Mistletoe and Murder

by Carola Dunn

“Aye, Chief, and I’m sorry for it. He seems like a nice enough chap, good to his ma and all. Given time enough to think, I dare say he’d have remembered there was nothing to stop him trying to change Calloway’s mind. After all, he didn’t gain anything by killing him. I’d say he must’ve regretted it at once.”

  “Too late. One way or another, I’m afraid the accessibility of that knife was probably a deciding factor. What do you think, Daisy?”

  “Uh?”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” Alec was rather peeved. Daisy insisted on involving herself. Admittedly she was occasionally helpful, but surely the least she could do was listen!

  “No, sorry, darling, I was thinking.”

  “About Captain Norville?”

  “The captain?” she asked, astonished. “Good heavens, no.”

  “Tom has just presented a very convincing case against him.”

  “Oh no. Sorry, Tom, but it wasn’t him. That is, I’ve been thinking, and I’m fairly certain …”

  “Daddy!” Belinda burst in, excitedly interrupting with no trace of her usual well-behaved diffidence. (Was Daisy having a bad influence on her, as Alec’s mother kept insinuating?) She was waving a soiled white object—Great Scott, an intimate garment! Piper blushed.

  Derek followed Bel, no less precipitately. “We’ve found a Real Clue!” he announced. “Look!” He dropped a woollen mitten on the table in front of Alec.

  “It’s another one like the other one we found. Derek thinks it’s got blood on it.”

  “And it’s quite clean otherwise so someone dropped it not very long ago. We had the other one, too, Uncle Alec, but we’re awfully afraid Nana must have buried it, or chewed it up, or something. Is it blood, d’you think?”

  Alec examined the rusty brown patch. “It could be,” he admitted cautiously and passed the glove to Tom.

  Tom took out his magnifying glass, at once aweing and delighting Derek, who held his breath, waiting for the verdict.

  “I’d say so, Chief. It’d have to go to the lab boys to make sure, of course.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “We were near the path, Daddy, the one that goes to the chapel.”

  “Not far from the chapel, but actually we didn’t find it ourselves. Nana brought it to us, but I don’t think she’d gone very far, so it was quite near where we were. We could show you where we were, couldn’t we, Bel? Bel said we must notice the trees and remember exactly.”

  “Well done, Belinda.”

  His daughter’s freckles vanished in a tide of red. “Is it a real clue, Daddy?”

  “It very well may be.”

  “It is,” Daisy said positively. “Darling, I rather think it would be a good idea if the children took Mr. Piper to see whereabouts Nana found it.”

  Alec assumed she wanted the children out of the way while she expounded her theory. It wouldn’t hurt to have Ernie go and make a note of the spot, just in case the mitten turned out to be significant. The possible bloodstain was along the little-finger edge of the hand, away from the thumb, in exactly the right place, assuming the murderer had held the knife in his fist to strike downward.

  “Detective Constable Piper, proceed to the woods near the scene of the crime with our two witnesses to mark and make a note of the area they point out to you as the vicinity where the evidence was discovered.”

  “Yessir!”

  “Gosh!” breathed Derek blissfully.

  “May Nana come too, Daddy? We left her in the scullery ’cause we didn’t know where you were.”

  “No, pet, better leave her behind this time. This is official police business.”

  “Gosh!” said Derek again, and he and Belinda went off with Ernie Piper.

  “I suppose they are witnesses,” Daisy said, frowning. “Will they have to give evidence in court?”

  “Not if I have any say in the matter,” Alec assured her. “A sworn deposition should do. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. What makes you think this dog-bedrooled object is important?”

  Daisy answered him with another question. “Do you recall seeing its mate among the debris Bel and Derek showed you before?”

  “No. Did they invent it?”

  “Tom, you looked before they threw the least promising rubbish away. Did you see the other mitten?”

  “No, Mrs. Fletcher,” Tom said positively.

  “Well, I did. Nana was carrying it, and she laid it at my feet as she did this one with the children.”

  “And then she took it away and buried it,” Alec presumed.

  “I don’t believe so. She ran off with some other rag which appealed to her more. And I think—I’m pretty sure—the mitten disappeared while Bel and Derek were chasing her.”

  “Pouf, into thin air!”

  “Sarcasm does not become you, darling, as my old Nanny used to say. No, as it happens, Jemima was lurking nearby at the time, pouring cold water—scorn, that is—on the children’s clues. I was watching them, not her. I believe she recognized the mitten, which she herself had knitted, and pinched it.”

  “You think Jemima killed Calloway?”

  “It’s possible of course,” Daisy said slowly, “but no, I don’t think so. She made the mittens for her father. I think she was protecting him.”

  “Very well,” said Alec, his scepticism slipping, “let’s hear your theory.”

  “Right-oh,” said Daisy, pleased with her attentive audience. “It all goes back to when I arrived at Brockdene. Gosh, it feels like months ago, but it’s less than a week. Godfrey was actually the first of the Norvilles I met.”

  She recalled following the boy with her bags under the entrance tower. When she had emerged into the Hall Court, he had disappeared and she had found herself faced with a plethora of doors.

  “I went to the door of the old Hall by mistake,” she said. “Godfrey opened it. Even before he introduced himself, he told me he had devoted his life to studying the history of the house and its contents. He seemed to think it natural that Westmoor’s staff should take care of the antiques while refusing to serve the residents. When he rang the bell for the housekeeper to come and look after me, he had no expectation of its being heeded. And when Mrs. Pardon did come, his first thought was to complain of some tarnish he’d detected on the suit of armour.”

  “Ah,” said Tom sagely. In Piper’s absence, he was making notes.

  Daisy realized that she was not merely propounding a theory, she was giving direct evidence which might have to be given again in court. She didn’t have to explain her conclusions. Both Tom and Alec were obviously drawing their own.

  Alec, his brows knit, nodded to her to go on.

  “The mittens come next. I decided to take some photos of the exterior while the sun was shining. Godfrey agreed to go with me to tell me what I was looking at, but before he would set foot out of doors, he sent Jemima to fetch his coat and hat and gloves and galoshes. It was a mild, dry day and he was already wearing a woolly waistcoat and muffler. I was quite warm enough in my costume, without my coat, let alone gloves and a hat, and Jemima just had a light cardigan over her blouse. In fact, it was warmer out than in. Before Mother arrived, the fires were positively miserly.”

  “Daisy, is this relevant?”

  “Yes, darling, I’m not just reminiscing. You’ll see where it’s leading in a moment. Where was I?”

  “The miserly fires,” he said dryly.

  “Yes, well, that was a slight digression,” she admitted. Tom, winking at her, ostentatiously ran a line through his last note. “To resume: Jemima brought her father’s outdoor clothes, among which were a hand-knitted woollen pompon hat, striped in grey and blue, and matching mittens. Felicity told me later that Jemima had knitted them for him, and his muffler, also grey and blue, and the waistcoat, which was green and clashed horribly.”

  Ignoring the irrelevant waistcoat, Alec said, “Yes, but anyone could have worn the mittens.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Daisy retorted. “They’d
have got in the way on most people though. Look at it.” They all studied the mitten on the table in front of Alec. He placed his hand beside it. It was half an inch longer. “Godfrey has hands almost as big as Victor’s,” Daisy went on, “only you don’t notice them so much because they’re thin and sort of etiolated.”

  “My superior vocabulary doesn’t stretch to ‘etiolated,’” Tom confessed.

  “Nor does mine, really,” she assured him, “but I remember it from having to look it up when I read Jane Eyre at school. It means pale and limp, doesn’t it, darling? Rather feeble-looking. Whereas the captain’s hands are brown and strong, and Miles’s are quite a bit smaller.”

  “So the captain might have borrowed them.”

  “He might, but if he killed on unplanned impulse, why should he wear gloves at all? Not to protect against leaving fingerprints, and he’s not the sort to worry about the cold.”

  “That he’s not,” Tom agreed. “Seamen have a sight worse to put up with than a winter’s night in Cornwall. Come to think of it, I doubt he’d care much for mittens. They need the use of all their fingers aboard ship.”

  “All right, Daisy, it’s unlikely—but not impossible—that Captain Norville borrowed his brother’s mittens. What’s next?”

  “I’ll have to jump back a few hours now, because it was the boatman who brought me up the Tamar who mentioned the chapel in the woods. While I was outside with Godfrey, I asked about it and he told me the story of the first baronet’s escape.”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Fletcher?” Tom asked.

  “Didn’t you notice the sign over the chapel door?”

  “Can’t say I did. Too high for dabs,” he pointed out.

  “Nor did I,” said Alec.

  Daisy glanced at him. “It’s not strictly relevant.”

  “Never mind, let’s have it,” he said resignedly.

  She told them about the cap thrown into the river to make Sir Richard’s enemies think he had drowned. “He hid in the bushes nearby till they went off. Anyway, it’s a good story and I decided to put it in my article, so I thought I might take a picture of the chapel. I asked Godfrey to show me the way, but he was absolutely horrified at the idea of walking in the woods in winter. He said it was damp and I’d catch my death of cold. He refused to go, said he never went near the place in the winter.”

  “Sounds to me like that knocks him right out of the running,” said Tom.

  “Yes, Daisy, that’s evidence for the defence.”

  “It may be, of course. But if you were to find leaf-mould on his shoes or galoshes …”

  “He’ll have cleaned them,” said Tom.

  “I doubt it. He doesn’t strike me as the sort to clean his own shoes. I bet Dora or Jemima usually does them. If he worried about the leaf-mould at all, he wouldn’t want them to see it, so he’d probably just quietly put them away and try to forget them.”

  “If he’s hidden them in the old house,” said Alec grimly, “we’d never find them.”

  “But the servants would, and that would really set the cat among the pigeons. I’d try the back of the coat cupboard in the entrance hall or his wardrobe.”

  “It’s possible. Tom?” Alec gestured with his head towards the door. “And keep your eyes open for the other mitten.”

  “No search warrant, Chief. Mr. Tremayne’ll jump on it.”

  “I took the precaution of asking Lord Westmoor’s permission to make any necessary searches when I spoke to him on the telephone. It’ll have to do. We haven’t a hope of getting a warrant today.”

  “Right, Chief. What about the second mitten?”

  “That, if I’m not altogether mistaken,” said Daisy, “you’ll find under the mattress of Jemima’s camp cot, in Felicity’s room.”

  “Right, Mrs. Fletcher.” The sergeant went out.

  Alec regarded Daisy in silence, shaking his head.

  “What is it, darling?” she asked anxiously. “Do you think I’m altogether mistaken?”

  “No, love, or I wouldn’t have wasted Tom’s time. One factor we haven’t gone into is that Godfrey has been the most fidgety of the lot of them since the murder.”

  “He’s really upset that Miles didn’t tell him about Westmoor’s heir being killed,” said Daisy, trying to be fair.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because his son … Oh, I see what you mean. Because if he was going to be earl some day, then even if he was chucked out now, some day Brockdene would actually belong to him. If he’d known, he would never have killed Calloway.”

  “Exactly. Though it’s all circumstantial, your theory makes more sense than most. Even if Tom finds the shoes, it’s not proof, but it’s more than enough to tackle Godfrey with some hard questions. The motive has always been the sticking point in this case, and you’ve provided one that’s believable.” Alec stood up. “I must try and get corroboration from the captain that that’s what they quarrelled about.”

  “I never told you that’s what they quarrelled about,” Daisy said virtuously. “It’s pure speculation, which you’re always exhorting me to avoid. But all the same, assuming your guess is the same as mine, I bet we’re right. What are you going to do with the mitten? You can’t leave it here for anyone to pinch.”

  “Would you mind dealing with it, love? We don’t want the servants speculating about it, so put it in Nana’s scullery, out of her reach, while you get hold of some brown paper or whatever they use in the kitchen. Then make a parcel and lock it in one of our suitcases.”

  “Ugh! It can go in your suitcase. Right-oh. What about the cami-knickers?”

  “Those,” said Alec, “can go in the dustbin.”

  19

  Alec glanced into the library, where Miles was studying some legal papers. “Do you know where the captain is?” he asked.

  Miles jumped up and came towards him, saying in horror, “You don’t believe Uncle Victor murdered Calloway?”

  “I don’t know who murdered Calloway. I have a few questions for your uncle, that’s all.”

  “Oh, right-ho. He and my grandfather went outside for a pipe and a cigar, respectively.” He waved at the east-facing window.

  Alec found the captain and Tremayne pacing the upper terrace, smoking in silent companionship, their boots crunching on the gravel.

  “I’d like a word with you, Captain Norville,” he said.

  “By all means,” said the captain guardedly.

  Tremayne laid a hand on his arm. “Victor, do you wish me to act for you?” he said, his face grave.

  “It’s good of you to offer, sir, but I don’t reckon I need a lawyer, not having done anything wrong. Scotland Yard’s got the best detectives in the world, and knowing the chief inspector here personally, it’s my opinion he won’t arrest an innocent man.”

  “I’m not about to arrest you,” Alec affirmed. “Just a question or two.”

  “Be careful what you say,” Tremayne warned, “and call me if you need me.” He went to stand with his back to them, gazing down over the gardens towards Calstock and the peace and quiet of his office.

  Victor Norville faced Alec squarely. “At your service, Fletcher.”

  “It was very much in your interest to keep Calloway alive, as long as he was prepared to testify in your mother’s favour. However, he was obviously having second thoughts. Did he give you a decision?”

  “Why, no. It’s what he went off to the chapel for, to pray for guidance, wasn’t it?”

  “You must have been very anxious to hear what he decided. Anxious enough to go after him.”

  “That I did not!” the captain roared. “And if I had, and he’d told me he’d decided against us, the last thing I’d do would be to kill him before I had a chance to change his mind!”

  “Unless you lost your temper.”

  Unexpectedly, the captain grinned. “Yes, I’ve got a temper. Always have, since I was a child. If I’d had a father, I dare say it’d have been beaten out of me at an early age. As it was, my mother’s tea
rs were just as effective. As soon as I was old enough to realize how much I upset her, I stopped lashing out when I lost my temper. I’ve been in rough parts of the world, and there are times when a fist in the face is the only answer, but I haven’t hit anyone in a fit of temper since I bloodied God’s nose when I was six.”

  Momentarily confused, Alec had a sudden, brief vision of Blake’s Ancient of Days being socked on the nose by Captain Norville because he gave Calloway’s prayers the wrong response. But of course, “God” was what the captain irreverently called his brother. He had given Alec the perfect opening for the questions he really wanted to ask.

  “So you and your brother didn’t come to blows when you quarrelled the other day,” he commented dryly. “What was that all about?”

  “Oh, God was furious that I’d brought Calloway. He’s a selfish, shortsighted fool. He never gave a thought to Mother’s feelings. All he cared about was that he’d have to leave his precious Brockdene. He’s been immured in this museum too long. So have my mother and my nieces, and I’ve a good mind to take them away anyway. I can afford to keep the lot of them, and so I told him.”

  “But all he cared about was that he’d have to leave Brockdene,” Alec repeated.

  “He’s obsessed with …” The captain’s voice trailed off and he gave Alec a grim look. “Well, I’ve said it. I suppose you’ll be asking me to make an official statement and to give sworn evidence in court against my own brother.”

  “Possibly. Will you?”

  “Possibly. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Just remember, Captain,” Alec said, “that if we don’t catch Calloway’s murderer, everyone in this house will be regarded with suspicion for the rest of their lives. Think about that.”

  “This cursed house,” the captain muttered as Alec turned away.

  When Alec stepped through the front door into the entrance hall, Dora Norville was staring with a puzzled frown at something to his right. Following her gaze, he saw a vast maroon-and-green checked backside protruding from the coat cupboard. Tom moved back on his knees until he was clear of the coats, then turned as he rose to his feet. In one hand was a pair of galoshes.