Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  “Special assignment from the Home Office,” Leo repeated for the tenth time that morning. “I do apologize about our little subterfuge.” He gave a smile that he hoped suggested that Mrs. Clemens was a woman of the world and would certainly understand that needs must in a circumstance like this.

  “Oh, I see. Quite, quite.” She eyed Leo skeptically.

  “By what means did visitors usually enter the house?” Copley asked.

  “Guests come to the front door,” she said slowly, as if to a recalcitrant child. “Were you under the impression that visitors to Wych Hall slid down chimneys or climbed through windows, young man?”

  “Are any other doors used, for any reason?” Copley asked patiently.

  “Tradespeople and deliveries go to the kitchen door. But anyone might come that way if they had something for the kitchen. Young Miss Smythe tends to come to the kitchen with eggs, but she doesn’t always venture upstairs.”

  “What about the french doors in the library?” the superintendent asked. “I notice that the terrace they lead out to is flush with the gravel drive at one end. It would make a convenient entry. Did anyone ever call on the colonel that way?”

  The housekeeper looked appalled. “Certainly not. Nobody uses those doors but the colonel. He considers—considered—them a private entrance.”

  Leo remembered the unlatched french door and the spots of wetness on the floor between the door and the desk. “Those doors are customarily kept locked, I suppose?” he asked.

  “No, the colonel was accustomed to stepping outside fresh air.” That would explain the wetness—just traces of new snow clinging to shoes after a few steps outdoors. But the colonel had been dry from head to toe, so the moisture could not have come from his own shoes.

  “Do you keep the front door bolted throughout the day?” Copley asked.

  “Only at night, at about ten o’clock, unless the colonel is out visiting or has guests.”

  The body had been found at nine. “So, the front door was unlocked all day. Somebody could have come in, unknown to you, and either shot Colonel Armstrong directly or hidden, with the intention of shooting him later.”

  Mrs. Clemens sniffed. “I don’t know what kind of house you think this is, with people creeping in and lying in wait.” But she didn’t deny that a person could have entered the house at any time.

  “Did your employer have any enemies, Mrs. Clemens?” Copley asked. “Had he any quarrels?”

  Mrs. Clemens appeared to struggle for a way to answer that question in a sufficiently genteel manner. “He was a man of strong opinions. He’s been quarreling with Miss Pickering over an easement for decades now.”

  “What about his staff? It seems that housemaids don’t last more than a few months at Wych Hall.”

  “He was a difficult man to please. I’ve worked at this house for twenty years. My father was one of his tenants and my sister’s family still lives in the village. It is possible that someone without the connections to the Hall and to the Armstrong family might not tolerate the colonel’s manner.” This all sounded to Leo like a diplomatic way of saying that the man was impossible to deal with.

  “Did that include Mr. Norris?” Copley asked.

  “Mr. Norris keeps himself to himself. I hardly know the man, for all he’s worked here the past year.”

  “Did he and Colonel Armstrong quarrel?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a quarrel, no, because that takes two. The colonel sometimes raised his voice at Mr. Norris.”

  “And how did Mr. Norris typically respond.”

  “Meek as a lamb, he was.”

  “Did they have any such quarrel recently?”

  The housekeeper hesitated only fractionally. “Yesterday.”

  “Did you happen to hear any of it? Since you say the colonel spoke loudly during these disputes, I daresay you couldn’t avoid overhearing them.” Leo suppressed a smile at the police officer’s attempt to excuse any eavesdropping on the part of the housekeeper.

  “Mr. Norris had gotten a telephone call, and told the colonel that he needed to go to London and wouldn’t return until late that night. The colonel didn’t take kindly to that. It wasn’t Norris’s day out, you see. He told Norris in no uncertain terms that he was to return that afternoon or there would be consequences.”

  “Did he threaten Norris with dismissal?”

  “No, that wasn’t it.” Mrs. Clemens frowned, as if remembering. “He said he’d tell his family.”

  “He threatened to tell Mr. Norris’s family that he was being insubordinate?” Copley asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t that. Colonel Armstrong said ‘I’ll tell his family.’”

  “Do you have any idea whose family? Or what information he threatened to share?” When Mrs. Clemens said that she did not, Copley told her she was free to leave. The housekeeper left the room, muttering something that sounded like “never in my life,” and “disgraceful” under her breath.

  Edward Norris was the only member of the household who seemed distressed by his employer’s death. He arrived at noon with a suitcase in his hand, and when told about the events of the previous night, seemed genuinely shocked. “I beg your pardon,” he said to Copley, “but you mean to tell me that Colonel Armstrong was shot point blank in the middle of his forehead. In his own home.”

  “We didn’t say anything about point blank, Mr. Norris,” Copley said coolly. “If you could give my sergeant the details of your whereabouts last night, he’s ready to take them down.” The superintendent gestured with his chin at a chair, but the secretary remained standing.

  “I was in London at the Clifford Hotel on Great Russell Street.”

  “And what was your business in London?” Copley asked.

  “How can that possibly be relevant to your inquiries?”

  “Answer the man,” Leo said with a pointed look at the secretary. “Otherwise we’ll all be here for hours.”

  “I received a telephone call yesterday morning from a woman purporting to be my sister’s secretary and requesting that I visit her at the Clifford Hotel for dinner. But when I arrived, she wasn’t there, and the concierge knew nothing of my sister.”

  “Did you telephone your sister to clear up the confusion?” the superintendent asked.

  Norris flushed an angry red. “No. My sister and I have not been in touch for many years. I wouldn’t know how to reach her. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she wanted to see me again, but when she didn’t show up, I assumed it was a cruel trick.”

  So Norris had been cast off by his family, presumably because he had deserted during the war. And last night he thought he had been given an olive branch, but instead had been given—well, somebody had taken care to make sure he had an alibi, was very much how it looked.

  “What train did you take to London?” Leo asked. He already knew Norris had been at the nursing home in the afternoon.

  “The 10:22.”

  “That’s early for a dinner invitation.”

  “I had business of my own to conduct earlier in the day,” Norris said. Leo supposed this meant his visit to the convalescent home where James had seen him.

  “The person who telephoned you,” Leo said. “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “A woman.”

  “Did she mention your sister by name?”

  “Yes, she said she was Lady Borthwick’s secretary,” Norris said bitterly. “I was quite taken in.”

  “When we telephone the hotel, will the desk clerk remember seeing you?”

  “I should dashed well think so. I sat in the hotel bar for a good three hours, deluding myself into thinking she’d turn up. Wound up missing the last return train and needing to book a room. And those don’t come cheap at the Clifford.”

  “Yesterday morning, when Colonel Armstrong threatened to divulge a secret to somebody’s family unless you did his bidding, to what was he referring?” Copley asked.

  Norris went pale. “That’s not my tale to tell.
”

  “It’s a murder inquiry, Norris,” Leo said. “There are no secrets.”

  “Feel free to arrest me. I’m not answering that question.”

  “You’ll please stay at Wych Hall until further notice, Mr. Norris,” Copley said with a sigh.

  Later, when the police set off to visit the houses in the immediate neighborhood of Wych Hall to see if anyone had noticed anything unusual, Leo said he’d come along.

  “Boy, would I like to know what kind of show this is if the Home Office had an undercover man here waiting for a murder,” Copley remarked as they walked through the wood to Marston’s cottage.

  “It’s not as exciting as it sounds,” Leo said. “Taxes.”

  “Oh,” Copley said, disappointed but not evidently eager to ask further questions. Taxes were nearly as unlikely to garner additional questions as church architecture was. “I’m only too glad to have the help. There’s a crime ring operating out of Stoke Prior that’s keeping our men busy.”

  Leo could not tell if the man was serious, and was still considering whether a place with a name like Stoke Prior could sustain a crime ring, however modest, when the gamekeeper’s cottage came into view. He cleared his throat. “I’d suggest going easy on this fellow. He had a bad war and I don’t know how he’ll react to a man in uniform. Maybe let your sergeant fall back a bit?”

  Copley perked up a bit at this. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that there’s a convenient madman on the premises?”

  Leo knew the police wouldn’t mind pinning this murder on Marston if all else failed. A forest-dwelling recluse with a beard and bad nerves had to be a policeman’s daydream when faced with an unsolved crime.

  “Nothing like that,” Leo said. “Just a bit jumpy. He was a prisoner of war. And if you want him to say anything useful, you’ll probably want him at his ease.” Copley hesitated, but ultimately agreed to speak to Marston without his sergeant.

  When the cottage door opened, it wasn’t Marston but rather James who stood on the cottage’s threshold. He had changed out of this morning’s jumper and wore his customary tweed suit. “Dr. Sommers,” Leo said. “This is Superintendent Copley of the Worcestershire Constabulary,” he said, addressing the remark to both James and Marston, who had appeared at James’s shoulder.

  “We met last night.” James nodded in turn to both men, his expression warming when he met Leo’s eyes.

  Leo felt a surge of daft affection wash over him, and for a minute he felt like he was seeing a friend, not destroying a community.

  WITH EVERY MINUTE JAMES listened to Marston answer the policeman’s questions, he grew more unsettled.

  “I heard nothing,” Marston repeated calmly. Well, calmly by Marston’s standards, which was to say his hands shook a bit and he startled at every sudden movement and tiny sound. “It was entirely quiet. I didn’t hear so much as an owl on the wing, let alone footsteps passing my cottage,” he told the superintendent.

  Every last sound, James repeated to himself. He had spent enough time with Marston to know the man heard everything: every broken twig, every scurrying mouse. It was one of the invisible scars he carried from the war: he reacted to every noise as if it was a mortar shell or the footsteps of his executioner. So, the man was lying to the police. James didn’t blame him for that: saying he didn’t hear anything was the quickest way to get them to go away, which was obviously what Marston wanted. Christ, it was what James wanted too.

  But James had seen the wetness on the library floor near the french doors that led to the terrace, and he knew they hadn’t come from the colonel’s own shoes. He had patted down the body himself, God help him, and knew the man was too dry to have been out in the snow. It certainly looked like the murderer had come through the french doors, and if that were the case, he or she could very well have arrived or departed via the footpath.

  Marston could be lying to get rid of the superintendent, or he could be lying to cover up for someone. James wasn’t certain he wanted to know which it was.

  “I’m glad we ran into you, Sommers,” Superintendent Copley said as he rose to leave the cottage. “One of my men rang your surgery, but there wasn't an answer. I wanted to get your impressions of the state the body was in when you found it. We had the police surgeon take a look at it, naturally, but it’s always good to get the opinion of a medical man who was on the spot, so to speak.”

  Numbly, James told the superintendent everything he knew about the body. Judging by the coldness of the colonel’s skin, he had been dead less than an hour by the time James and Leo got there; the relatively small amount of blood indicated that he had died instantly. There was no gunpowder near the entry wound, suggesting he hadn’t been shot at very close range. James had said all these things last night, but had a sinking feeling that he’d have to say them many more times before this was all done with. If it was ever done with. He had the sense that it would never be done, that there would be an endless succession of bodies.

  It didn’t help that Leo Page was there, listening to every word James told the policeman. He wished he had met Leo under other circumstances. It would have been lovely to get to know him without this grisly shadow casting its gloom over them both. He supposed he had always known he wanted someone in his life, someone to share a bed with, someone to bring tea to in the morning. That person wasn’t Leo Page, couldn’t possibly be. But it had been lovely to pretend.

  When the policeman and Leo left, the snow had begun to fall once again, and this time it looked like it would keep up. The entire sky was filled with pale gray clouds, each heavy with snow. James shut the door behind him and turned to Marston.

  “I think we’re handling this well, all things considered,” Marston said as he put a kettle on the cottage’s ancient stove.

  James smiled at this inclusion of himself. “I nearly fainted when I saw the body,” he admitted. It felt good to talk about this with someone who had a similar experience.

  “And I nearly got sick at the sight of that policeman outside my door. Glad he didn’t come in though. I take it that was your friend’s doing?”

  “Could be.” James would have to thank Leo. “You seem cheerful,” he remarked as he took the cup of tea Marston handed him.

  “About the colonel dying? I can’t say he’s much of a loss to me or anybody else.”

  “Marston, did you know Colonel Armstrong before coming here?” Marston had been a patient at the nursing home where James sometimes worked. When he no longer needed that level of medical care, James had suggested Wychcomb St. Mary as a place where he might get a fresh start. He wouldn’t have suggested it if he thought Marston had a former acquaintance in the village. But he remembered the way Armstrong had been startled during Mrs. Hoggett’s burial. At the time, he assumed the man had seen Leo, or had been startled by the Griffiths children. But he may have been looking toward Marston, who he wouldn’t necessarily have seen up close before that day.

  Marston regarded him for a long moment. “We crossed paths.”

  “He was involved in Dieppe, wasn’t he?” James sat heavily on the bare oak chair by Marston’s hearth. He hadn’t put it together until Griffiths mentioned that Armstrong had been talking about Dieppe the night of the dinner party. “That’s where you were captured.”

  “Armstrong was an incompetent officer. Possibly worse than incompetent. There was always speculation that somebody told the Nazis about the Dieppe raid beforehand. That in addition to being acutely mismanaged and a bad idea to boot, somebody high up the chain of command let a secret slip.”

  “You think he was a traitor? An informant?” James’s head was spinning.

  “I don’t think he’s clever enough for that. It might have been more of a ‘loose lips sink ships’ situation. And I don’t have any evidence that it was him. I didn’t kill him. I wouldn’t have done, even if I thought I could stand adding another corpse to the world. But I can’t get too exercised if somebody thought it was their duty to eliminate him.”

 
; “Wait. Marston. Are you saying that’s what happened?”

  Marston smiled grimly, and James realized it was the first time he had seen the man smile at all. “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Christ. Did he know you? Did he remember you from Dieppe? Or before?”

  “I called on him the day after I moved in. And he said ‘bad luck about Dieppe.’”

  James needed a drink. “You called—we are talking about this later, Marston, but right now—” he shook his head, as if trying to get it to work better. “So it wasn’t you that he was startled by at the burial, because he had already seen you. And it wasn’t Page. He knew everybody else, so what the hell was going on?”

  “That I can’t help you with.” He lit a cigarette.

  “Also, you lied to that superintendent. You must have heard something last night. We both know that.”

  Marston took a drag from his cigarette, regarding James levelly as he did so. “Listen, I’ll deny this if the police ask, so don’t get any ideas, but I have the idea that Wendy went to Wych Hall last night.”

  “Wendy?” James was taken aback. “Miss Pickering just told me that she’s been sick in bed since yesterday afternoon. What makes you think she went to the hall?”

  “You remember how for the first few months I was here, I jumped at every last noise that came from outside. Well, there some noises I’ve learned to—not tune out, because that’ll never happen, but not jump at, at least. And one of those sounds is Wendy’s bicycle going along the footpath. Around eight or nine o’clock, I thought to myself, it’s awfully late for Wendy to be traipsing about, and I made up my mind to speak to her about it the next day.” He took another puff on his cigarette. “She does often prowl around at night, but usually not on her bicycle. Honestly, I can’t tell you more. But I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  Chapter 13

  When James next saw Leo, the sun had begun to dip low toward the horizon, and there was enough snow on the ground to make him wish he had worn sturdier shoes. They were at the place where the path forked in the woods, leading to the village in one direction and Little Briars in the other.