord Roderick. ‘I swear I had nothing to do with any of this mess!’
‘And you!’ Posie pointed at Lady Eve, who was swigging brandy straight from the decanter.
‘You were worried about the state of your husband’s finances, and you were frantic at the thought that Alaric might leave his money to anyone other than Roderick.’
Posie spoke softly, but still everyone in the room could hear:
‘And there was more to it, wasn’t there, Lady Eve? I didn’t realise until fairly recently that you were obsessed with Alaric. It was a twisted sort of love, a dangerous obsession. An obsession which led to your cutting out every single picture you could lay your hands on of him for your scrapbooks; an obsession which led to you deciding that if you couldn’t have him, no-one else could, either. You realised that Alaric was still in love with Cosima, even after their affair had ended. And when you realised that he would never be yours, you became obsessed with hurting him instead. Perhaps you plotted that plane crash? The burnt beehives? Perhaps it was you out in Sicily following me around? Planting poison in drinks?’
‘Of course it wasn’t me!’ flashed Lady Eve angrily. ‘What a load of rot! Roderick and I never left England, either! The two of us were holed up in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in London, together with my father. We were trying to restore our relationship, and trying to keep cool in this dratted heatwave, too. It was the only place my father would agree to stay: it’s the only place in England where they actually have air conditioning! It’s not my fault if your idiot police force couldn’t track us down there! And that they let us escape from Boynton Hall in the first place! Check the Ritz Hotel records if you must. And anyway, I’ve never done anything to actually hurt Alaric.’
Posie cocked her head to one side and then nodded, accepting Lady Eve’s explanation.
‘I believe you, as it happens. And of course, I have already checked the hotel register at the Ritz. But it’s not quite true what you say, about not having done anything to hurt Alaric, is it? Your obsession led you to send that telegram to Major Marchpane informing him of Alaric’s affair with Cosima, didn’t it?’
‘That was you?’ shouted Lady Violet, incredulously, still burrowed in Alaric’s shoulder. ‘I thought it was Ianthe! More fool me!’
Lady Eve flushed darkly and stared at the floor. Roderick stared at her in total disbelief.
‘Yes, it was Lady Eve!’ declared Posie. ‘It seems that Ianthe Flowers was a better judge of character than anyone gave her credit for, and her book, The Tomb of the Honey Bee, is key to this whole case. She describes Lady Eve and her obsessional love for Alaric perfectly in the book. In fact, all of you were in that book! It’s a shame on so many levels that literally every single copy is now destroyed, but no matter. It did its job! It told me enough!’
‘What do you mean, Missy?’ asked Mr Burns, shuffling forwards on the sofa, his eyes wary.
‘What I mean is that it told me who the true murderer was!’
All eyes swivelled onto Posie. She turned to Lady Eve. ‘You, Lady Eve, are an obsessive when it comes to matters of the heart, but you don’t have it in you to murder anyone. And neither do Lord Roderick or Mister Codlington.’
‘So you’re now ruling us out?’ Eve gasped, incredulously.
‘I was just running through the possibilities before,’ Posie smiled. ‘Hypotheticals.’
She turned to the room at large:
‘From the very start of this case I thought that something here was strange, that perhaps one careful hand was at work, playing people off against each other. Things didn’t stack up as they were supposed to, the clues were there and everybody had a motive, but nothing rang true. There was evil in this house, but I couldn’t put my finger on it; it seemed to come from so many directions, with so many layers! Usually you find when a case is very complicated it means that the motive behind it all is very simple. Don’t you agree, Inspector?’
Inspector Lovelace nodded from his place by the door. ‘That’s right, Miss Parker. And in this case money was the motive. Pure and simple.’
Posie continued:
‘Our killer was well equipped for murder, and tried to kill Alaric in a number of ways, none of which worked. But then Alaric got suspicious and disappeared. And that is when our killer panicked, and needed to find him. And it was then that our killer found they were not so clever and not so well equipped, after all. They needed help!’
‘I don’t follow you,’ said Mr Burns, angrily. ‘What the blazes are you talking about, Missy?’
Posie smiled calmly. ‘I mean to say that our killer was baffled. They had no idea where to look for Alaric. And so she came to me!’
Posie turned to Lady Violet. ‘It was YOU, my Lady.’
Everyone gasped in unison. Lady Violet had sat up straight on the sofa.
‘Yes, you, Lady Violet! You came to me with your clever story, full of woe and desperation for your missing brother! You came to me with your careful list of suspects, each one of whom you had given a motive to. And I admit, they were good motives, extremely convincing, most of them included a grain of truth, too – which was clever. But I began to think when I first came down here to Boynton Hall that things were more complicated than how you had suggested, and I just put it down to your misunderstanding of people, to your preoccupation with your brother’s disappearance. But you were arrogant. You assumed that I would take everything you told me about people at face-value, and just accept the twisted half-truths. You tried to stage-manage everything!’
Lady Violet was staring at Posie with narrowed eyes, a look of utter bemusement on her face. ‘What on earth?’ she cried out desperately, casting pleading looks around at Alaric and then at Roderick before looking back at Posie.
‘Have you totally lost your mind? How dare you! It was I who employed you to come here and find Alaric. Don’t forget that!’
Posie smiled and fished in her bag for a couple of items. ‘Oh, I haven’t forgotten that, Lady Violet. That is what I mean by your arrogance. You considered yourself a mastermind, much better than me, in fact. You considered my own detective skills too paltry to root out the truth. You thought that if you came to me and asked me to investigate Alaric’s disappearance, it would seem as if you were utterly innocent. Unfortunately, it took me a good deal of time, several deaths and much travelling to realise the truth.’
Mr Burns was on his
feet, his face red and angry.
‘I say, Missy, you sure as hell have got this all wrong! You can’t go accusing that little girl over there of murder! What do you think you’re playing at? She’s just a lovely little girl who makes the sweetest cakes in the whole darn world!’
‘Oh, but there you are right. And there you are also wrong, Mr Burns.’
‘Come again?’
‘I always thought Lady Violet was complicated. And it seems I was right.’
Posie smiled, shaking out one of the items from her bag. It was The Lady magazine from June, with Lady Violet on the cover.
‘You see, Lady Violet is just a sweet little girl who bakes cakes, but she is so much more than that. See this article? This is the key to it all! It sets out her motive. I wish I had realised it in the first place! In it she tells the world that she wants to open a chain of tea-shops to rival Lyons Corner Houses. And she did want that! Desperately! She still wants that! It was a long-held ambition. But she couldn’t do that without money, a great deal of money. And there was precious little of that here at Boynton Hall. And there were few wealthy men left in the country to marry, not that she didn’t have several admirers! I had the good fortune to meet one of them, Harry Redmayne, out in Egypt, and a nicer fellow you couldn’t hope to meet! He told me that he had loved Violet, but that he wasn’t rich enough for her. Now, at the time I thought that he meant the family, perhaps Lord Roderick, had declared that Harry wasn’t rich enough for her and forbidden the match…’
‘Of course I wouldn’t have said such a thing!’ shouted Lord Roderick. ‘I just wanted Cuckoo to be happy! I never stipulated that a fellow had to have money! I don’t know why people think I’m such a rotten sort of fella! You’ve got that all wrong!’
‘EXACTLY!’ said Posie, nodding sympathetically.
‘But so has most of the country got it wrong! With good reason! I did a little digging, and I asked Alaric about it too, and it seems that the whole image of Lady Violet being kept here in penury without any money, and the reputation the family has of only allowing her to marry a rich man is totally wrong. It was Lady Violet herself who created that image, always wearing the same old clothes, getting people to feel sorry for her, bemoaning her lot in life to anyone who’d listen. And it was Lady Violet herself who turned down countless offers of marriage from men whom she deemed not rich enough for her. Men such as Harry…’
The Tomb of the Honey Bee: A Posie Parker Mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 2) Page 20
