01 - Murder at Ashgrove House

by Margaret Addison

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Rose, not totally convinced. She wondered how anyone could ever be alright again when one of their parents had been so brutally murdered. ‘It’s just so awful. How can such a dreadful thing have happened? It’s like some awful nightmare. I keep imagining that I’ll wake up and find that it’s all been a bad dream. But it isn’t, is it?’ She could hear her voice beginning to break. ‘I just want everything to go back to the way it was before this all happened.’

  ‘I know it all seems awful now and that you feel you’ll never be able to get over it, but you will, my dear, I assure you,’ Edith said with surprising conviction. ‘You’re still so very young and you’ve your whole life in front of you. Now, you mustn’t think about it anymore, Rose, do you hear me?’ Edith sat on the bed and took the girl’s hands in her own cool ones. ‘Promise me that you’ll try and blot it out of your mind and forget all about it.’ She lifted a hand to gently remove a strand of hair from Rose’s face and there was such an earnestness and sincerity in her manner and words that Rose was touched and her heart went out to this woman who had herself endured so much heartache and yet was striving to comfort her.

  ‘I’ll try later, I promise, to do exactly what you say, but right now the police want me to try and remember as much as I can about what happened. They’ll want me to try to recall every single detail of what I might have seen or heard because they think it’ll help them to identify who killed Lady Belvedere.’

  ‘But you won’t be able to help them, will you, my dear? You said that you didn’t see anything, nothing at all, that’s right, isn’t it?’ The voice that had been so kind, so soothing a moment before, now contained a sudden note of alarm that had not been there before. Rose opened her eyes wide, but Edith’s face looked as sweet and caring as it had before. Perhaps she had just imagined the change in her tone. It was such a strange day after all, a day when anything might happen.

  ‘Yes, it all happened so quickly and I wasn’t looking the right way. I had my back to the … the person that … I was looking at Lady Belvedere at the time it all happened. She was so very angry with me and I with her, you see, and then suddenly the expression on her face changed and she looked afraid. And before I could …..’ She broke off at the recollection; it was a moment or two before she could continue. ‘She saw him, she saw the person who killed her before he pulled the trigger. And she knew what he was going to do before he did it. The look on her face frightened me so much. It was as if she’d seen a ghost. I went forward to grab her hand to see what was wrong. But I shouldn’t have, should I? I should have turned around to see what she was staring at, who she was staring at, what had made her so afraid.’ Rose began to cry hysterically. ‘I could have saved her, I should have turned around.’

  ‘It’s probably just as well you didn’t, Rose’, said Edith, gently again.

  ‘I know, that’s what the police said. That if I had turned around, I’d probably have been killed too, because I’d have seen him too.’

  ‘But you didn’t see who it was, did you, Rose? You can’t say for sure whether it was a man or woman, can you?’ The urgency in Edith’s voice could not be mistaken now. And then as if to avoid all doubt she bent forward and clasped Rose’s shoulders roughly so that it made the girl wince. ‘You didn’t see who it did it, did you, you didn’t see who killed Lady Belvedere, did you?’ It was more a statement now rather than a question.

  ‘No, no, of course I didn’t.’ Rose pulled herself away from the older woman’s grasp. ‘Don’t you think I’d have told the police if I had? So no, no I … but, oh no, no!’ She leapt from the bed, a sudden look of horror on her face. ‘But, of course, I’ve just realised what that means. But, no, it can’t do, it’s too awful …’

  ‘What is it, what is it?’ Edith was on her feet now too, a look of alarm on her face.

  ‘I must talk to the police again, now, please.’ Rose stumbled towards the bedroom door. Edith barred her way. ‘You’re confused, Rose, you’ve been through an awful ordeal. Come and lie down. The police can wait. They’ll want to see the body first and talk more to Sir William. No need to rush to see them, there’s plenty of time.’

  ‘No, I’ve got to see them now. I must tell them, it’s important.’ Rose lurched towards the door. Edith stood firm. The girl stared the woman in the face and then suddenly, in one fierce movement, pushed her aside. Edith was taken off guard and slipped and fell against the dressing table. Rose did not stop to check that she was alright. Instead she tore open the bedroom door and made a run for it across the landing and down the stairs. Her legs seemed heavy and slow and she was afraid that she would trip and fall or be overtaken. It reminded her of dreams she had had as a child where she was running away from something, but the more she tried to run the more she stood still like a hamster going round and round on a wheel, never reaching its destination.

  She slowed once to look over her shoulder fearfully, afraid that Edith would be just behind, ready to pounce and drag her back in to the bedroom, but there was no-one there. The knowledge spurred her on and she did not stop again until she had reached the library, where she found herself banging on the door with clenched fists for all she was worth, as if she feared that it was locked and would never open. It was opened abruptly by a surprised Sergeant Lane, and before she could stop and think what she was doing or how it must look, she found that in her relief she had flung herself into his bewildered arms.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Right, Lane, let’s get the alibis sorted out,’ said the inspector, looking at the list of guests that Sergeant Lane had jotted down. ‘We’ll have another talk with Miss Simpson later, when she’s got over the initial shock. She may find that she remembers something that may prove useful. I’d like you to go to the servants’ hall and interview the servants. We need to get a feel for the people in this house, who got on with who, who disliked who, that sort of thing. We need to know exactly who we’re dealing with. Pick up any gossip you can, I know you’ve got a certain way with cooks and parlour maids; it must be those youthful good looks of yours. Maids want to flirt with you and the cooks want to mother you. Just don’t take too long about it and try not to eat too many cakes, I don’t want you to be too stuffed with food to run after the murderer in case he tries to make a run for it!’

  Sergeant Lane laughed and grinned mischievously. This was a part of his job he enjoyed, the harmless flirting with the young servant girls, impressing them with highly exaggerated tales of his exploits as a policemen. In his experience, servants tended to know everything that was going on in a house like Ashgrove, all the secrets and idiosyncrasies of their masters and mistresses, and gossip about the guests. And if he was lucky, he’d manage to sweet talk the cook into giving him a cup of tea and a homemade sausage roll just fresh from the oven, he could feel his mouth watering just thinking about it, and then perhaps finished off by a large slice of Victoria sponge, light as anything ...

  ‘Stop daydreaming, Lane, you’re not stuffing your face yet,’ Deacon said. ‘Listen, man, I want to find out who found Miss Simpson in the woods and what she was doing. Was she crouched over the body crying her eyes out or some way away trying to hide the gun? And what sort of state was she in? Did she run back from the woods herself or did someone have to bring her back and, if the latter, who was it and what were they doing there? The more I think about it, the more I realise how little we got out of Sir William or Miss Simpson, the first time we interviewed her, as to what exactly happened ... Good God, man, what’s that noise?’ Deacon broke off abruptly from what he was saying, swinging his head around violently to stare in bewilderment at the library door. There was a banging on it which seemed deafening after the detectives’ quiet deliberations. ‘They’ll have the door off the hinges if they’re not careful, or at the very least put a hole in it if they go on like that much longer.’

  Sergeant Lane leapt across the room and opened the door. Rose collapsed into his arms. After a moment of indecision, Deacon took the
girl from him and led her into the library where he seated her gently on the settee. He strode to the door and whispered urgently to the sergeant. ‘You go on, Lane, see what you can get from the servants.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘The girl still seems distraught and I don’t want to lose any more time. We must crack on and interview Lady Withers and the house guests.’

  Lane nodded and departed, although he was very tempted to stay and hear what Miss Simpson had to say. Deacon had just closed the door behind him and was making his way back into the room when the door swung open and a very excited young constable stood in the doorway, hardly able to contain himself.

  ‘Good God, man,’ said Deacon, annoyed at yet another disruption, ‘haven’t you heard of knocking.’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ replied the constable looking slightly abashed at the ticking off. ‘It’s just that we thought you’d want to know straight away …’

  Deacon held up his hand to silence him and walked over to the constable so that he could tell his news out of ear shot of Rose.

  ‘What is it, man, for God’s sake tell me quietly, there’s no need to broadcast it to the whole house.’

  ‘It’s the gun, sir,’ said the constable in an excited whisper. ‘As you instructed, we were making a search of the woods for the murder weapon and we’ve found it, sir. We found it in some undergrowth not far from the scene of the shooting.’

  Sergeant Lane found himself seated comfortably in a chair in the servants’ hall. Initially his arrival had caused a flurry of excitement with maids of all description – house, kitchen and scullery – staring at him in awe of a real life Scotland Yard detective being in their kitchen, marvelling at his good looks, giggling and nudging each other, trying to catch his eye and being rewarded with a wink or a grin when they did. Albert, the footman, who was used to having the girls’ undivided attention, and Mrs Palmer, had been less delighted to see him, although the latter was being grudgingly won over by his charm and his saying how his mother had once been a house maid herself in a large house like this and he knew the amount of hard work that went into making sure that the household ran like clockwork and if only the master and mistress of the house knew the full worth of their servants they’d double their wages in a trice. Soon she was beckoning him be seated at the vast well-scrubbed wooden table and, wiping her hands on her apron, was pointing at the kitchen maid and scullery maid for one to quickly pour the gentleman a nice strong cup of tea and the other to cut him a generous slice of Victoria sponge, fresh baked that morning before all the kerfuffle, as she called it. And as light as a feather, the detective had assured her, quite melted on the tongue it did and, though he would never admit it to her face, it tasted even better than the cakes his mother made, if such a thing was possible.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying it,’ Mrs Palmer had said, rolling up her sleeves in preparation for starting her next cooking task, revealing to Lane two mighty forearms in the process, muscular from years of beating and whisking, ‘what with all that’s happened, I’ll doubt them upstairs will be wanting their afternoon tea and I do so hate to see things go to waste, don’t you, not though that it will with all these greedy young mouths,’ she said indicating the maids and footman. ‘Mr Stafford and Miss Crimms have got something of a sweet tooth themselves so I dare say there’ll be nothing but a few crumbs left before the day’s out.’

  It had seemed to Lane an awful lot of servants for a household of just two to have, especially as the general view was that since the war it was hard to get good domestic staff. It appeared that, as a result of fair wages and good working conditions, and because generations of the same families had been employed there, Ashgrove enjoyed an almost unnatural sense of loyalty amongst its staff, so that although all the able men had joined up as soon as war had been declared, and some of the women staff had become ambulance drivers, nurses and the such, as soon as the war was over those who were able to had returned and had been received back to jobs kept open for them. The sergeant looked at Mrs Palmer, called such because of her status as cook-housekeeper, not because she had ever been married. He wondered idly whether she had chosen to be a spinster, to devote her life to the service of her employers, or whether she had lost a sweetheart in the Great War as so many women had done. Instead of fretting over a soufflé for Sir William and Lady Withers, was she wishing instead that she was fussing over a husband, to say nothing of the offspring they might have produced. Instead she immersed herself in her cooking and running a large house, a poor substitute for loved ones, he thought.

  Lane, noting her harsh words to them, wondered whether Mrs Palmer resented the kitchen maid and the little scullery maid for the love and happiness that might await them but had eluded her. If she had been affected by the war, she had not been the only one. Lane himself had lost a cousin and an uncle, and Deacon, he knew from police station gossip, had lost his only brother. He knew also that it was only because of the dearth left by a generation of men lost in the Great War, rather than by personal merit that both he and Deacon had been promoted so quickly and at such a young age to fill dead men’s shoes. He felt always a sense of guilt that he had benefited in this way from the death of others, that his career had been propelled forward while those of others had sunk in the blood and mud in France. Instinctively, he knew that Deacon felt the same although they had never spoken of it, that the only thing that kept the two of them going, assuaged them from the guilt that they had survived while others, better men, had perished, was the belief that they could bring justice to the Britain that these men had fought for, could make it a land worth dying for. It did not matter that he and Deacon had not been old enough to fight, they carried the guilt with them like a heavy bag, men born a few years too young. Lane had known a few lads the same age as him who had lied about their age. They had signed up and gone to France and most had died, but one or two had survived although they had never been quite right. Williams was in a home and recognised no-one but sat and shook all day, his mind all blown to pieces, while Brown’s body had been blown apart, he had lost his legs and an arm and sat in a chair with his only arm resting over a blanket knitted by his mother, a former shadow of himself, but with his mind intact so that he could witness the life he had lost, the kind of man he could have been.

  ‘I’d just like to get an idea if I can, Mrs Palmer, as to the guests, get a feel for their characters,’ began Lane. ‘We find if we get an idea about the types of people involved, their likes and dislikes, what kind of people they are and such like, well it helps us to find out exactly what happened. And I know from the stories that my mother used to tell me, there’s nothing that goes on in a house like this without the servants knowing, particularly in a well-run house like this one.’

  ‘You’re quite right, Sergeant,’ agreed Mrs Palmer, ‘although I won’t have it said that we tells tales, because we don’t.’

  ‘Quite so, Mrs Palmer. But you’ll have nothing against helping the police with their enquiries, will you? But before we go into all that, there’s something that’s been puzzling me. Sir William was called away otherwise we would have asked him. It was Miss Simpson, I believe, who was out walking in the woods with Lady Belvedere when she was shot. I was wondering whether she made her own way back to raise the alarm. The inspector and I have been to the woods where the incident took place and it’s a fair distance from the house, quite a trek over the parkland and through the gardens. She must have been shocked and distraught; I’d be surprised if the young lady could find her way back unaided. We had some difficulty ourselves finding our way back onto the path.’

  ‘You’re right, Sergeant, she was in no fit state to do so. She was found by Archie Cutter and his son, Sid. Crouched over the body she was, so they said. Screaming for all she was worth, as you’d expect. Had to prise her away, they did. Archie stayed with the body while young Sid led her back here to raise the alarm and get someone to look after her. An awful job he had too. First she wouldn’t leave the body, kept talking a lot of odd non
sense so Archie Cutter told me later. Said as how it was all her fault that Lady Belvedere was dead, said as how she’d killed her! Poor lass didn’t know what she was saying, poor thing. I doubt whether she had ever picked up a shotgun in her life let alone shot anything. Anyway, in case you start wondering and adding two and two to make five, Archie assured me there was no gun anywhere. He checked the undergrowth and bushes nearby. Talking nonsense, he told me, he thought she must have been delirious with the shock like. Anyway, once they had managed to tear her away from the body, quite a two man job it was and Sid such a little fellow even for his age, she kept stumbling like and trying to turn back.

  ‘But the two of them managed to get here eventually. Sid brought her to the servants’ entrance and we brought her in here and sat her down on that there chair where you are sitting now, Sergeant. Quite a state they both were in, I can tell you. Could get no sense out of either of them until Mr Stafford had given Sid a drop of the master’s brandy. Miss Simpson was as pale and white as a ghost and shivering as if she would never get warm again, so I gave her a nice hot, weak cup of tea with plenty of sugar in it, because of course she was suffering from shock. Young Sid seemed to pull himself together first, although his words came tumbling out on top of each other. Anyway, eventually we could just about make out a garbled message about a lady lying dead in the woods. Sid was awful scared about having left his father guarding the body, kept saying that he was afraid that he’d get shot, that he was sure the man was still out there and we had to hurry.

  ‘Mr Stafford and me, we didn’t know what to make of it all, I can tell you. Something dreadful had obviously happened, but we didn’t want to waste the police’s time.’

  ‘Very considerate of you I’m sure,’ said Lane, trying to look impassive while taking in the news of the confession. He wanted desperately to scribble down all the information he could, but, not wishing to appear too excited, limited himself to writing down the general gist in a slow and methodical manner.