‘Would you?’ Andrew looked half-pleased, half-fearful. Then a note of warning crept in. ‘But you wouldn’t ask her too nicely now, would you? As a friend?’
Murray laughed.
‘I don’t think I’d have much hope with Grisell. I’ll send her down to you as soon as I can. But make sure you tell her.’
‘Aye.’ Murray locked the cell door, and took a last look in at Andrew, sitting on the wine rack. He tossed his hair back. ‘At least it’ll be a quick death.’
He did not know if he was wise or not, but he did not tell Grisell the identity of the prisoner in the third cell, merely that he needed feeding and was unlikely to be violent. Mrs. Costane was a little agitated as to the whereabouts of Mr. Naismyth and Andrew, but she and Hannah had already heard about Tibo’s death: the gardeners who had been summoned to help Lady Scoggie escort the corpse home were already back, and spreading the news around the house.
‘There’s always a third,’ said Mrs. Costane, and Hannah nodded grim agreement. ‘What did he think he was doing, wandering round in the dark walking into trees? Foolish man, for a lawyer,’ she muttered, but there were tears in her eyes. She had always had a soft spot for Mr. Tibo.
Up in the Great Hall, Major Keyes was already sitting over a plate of ham and boiled onions.
‘Any sign of the boys yet?’ Murray asked, helping himself to ham from the sideboard.
‘No, nothing. And before you ask,’ he added, huffily, ‘I haven’t told Lord Scoggie about the letters yet. I brought the last one downstairs, but I couldn’t find him.’
He was very touchy about these letters, Murray thought.
‘He wasn’t in the library?’
‘No.’
Murray started on his ham without saying anything further. After a moment, the door opened, and Robert, looking washed out, came in, followed by Henry, who looked even worse. They said good morning with worrying courtesy, and helped themselves to breakfast, sitting quietly at the table and eating with thoughtless care. It was only when Robert had cleared his plate that he said,
‘Where is Mr. Tibo?’
‘He’s been taken home. Lady Scoggie has gone to watch him until his brother arrives to arrange things.’
Henry and Robert exchanged furtive glances. Henry muttered something, and Robert dropped his knife noisily on to his plate.
‘What was that?’ Murray demanded.
‘Nothing,’ said Robert quickly.
‘Try again.’
Henry swallowed loudly. His eyes were red.
‘If the headless horseman comes back and his victim isn’t here, he’ll take another one, won’t he, Mr. Murray?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I told you it wasn’t the headless horseman, anyway. You saw for yourself that Mr. Tibo was not beheaded.’ He did not meet Major Keyes’ eye: he did not think he was dealing with this very well.
‘How do you know? You said yourself he could have missed. He could have seen Mr. Tibo’s hat roll off and thought he had got him.’ Robert was breathless, half-angry, insisting that the grown-ups should admit what he was sure was the truth.
‘He’s right,’ said Henry. ‘That’s what you said. And we saw dead-candles before he died. That’s a sign of a bad death. The headless horseman got him.’
‘The headless horseman,’ said Murray, ‘did not get him, for the very good reason that the headless horseman does not exist. I made it up.’
‘You made it up?’ The boys were horrified.
‘You wanted a ghost story. I made one up.’
‘So you made him come. It’s all your fault!’ cried Henry.
‘Right, I think we’ve had enough, Henry. The pair of you go upstairs and copy out the hundred and nineteenth Psalm in your best handwriting. I’ll be up after breakfast. And no more talk of headless horsemen.’
‘You think the Bible will protect us, that’s what it is,’ muttered Henry.
‘Of course it would, if there was anything to protect you from.’
‘You’re lying!’ cried Henry, and pushed his chair back hard. He and Robert ran to the door, flinging down their napkins, and blustered through, running hard into Deborah in the doorway.
‘Good heavens, Mr. Murray, couldn’t you find some kind of harness for those two?’ she asked, smiling.
‘I do apologise, Miss Deborah. They’re rather upset, and neither of them slept well last night.’
‘Nor did you, by the look of it. Dancing long into the night, I suppose?’
Murray and Major Keyes exchanged glances. Major Keyes shrugged fractionally.
‘You haven’t heard the news?’ Murray asked, trying to warn her with his tone.
‘What news?’ She could not have heard.
‘It’s Mr. Tibo. He has – met with an accident.’
‘An accident?’ She had heard the warning at last, and took hold of the back of the nearest chair, staring at him. ‘A ... bad one?’
‘A very bad one, I’m afraid. He is dead.’
‘Oh, no! You’re sure?’
‘Positive. The boys found him late last night. We brought him back to the house, and this morning Lady Scoggie escorted him home.’
‘Oh, no ...’ She braced herself with both hands on the chair now, her head lowered. Murray had the odd impression that she was as much annoyed as shocked. A poor failing in a family retainer, to find himself dead.
‘Please, sit down, Miss Deborah. Let me pour you some coffee.’
She did as she was bid.
‘What kind of accident?’ she asked, after the first sip of coffee.
Murray looked at Major Keyes. He was supposed to be her betrothed, after all: surely this kind of thing was his responsibility. Major Keyes did not return his look: he had his eyes firmly on Deborah’s face.
‘He was struck down by – an assailant. We don’t know who, yet.’
Deborah stared at him.
‘He was murdered? Where? You said the boys found him – was he inside the castle?’
He wanted to put a reassuring hand on her arm, but knew he could not.
‘No, he was down by the lake. Just beside the trees.’
‘By the lake ... but ... that is still near the castle.’
‘Yes. The reason I told you is that you must take care, and not go out alone in the dark, and try to keep near other people at all times.’
‘Oh ... I’m sure no one else will be assaulted.’ She drained her coffee and he poured more. ‘I must hurry: Mama will need help, and there is a great deal to do here after last night.’
He thought afterwards that it was an odd thing to have said, that no one else would be assaulted. Beatrix had already heard the news from the servants, and when she appeared in the Great Hall, Murray excused himself and left the girls to comfort each other. Crossing the hall to the library, he wondered if she had known what she was saying, or whether it was just the shock. He must speak to her soon, but on her own, not with Major Keyes there. Perhaps he would be able to catch her after dinner.
In the empty library, he went to the shelf where he knew he had seen a copy of Buchanan’s Latin psalms, but it was not there. He knew he had not sent it to the binder’s, nor taken it up to the schoolroom. Perhaps Lord Scoggie had been reading it. He walked round the high table to the fireplace where the two library chairs sat opposite each other. There was the book, on the table with the brandy glasses. He bent to pick it up, and noticed that scraps of paper from Lord Scoggie’s earlier fire had drifted on to the hearth. Crouching to pick them up, he could not help noticing that the papers had writing on them, in Nathaniel Tibo’s unmistakable clerkly hand. He turned the paper round. There was one word remaining on the half-burned scrap, and even it was a little damaged. Still, it was easy to read. ‘Kinkell’, it said.
It must have been something to do with the dispute between the fishermen and the up-town men. Tibo would not have concerned himself with the hiring of servants, so it could not involve Andrew. But why would Lord Scoggie have been burning it, just after Tib
o’s death? Particularly when he so rarely lit a fire anyway.
Buchanan’s psalms did not go down well with the boys. They sulked all morning until dinner time. Murray was angry with them. They were foolish, and lazy, and they had shown him up in front of Major Keyes. He was angry with Major Keyes, too, who had so signally failed to back him up with the boys. When he thought about it, he was angry with Naismyth for accusing Andrew so unexpectedly, and with Andrew for so obviously hiding something, and with Lord Scoggie for behaving out of character, burning bits of paper and then vanishing. He left the boys working their way through Buchanan’s short Psalm 150, and made himself close the schoolroom door softly before he stamped off into his own bedchamber. He strode over to the window, glaring out at the back of the Great Hall, and kicked the window seat not quite as hard as he would have liked. He was angry with himself. He should not have lost his temper with the boys – he should not have told them the ghost story in the first place. He should be better able by now, at his age, with his experience, to deal with this odd position he held between family and servants’ hall. He kicked the window seat harder, and punched the windowsill, feeling the echo of the blow singing up his arm. What a miserable few weeks it had been. Poor Cocky, broken and dead. He could still feel the pain in his own back from the glass fragments, and sometimes his head ached where the mirror had hit him. The quarrels between the fishermen and the uptown men, and now between Andrew and Grissell, and then the death of young Hugh Farquhar, who had looked so hungrily at the library bookshelves, a look Murray had felt on his own face. And now, Nathaniel Tibo, and all the nasty, insidious ways that things would happen now that a man had been murdered. He had seen it before. Murder made the whole place twist and contort, small things swell and grow like cancers, people seem sharp and dark, devious beyond their means, until even the natural seemed wrong and sick.
He needed to get out.
Chapter Sixteen
He managed it, but only, he thought, because Deborah was still not thinking quite straight. His excuse was taking a basket of provisions to Lady Scoggie in her vigil over Mr. Tibo, and paying his respects to Tibo at the same time, a task that could have been done as easily by almost anyone else. There was, he admitted to himself, a slight edge of panic to the speed with which he managed to arrange the basket with Mrs. Costane, and to the way he found himself running up the servants’ passage to the front hall, seizing his coat and hat, and hurrying outside on to the drive. Once in the fresh air, he felt his heartbeat calming, but he walked briskly down the drive, and did not look back once at the castle.
Of course it was only to be for an hour or so, but it was better than nothing. He drew a deep breath, and relaxed enough to look around him. It was frosty still, the sunshine hardly making an impression on the hard ground. He breathed out, feeling the fog of his breath on his face as he walked, seeing out of the corner of his eye sparkling droplets forming on his scarf and hat brim. He increased his stride, stretching his long legs, feeling the tension leave him.
Tibo had lived in the upper end of the village, not because of any strong feelings about pigs, but more because it allowed him to be close to his most valued clients, the Scoggies and one or two prosperous farmers, and usually whatever tenant took Aberardour Lodge. The house was new, built by his late father to look almost like a town house, with the usual dining room and one bedroom on the ground floor and the drawing room upstairs. Murray had not been there often, and today he was shown by a maid straight into the ground floor bedchamber, where Tibo’s body was laid out on the bed.
Technically speaking, he had not in fact been laid out. Blood still coated his face, and the clothes he wore were the ones in which he had lain on the frosty grass last night. A sheet had been pulled over him, but just as Murray arrived, a woman from the village and her daughter had drawn it back, preparing to wash and tidy the corpse. Lady Scoggie, who had her sleeves pushed up to help, set down her cloth and bowl of water and led Murray back into the dining room, leaving the village women to carry on without her.
‘I brought some provisions from Mrs. Costane,’ Murray explained, holding out the basket.
‘Very kind of you, Mr. Murray.’
He half-expected some remark about food delivery being more the provision of footmen than tutors, but it did not happen. Lady Scoggie was biting her lip, the basket half-forgotten in her hands. He looked around, pulled out a chair for her from the table, and took the basket back.
‘Please allow me to pour you a glass of wine, my lady. You seem tired.’ The keen points of cheekbone and chin were still there, the determined lips and brows, but it was as if a veil of fatigue had been thrown over her face. He wondered again if she was ill, as Major Keyes had suggested. She seemed worse every day.
She said nothing in response, so he drew out the bottle of wine from the basket and found the means to open it, as well as a glass, on the sideboard. It was red, and for a second or two he warmed it between his hands before setting it down in front of her. Rummaging through the basket, he found bread and cheese, and unwrapped them on to a napkin. Then he drew back, allowing her some space. She took the glass between her own hands, and sipped as much as a bird would.
Perhaps she had not slept well, he thought: perhaps that was all. He tried not to look as if he was watching her, and went to stand by the window, hands screwed up behind his back, suppressing a yawn himself. None of them had slept well last night, he was sure of that. But what had they all been doing earlier in the evening? Could anyone from the family, or from the household, have seen anything remotely useful, down by the lake? At least he could find out who had been the last to see Tibo alive, and how he had seemed.
He wondered how useful that would be if he was right and Keyes had been the intended victim. Had he told Lord Scoggie about the letters yet? Had he told Lady Scoggie? Was that why she was upset? Would he have confided in his cousin rather than his cousin’s husband? But when he thought about it, Keyes was the kind of man much more likely to rely on another man to keep his confidences, not a woman, however related.
Lady Scoggie was not touching the food, but the wine glass was nearly empty. He stepped over and refilled it, cautiously, expecting any second to be waved away with her old briskness, but she accepted it silently. Indeed, the silence was becoming very weighty, settling over the room like a shroud. If one of them did not speak soon, he had the strange impression that neither of them would again, condemned to soundless eternity in this fashionable but blank dining room.
‘I shall only remain until Mr. Tibo’s brother arrives from Kirkcaldy,’ she said, so suddenly he felt his heart jump. ‘He should not be long.’
‘Is there any way in which I can be of service, my lady?’
She looked up at him at last.
‘Should you not be with the boys?’
‘They had an unsettled night, my lady. I was disinclined to push them too hard this morning, but I have given them some reading to do. With Naismyth indisposed and Andrew in a cell, there was no one else to bring the basket over conveniently, and Mrs. Costane was anxious that you should not be hungry.’
Lady Scoggie’s gaze had wandered a little again.
‘She was very thoughtful.’ She poked around in the basket. ‘I see she has sent bannocks as well as cheese. I wonder does she mean them to be kept for the funeral?’ She let the cloth fall back over the bannocks, and took up her wine glass again.
‘Have you seen Deborah this morning, Mr. Murray?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘Does she know – about Mr. Tibo?’
‘Yes, my lady. She heard the news at breakfast.’
‘From whom?’
‘From me, my lady.’
‘Was Major Keyes present?’
‘Yes, my lady.’ This was like one of her old interrogations. Oddly, it put Murray more at ease.
‘Then why did he not tell her?’
‘He did not seem inclined to, my lady.’ He tried to make it sound as uncritical as possible, th
ough he was still quite cross with Keyes. ‘He has still to find –‘
‘What?’
Murray squirmed inwardly. He had started to think out loud.
‘He has still, I believe, my lady, to find himself entirely at ease with Miss Deborah and other young ladies.’ He braced himself, ready for the reprimand he deserved for his intrusion. But Lady Scoggie looked thoughtful.
‘I am anxious about Deborah, I confess,’ she said, setting down her glass, looking at the floor. ‘My cousin is – I know Lord Scoggie spoke to you of this. He trusts you, I believe, to be discreet. My cousin had a reputation for a very hot temper when he was young, and we would not have encouraged his suit if we had seen any evidence of it still. But all the same, although he has been given permission to woo her, Deborah has not yet given her consent.’
Murray was surprised. Deborah had seemed resigned to her fate, and he would not have seen her as someone who would postpone the inevitable. He managed not to say anything this time, and after a moment Lady Scoggie continued.
‘I believe, you know, that she preferred Mr. Tibo to Major Keyes, which makes me anxious that she will be more upset by Mr. Tibo’s death than we expect. I must see to it that she is all right. But in the end it will make things less complicated if poor Mr. Tibo is not around ... poor Mr. Tibo.’
‘Do you have any idea, my lady, who would have wanted to kill him?’ Murray asked, taking advantage of her open mood. She frowned.
‘That I do not know,’ she said at last. ‘I suppose the inclination is to hope that it is some vagabond or chance criminal who assaulted him for his purse, but I should rather that it was someone local and obvious who is caught quickly and cleanly. Then the problem is at an end.’
‘And would you be surprised, my lady, to find that he had been killed in mistake for, say, Major Keyes?’
She looked sharply at him for the first time.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘They were both tall, and inclined to wear cloaks rather than coats in this weather, and last night Mr. Tibo was still limping badly from his injury at the boxing lesson. I wondered if there was any chance that, in the dark, perhaps someone had made a mistake.’
Knowledge of Sins Past (Murray of Letho Book 2) Page 24
