The Truth-Seeker's Wife Read online

  ‘Oh, I dare say,’ returned Wilfred after a pause. Studying the draughts board, I thought. Wondering where I am going next. Ready to outmanoeuvre me. He continued, ‘He’s usually looking for jobs of work and he’s good with horses.’

  ‘Did you see him tonight?’ I asked next.

  ‘No, I didn’t see anything of Davy.’

  ‘Yet I understand he lodges with your aunties, Tibby and Cora.’

  Wilfred didn’t know who had told me this, so was uncertain whether to confirm or deny it. ‘Sometimes,’ he said at last. ‘I fancy he comes and goes. That’s Davy’s way. Don’t see him for days on end and then he turns up. He’s maybe been working on a farm or been out fishing in his boat.’

  ‘Or poaching?’ I asked casually.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ returned Wilfred, now very uneasy. ‘I never heard it said. He causes no trouble, Davy, but he’s what they call a free spirit.’

  I’d have called him a ne’er-do-well. At the beginning of the century, when smugglers landed their goods on the beaches at the Forest’s edge, Davy would’ve been there among them. It was to control the activities of Davy Evans and his kind in this part of the country that The Old Excise House had been built.

  ‘So, is Davy kin to you, by any chance?’

  ‘Not directly,’ Wilfred said firmly. ‘He’s more of what you’d call a connection. He’s an Evans; and they don’t live in the village.’

  Time to abandon this game of draughts and outmanoeuvre Wilfred in something else: his persistent shadowing of my activities.

  ‘I shall be going across to Southampton tomorrow,’ I called out to him. ‘So I’ll need Firefly again in the morning to ride to Hythe. I don’t need any guide to find my way there. I’ll leave the pony at the livery stables in Hythe, take the ferry across, come back when I’ve finished, collect Firefly and ride him home.’

  ‘Right you are, sir,’ called Wilfred. He sounded relieved. In Southampton he could not be expected to keep track of me. I was proving more troublesome than expected.

  ‘You don’t know if the other gentleman staying at the inn needs the animal?’

  ‘The lawyer fellow?’ asked Wilfred, with the countryman’s reserve regarding professional persons.

  ‘Yes, Mr Pelham.’

  ‘He won’t need either of the ponies,’ said Wilfred with confidence. ‘Mr Beresford will be sending the trap for him.’ He paused and added, ‘Anyway, I don’t see Lawyer Pelham riding one of Mrs Garvey’s ponies. Would be beneath his dignity, most likely.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Wilfred,’ I told him. With this exchange we arrived back at the Acorn in a spirit of harmony.

  Chapter Twelve

  Inspector Ben Ross

  It was common courtesy, as well as advisable, to keep Inspector Hughes informed of my progress, or lack of it, regarding the murder of Sir Henry Meager. I had informed Mrs Garvey, when Wilfred and I returned the previous evening, that I’d be hiring Firefly for the whole of the following day. (I insisted I would not need Wilfred.) As I was telling her this, it was going through my mind that I’d almost certainly have to argue the increasing costs of hiring the pony with Superintendent Dunn on my return to London. If Dunn knew that I had been offered the use of the berlin and Tizard to drive me, gratis, the extra expense would not go down well.

  Mrs Garvey said, ‘Right you are, sir!’ She accompanied the words with a beaming smile. She was doing very nicely out of all of this. She continued, ‘Mr Pelham, the legal gentleman, is in the snug.’

  Whether this was a warning or not, I didn’t know. ‘Alone?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, I do believe he’s working on some papers.’

  So Pelham had commandeered the snug as his office. This annoyed me. First come, first served. I had developed proprietorial feelings regarding the snug and was quite surprised to find myself feeling so cross about the matter. Then again, I didn’t like Pelham. After a moment’s struggle, I decided it would not only be polite to put my head into the room and bid Pelham goodnight but also prudent to appear to satisfy his request to be kept informed. I had nothing I wished to tell him regarding the case, of course, nor had he any business to pester me for constant detail. But if you have a dog of uncertain temper following you about, you throw him a scrap of food from time to time. This time Pelham would have to be satisfied with a little information regarding my travel plans.

  I rapped at the door and walked in. Pelham sat at the little table with an oil lamp burning. He looked up with a cross expression as I appeared, then forced something like a smile; it was more of a grimace. It put me in mind of a stone gargoyle at the end of a waterspout.

  ‘I won’t disturb you, Mr Pelham,’ I said. ‘I only come to bid you goodnight, and to let you know I shall be going over to Southampton tomorrow. I like to keep in touch with Inspector Hughes there. Have you still some legal business to conduct hereabouts, or will you be returning to Town?’

  ‘I shall stay a day or two longer,’ returned Pelham unwillingly, ‘to see how things turn out, and consult with my client, Beresford. Did you spend a pleasant evening, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. I had the pleasure of dining with my wife and Mrs Parry. We had an excellent meal. Mr Beresford will send the trap for you in the morning, I dare say.’

  ‘Yes!’ snapped Pelham. Again came the gargoyle grimace masquerading as a smile. ‘I am not so intrepid as you are, Inspector Ross, riding around the countryside at night.’

  ‘There is a beautiful moon,’ I told him. ‘It is nearly as clear as day out there.’

  Pelham didn’t snarl, but he’d have liked to.

  * * *

  I begged a carrot of the cook the following morning, as I felt I owed something to Firefly. He had to work a lot harder on my account. I fancied he recognised me when I came out to his stable; he snickered a welcome, or it might just be that he’d seen the carrot. The ferry across to Southampton was packed that morning and I was lucky to find myself a spot on deck, wedged between two solidly built countrywomen with large baskets balanced on their laps.

  Hughes greeted me with a friendly grin and said, ‘I’ve been wondering how you were getting on. Found a likely suspect yet?’

  ‘I have been opening up a tangled mess of old scandal,’ I replied. ‘As to whether it has brought me nearer to naming a culprit, no, it hasn’t. But I am convinced the roots of the matter go back a long, long way.’

  ‘It’s to do with the will, then?’ asked Hughes. ‘Well, it nearly always is, when the gentry take to murdering one another.’

  ‘Very probably. I can’t say for sure. There is a solicitor by the name of Pelham who has come down from London. He handled the late Sir Henry’s affairs and he appears to deal with Andrew Beresford’s also. He’s lodging, as I am, at the Acorn. Also, I’ve met him before, in London. This is his second visit to the area in recent times. He was down a month or so ago to revise Sir Henry’s will.’

  ‘He called on me a day or so ago to let me know he’d returned, but I was busy and had little time to spare him. Got your money on anyone at all?’ Hughes leaned back in his chair and squinted at me.

  ‘At the moment, the estate manager, Robert Harcourt, would appear to be the frontrunner. I am not naming him as a murderer, far from it, or not yet, anyway. But he could have a motive.’

  ‘Met him, too,’ said Hughes. ‘Why have you got your eye on him, then?’

  ‘There is bad feeling there. Harcourt claims to be the late Sir Henry’s son, born out of wedlock and never acknowledged. Mind you, when I say “out of wedlock”, I don’t mean his mother was not married. She was, but not to Sir Henry. Her acquaintance with Sir Henry, however, dated from before her marriage. I warned you it was a tangled mess!’ I told Hughes the tale, as Harcourt had recounted it to me.

  ‘What the better classes get up to, eh? Well, Harcourt could never prove it,’ said Hughes, when I’d finished. ‘If he’s thinking of challenging the will, he’ll have the devil of a job.’ He shook h
is head gloomily.

  ‘The strange thing,’ I replied, ‘is that he’s not complaining he’s been cut out of the will. My understanding is that he has refused to be included in it, because of the wording of any legacy left to him. He was treated, in his view, as one of the servants.’

  ‘And he wants this will to include some written acknowledgment of his paternity?’ Hughes retorted shrewdly.

  ‘He didn’t say that. You may well be right, though.’

  Hughes shook his head. ‘Sir Henry wouldn’t do that, I reckon. Even if it were true, apart from anything else, think of the scandal. Who else knows of Harcourt’s claim to be Meager’s son?’

  ‘He says everyone knows it.’

  ‘Which could mean that nobody does, other than himself – or what he’s decided himself is the case.’ Hughes drummed his fingers on his desk in a way that reminded me of Dunn, who had the same habit when thinking. ‘Suppose,’ Hughes went on suddenly, ‘I were to put a possible sequence of events to you? Your case, of course,’ he added hurriedly. ‘But I made the initial inquiries, visited the scene of the crime, and it doesn’t go out of my mind. It seemed such a— such a personal sort of a crime. There was hatred in it.’

  ‘How so?’ I was interested, because the murder had struck me in the same way. It had not been the result of a random housebreaking, even if Mrs Parry was convinced it was so.

  ‘From the feel of it, you know?’ Hughes smiled. ‘Anyway, it has to be more interesting than the robbery at a wholesale fruit importer’s warehouse, which I’ve got on my desk at the moment.’

  ‘What kind of fruit?’ I asked automatically. A detective always wants precise information, and his response to news of a robbery is to ask what’s been taken, even if he’s not on the case.

  ‘What they call tropical,’ Hughes replied. ‘Bananas, pineapples, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Then the costermongers in London will be selling it from their barrows while we sit here,’ I replied. ‘With town houses being opened up by the wealthy, the fashionable dinner parties have begun. Your missing tropical fruits will form the centrepiece of every dessert course.’

  ‘Never saw such a thing as a pineapple when I was a boy,’ said Hughes moodily. ‘Apples, that was fruit to us. Mam made apple pies and very good they were.’

  ‘Tell me your theory about the murder,’ I invited him.

  ‘How’s this, then?’ asked Hughes, his soft Welsh lilt becoming gradually more noticeable as he began to tell a story. Or perhaps he was still thinking of his mother’s apple pies. ‘Meager had recently revised his will. His solicitor had come down from London just for that purpose. Beresford was understood to be the main beneficiary. But there were other legacies and someone wanted to know the details. Now then.’ Hughes leaned forward, his hands clasped on the desk and his dark eyes glowing with enthusiasm. ‘It was known in the household, and possibly outside of it, that Meager kept some private papers locked in the drawer in the library, along with the pair of pistols. Someone gets the idea into his head that a copy of the will is kept there. That person is desperate to see it, because he has an interest. He slips into the house. He breaks open the drawer of the desk. Perhaps he finds the will, reads it, and the legacy he hoped for is not there. Or, in view of what you’ve just told me, Harcourt might have broken in, hoping that Sir Henry had, after all, acknowledged him as a son. And he discovered he hadn’t. Or the will isn’t there; and the intruder suspects it might be kept by Sir Henry upstairs in a safe in his bedroom. Whatever the reason, the fellow takes one of the pistols, and makes his way upstairs to Sir Henry’s room. He either shoots the victim in anger as he lies in bed or he starts to search the room and disturbs the sleeping man, who sits up in bed and demands to know what the devil he’s doing there. Intruder panics, fires, throws the pistol down on the bed and flees.’

  Hughes sat back. ‘What do you think, Ross?’

  ‘I think that either scenario would fit the facts, as we know them at the moment,’ I said cautiously. ‘And it would point a finger at Harcourt in an obvious sort of way.’ But I didn’t think Hughes had supplied the answer. There was something else, something I’d so far missed.

  ‘You don’t accept it?’ Hughes asked.

  ‘There is something else I should perhaps tell you.’ I recounted the story of the roses and the painted fan. ‘I can’t see Harcourt doing that. Apart from anything else, frightening Agnes Beresford would avail him nothing. Unless, of course, he is trying to throw the police off the scent.’

  ‘Laying a false trail, eh?’ Hughes thought it over and then heaved a sigh. ‘Well, your case now, as I said. I’ll stick to my tropical fruit. Unless there is something I can do to help you?’

  He was itching to help me. He had been called to the crime initially and then it had been taken from him and passed to a London man. I sympathised, and there was something he could do, as it happened.

  ‘Among the servants,’ I said, ‘there is a skivvy, Susan Bate. She is on the list you gave me. She’s a little touched.’ I tapped my head. ‘Giggles a lot.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I remember her.’ Hughes nodded. ‘Now that’s a sad business, awful pity when a pretty girl like that doesn’t have all her wits. Still, she’s employed, or has been until this murder.’

  ‘You mentioned to me,’ I said, ‘when we originally spoke of the staff, that the skivvy had come to the Hall from an orphanage.’

  ‘So she did,’ replied Hughes promptly. ‘I don’t have to look that up, because it’s stuck in my mind. She didn’t come from the workhouse, you see. She hadn’t been brought up on the parish. She came from a private orphanage run by nuns, in Winchester.’

  ‘Winchester!’ I exclaimed, startled. ‘That’s a long way off. Of course, I understand it’s Hampshire’s county capital, but it’s a long way to go to find a girl to wash your dishes.’ I was startled for another reason too. I had heard the city of Winchester mentioned recently, but where?

  ‘Want me to look into it?’ asked Hughes, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘If you could find a moment, I know you’re busy…’

  ‘No trouble at all,’ he returned. ‘Wonderful thing, the telegraph system. I’ll just send a telegram to the police at Winchester; ask them to make inquiries at the convent. I’ll let you know what comes of it.’

  ‘I’m very obliged,’ I told him. ‘I could send the telegram myself, but I fancy it would come better from you. They will know you.’

  ‘Any particular reason why you’re interested in her?’

  ‘Oh,’ I returned as vaguely as I dared. ‘Just crossed my mind that the late Sir Henry Meager might have fathered more than one illegitimate child, not only Harcourt, if Harcourt is indeed his son.’

  ‘Ah, now,’ said Hughes. ‘It’s the way of the world, I dare say. But I don’t think that unfortunate child would take a pistol and shoot the man in question. Bit beyond her, that.’

  ‘Quite,’ I agreed. ‘But someone else might do it on her behalf. Oh,’ I added as casually as I could. ‘The other pistol, the pair to the murder weapon that you have here, had remained at the Hall. I saw it when I walked round the place. Beresford has now taken possession of it and it is locked in his safe at his house. I had nowhere secure for it at the inn.’

  Hughes flushed. ‘It shouldn’t have been left at the Hall,’ he admitted. ‘But Beresford shouldn’t have it either. Do you want me to send a constable to take possession of it and bring it here?’

  ‘A good idea,’ I said approvingly. ‘However it would need tact. Beresford might simply reply that the pistol is his property now.’

  ‘That pistol and the murder weapon make a pair and were kept in a case together. As such, they are both evidence, even if only one of them fired the fatal shot,’ Hughes replied firmly. ‘Now then, Ross, I am the first to admit the pair of pistols should not have been parted. But I’ll sort it out without offending the gentleman in question.’

  ‘I am sure you will,’ I soothed him.

  ‘Anything else?�
� asked Hughes after a moment’s silence. ‘Because I’m getting a bit hungry myself and I fancy you must be, having started out so early. There’s an excellent chophouse nearby.’

  We duly repaired to the chophouse and made a very good meal.

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when I collected Firefly from the livery stable in Hythe. He’d spent his day resting up after I’d ridden him there that morning, so he was fresh. Also some equine instinct told him he was on his way home, which meant we set off back to the Acorn at a good clip. Thus all was going well until we got there. The one thing I wasn’t looking forward to was avoiding Pelham’s questions. The solicitor wasn’t there, however, but a dogcart was. It was drawn up before the door. Standing at the head of the pony harnessed to it was a lad I recognised. I’d last seen him washing the berlin carriage in the stable yard at the Hall. When he saw me arrive atop Firefly, he raised an arm to attract my attention. At the same time Wilfred appeared and took Firefly’s bridle. Both the lad and Wilfred were obviously bursting to give me some news; and nothing led me to suppose it would be good. Bad news travels fast.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked resignedly.

  ‘Joe here,’ said Wilfred, indicating the boy by the dogcart, ‘is waiting to drive you to the Hall, sir. It’s a pity you have to go in the dogcart. It’ll rattle your bones a bit. But when Tom Tizard came with the berlin, you were in Southampton. So Lawyer Pelham took the berlin and has gone ahead of you to the Hall.’

  ‘Just tell me what’s happened!’ I snapped. Confound Pelham. I couldn’t get rid of him.

  ‘Mr Harcourt’s gone missing, sir!’ called Joe.

  ‘How so, missing?’ I asked sharply. ‘Has he packed his bags and decamped?’

  Was Harcourt indeed our man? Had he lost his nerve and fled?

  ‘No, no, sir, nothing like that.’ Wilfred gave Joe a severe look. He considered himself senior to a stableboy and if a dramatic tale was to be told Wilfred meant to be the one to tell it.