The Enemy in Our Midst: A Lord Charles Stewart Mystery

by Conley, John E.

  “Bingham, why don’t you take a ride back to Balfron and pack some clothes for us,” Charles said. “I’m going to have a stroll and see who I can talk to. Oh, and don’t forget my golf clubs.”

  The weather was breezy and warm as Charles strode down the hill at the back of the manor. He spotted Cooper and Parker standing together in the shade and approached them with an air of sociability, hoping to begin his pursuit of information on the mysterious Margaret with these two.

  “Hullo, Stewart,” Cooper said. “Any news?”

  “Nothing as of yet. The Inspector will be locked up in the library for a while. Perhaps after dinner we’ll know something,” Charles explained. “And the inquest should be tomorrow.”

  “Don’t you find it interesting that a man of his wealth didn’t have a private secretary,” Parker asked. “I never knew the Colonel to be a man of great talents in bookkeeping and such.”

  “I suppose it depends somewhat on what you do with the money you have,” Charles replied. “Does it take a private secretary to keep money in the bank and never touch it except to make withdrawals?”

  “Still, you have the daily operations of the manor and payments to people like Daphne Bishop,” Parker said. “The top of his desk looked rather cluttered to me, personally.”

  Charles grinned at the prospect of George Parker taking such interest in the condition of the top of the Colonel’s desk. Then, he said, “Speaking of Miss Bishop, do either of you know the nature of the relationship between her and Malcolm?”

  Parker and Cooper looked at each other in such a way that made Charles believe he would get an interesting answer, one way or the other.

  Cooper, in his usual straight-forward, no words minced method, said, “Ah, yes. Malcolm and Daphne. From what I’ve heard, he is intent on marrying her, whether she realizes it or not. My guess is she realizes it and is too smart for him. Not to mention the age difference of nearly ten years.”

  “Yes,” Parker added. “He’s in this part of Yorkshire more than is ordinary, I hear, and is never here without seeing Daphne. When I asked Malcolm about it he gave all kinds of excuses about having business here, or genealogy, or he was here to hunt and fish, but never an admission about Daphne.”

  Charles listened while filling his pipe with tobacco and lowering his match to the bowl. With the pipe in full fire, he asked the men, “The Colonel once mentioned a woman to me by the name of Margaret. Do either of you know anything about her?”

  “My goodness, Stewart, I had totally forgotten about that until you just now mentioned her,” Parker said with excitement. “I remember word in the battalion was that the Colonel might have had a wife by that name prior to the war.”

  “Or, a lady friend, at least,” Cooper interjected. “Nobody knew for sure they were married. Do you remember, Parker, that Meath even mentioned that they might have had a child?”

  Parker nodded. “I remember that. I always considered it just talk in the camp but Meath was adamant about it. He may have just been livening things up. I don’t know. We should ask him, Stewart.”

  Charles grinned, the pipe held tight between his teeth. “We will. We definitely will.”

  Inside the manor, Daphne and Malcolm were alone in the pantry, a narrow but long room adjacent to the kitchen. Daphne was stacking supplies with Malcolm sitting on top of a barrel near the door. He stroked his short beard as he watched her.

  “Who do you think would want to kill old man Humphries?” he asked her.

  “Malcolm, don’t talk about him that way,” Daphne scolded him. “He wasn’t as bad a man as you make him sound. And in answer to your question, any of you that served with him had a reason, I suppose. Excuse me for being so blunt with you.”

  “I bet Alistair Cooper couldn’t believe his luck when he got the invitation,” Malcolm said. “He’d probably been plotting for all these years and then the Colonel invites him over for dinner. Cooper probably laughed the whole way here.”

  “Malcolm Leatherby! Stop talking like that. You have no more evidence that’s true than I do.”

  Malcolm smiled. “OK. Then let’s talk about us.”

  Daphne was only slightly happier to switch the topic, and replied, “What about us?”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to find a good man to help you with the business? Ever since your parents died, you’ve been working non-stop. It’s not what a woman your age should be doing.”

  Daphne walked closer to him and looked him directly in the eyes, as she often did with any man who misjudged her, and said, “This is not the nineties, Mr. Leatherby. I am capable of running the market with or without a man, and I alone will make that decision.”

  She continued walking toward the door to the kitchen.

  “Will I be the first to know?” he asked with a grin.

  “The very first.”

  Bingham returned from Balfron Manor soon after dinner and he and Charles met in the sitting room with glasses of brandy within easy reach.

  “You have solved the whole affair in my absence, I assume, my Lord,” Bingham said.

  “Hardly, Bingham. Without an obvious motive, outside of pure hatred, it’s going to take longer than a day. But we do have some interesting angles to study further, I believe.”

  “Good,” said Bingham. “What might those be?”

  “Cooper continues to interest me,” Charles said after taking a drink. “Oh, I know he may have hated the Colonel the most, but there’s more to it than that. Oddly enough, it may hinge around Margaret. I spoke today with Cooper and Parker. I brought up her name and asked them what they remembered.

  “They both mentioned that Meath seemed to have an unusual curiosity about the matter. Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, Bingham, but it seems to me Cooper has an unusual curiosity about Helen Meath. Is it possible Cooper is questioning Helen about what her husband knows about Margaret?”

  Bingham stared out the window in thought and in due course replied, “I suppose that is possible, of course. But it’s not the only option, my Lord.”

  “Pray tell,” Charles said.

  “Is it possible Helen is questioning Cooper about what HE knows about Margaret?”

  While Charles and Bingham talked upstairs, Inspector Silsbury inserted the last of Margaret’s letters to the Colonel into its envelope and added it to the stack, neatly tying the string around them once more. He leaned back in his chair by the fireplace and looked out through the French windows at the rolling countryside. ‘What does it all mean?’ he thought to himself. ‘Who was Margaret? What made Humphries keep those letters for forty years?’

  He stroked his chin and rose from the chair to walk and think. There was absolutely nothing to definitively connect the woman in the letters to the murder. Yet, Silsbury had a feeling, based on his experience alone, that she somehow played a role.

  Silsbury had paced back and forth in front of the fireplace at least twice before he actually stared into it. He took one more step and then froze in place, gazing raptly at the charred remains of a piece of paper mixed in with the ashes, near one of the blackened walls. Bending to look closer, Silsbury thought he saw writing in the middle of the sheet.

  He got on his knees and leaned in, slowly and carefully placing his fingers on the centermost, unburned portion of the paper. He lifted it with care, watching tiny black fragments fall off around the edges. The Inspector then laid the paper on the hearth and leaned even closer to see what he could read.

  Although little of the writing was readable, he was quite certain it was a lined sheet, similar to what could be found in an accounting journal. Except this sheet contained more names and dates than numbers. He walked to the Colonel’s desk and found two sheets of unused paper. Returning to the hearth, he carefully placed the burnt document between the two clean sheets and carried them from the library.

  In the nearby study, Alistair Cooper and Helen Meath were having a private discussion behind closed doors.

  “What do you mean you told
him you were with me?” Cooper exclaimed in a muted but forceful voice.

  Helen shrank from him, fidgeted with the sleeve of her dress and said meekly, “Well, I couldn’t tell him the truth.”

  Cooper rolled his eyes. “If Stuart finds out what you told Silsbury he’ll…he’ll kill me.”

  IX. Lord Stewart Goes to Church

  Following dinner, Charles felt compelled to emulate Bingham’s walk into Danby and set off down the same road with nothing more in mind than to think and take in the scenery. One of the sights a hiker could not possibly miss along the route was St. Andrews church.

  The square-towered stone structure stood with ancient power and grace high above the road about one hundred yards to Charles’ right. Small, rounded windows dotted the sides of the church and large, modernized stained glass windows highlighted the portion facing the road. Three massive clocks in the tower could be seen from every approach to the church except from the open fields behind it, leaving Charles to consider the fact the builders saw no need for the livestock to know what time it was. What the cattle and sheep got instead was a squat bell tower at the opposite end of the church with six large bells in fine working order to call the faithful.

  The church, alone, would have been sufficient to make Charles stop to admire it for a moment. But what he saw next made him forget the architecture.

  Walking briskly on a dirt path parallel to the main road was a man with a short beard and glasses. He approached the church without turning to look in any direction other than straight ahead. When he reached the door, he opened it and entered.

  ‘What brings Malcolm Leatherby to St. Andrews at this hour of the day?’ Lord Charles asked himself before continuing on his way to Danby.

  As Bingham had discovered before him, the village consisted of no more than three dozen stone homes and buildings, one public house, a meeting hall, one small hotel, and Daphne Bishop’s market. It was the latter that Charles was most interested in.

  The heavy, wooden front door groaned as Charles pushed it open. The smell of fruits and vegetables welcomed him and the visitor strode down the first row of nearly empty displays. He inspected some raspberries before replacing the small container and rounded the corner at the end of the aisle.

  “If ye came for fruit, mister, best wait until mornin’.”

  Charles found the source of the high pitched voice at the end of the service counter. An old, white-haired woman stood with one hand on the counter, steadying her tiny, slouched frame.

  “Oh, hullo,” Charles said with a bow. “I’m so sorry to disturb you so late in the day. I’m not here to purchase anything, actually. I was wondering if Miss Bishop was in?”

  “No,” the old lady said with a shake of her head. “She’s off somewhere by now, I’m sure.”

  “Ah, too bad. Let me introduce myself, then. Lord Charles Stewart, ma’am,” he said with a tip of his cap.

  “Evenin’, sir. Ida is mine. Last name’s not important in Danby. Everybody knows everybody.”

  Charles grinned. “I’m sure that’s true, and I bet you’ve lived here your entire life.”

  “I have for a fact,” Ida said with pride. “Seen ‘em come and go for near eighty years.”

  Charles tried to suppress his elation over stumbling upon a possibly valuable source of information. He hardly knew which of several questions he wanted to ask first. He decided to begin with the topic he thought Ida must know the most about.

  “How long have you been working with Miss Bishop?”

  “Ever since Mr. and Mrs. Bishop was killed in that awful fire, God rest their souls. Good people they was, my Lord,” Ida proclaimed.

  “How sad. What happened?” Charles asked.

  “They say a candle might ‘a been knocked over by the cat. Everyone in the house was asleep, you see. Before anyone knew, the house was a’burning like blazes. The Bishops went to get young Daphne. The last thing they did was wake her up and help her out the bedroom window. She was maybe ten at the time, you see. And then the roof caved in, I guess, and the fire got them both. Horrible, it was.”

  Charles shook his head and said, “And you helped raise her since then?”

  “Did what I could, sir,” Ida said. “But they sent her to an orphanage at first and little Daphne cried and screamed when she heard about it, as if she knew. Poor thing.”

  Charles waited and then asked, “Who ran the market in the meantime?”

  “Oh, it nearly didn’t exist, you see. Farmers would come in and use it to sell their vegetables and things, but nobody ran the market. Not until Daphne came back when she was of age. No man could run it any better, either,” Ida grinned.

  Her smile widened as Charles pulled a shilling from his pocket and pressed it into her withered palm.

  “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, ma’am,” he told her. “We’ll meet again.”

  Charles’s mind was already made up to stop at St. Andrews on his way back to Stichen Manor and his conversation with Ida induced him even further. He now had two reasons to make a visit: to see if Malcolm was still there and to ask to see some records.

  Charles climbed the short hill leading up to the door of the church and he entered a shadowy, cool aisle on the north side. The nave led from the base of the square tower to the alter, with an aisle on either side. At the end of the aisle an organ chamber and vestry took up the space beside the alter.

  Just as he reached the crossing in front of the nave and before the alter, a man appeared on the opposite side of the church. Charles assumed correctly that the old man with the white hair was the vicar, who introduced himself as Patrick Donegan.

  They exchanged greetings and Charles’ disclosure that he was staying at the Colonel’s manor led to a prolonged discussion of the man and his demise. By this time, Charles was also coming to the conclusion that Malcolm Leatherby was nowhere to be found.

  “Such evil has rarely, if ever, struck so near Danby,” the vicar told Charles. “And if it doesn’t strike again in my lifetime I will be a happy man.”

  “It’s terrible, without question,” Charles replied. “Justice will be done, here on Earth or later, vicar.”

  He nodded. “That is the truth, my Lord.”

  “Vicar Donegan, I have a particular request today. Am I correct in believing that somewhere in this fine old church might be some parish registers of births, marriages, and deaths?”

  “Of course, Lord Stewart,” the vicar said. “Back to the fifteenth century, although the books prior to 1750 are quite frail. In fact, they are mostly just individual sheets of paper. I am proud of the condition of the current records, however.”

  Charles smiled. “I’m sure they will do perfectly, vicar. I’m interested in a period around 1880. Perhaps ten years on either side of that.”

  The vicar’s expression changed instantly to one of astonishment.

  “My goodness! Now, why the sudden interest in those records, I wonder?” the vicar said more to himself than Charles.

  “Oh? Why do you say that?”

  “Mr. Leatherby has asked for those same registers several times in the past few weeks, Lord Stewart. He was just here again, in fact, within the past hour. I have those registers still on a desk.”

  Charles said, “May I bother you by spending a few minutes taking a look at them?”

  “Of course, of course,” the vicar said, turning towards his office. “This way.”

  As they walked, Charles asked, “Did Mr. Leatherby ever ask you any questions when he was here?”

  “No, sir. Each time he just sat and read the pages very intently. He never asked me for anything,” the vicar said.

  They entered a small room that was taken up almost entirely by the bookcases along the walls and a desk and chair in the center, with the volume the vicar referred to earlier still resting where Malcolm left it.

  The vicar said apologetically, “I don’t normally leave the registers just sitting around, you understand, Lord Stewart. But with Mr. Leatherb
y having just been here….”

  As Charles sat, he said, “It’s quite alright, vicar. I totally understand. There’s no need for you to stay, and if you show me where this register belongs, I’ll gladly replace it for you.”

  “Oh, that is so kind of you, sir. It goes right here,” the vicar said, pointing to a sizeable gap in the bookshelf.

  With that said, Charles was left alone in the room with a thick book delicately labeled, ‘Baptisms – 1880 to 1889.’ He knew from searches in other parishes that starting around 1812, preprinted registers replaced the blank pages that previously contained information on baptisms, marriages, and burials and that separate registers were kept for each event. Therefore, he was prepared for possibly having to make a return trip if the volume he had in his hand didn’t provide him what he wanted.

  In fact, Charles wasn’t completely sure what he was looking for, but if this was the register that interested Malcolm Leatherby, then it also interested him.

  He began to slowly scan the entries on each page, quickly seeing a pattern of the same local family names appearing repeatedly month after month, year after year. Charles’ pace hastened through 1880, into 1881, and a half hour later he found himself in early 1884. He stopped suddenly at a page, flipping back to the previous page, and then once again looking at the next page.

  ‘Where is…,’ he mumbled to himself, staring at the pages over and over. ‘My word. A page is missing.’

  X. Charred Remains

  Inspector Silsbury never had it far from his mind that his primary reason for being sent to Stichen Manor was to dig into George Parker’s relationship to the Colonel and the nature of their business dealings together. The visitors who were present at the time of Humphries’ murder were interviewed and would be free to leave the following day, after the inquest at noon. Silsbury had only the remainder of the evening and the following morning to question Parker, and the others if necessary, to fill in the blanks.

  Silsbury found Parker alone in his room and they agreed to meet in the study. The Inspector was seldom intimidated by the individuals he came across in his profession, but something about Parker had unsettled him from the first day. Perhaps it was his height or his ever-present expression of confidence. Now, as Parker stood by the window with a drink in his hand and a cigar in his mouth, Silsbury again felt apprehensive.