Murder in the Manor
Page 16
She gasped and almost dropped the photograph. One of the men looked very familiar indeed. Curly dark hair. Dimples. He looked just like Lacey’s father.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
“Nigel!” Lacey cried, bolting out of the guest bedroom, the photograph clutched tightly in her hand as if it were a life raft and she were adrift in the ocean. “Nigel?”
She thundered down the first staircase, almost stumbling in her haste to locate the valet and ask him if he had ever met her father, or if he knew anything about how Iris and Frank were connected, to be posing in a photograph like old chums.
Beside her, Chester seemed to have picked up on the urgency in her tone and movement, because he kept flashing her anxious looks, and kept right beside her as if to protect her. But little did Chester know, he couldn’t protect Lacey from emotional pain. There was no perp to bite in this scenario.
She reached the landing and peeled along the hall for the main staircase that led down to the foyer. As she went, she slammed right into Nigel coming out of one of the bedrooms. Nigel staggered back several steps, his back hitting the wall with an audible thud.
“Oof!” Lacey grunted.
“Are you okay?” Nigel asked, grasping her by the elbow to stop her from falling. “I heard you calling me.”
Lacey righted herself. “Yes, I was…” She paused, seeing Nigel’s expression for the first time. His cheeks were stained with tears. All thoughts of the photograph left her mind. “Oh, Nigel. What’s wrong?”
“I just realized something is missing. Something has been taken.”
Lacey gasped. “Really? What?”
Nigel showed Lacey into the room. It was a bedroom, bigger than Lacey’s old apartment had been, with a space to do makeup and dress, an en suite bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a fireplace with a couch beside it. The wall opposite the couch was filled with hundreds of small framed artworks—mainly depicting women in different outfits throughout the ages, a sort of visual love letter to the evolving art of fashion.
“There,” Nigel said, gesturing to a patch where the colors of the wallpaper were more vibrant.
It was a small square, an inversion formed by years of sun bleaching the paper around it. There had been a picture there before, another amongst the myriad hanging on the wall, and it had been removed.
“Wow, how did you even spot that?” Lacey asked. Amongst the sea of paintings, it would take the keenest of eyes to even notice one had gone.
“Because it was a valuable one. A rare original by Lady Isabelle Wiccomb Defante. She was an ancestor of Iris’s. She painted women in a variety of natural poses—cradling their infants, brushing their hair, that sort of thing—and it was considered extremely daring at the time. Some claimed it was almost pornographic. So her husband put a stop to her painting. She secretly began to paint miniatures. But when her husband found out, he had them all burned. Lady Isabelle supposedly went mad after that. There was a rumor that one miniature survived the blaze.”
He pointed at the small space on the wall.
Lacey, enthralled by the tale of the rebellious Lady Isabelle, widened her eyes. “Iris had the miniature all along?”
Nigel smiled as if reminiscing about his former mistress’s devious streak. “She did. Lady Isabelle was her heroine. She wanted to honor her by displaying it. But she didn’t want to draw too much attention to the fact she was in possession of such a rare piece of work. It’s not in the ledger. She hid it in plain sight, amongst her wall dedicated to fashion.”
Lacey shook her head with awe. “She obviously inherited Isabelle’s rebelliousness.”
“Yes. And her stubbornness.” His smile faded as grief took over. “Isabelle Wiccomb is considered a master now, a pioneer amongst female artists. The discovery of her lost miniature would rock the art world, I can assure you.”
“Did anyone else know about it?” Lacey asked.
Nigel shrugged. “Honestly, I’ve no idea. She may have told the children but whether they were interested enough to retain it is another thing. They never paid any attention to Iris’s love of fashion so I doubt they cared about art, either. Her sister might well have known. But, as you know, she’s unwell with Alzheimer’s now. She may have told her husband as well, but he is now sadly deceased. Once I saw the painting was no longer there, I checked to see if she’d moved it to her safe. She’d moved other things before her death as well, as you know. But no. It’s gone. Someone must’ve realized what it was … and… Oh, Lacey, do you think she was murdered for a painting?”
Nigel sank onto the couch and broke down in tears.
The sight made Lacey’s heart ache. She reached for him and rubbed his back for comfort.
As he wept, she ran through everything in her mind. The person who took the painting must have known the story behind it, or else they wouldn’t have singled it out. And they must have known it was there, on the wall.
She looked at the space the rare piece had once occupied. Something about the sun-bleached paper around it struck her.
“Hiding in plain sight!” she blurted. “Whoever took it did so because it was virtually untraceable. The painting was only rumored to still exist. It was hidden amongst all these other works and its removal wouldn’t immediately be obvious to the police when they searched the house for signs of theft after the murder. She didn’t even have it listed on the estate’s ledger, she wanted to protect it so much. All the thief needed to do was wait long enough for the sun to bleach out the wallpaper and no one would be able to claim the painting was ever there in the first place. Whoever took it is literally sitting on a gold mine!”
Despite her excitement at finding a clue, Lacey was more than acutely aware of the reality behind it. An old woman was dead. Possibly over a painting. Her life had been brutally taken from her. It was too horrible to bear thinking. The deviousness needed to plan such a deed left Lacey cold.
Nigel looked up then, his weeping fit having subsided.
“You were calling for me,” he said.
Lacey jolted, suddenly remembering the photograph, still clutched in her hand. She’d been so wrapped up in the story of Lady Isabelle and the clue with the stolen painting, she’d completely forgotten all about it.
She held it out to Nigel and he took it with a frown of curiosity.
“What’s this?”
“I found it inside a copy of the Bible. Someone had cut the pages to make a sort of compartment, and it was wedged inside.”
Nigel looked bemused. “What room was it in?” He took the photo from her.
“One of the guest rooms on the third floor. There were some bits of jewelry in there as well, that looked like they’d been handcrafted.”
“That sounds like Clarissa. From what Iris told me about her, Clarissa always admired her jewelry and tried to make her own as a child, but the boys used to wreck her creations so she took to hiding them. You must’ve stumbled across one of her old hiding places.”
Lacey frowned. Hiding her creations from her monstrous brothers certainly made sense, but why would Clarissa also put a photograph in there? A photograph of a man who looked like her father!
“Do you know either of the men in the photo?” Lacey asked, purposefully keeping her question vague so as not to accidentally implant any information into Nigel’s mind that might lead to a false memory.
Nigel studied the picture for a while, then shrugged. “No, sorry, I don’t. This looks like it was taken twenty or thirty years ago. Long before my time at Penrose Manor. Why do you ask?” He handed it back to her.
Lacey felt disappointment settle in her chest. “I just thought it might be a clue. I guess not. Anyway, the missing painting is quite enough of a lead to be getting on with.”
Nigel nodded. The discussion of the theft seemed to have turned his mood morose. Lacey decided she’d better give him some privacy with his grief.
“Chester and I ought to leave now,” she said.
“I’ll show you out,” the valet replied.
Nigel stood, his knees cricking loudly, and, ever the polite valet, gestured for Lacey to exit Iris’s bedroom first. He followed after her.
As they began to descend the staircase, Lacey heard Nigel wince.
“Are your knees giving you problems?” she asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Not at all,” Nigel replied, dismissing her concern. He kept his eyes averted, but the wince was evident on his face.
“Oh no,” Lacey said. “It was me, wasn’t it? I hurt you when I bumped into you in the hallway. I’m so sorry.”
It was just like the polite valet not to make a fuss; he was practically the human personification of a Stiff Upper Lip.
“No, no, no,” Nigel said, looking increasingly awkward. “It’s nothing.”
Lacey wanted to comfort him, but he was clearly uncomfortable with her bringing attention to it. But he was evidently in quite a bit of pain, and they had collided quite hard on the landing. Lacey couldn’t help but feel responsible and, in turn, want to fix the problem in some way.
She was about to ask him if he’d allow her to fetch him some painkillers at the very least, when a new thought suddenly struck her. Nigel’s wince was in time with his steps. He was limping, as if the pain was from putting weight down on his leg rather than a bump or swelling that was causing him issues.
With a sudden dawning, Lacey felt a horrible swaying, swirling in her head. She grasped the banister tightly, it suddenly feeling like the only thing stopping her from collapsing down the staircase.
Was Nigel in pain because of … a dog bite?
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Lacey’s hands shook as she clutched the steering wheel and plowed the Volvo down the winding country streets. In the passenger seat beside her, Chester sat alert. The window was open a crack and wind whipped in, ruffling his fur.
“Sorry,” she said, leaning across him and winding it up with the hand crank.
Chester whined.
“What do you think about all this?” she asked him. “I mean, we know Nigel. We know him well. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt Iris, would he?”
As much as she didn’t want to even entertain the thought that Nigel might somehow be involved, Lacey found herself running through all the evidence she’d gathered so far to see if any of it might fit with a theory of Nigel being the culprit.
“Let’s start with the burglary at my store and work backwards,” she said to Chester, turning off the main street onto a darker side alley that was lit by a few sporadic lampposts. “Let’s assume the person who tried to rob me was specifically after Iris’s belongings. Who knew they were there? Nigel, of course, because he arranged for the delivery. The lawyer. The delivery firm. Oh, and the specialist music insurers, because I had to get them to insure the Grecian harp. Well, we can count them out right away. They’d run their business into bankruptcy if they went around stealing the very harps they insured! And the same can be said for the deliverers. They were specialists. Companies like that only survive through having a stellar reputation. If there was even a whiff of a scandal going on there, they’d fold right away. I mean, look at my store as a prime example of that.”
She scoffed. Then she paused. She was talking to her dog. Not just a couple of sentences here and there that Chester may comprehend, but she was monologuing at him and theorizing as if he were her actual sleuthing partner. The thought was so absurd, she managed a laugh, despite the heaviness of the situation.
But though Lacey wasn’t crazy enough to think Chester could understand her more complex thoughts, speaking them aloud was actually really helpful. And so she continued.
“That leads us back to Nigel. He was the only other person who knew for certain that Iris’s items were at my store.”
Her stomach swirled as she gave Nigel his first strike.
“But that’s only assuming the break-in was targeted. Tom thought it might have been a local trying to scare me, like the person who’d left me threatening messages.”
But then she remembered that they’d come to the realization—during their chat over jam-filled croissants—that the perp had been targeting the grandfather clock specifically.
That’s when the aha! moment hit Lacey. And it was nothing like she imagined. She felt no relief, but instead a horrible, dull, aching thud in her chest. It did not feel good. It felt downright awful. The answer wasn’t one she wanted, even if it was right. The pieces of a puzzle were falling into place in her mind, building up a picture she just didn’t want to believe. But seeing, as they say, is believing, and the picture forming in her mind was as clear as day.
Heart heavy with realization, Lacey said aloud; “They weren’t trying to move the grandfather clock. They were trying to get inside it. Inside its locked cabinet. The one with a missing key. The one small enough to hide a miniature painting in. The thief was wielding a crowbar, not to break into the safe—that would be impossible—but to break into the clock to retrieve something hidden inside.”
She made the final turning into Crag Cottage and parked outside the house, killing the engine. Her shoulders slumped. In the silence, she spoke.
“Benjamin accused Nigel of moving the grandfather clock out of the playroom in order to exploit the wording of the will, the wording that Iris had had changed just before her murder, a change that only Nigel knew about.”
Moonlight streamed in through the windshield. Lacey looked over at Chester. He regarded her with the same attentiveness as always.
“Why would he do it?” she asked the dog. “Why?”
Nigel knew he would inherit the estate in Iris’s will—and soon, since the woman was old and ailing. But none of the money from the sale of her items would go to him at all. That was all going to charity. How was he supposed to pay all the expenses having such an enormous estate would entail? Essentially, the house would become an albatross to him, if he didn’t have some kind of income. A rich woman like Iris probably didn’t realize how impossible it would be for a normal guy like Nigel to pay for upkeep. She was essentially leaving him a multimillion-pound rot bucket.
“He could have refused the estate!” Lacey exclaimed aloud, thumping her fists on the steering wheel as fury raced through her. “But he must have succumbed to greed. Turning down the gift of a famous, multimillion-pound manor would take willpower of steel. Knowing all the money you needed to upkeep it could be earned through the sale of just one painting…one that no one even knew about, that was rumored to have been destroyed.” She sighed. “Of all the people in Iris’s life she’d told about the rare, rumored artwork, it was Nigel. And that one small, hideable item alone would pay all the bills and taxes and maintenance on the manor for years to come.”
She got out of the car, Chester hopping down to walk beside her, and headed inside the cottage. Her mind seemed to be ticking at a million miles a second. She went straight to the kitchen, filled Chester’s bowl with kibble, and poured herself a glass of wine. Then she sat on the stool at the butcher’s block table where her notebook was still lying open to all the notes she’d made from the news reports about Iris’s murder. There, her list of suspects stared up at her.
Benjamin.
Henry.
With a sad sigh, she picked up her pen and circled the last name on her list.
Nigel.
From his name she drew an arrow and added the word greed.
“Nigel got greedy,” Lacey said. “Iris told him he was going to inherit the estate but none of the money for its upkeep, and he figured out there was a way to pay for it. To sell the painting. He couldn’t take it while Iris was alive, because she’d notice its disappearance immediately. She’d have to be dead for him to take it. But why not just wait until Iris died a natural death, then take the painting? Why kill her? There must’ve been some urgency. Perhaps he had some kind of ticking clock
. Bills mounting for whatever reason. Something that forced his hand.”
She added a word beside greed. Urgency. And then another word: Hide?
Because why would Nigel need to hide the painting inside the clock? Why not just remove it from the house? He could’ve put it in his car, perhaps, during the so-called prescription pill run. Because he was worried his car might also be searched by the police? Or possibly because the painting was so delicate and precious he didn’t want to risk it being damaged?
“Yes, that’s it!” Lacey said, writing down insurance to her list of words.
Nigel knew there were special insurers involved for antique items because they’d discussed it! He’d known full well that everything inside Iris’s house was protected, and that everything inside Lacey’s store was as well. If the painting was anywhere else but the manor or store, then any damage it incurred would render it worthless. Since he was worried the children might break into the house, the only place the painting was truly safe was Lacey’s store.
“That’s why he was so desperate,” Lacey said, her guts swirling. “He used me. Pretended I was an ally. Brought me in on the scheme under the guise of being a friend. Laid all that stuff on my shoulders about Iris wanting me to value her items as her dying wish. He chummied up with me so I wouldn’t suspect him. To deflect attention. He was… hiding in plain sight.”
She put down her pen and sank her head into her hands.
This whole elaborate scheme had been so well planned it left her feeling cold. Nigel had had the clock moved from the children’s bedroom so he could use it to hide the painting inside, claimed the key was missing so no one would check, then had the clock delivered to Lacey—an amateur who knew no better—for safekeeping. He must’ve known that it wouldn’t take long for the sun to bleach the wallpaper and hide his crime forever.
Of course, he wouldn’t have been able to sell it outright because of the obvious link between him and Iris’s estate. There must be a middleman, some kind of backstreet dealer who’d be the one to take all the fame and glory of finding the infamous lost miniature of Lady Isabelle Wiccomb Defante.