Much love,
Madrun
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Didn’t you bring swimming trunks, Vicar?” Lucinda slipped her sunglasses down her nose and squinted up at him from the sun lounger.
“I didn’t expect to be staying.”
“Nor I, really. But I found something of Georgie’s that fit. Can’t imagine her ever wearing this, though!” She shifted slightly in the chair, which had a cantilevering effect on her breasts encased in the scrap of costume. “Well, sort of.” A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth as she plucked a tube of sun cream from a raffia bag next to her. “Wonderful of Hector to fill the pool.”
Tom glanced at the translucent water—the tiny turquoise lozenge he had seen from on high the day before—and at the sun-dazzled ripples, which might have transfixed him on another day, a day set aside for relaxation, if he wasn’t otherwise troubled. At luncheon, Lucy had declared for an afternoon at the pool, which met varied shadings of opprobrium from much of her family, none of which deterred her, he’d noted from his bedroom window, on his mobile, trying (unsuccessfully) to reach his mothers in Gravesend. A gauzy white kimono jacket fluttered around the tops of her bare legs as she moved with self-possession over the south lawn. Reattaching his cast boot, he had hobbled through Eggescombe Hall and out the terrace after her, joining a path that branched from the one leading to the walled kitchen-garden-cum-garden-centre, through a topiary hedge corridor, to a gate marked STRICTLY PRIVATE. The pool, once he’d manoeuvred the latch and climbed down a few steps, seemed a world apart, protected from the wind and curious eyes by a high stone wall and a curtain of trees. In a climate of uncertain sunniness, it was an extravagance, as much a folly as the adjoining Gaze Tower, a giant’s pencil of stone purposelessly piercing the sky.
“I understood at lunch that Lord Fairhaven’s intent was to fill the pool in.”
“Perhaps.” Lucinda twiddled the tip of the tube, adding, as if in explanation, “Hector’s in a foul mood.”
“Understandably so, yes?”
Lucinda’s response was to squirt a dollop of white cream onto her fingers. “Although I suppose this patch really could be put to better use.” She glanced over the rims of her glasses around the enclosure, almost shimmering in the hot imperturbable calm of August. “A petting zoo, perhaps? A paintball arena?” Her tone contained no irony. “Can’t imagine what Hector’s grandfather was thinking putting a swimming pool in? Turning Eggescombe into a country house hotel, likely. I expect someone came along with a different view.” She smoothed the cream into her upper arm. Tom noted the faint white souvenirs of cutting on the lower. “Clever old Georgie.
“Marrying Hector,” she added, as Tom frowned at the non sequitur. “The Stricklands have—oh, what’s the word?—husbanded their resources well. My grandfather, on the other hand, sold off the family seat while he was living in Kenya. Riseley Castle. In Cambridgeshire. Do you know it?”
“Vaguely.”
“It’s a country house hotel. And then there was Kilmore in County Armagh, which my grandfather also sold. It’s now the headquarters of a potato crisp manufacturer. And then, of course, there’s my father’s—our father’s, Oliver and Georgie’s and mine … have you thoroughly plumbed the fforde-Beckett line …?”
“As I indicated, I was given a scorecard earlier.”
“… our father’s disastrous investment on Baissé in the West Indies, where I was born, incidentally.” She paused in her application of cream. “Why don’t you sit down? You’re casting a shadow. Pull that sun lounger over here.”
Tom chose instead a deck chair, which seemed less louche. Like his hosts, he judged sunbathing—or even the appearance of sunbathing—in the circumstances of family tragedy ill considered. With his free hand, he dragged the chair across the tiles, wood scraping paving stone, sensing her eyes resting on him rather like a cat’s on a mouse. He felt uncommonly uncomfortable.
“I take it you’re here to talk to me,” Lucinda said as Tom settled himself into the chair. “Not take in the sun.”
“Yes.”
“About last night,” she murmured throatily, resuming the application of sun cream.
“About the early morning.”
“The early morning? Oh, do tell.”
Tom took a cleansing breath. “You know, don’t you, that I was the one who found your brother’s—”
“Half brother.”
“—half brother’s … body—”
“Yes.”
“—in the centre of the Labyrinth. Well, in the short time before that I thought I saw—”
Lucinda looked at him expectantly. “Yes …?”
Tom had paused. “You haven’t had a conversation with the CID yet, have you?”
“No. I wasn’t expecting to.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. Can she be so ingenuous? “I don’t doubt we’ll all be interviewed by them before very long—helping them with their enquiries, as the saying goes.”
“I can’t think there’s much I can tell them.” Lucinda affected to stifle a yawn.
“Unfortunately, there are one or two things I may need to tell them.”
“Really?” she drawled, popping her sunglasses in place over her eyes.
“One of them,” Tom persisted, “has to do with what I saw when I entered the Labyrinth—”
“Thought you saw, you said.”
“Yes, all right, ‘thought.’ It was a head, the back of one, at any rate.”
“Perhaps it was Eggescombe’s famous ghost.”
“I’m told Eggescombe’s ghost is male,” Tom responded, glancing at his own vexed reflection in her sunglasses. “I’m fairly sure I saw the back of a woman’s head.”
“A woman’s.” Lucinda pushed the glasses down her nose. “Do you mean like mine?” She twisted on the sun lounger, exposing the mane of reddish blond hair parting gently to reveal a few wispy hairs on her neck.
Momentarily distracted—there was something so vulnerable about the back of a woman’s neck—Tom could only murmur, “It was very early, the light was poor—”
“You think it may have been me.” Lucinda twisted her body back round. “You must or you wouldn’t have bothered to come all this way.”
“I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely saying that I saw a woman.”
“Thought you saw a woman.”
“In either case, I feel duty-bound to say so, which means the police may ask certain … questions—awkward questions—of the women at Eggescombe. Well,” Tom amended, “of all of us, really.”
Lucinda lifted an editorial eyebrow. “Well, it couldn’t have been me. I took a cup of coffee on the terrace about eleven and that was the first time I was out of doors today.”
Tom found himself fidgeting with his wedding ring with rising embarrassment. It occurred to him that in the midst of His innumerable concerns, God had paused to lend an interested ear. Helplessly, he glanced up at the sky, past the Gaze Tower, as if expecting the divine auricle to manifest itself among the wisps of clouds over Dartmoor, and saw only a lean figure—possibly Dominic from the white of his costume—leaning out of the tower’s window looking their way. It didn’t matter that Dominic lacked God’s omniaudient attribute; Tom was made to feel uncomfortable anyway. He returned his eyes to Lucinda and said the words before he had any more time to think:
“When did you leave my bed?”
Her lips parted in the beginning of a smile. “When? Why, Vicar, I haven’t the foggiest. It was dark.”
“And you returned to your room?”
“Ah, a trick question! But Jane has already told me she went looking for me early this morning and couldn’t find me. I’ll tell you what I told her—I was in Dominic’s room.” She pushed the sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose. “I took a nightcap with me to Dominic’s room after the party last night and fell asleep on the daybed in his room. And then, later, after we, you know … I returned to his room.”
“Why?”
“Why?” The question seemed to catch her unawares.
“You might have stayed with me.”
“Is that something you would have wanted?”
Tom could feel a blush creep up his throat. Yes, damn it, he very much liked to wake up with a woman, but he felt absurdly as if doing so breached some country house weekend etiquette.
“It occurred to me,” she continued when he didn’t reply, “that … well, that you might not want your daughter to find us together. Children are known to barge into their parents’ bedrooms, are they not?”
“Yes,” he said, though he sensed she was improvising. He wasn’t sure Miranda would know how to find the Opium Bedroom without a trail of bread crumbs.
“Anyway, you mustn’t worry, Tom. I shall swear I was with Dominic all night—should I have to, of course. Your secret is safe with me. Now, would you be a lamb and rub some cream on my back?”
“No,” Tom responded more vehemently than he intended.
“No? How very unkind.”
“I meant, you must be forthright with the police.” Though he realised his response lacked honesty—he didn’t at all look forward to anyone knowing.
“Must I?”
“If you want your brother’s—your half brother’s killer found.”
“I’m not sure I do. Or care, really. A lot less Olly in the world is purely beneficial as far as I can see.”
“You can’t mean that.”
“But I do.”
“A human life has been snatched away,” Tom protested. “He was to marry. He is expecting a child!”
“I meant beneficial to me, Vicar.” Her mouth twisted unevenly. “Olly has dominated and bullied the family Trust in the years since our father died and mismanaged what’s left of the estate terribly. Georgie has no idea what’s been going on. She likes to keep her head in the sand, but then in marrying Hector she has the wherewithal to do so. Olly’s been selling properties like mad without any discussion, looting Morborne House while my mother and I have been away—and, Dominic told me this weekend, putting up fake pictures in their place. Dom thinks he’s been doing it for years! Then Olly said he was going to sell the house itself, claiming the Trust can’t afford the costs of maintaining it and the money is best placed elsewhere. But what he really wanted was the house to himself and Serena, who needs to have her head examined for assenting to marry him. ‘It’s a Trust decision,’ he always said.” She popped her glasses down her nose again and fixed him with her gaze. “I shouldn’t bore you with this, because it is such a bore! But I got back from visiting mother in Cap Ferrat on Friday to find the locks on the house had been changed. He claimed to me yesterday we had received notice to vacate the house by August first. We received no such notice. My mother has a life right to the use of Morborne House, according to the terms of Daddy’s will, and that only changes if she remarries.”
“Is she? Remarrying?”
Lucinda looked away. “No. Well, not yet. Anyway, I’ve only the clothes in my suitcases, you know. Everything else is in Morborne House. Olly’s rendered me homeless. And worse … !” She paused. “I suppose all this could constitute motive, couldn’t it? I might be a character in one of those country house murder-mystery weekend thingies—which I shouldn’t be surprised is on offer at Riseley Castle.” She held out her hands. “But for these.” She wiggled her slim fingernails tipped with the faintest pink varnish. “I don’t think these could strangle a man, do you?”
Twitching with the memory of those hands running down his back, Tom failed to respond immediately. Her hands were not flaccid mittens. They were strong hands; Lucinda was fit, gym-toned. But her hands were a woman’s hands, and besides …
“Well, do you?” She broke into his thoughts.
“Lord Morborne was strangled with a ligature of some nature,” he said dumbly, still remembering her hands.
“Really? I didn’t know.” Lucinda shifted on the sun lounger. “What exactly?”
“It’s not clear.”
“You mean whatever was used hasn’t been found?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Lucinda’s lips formed a thoughtful moue. Then she flicked her head suddenly, as if alerted by a movement in her peripheral vision. She put her hand to her brow to shield her eyes and stared up to the Gaze Tower. “Is that Dominic?”
“I believe so. He’s been up there awhile.”
“Dominic!” Lucinda called and waved. “Come down from there! Come here!”
Tom watched as Dominic leaned from the opening, his hand cupping his ear. Lucinda shouted again, but Dominic shook his head.
“He can’t hear me. Pity. I’d have him put sun cream on my back.” She flicked Tom a sardonic glance.
Tom watched her take up the sun cream once again and continue her toilette, spreading the white liquid along her legs in strong strokes. The front of her was now almost unashamedly glistening with sun cream—a sunblocking SPF 90, he noted, wondering at the point of lying in the sun if you didn’t wish to encourage a bit of a tan. An aroma of coconut and Bounty bars wafted in the tepid breeze to his nostrils, redolent of bucket-and-spade holidays on the Isle of Wight with his mothers. One summer they had gone to the south of France, when he was about Miranda’s age. Not Cap Ferrat, though. Somewhere much less grand.
“What might be worse than homelessness?” he asked, his mind returned to their earlier conversation.
“A philosophical question?”
“No, earlier, when you said your … half brother had rendered you basically homeless, you alluded to a worse condition.”
“Oh.” She regarded him steadily, arrested in her movements. “There’s something about you that makes me want to tell secrets. What is it?”
“I’ve been told I have a kindly face.” Tom laughed for the first time that day. “Or that people think priests are of necessity discreet.”
“Aren’t they?”
“I am.”
“Well, then …” She restored the cap to the bottle. “Illegitimacy is worse. Oliver had it in his fat melon that our father did not properly divorce his mother, thereby making our father’s marriage to my mother bigamous and illegal. Which in turn would make me a bastard. From there, he could challenge my right—and my mother’s—as beneficiaries of the Trust, and deny us our titles.”
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 16
