Death at Wentwater Court

by Carola Dunn

  He squared his shoulders, ready to confess to his misdeeds and take his punishment like a man, as he had been taught. ‘Father, I must explain . . . ’

  ‘Wait!’ Annabel appeared in the doorway.

  Geoffrey started to his feet. ‘No! You have nothing to do with this!’

  With swift steps she crossed the room to stand beside her husband, face to face with her stepson. ‘My dear boy,’ she said passionately, ‘you cannot imagine I shall let you shoulder all the blame.’

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘I went up to bed early that night,’ Annabel began in a low voice, staring down at her clasped hands. Geoffrey had seated her in his chair, with an ardent solicitude that made Daisy blink hard.

  In turn, Lord Wentwater had set a straight chair for Geoffrey between them and made him sit. As he fetched it from the desk, his gaze had passed over Daisy unseeingly, his mind on his wife and son and the disclosures he must fear were about to bring his world tumbling in ruins about his ears. He listened with bowed head. Daisy saw only his aristocratic profile and one thin but strong white hand, resting in tense stillness on the maroon arm of his chair.

  ‘I was tired,’ Annabel continued, ‘and I had a slight headache.’

  Geoffrey interrupted her. ‘It was that horrible song of James’s that drove you away! The one about . . . ’

  ‘That’s enough, Geoffrey,’ she said sharply, raising her head with a protective glance at her husband. Her eyes met Daisy’s. Daisy tried hard to convey sympathy and encouragement, and hoped she was right in thinking Annabel looked a little comforted. ‘No matter why, I went upstairs and had Barstow draw me a bath, then I dismissed her. All I wanted was peace and quiet.

  ‘I stayed in the bath for ages. The warmth and the rose scent of the bath-crystals were so soothing, just what I needed. Then the water began to cool. You know how you feel after lying in a hot bath, relaxed and languorous and indolent. It was quite an effort to get out and I was glad of the little stool. I was stepping down from it to the floor and reaching for my towel when I heard behind me the click of a latch.

  ‘I flung the towel around me and turned. The door to the corridor was opening. That man’ – Annabel’s voice cracked – ‘Lord Stephen swaggered in.

  ‘He held the key dangling from the tip of his finger in front of him, like a sort of Open Sesame talisman. He boasted that he’d stolen it. That door was always kept locked and I hadn’t noticed the key was missing. He pushed the door to behind him and came towards me.

  ‘He was wearing his dressing-gown, a frightful crimson velvet thing embroidered with gold dragons, with a gold-tasselled cord. As he came he untied it. Underneath, he was nude. I cried out, “Go away,” and clutched the towel tighter around me, and retreated backwards. He smiled. Oh, it was a cold, evil smile! It made me cringe. He said, “Oh no, my dear. Not when at last we have our chance.”

  ‘“Go away,” I cried out again. I couldn’t move any farther back. The edge of the bath pressed into the back of my thighs. I told him I’d scream if he came a single step closer. “Someone will hear!” I threatened, praying I was right. “Someone will come!”

  ‘He laughed. He said that would suit him almost as well, though he’d be sorry . . . to miss the seduction scene. It was revenge he wanted, you see, as much as he wanted m-me, revenge because I refused him years and years ago.

  ‘That was when he touched me. He stroked my shoulder and I hit his hand away. Then he told me he was leaving the country very soon anyway, so scandal could not touch him. He didn’t care if he was caught with me, not that he’d ever paid much attention to the gabbling of envious geese, he said.

  ‘He tore the towel from my grasp,’ Annabel continued with a dry sob. ‘He tossed it on the floor and reached for me. I did scream then. I was terrified. But at that moment the door crashed open and Geoffrey rushed in.’

  ‘I heard her,’ Geoffrey said simply. ‘I heard his laugh. I’d been suspicious when he left the drawing-room so soon after she did. I followed him upstairs and saw him go into his room. I went to mine, but I left the door open just a crack and kept an eye on the corridor.

  ‘The trouble was, my door hinges on the wrong side. I couldn’t see towards Astwick’s room without sticking my head out. I didn’t think it mattered because I assumed he’d have to go past my room and round the corner to the boudoir or bedroom door. I didn’t see him sneaking across the corridor to the bathroom. I heard a door close, though, and voices. I went to listen at his bedroom door. That was when he laughed and she screamed.

  ‘Oh, God, I was so afraid the bathroom door would be locked. I’d have knocked it down, but it would have wasted time. But it wasn’t even properly latched. It slammed open with a crash and he swung round, still gripping her by the arm. As I charged at him, she wrenched free and escaped.

  ‘I hit him.’ Geoffrey couldn’t keep a vestige of pride out of his voice. ‘It was a ripping left uppercut to the chin. Of course, I did catch him unawares. Anyway, he lost his balance, tangled his feet in the bath mat, and tripped over the stool. I didn’t wait to see any more than that. I grabbed a towel from the rail and her dressing-gown from the chair and dashed into the boudoir after her.

  ‘I didn’t want her to take a chill,’ he explained earnestly to his father. ‘I wanted to comfort her, and to promise I’d never let that beast go near her again. I didn’t look, I swear it. Besides, I had to watch the door in case he came after us.’

  ‘He kept his back turned to me,’ Annabel confirmed shakily, ‘until I had dried myself and put on my dressing-gown, and a cardigan over it. I was cold, so very cold. Henry?’ The word held a desperate plea.

  Lord Wentwater leaned forward and clasped her outstretched hands. ‘My dear, no blame can attach to you for that blackguard’s actions, nor are you responsible for my son’s gallantry. If I am silent it’s because I don’t wish to interrupt what I know to be a painful narration.’

  Reassured, she took up the tale. ‘We talked for a few minutes, not long. There was no sign of Lord Stephen, no sound, so Geoffrey returned to the bathroom to make sure he had left.’

  ‘He was still there all right,’ Geoffrey said harshly, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes as if to shut out the memory. ‘He was bent double over the edge of the tub, his head and shoulders underwater. I hauled him out but there was no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. He was dead.’

  In the tense, almost palpable hush that filled the study, a coal falling in the grate made Daisy jump.

  ‘Geoffrey didn’t come back,’ said Annabel, ‘and I heard such odd noises. I was frightened. I peeked into the bathroom and saw him crouching by the body. Lord Stephen lay sprawled on the linoleum in a spreading pool of water, with blood oozing in droplets from a gash in his forehead. I thought I was going to be sick.

  ‘Geoffrey’s face was stark white, horror-stricken, anguished. He cried out that he hadn’t meant to kill him. I knew it, and I pulled myself together enough to reassure him. He stood up and glanced at the bathtub. I saw that the water was stained pink. There was blood on one of the taps.

  ‘The taps in my bathroom are cockatoos,’ she said in a monotone. ‘When Lord Stephen tripped and lost his balance, he must have somehow spun round, falling, and hit his head on a cockatoo’s crest. Between that and Geoffrey’s blow, he must have been unconscious, or at least too dazed to pull himself out when he fell head down in the water. And perhaps before he recovered he was weakened by loss of blood.

  ‘Geoffrey wanted to go to you, Henry. I stopped him. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I should have let him go. But I couldn’t bear to bring any more trouble upon you! You should never have married me!’

  In an instant the earl was out of his chair and bending over her. ‘Never say that, my love.’ He took her face tenderly between his hands and kissed her forehead. She clutched his sleeve, tears trembling on her dark lashes.

  Daisy hurriedly looked away. Geoffrey, scarlet to the tips of his ears, was staring with intense concentration at the windo
w. His chin quivered pitiably.

  After a moment, he gasped out in a strangled voice, ‘I promised. I promised not to tell you, sir, but when Miss Dalrymple guessed . . . ’

  Lord Wentwater threw a vague glance over his shoulder at Daisy before turning to Geoffrey and laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘You saved the woman I love from rape. How can I thank you? What more can I ask of you?’

  ‘I love her too,’ said Geoffrey, almost inaudibly.

  As though struck by a physical blow, Lord Wentwater sank back into his chair. ‘I see.’ He sounded old and very tired.

  ‘She loves you, Father!’

  Before the words had left Geoffrey’s mouth, Annabel was kneeling at her husband’s side, pressing his hand to her cheek. ‘Oh, my love, my love, don’t look like that. There is no one in my world but you. Geoffrey knows it. He has my affection as your son, and my eternal gratitude for what he has done for me, but you are all I want or need.’

  And Geoffrey, to Daisy’s silent applause and admiration, moved his chair close to his father’s for her. She sat down, her hand in the earl’s, and Geoffrey retreated to lonely exile on the far side of the fireplace.

  With an obvious effort, he returned to his story. ‘We couldn’t leave Astwick lying there for the maid to find in the morning. Lord knows what sort of scandal that would have led to. We had to get him out of there. I thought it would be best just to move him into my bathroom, the one I shared with him.’

  ‘I couldn’t let him do that,’ his stepmother said. ‘If anyone had guessed more was involved in Lord Stephen’s death than a simple accident, Geoffrey would inevitably have been implicated. We had to make it appear obvious that Lord Stephen had been alone, that the accident was entirely his own fault, but we weren’t even sure whether he had bled to death or drowned.

  ‘I suppose I was beginning to recover from the shock, because I began to notice things I’d overlooked. There was a strong smell of roses and I discovered the entire jar of bath-salts had dropped into the bath and broken. He must have knocked it with a flailing arm when he fell. The salts were bright pink, so presumably part of the tinge of the bathwater was from that. Then I saw the red rivulets trickling from his dressing-gown – it was sodden from the waist up – into the pool on the floor. The dye was running, and must have started to run when it was in the bath, colouring the water.

  ‘So I realized he had not necessarily lost a great deal of blood. It seemed more likely he had drowned. We needed to stage a drowning accident and the lake was the obvious place.’

  ‘I didn’t want her involved in the gruesome business, Father. I said I’d do it myself. She insisted on helping.’

  ‘While I dressed, Geoffrey went to change into outdoor clothes and to fetch Lord Stephen’s skating clothes. I put them on the body.’ Annabel shuddered. ‘It was ghastly. My stomach heaved the whole time.’

  ‘And in the meantime,’ Geoffrey explained, ‘I sneaked down the backstairs and out to the woodshed. I found an axe. The moon was rising, which made it quite easy to move about outside and not to stray from the trodden path. A beautiful night! If I’d been seen I could have concealed the axe and said I was just out for a stroll.

  ‘Once I got down there I was pretty safe in the black moon-shadow of the bridge. I hacked a hole in the ice, took the axe back to its place, and went back up to the bathroom.

  ‘She was struggling to force Astwick’s limp feet into the skating boots. I helped her, and we laced them up tightly.’ He looked across at Daisy. ‘It never crossed my mind that he would have worn ordinary boots to walk down to the lake. That was what aroused the detectives’ suspicions, wasn’t it? That one stupid mistake was what made them guess it wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. Later they wondered about the missing boots, but no one could remember whether they’d been under the bench when we went down or not. The gardeners cleared everything up afterwards, so anything might have happened to them.’

  ‘Then what was it?’

  ‘A silly little thing. There were axe-marks in the ice around the hole. If I hadn’t taken those photographs, they’d probably have passed for the marks of skates, but they showed up distinctly different on my pictures. I pointed them out to Mr. Fletcher. How I wish I hadn’t!’

  All three rushed to reassure her.

  ‘It was your civic duty,’ the earl reminded her with stern kindliness.

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Daisy,’ Annabel cried. ‘You didn’t know – how could you? – where it would lead.’

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ Geoffrey said desolately. ‘If! hadn’t lost my temper, I could have stopped him without hitting him. None of this would have happened. The whole thing’s like a bad dream. The worst was carrying him down the back stairs, then down the hill. A nightmare! His feet kept knocking against the walls.’

  ‘I went first down the stairs,’ Annabel said, ‘to make sure the coast was clear, but I didn’t go out. I went back up to clean up the bathroom. I wrung out the wet dressing-gown and draped it over the towel rail to dry, cleaned the bloody tap, and mopped the floor. I left the broken glass in the tub and in the morning I told Barstow I’d knocked it off the shelf reaching for it to add more to my bath. Would you believe it, she was very relieved that I hadn’t cut myself!

  ‘Meanwhile Geoffrey was struggling down the hill with that ghastly burden on his back.’

  ‘He weighed me down, upset my balance. I kept slipping and sliding on the packed snow and I was terrified of letting him fall, leaving an inexplicable hollow in the untrodden snow to either side of the path.

  ‘I got him down to the bank, though he seemed to grow heavier and heavier. I had to lay him down to take a breather, and I thought I’d never be able to lift him up again. The moon was high by then, reflecting brightly off the snow. I felt as conspicuous as a beetle on a sheet of white paper. If anyone had looked out . . . ’

  ‘I picked up the body in my arms, heaved myself to my feet, and set out across the frozen lake. Beneath the double weight the ice creaked and groaned, and I kept thinking how ironic it would be if two drowned bodies were found in the morning.

  ‘I didn’t dare go right to the edge of the hole. I knelt down and rolled him towards it. I couldn’t believe everyone for miles didn’t hear the splash when he fell in.’ Geoffrey faltered. ‘He sank, and I thought he’d stay down, but that leather jacket of his – with the belt and tight cuffs and fastened up to the chin – it trapped air like a balloon. I nearly fainted when he bobbed to the surface. Thank God he was facedown. Thank God!

  ‘Somehow I made it back up to the house, through the side door, and up the back stairs. By then her bathroom door was locked. I went to bed and tossed and turned for hours before I fell asleep. Yet when I woke in the morning, I didn’t remember any of that horror until I went into my bathroom and saw Astwick’s crimson dressing-gown hanging on the back of the door.

  ‘All I wanted was to get away from the house. I went riding – and when I came back, the police were here.’

  ‘We didn’t talk about it,’ Annabel said. ‘Not even once. It was too risky, and I suppose I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. Besides, there really wasn’t anything to say. We had done all we could to keep scandal from your family, Henry. It wasn’t enough.’ She hid her face in her hands. ‘Now we’ll all be dragged through the courts. The whole world will be convinced of your wife’s . . . ’

  ‘No!’ cried Geoffrey. ‘You need not come into it at all. We’ll make up a story. We’ll tell them I quarrelled with Astwick over money or something, and he drowned in his own bath, not yours.’

  ‘The police know Astwick was pursuing Annabel,’ said Lord Wentwater, passing a weary hand over his face. ‘They know you attacked James to defend her, Geoffrey.’

  ‘They know he’s in love with me,’ whispered Annabel.

  The earl groaned. ‘I still cannot bring myself to believe that my son is in love with his stepmother. I’m not sure which appalls me more, that, or his ki
lling a man, a guest in my house.’

  Huddled in the wing chair, Geoffrey seemed to shrink.

  ‘Remember, Henry, he did it for me!’ Annabel reproached her husband.

  ‘And not on purpose,’ Daisy reminded him, ‘and Astwick was a villain.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’m sorry, my boy, I’m having difficulty trying to take it all in. Of course, it was unintentional, and Astwick richly deserved punishment, if not to meet his end.’

  ‘Will I have to go to prison, Father?’ Geoffrey asked fearfully.

  ‘I don’t know. It can’t be called murder, surely, but manslaughter . . . ? I don’t know the penalties. Criminal law has never been one of my interests. I’ll stand behind you all the way, you may be sure. You shall have the best lawyers in the country. We’ll ask Hugh’s advice. He will know who’s best, what we ought to do first, whom to approach.’ Lord Wentwater stood up and moved towards the bellpull, cheered by the prospect of a practical course of action.

  Not murder, Daisy thought, but would the police believe it? Would a jury believe it?

  Even if Geoffrey was found innocent, or convicted of manslaughter, would sensation-hungry journalists believe the verdict and persuade their readers of its truth? There would always be those who were certain that the earl had used the influence of his title to save his son from the gallows. Mud always stuck.

  Not only to Geoffrey. Suppose some reporter, not satisfied with scandal easily acquired, dug up the secret from Annabel’s past that had allowed Astwick to blackmail her. Annabel would be ruined, her marriage and her life destroyed.

  Overwhelmed with guilt, Daisy couldn’t bear the possibility that she might be responsible for so much misery. If only she had more time to think up some way to prevent it! Once Alec came back and arrested Geoffrey it would be too late.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘I have it!’ To Daisy, her plan appeared gloriously inevitable in its simplicity, the solution to every problem – as long as Alec didn’t come back too soon.