Set For Murder (Showbiz Is Murder Book 1)

by Jolie Beaumont

  Inspector Travers walked over to Lady Margaret and took her by the arm. “There will be plenty of time for you to talk, Lady Margaret.”

  While he escorted her toward the door, no one spoke. Almost everyone tried to look anywhere but at the young woman being led out of the room. Only Peter and Lady Lambton-Keene followed her retreating figure with their eyes.

  When they reached the cabin door, Lady Margaret looked back and hesitated. Her body threatened to fall into a helpless heap, but Travers held her firmly in his grip. Then she recovered and turned back to Inspector Travers. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I can walk alone.”

  Travers opened the door and motioned for Lady Margaret to go first. He followed her and was about to close the door behind them, when someone in the room called after them.

  “You win, Inspector. I did it. I killed Honey and Mabel Watson.”

  CHAPTER 25

  LADY LAMBTON-KEENE CAST a defiant glance about the room. “I don’t care what you think, any of you. Honey broke the rules. I warned her, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Cecil stood up and confronted her. “What rule could possibly justify killing a person?”

  “You should know, Cecil, better than most of the people in this room. We’re not sentimental people, we aristocrats of England. We marry for the title and the estate and the money, and we allow a woman to get love where she can find it, just like a man—but not until she has produced a male heir, a legitimate male heir. That’s a rule no woman who marries an eldest son is allowed to break. Ever.”

  It was later that evening, after dinner. Inspector Travers had gotten his confession from Lady Lambton-Keene—who had talked more from a spirit of defiance than her usual calm and collected intellect—and Lady Margaret, who had shown surprising strength. Travers had promised to brief the occupants of Corridor B, before the ship docked at Southampton and they all went their separate ways. He and Jeffrey Baird were waiting in the bar for the others to arrive.

  “This would never have happened before the war,” Baird said gloomily.

  Travers knew his “Watson” was unhappy; Baird wouldn’t have offered his assistance, if he had thought there was even a remote chance that a member of his own class would be publically charged with murder. In the past, Lady Lambton-Keene, if she had been caught committing such a crime, would have either gone scot-free or been quietly removed to some remote part of the country or Empire. Travers also knew that some of his superiors at the Yard were probably going to be unhappy as well. How that would affect his career, he didn’t know. He did know that he couldn’t have acted other than he had done—pinned the blame on Peter Carroll or declare the case unsolvable, for example—and live up to his own code of honor. If that left him stuck in a forgotten corner of the Yard for the rest of his career, so be it.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the others. Even Cora Hardwick had passed up her usual after-dinner game of bridge. Only the Lambert-Keenes and Lady Margaret were absent.

  “Well, Inspector, it’s time to put on your deerstalker hat and tell us how you did it,” said Cecil, trying to bring a light touch the proceedings. Yet Travers knew the man must be deeply shocked and worried.

  Travers glanced down at his notebook. When he was telling a story, he liked to get all the details right.

  “It was really rather simple, once I learned that Mr. Carroll and the duchess had been lovers for some time—and that the duchess was with child. Mr. Carroll has confirmed that he first came to Europe as part of Honey Lynde’s retinue. A wealthy admirer of Miss Lynde had arranged and paid for a party to the Riviera. Carroll’s official role was piano player and entertainer. His unofficial role as Honey Lynde’s lover you know. When Miss Lynde left the admirer and married the Duke of Tarrington, she set Carroll up in London. After he married Lady Margaret, they anticipated it would be even easier for them to meet and continue their affair. It therefore was a reasonable assumption that Mr. Carroll was the father of the child the duchess was carrying. The family might have put up with a great deal of bad behavior on the duchess’s part, but this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  “It’s true. It’s not done,” said Cecil, answering any criticisms the others might be thinking. “That’s the trouble with the Honey Lyndes of the world. After they experience a little success, they think they can make their own rules and make the world bend to them. But in this case, she was up against centuries of plodding, pigheaded English tradition. If the child turned out to be a boy and everyone knew it wasn’t Gerald’s child, the situation would have been impossible.”

  Cecil looked about the room, hoping to see at least a few sympathetic faces looking back at him. But only Cora Hardwick was giving him an encouraging smile.

  “Gerald might have asked for a special dispensation, or whatever it’s called when you ask the Pope to annul a marriage,” Cecil added. “It really doesn’t seem in character for him to rush to suggest murder.”

  “He didn’t. Remember, the duke didn’t yet know about the child,” Travers reminded him. “At first, only two people knew, besides the duchess: Mr. Carroll and Lady Lambton-Keene. Lady Lambton-Keene acted on her own initiative. She might not have done anything if she hadn’t seen the duchess and Mr. Carroll carousing together in the music room the first night at sea. A private meeting in the duchess’s cabin could be ignored. But a public display of their amorous feelings toward one another was, to use her word, ‘revolting,’ Her hatred of the duchess increased when she was in the duchess’s cabin and the duchess flung the Tarrington pearls aside like—again, these are Lady Lambton-Keene’s words—like ‘they were a cheap showgirl’s fake jewels for the stage.’ The ultimate insult, though, was when the duchess tauntingly revealed that she was pregnant—and the duke wasn’t the father of her child. That’s what sealed the duchess’s doom, to put it in somewhat melodramatic terms.

  “The next day, Lady Lambton-Keene began to formulate her plan. The duchess unwittingly helped her by going to pieces over the missing pearls. She might also have regretted revealing her secret—if she remembered doing it—which would be another reason why she was anxious. But when the duchess locked herself in her cabin all day and claimed to be ill, it gave Lady Lambton-Keene a perfect excuse for visiting the duchess throughout the day, so that her final visit that night wouldn’t seem strange, if anyone chanced to see her enter the cabin.”

  Travers then related the scene that occurred in the duchess’s cabin, as it had been told to him earlier by Lady Lambton-Keene. She was familiar with potassium chloride, because of Lady Margaret, and knew about the dangers of taking an overdose. When she visited Lady Margaret in her cabin to say goodnight, Lady Lambton-Keene easily found an excuse to get the case, fill the syringe, and slip the thing in her evening bag; Lady Margaret would never dream of questioning Lady Lambton-Keene if she asked to use her bathroom. The only real problem was giving the duchess the injection.

  Inspector Travers turned to the next page and began to read the words of Lady Lambton-Keene’s confession.

  By then Honey really did have a bad headache. She hadn’t eaten a thing all day, and she was frantic about the loss of the pearls. For some reason she thought she had lost them somewhere on the ship the night before, and she knew Gerald would be furious. I saw this as an opportunity to gain her trust. I said I would look for them and I assured her they would be found. But I told her that she had to abort this child.

  “What would you like me to do?” she said. “Throw myself down the staircase and break my neck?”

  I told her that she wasn’t the first woman in this predicament and that in England we had a drug that many women used to get out it. She would have some stomach cramps—it wouldn’t be at all pleasant—but it was perfectly safe. If she did it—and she promised to be more careful until she had given Gerald a legitimate heir—I said I wouldn’t tell Gerald about any of this. Not the child, and not the pearls.

  I think she agreed principally out of exhaust
ion. She got into bed and sank into the pillows like an overtired child. She even pleaded with me to stay with her, like a child who has awoken from a nightmare and is afraid of the dark.

  I assured her I would stay with her to the very end. It was all I could do to keep from laughing when I said that. Then I gave her the injection. She died practically instantly. I stabbed her with the steak knife because I intended to cast the blame on someone else, Lady’s Margaret’s husband, and a knife is a man’s weapon. Peter was as guilty as Honey in my eyes. I only hoped he would be as stupid.

  Travers lifted his eyes from the notebook. The next thing she had to do, he explained, was shift suspicion onto Mr. Carroll. “As I just mentioned, Lady Lambton-Keene stabbed the duchess after she was dead to suggest a man had committed the crime. If she could find a way to reveal that the duchess and Mr. Carroll were lovers, without drawing attention to herself, it would be natural for a Scotland Yard inspector to assume this had been a crime of passion committed during a lovers’ quarrel. Lady Lambton-Keene therefore moved on to the second part of her plan.

  “Experienced travelers know the air vents in their cabins carry voices and often ask for them to be shut. Lady Lambton-Keene correctly guessed that Miss Garnett, being an inexperienced traveler, would have left hers open. She therefore chose a time when she was sure Miss Garnett was in her cabin—and when she was equally certain that Mr. Carroll wasn’t in his—and staged a little scene for Miss Garnett to hear.”

  “Then it wasn’t Peter and Mabel Watson that I heard arguing?” Penny asked.

  “No.”

  “But I distinctly heard two voices, two American voices.”

  “Distinctly, Miss Garnett? Or was the sound coming through the air vent muffled and slightly distorted?”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Penny reluctantly admitted. “But it sure sounded like two people.”

  “Lady Lambton-Keene is the jewel in the crown of the little acting troupe that performs for charitable causes on the Duke of Tarrington’s estate,” Cecil explained. “She plays everything from young girls to old men and she’s brilliant at sound effects—creaking doors, hooting owls, whatever you like. I imagine she was having the time of her life in that cabin pretending to be both Mr. Carroll and a hard-boiled American girl, like Miss Watson.”

  “Lady Margaret said she overheard the conversation too,” Nick pointed out.

  “And so she did. She heard Lady Lambton-Keene pretending to be Miss Watson and Mr. Carroll.”

  “But she didn’t kill anyone,” Peter protested. “She won’t be charged with murder, will she?”

  “Don’t forget, Mr. Carroll, that your wife accused you of trying to murder her.”

  “She only did it because I drove her to it. I’m as responsible as she is for what happened.”

  “Morally, but not legally, Mr. Carroll,” said Inspector Travers. He then turned to the others and continued with his explanation. “The so-called attempted murder of Lady Margaret was Lady Lambton-Keene’s idea, of course. But it was Lady Margaret who gave herself an injection with just slightly more of the potassium chloride than she needed. It wasn’t difficult for her to do. She had taken the stuff for many years, and so she knew about the effects of different doses. And it was very effective, especially after she fainted in the lobby. It gained her sympathy. Before that I had summed up their marriage as the long-suffering husband shackled to a shrewish wife. When she accused Mr. Carroll of trying to give her a lethal overdose, I was almost taken in. I think it’s very possible a jury would have been taken in too.”

  Roberto put his hand up to his neck and grimaced. “This is why I stick to dresses and never married. Hangers are better than being hanged.”

  “I know Lady Margaret isn’t the most sympathetic person in the world,” said Cecil, “but please don’t condemn her entirely, Inspector. She was very unhappy.”

  “I know,” Travers replied. “She was, in fact, desperately unhappy. As soon as Lady Margaret boarded this ship and discovered the duchess was sailing too, she snapped. She wired her father that she wanted permission to have her marriage annulled; it was possible, in theory at least, because Mr. Carroll had never intended to be faithful to her, as his actions showed. She received a reply almost immediately. It was the wire you found in that copy of Foreign Affairs, Miss Garnett.”

  “I never got a chance to read it,” said Penny.

  “It wouldn’t have taken you long. It was just one word. No.”

  “Poor Lady Margaret.”

  “Yes, poor Lady Margaret. I don’t think she would have agreed to cast the blame for the duchess’s murder on Mr. Carroll, if she hadn’t been so utterly unhappy in her marriage and disappointed in her father’s refusal to help her get out of it. I also don’t think she realized how serious the loss of that wire from her father was, but Lady Lambton-Keene did. If it came to my attention—as it eventually did—it would make me curious to discover the question that had merited such a terse reply. And once I knew that Lady Margaret was desperate, it was just as easy to suspect her of committing a crime of passion as her husband. Indeed, I did suspect her, especially after I discovered she took potassium chloride for a medical condition and saw the drug in her medicine cabinet.

  “Lady Lambton-Keene’s attempt to get back that wire turned out to be her one mistake. It’s a mistake murderers often make. They have covered their tracks pretty well, but there is always that one small detail that worries them to no end. It’s when they go back and try to cover up this detail that they get careless and get caught.

  “Lady Lambton-Keene had Lady Margaret retrace her steps, after getting that wire. This led Lady Margaret to the beauty salon. She recalled hiding the wire in that issue of Foreign Affairs, which she had brought with her to the salon—and left there by mistake. Unfortunately, Miss Garnett had picked it out of the pile, just when Lady Margaret had gone back to retrieve it.

  “It was an unusual choice of reading material for a young woman, Miss Garnett, and Lady Lambton-Keene—who really was getting her hair done and happened to be in the salon at that hour by coincidence—noticed it, knowing full well who the magazine belonged to. Lady Lambton-Keene guessed that you, Miss Garnett, had found the wire stuck in the pages of the magazine. When she saw you enter the library and go toward my office, she was afraid her guess had been correct and you were going to give me the wire. I wasn’t in, so she had a temporary reprieve. But she couldn’t follow you about day and night. She therefore grabbed a paperweight from a table, accompanied you to the suitably secluded place you had unknowingly provided, hit you over the head and staged the theft of your handbag. She destroyed the wire by flushing it down the toilet, which was a foolish thing to do. After Miss Garnett remembered and told me about the wire she had found in the magazine, and which was now missing from her handbag, I had only to go to the ship’s log to find out what it was. Once I knew the wire concerned Lady Margaret and that Lady Lambton-Keene had been with Miss Garnett when the wire was supposedly stolen, it didn’t take too much brain power to put the pieces of the puzzle into the correct pattern.”

  There was silence while the small group mulled over what the inspector had told them. Once, Nick started to raise an objection, but quickly changed his mind. The countess broke the silence when she asked, “Did Lady Margaret know who really killed the duchess?”

  “Probably not at first,” Inspector Travers replied. “But she had to have known after Lady Lambton-Keene murdered Mabel Watson. Miss Watson, of course, had to be silenced. She couldn’t go around contradicting Lady Margaret’s testimony—or yours, Miss Garnett. But it was cruel of Lady Lambton-Keene to involve Lady Margaret, although I suppose she thought she was doing Lady Margaret a favor by trying to pin the murder on Mr. Carroll and letting the hangman end their unhappy marriage.”

  “How did she get Miss Watson to stick out her arm for the injection?” asked Nick. Ever the man of the theatre, he was trying to visualize the scene.

  “Watson never willingly did anyth
ing that I asked,” said Mrs. Hardwick.

  Inspector Travers once again referred to his notebook and read:

  Killing Watson was laughably easy. I came to her cabin with Lady Margaret’s hypo case. I told her Lady Margaret needed an injection right away and I couldn’t find the ship’s doctor and I knew next to nothing about these things. I asked Watson to show me how an injection was done—on her own arm. At first, she didn’t want to do it. But when I gave her a ten-pound note she came round. When the needle was almost touching her skin, I did the rest for her and pushed the needle in. It really is a marvelous drug. Death came very quickly. But don’t go looking for the banknote, Inspector. I took it back.

  “I think that covers it.” Inspector Travers closed his notebook and put it back in his coat pocket. “My threatening to arrest Lady Margaret was a ruse, of course. I still didn’t have any watertight proof, so I had to force Lady Lambton-Keene’s hand. I didn’t think she would let Lady Margaret hang for crimes she had committed.

  “Then Margaret won’t be charged?” asked Peter.

  “Not for murder. But she very likely will be charged as an accessory to the murder of Mabel Watson. She must have known she was putting Miss Watson’s life in danger when she lied about that conversation.”

  “This will kill Gerald,” said Cecil.

  Inspector Travers removed his notebook and took out a piece of paper—yet another ship’s wire—and handed it to Cecil. “This is the wire Sir William received today. I meant to tell you the news in private, Your Grace.”

  “My what?” Cecil quickly read the contents of the wire and turned to the countess. “Gerald is dead. He was out riding and broke his neck.”