Almighty and most merciful Father,
We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep,
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts,
We have offended against Thy holy laws,
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done,
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done …
Tom paused in his recitation, the last words sinking like stones into his soul. “And we have done those things which we ought not to have done,” he intoned again, his voice this time fallen to a murmur. He shifted his weight on his crutch and continued:
And there is no health in us: But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders.
Tom paused again, the severity of the avowal—there is no health in us—reminding him, with a ridiculous literalness, of his ankle. Twenty minutes of hobbling with crutches was wearing. He would sit to finish Morning Prayers.
He made to twist around to move to the nearest bench, one behind him, which sat in the deepest shadow. Six lunations, he counted as his eyes circled past, a rosette pattern. What delightful symmetry! His eyes fell first on a torch left on the ground, switched on still, its feeble light casting a pallid arc no match for the rising sun’s. And then his gaze travelled to what seemed at first glance a large grey heap marring the perfection of the scene. Puzzled, fears rekindled that some creature had indeed penetrated the Labyrinth by defiling its boundary, he moved closer, steeling himself for some sort of unpleasant confrontation, and peered into the gloom at the base of the bench. It was no animal, but a man. Oliver, he realised with a shock when he peered closer, noting the rumple of red hair, the idiosyncratic needlework at the neck of his shirt. One arm was wedged against the base of the bench, the other flopped forwards, the kufi hat just beyond the reach of clawed fingers. Tom gazed upon the sight unbelievingly for the time it took another jackdaw to sound his alarm, battling a wave of nausea. Oliver fforde-Beckett, seventh Marquess of Morborne, wasn’t sacked out, sleeping off some night of drunken debauchery. No snores, no guttural snorts, competed with the bird’s call. Lord Morborne wasn’t asleep at all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Jane!”
“ ’Morning, Tom!” Lady Kirkbride’s arm lifted in a cheery wave as she jogged along the lawn, Bonzo loping in her wake.
“Jane!” Tom shouted again, urgently. She had disappeared behind a grove of trees and would soon vanish down the road to the Gatehouse and the village if she were not diverted. “Would you come over here?”
For a second he thought she hadn’t heard, or was ignoring him, but she rounded the trees in short order and continued her run across the grass towards the Labyrinth.
“You’re up early,” she called, stopping near the Labyrinth gate, gasping a little as she caught her breath. Even at fifty feet, Tom could see her cheeks pink with exertion.
“Jane, there’s been a …” He hesitated. He needed to raise his voice to be heard, but he feared frightening anyone unnecessarily in the Hall, though sound had little chance against Eggescombe’s thick walls.
“… an accident.”
“An …? Oh, God. Are you all right, Tom?”
“It isn’t me. It’s—” He glanced again towards the Hall. “You’d better come here. But leave Bonzo outside the gate,” he added as an afterthought. “And close it behind you.”
Jane seemed to hesitate, but did as instructed. After a moment, she was moving quickly along one arc of the Labyrinth’s path, then turning down another, as Tom had earlier, swinging by the centre, then swinging away from it. “This is maddening!” she called as she took the next turn at a run. “I’ll be forever!”
“You’re coming to a straight bit in a second. I’ll meet you on the other side of it.” Tom hobbled out of the centre and found Jane waiting across the width of the hedge, anxiety stamped on her face as she searched his.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“It’s Lord Morborne … Oliver—”
“Oh, no! What is it? He’s here? Is he hurt badly?”
Tom slumped along the crutch. “No, Jane. It’s much worse. I’m sorry I have to tell you … that Lord Morborne is dead.”
Her lips parted to form a strangulated how.
“I’m not quite sure. I’d only barely found him when I saw you passing by. You don’t happen to have your mobile with you?”
“No, I …” She glanced in the Madonna’s direction. “I’ve got to get over this damned hedge.”
“Are you sure? You could—”
“If it were only a simple fence …”
“If you push in a bit, I think I can reach you and lift you over.” Tom studied the foliage. It was the girth of the hedge, rather more than its height, that made scaling it difficult. Jane had a petite figure. He judged her about five foot three. But even a man six foot one, as he was, would have no success vaulting over it, with or without a bandaged ankle. Her advantage to him was that she couldn’t weigh more than eight stone.
“But your foot!”
“I’ll be fine,” he lied.
Jane raised a doubting eyebrow but pushed into the hedge, grimacing as the foliage stabbed at her bare legs.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not bad. Sweatpants would have been a better choice, if I’d known. It is dense. Hector won’t be happy if I make a mess of his hedge.”
“There’s worse, I’m afraid.” Tom leaned in as close as he could and put his arm under Jane’s back. “Now, if you can …” He suppressed a wince. “… lean back and elevate your feet a little while I’ve got hold of you. Quickly as you can so—”
“I see. Okay.”
He could hear her legs thrashing through the foliage with sufficient momentum that he was able to thrust his other arm under her legs and lift her over. The sensation felt odd, tender: like carrying Lisbeth over the threshold of their first shared flat.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Tom?” Jane brushed at her running shorts as he settled her on the path.
“My ankle will heal at any rate.”
She gave him a wan smile and together they moved into the heart of the Labyrinth.
“Oh, Olly, how on earth …” Tom could hear the catch in Jane’s throat as they gazed down on the lifeless form of Lord Morborne. “That poor woman, Serena Knowlton, the one he’s engaged to. And Georgie! Oh, and his mother!”
“Where is … Lady …?”
“She’s Mrs. Quintero now. She lives in Panama. Her second husband is in shipping and hotels.” She paused. “A heart attack, then? Is that …?” She faltered, looked at him with anxious eyes.
Tom shook his head. “Jane, it’s not a heart attack … or an accident. You can’t really see well in this shade—” It would be hours, he realised, before the summer sun moved through the skies to illuminate this particular petal in the rosette. “—but … Jane, Jane!” he added with haste as she moved to bend for a closer examination. “It’s not very pleasant. You don’t want to—”
She ignored him, falling to her knees on the damp grass. “He’s been strangled,” she murmured in a tone of astonishment after a moment’s examination.
He looked down on her vulnerable neck where her dark hair parted. He had not found probable cause quite so quickly, but he had been nursing the hope that the only violence done had been Oliver’s body failing itself somehow: an aneurysm, a heart attack, a fatal stroke. But when he let his crutch drop and crouched by the body for a closer study, he could see even in the imperfect light the marked congestion of Oliver’s face, the glazed, half-opened eyes red with blood, the tiny hemorrhages along his lids. A ribbon of blood oozed from his nostrils, coiled onto the grass, gleamed blackly. What violence could cause this? His answer came swiftly from a glance at Oliver’s neck above his open collar: a demarcating raw redness. Revulsion battling pity, with slender hope, he had rested two fingers at the neck where a pulse should be, and wasn’t.
“He can’t be long dead.” Jane
rose shakily. “The blood hasn’t dried completely.”
Tom flicked a curious glance at her as he steadied her with his arm.
“When I was in service,” she responded, “before I met Jamie … well, even at the time I met Jamie, I found myself involved in some puzzling deaths …” She trailed off, turning from Tom to look around the patch of shadowed lawn.
“I was doing a recce myself when I saw you running by,” Tom said, making an inference from her gestures. “I couldn’t see anything that looked a likely …” The word was sickening to say. “… ligature.”
Jane folded her arms across her chest as if she were suddenly cold. “I feel like the earth has shifted in its orbit,” she murmured, then straightened, as if finding a new resolve. “I’ll tell Georgie and Hector. Hector can make the call to the police, I guess. Or I can. Will you—”
“I’ll stay here. I’d like to say a short prayer.”
“Of course. Let me join you, then you can help me back over the hedge.”
“Actually, there is another way out, a quicker one. I should have thought of it earlier when you arrived.”
Tom watched Jane emerge from the chrysalis of the hedge onto the adjoining lawn.
“Whoever made this breach,” she said rising from a crouch and picking scrubby tangle from her hair and T-shirt, “has got to have a mark on him somewhere, don’t you think? I do. Look.” She twisted the underside of her forearm to reveal a thin red scratch.
“Yes, quite possibly.” Or on her, he thought, if indeed it was a woman’s head he’d seen earlier—if he’d seen a head at all, other than the Madonna’s. The memory seemed long ago and like a dream now. He watched Jane veer to the right and break into a jog. She whistled. Bonzo joined her with joyous barking and together they disappeared down the mound.
Nature being indifferent to human tragedy, the morning swiftly restored itself to tranquility. Tom girded himself to return to the sad task of holding vigil over Lord Morborne’s body, but his eyes were caught by the field of tiny diamonds scintillating before his eyes. The sun, now a lemony ball on the southeastern horizon, sent its rays glancing prettily off the drenching of dew on the tract of grass that glided down from the Labyrinth knoll, and for a moment—only a moment—Tom experienced a tiny unexpected fillip of joy. Lord, I my vows to Thee renew—the words of the hymn came to him like a gift—disperse my sins as morning dew, grant my first springs of thought and will, and with Thyself my spirit fill.
He glanced again at the sparkling and immaculate carpet when he noticed a blemish, a darkening of the lawn by the hedge itself. He realised quickly Jane was the cause. She had trampled the grass emerging from the hedge and ghosted a trail that disappeared northwest towards the Hall. But the sun, he noted, highlighted another track, this one running directly south, down the dew-covered mound. No, that wasn’t quite right. At the bottom, he could clearly see the trail split in two: one path twisted west, vanishing into the growing brightness of Eggescombe’s south lawn; the other travelled east, towards a copse of trees, roughly in the direction of Abbotswick. Tom pressed the side of his hand to his brow and squinted at the sun, a golden ball now. Another hot day in the offing. Soon the dew would burn away and the trails vanish. He pinched his lips in indecision. These weren’t paths trod by early-rising gardeners. This was the Lord’s day. Gardeners were having a lie-in.
What he was about to do, he knew, was transgression of what would soon be declared a crime scene, but the opportunity would not come again. Tom tossed his crutch over the hedge, listened to the dull thump on the grass beyond, then bent to crawl through the breach in the hedge, as Jane had done, and, if the dew paths did not fib, two others, too, in recent hours. He poked his head into the scrubby tangle of branches, had a moment’s self-doubt, then shouldered through on hands and knees, elevating his painful ankle so it didn’t catch, pushing at the more resistant branches to protect his face. Emerging, feeling assailed, he brushed the few leaves and twigs that adhered, checked his shirt for tears, and retrieved his crutch. Gentle as the slope was, he narrowly avoided slipping and half skidded to the bottom where the trail diverged.
Which way, which way? Both tracks looked the same. Each was little more than a progression of iridescent skid marks along the grass. But the direction of the tracks was more expressive. The eastwards track suggested a connection to the world beyond Eggescombe Park, to an intruder, perhaps, from Abbotswick or elsewhere, a stranger to Oliver. Someone deranged? Someone with some base motive? Had Oliver, for instance, been strangled for the contents of his pocketbook?
Tom turned his head to the west. A nasty shiver travelled his spine: The westwards track led to the peopled heart of the estate, to Eggescombe Hall, where no one was a stranger to Lord Morborne.
He turned west. He told himself it was likely the shorter route, that by following it he might be rewarded with some useful nugget to present to investigators. He pushed from his mind the possibility that someone close to home, someone in Oliver’s orbit, might have taken his life.
He traced the scuffings along the shorn grass, feeling the cool dampness of the dew on the skin of his unshod foot, passing the oak with the tree house and crossing the south lawn where yesterday half of Thornford had made merry. The confection of fanciful gables, towers and turrets, flaring an intense rose-pink, seemed yesterday a welcoming backdrop, exalted by the centuries, a mellow manifestation of an England timeless and unchanging. This morning it loomed over him, a lone figure in the landscape, as a spiky bulk, massive and intense, shut to the world, animated only by the hard diamond glitter of sunshine on the window mullions as he passed. He knew what manner of men had built this great thing—ambitious, fierce, restless, and unscrupulous men.
The dew path did not meander. Soon it took Tom around to the shaded west façade of Eggescombe Hall, down to a walled yard with stacked outdoor tables, folded chairs and café umbrellas, and potted trees corralled to one side. The servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance of old, he surmised, but now refurbished, decorated, and signed to indicate the Eggescombe tearoom, of which the yard was the outdoor patio, public lavatories, and souvenir shop within. His eyes went to the fresh stains, darkly wet on the dry grey stone steps. The shape of a shoe was now discernible. A woman’s shoe, he was certain, noting the marks grow less distinct as he followed the trail across the yard to a glass-fronted door set into the far corner. It was slightly ajar, which startled him a little. Who had risen and been to this part of the house so early in the morning? Or had the door been left unlatched and unlocked all night? Surely Eggescombe was alarmed? And yet he himself had exited by the front entrance with no trouble.
Tom pushed through the door and found himself in a tiled vestibule, dim and grey without benefit of electric light. To his right, he could see through another glass-fronted door into the souvenir shop, the china and the books slumbering in neat display. Over his right shoulder he glimpsed the tearoom, similarly grey and lifeless. More interesting, though, was the passage straight ahead where a tracing of wet footprints vanished into shadow. He noted door frames, two on the left side of the passage, but no welcoming light streamed forth onto the tiles from an open door. With trepidation, wondering what he would find if he burst in, he tried the knob of the nearest one, but it resisted turning. He looked down the passage to the next door, some ten feet away. A fresh green leaf caught his eye, squashed in a smear of damp on the floor between the two doors. He stepped around it and tried the next door. It, too, was locked or bolted. He glanced again at the leaf, set in the last of the footprints, puzzled at the abrupt termination of the trail. No stride could have taken a man or woman to this second door. Whoever had come this way had to be behind the first door, surely.
He moved to knock this time, but was arrested by a sudden dazzling burst of light. He blinked to see a woman in a navy button-front tunic with a white apron around her waist standing in the doorway to the tearoom, chairs upturned on tables behind her, stripped of their covering cloths, naked and ugly in bright over
head lamps. She was, ludicrously, brandishing a rolling pin.
“Oh! It’s you, Mr. Christmas.” Ellen Gaunt cast him a severe frown. She was a plump woman with a full, high bust, and a deportment that seemed almost military.
“Mrs. Gaunt, I’m sorry to startle you. I—”
“We had a stranger wander in here last week so—”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Tom frowned. “You haven’t seen someone else here this morning? A woman, perhaps?”
“No, but I’ve been in the kitchen. I only came into the tearoom to fetch one of the larger coffeemakers, when I thought I saw someone lurking in the passage.”
“How long have you been here, if I might ask?”
Ellen didn’t answer immediately. Small, sharp eyes seemed to assess him in some fashion. Then she turned to the watch on her wrist, affecting to study it. “Not more than an hour, I shouldn’t think.”
“That’s very early.”
Her lips formed into a thin line. “I like to make an early start. There’s breakfast, but I have a lunch to prepare, too.”
Tom couldn’t help his eyes darting to her sensible black shoes. It was impossible these footprints along the corridor belonged to her. The trail would have led to the kitchen, which the rooms at this end evidently were not. And unless she was lying about her time in the Big House, the footprints would have dried and vanished. But to reassure himself, he asked:
“And you arrived by way of …?”
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 9
