At any other time, she would have been impressed by her surroundings. Towering above the surrounding countryside, Sir Horace’s Victorian walkway had been designed to provide a view to take the breath away. Even in the fading light of the English summer evening—it was nearing ten P.M—the grounds of Datchworth and the lands surrounding it would have been a sight to gladden the heart of anyone under any circumstances remotely resembling normal.
At least, Kathryn reflected, she was in no danger of falling off, even though she was running as fast as she could in the narrow space between the guard wall on her left and the steep, almost vertical, roof on her right; the edge of the guard wall came up to her waist. She might sideswipe it, but she wasn’t going to fall off of it. Even as the expected shots rang out behind her, some small portion of her mind was wondering how Clarissa had managed to push Rob over it.
The answer to this question came, sudden and unwelcome. Rounding the corner she had hoped and prayed for, she fell to her knees, her heart in her throat, to avoid going over the edge. The parapet’s wall on the west side of the Castle was only two feet tall. She scrambled to her feet, oblivious to the blood on her legs, and jogged as fast as she dared.
Behind her the shots had stopped. Clarissa had to get around the corner before she could fire again. How many shots had there been? Kathryn cursed herself for not having counted them. She’d been too frightened.
Suddenly she realized that the sloping roof at her right was not very steep, and it was punctuated with large dormer windows. Kathryn skidded to a halt, threw a quick look behind her to make sure Clarissa was not yet in sight, and climbed up onto the roof, blessing the rubber soles of her shoes. She crouched behind one of the dormers and applied herself to the difficult task of breathing quietly. Chanting silently in her mind a prayer to her favorite mystic, Mother Julian, show me your peace, she matched her breathing to the rhythm of the chant. She thought she could hear footsteps.
When Clarissa spoke she was so close, Kathryn’s heart stopped. “Come, Miss Koerney, this is foolish. You can at least attempt to behave with dignity. What would your mother think?”
Some day, if I live so long, Kathryn thought, I’m going to find that hilarious.
There was silence. Clarissa was not moving forward.
Does she know I’m here? Kathryn wondered. Behind this particular dormer, or is she just guessing that I’m behind one of them?
Again Clarissa spoke. “Miss Koerney. You are wasting my time. You cannot possibly—”
She was interrupted, incredibly, by somebody calling her name. “Mrs. Banner!”
Kathryn’s heart stopped again. Kit’s voice. How the hell had he got up here? And did he know Clarissa had a gun? The second question was answered immediately.
“Don’t threaten me with that toy, Mrs. Banner. I’m not that easily frightened.”
Clarissa replied, icicles hanging from every word, “My name is Bebberidge-Thorpe.”
“No it’s not, you silly cow.”
Kathryn was horrified. Didn’t Kit realize she was dangerous?
“Your name is Banner, don’t you remember? You married a nouveau-riche gutless wonder to get out of a house where everybody saw through you, where everybody knew you were nothing but a heartless bitch with a pretty face who would stoop to—”
Kathryn understood what he was doing in the split instant before she heard the first shot. She slid rapidly, noisily, down the roof to the parapet. Clarissa couldn’t hear the noise for the gunfire, and of course she had her back to Kathryn.
Kit was actually crawling toward Clarissa, shouting more abuse at her in a louder voice, as if he assumed the bullets were blanks and he was invulnerable.
Kathryn grabbed Clarissa from behind and immediately fell to the left, onto the sloping roof and away from the perilous drop. Her left arm was around Clarissa’s neck; her right hand was holding Clarissa’s right wrist, trying to point the gun skyward. To her horrified dismay, she found she had understimated Clarissa’s strength. The woman twisted in her grasp and managed to free the hand that held the gun.
Before Clarissa could do anything with it, however, she was yanked off her feet by Kit, who had reached up and caught hold of the sash of her dress. Clarissa fell on top of him. Without a second’s hesitation he grabbed a handful of her hair and slammed her head against the roof tiles. The gun fell from her slack hand and she lay still.
Kathryn pushed herself up off of the sloping roof, leaned over Clarissa, and picked up the gun. She was shaking so hard she couldn’t stand, so she sat down on the narrow floor of the parapet. It felt good to have the two-foot wall at breast level.
She looked at Kit, trying to collect herself enough to speak. He was looking at her, doing the same. She got there first.
“Did you kill her?”
Kit took another breath. “God, I hope not.”
“Are you hit?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good.”
It was all she could think of to say.
They sat without further attempt at conversation, too exhausted even to hold hands, until the police found them.
Chapter 28
Two Days Later
The first thing he was aware of was that his head hurt. God, did it hurt. Other things, less painful, began to introduce themselves to his notice. He was in bed. It wasn’t nighttime, though; warm light penetrated his closed eyelids, coloring them orange. He thought about opening them but he was afraid that it might make his headache worse.
He never had headaches. Where on earth had he gotten this one? Suddenly it came flooding back: Datchworth, Clarissa Banner, Kathryn. Kathryn! He opened his eyes. He appeared to be in a hospital bed, but the room looked too good for a hospital. There was real wallpaper and a decent-looking painting and a huge television on a tall stand that made it easily visible from the bed. Best of all, however, was the armchair, because sitting in it, reading a book and looking entirely healthy, was Kathryn Koerney.
“Kathryn!” he said. Or at least, tried to say. All that came out was a harsh rasp that sounded like an unsuccessful cough.
She looked up in delight, however, as if summoned by the voices of angels. “You’re awake! Oh, thank God! Here,” she said, jumping up and coming to the bed. “What you need is water.” She had picked up a pitcher and was filling a glass. “Your mouth probably feels like Death Valley. Unfortunately they don’t have those cute hospital straws over here that let you drink lying down. . . .”
She had pressed a button at the side of the bed, and with a loud hum it was raising him to a more or less upright position. He tried to speak but it was hopeless; she shushed him and told him to wait until he’d had a drink. He decided this was good advice and followed it. He drank the entire glass of water, although toward the end his hand shook from the effort of holding the glass. She saw it, steadied his hand as he finished the last sip, and then took the glass and put it on the bedside table.
“Better?” she asked.
“Kathryn.” At least this time it sounded more like her name and less like the rattle of a dying man. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. You have nothing to apologize for. It wasn’t your fault. How could you have known the banister would break?”
“ ’S not what I meant,” he whispered. “I mean, I’m sorry I yelled at you, said those awful things.”
“Oh, that! Forget it. We were both stressed-out; the whole house was awash with negative emotions, so it’s no wonder it got to us, too.”
“But still. The things I said . . .”
“The things you said, my friend, were mostly true.”
“No, they weren’t. I was just—”
She laid her forefinger on his lips to hush him. It was the most intimate gesture she had ever made to him; he closed his eyes the better to savor the sensation. He would have given half the planet earth to be able to extend his tongue and lick her finger.
“You were absolutely correct, Tom, I was enjoying hobnobbing
with the wealthy and the titled. And although I honestly don’t fancy a life as lady of the manor, my ego was tickled pink that a marquis, no less, had fallen in love with me.”
Tom swallowed hard. “Was it mutual?”
“It was and is.” She sighed, sat down on the edge of the bed, and gazed out the window. “I just wish he were—oh, an English teacher.”
Misery held Tom’s tongue. He needed desperately to change the subject. “Speaking of English teachers, did you find something in the manuscripts that, ah, explained . . .”
“Yes. Yes, I did. I forgot you’ve slept through all of it. Headlines from here to Timbuktu. ‘Sensational Literary Find Solves Murder.’ ” She explained about the Chaucer fragment, but her tone was so obviously bitter that he was puzzled until she got to the end. “One’s desires,” she concluded, “can render one’s brains useless. Rob should have noticed the parchment was unused on one side. I should have noticed that the wife was supposed to be carrying on while her husband slept, but Chaucer makes clear that the husband himself is a late-night reveler.”
“It’s a fake?”
“The Lord High Muckety-Muck Manuscript Expert at Oxford is flying back from somewhere to look at it, but yes, he’s going to say it’s a fake. A sixteenth-century joke. A novelty.” She spat out the last word as though it were an obscenity, rose abruptly from her chair, crossed to the window, and glared out of it.
“Oh, shit, Kathryn,” Tom said with feeling. Her cousin had died for a joke. He could think of nothing else to say, so after a short silence he repeated it. “Oh, shit.” It sounded appallingly inadequate to the occasion.
After a while, however, she turned and went back to the armchair, saying as she sank into it, “Do you know, I think that is the most intelligent remark anybody has yet made to me on the subject?” Then, before he had time to feel gratified, she added, “Would you like to hear about my adventures with Clarissa?”
Tom recognized the deliberate change of topic; he assured her he wanted to hear every little detail.
“Well, then.” Kathryn settled herself in the chair. “Do you remember that you added a couple of relatives to the family tree, people Crumper had told you about? We didn’t give much thought to them, did we? But one of them was Clarissa’s first victim.”
She told Tom what Derek had finally told the police: that twelve-year-old Richard Bebberidge-Thorpe, Sir Gregory’s older brother, had “fallen” out of his bedroom window into the moat and drowned. That months later, his room had been cleared out and various and sundry of his belongings stored in one of the attics. That decades later, Sir Gregory’s son Gerald had asked if he could have the old set of golf clubs he’d seen in the attic, and his father had said yes. That a friend of Gerald’s had been the first to try the wood, and had asked him rudely, after the manner of schoolboys, what Jerry’d been using the club for, bashing rabbits? Because there was pale brown hair stuck to the wood. That Sir Gregory had taken the club, bought his son a new one, and sent the old one to a laboratory in London to be tested.
“It was human hair,” said Kathryn, “stuck to the wood with human blood. Sir Gregory knew then what had happened, because Clarissa had always simply taken whatever she wanted, and she wanted her brother Richard’s room. Which is understandable, actually, it’s a wonderful architectural eccentricity, huge and perfectly round—”
“Kathryn,” Tom murmured.
“Yes?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Oh, of course you have, what an idiot I am. Where was I? Oh, blood on the golf club. Later, when DNA fingerprinting had been developed, Sir Gregory had the golf club tested again and then he had irrefutable proof. But he kept it to himself. He had not believed his sister then presented a danger to anyone, because by that time she was married to John Banner, a man who could buy her literally anything she wanted. Desperate measures would not be necessary.
“But in 1995 Dotty Mallowan decided to marry Harry Tandulkar, and Clarissa went ’round the twist. She’d always hated the very thought of having Will and Harry as relatives; they claim she refers to them as ‘filthy niggers,’ which seems rather hard to believe in this day and age, but having spoken to her I can believe anything about her as long as it’s unpleasant. At any rate, if Harry married Dotty, as you pointed out yourself, and Kit died without male issue, any son of Harry’s would be the next Marquis. So, Clarissa—my God, Tom, it’s so bizarre. Clarissa actually told Derek he had to kill Harry. So Derek and Sir Gregory decided to lock her up where she couldn’t do any harm. But they couldn’t have her properly medically committed without letting strangers in on the dire family secret, so they put her under house arrest at Datchworth, imprisoned in the room she’d originally killed for, and set as her servant and reluctant jailor Crumper’s father, ‘Old Crumper.’ Crumper tells me you met his father briefly in the mad chase.”
Tom nodded. “Yes. Suddenly there was this old man, and Crump was calling him ‘Dad,’ and it just seemed like part of the craziness, you know? The idea of Crumper having a father, when anybody can plainly see he wasn’t born, he was, I don’t know, ordered out of an old Hollywood film, know what I mean?”
Kathryn chuckled. “I know exactly what you mean. Let me fill you in. The old Hollywood film in question is the Datchworth Castle estate. The Crumper family has worked on it for generations. Our Crumper’s father, Old Crumper, is named Albert. As a child, Bertie Crumper, like all the other Datchworth children, watched the Family from afar, and from afar I imagine that Clarissa Bebberidge-Thorpe, who is still beautiful at seventy-five, must have looked like an angel from heaven. From my short conversation with Old Crumper, I gather that he is blindly devoted to her despite the fact that she is a heartless viper and mad to boot, so I’m guessing that what we’re dealing with is idol worship conceived at a very early age. Crumper, our Crumper, says his dad worked like stink to ‘better’ himself to get off the farm and into ‘house service,’ and maybe he did it to get closer to Clarissa. But I wander far from my tale.”
“Yeah, you never could stay on the subject.”
“You are taking shameless advantage of the fact that I dare not throw anything at you for fear of making your head hurt worse.”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough. Where were we? Ah, yes. Derek and Sir Greg put Clarissa under house arrest in the Round Room with Old Crumper as her butler and jailer. They thought she couldn’t harm anybody there. They underestimated her. As did my cousin Rob, apparently. As indeed did I.”
Kathryn told Tom how Clarissa, serenely claiming the Bebberidge-Thorpe name and title on the basis that she was the next eldest, had explained just as serenely how she had pushed an unwary Rob Hillman over the parapet so that the newly discovered treasure would remain at the Castle rather than go to Brasenose College.
“She thought she could take Datchworth and the Chaucer fragment with it. With Sir Gregory dead”— here Kathryn took a breath—“she was going to disown Derek on the grounds that he was not actually her son but an illegitimate Italian peasant.”
“What?”
“Gets better all the time, doesn’t it? She told me about it but I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. When the police and the guys in the white coats took her away, she was screeching it at the top of her lungs. The story got to Morgan Mallowan by the next morning, of course, and Harry came storming over to demand that Derek take a DNA test and if he couldn’t prove kinship, Harry was going to claim Datchworth for himself. Derek told Harry where to go and to take his DNA tests with him. I found it all very unattractive, so I told Derek to check Sir Gregory’s will to see who inherits if he doesn’t. Lo and behold, Sir Gregory left the entire Datchworth estate, every stone and every penny, to Derek Several-middle-names Banner of such-and-such an address, Oxford, further to be identified as ‘the infant baptized at Saint Something’s parish church, Little Nowhere, Surrey, on such-and-such a date, and subsequently reared as the child of Mr. and Mrs. John Banner of Banner House, Little Nowhere, Surrey.’ T
he word ‘nephew’ does not appear.”
Tom whistled.
“I couldn’t agree more. Anyway, that at least got Harry out of the house. He may get the ‘Sirdom’ but he won’t get the Castle.”
“He can buy himself a dozen castles,” Tom remarked, “with the Banner millions.”
“You know, for somebody who’s been unconscious for two days, you’re picking up the pieces mighty fast.”
Was it his imagination, Tom wondered, or was she sounding more American again? And she was certainly saying nice things to him. Things were looking up.
Then he made a fatal mistake. He asked how she had gotten safely out of Clarissa’s clutches.
She told him.
“And then Inspector Griffin was there, and other cops, and they more or less picked us up and took us downstairs.” She was silent for a while, looking out the window. Then she said quietly, “He just kept coming, walking on his hands, shouting insults at her while she shot at him.”
Tom became aware that his head hurt like a son of a bitch and all he wanted to do was go back to sleep again. And possibly never wake up.
He did fall asleep again, and he did wake up, but not of his own volition. An irritatingly bright voice was calling his name. “Come, Mr. Holder! Wakey-wakey! We know you can do it, your friend told us so.”
It was a nurse. She was taking his pulse and temperature and chattering about how Dr. Somebody would toddle along in a minute to see how he was getting on. Kathryn was no longer in the room. He couldn’t remember her leaving.
He tried to stay awake this time in case she came back, but the painkillers defeated his efforts. Fortunately, they also defeated about half of the pain, so he was a bit more comfortable as he drifted off.
The next time he woke up, the armchair was occupied by Crumper.
“Shouldn’t you be serving tea to somebody?” Tom’s voice was getting stronger, that was one comfort.
Thieves Break In Page 26
