“Escape, please. And I know just how. As for tracking down the bastard, that’s not our job. You and I are just part of the audience on this one. We are not players. Do you find it frustrating?”
“A little,” he admitted.
“Well, I hope you won’t think it beneath your dignity”—here she dusted the crumbs of scones off her fingers and rose from her chair—“but there is a mystery I should like to solve, and we wouldn’t be getting in anybody’s way.”
“Great! Lead me to it,” he said agreeably, getting to his feet. “What’s the mystery?”
“Meg’s plethora of uncles! I know it doesn’t matter, but I hate being confused about anything, and I like family trees. Could we build one, do you think?”
Tom laughed and declared himself game.
“Follow me, then. I’ve got some paper in my room.”
They sat elbow-to-elbow at an antique writing desk no more than eight feet from Kathryn’s bed (I will NOT think about it, Tom thought); she had produced a spiral notebook and opened it to a blank page.
“All right, then, we start with Meg.” She wrote the name at the bottom of the page, roughly centered. Her last name’s Daventry, so we’ll call her parents Mr. & Mrs. Daventry—”
“A brilliant feat of deduction,” Tom murmured.
Kathryn hit him on the arm, told him to shut up, and continued, “Until we learn, if we ever do, their first names. Now, Meg said her mother had two half brothers—” She wrote the fraction “1/2” twice, out to the right of “Mrs. Daventry.” “That means one of her mother’s parents must have married twice.”
“A small point,” Tom said.
“Yes?”
“She said her mother had two half brothers. Then when she counted them all up, she said ‘three whole uncles living.’ ”
“Meaning her mother must be dead.”
“Right.”
Kathryn wrote “deceased” under “Mrs. Daventry,” and asked Tom if they were ready to move up a generation.
“Sure. Meg said Derek was her grandmother’s brother, which is hard to believe, but why would she make it up? And he didn’t contradict her.”
“No, he didn’t. So we add ‘Meg’s Granny’ here,” Kathryn said, suiting the action to the word, “but bear in mind that we don’t know whether Granny is Mr. Daventry’s mom or Mrs. Daventry’s. Do we?”
“Not yet, but I live in hope.”
She hit him again and said, “And finally, Uncle Gregory is—didn’t she say, the brother of her great-grandmother?”
“That’s right.”
“Oh! Something’s coming back to me. An email from Rob. There’s an old woman they call Cruella, and I’m virtually positive she’s Sir Gregory’s sister. And she’s off somewhere wearing a white coat with exceedingly long sleeves.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“I pull it not, I do assure you.” Kathryn added “Cruella” and “Sir Greg” to the chart in appropriate places and, after a brief pause, “Aunt Sophy,” drawing little connecting lines and leaving blanks and question marks here and there.
“It’s this inconvenient business of people having two parents each,” she complained.
“Hang on, I think we can get rid of some of those question marks. Derek’s the heir, right?”
They discussed possibilities and certainties; Tom pointed to various parts of the diagram; Kathryn scribbled through some of the lines and question marks. They were bestowing slightly tentative approval on the result of their labors when a housemaid appeared at the open door.
“Pardon me, Miss Koerney. Mr. Holder.”
“Yes?” Kathryn slewed around in her seat, as did Tom, to look at the maid.
“Mr. Crumper sent me to say that Sir Gregory is keeping to his room, but Mr. Banner and Miss Daventry are going to have supper with him there, and would you”—her glance included them both—“like to have your supper in the Family Dining Room where you had luncheon or would you like to have it in the room where you had tea?”
Tom and Kathryn looked at each other and asked simultaneously, “Tea room?” They both grinned and turned to the maid, saying, “Tea room!” not quite simultaneously.
The maid, less vigorously trained than Crumper, smiled. “Yes, ma’am. Sir.” She started to go but Kathryn called her back.
“I say, are you Mary?”
“Why—yes, I’m Mary.”
“Please come in, Mary. We need some help here.”
Mary proved to be less omniscient than Crumper about the Bebberidge-Thorpes and all their branches, but she was considerably more willing to chat about the current generations, Kathryn decided, than the butler would have been.
When she left, Kathryn took the much-corrected diagram she had started with, produced a fresh sheet of paper, and on it made a fair copy and presented it to Tom for his approval.
They had done fairly well. There were still some blanks, but there was only one error (they discovered the next day that they had put the mysterious Mr. Daventry in the wrong generation).
Tom and Kathryn’s first draft of the Bebberidge-Thorpe family tree looked like this:
Thirty miles away another set of data—known facts and guesses—was under review, but those examining it were considerably less pleased with their results than were Tom and Kathryn with their family tree.
“Stop fidgeting, Griffin. Things are bad enough without your incessant preening.”
Gee Gee Griffin immediately stopped tweaking his cuff links and folded his hands in his lap. “Beg your pardon, sir. But may I just emphasize that—”
“Do me a favor and emphasize later. Let’s just go over it first, shall we?” Chief Inspector Lamp was in a grim mood. The Reading homicides promised to be a nasty headache, their only virtue being that they had temporarily diverted the attention of the tabloid press from the Datchworth case (“Castle Killer Befuddles Fuzz!”). And the Chief Inspector had never greatly cared for Gee Gee Griffin, who, Lamp considered, would make a better cop if he were less fond of himself.
“Point number one, from the original list of eight people in the household who might have had opportunity to murder Rob Hillman, you have managed to eliminate two, the gardener’s assistant who found the body and one of the maids. Leaving us with a mere six, namely the niece, Margaret Daventry: the estate manager, Ralph Carlyle: the butler and his daughter—sounds like a smutty joke, that does—and the other two maids. Of which only the Daventry girl appears to have had anything like a personal relationship with the deceased.”
“Yes, sir. It was Miss Daventry’s idea to get him there in the first place, and she’s obviously the most upset. Fits with love affair gone wrong. But . . .”
“Spit it out, Griffin.”
“Two things. Her friends that we’ve talked to say things like she ‘had a terrible crush on him,’ but they all swear it was one-sided, she got no response out of him. A woman kills her lover, sure, but some guy she just fancies?”
“Sudden rage? Frustration builds up and goes bang? She didn’t have to bludgeon Hillman to death, after all. She didn’t even have to intend to kill him. Just an angry shove, he loses his balance?”
Griffin was shaking his head. “Doesn’t have a reputation for temper. And besides, it doesn’t go with the other thing. Miss Daventry keeps insisting it’s all her fault. She says it to everybody, all the time. She’s said it to me three times. Her fault because Hillman wouldn’t have been there except for her. I mean if she really killed him . . .” Griffin shrugged.
Lamp began to think Griffin might be shrewder than he had heretofore appeared. He nodded. “You’re right, if she did kill him, then running around saying ‘it’s all my fault’ is sheer brilliance, a double bluff and a half. Worthy of a really devious mind. And you don’t think she’s being devious.”
“If she is, she ought to be in Hollywood. Oscars for certain.”
Something about the metaphor aroused Lamp’s suspicions. He inquired casually, “Does D.S. Patel agree with you on
this?”
Sure enough, the faintest pink tinge appeared around the edges of Griffin’s manly ears even as he replied, “Yes, sir.”
Lamp regarded him for a moment. You little, he thought. No wonder Griffin’s insights had seemed unusually subtle. The wretch had stolen them from the Family Liason Officer. Griffin was jealous of her because he was afraid she’d have his job someday. He was right.
On the pearls-before-swine principle, Lamp refrained from sharing these thoughts with his junior officer. Instead he asked, “All right then, Griffin, who’s your money on?”
“Banner.”
“Ah, why?”
“Because he’s frightened. Everybody in the house is jumpy, but you expect that. But Banner is the worst. Scared to death of me. Much too polite. An innocent man in his position would resent the lot of us, he’d be asking us why we hadn’t made an arrest yet, when we were going to clear off and leave them alone. But Derek Banner’s treating us like some old battle-ax of an aunt he’s terrified to offend.”
Lamp knew this excellent piece of psychology must also have originated with Meera Patel, but once again declined to rub Griffin’s nose in it. He merely nodded and commented, “Which is why you have a small army asking everybody within a ten-mile radius of the Castle if they caught sight of Mr. Banner anywhere in the neighborhood on the afternoon in question.”
“Ah, well, two teams, actually.”
“Double it. I like the smell of Banner for this. Driving around the Cotswolds, my arse. By himself, if you please. Why do these idiots take us for idiots?”
There was silence for a moment. Even the heir to a baronetcy on one side and a billion on the other could be hauled down to the station and dragged over the coals if they could catch him in a lie. Whether they could wring a confession out of him was another matter.
“Griffin.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Find me a motive, dammit.”
“Yes, sir, I know, I’m trying. We’re going over the printouts of the disk Reverend Koerney gave us, but it’s—”
“Miss Koerney. Or ‘Miz.’ ‘Reverend’ is like ‘Honorable.’ You refer to your M.P. as ‘the Honorable Fred Squat,’ but you don’t call him ‘Honorable Squat.’ So the disk isn’t helping?”
“I sent a copy of the printouts to Sharkar and Preston with a note to go back to a woman named Chris Foley, one of the dons at Brasenose. Hillman was going on about ‘raven’ hair and green eyes when they first met, but later it seems he cooled off and he and this Miss Foley settled for just being friends. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but sir, nothing sounds like much. Whatever the hell this guy did to get himself murdered . . .” Griffin trailed off and shrugged. But the look on his superior’s face made him rally. “I’ll find it, sir,” he declared firmly, setting his square jaw. “I’ll find it.”
“You do that,” the Chief Inspector replied wearily, with a nod that was a dismissal. He watched Griffin’s well-dressed back walk out of the office. Meera Patel, Lamp reflected, would have said, “ We’ll find it.”
Chapter 14
EARLY JULY 1997
Three Weeks Before Rob Hillman’s Death
The glorious heat wave was continuing. They’d had a bit of rain the previous day, but that morning had dawned only partly cloudy and a spanking breeze had since cleared the sky. The breeze had died down about lunchtime, leaving an afternoon full of butterflies.
They danced among the blossoms in Sir Gregory’s gardens, themselves like flickering airborne flowers. Bees hummed. The Castle, all nine centuries of it, lay in the hot sun like a sleeping cat. Had it been Spain, everyone would have retired for siesta. But the English enjoy such weather far too seldom to sleep through it. The servants had been told to take the afternoon off, and had hauled out their folding lawn chairs and croquet set and were disporting themselves languidly in the large informal garden the Baronet had set aside for their use. The Baronet himself dozed on a chaise longue by his bedroom window.
Meg Daventry had gone riding with friends in the relative cool of the morning, lunched with her uncle, lain for a lazy hour in a secluded side garden clad in a fetching bikini that no one, alas, was around to appreciate, and had begun to wonder how to avoid boredom for the rest of the day before she drove back to Oxford that evening to see the Welsh National Opera.
She decided to go bother her tutor. The man worked altogether too hard, anyway. Wrapped modestly in the beach towel she’d been lying on, she made her way back to her room, showered, changed into plaid Bermudas and a T-shirt in minty pastels, and set out for the muniment room.
The muniment room was part of the rather pretentious embellishments built onto Datchworth by Sir Horace Bebberidge-Thorpe to celebrate the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. Typical of their time, those additions were a mad attempt to resurrect the Middle Ages, Gothic windows and all. Sir Horace had decided that an ancient castle should look like a castle, and had covered up the tasteful Georgian entrance with several tons of Cotswold stone culminating in a round tower and crenellations. Sir Horace’s erection, as Derek and Meg gleefully referred to it, had only two saving graces. Cotswold stone, unlike the gray stuff that renders so many ancient British buildings forbidding, is the color of crystallized honey, a comfort on dull days and a glory in the sun. And in the round tower there was a spiral staircase leading up to a parapet, where one could stroll behind the crenellations and savor a view that stretched for miles. On a clear day one could even see the chimneys of Morgan Mallowan; Meg had joked with Kit about sending smoke signals.
Sir Horace had also decreed that any castle worthy of the name (blithely ignoring that it was he who had resurrected the term “castle” and clapped it on to a building which had gotten along quite happily for several hundred years as Datchworth Hall) must have a muniment room. And so it was that the round stone chamber at the bottom of the tower was fitted out with huge cupboards of ornately carved black wood (more Gothic arches) into which were put all the Datchworth documents, ancient, legal, and miscellaneous, that could be found on the premises. On public days, the Japanese and American tourists were wowed.
This room, for no logical reason, was three feet higher than the space surrounding it, and thus was reached by a short flight of stone steps. Up these tripped Meg Daventry with the nimbleness of youth. The wrought iron doorknob turned with its usual loud clank. Meg burst in on Mr. Hillman and assumed a stern countenance.
“Up! Up, my friend!” she commanded, “and quit your books, or surely you’ll grow double!”
“And something, something, something else, why all this time and trouble?”
He was laughing, and Meg’s heart skipped a beat. There really ought to be a law against assigning tutors this gorgeous to impressionable girls like me, she thought.
Rob admitted she had caught him at a propitious time. “I’ve just found a treasure. Look here.”
Meg went to the table and looked down upon what had clearly been, at one time, the upper left-hand corner of a page, stiff and rippled a bit with age. Almost all of the fragment, which had been painstakingly cut out of its context, was filled with a capital letter, written in gold and trimmed with scarlet, and so ornate that she couldn’t figure out what letter it was meant to be. In the open spaces of the letter was a tiny scene that must have been painted, in parts at least, with brushes containing a single hair.
Rob had his satisfaction in Meg’s audible intake of breath. He handed her a magnifying glass, saying, “It’s the Assumption of the Virgin. Check out the angels holding up the cloud.”
Meg did as she was told, leaning close over the parchment. “My gawd,” she drawled, flaunting her improving Texas accent and her modest knowledge of the medieval, “That is whut ah call an illuminated manuscript.”
“Too right, my dear gel,” Rob replied, in a wickedly accurate imitation of Derek.
“Oh, you are getting really good at that.”
“Yes, we’re becoming bilingual, aren’t we? I could do a backward Henry Higgin
s and take you to Houston and pass you off as a member of the First Baptist Church:
“Super! And if I pull it off I get a custom pair of boots. Look here, you see that sky out there?” Meg pointed toward one of the narrow windows. “I am unfamiliar with customs in Texas, but in England it is considered a sin to stay indoors in such weather.”
“The custom in Texas is to stay as cool as is humanly or mechanically possible in the summer, which means hiding from the sun, not wallowing in it.” But he pushed his chair back from the table. “Deadly or merely venial?” he asked.
“Deadly,” she assured him. “Lemonade on the terrace? There’s shade if you look hard enough.”
“You are a wicked temptress and you will burn in Hell for it. Lead me on.”
Ten minutes later Rob and Meg were sprawled comfortably in garden chairs at the precise place where a small Georgian addition jutted out from the main pile and cast a shadow across one end of the terrace. Meg was seated in the sun, Rob in the shade.
“I’ll say this for you, kid,” Rob observed contentedly. “You steal a mean lemonade.”
“One of my better-honed talents.”
They had crept into the depopulated kitchen and found a large jug of Mrs. Drundle’s lemonade in the old green refrigerator. Meg had rummaged in the cupboards and produced glasses; they had poured and run.
Safely removed from the scene of their crime, they relished their cool drinks and chatted of this and that. Rob had long dispensed with the relative formality he exercised in Oxford when Meg came to him for tutoring, a dispensation that pleased that young lady no end, but there were lines that both of them were careful not to cross.
With her maternal ancestors as splendid examples of how to let your life get screwed up (literally and figuratively) by men, Meg approached the opposite sex with a levelheadedness beyond her years. She found her American tutor amazingly attractive, but he was far from achieving tenure, and she wasn’t sure how the college higher-ups would react if news got round that a tutor was having an affair with a student. Not that she was afraid of getting into trouble herself, not with the Bebberidge-Thorpe name and the Banner money behind her. It was Rob who was vulnerable, and she had no intention of giving the members of the Senior Common Room the slightest reason not to renew his contract.
Thieves Break In Page 12
