Dressed for Death

by Julianna Deering

  “No, nothing like that. She came in after Beryl. After Beryl saw the body and screamed.”

  “I see.” The chief inspector jotted down a few notes. “I understand the house party broke up fairly quickly after the incident with the Henley girl. Besides your group, anyone else stay over?”

  “Laurent, of course.”

  “Yes. Besides him, I mean.”

  “Everyone else went home. Oh, Laurent’s man, Adkins, is still here, needless to say. I still don’t think he’s quite the article. Looks more like a street tough than a valet, if you ask me.”

  “Anyone been by to visit?” Birdsong asked.

  Drew considered for a moment. “No one of note. Some ladies from the church came to console Mrs. Cummins and Tal. The vicar has been by a few times. I can’t think of anyone else, but you might ask Beddows. I don’t doubt he sees everyone who comes and goes. And anyone he doesn’t see, I’m sure the cook does.”

  “The cook was here, was she?”

  “Yes. We were just having lunch.”

  “I will be speaking to them both.”

  “Pardon me, Chief Inspector,” Dr. Fletcher said, coming over to them. “Your men say they’re nearly done. May I take the body now?”

  “All right.” Birdsong went over to the constable kneeling beside the body. “Griffiths, I want you and Parkins to help the doctor with the deceased.”

  P.C. Griffiths nodded. “Right away, sir.”

  Birdsong turned to the doctor. “You might want to bring your car round to the back. And you, Mr. Farthering, could be a great help in seeing the ladies are in another part of the house when the boy’s brought up.”

  “Certainly. I expect you’ll want to talk to his sister.”

  “If she feels up to it,” said the chief inspector. “If you think she does, why don’t you get her and your wife settled somewhere. I’ll go talk to the maid. Beryl, is it? Then I’ll talk to Miss Holland.”

  “We’ll be in the library.”

  “I’ll drive my car round and bring in the stretcher,” Dr. Fletcher said. “Then I’d best go up and see to Mrs. Cummins, poor woman.”

  “Perhaps I’d better lead off, Doctor,” Drew suggested. “If you go back into the kitchen, I’m sure there will be questions. Let me get everyone out of the way before you come out.”

  “Just as you say.”

  Drew studied the scene one last time. The two large wine barrels lay where they had fallen, one squarely on Billy Holland’s head and shoulders, the other tumbled beside it, mostly on end but leaning on the first. Over against the wall was a smaller cask Drew hadn’t noticed before. There was a puddle of wine around it.

  “Must have cracked when it hit the floor,” Birdsong said, coming over to him.

  “Could have.” Drew pointed out a semicircular dent in the wood. “Could have hit one of the other barrels and bounced over here. Funny that the leak would be on the other side, if this is where it hit.”

  “Could have hit there, too.” Birdsong turned to his photographer and the fingerprint man. “You and Parkins see to this, Tompkins, so we can move it.”

  “Right you are, Chief Inspector.”

  P.C. Parkins made quick work of the fingerprinting, and Tompkins finished up with his camera. The blue-white flash was blinding in the dimness of the cellar, and Drew spent a moment or two blinking before he could see again.

  “I’d like to have a look at this leak.” Drew started to turn the barrel over and then stopped himself. “All right if I move this now?”

  Birdsong pursed his lips. “I’ll see to it, if you please.”

  Careful to touch it as little as possible, he rolled the barrel toward the center of the cellar where the light was better. As Drew had suspected, there was a crack between the staves on the side opposite the dent. Birdsong had that side photographed and fingerprinted, and then Drew was allowed to touch it.

  “Strange it would split that way,” Drew said.

  It wasn’t that much of a split, only about two inches long, but it was enough to have let most of the wine drain out. Drew frowned at the puddle toward the back of the cellar where the smaller barrel had landed and glanced over to where Will Holland’s body lay. Drew had seen it when he’d first come down into the cellar, a pool of blood around the mangled head and shoulders, but now he realized it was not just blood.

  “Perhaps this barrel was leaking already.” Drew looked at the barrels still stacked against the side wall and traced two fingers along a wet line down the front of them. “If it broke back there, there’s no reason there should be wine here.”

  “Quite right.” Birdsong stroked his mustache. “I’m wondering if he hadn’t moved that one himself, looking for something, and it was knocked out of his arms when the big ones fell on him. Could have been why the other barrels rolled off.”

  Drew nodded. “Might be, I suppose.”

  Dr. Fletcher cleared his throat. “I’d like to get the body out now, if I might, Chief Inspector.”

  “Yes, of course.” Birdsong gestured toward the stairs. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Farthering.”

  Drew went back into the kitchen where Madeline, Nick, and Carrie were seated at the table. The three of them looked up, a wordless plea for him to tell them something, anything, to make sense of all this.

  He leaned down to kiss Madeline’s hair. “Come on, all of you. We might as well move to somewhere more comfortable.”

  Carrie seized Drew’s sleeve. “What did they say? Please, I have to know something.”

  “Come on.”

  He helped her to her feet, and Nick put his arm around her.

  “Let’s go to the library,” Drew said. “We can talk there.”

  The library at Winteroak was serene and sunny and blessedly quiet. By the time Drew told the others what little he knew, Beddows was announcing Chief Inspector Birdsong.

  “I’m sorry to intrude upon your grief, Miss Holland,” the chief inspector said, and he seemed rather more than just professionally grave. “I will make this as brief as possible. May I sit down?”

  Carrie nodded, watching him.

  Birdsong took a straight-backed chair from near the hearth and set it down in front of the sofa where she sat next to Nick. “The doctor says Mrs. Cummins is too upset to be questioned at the moment. He’s given her something to make her sleep. The maid, Beryl Duncan, corroborated what you told me, Mr. Farthering, and doesn’t recall seeing anyone except the cook in or near the pantry for the past hour. That was when she came to help out in the kitchen. I spoke to the cook, a Mrs.—” he paused and looked at his notes—“Mrs. Ruggles. She remembers the same.”

  “I . . . I wasn’t in there,” Carrie said. “I don’t have any idea who may have seen what.”

  “Yes, miss, but perhaps you can give me an idea why your brother might have been down there. As far as we could see, he hadn’t taken anything down there with him or touched anything in the cellar. There’s no indication that anyone was down there with him before all of you heard the crash. Had he said anything to you about going into the wine cellar?”

  Carrie shook her head and twisted the sodden handkerchief in her hands. “I know he wanted to find out what happened to Alice. After Mr. Cummins was arrested, he was talking to the men from Scotland Yard about the smuggling. He thought . . . he thought it was some kind of game.”

  She broke down again, and Nick gave Drew a brief pleading glance.

  “I don’t think she can tell you anything, Chief Inspector,” Drew said quietly. “Perhaps, if you think it necessary, you could talk to Miss Holland another time.”

  Birdsong put his notebook and stub of a pencil back into his coat pocket. “I’m very sorry for your loss, miss. We will be keeping you informed of any developments in the case, and for the time being there will be a constable stationed outside the house just to see there’s no other trouble.” He nodded at Madeline and Nick. “Mrs. Farthering. Mr. Dennison. A word, if you would, Mr. Farthering.”

  Drew followed the
chief inspector into the corridor and shut the door behind him.

  For a moment Birdsong stood looking across into the dining room and out over the front lawn. “Following your example, eh, Detective Farthering?”

  The blow more than stung. “I did my best to keep him out of it.”

  “I don’t suppose warning you off now will do any more good than it has before.”

  “I promised my friend.”

  Drew didn’t know what else to say. It seemed rather a weak motivation at the moment. At the least, some of that boy’s blood was on his hands. He’d talked up his and Nick’s playing detective, and this was the result. Telling Will to stay out of it had done no more good than had Birdsong’s many warnings to Drew himself. If solving these sorts of crimes was truly his reason for being, it was all a cruel joke. A bit like assigning a dachshund to herd sheep.

  “I saw him,” Drew said. “When I came back from the grocer’s, I saw him going down toward the beach.”

  Birdsong’s heavy eyebrows went up. “Oh, yes? And what did he say?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. Just . . .” Drew swallowed down the strangling tightness in his throat. “Just gave me a grin as though he were off on a lark and hurried on. I don’t know how he got back into the wine cellar.”

  “And when was this?”

  “About a quarter past ten, maybe closer to half past. I wish I’d asked him where he was off to.”

  Before either of them could say more, the bell at the front door rang. Beddows admitted Endicott and Dane of Scotland Yard.

  “We called at your office,” Endicott said, “and they told us you were down here. I see the case has gotten more interesting. Care to fill us in?”

  Birdsong gave him the briefest account of what had happened.

  “Lovely,” Endicott said, his mouth pressed into a grim line. “And your front-runner?”

  “Nobody knows anything at this point,” the chief inspector answered. “As usual. I’d like to know what our Frenchman has been up to this morning.”

  “He’s been on his yacht having his lunch, a rather nice bit of roast mutton and sprouts with a cheeky little Beaujolais to set it off.”

  Again Birdsong’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh, yes?”

  “You’re sure of this?” Drew asked, and he got Endicott’s smug smile in return.

  “We were interviewing him.”

  Birdsong snorted. “Charming.”

  “I wonder why he didn’t come to lunch with everyone else,” Drew said. “Seems rather a bother to have his own made separately.”

  “I think it was the company rather than the food,” Dane put in with a smirk. He consulted his notebook. “A Mrs. Barbara Stott, twenty-eight, from Pennington.”

  Endicott nodded. “She left soon after we arrived. I believe we upset Monsieur Laurent’s plans.”

  “What about his valet?” Drew asked. “Adkins.”

  Endicott shook his head. “No good. He was serving the mutton.”

  “That lets them both out,” Birdsong said.

  “Adkins and I had a chat last night,” said Drew.

  Endicott narrowed his eyes. “What exactly did he say?”

  “He told me to stay out of the investigation and to keep Will out, too. He claimed he didn’t like the idea of Mrs. Farthering being a widow.”

  “He made threats, and you didn’t think that was something you ought to tell us?” Birdsong asked, his face stern.

  Drew shrugged. “He didn’t exactly have the most gracious way of putting it, but I got the impression he was sincere. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “I’ll have a word with Mr. Adkins,” Birdsong said. “You can be sure of that.”

  Endicott shook his head. “No, I don’t want you tampering with him. And he couldn’t have killed the boy and been down at the yacht at the same time.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” Birdsong said, “but clearly he knows something. Or why the warning? I somehow doubt it was out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “That’s exactly what he claimed,” Drew said. “He said that, because I hadn’t made things difficult for him over my wife’s pearls, he wanted to do me a favor in return. Now I wish I had listened to him.”

  “I’m not concerned about those pearls,” Endicott said. “I just want to know how Cummins was getting his cargo up to London on a routine basis. We think Adkins is our best bet for finding that out, but he’s not likely to lead us anywhere if you lot keep hauling him down to the station.”

  “This isn’t about the pearls,” the chief inspector said, and his face was hard. “This is murder. If Adkins—”

  “I don’t care about your murder.” Endicott glared at Birdsong. “Murders happen all the time. Seeing to them is your job. Mine is stopping the importation of illegal substances into my jurisdiction. If nabbing your Hampshire murderer catches me my London smuggler, I’m all for it. Otherwise, you’re on your own.”

  “Decent of you,” Birdsong said coolly. “I don’t suppose your little chat with Laurent brought anything of note to light?”

  “Believe you me, if I had found even a hair out of place, I’d have invited him to London for a little tête-à-tête.” Endicott’s heavy jaw tightened. “But no, he merely smiles and invites us to make ourselves at home on his yacht and look wherever we please.”

  “Did you happen to notice some little marks in the aft deck while you were there?” Drew asked. “Whitish, curved marks.”

  Endicott shook his head. “No. What’s that from?”

  “I don’t know. May be nothing.”

  “Marks or no, if Laurent’s not in this somehow, I’m a Dutchman, I swear.”

  Birdsong looked unimpressed. “You lot have been on this case for months already and haven’t found how they’re getting the drugs into the country, much less up to London.”

  “At least we haven’t had any murders on our watch,” Endicott shot back. “But you lads here in Hampshire obviously have that well in hand.”

  Birdsong glowered at him. “It’s being seen to.”

  “True. True. You’ve said all along your murderer’s Cummins, right? He’s locked up tight. But perhaps you let him go out for a newspaper and a pint of milk an hour or two ago. I mean, so long as he promised to come right back, eh?”

  “Perhaps if you both cooperated rather than squabbling,” Drew said, “we’d be further along than we are.”

  “And perhaps, Mr. Farthering,” Endicott said, “we’d be further along if you and your toffy friends kept out of the way. Just for your own safety.”

  Drew gave him a hard look. “But we’re none of us safe, are we? Not until we find whoever’s done this. If Will was down in the wine cellar, it had to have been because he thought there was something there that would help crack this case.”

  Endicott huffed. “We’ve been down there. The Hampshire lads have been down there. There’s nothing to see. Maybe the boy did go to see what he could find, but there’s just nothing there.”

  “Someone thought it was important enough to kill him over it,” Drew said.

  “You’re wrong there,” Birdsong said. “If it actually was murder—”

  Drew opened his mouth to protest, and the chief inspector held up one finger.

  “If it was murder, that means only that someone wanted him dead. He might have seen something in the cellar, or in the woods, or at the pub for all we know. The wine cellar just might have been the killer’s best opportunity.”

  No one said anything else for a moment, and then Birdsong cleared his throat. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll be getting back to my job.” He gave them a nod and strode back toward the kitchen.

  “We’ll be off, too,” said Endicott, replacing the hat he had removed when he entered the house. “And do leave the police work to the professionals, if you please, sir. We don’t want to have to clear up another corpse by the end of the week.”

  Sergeant Dane chuckled and followed his superior out the front door.

  Drew stood for a whil
e, staring at nothing. These professionals had taken a rather cavalier attitude toward the death of a young boy. Amateur or not, Drew wasn’t about to leave this investigation totally in their hands. Not quite yet. No matter the muddle he’d made of it all so far.

  He found the cook at the sink, scrubbing clean a variety of kitchen implements. She snatched up a handful of cutlery and slammed it down into the water and then started when she realized she was not alone.

  “I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t see you there.” She wiped her hands on her apron and blotted her red face with it. “Is there something you were wanting?”

  “I wanted to ask you about this morning, if I might. I realize it’s a terribly difficult time for everyone.”

  “True enough.” She blotted her face again. “I wish I could be some help to you, sir, as I know that’s what you’ve come for, but I’m afraid I haven’t got much I can tell. Except for going to the butcher’s, I hadn’t left the kitchen all morning. How that boy got in without me seeing, I’ll never understand. I told the police as much.”

  Once again, Drew saw the grin on Will’s face as he bragged about getting into the pantry without being seen. Perhaps the cook hadn’t seen him, but someone else had. Drew should have sent him to Farthering Place, Will and his sister and Madeline, too.

  “Quite,” Drew said, forcing his thoughts back to the task at hand. “Who did you see?”

  She shifted on her feet, and he pulled out a chair for her.

  “Do sit down, Mrs. Ruggles.”

  “If you’re sure you don’t mind, sir.” She sank into the chair with a little sigh of relief. “As I said, I didn’t see anyone. When I came back from the butcher’s, I started making lunch. Mrs. Cummins asked about having Mr. Tal’s cake, and I told her it wouldn’t be any trouble at all. Then Mrs. Farthering came in and got that dratted cat out of my pantry. I didn’t see anyone else until the vicar came in to take away some of the things for his charity.”

  Drew took a seat across the table from her. “So he and Mrs. Cummins went into the pantry.”

  “Madam had already gone to lie down. Mr. Broadhurst didn’t like to trouble her, with everything as has happened, you know, so he came and saw to things himself. Wasn’t there but a few minutes and was gone again.”