A Quiet Life in the Country (The Lady Hardcastle Mysteries Book 1)

by T E Kinsey

  ‘What can he call you?’ asked Lady Hardcastle after Skins had closed the door.

  ‘I’ve not decided yet, my lady.’

  ‘Is it a difficult decision?’

  ‘No, my lady, but one can’t take such things lightly. There’s power in a name.’

  ‘There is, there is,’ she said. ‘Well, Inspector, what do you make of all that?’

  ‘If he’s not spinning us a yarn, it seems Mr Holloway and Mr Richman were up to no good. There seems to have been someone else involved who was...’ he consulted his notes, ‘...“posh but foreign” who might have been Indian and might have been paying them to smuggle something small into the country. Or it could be a load of old nonsense. But there’s some correlation between what he says and what Mrs Sewell said, so I should say it’s worth talking to Mr Richman again as soon as we can; at the very least he might give the lie to Mr Maloney’s tall tales.’

  ‘Would you like me to fetch him, Inspector,’ I said, but before he could answer there was a knock at the door.

  It was Jenkins.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Inspector, but a telegram has arrived for you.’ He presented the telegram on a silver tray.

  ‘Thank you, Jenkins,’ said the inspector.

  ‘May I clear the coffee tray, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the inspector distractedly as he read the telegram. ‘Please do.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Jenkins, and went unobtrusively about his business. ‘Luncheon will be served in half an hour on the terrace, sir, my lady. Shall you be joining us?’

  ‘Would you think me very rude,’ said the inspector, looking up from the telegram, ‘if I asked for a plate of sandwiches in here? I really do have a lot of paperwork to get through. Notes and such like.’

  ‘Of course not, sir, my only intention was to make certain that you felt welcome. I shall have lunch sent here for you presently.’

  ‘Thank you, Jenkins.’

  ‘And you, my lady?’ said Jenkins.

  ‘Actually, Jenkins dear, I have one or two errands to run in the village,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘So if the inspector is busy, I shall be slipping out for a while. I can get out of your way for a while, Inspector.’

  ‘Please don’t leave on my account, my lady,’ he said. ‘But if you need to be elsewhere, please do. Shall we reconvene at three?’

  ‘That will be splendid. So, no, Jenkins. Thank you for the kind offer, but I shall be away for an hour or two myself.’

  ‘Very good, my lady. Perhaps an early tea when you all return to work?’

  ‘You, Jenkins, are the very model of a modern… ummm… something or other,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Whatever would we do without you? That would be splendid. Thank you.’

  Jenkins left, beaming.

  ‘What’s in the telegram, Inspector? Anything juicy?’ she said as Jenkins closed the door.

  ‘Quite possibly, my lady. Quite possibly very juicy indeed.’

  ‘And…? Is that all we get?’

  ‘For now, my lady. I think this afternoon’s interviews should prove very nearly conclusive.

  ‘I say,’ she said. ‘How exciting. But for now, we must away. Servant, neither shilly, nor shally. Let us leave the good officer of the law to his deliberations and hie us to the village.’

  And with that, we were gone.

  We left the house through the front door and set off for a walk into the village in the warm, late summer sunshine. The grounds were clean and tidy, but not luxurious, with the same air of faded opulence that clung to the house itself. The whole place was charming, comfortable and welcoming. I had succumbed to snobbishness when I first encountered the Farley-Strouds and had dismissed them as pretentious lord-of-the-manor types who were clinging to memories of their wealthier past and trying desperately hard to be something they were not. But the more I got to know them, the more I succumbed instead to their geniality and charm. They couldn’t afford to maintain The Grange as once they could, and they should probably have sold up and bought a nice little flat in Bristol or Gloucester. But that would have meant giving up the life they knew and loved, not to mention putting at least a dozen servants out of work, so instead they made do. I decided that I very much liked the competent and capable Lady Farley-Stroud and her charmingly baffled husband. The village was very much enriched by their presence.

  We were walking along the grass beside the long, winding drive, enjoying the late afternoon sunshine and Lady Hardcastle was wondering aloud about some unusual bird she’d just seen, when I saw a strange movement out of the corner of my eye. I touched her elbow to alert her and turned to face whatever was approaching us.

  It was Mr Bikash Verma, running at an impressively athletic pace and obviously trying to catch us up. Lumbering behind him, much more slowly and clearly none too happy about having to move even that quickly, was a gigantic, muscular man in what I took to be Nepalese garb. He looked like he could lift a horse above his head if only he could catch up with one.

  ‘I say!’ shouted Mr Verma. ‘Lady Hardcastle! Please! Wait a moment!’

  She turned to face him and we waited for an awkward few seconds while he closed the distance between us.

  Panting and laughing, he finally caught us up. ‘I say, that was invigorating. Thank you for waiting.’

  Mr Verma, too, was dressed in loose-fitting clothes of an unfamiliar style, but made from a much more luxurious fabric. The man-mountain was still lumbering towards us and was still some way distant but Mr Verma paid him little attention.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Verma,’ said Lady Hardcastle, warmly. ‘How lovely to see you again.’

  ‘You too, my lady,’ he said with a small bow.

  ‘Did you enjoy the party?’ she asked. ‘Did I miss too much fun after I left?’

  ‘It was very enjoyable, thank you. And no, you didn’t miss much unless you would have enjoyed our ill-advised game of croquet by candlelight.’

  ‘Oh, I say,’ she said, delightedly. ‘What larks.’

  ‘There was certainly more larking than playing,’ he said, ruefully.

  ‘Wonderful, wonderful. Well, now then, Mr Verma, what is it that brings you careering across the grass at such a pace? What might I do for you?’

  The muscle man had finally caught up and Mr Verma indicated that we should resume our walk. ‘Clarissa was telling us at the party that you are something of an amateur sleuth,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ she said proudly. ‘With my faithful assistant Armstrong, I have solved many a mystery.’

  ‘Two, my lady,’ I said. ‘You’ve solved two mysteries. And one of those more or less solved itself.’

  ‘Very well,’ she harrumphed. ‘Yes, Mr Verma, I have solved one mystery and my maid here has helped me enormously by being a Dreary Dora and spoiling all my fun.’

  Mr Verma laughed. ‘Well that’s one more than I have managed. I am in a spot of bother.’

  ‘“A spot of bother”? Would you think me awfully rude if I were to ask you how it is that you speak such wonderful English?’

  ‘Not rude at all, my lady. I studied at Cambridge.’

  ‘Really? Goodness me. Which college?’

  ‘King’s.’

  ‘Well I never. I was at Girton.’

  ‘It’s a wonder we never met,’ he said graciously.

  ‘Oh, you charming young man. I fear I was there long before you were born, dear boy. And now you’re the King’s emissary?’

  ‘I am, my lady, and that is why I was especially keen to come to Clarissa’s party and why I most urgently need your help.’

  ‘Gosh,’ she said, rather nonplussed. ‘What on earth can I do that might be of help to the King of Nepal?’

  ‘The tale is a long one,’ he said. ‘But I shall try to keep it brief. If doing so makes anything unclear, please stop me and I shall try to elucidate.’

  Lady Hardcastle nodded and gestured for him to continue.

  ‘My country,’ he began, almost as though reading from a prepare
d script, ‘has a rich and complex religious history. Over the centuries, many gods have been worshipped and many sacred idols have been fashioned. One such idol was presented to the King as a gift on the occasion of his coronation. It was cast in pure gold, decorated with precious jewels of exquisite colour and clarity, but the most magnificent of them all was the emerald which formed its single, all-seeing eye. It was of the deepest green and the size of a hen’s egg, nothing like it had ever been seen in the kingdom before or since.

  ‘The idol was given a special place in a temple to the north of our capital and the people would come from miles around to see it. It was once a sacred object, but it was also a creation of rare beauty, and even though the religion it represented had long-since faded away, it was still revered. At first it was guarded day and night by the Royal Guard, but after a time it became apparent that it was so beloved by the people that no one would dare steal it, and soon the guard was stood down.’

  Mr Verma paused for a moment and Lady Hardcastle seized the opportunity to interrupt.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘It was stolen?’

  ‘It was stolen, my lady,’ said Mr Verma. ‘There was a public outcry and everyone, young and old, rich and poor, joined the hunt for the thief. After a month of searching and more than one unfortunate false accusation, a gang of Indian thieves was apprehended at the border, attempting to smuggle the statue into Bengal. The members of the gang were hanged on the spot and the statue returned to Kathmandu, but during the month it had been missing, there had been some damage. Several of the jewels had been prized loose from the idol, including its magnificent emerald eye. Over the following months, many of the jewels were recovered and the rest replaced with similar stones, but the Eye was never found.

  ‘For nearly ten years, the King’s agents have been searching for the Emerald Eye, but every time they picked up a new trail, fate intervened and once more it slipped from their grasp. Early this year I was appointed the King’s Royal Secretary and as one of my many duties, I inherited the task of finding the Eye. We heard that it had surfaced once more in Calcutta, and then in March we heard a rumour that it was being offered for sale by a sailor in Marseille. From there we managed to follow its trail to Paris, where the story was circulating that it was in the hands of an Indian antiquities dealer who had found a buyer in England and that the Eye would soon be making its way to London.’

  ‘My goodness,’ interrupted Lady Hardcastle. ‘I think I might have heard that part of the story this morning.’

  Mr Verma stopped dead. ‘Really?’ he said, apparently somewhat shocked.

  ‘One of the members of the band told us what we thought was a tall tale about something being smuggled from Paris. We had no idea what it might be.’

  ‘But why on earth would he tell you such a thing out of the blue? Do you know this man?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Verma, I thought you knew. Armstrong and I are helping Inspector Sunderland with the murder investigation.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, warily. ‘And you were questioning this musician?’

  ‘Yes. Mr Maloney, the drummer,’ she said, and then briefly recounted his story of the Parisian bar and the mysterious Indian stranger.

  Mr Verma’s mood shifted subtly but noticeably. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then I fear I might put you in an awkward position. I had hoped to enjoin you in my quest for the Eye, but if you are already involved in the investigation of the murder… You cannot serve two masters.’

  Lady Hardcastle bridled. ‘I serve no master, Mr Verma.’

  ‘An expression, my lady, nothing more. I merely meant that my aim is solely to recover the Eye and return it to my King. I have no interest in any of the incidental crimes that follow the jewel wherever she goes. Whereas you… you wish to find the killer and solve the mystery like someone in a detective story, and for you the Eye is merely a colourful detail. The Eye is recovered… the Eye is not recovered… it would not matter to the solving of the murder. You see? You have made your commitment to the police inspector and I cannot ask you to help me if it might mean betraying his investigation.’

  ‘And might it mean that?’ she said.

  ‘It might, Lady Hardcastle. It might. I shall trouble you no further, but all I ask is that if you come upon any information regarding the whereabouts of the Eye and you can share that information with me without compromising your own investigation, that you do so.’

  And with that, he turned abruptly on his heels and strode back towards the house, the Man Mountain puffing along behind him.

  ‘Well that was abrupt,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘I’m at something of a loss to understand what it was that he wanted from you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, he told a romantic tale of a cursed jewel–’

  ‘“Cursed”, my lady?’

  ‘Sacred, beloved, stolen, cursed… It’s all the same. He told us the tale to appeal to our innate girlish romanticism and to get us snooping round The Grange on his behalf. That’s how I read it.’

  ‘I don’t think I unpacked my girlish romanticism, it might still be in that trunk we put in the attic.’

  ‘I thought it seemed a little heavy. But now that he knows that we’re already involved, perhaps he thinks we might not be so amenable. In fact, we might actually make things more difficult for him.’

  ‘How so?’ I said. ‘You think he had something to do with the robbery in the library?’

  ‘Oh no, I think our Mr Verma is far too shrewd an operator to soil his own hands with something as sordid as rifling through instrument cases, but that body guard of his seems built for dirty work. And one could imagine him sloshing someone round the head and leaving him for dead without a second thought. And I think I know of someone who might have a particular interest in an Indian jewel.’

  ‘Nepalese, my lady.’

  ‘What? Oh yes, Nepalese. Not far from India.’

  ‘Should we go back and tell the inspector?’

  ‘Not straight away, no. He can wait until later. He wasn’t at all keen to share the contents of his telegram, was he. Well, if he can have his little secrets, then so can we. Speaking of which, we need to get to the Post Office. I’ve had a rather splendid idea and I have a telegram of my own to send.’

  With our errands run and a sandwich eaten in the Dog and Duck, we were back in the dining room at The Grange with Inspector Sunderland. To judge from the wreckage of his own lunch on the sliver tray on the table, he’d been very well looked after, and I wondered if we were going to have trouble keeping him awake after such a handsome meal, but he seemed as alert as ever.

  ‘So, ladies, to business,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed distracted before lunch but I’d had some interesting news and I was keen to get one or two things confirmed before we resumed this afternoon. Sir Hector was good enough to let me use his telephone and I’ve had confirmation from Scotland Yard and, through them, from our colleagues in the Sûreté in Paris, that Mr Roland Richman is indeed a known smuggler. He’s been picked up a couple of times at Dover with bottles of cognac in his duffel, but never anything more. The French lads were sure he was responsible for moving some diamonds that had come down from Amsterdam last year but nothing was proven.’

  ‘That does seem to square with what Skins told us,’ I said.

  ‘It does, miss, yes. But there’s more. It seems that acting on information from customs officers in Marseille, the Sûreté has just picked up one Praveer Sengupta, an English-educated Indian gentleman from Bengal. They have strong evidence against him on a number of charges of smuggling antiquities out of the Subcontinent and into Europe.’

  ‘Well, well,’ I said. ‘So he’s “posh but foreign”. This is all very encouraging.’

  ‘Very encouraging indeed, miss.’

  ‘We’ve just heard something even more encouraging, Inspector. Something that fills in yet another of the gaps,’ said Lady Hardcastle.

  ‘I’m all ears, my lady,’ he said.

  She repeated Mr
Verma’s story of the Emerald Eye with surprisingly few of her usual embellishments and when she had finished the inspector let out a low whistle.

  ‘And Verma just ran up to you and blurted this out?’ he said

  ‘He did, Inspector. Which is odd, don’t you think?’

  ‘Most peculiar. Most peculiar indeed. What did he hope to gain? Surely he knew it would implicate him or his servant in the murder.’

  ‘He’s a bright chap,’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t have escaped him. But he was genuinely surprised that we were involved in the investigation and I’m afraid I might have rather played up the “dizzy old biddy” routine at the party so he might not have had too high an opinion of my capacity for deduction.’

  ‘You, my lady?’ he said. ‘A dizzy old biddy?’

  ‘Oh, come now. Lots of bright young things, a few glasses of fizzy wine and some very reasonable cognac…? Everyone loves a bit of flattering attention, Inspector, and I thought I might get more as a disreputable aunt figure than a disapproving civil servant.’

  ‘Civil servant?’

  Lady Hardcastle paused very briefly. ‘Figure of speech, Inspector. Someone boring and official, let’s say. But it seems I played my part well and he thought I might be exactly the sort of dizzy old biddy who would go trotting off round The Grange looking for his missing jewel without a second thought for how it might be linked to other events.’

  The inspector looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps, my lady. Perhaps. And if he’s looking for the jewel, it might mean that neither he nor the… the, er, “Man Mountain” are involved. If one of them had pinched the case, they’d have the jewel.’

  ‘Unless,’ I said, ‘it was still in the trumpet case when they hid it but someone else found it before they could retrieve it.’

  ‘Are you two sure you wouldn’t like a job on the Force?’ said the inspector. ‘I’ve got detectives on my squad that can’t see things like that.’

  ‘You’re a shameless flatterer, Inspector Sunderland, and we see right through you,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But I suppose it’s my fault for revealing my weakness for such blandishments.’