Gunpowder Plot

by Carola Dunn

  “Sir Nigel Wookleigh?” That gentleman’s friendship with the late Lord Dalrymple had been responsible for saving Alec’s bacon. Wookleigh had been remarkably forgiving last year when Alec, dragged in by Daisy, had operated in a flagrantly unofficial manner in his jurisdiction.

  “That’s the chap,” the Super confirmed. “You know him, don’t you? But you’re out of luck—it’s not his county. You’ll be dealing with Herriott, and he can’t give you much help till tomorrow. Some gang blew up a vault in a Customs warehouse at the Gloucester docks under cover of the fireworks and he’s got all available men onto that. Did you know Gloucester is a port?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor did I. The village bobby is on his way to Edge Manor, but knowing village bobbies, you and your chaps can probably get there almost as quickly.”

  “About an hour, sir. I have my car here. We’re on our way.”

  “Good. I needn’t tell you the Assistant Commissioner is breathing fire. How does she do it, Fletcher?”

  “If I knew, sir, I might have some hope of stopping it. I don’t exactly like having my wife mixed up in murder cases.”

  “No.” Crane sounded somewhat mollified. “I don’t suppose you do. Off you go then; Good luck, and my best regards to Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  How did Daisy do it? Alec mused on the perennial problem as he hurried back to the lounge. It wasn’t as if she was the kind of siren who swanned through life leaving flaming passions in her wake. The crimes that beset her way had nothing to do with her, but her personal combination of sympathy and curiosity invariably led her into the heart of the matter. She simply couldn’t help meddling—or “assisting,” as she preferred to call it.

  The truly extraordinary part was the way people rushed to tell her things they would never reveal to the police. Those deceptively guileless blue eyes of hers . . .

  Alec couldn’t wait to see them again.

  8

  Shortly before ten o’clock, Alec and his men arrived at Edge Manor. The door was opened by a uniformed constable. A screen hid the high-ceilinged room beyond.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher,” Alec announced himself.

  The young man came to attention with a smart salute. “Blount, sir. Cor, I’m that glad you’re here, sir,” he added in accents of profound relief.

  “What’s up?”

  Blount lowered his voice. “Well, sir, aside of two dead bodies, we’ve got a Lord Lieutenant and a Chief Constable which can’t agree on nothing, a visiting engineer, and Mrs. Fletcher, sir, which is the only one seems to know what needs to be done.”

  “Good for Mrs. Fletcher!” said Piper, not quite sotto voce, his boundless faith in Daisy once more renewed.

  “Then there’s the Squire’s family, him being of one of deceased, which is gathered upstairs.”

  “They’ll have to wait until I’ve talked to my wife and the CC. This is DS Tring. Take him to the scene and stay to give him a hand photographing and fingerprinting, as he directs.”

  Blount paled and gulped but said manfully, “Yes, sir. This way, Sergeant.” He took the camera, tripod, and magnesium lamp Piper handed him. Tom Tring was carrying the precious Murder Bag he took everywhere. One could never be sure what equipment provincial police forces would be able to provide.

  As they headed for the stairs, Alec moved around the screen, knowing Ernie Piper was at his heels with his notebook and his ever-ready supply of well-sharpened pencils. A group of people, seated in easy chairs by the fireplace on the far side of the large hall, were all gazing his way with varying degrees of anxiety. They rose as he appeared.

  “Alec, at last!” Daisy came to meet him, looking decidedly wan. She held both hands out and he clasped them, wishing etiquette did not proscribe taking her in his arms in front of other people.

  “Come and sit down, love. You look worn to the bone.”

  “You look rather toil-worn yourself, darling. No rest for the wicked! Hullo, Mr. Piper.”

  “Evening, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Sir Nigel, you remember my husband?” Daisy introduced Alec to the other two men, Dryden-Jones and Miller, and how-d’you-do’s were exchanged. They all sat down by the fire, Daisy and Alec together on a sofa, the others in chairs facing them, with Ernie Piper slightly behind the rest. They would speak more freely if not reminded that their words were being recorded.

  “Sir Nigel,” Alec began, “would you mind telling me what’s happened? Assume I know nothing at all, which is pretty much the truth.”

  “Harumph!” Dryden-Jones cleared his throat testily, his reddish mop of hair bristling like an irritated hedgehog. “Not Wookleigh’s county, don’cha know.”

  “By all means go ahead, my dear fellow.” Wookleigh’s tone was cordial, but the gleam in his eye was malicious. “I should think you’d better start with the appearance of the bodies and why it led you to believe a crime had been committed.”

  The Lord Lieutenant’s cheeks puffed and turned purple. “Most improper subject in the presence of a lady!” Tugging on the Albert chain stretched across his round belly, he produced a gold hunter watch from his fob, snapped it open, and checked the time. “Dash it, look at the time. The wife will be wondering where I’ve got to. Besides, the chauffeur came back to wait for me after he took her home, and it doesn’t do to keep servants waiting these days. Don’t need to tell you, Chief Inspector, I’m ready to answer any questions you may want to put to me, but I trust tomorrow will do.”

  “Certainly, sir.” With equal courtesy and curiosity, Alec stood up as Dryden-Jones took his leave, then turned with raised eyebrows to the Chief Constable. “What was that about, sir?”

  If Wookleigh were not such a distinguished gentleman, his expression might have been described as a smirk. “As a matter of fact, Dryden-Jones didn’t actually see anything. To give him his due, he followed my instructions impeccably in ringing up Herriott and insisting that he send for you, Fletcher. He’s right about one thing, though. I shan’t describe the scene in Mrs. Fletcher’s presence.”

  “Nor I,” Miller agreed.

  “No, it can wait,” Alec said, wondering where the devil Miller came in. Had he discovered the bodies? What had Blount meant by “visiting engineer”? Had he come to repair the electric plant? “My sergeant has gone to take a look.”

  “As for the rest, Mrs. Fletcher ran the show and she can best tell you the story—if you’re not too tired, young lady.” Wookleigh’s glance at Daisy was full of concern.

  Ran the show? Alec’s glance at Daisy was full of suspicion. What had she been up to?

  “All I did,” she said defensively, “was try to make sure that nothing was disturbed in the study, that we had all the guests names and addresses before they left, and that Mr. Gooch wouldn’t leave the country before he’d been questioned.”

  “I have his passport.” Sir Nigel, with the air of a conjurer, produced the document from his inside breast pocket and handed it over.

  “Australian! Mr. and Mrs. James William Gooch. Just visiting?”

  “The fellow’s staying at the Three Ravens in the village. I didn’t feel justified in keeping him here in the house where his wife was murdered. Not my county, you know,” he apologized. “At least, Edge Manor isn’t, but Didmarsh-under-Edge is. Come to think of it, the village bobby’s outside his district.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about that, sir, now that we’re here. But all I know is what my superintendent told me, that we’d been asked to investigate a murder-suicide. Someone had better begin at the beginning, if you please.”

  Wookleigh looked to Daisy, but Miller spoke first: “I’ve been thinking about just that, Chief Inspector.” The touch of Midlands accent made Alec wonder all the more what he was doing there. “It seems to me it all began when we met the Gooches at the Ravens. Wouldn’t you agree, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “Ye-es.” Daisy nodded. “Yes, you’re right. There was something rather odd. . . . But for now, we’d
better just stick to telling Alec what happened this evening. Everyone was out on the terrace, darling, watching the fireworks. The moon hadn’t come up yet and it was black as pitch.”

  “Tyndall always has the house lights put out for the show,” Wookleigh put in. “I believe the family all carry electric torches for emergencies.”

  “No one would have noticed Sir Harold and Mrs. Gooch leaving. When the fireworks went off, at least the brightest ones, you could just about see who was standing next to you, but other people were just bluish faces, or greenish, or whatever, depending on the colour of the lights.”

  Wookleigh nodded. “And they were quite noisy. Not like the front line in the middle of a bombardment, of course. All the same, with all the explosions, no one would have noticed a howitzer going off in the house, let alone a couple of pistol shots.”

  “At the end of the show, everyone came in from the terrace,” Daisy continued. “Jack Tyndall—”

  “Jack?”

  “The only son of the house. John, strictly speaking,” she told Piper for the record, then turned back to Alec. “He got into a row with his sister Adelaide and she went flouncing off to find her father to support her, with Jack in hot pursuit. Or vice versa? I’m not sure. We were in the dining room, but most guests had already helped themselves and gone to sit in the drawing room or here in the hall. Jack came back and said they couldn’t find Sir Harold. Someone—Gwen, was it?—suggested that he might be in the billiard room.”

  “It was Gwen.” Following Daisy’s example, Miller turned his head momentarily to address DC Piper. “Miss Gwendolyn Tyndall. She had heard Sir Harold talking to someone earlier about his antique duelling pistols. She thought he might have gone to show them off. Jack went to look for him.”

  “The billiard room is a gun room, too,” Daisy explained. “Sir Harold’s study is above it, with a connecting stair. Up there is where . . .where it happened. Jack came back looking like a ghost and said his father had shot Mrs. Gooch and himself.”

  Daisy was beginning to look somewhat ghostlike herself. Alec took her hand. “You didn’t go to see!”

  “No.” Her other hand went to her abdomen, where his baby was growing, and he suspected that but for her pregnancy she might have gone up to the study. He was profoundly grateful that she hadn’t. “I sent Gwen to find Sir Nigel and a doctor, who were among the guests. She was in a state of shock, but not as bad as Jack. He actually saw . . .” She turned to Miller. “You weren’t there.”

  “I came in just then, but I didn’t know what was going on. I’d helped Lady Tyndall upstairs, remember? Handed her over to her maid. She wasn’t at all well.”

  “That’s right. She’s something of an invalid, darling, and though Gwen did most of the work, entertaining the hordes was too much for her. There must have been fifty or sixty people here, not counting the children.”

  Alec swallowed a groan. Fifty or sixty people to be tracked down and questioned about where they’d been, what they’d done, whom they’d seen and talked to, and when. He’d have to rely on the county forces for most of it. A sudden shocking thought struck him. “Great Scott, not your mother, Daisy?”

  “No, thank heaven! It wasn’t really her sort of party.”

  “Thank heaven!” Sir Nigel echoed. “Lady Dalrymple and murder—it doesn’t bear thinking of!”

  Daisy and Alec exchanged a reminiscent glance. Carrying on a murder investigation with the dowager viscountess in the house was an experience they never wanted to repeat.

  “So Miss Gwendolyn fetched you, sir?” Alec asked Sir Nigel.

  “Yes. She kept her head, said nothing about shooting, just that I was urgently needed. Unfortunately, I was chatting with Dryden-Jones at the time. He stuck to me like a burr and argued with every decision. Never been in the army, you know.”

  Alec wished he had taken the time to change into his Royal Flying Corps tie, which generally went down well with upper-class gentlemen sporting their own regimental or public school colours. Still, Wookleigh knew his credentials, and Miller did not appear to be an upper-class gentleman. Who was the man and what was he doing here?

  “Gwen brought Dr. Prentice, too,” Daisy continued, “the local GP. He rushed off to see if he could do anything for Mrs. Gooch. Mr. Miller showed him the way.”

  “Mrs. Fletcher pointed out that nothing must be moved or touched unnecessarily,” said Sir Nigel. “Dashed clever to remember such a thing at such a time. So I went along as well, as soon as I’d detached Dryden-Jones from my coattails. You’ll want to have a word with Prentice, of course, but Miller and I can tell you what he said and what we saw.”

  Daisy’s hand twitched in Alec’s clasp. “Later,” he said firmly. “Daisy, is there anything else you really need to tell me now, anything Sir Nigel doesn’t know that can’t wait until the morning?”

  She frowned. “No, I suppose not. You’re going to question the family tonight?”

  “Yes, I must talk to them.” He knew she wanted to tell him all about the Tyndalls. Her judgements of people she knew were often useful, if sometimes misleading. She had a way of taking one or more suspects under her wing and failing to notice anything to their detriment. Tomorrow was soon enough to hear her views, though, and the wild theories which would undoubtedly accompany them.

  Presumably she had an opinion about Miller, too. And the Gooches? Their appearance in the drama seemed even more mysterious than Miller’s. He was on the point of asking her, when she succumbed to an enormous yawn.

  “I beg your pardon!” she said, blushing.

  Alec managed to suppress a strong desire to kiss her. He escorted her to the stairs and bade her a fond but discreet good night.

  When he returned to the fireplace, Miller was holding out a packet of cigarettes, Player’s Navy Cut, to Sir Nigel.

  “Thanks, my dear fellow, but I never touch ’em. May I offer you one of these?” He produced and opened a silver cigar case. “Dash it, only one left.”

  “All yours, sir. I prefer my own. Chief Inspector?”

  Alec was already feeling in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. “No, thanks. I’m a pipe man.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Miller offered the packet to Piper, who looked to Alec for permission before taking one. They were a cut above his usual Woodbines.

  The others had all lit up while Alec was still tamping the tobacco in his pipe. In spite of their long day, Ernie was bright-eyed and alert, his pencil hovering at the ready over his notebook. Wookleigh’s soldierly pose had relaxed; he sat, as it were, at ease, not forgetting that he was a Chief Constable, nor that a murder had taken place, but remembering that he was not in his own county.

  More interestingly, Miller had also relaxed. The death of his host did not appear to cause him any distress. An engineer, as firmly middle-class as was Alec himself, he was an anomalous figure in this house where an anomalous event had occurred. To a detective, anomalies are meat and drink.

  However, Alec had no reason to suppose Miller’s visit had anything to do with Sir Harold having shot the Australian woman. Since the murderer was as dead as his victim, his motive was of little interest to anyone except their families. The local police ought to have handled it, and would have, no doubt, but for Daisy’s presence and the rivalry between Wookleigh and Dryden-Jones.

  Still, since Scotland Yard was on the scene, Scotland Yard had better show its paces.

  The pipe caught at last. Alec puffed a couple of times, then said, “Sir Nigel, what do you know of the Gooches?”

  “Absolutely nothing whatsoever, my dear fellow. Never heard of them, never seen them before, never exchanged a word with either of them.”

  “Mr. Miller, you mentioned meeting Mr. and Mrs. Gooch at the Ravens. That’s the pub in the village?”

  “Yes, the Three Ravens. We all went down for a drink—good heavens, it was just last night. It seems like a century ago.”

  “Dash it,” said Wookleigh, “I could do with a whisky, but I suppose in t
he circumstances, helping ourselves would hardly be cricket.”

  “ ‘All’?” Alec queried. “My wife and you, Mr. Miller, I gather, and who else?”

  “Jack, Miss Tyndall, Miss Gwendolyn. Jack drove Mrs. Fletcher. The rest of us walked.”

  “Sir Harold didn’t go with you?”

  “Lord no! We were . . .” He clammed up, then went on, “No. Nor Lady Tyndall, nor Mrs. Yarborough.”

  “Mrs. Yarborough?”

  “The middle sister, Adelaide. She’s a widow and she doesn’t live at Edge Manor, but she spends a lot of time here.”

  “Oh, yes, Daisy mentioned her having a dust-up with her brother which led to the discovery of the bodies.”

  “I simply cannot understand why Sir Harold took Mrs. Gooch up to his study!” Miller exclaimed.

  “Come, come!” said Wookleigh. “No need to beat about the bush now Mrs. Fletcher has gone up. I saw Mrs. Gooch, though I didn’t speak to her—a nice-looking woman, must have been a stunner in her youth, and I understand she came from Evesham originally. I imagine she was Tyndall’s mistress, come back to blackmail him.”

  9

  On her way to her bedroom, Daisy passed the door of Lady Tyndall’s sitting room. Or rather, she nearly passed it, but a moment’s hesitation was her undoing. She paused long enough to hear low voices.

  She hadn’t expressed her condolences properly, she remembered, having been too busy organizing things. It would be bad manners to trot off to bed as if nothing had happened.

  She knocked.

  After a moment’s silence, Babs opened the door, her face impassive. “Oh, it’s you. We were expecting the interrogators. It’s Daisy, Mother.”

  “I just wanted to—”

  “Come in, Daisy.” Lady Tyndall’s voice was less feeble than Daisy had expected. Her eyes were reddened, as if she had wept, but putting her feet up for a while seemed to have restored her somewhat, in spite of the shocking news of her husband’s death. She reclined on a chintz chaise longue, a shawl around her shoulders and another across her legs.