The Stately Home Murder iscm-3

by Catherine Aird

“Ha! The extended family, Sloan.” The Superintendent had once read a book on sociology and felt he had mastered that tricky discipline.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing, Sloan. Just a technical term.”

  “I see, sir. There is also an additional nephew.”

  “Oh?”

  “A Mr. William Murton.”

  “Makes a change from Cremond, I suppose,” observed Leeyes.

  “His mother was a Cremond. She married a groom.”

  “She did what?” The Superintendent, who dealt daily with sudden death, larceny, road traffic accidents, and generally saw the seamy side of human nature, was not easily shocked, but there were some things…

  “She ran away with her groom,” said Sloan. “Mr. William Murton, the Earl’s nephew, is the outcome of the union.”

  “And where does he come in?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. Not yet. He has a cottage in Ornum village which he uses—mostly at weekends. The rest of the time he lives in London. I understand he paints.”

  The Superintendent didn’t like that.

  “And,” pursued Sloan, “there is also the Earl’s Steward, a man called Charles Purvis. He lives in a little house in the Park and comes all over a twitter whenever he looks at young Lady Eleanor.”

  “Like that, is she?”

  “No, sir”—repressively—“she is not. Apart,” he went on, “from this… er… one big happy family”—-Sloan didn’t know if this was the same thing as an extended one or not—“there are the servants.”

  “Loyal to the core, I suppose?”

  “Well…”

  “Above suspicion?”

  That was not a term Sloan had been taught to use.

  “Trusted to the hilt, then,” suggested Leeyes, who in his youth had been grounded in heroic fiction.

  “No…”

  “Been with them all their lives?” The Superintendent was rapidly running out of phrases associated with family servants.

  “No, sir. Oddly enough, not. The cook has. Started as a tweeny at twelve and worked her way up, but the housekeeper has only been there a couple of years and the butler rather less. About eighteen months. The other girl—I don’t know what you’d call her…”

  “I’d call her maid-of-all work,” said Leeyes promptly.

  “She’s been with them about three years. That’s the indoor staff. Outside there are two men and a boy looking after the Park and gardens. One of them—Albert Hackle—comes in on open days to show off the dungeons.”

  “Perhaps,” said Leeyes, “there’ll be someone in them soon.”

  Sloan said sedately that he would see what he could do and rang off.

  What he wanted to do next was to find the parts of the house where Osborne Meredith had spent his working time. The Library and the Muniments Room.

  Stepping away from the telephone, he met Lord Henry. He asked the young man to lead him to the rooms.

  He wished he had gone there sooner.

  The Library was apparently in perfect order.

  The Muniments Room looked as if it had been hit by a tornado.

  9

  « ^ »

  Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t step very far into the Muniments Room.

  Just far enough to see that the disarray was not that left by an exceptionally untidy scholar.

  It was not.

  From where he stood he could see that it had been carefully calculated. Sheets of manuscripts lay disarranged on the floor, documents of every sort were strewn all over the place. A great chest lay open, its contents distributed far and wide.

  “Phew!” whistled Lord Henry over Sloan’s shoulder.

  “Don’t come any farther, my lord,” warned Sloan. “I’ll need to take a proper look round the room first.”

  “It’s a bit of a mess.”

  “Quite so.”

  Typical English understatement, that was. Sloan’s gaze swept the room and noted that the disturbance had every appearance of being systematic. It looked as if every drawer had been opened, every deed unrolled. Long scrolls of paper covered all the surfaces, and, sprinkled over everything like some monstrous oversize confetti, were dozens and dozens of filing cards.

  “Poor Ossy,” murmured Lord Henry quietly. “I hope he didn’t see this. A more orderly man didn’t exist.”

  “Those filing cards…”

  “All the deeds, documents, and depositions,” said Lord Henry, “recorded and cross-referenced. It took him years.”

  Sloan nodded. “The room was never locked?”

  “No. This part of the house isn’t ever shown to the public.” Lord Henry was still looking at the room as best he could round the police inspector. “That’s a funny thing, though.”

  “What is, my lord?”

  “The room isn’t kept locked, but the document chests always were.”

  Together they peered at the iron-banded chests. Keys were clearly visibly from where they stood, still in the locks.

  “Who had the keys to them?” asked Sloan automatically.

  “Just my father and Ossy.”

  “I see.” Sloan made a mental note about that. The contents of the deceased’s pockets would be recorded by the police in due course. Just at the moment they were inviolate behind a portion of armour called a tasset.

  Lord Henry frowned. “Ossy would never have left them open like that—or even with the keys in. They’re much too important for that.”

  “He might not have had the choice,” Sloan reminded him.

  “No, of course not. I was forgetting.” Lord Henry’s gaze rested on the dishevelled room. “There’s another extraordinary thing, Inspector, isn’t there?”

  “What, my lord?”

  “All this confusion…”

  “But no actual damage.”

  This was quite true. Disorder reigned supreme, but none of the papers appeared to be torn or defaced.

  “Just as if someone only wanted a muddle,” said his Lordship perceptively.

  “These documents must have value,” began Sloan. “It stands to reason…”

  “To an antiquarian perhaps, Inspector. But not an intrinsic value like the pictures or the books or the china.”

  Sloan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “If there was anything missing…”

  Lord Henry said carefully, “Then only Ossy would be able to tell you.”

  “And he can’t do that now.”

  “No.” The younger man paused. “Moreover, Inspector, if he were here to tell us, it would take him a very long time indeed to put this room to rights—even though we may think nothing’s been damaged. Months. Years, perhaps.”

  Sloan could see that for himself.

  “Presumably,” he said, going on from there in his mind and thinking aloud, “this room would otherwise have told us something useful.”

  “But what?” asked Lord Henry, surveying the muddled muniments from the door.

  Sloan decided that their message—if any—would have to wait for the time being.

  He turned his scrutiny to the floor. There was no blood immediately visible. Mr. Osborne Meredith did not appear to have been killed here. And whoever had created this disturbance had been careful not to stand on any of the papers.

  Or had they?

  Sloan dropped to his knees and looked along at ground level. There was an imprint of sorts on one piece of paper.

  A heel mark.

  A heel mark so small and square that it must have come from a woman’s shoe.

  Detective Constable Crosby was asking Charles Purvis the Earl’s name.

  He did not know it, but this—like matrimony—was not something to be taken in hand lightly.

  “It’s for the Coroner,” he began. “I need to know the full name of the occupant of the premises in which the deceased is presumed to have met his death.”

  “The full name?” said Charles Purvis dubiously.

  “The full name.”

  “Henry,”
said the Steward. “The eldest son is always called Henry.”

  Crosby wrote that down.

  “Augustus.” After the Duke of Cumberland—or was it the Roman General?

  Crosby wrote that down too.

  “Rudolfo.”

  “Rudolfo?”

  “The tenth Earl was invested with a foreign order. He was the English ambassador to the country at an awkward time diplomatically and… er… carried it off well. Saved the situation, you might say. He called his own son after their reigning monarch of the day—that went down well, too. The name has been kept.”

  “I see,” said Constable Crosby laconically. “That the lot?”

  Purvis stiffened. “By no means. There’s Cremond, too.”

  “That’s the surname, isn’t it?”

  “As well.”

  “As well as what?”

  “As well as being a Christian name.”

  Crosby wasn’t sure what Purvis meant and said so.

  “Twice,” said Charles Purvis.

  “You mean he was christened Cremond as well as having it as a surname.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Cremond,” Crosby looked incredulous, “and Cremond?”

  The Steward coughed. “That dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century when…”

  Crosby wasn’t listening. “William Edward Crosby Crosby,” he said under his breath, for size.

  “I beg your pardon, Constable?”

  Crosby turned back to his notebook, and read aloud, “Henry Augustus Rudolfo Cremond Cremond?”

  Name of a name of a name, that was…

  “That’s right,” agreed the Steward and Comptroller. “Thirteenth Earl Ornum of Ornum in the County of Calleshire, Baron Cremond of Petering…”

  “There isn’t,” said Detective Constable William Edward Crosby of 24 Hillview Terrace, Berebury, with tremendous dignity, “any room on the form for that.”

  Sloan methodically sealed the door of the Muniments Room and went back next door to the Library. This was a very fine room.

  It was divided into six small bays all lined with books—three bays on either side of the centre. The right-hand three each ended in a window and a window seat with a view over the Park. The left-hand three consisted entirely of bookshelves with a sliver of table down the middle. At the far end was a bust of Lord Henry.

  “My great-great-grandfather,” murmured Lord Henry.

  Sloan shot a swift glance from the bust of Lord Henry and back again. There was no discernible difference between the two.

  “Army,” said Lord Henry by way of explanation. “Too young for Waterloo. Too old for the Crimea.”

  Sloan advanced. Apart from the neckwear, the bust might just as well have been Lord Henry. It was as near a replica as he’d seen.

  “Mr. Meredith worked here, too, I take it,” he said generally.

  Lord Henry nodded. “Spent nearly all his time between the Library and the Muniments, though he was always popping down to have a look at the pictures, too.”

  “As to Friday,” said Sloan, “if he’d been working here then, what sort of traces would you have expected to find?”

  “None,” said his Lordship promptly. “He wasn’t that sort of scholar. When he’d finished with a book, he’d put it back in its right place.”

  Sloan wasn’t surprised. From what little he’d seen of the body that had emerged pupa-like from the chrysalis of the armour, he’d have said Meredith was a neat, dapper little man.

  Lord Henry carried on, “He was quite mild about everything else, but it was as much as your life was worth to spoil the order on the bookshelves.”

  This wasn’t perhaps the happiest of comparisons, and Lord Henry’s voice trailed away.

  “I see,” said Sloan, moving down the three bays.

  Everything was utterly neat and tidy. At the end by the door a small stack of papers on the table there was the only testimony that the room had ever been used at all. The first two bays seemed normal enough. Sloan paused at the third.

  The casual observer—the untrained eye—would probably have seen nothing.

  Sloan did.

  What he saw was on the spine of Volume XXIV of The Transactions of the Calleshire Society.

  Blood.

  This, then, was in all probability where the Librarian and Archivist to the Ornum family had met his death.

  Sloan stepped carefully round the thin table and measured a few distances with his eye. The photographers would have to come back and bring the lab boys with them. In the meantime…

  At a quick guess the deceased could have been sitting at the inside end of the table, which ran the length of the bay. He had been hit from behind—the pathologist had told him that much—and from above. The height of the book with the blood on it confirmed that.

  Lord Henry cleared his throat. “This the spot, then?”

  “I think so,” said Sloan. There was nothing much else to point to it. The table might have had blood on it and been wiped clean. There might be drops on the floor. The Library carpet was Turkey red, which didn’t help… and any derangement of chair and table had long ago been made good. And marks of scuffed heels on the pile of the carpet would have…

  “The cleaning arrangements in here…” began Sloan.

  But he had asked the wrong man.

  “Not really my department,” said his young Lordship frankly. “Dillow will know.”

  “I see,” said Sloan. He wouldn’t mind another word with the butler. “Where would I find him now?”

  “It’s easier than that.” Lord Henry drifted across the Library and tugged at a green silk sash. “He’ll find us.”

  It was, in fact, simplicity itself.

  “Thank you.” Sloan wasn’t sure about the paths of righteousness, but those of some people could be made very smooth indeed. He cleared his throat. “By the way, my lord, your injury…”

  “Silly thing to do.” Lord Henry’s bandaged hand was still drooping down like a limping dog’s paw. “I cut it on Friday morning fiddling about with my car.”

  “Were you alone at the time?” enquired Sloan pertinently.

  “Oh yes, Inspector. Nobody else here really cares about cars. I caught it between the fan blade and the engine.”

  “I see.”

  “Trying to tune her up a bit and all that…”

  The Library door opened. “You rang, my lord?”

  “Ah, Dillow, the Inspector wants another word with you.”

  The butler, professionally expressionless, turned expectantly to Sloan.

  “Friday,” said Sloan. “Friday afternoon. You said you brought Mr. Meredith his tea here.”

  “That is correct, sir. At four o’clock. I collected the empty tray a few minutes before five.”

  “Did you see Mr. Meredith then?”

  “Not the second time, sir. The tray was on the table by the door and I just collected it…” The man hesitated. “In fact, sir, I’m afraid I assumed Mr. Meredith had gone home because the Vicar called about half an hour later, asking for him, and he said he’d tried the Muniments Room and he wasn’t there. I took the liberty of telling him that Mr. Meredith must have gone home then, though of course I realise now that…”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan. “And after that?”

  “After, sir?”

  “When did you next come in here?”

  Dillow frowned. “Yesterday morning sometime, sir, it would have been. Just to see that the room had been put to rights. Though Mr. Meredith was such a tidy gentleman that I knew nothing would need doing.”

  “And did it?”

  “No, sir, not that I recollect.”

  “Whose job is it to see that the room had been tidied?”

  “Mine, sir, to see it had been done. Edith’s to… er… do it.”

  “Edith’s?” The nuances of the division of labour among domestic staff were lost on Sloan. Now if it had been police work…

  “She’s the housemaid, sir, but…”
/>
  “Yes?”

  “On open days, sir, we all tend to devote ourselves to the rooms which are Shown.”

  “I see. And the Muniments Room?”

  “I didn’t go in there, sir, at all. Mr. Meredith liked to deal with that himself. It’s a small room and when any cleaning was done in there Mr. Meredith always arranged to be present himself so that nothing was disturbed.”

  “The Muniments Room? Turned upside down? Look out, Dillow, you’re spilling that soup.”

  “I beg your pardon, my lord.”

  “I should think so. Henry, who the devil would want to play about in the Muniments Room of all places? Nobody ever goes in there.”

  “Couldn’t say,” said the son and heir. “But somebody has… er… did. And you can’t go and see because the Inspector has sealed it up. And the Library.”

  The dining-room at Ornum House that evening was scarcely more festive than the armoury. The Earl of Ornum sat at one end of the table, the Countess at the other. Ranged round the table were the rest of the family.

  Dillow hovered.

  William Murton, whose summons to Ornum House had, in fact, gone on to include a meal, took an immediate interest. “That means something, doesn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t go to the bother of stirring up the papers without a reason, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t,” responded Henry.

  “But,” asked Laura Cremond, “what was there in there that mattered anyway?”

  “Search me,” said Lord Henry frankly. “Never could make head or tail of those papers myself. All that cramped writing. In Latin, too, most of it. Still, I expect it meant something…”

  “Your inheritance,” said his father drily.

  “It must have meant something to somebody else, too,” pointed out Miles Cremond, who always followed his wife’s conversational leads. “Else they wouldn’t have messed it about.”

  Cousin Gertrude, who was a considerable trencher-woman, looked up from a bit of steady eating and said, “Does that mean that now no one can prove that Harry here isn’t Earl of Ornum?”

  There was a small silence.

  The Earl of Ornum crumbled some bread and wondered why it was that plain women so often went in for plain speaking.

  “Well,” demanded Gertrude Cremond, “can they or can’t they?”