“And the murderer’s not been found? I believe I know that.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Marguerite closed the coop. As she shooed the chickens past the fence and closed the gate, she murmured, “I’m not certain I want Oliver’s murderer found.”
“Lady Fairhaven, surely not.”
“Do call me Marguerite at least, Tom, and you can leave the tin here.” She shifted the wicker basket to her other hand and closed the latch. “I know I’m being blunt, but Oliver—and I’m sure others have remarked on this to you in one fashion or another—could be quite a dreadful man.”
“I do know about Mr. Sica’s sister, Marguerite, but—”
“Oliver’s offended more people than Roberto. The fforde-Becketts are a troubling lot, really. At least my brothers and sister, however wrongheaded they were with their politics, had some little notion of something larger than themselves, but the fforde-Becketts have an enormous streak of debauchery and selfishness. With the exception of Georgina, I suppose. Hector’s father and I weren’t pleased with his choice of Georgina for a wife. We didn’t know how … fforde-Becketty she might become. She was quite vivacious when she was younger, but she’s become terribly conventional. I’m afraid my son’s made a very dull marriage, and in the end there’s nothing more unthinkable than a dull marriage.”
“Lady Fairhaven has had a tragedy.”
“Then you’ve been told. I sympathise with my daughter-in-law. I do, utterly. I would so adore to have had another grandchild, but it’s been ten years since Arabella died so tragically. I find myself thinking—perhaps unkindly, but I can’t help myself—that Georgie with her migraines and her helplessness has only found a way different from her brother and half sister of claiming everyone’s attention.” She paused. “Yes, I know I’m being harsh. I can be an awful mother-in-law at times!” Her blue eyes flashed. “I just want to poke Georgina with a stick some days. I know I’m contradicting myself, but sometimes I wish she would show a bit of Oliver and Lucinda and Dominic’s spark.” She laughed. “And here I am telling you family secrets and I barely know you.”
“I’m much in favour of discretion, so you can rely on it.”
“I sensed that. The vicar in Abbotswick—do you know him—?”
“No, I can’t say I do, though I’ve probably met him at some church affair.”
“—is an awful gossipy old woman, and he’s a man.” She laughed again, then grew serious. “Tom, I do want to explain something: I don’t mean to say that I don’t want Oliver’s murderer found because I think Oliver somehow deserved what he got. It was your phrase nearest and dearest. I felt a weight lift when that deranged man made his claim, but since then—well, I think we both know that someone near and dear has most likely taken Oliver’s life. I suppose I’d rather not know who.”
Tom felt the weight fall on him. “Marguerite,” he began as they stepped through an iron gate into the dower house’s walled back garden, “in that regard, there is something I do feel I should tell you—”
“Oh, dear, what?”
“—so you might be … prepared. The police of course asked me for any information that might help them with their enquiries, so I didn’t think I could not tell them about …”
“Idiot boy!” Marguerite retorted when Tom finished telling of Hector’s machinations over Oliver’s corpse. “Whatever can he have been thinking? And you talked to Hector before talking to the CID, so you must know why he would—”
“Marguerite, you wouldn’t want me to behave like Abbotswick’s vicar.”
The dowager countess’s mouth pressed to a thin line. “No, I suppose not. I know he and Oliver have been having a go at each other, but Hector’s mostly bluster—which is why he’s perfect for Parliament. Oh, hello.”
Marguerite addressed a young woman perched on the edge of a stone bench by a garden of pinks and roses. She was wearing a striped T-shirt and pale blue jeans.
“Lady Fairhaven.” The woman rose. Her tone was apologetic, faintly tentative.
“I wasn’t expecting you today.”
“I thought I would come in any case.”
“Were you let in?” Tom couldn’t help asking. Between the police and Hector’s private security Eggescombe Park was, he thought, made impenetrable to outsiders.
“Forgive me,” Marguerite interrupted. “Tom, this is Anna Phillips. She lives in the village. Anna, this is the Reverend Tom Christmas, who … has been staying with us this weekend.”
Anna’s eyes darted between him and the dowager countess as he took her hand. Tom sensed a strained atmosphere between the two women, a guarding of words that would have been voiced but for his presence. He looked more keenly at her face, a pale oval, delicately boned and eloquent, small ears exposed by her fair hair loosely tied at the back.
“I clean for Lady Fairhaven,” Anna dropped his hand, “and at the Hall, too, as part of—”
“I know your name,” Tom responded. “You recently lost your brother. It was in the local newspaper. I’m so sorry for your loss. I certainly hope the driver of the car is found very soon and some justice is had, although”—he found himself stumbling over the familiar encomium, unnerved by the stoical misery in her eyes—“I know of course that won’t bring back—”
“Rough justice may have already prevailed, Mr. Christmas,” Anna interrupted.
Startled, Tom opened his mouth to respond, but as if regretting her words, Anna swiftly turned her attention to Lady Fairhaven. “I thought I’d prefer to keep busy.”
“Of course, my dear. I quite understand.”
“I wasn’t seen.”
“Ah, good.” Marguerite smiled thinly. “Anna knows many of Eggescombe’s less frequented paths,” she explained to Tom. “Have you been in the house?”
“No,” Anna replied. “I’ve only arrived.”
“Come along, then.” Marguerite led the way down the grassy path between the borders of flowers. Tom fell in beside Anna.
“I hope you don’t think me rude or abrupt,” he began, “but I must ask you if you ever lived in the Highlands, on an estate named Tullochbrae?”
Tom noted Marguerite’s shoulders stiffen. Anna glanced, too, at the dowager countess’s back. She didn’t answer immediately. When she did she turned watchful eyes to Tom and said simply, “Yes, I did.”
“Then you are—or at least once were—Ree Corlett.”
“Yes.”
“Jane Allan—Lady Kirkbride—guessed you might be she after reading the story in the paper yesterday. Of course,” he added, gesturing towards the silent Marguerite, “it’s nobody’s business why—”
“It’s all right. Lady Fairhaven knows. When I moved down south, with my brother, I took my mother’s maiden name, Phillips. My mother had me christened Rhiannon. She was Welsh and had a certain romantic streak.” She cast Tom a tentative smile. “Everyone at Tullochbrae called me Ree, but when I left I decided to call myself for one of the other syllables.”
“Why, if I may ask? You’ve altered your accent, too, have you not?”
“It … it felt the right thing to do.” Anna’s hand brushed a drooping peony as they passed, setting petals scattering to the lawn. “Did Lady Kirkbride tell you my father was land agent at Tullochbrae?”
“Yes. I understand he died a few weeks before her wedding to Jamie.”
“I had turned eighteen the month before. David was thirteen. Our mother, you may have been told, had died well before our father. It was my father who raised us, really. As well as he could in the circumstances. Although the other staff at Tullochbrae were very kind.”
“I expect you did more than your share in raising your brother.” Tom glanced at her pensive profile, impatient with a new question.
Anna turned her head to acknowledge his remark with a small smile. “I’m not certain that’s true. As I’m sure the newspaper said, my brother was mentally handicapped. During the week, he was boarded at a Steiner school near Aberdeen. Weekends, he was with us at T
ullochbrae.” She paused. “I left Tullochbrae not long after the Allan wedding. There was really nothing for me to do there, although Lord Kinross—Jamie’s father—offered to help me, which was very considerate, especially given … the terrible ordeal he was going through—the whole Allan family was going through.”
“You mean the death of Jamie’s older brother, William—Boysie, as they called him. Did that have anything to do with your leaving?”
As they turned towards the brick courtyard adjoining the dower house, sunlight caught Anna’s face and played along her high cheekbones. She looked to the sky, as if some memory could be captured from the air. “I left because that’s what eighteen-year-olds do, if they’re able. I had reached my majority. My father’s insurance paid out a very good sum. And Tullochbrae had become a place of grief … grief of many kinds,” she added, glancing back to him. “David and I left and moved to Bournemouth. I was able to get him a weekly boarding placement at a sister Steiner school nearby. I bought a flat in town, and David would join me at weekends. I … I suppose I should have taken some training in something—it’s what my father would have expected—but I took a temp job for a cleaning service and found it … satisfying. I still do.”
“Then it was at Bournemouth you modified your name—and your brother’s.”
“I wish I could give you a good explanation why,” she responded, casting him an uneasy glance as the three of them stepped onto the brick. “As I said, it felt very much like the right thing to do. A new life, a new town, I suppose was part of it. David and I had no real family that would mind. Both our parents were only children; we had no cousins, for instance.”
Tom voiced his perplexity: “I believe there’s more, if you don’t think me unkind for saying so.”
Anna glanced at Marguerite, who had stopped by the boot scraper, before replying, “I won’t say I have second sight. I don’t, I’m sure. My mother did, according to my father. She apparently foresaw her own death. But”—she hesitated in her movements—“perhaps a little rubbed off. I had a strong feeling that if I altered my identity, I would draw a ring of protection around David and me—that if no one knew who we once were, or where we had once lived, then we would be safe.”
“And were you?” Tom asked.
She glanced at him. A shadow crossed her face. “For a time.” She slipped from his attentions, towards the back door, as if she regretted her candour.
“Perhaps it’s best,” Marguerite murmured to him as she ran her boots over the scraper, “not to mention seeing Anna here when you’re back at the Hall. We wouldn’t,” she added with a conspiratorial glance, “want the police to know their cordon sanitaire has been broken.
“Do step in a minute.” Her normal timbre resumed. “I want you to take some eggs up to the Hall. I’ll get you a box.”
Together the three passed from the sunny yard into the cool of the mudroom, Marguerite handing her basket of eggs to Tom while she removed her boots. Following her into the kitchen, Tom placed the eggs on the counter and studied Anna as she crossed past a bright window to a selection of aprons on hooks along the wall. Something half remembered teased at him. What was it? But the sensation vanished as quickly as it arrived. He wanted to probe Anna’s remark about “rough justice,” but a more urgent concern pressed upon him:
“Lady Kirkbride was very excited to read that you shared your cottage with a man named John. She can’t help wondering if it might be her brother-in-law, John Allan, who’s had no communication with his family for years.”
“No.” Anna’s hand hesitated over a green apron. “My man’s John Phillips.”
“Oh,” Tom responded, disappointed, wishing she’d turn so he could read her eyes. “Jane thought because you’re unmarried and share the same last name …”
“A happenchance, Mr. Christmas, that’s all.”
“Tom, please. I also wonder—” He stopped, his ears pricked suddenly to a rumble of male voices deeper in the house’s interior.
“Do you have company?”
Marguerite was washing her hands over the kitchen sink. She half turned. “No, why do you ask?”
“Voices, coming from your front rooms, I think.”
She turned off the taps. “Yes, I hear it now.” She glanced at Anna who, arrested in tying her pinny, seemed to shrink against the wall. Wiping her hands on a towel, she moved quickly across the tiles and pushed through the door into the corridor before Tom could caution her.
“Marguerite,” he called, following swiftly, his mind cringing with images of intruders. “You don’t know who it might be.”
Tom entered the drawing room in time to see Bliss and Blessing, who had apparently been lounging on a chintz-covered settee, snap to their feet.
“I believe you’re to have some sort of warrant to enter my home,” Marguerite said in a deliberate, almost regal drawl, regarding the two men as though they were something crawling up her garden wall. “Am I not correct?”
“You are, Your Ladyship.” Blessing spoke first. “But Mr. Sica asked us to wait for him here while he … cleaned himself up.”
“With a view to doing what, exactly?”
“To coming with us to Totnes station to help us with our enquiries.”
“I know what that means.” The dowager countess’s face hardened. “And it’s ridiculous. You can’t possibly believe—”
“Marguerite, it’s all right.” Roberto had slipped quietly into the room, his dark hair damp, wearing fresh khakis, buttoning his cuffs. “I’m going voluntarily. I don’t expect to be very long.”
“Roberto, you have no idea how long you’ll be. You don’t know what these two have planned. You’ll need a solicitor. I have a man in Totnes. I’ll ring him and he’ll join you there.”
“You’re certainly within your rights to do so.” Bliss spoke this time. To Tom’s ears, the suggestion sounded ominous. Evidently it did, too, to Marguerite, for she said, again in her imperious voice:
“I have told you, Inspector, that Roberto has an alibi for Sunday morning. Me.”
Bliss favoured her with a feeble smile before flicking a glance at Tom that struck him—to his dismay and confusion—as conspiratorial. He felt Roberto’s eyes fall upon him.
“Your Ladyship,” Bliss continued, “I can only repeat that Mr. Sica is helping us with our enquiries. There’s nothing more I can tell you, I’m afraid. I’m sure you understand Sergeant Blessing and I—” He nodded to his partner as the three men moved into the vestibule. “—are only doing our job.”
“Marguerite, don’t worry,” Roberto called over his shoulder as she moved to follow, “I’m innocent of this. I’ll be back before long. Stay with the vicar.”
Tom suddenly felt a sting of misgiving as he watched Marguerite lift the curtain of the front window. He could see over her shoulder past the rhododendrons to the unhappy scene of the two detectives and two uniformed officers hovering near Roberto as he bent into a police car.
“Lady Fairhaven,” Tom began. Addressing her as Marguerite seemed suddenly presumptuous. “I may bear some responsibility for this, and I’m very sorry.”
Distracted by the detectives returning to their Astra and the whole convoy moving down the drive, Marguerite took a moment to respond. When she did, turning from the window, her expression suggested neither consternation nor anger. Rather it was worry and distraction that clouded her eyes. “What were you saying?”
“My daughter woke in the night and thought she saw a ghost on the lawn in a flash of lightning. Of course, she didn’t see a ghost. She saw a man. The police may have interpreted it to be Mr. Sica.”
“I see.”
“I’m very sorry,” Tom said again.
“Don’t be. Tom, I haven’t been wholly truthful—to the police. Roberto was with me for some hours Saturday night, Sunday morning, but I know he left me at some time. I’m not sure when. It’s not unusual for him to go to his studio or …”
“I’m so very sorry.”
Marguerite
made a vague dismissive gesture. “I’m not sure it’s what your daughter saw that has excited them—Bliss and Blessing.”
“What would it be?”
“Something more tangible, surely.”
“Yes, most likely.”
“When they were interviewing me here yesterday evening—well, in the kitchen—they took an interest in a certain piece of clothing, and they asked to take it for examination. I couldn’t say no, of course.”
“What was it?”
“A red jacket. A hoodie, as they call them these days.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ ‘Exploring,’ I believe Maximilian said.” Ellen Gaunt seemed to search her mind. She brushed absently at the front of her pristine apron as if flour had fallen on it. “He was wearing his pith helmet. I think he was going to show your daughter the priest’s room, Mr. Christmas.”
“Oh.” Tom hoped the disappointment didn’t sound in his voice. He’d been hoping for such an opportunity himself, but it seemed ill mannered in the circumstances to expect his host to supply a tour, as though he were some day-tripper. Eggescombe’s priest’s room and priest hole weren’t listed in the brochure as being on offer anyway.
“Let’s go up and see if we can find them, if you think your foot can handle it,” Jane suggested. “I think I remember how to access the priest hole. Hector showed me on an earlier visit. We’ll need a torch or two, though.”
“You’ll find extras in that drawer, Your Ladyship.” Mrs. Gaunt gestured to a large cupboard by the kitchen door. Tom noted her darkly shrouded eyes and pallid skin. She looked like a woman who’d slept poorly.
Jane reached in a drawer and handed him a torch. “I think Jamie’s in the estate office. I’ll let him know what we’re doing.” She popped out of the kitchen. Tom could make out the timbre of a male voice down the passage, the rumble and pause of a man on the telephone.
“Another wonderful meal, Mrs. Gaunt,” Tom said, groping for conversation as Ellen stood stiffly in attendance. “The chilled cucumber soup was splendid. You and Mrs. Prowse could have your own cookery program on TV.”
Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery (Father Christmas) Page 24
