Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas)

by Benison, C. C.

  He’s lying, Tom thought, reading the stubborn closing of his lips. “Some pressure from this boy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tom looked to the elaborate cross behind the altar. “Has your conscience declared a winner yet?”

  “Again, I don’t know. What will you do?”

  “As regards Detectives Bliss and Blessing? Only what I witnessed, not what you’ve told me.”

  “Could you be persuaded to keep schtum?”

  “My lord, I’m a priest.” Tom instinctively raised his hand to his neck to indicate his clerical collar, but of course it wasn’t there. He had put on casual clothes this third day of his holidays.

  “I said earlier I thought you might be being naïve.”

  “You did, but I can’t see why any of this would go any farther officially, if you are innocent of Lord Morborne’s death. Reconciling yourself with Lady Fairhaven, with your conscience, with God, are entirely private matters.”

  Hector’s face seemed to sag. He looked suddenly exhausted. “When I say you may be being naïve, I mean this: Oliver claims the boy was … underage at the time I met him. He may well have been, if his birthday on the Internet is correct. I didn’t know. I—”

  “Oh, God, Hector.” Tom couldn’t suppress his dismay. “How could you?”

  Indignation flashed in Hector’s eyes as a new and dangerous colour returned to his cheeks. “Don’t you come the virtuous man to me, Mr. Christmas! I was in the north corridor in the small hours Sunday morning and saw Lucy, in moonlight from the window, tripping merrily up the grand staircase, coming, it would seem, from the ground floor, where the Opium Bedroom is located. I’m quite aware of my sister-in-law’s appetites, and they aren’t for a nice warm milky drink in the middle of the night. I can’t think who else in the house might better satisfy her … enthusiasms. I can see from your expression that my deduction is not misplaced.”

  Tom had tried to compose his face in what he thought was imperturbability, but felt nonetheless the beating of blood along his cheeks. The words caught at his throat: “I didn’t intend to cast the first stone, my lord.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Aptly named, I suppose,” Tom said.

  “Smallest room in the house, I’ll wager,” DI Bliss responded gruffly, glancing around the linen-fold paneling.

  “Not quite the smallest, sir.” DS Blessing tapped his notebook against his thigh.

  Bliss scowled at his junior and refrained from comment. Tom, seated on a richly carved high-back chair that dug uncomfortably into his spine, looked from one to the other wondering, not for the first time, about the nature of their relationship and their lives. Why, for instance, was the senior officer junior in age? DI Bliss was perhaps early forties while DS Blessing had to near fifty. Blessing’s sister, he knew, had gone to school with Mrs. Prowse—which must make her an older sister—and his wife attended St. Mary’s in Totnes. Bliss’s wife liked theatre, and dragged her husband to plays. That was the extent of his knowledge, other than Blessing’s confiding remark that Bliss was cursed with an irritable bowel, the goad to Blessing’s remark.

  “I’m not sure why you think it’s aptly named, either.” Bliss addressed Tom’s earlier remark. “The missus and I did the tour of Eggescombe on an open day a few years ago. I don’t recall coming in here.”

  “It’s very plain, sir.”

  “I expect the local felons were tried here in centuries past, as there was likely no proper court,” Tom said. “That’s why it’s called the Justice Room.”

  “I do know that.” Bliss’s tone was testy. “I’m wondering why you think it’s apt now.”

  “Because you two”—he gestured with his finger—“are the instruments of justice in this instance, are you not? Lord Fairhaven, I expect, is displaying a sense of decorum.”

  Or humour, he thought, though Hector seemed cursed with a lack of it.

  Or irony.

  The Justice Room, adjacent to the great hall, was a comparative closet of a room, bare in decoration, spare in furniture—plain, as DS Blessing said—containing only a single table, oval, with an added leaf, richer in colour than the other sun-bleached boards, and several chairs identical to the one Tom sat on. The smell of warm dust pervaded, though none was evident; the room felt reopened after a very long period. Perhaps, Tom thought, the privilege of maintaining the king’s peace had slipped from Eggescombe as Hector’s ancestors stuck by their Roman faith, making the room redundant.

  “More likely His Lordship doesn’t want us mucking up his posh rooms,” Bliss muttered.

  “Perhaps you won’t need this as your incident room for long,” Tom said, noting the room was absent of the sort of crime-solving paraphernalia he recalled from the detectives’ installation in Thornford’s Old School Room during a murder investigation a year earlier. “Anyway, how may I be of assistance?”

  Gaunt, who seemed to have a sixth sense of everyone’s whereabouts, had waylaid Tom the minute he’d exited the chapel. He’d ushered him past a congeries of rooms and staircases to the Justice Room where Bliss and Blessing had parked themselves.

  “I’m also wondering,” Tom continued when an immediate reply wasn’t forthcoming, “when my daughter and I might be permitted to leave Eggescombe? We were scheduled to leave for London late Saturday, to visit relatives.”

  “I can’t really say, now can I, Mr. Christmas? Much depends on folk cooperating with us.”

  “But surely once you’ve interviewed everyone, those of us who don’t live here can go. You can always find us later. I’m not intending to flee the country.”

  “No second home in Cap Ferrat then, Mr. Christmas?”

  “No,” Tom replied, guessing that Lady Lucinda had entertained recently in this chamber.

  Bliss grunted. “We didn’t really get on to you yesterday when we were next door.” He nodded towards the great hall, adjacent. “That nutter confessing to a crime he didn’t commit put a bit of a spanner into the works.” He frowned. “You gave us an outline yesterday morning outside on the drive of what you found in the Labyrinth. What was it, Sergeant?”

  Blessing flipped back through his notebook and read the relevant entry.

  “Have we left anything out?” Bliss asked.

  “No …” Tom hesitated. “But I’m afraid I’ve left something out. I neglected to tell you that when I returned to the Labyrinth after my exploration along the dew path yesterday morning, I … found Lord Fairhaven in the centre removing something—I thought—from Lord Morborne’s person.”

  Bliss’s eyebrows rose imperceptibly. “What exactly?”

  Tom glanced at a series of carved figures along the wall. “You must ask Lord Fairhaven. I didn’t say anything earlier because I wasn’t certain what I saw. I am now. I’ve discussed this with His Lordship, but I can’t in good conscience give you the details—or at least what details I know. The three of you must have a conversation.”

  “Fear not, Vicar, we will. Anything else your … conscience has kept you from?”

  “Will you be interviewing the children—Max and my daughter?”

  “Only if we think it necessary, and under supervision, of course. Why?”

  Tom hesitated again. His experience of the police interviewing Miranda, even under supervision, after her mother had died had left him with a sour taste. “Perhaps I might report something that my daughter saw in the small hours of Sunday morning—a ghost.”

  Blessing looked up. “My cousin Barry saw a UFO on Exmoor last year.”

  “I’m not having a laugh,” Tom said.

  “Nor am I. Turns out it was a police drone. Rational explanation.”

  “I take your point, Sergeant. Young Max—who seems to have a fanciful streak—insists that what my daughter saw was the ghost of Sir Edward Strickland who is said to wander the property during full moons, but Miranda is, well, less certain.”

  “Then what was this ghost?” Bliss asked.

  “She’s not sure. Nor am I.”
<
br />   “Or you don’t want to say, perhaps.”

  “Inspector, though I can’t help but be mindful that a man has been killed, I don’t—”

  “Want to grass anyone up.”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “You lack confidence in our abilities?”

  “No,” Tom fibbed. His wife’s killer had yet to be found and the case was as cold as a tomb. “But bear in mind that what Miranda saw, she saw from the nursery floor in a burst of lightning over the moor—some little distance away.”

  “Time?” Blessing scribbled in his notebook.

  “Miranda’s not certain. Anyway, what she saw was not in Tudor costume. The figure was in modern dress … or perhaps no dress—or at least in little dress. Pale, white … male.”

  Interest flickered across Bliss’s face. He exchanged a glance with his sergeant. “Whereabouts?” he asked Tom.

  “I believe the nursery floor overlooks the south lawn.”

  “Any other details?”

  “None, I’m afraid. As I said, Miranda only had a glimpse. Perhaps it’s not important.”

  “We’ll be the judge of that, sir.”

  “If you are going to talk with Miranda, you will of course include me.”

  “It’s mandatory, sir.”

  “Good. Now is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Bliss frowned down at Blessing, who flipped through pages in his notebook and shrugged:

  “You told us you retired a little before midnight Saturday and woke about five thirty.”

  “That’s true.” Tom’s heart began a tattoo.

  “Any bumps in the night?” Bliss enquired.

  “No.” How swiftly the lie came to his lips. How cowardly he was!

  “You weren’t awoken by distant thunder?”

  “No.” That was at least true. Thunder had not awoken him.

  Bliss’s mouth widened to emit another question when a knock on the door interrupted. The door opened a crack and a man’s head peeked through, followed by a uniformed arm. Bliss took the paper proffered, nodded a thanks to the departing figure, and studied the document a moment, his mouth parting with the beginning of a smile. He glanced at Tom as if wondering why he was still in the room.

  “Thank you, Vicar,” he said, handing the paper to Blessing. “I think that will be all … for the minute.”

  Tom understood he wouldn’t be leaving Eggescombe anytime soon.

  “To get a decent egg, I really think you need to keep your own hens.”

  “Yes, I expect that’s true.” Tom regarded askance the congregation of frisky poultry, snowy white and reddish brown, mobbing the dowager countess’s legs and tried to imagine the effect in the vicarage garden. A brief one, he thought: pure carnage. Powell and Gloria, the vicarage cats, weren’t awfully interested in eggs.

  His eyes went up to the top of the high brick wall. He doubted even the most athletic fox could scale it.

  “There’s wire netting dug nearly two feet into the ground.” Dowager Lady Fairhaven seemed to guess his thoughts. “I’ve only lost one and that’s because Roberto’s cat—I think of it as Roberto’s; Fred Astaire, as Max calls him—snuck through the gate after him.”

  It was all a bit Hameau de la Reine, the rustic henhouse, the tidy fencing, the pretty chickens, the wicker basket at her feet. Lady Fairhaven in a muslin dress and a straw hat comme Marie Antoinette would have capped the scene quite nicely, but, as she had on Saturday when he’d first met her, she was dressed in practical fashion in jeans and an old shirt and looked, as her sobriquet suggested, marvellous—authentic, very much in her milieu.

  He had only happened upon the chicken run, drawn by a sudden collective shriek that startled him as he limped along a track near the dower house, gingerly giving his healing ankle in its cast boot a little exercise. He had left the detectives, choosing a path that took him into a wood and along a grassy bank of the Eggesbrooke to sit for a time under a huge willow that leaned over the water, trailing its branches on the surface, making ripples in the flow. Walking back, the noise he’d heard was unmistakably that of poultry under provocation, but by what, he’d wondered—vermin? He skirted the high wall past the rhododendron shrubs to investigate. No, he’d quickly seen, peeking through a wooden gate, the poultry had been aroused by the dowager countess who was tossing corn from what appeared to be an antique biscuit tin. She invited him to join her.

  “Have you been keeping chickens long?” he asked.

  “Some few years. You look a little bemused.”

  “You mentioned chickens to the children yesterday, but I didn’t think—”

  “My mother was very fond of chickens. She even wrote a book about them, a sort of memoir, with poultry. Three French Hens. My mother was Nancy, Lady Moncrieff.”

  “Oh!” The name pinged a bell. “I didn’t realise you were—”

  “One of those Moncrieffs, yes. I’m the quiet one, socalled—the youngest.” She threw another handful of corn on the ground, sending the chickens scattering. “My brothers and sister were the tearaways, really. Certainly by comparison.” She smiled with her piercing blue eyes.

  Tom had a vague notion—largely from television interviews and book reviews, as the Moncrieffs had become prolific published diarists—of the siblings as cynosures of Swinging London in the years before he was born, then later falling into various forms of darkness. One brother, he believed, had died of a drug overdose, but the others had lived to … Did one join the Baader-Meinhof in Germany? Oh, surely not. And didn’t another defect to the Soviet Union? Had he been a spy?

  “Which is how in a way,” Marguerite continued, “your parents came to a party here and where they learned they would be adopting you. I had met them at a gallery opening in London, though my husband had already met your father in some business situation. He more or less managed your mother’s all-too-short career, I think. Didn’t I say this when we were looking at the photos yesterday? Interesting days, I must say.” She threw another handful of corn over the yard. “But they didn’t last. My father-in-law died quite young, as did my husband—there’s a congenital heart condition among the Strickland males, which is one reason I do wish Hector would stop jumping from airplanes—so we had to devote our attentions to this estate and the other businesses.

  “Anyway.” She paused. “What were we talking about? Chickens! We were talking about chickens. My mother kept them. She found tending to them soothing, oddly enough. As do I, though when they’re flocked about me as they are now”—she looked down—“I feel rather like I’m at the Women’s Institute about to give a little talk.”

  Tom laughed. “You must come to ours then.”

  “Thornford? Oh, I think I have been in the past. But that was before the chickens. I could come again and talk about poultry management. Usually people have me talk about my family or the sixties. Were you out for a walk? I wasn’t expecting to see you until teatime.”

  “I thought I might take some air. I had a short interview with the police, which was a bit … cheerless.”

  “Oh?” She regarded him curiously. “I talked with them yesterday evening after they’d sorted out that poor deranged man who confessed. I told them,” she added, her voice growing cross as she reached into the biscuit tin, “ ‘I’m not trotting back and forth to the Hall at your whim. If you want to talk to me, you can get it over and done with at my cottage.’ ” She scattered the corn. “They’re a pair, aren’t they?”

  “Those two hens?” Tom had been admiring a pair with coppery hackles jostling and pecking each other.

  “No, those two CID—Bliss and Blessing. Not quite Morse and Lewis, are they?”

  “They’re … adequate to the task, I think, on the whole.”

  “Oh, you’ve met before?”

  “There have been some unhappy incidents in Thornford.”

  “Of course, that poor girl in that drum!”

  “How did you know?”

  “I … must have read it in the papers,” she
replied, handing him the biscuit tin. She swiftly and expertly scooped up a hen, tempted by a new handful of corn, and tucked it under her arm. “You must take some eggs away with you when you leave.”

  “That’s very kind.” Tom felt absurdly as though he were addressing the hen, whose beady glassy eye fixed him with alarm. “I’m not sure when that will be, though.”

  “After tea, at the earliest,” Marguerite said firmly. “It’s a birthday tea. Happy birthday, by the way. So, you see, you really mustn’t leave.” She released the hen and picked up the wicker basket. “Did Bliss and Blessing—what peculiar names they have—say anything that would lead you to believe they had …” She seemed to search for the words. “… focused their enquiries?”

  Tom reflected. “Not really. My interview was brief. We weren’t long in it when a constable interrupted us with some paper or other and they dismissed me.”

  “But you said the interview was cheerless.”

  “I can’t help thinking that anything I say could send them haring down the wrong garden path.”

  “You have a kind heart, I think.”

  “I don’t think I’m unusual in wanting redress, but I don’t really want to see someone innocent troubled along the way—which I suppose is a fair bit of wishful thinking.” To the flash of curiosity in her gaze, he explained. “When my wife was murdered—”

  “Of course.”

  Tom hesitated over her brief acknowledgement as Marguerite turned towards the henhouse and began plucking eggs from the nesting boxes. “Did you know?”

  “Yes …” She plopped an egg in her basket. “I did, and I’m very sorry. I can’t imagine anything more dreadful.”

  “You’re remarkably well informed, Lady Fairhaven—”

  “I’m pottered down here in Devon most of the year. One … hears things. Anyway, you were saying …?”

  Tom continued as Marguerite gathered eggs: “When my wife was murdered—we lived in Bristol at the time—the police held me under suspicion for a time. It’s routine of them, I suppose, to suspect the nearest and dearest, but it’s the most awful feeling, dealing with your own grief, your child’s, too, and having them on at you all the time. You start to wonder if you did do it and lost your mind somehow.”