Murder Included Read online

  Jardine said, ‘Before I catch my train, Charles, there’s something I want to say to you. There’s only one member of your household who has an obvious straightforward motive for this murder, and that’s Hugo, and I’m perfectly certain he didn’t do it. He’s a curious character; at one time, I admit, I thought him work-shy; but now I’m beginning to think that his lack of interest in anything we’ve tried to arrange for him is due to the strange fact that he’s got no use for money. As far as I know — correct me if I’m wrong — he’s perfectly content to spend all day and every day at the kennels.’

  ‘That’s perfectly true,’ said Charles. ‘He drinks and smokes very moderately, he loathes motor cars, and even Pat can’t get him to London.’

  ‘We’ll rule out Hugo then, and that means we’re looking for someone with a motive we can’t even guess at. It leaves us damnably in the dark, Charles. I do want you to realize that any or all of you may be in grave danger. For all we know this may be the work of a homicidal maniac or of someone with a grudge against the whole family, or of someone … well, you take my advice, Charles, and don’t trust even your nearest and dearest. Price believes this to be the work of a woman — well, some women get queer in their forties,’ said Jardine with relish, for his wife, saying that he was a stuffed shirt, had left him in nineteen-twenty, and it pleased him to think that she now had her difficulties.

  Sir Charles said, ‘Hmm,’ and then Benson at the door announced Mr Jardine’s taxi and Jardine hurried away, congratulating himself on his tactful timing. Until tea was brought in and with it came Bunny, followed by Hugo and Patricia, inclined to giggle and imitate Price as they compared their respective interviews, Sir Charles sat thinking of what Jardine had said to him: ‘Certainly not Hugo … don’t trust your nearest and dearest … a woman’s crime … women get queer in their forties …’ He meant Bunny, of course. It had been obvious from the first that he didn’t cotton to her … naturally he wouldn’t; she wasn’t his type; he didn’t like outstanding women, queer women, clever women, exotic women: his type was the ordinary, straightforward, quietly dressed, quietly mannered, upper-class Englishwoman, the kind of woman Hermione had been and Patricia would be … my type, too, thought Sir Charles, except when I’m in the mood in which I married Bunny. The thought shook him: it was the first time he had thought like that of his marriage and he realized that was how others must have thought of it — his children, his friends, his servants — the outcome of a mad mood, induced by the sun and the wine of the Mediterranean, a holiday indiscretion. And they were right, he thought, getting up, lighting another cigarette and walking restlessly to the window; they were right … he’d been a ridiculous old man and, God bless them, it was marvellous that they’d kept straight faces: like some silly impulsive youth he, old enough to be a grandfather, had married a woman of whom even now he knew nothing. It had been her gaiety, the sharpness of her mind, what the Victorians would have called her sauciness, which had bewitched him, and then there had been the pink villa, the charming meals on the diminutive terrace, the romantic backcloth of the medieval village and the blue mountains and the sea; and there had been her friends, so casual and so distinguished, and the picturesque little daughter to remind you that life wasn’t all beer and skittles to a woman who must face it alone. Half amused, half protective, he had married her, and presently, with the sudden eruption of the long-quiescent volcano of his financial difficulties, he had found, in place of his amusing poppet, a creature of inflexible will, unshakeable self-confidence, and merciless industry. In France he had dipped into her books and, since they were about children and gardens and Siamese cats, he had thought them delightfully feminine, and had shut them up and returned to the life of the Duke of Wellington: he’d never guessed at the sweat and the toil of the forge from which had issued that prose of finest steel. When Bunny had suggested the guest house, he had said, ‘It’ll mean so much work for you, darling. Surely with your knack it would be less trouble to dash off a best-seller,’ and had defined as mulish the stricken look on her face. Patricia and Hugo … he knew them as he believed he had known his Hermione, through and through, but even before this wretched business he had realized that he was at sea with Bunny … how, now, could he be sure of her? She said, ‘Pat, darling, you pour out,’ and her diffidence exasperated him: she should take her place even if it had been Hermione’s and, for a short time, Patricia’s. ‘It’s your job, Barbara,’ he said sharply.

  Bunny made no move from the sofa, into which she had sunk in an attitude which showed her shapely legs to the knees, robbing her black dress of any suggestion of mourning. ‘You must all prepare to take on my jobs,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’m Suspect Number One. Since the ’tec finished with Pat, he’s been prowling about the upstairs pantry. I shall be surprised if I’m not in gaol by nightfall. Actually, Mrs Capes is quite capable of doing the housekeeping, and if someone will drive Nanny into Harborough once or twice a week she could do the odd bits of shopping. Charles, you’ll have to do the accounts — Lisa will help you if it comes to long division.’

  ‘I’m quite capable of doing long division,’ said Sir Charles, ‘but I wish you wouldn’t talk like that — you know I dislike flippant talk on serious subjects.’

  ‘Oh, my feet!’ said Bunny, kicking off her shoes. ‘I shall pass out, Charles, if you don’t let me soon change into espadrilles.’

  ‘Why aren’t you wearing espadrilles?’ asked Hugo. ‘Your father didn’t think them suitable for to-day,’ said Bunny. Patricia, trim in three-guinea ‘Coolies’, said, ‘The more you wear sloppy shoes the more you have to.’

  ‘I don’t see why Bunny shouldn’t wear what she likes on her own feet,’ said Hugo.

  Sir Charles said, ‘Don’t be impertinent, Hugo,’ and Hugo had opened his mouth to reply when a diversion was created by the entrance of Lisa with Babette and Captain at her heels.

  Lisa said, ‘Do you know what? I’ve been detecting down in the Low Meadow. There’s marks of heels and you can see where someone’s been puddling about round the water dropwort. I did hope there’d be a handkerchief with a laundry-mark on it or a hairpin but all I found was a cigarette-end, and everyone in the house smokes except me and Nannie and Sylvia — even Eric does sometimes — and it hasn’t got any lipstick on it. If we could find out who knew that dropwort grows in the Low Meadow …’

  Sir Charles checked her. ‘Just a minute, Lisa. How did you know what I didn’t know myself — that water dropwort was the poison?’

  ‘Everyone knows that,’ said Lisa impatiently. ‘The detective asked Benson if there was any on the property and Benson didn’t know. He told Beatrice about it and Sylvia overheard him and told Eric and he told me.’

  ‘Associating with the boot-boy again,’ sighed Patricia.

  ‘Leave that at the moment, Pat,’ said her father. ‘Lisa, you’ve never shown any interest in botany — how did you know where the dropwort grows?’

  ‘Cousin Elizabeth told me ages ago. Bunny wanted me to do the flowers and it was autumn and there weren’t any, and Cousin Elizabeth said surely I wasn’t blind to the beauty of the autumnal tints and made me go all the way down to the knoll with her to get some beastly beech leaves, which had dropped off their sticks anyway by the time we got home. All the time she was pointing out botanical facts — it was frightfully boring — and she pointed out the dropwort and said that once in a village where she had lived a carter had pulled some up and eaten the root in mistake for parsnips, and he had given some to his horse and both of them had died. She said that Mother Nature …’

  This time it was Bunny who interrupted her. ‘Elizabeth must have told that to someone else too — someone she went strolling round the place with, or to whom she talked about horses … *

  ‘I’ve heard her say thank goodness we’ve no yew hedges/ said Patricia, ‘but I’ve never heard her mention dropwort, not even when we’ve talked about turning out the horses and you know how she fussed over Brutus.’

  ‘If t
he dropwort was eaten in mistake for parsnips it must have been the root that was eaten, not the leaves,’ said Lisa. ‘Horses don’t go digging up roots. In Cousin Elizabeth’s anecdote the man pulled the plant up like you’d pull up a parsnip. I daresay the leaves aren’t poisonous.’

  ‘If one part of a plant is poisonous, the rest of it must be,’ said Patricia. ‘Are you sure it was Cousin Elizabeth who told you about it, Lisa?’ She turned the direct gaze of her steady blue eyes on the child.

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Lisa, looking on the ground.

  ‘You see, it doesn’t make sense that Cousin Elizabeth should have told you, when she never told me. Are you quite sure that it wasn’t someone else, Lisa?’

  ‘What are you trying to get at, Patricia?’ asked Bunny, straightening up and dragging on her shoes. ‘Whatever it is, I’m sure you won’t get at it by talking to Lisa like a prefect.’

  Patricia flushed angrily. ‘When you’re dealing with people whom you happen to know are liars …’

  ‘Do you mean me?’ asked Lisa.

  ‘Be quiet, Lisa. Listen, Pat,’ said Sir Charles. ‘You’re going too fast; you’re rushing your fences. Let’s think this out logically — sit down and get on with your tea, Lisa. Now, Pat: Elizabeth, as we all know, was well up in botany and was quite the most likely person to have told Lisa about this plant. Lisa, did you tell anybody?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Lisa, through a mouthful of cake. ‘Why should I? Going about disseminating botanical facts is not in my line. But Cousin Elizabeth’s conversation, when it wasn’t just squashing people, was mostly anecdotes; and the man and the horse eating the dropwort was an anecdote quite apart from being botany. She might have told it to anyone.’

  ‘You mean it might have emerged as (a) a botanical fact, (b) a horsey fact, or (c) an anecdote. How nice and clearly you think, Lisa!’ said Bunny.

  ‘I don’t see that it gets us any farther,’ said Patricia.

  ‘Oh, but surely it does,’ said Bunny. ‘To whom did Elizabeth talk horse, to whom botany, and to whom did she tell anecdotes? No, you’re right, Pat. It’s useless. She was an Ancient Mariner and she didn’t give a damn for her victim’s interests — she just talked on.’

  Patricia said, ‘I don’t think it’s very good form to make clever remarks at the expense of people who are dead.’

  ‘Play the game, mater,’ said Lisa, with a giggle.

  ‘You’d better go to the nursery, Lisa,’ said Patricia.

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Pat,’ said Hugo. ‘Lisa’s the only one of us who’s discovered anything so far. Actually, I think we’d much better leave things to the detective. It’s obvious that Cousin Elizabeth was poisoned by one of the lodgers and I don’t care which — as far as I can see they’re all equally bloody.’ He rose. ‘If anyone wants me I shall be over at the kennels. Dreamer’s cut himself open on some wire and I don’t trust the kennelman.’

  ‘I must go and see to Romanee Conti,’ said Lisa. ‘I got late detecting.’

  ‘You shouldn’t keep him waiting,’ said Patricia. ‘You shouldn’t have a pony if you can’t look after him properly. I didn’t feed him because I know how that would end.’

  ‘I don’t want you to feed him,’ said Lisa. ‘I don’t want you to touch him, thank you,’ and Bunny said, ‘I’ll come with you, Lisa,’ and hurried her daughter from the room. Alone with her father, Patricia, collecting tea-cups, switching on lights, said, ‘Lisa’s a queer child and at that age they’re all terrible little liars — that’s why I thought someone other than Elizabeth might have told her about the dropwort. And I’m not sure that I wasn’t right. Did you notice that she couldn’t look me in the face when she denied it?’

  Sir Charles said, ‘I still don’t see what you’re driving at. Lisa thinks she’s detecting — surely she’d have been only too pleased to tell us the name of her informant?’

  ‘Not,’ said Patricia, ‘if it was someone she liked and wanted to shield.’

  ‘Well, who does she like?’ mused Sir Charles. ‘I feel I’m only tolerated; I don’t think she’s exactly devoted to you, Pat; Hugo doesn’t seem to notice her much; I’ve never heard her say a good word of any of the lodgers.’

  ‘The people she really gets on well with,’ said Patricia, ‘are the servants. But with kids of that age you never know — they have tremendous secret pashes, as we used to call them at school, for the most unlikely people.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think,’ said Sir Charles, ‘that Lisa has much affection to spare from her mother.’

  There was silence then in the library. Patricia had sat down and was smoking; like all the d’Estrays, she could sit still and say nothing, whereas Bunny and Lisa, unless they were reading, when they were apparently and often irritatingly unconscious of what was going on around them, talked, fidgeted, poked the fire, took off their shoes. Lamplight, the quietness of the room, only occasionally broken by the shifting of the log fire, the companionable silence of his flesh and blood, induced in Charles d’Estray’s troubled mind a confidential mood — so had he and Hermione sat in the autumn twilights of the good years long ago. Patricia was like her mother, especially in profile, and it was in profile that Sir Charles saw her now. He said, ‘Pat, we’ve always been good friends. I wish you’d be frank with me.’

  Patricia said, ‘I wish I could be. But there are things one can’t say … It’s not as if I really know anything. I’ve only suspicions.’

  ‘Then you’d better speak out,’ Sir Charles said. ‘Suspicions won’t hang anybody but they’re poison in the mind. You’re thinking of Bunny and Lisa …’ He was glad that, after all, he had been able to say it in perfectly normal tones.

  Patricia gave a gasp of relief because it had been said. ‘I feel so awful, Daddy. It seems so terribly disloyal to you. But I’ve felt like bursting, and the only other person I could talk to is Hugo, and he just doesn’t seem to be interested — he only says to stop bothering, it was one of the lodgers, and I’d like to think so too, but I can’t, because it’s just wishful thinking: none of them had the slightest motive as far as I can see. Lisa had, of course: as you say, she’s devoted to her mother and she might have thought that Bunny would be happier with Cousin Elizabeth out of the way. Or she might have done it in a rage: she’s a queer child — goodness knows what they would have thought of her at St Olaf’s — and once or twice when she was in a temper she said that she would like to kill Cousin Elizabeth. I was wondering about her father — he was T.B., wasn’t he? She may have inherited something …’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Sir Charles. ‘He was T.B. certainly, and, I imagine, one of those disgruntled neargeniuses, but that’s no reason that he should transmit homicidal tendencies. They say young girls are unpredictable, but you weren’t, Pat. You were always very steady.’

  ‘I wasn’t half French and I didn’t spend my childhood being dragged about foreign countries, like poor Lisa. Anyhow, what corners I had were duly knocked off at St Olaf’s.’ She smiled, evidently recalling humorous incidents connected with the loss of her individuality.

  Sir Charles said, ‘I see now what you were getting at. You think that Bunny, not Elizabeth, might have told her about the dropwort. That being so, either Bunny or Lisa could have taken advantage of the knowledge.’

  ‘It’s awful even to think such things. You must hate me, Daddy.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Pat, old thing. You can’t help your thoughts — Jardine’s got the same idea, I think; he warned me very solemnly not to trust my nearest and dearest and I don’t fancy he meant you or Hugo. We must face facts: Bunny — and Lisa — had a motive: hatred of Elizabeth; and there’s Bunny’s knowledge of herbs into the bargain. Instead of shutting our eyes to all that, let’s try to prove to ourselves, and everyone else if we can, that they are innocent. I don’t know where Lisa keeps her possessions — in the schoolroom, perhaps … oh, I know it goes against the grain to snoop and spy, but anything’s better than that we should nurse these intolerab
le suspicions.’ His voice had lost the forced cheerfulness with which he had been speaking; Patricia caught the note of anguish and her cool heart bled for him.