C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (18 page)

‘Did he have any special reason for doing so?’ asked Jack as he began sliding open drawers.

‘I believe his accountant suggested it would be cheaper than a divorce,’ I replied as I flung myself upon the only wardrobe in the room. ‘I say,’ I added, ‘I feel a bit of a heel going through a lady’s things like this.’

‘The lady is dead, and if her ghost could tap you on the shoulder at this moment it would probably encourage you to find out who killed her.’

‘Yes, there is that, I suppose.’

We searched in silence for the next few minutes.

‘Anything in particular we should be looking for?’ I asked as I pushed aside the hanging clothes to see if something was hidden at the back of the wardrobe. It wasn’t.

‘Paper,’ said Jack. ‘Did she keep any records? Letters? Receipts? A diary? Scribbled notes? Travel brochures for exotic places? Being dead she yet speaks—but only if she’s left bits of paper we can find.’

‘Righty-oh then,’ I responded cheerfully and got on with the search.

But it turned out that Connie Worth was exceptionally neat, leaving no pieces of paper lying on the top of her dressing table or in any of the drawers or in any other place we could think to look.

After some time I stood up and said, ‘If there was anything here, the police have cleaned it all out.’

‘It rather looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Jack agreed. ‘However, if she was trying to keep something hidden, where in this room might serve as a hiding place?’

Thus we entered a second phase of the search, where we lifted up the paper lining in the drawers of the dressing table—and every other conceivable hiding place—again with no results.

‘What’s this?’ asked Jack. He’d been staring for some time at a small black and white photograph in a modest wooden frame on the dressing table.

Taking a closer look, I said, ‘I believe that’s a picture of Lady Pamela and Connie Worth as young women. Look—you can see the resemblance. When they were single, being sisters, they probably went around together rather a lot. Which this picture commemorates.’

‘But think, Morris—think. This is the only personal decoration in the room. Apart from this one photograph the room is entirely blank—totally without character. Why this one thing?’

Jack picked up the frame and turned it over in his hands. He looked at it thoughtfully from every side for a moment, then turned it over again and carefully studied its back. He prised open the studs and lifted off the back cover. There, jammed between the back of the photograph and the frame, were two small pieces of paper. Jack took them out and gently unfolded them.

For a moment the song of the nightingale trilled in my heart: this is the vital clue, it sang, that will reveal all. The next moment the bird dropped its sheet music, hit the wrong note and the whole thing went flat. The two pieces of paper were entirely trivial, unhelpful and unimportant.

They were both receipts. One was a receipt for a delivery of meat, signed for by the cook, Mrs Buckingham. The other for a case of whisky and brandy signed for by Keggs the butler.

‘Odd,’ said Jack. ‘And very interesting.’

‘Domestic waste paper,’ I groaned. ‘They tell us nothing.’

‘On the contrary, they tell us something very important.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘At the moment I’m not sure. But they ask two very tantalising questions: why did Connie Worth keep them? And why did she conceal them where they were unlikely to be seen by a maid or a casual visitor to her room?’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘Well, think of it now. To Connie Worth these must have been more than bits of domestic ephemera—to have kept them at all, in the first place, and to have concealed them, in the second place.’

Jack slipped both pieces of paper into his pocket, and we stepped quietly out of the room. I asked Jack where to next, and he said, ‘To the other victim’s room.’

Stiffy Bassett’s room was at the far end of the corridor, where the larger, better furnished bedrooms were found. Housing her there was part of Lady Pamela’s plan to impress her and encourage her future marriage to Douglas.

On our way down that long corridor we passed an open door.

‘Which room is this?’ Jack asked.

‘That’s Sir William’s study,’ I said, and was alarmed to see Jack step swiftly inside.

‘He doesn’t like anyone just . . .’ I began. But I stopped because I’d followed Jack as far as the open door and could see that the room was unoccupied. Jack wandered around looking at the decorations on the walls.

‘Impressive,’ he said. ‘Primitive artwork from South America, bows, arrows, quivers, blowpipes, paintings of tropical orchids—an exotic collection for an Englishman’s study.’

‘Sent back by Edmund,’ I said, speaking quickly, ‘before his death in South America. Now come on, Jack. Sir William may return at any moment . . . if he finds us here . . .’

But Jack ignored me and picked up a piece of native carving painted in red and ochre. He did not look impressed. He seemed to consider it the sort of thing knocked off by some jungle native to sell to a gullible passing explorer from the souvenir counter of the local trading post.

He put the carving down and walked over to the big bow window looking down on the terrace. ‘It’s still deserted down there,’ he said. ‘I wonder where everyone is today.’

‘Come on, Jack,’ I repeated with some urgency. ‘We can’t just go barging into Sir William’s study without his express invitation. He’s a tough customer when he’s annoyed.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Jack with a broad smile as he joined me in the corridor.

It was with a sense of relief that I led the way beyond that open study door down to the room that had been occupied by Stiffy.

Here the door was closed, but slightly ajar. I pushed on it lightly and it swung inwards—revealing Sir William Dyer, bent over Stiffy Bassett’s dressing table with his back towards us.

We must have made some slight noise because he straightened up at once, and spun around to face us.

‘Just giving Jack a tour of the house,’ I ad libbed quickly.

Sir William gave us the sort of look Macbeth probably gave when a couple of Banquos walked into the room.

‘I was . . . ,’ he began, ‘. . . ah . . . looking for the address of poor Stephanie’s family . . . should send them a condolence message . . . can’t find it . . . perhaps Pamela has it . . .’

With those words he pushed past us and hurried off down the corridor.

‘Well,’ said Jack rubbing his chin. ‘That was very interesting. What do you imagine he was really looking for?’

We gently eased the door closed so that we could work undisturbed, and then searched Stiffy’s room as thoroughly as we could. This time with even less success than in Connie Worth’s—there were no scraps of paper, not even a skerrick, to be found. Looking for something interesting in her room was like looking for a happy face among the gloomy punters trooping home after a day at Epsom.

We did find an extraordinarily generous supply of makeup, cigarettes in a silver cigarette case and a collection of the novels of Ethel M. Dell scattered carelessly over a bedside table. But nothing else.

Once again we searched for secret places where things might be hidden. But this time our search was bootless. (When I was younger I believed there was no such word as ‘bootless’ and the poor goof of an author who’d used it had meant to write ‘fruitless’. I now know better. Later research has convinced me that in a case such as ours ‘bootless’ is right on the money.)

After a final rechecking of places we’d already examined I shrugged my shoulders and Jack and I left for the part of the house that was my own personal province—the library.

Jack asked to see the work I’d been doing, so I handed him the large, leather-bound book in which I’d recorded my catalogue of the collection.

He read in silence for some time and then remarked, ‘This is a very careful and precise bibliography, Morris. You should think of taking up this sort of research full time. There are a lot potential areas of research in bibliography.’

‘That’s kind of you, Jack,’ I replied, ‘but I found doing this about as exciting as compiling a telephone directory for a small town in Latvia. Besides, I have other plans and ambitions.’

Jack asked me what they were, and I said I’d tell him if he promised not to laugh.

‘As if I would, Morris,’ said Jack earnestly. ‘I take your ambitions most seriously.’

Taking my courage in both hands, I admitted that my goal was to become a writer—a novelist.

‘That’s a noble ambition,’ said Jack. ‘You should try—seriously try. When I was your age, I thought I might make a poet. In fact, I had two slim volumes of poetry published.’

‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ I was surprised by this revelation.

‘There’s no reason why you should; they appeared under a pseudonym. Both volumes fell dead from the press, and I concluded that my talents did not lie in that direction. But I tell you this to encourage you to try your wings while you’re young.’

‘The problem, of course, is that “novelist” is not a salaried position that’s advertised in
The Times
asking applicants to turn up at nine o’clock on a Monday morning and please bring references. Becoming a published novelist, I have discovered, is rather a tricky business. So, in the meantime, I have to earn a living,’ I said. ‘Hence this cataloguing.’

‘Which is about to end, so what will you take up next, as you spend your evenings scribbling away?’

‘I thought I might try a bit of school mastering. That shouldn’t be too hard, and it might leave me enough free time. I thought I might be able to teach irregular verbs and dream up complicated plots at much the same time.’

Jack patted me gently on the shoulder. Coming from Jack that was warm and enthusiastic encouragement. Then he asked to have another look at the quarto
Romeo and Juliet
I had found.

I retrieved the ancient, leather-bound volume with all the pride of a grandmother whipping out a photograph of the latest infant to grace her family line.

As he slowly turned the pages, stopping to read the occasional speech, he remarked that it was Pollard who’d coined the expression ‘bad quarto’ to cover several early volumes of Shakespeare—including my 1597
Romeo and Juliet
.

He was about to launch into another of his spontaneous miniature lectures on early English printed texts when a piece of paper fluttered out of the book in his hands and floated gently to the floor.

I picked it up. ‘It’s a letter,’ I said.

Addressed to whom, Jack asked. ‘It says “Dear Judith”,’ I replied. Then Jack wanted to know who the author of the letter was. I turned over the single sheet of paper and at the bottom of the second page saw a signature I was familiar with.

‘Well, well, well,’ I said slowly.

‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘There’s just a single name, “William”, but I recognise the writing. I’ve seen that signature often—that’s Sir William Dyer.’

‘Is there a Judith that we know of—a Judith connected with this case?’ Jack asked.

‘The only Judith I can think of,’ I replied, ‘is Judith Trelawney—Lady Pamela’s younger sister. But she’s dead.’

‘She might still have been the recipient. Is there a date on the letter?’

I looked at the top of the front page. ‘Yes, it was written two years ago.’

‘And since we’ve gone this far we may as well go on and read the whole letter. What does it say?’

I began to read, and I’m sure I blushed. It was a love letter. A passionate love letter. A passionate and intimate love letter. The Tom Morris who read that letter may have been an Oxford graduate, but he was a young and innocent Oxford graduate. I stopped reading and handed it over to Jack, who didn’t blush at all. He read it as calmly as if it was a medieval allegory in rhymed heroic couplets. Which it wasn’t. This was prose so hot I was surprised the page didn’t spontaneously combust.

‘Clearly this epistle was passing between two people who were already engaged in an affair,’ he said at last.

‘Well, such things happen.’

‘Indeed, but in this case we must ask ourselves if it might be related to the murder.’

‘An excellent question,’ I said, looking puzzled, ‘but how?’

Jack’s eyes lit up and he adopted his tutorial manner. He jabbed the air with his forefinger as he made a series of logical points.

‘Taking the addressee to be the only Judith we’ve heard of, namely, Lady Pamela’s younger sister, we have an affair within the family—the sort of business that can only end unhappily. We’ve already heard this Judith referred to as “the beautiful younger sister”, and the maids told you that Sir William was flirtatious, so an affair between the two of them is not out of the question. Sir William’s primary concern in this letter is to get Judith to burn all his letters to her. Clearly his intention is that his wife will never discover what has gone on. He seeks to avoid the social, and possibly even financial, consequences of a divorce. Judith may well have burned all his other letters, but she has clearly kept this one—perhaps her sentimental attachment to it made it hard for her to destroy. Are you with me up to this point?’