Murder in Pug's Parlour (4 page)

Cowed, the Fred sped on his way, planning the relating of his news to more receptive ears.

Auguste avoided Mrs Hankey’s eyes.

At last she spoke. ‘Murder,’ she said disbelievingly. ‘In Stockbery Towers? Mr Greeves? Archibald?’ Her voice
rose high and trembled. She spun round abruptly and disappeared down the corridor to her room, leaving Auguste to his own thoughts.

They were a jumble; he needed time to sit down, quietly, methodically to arrange them as he would the ingredients for a receipt, then leave them to simmer quietly in a
pot-au-feu.
That this was necessary, his French logic told him. Necessary for his own protection. Greeves’ death in the afternoon pointed to his luncheon being responsible. True, the first part of that luncheon had been spent as usual with the lower servants, but since Greeves was carefully flanked at the table by his fellow upper servants, it was almost impossible that any of the lower servants could have had an opportunity to drop poison into Greeves’ food. That meant the poisoning was confined to the second half of the meal in Pug’s Parlour. It was an unpleasant thought – and doubtless would not take long to occur to even the most obtuse of the Kent Detective Branch. And who was responsible for the luncheon? Himself, Auguste Didier. A foreigner, and as such the natural target for suspicion by the Kentish men and true.

Who had a motive to murder Archibald Greeves? After this afternoon’s outburst perhaps there were undercurrents in the hitherto reasonably untroubled waters of the Upper Ten of which he had not been aware. What if Mrs Hankey had known about May Fawcett? And Ernest Hobbs, he had a motive if it had been Greeves who got his daughter into trouble. Or May Fawcett herself? Perhaps Greeves had really intended to marry Mrs Hankey after all? May wouldn’t have liked that. She had shown an interest in Auguste when he first arrived two years before. But she was not his type. Too sharp-faced and thin-bodied; these high necks and tight-fronted skirts did little to flatter the English figure, and May Fawcett looked like a bad-tempered mare
much of the time with her long face and scraped-back hair. Yet she was pretty in a way – when she bothered to smile, which seemed to be less and less recently. If ladies’-maids did not marry, it could be a sad and lonely future. No wonder she boasted about Greeves’ attentions. She’d have to leave of course. Hanky-panky – he caught himself firmly – Mrs Hankey would never allow her to remain now.

Ethel Gubbins was very different. Twenty years old, soft, warm, the perfect English country girl of which his mother had told him. Brown curls, big grey eyes and a way of looking at him that sometimes almost made him forget his resolution always to be true, in his heart at least, to Tatiana. Yet Ethel could not be quite so soft as she appeared, it occurred to him. She had to keep five under-housemaids in order, and could be as much a martinet as Mrs Hankey when her rules were transgressed.

Then there were the two men: Frederick Chambers and John Cricket. Cricket, a shifty nervous man in his forties, certainly had cause to dislike Greeves. And vice versa. A valet was a potential rival to the steward. He could whisper in his master’s ear at quiet moments, running his bath, dressing him, lacing His Grace’s boots, performing intimate services that created a bond between them to which a steward, however efficient, could never aspire. Greeves had crushed the competition somehow, for Cricket plainly walked in fear of him. Chambers was more of an enigma, the type of Englishman Auguste found it hard to fathom. A sensuous man, he guessed, with his full lips and cheeks. About his own age, he kept himself to himself and went about his duties formally and efficiently. He wondered what, if anything, was between him and May Fawcett.

And lastly Edward Jackson – and that curious fact that Auguste’s brain had noted at the time, while so much else
was going on. Why had Edward Jackson been quite so sure that someone had done Greeves in?

At that moment the bell from the dining-room signalled the serving of coffee and Chambers hurried to take it to the ladies now gathered in the large ornate drawing-room while Hobbs hovered round the gentlemen solicitously with decanters of port and brandy. It was the signal for the lower servants to gather in the servants’ hall, and for the Upper Ten, now attired in evening dress, to congregate, a trifle self-consciously at this unusual meeting place, in the housekeeper’s room. Mrs Hankey, magnificently attired in deep purple satin, black lace fichu covering her ample chest and high neck, held tragic and silent court, centre stage. May Fawcett floated in black chiffon. Ethel had done her best with dark green crêpe. The visiting ladies’-maids, caught out by this unexpected departure from protocol, were bright birds of paradise in reds and blues.

Almost at once a problem arose. The formal procession to the servants’ hall for supper should be led by the gentleman of the highest consequence escorting the highest-ranking visiting lady’s-maid. Mr Greeves was dead, Ernest Hobbs still busy about his duties upstairs. That only left –

‘Mr Didier, would you?’ Edith Hankey bowed to the inevitable, and inclined her head gracefully towards a small dark girl with dancing eyes – ‘The Markeys dee Lavalley,’ she announced impressively.

Mademoiselle Emilie Levine, lady’s-maid, accepting by custom her mistress’ rank for the evening, took Auguste’s arm which was proffered with alacrity. There were immediate benefits to Greeves’ death, it seemed, and the prospect of an evening speaking French pleased him enormously. His grip tightened. Ethel was not so pleased, and a pout crossed her pretty face, as she took Petersfield’s arm, a
portly fifty-five-year-old. May somewhat nervously acquired the support of the Prince’s valet, a fair-haired young man of stiffly correct manners.

Even once the intimacy of the housekeeper’s room was again attained, etiquette demanded they should not discuss their private affairs in front of the visitors – who this evening showed a strange reluctance to depart to their beds. Thus it was eleven o’clock before they were alone, to discuss it, over a small late-night supper hastily prepared by the little still-room maid from leftovers from the dining-room.

Already the house was making early preparations for the night. Bedwarmers were being placed in beds that would not welcome their occupants for several hours yet; refreshments were put out for the gentlemen in case they fancied any slight supper, after the exertions of billiards and cards. The lampboy was preparing candles for Chambers to hand out to guests as they went to bed. Stockbery Towers was still old-fashioned in its lighting, with a mixture of oil and gas, but one never knew when a guest might have need of a candle in the dark mysterious corridors of the Towers, or to signal an invitation. Sandwiches were prepared in case guests might suffer night starvation, and occasionally for more romantic purposes: to a lover a plate left outside a door conveyed the information that the lady was abed and waiting. For the morality of the servants’ hall, so strict that a kiss snatched in passing might mean instant dismissal, did not apply upstairs – except perhaps in the consensus that one should not be found out.

In Mrs Hankey’s room, the temporary Pug’s Parlour, the atmosphere lightened, partly because May Fawcett took herself to bed at an early opportunity in a waft of black chiffon and red eyes. Her Grace, having departed early to bed herself, had graciously given her leave to depart. Hobbs too had joined the silent circle, tired but exhilarated by his first taste of power.

‘I still say it was an accident,’ said Mrs Hankey, opening the discussion as her double right, both as occupant of the room and as the bereaved. ‘An accident. Must’ve bin. I know you think my poor lamb was murdered, Mr Didier, but if so who did it? And why, that’s what I would want to know. Why?’

‘The police, they will find out,’ murmured Auguste soothingly. ‘No need for you to upset yourself, Madame Hankey.’

‘The police,’ she said scathingly. ‘It ain’t the whole might of Scotland Yard we got outside, you know. It’s only that Ned Perkins on the door and Sergeant Bladon. I’ve known Tommy Bladon since he was knee high. He couldn’t find out who pinched a leg of lamb. No,’ she said, looking round defiantly, ‘it was a tramp.’

There was a silence. Nobody dared to ask how a tramp could have infiltrated the bastions of Stockbery Towers, and why any tramp should have bothered to put a lethal dose of poison into the steward’s food.

‘It could have been any of us,’ ventured Ethel soothingly but untactfully. ‘Any of the outdoor servants, any of the lower servants, any of us.’

‘No,’ said Auguste quietly. ‘Not one of the outdoor servants. They couldn’t take the risk of being seen inside. The police will think it’s one of us.’

‘Us?’ said Cricket stiffly.

‘One of
us
?’ echoed Mrs Hankey in awful tones. She regarded him with dislike. ‘Mr Didier, do you see Daisy’ – pointing at the yawning still-room maid in the adjoining room – ‘or that flibbertigibbet scullery maid of yours creeping into Mr Greeves’ room and poisoning his food? Might have been the boy, of course. Mr Greeves was a bit hard on him sometimes – that I will allow. After all,’ she said, warming to the theme, ‘the poison couldn’t have
been in the lunch – we all eat that. It must heve been something that he had in his room alone – and the boy prepared all that.’

Auguste thought of Edward Jackson, the sharp fifteen-year-old cockney, and dismissed the idea of his tipping a lethal dose of something into Greeves’ food, despite the fact he intended to have a talk with young Edward.

‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘It could have been anyone. We don’t know the poison worked instantly. Mr Greeves didn’t say much all through luncheon; he could have been feeling ill then. It could have been given to him much earlier – before lunch. It could have been anyone in the house.’

‘
Anyone
?’ said Mrs Hankey, with horror. ‘What are you suggesting, Mr Didier?’

Five pairs of eyes fastened on him. There was an awestruck silence.

Then Mrs Hankey drew breath and spoke: ‘Are you suggesting, Mr Didier, that it could have been One of Them?’ She turned her head to look from the uncurtained window across the dark driveway to the brightly lit drawing-room on the far side of the house, where the myriad lights of the huge chandeliers were still shining out.

‘One of the Family?’

Stockbery Towers had been built in the early eighteen-sixties, a monument to mid-Victorian Gothic grandeur. The former country seat of the Dukes of Stockbery had been burned down in the late fifties, its Elizabethan panelling and solid wood furniture having succumbed to fire on New Year’s Eve, while the Duke and his lady were stepping out with steward and housekeeper respectively at the Servants’ Ball. By the time they returned, flushed and gracious from their exertions on their inferiors’ behalf, the fire was too well under way to save the house. Nothing daunted, the Duke, then a stalwart seventy-year-old, set out to build a monument in keeping with the age. Fired in his youth by a nanny who filled his infant head with crusades and troubadours, he tyrannised the unfortunate architect into adding two instead of the one more modest tower planned, and many pleasing (to him) crenellations, more suited to a stage Elsinore than the middle of the Kentish downs.

No expense was spared. The old Duke worked on the principle that if in order to run a family and guests of forty you needed a staff indoors and out of sixty, then it stood to reason that the servants’ quarters should be at least as large if not larger than the main house. Not so in advance of his time, however, that he felt that servants should be seen as well as their presence felt, the servants’ wing at Stockbery Towers, almost a peninsula of its own, was so carefully
camouflaged by a tasteful row of tall plane trees that to the casual eye it did not exist at all. Grateful as they were for the additional comfort that this privacy and comparative luxury compared with older houses afforded them, it posed some problems for its inmates. It was two hundred feet from the kitchen to the dining-room. From the coalhouse to the women servants’ stairs and thence to the bedrooms was four hundred and fifty feet. The transport of coal and hot water had not been taken into consideration. The former was a disadvantage since it had the unfortunate effect that a sauce hollandaise would undoubtedly cool ‘twixt kitchen and dining-room, a soufflé sink never to rise again, and even the salmi of game could not be guaranteed to reach its destination with quite that peak of bubble and heat as was desirable. A servery was therefore installed next to the dining-room, lined with heated cupboards and with numerous chafing dishes. Unfortunately, having enjoyed his first shoot from the new Stockbery Towers, followed by his first cold partridge and rum lunch, the Duke expired forthwith and was never to taste the exquisite fruits of the huge and expensively equipped kitchen.

His son, the twelfth Duke, succeeded him at the age of thirty-three and was now, in the autumn of 1891, a man of fifty-eight. With his wife Laetitia, he ruled over his estates as had his father before him, and the tenth Duke before him, right back to the first Duke, a highly unpleasant gentleman whose accomplishments leading to the bestowal of the dukedom had fortunately been clouded in the mists of time. English to the bone, George, twelfth Duke of Stockbery, had one day developed a taste for the bizarre, much as had his father in the matter of crenellations. The Duke had, two years before in 1889, with loud protestation, visited Paris, and once there had developed such a fancy for what he had hitherto categorised as ‘foreign muck’ that he
had imported a French chef, in order that his whim for sweetbreads
à la dauphine
or
écrevisses à la provençale
might instantly be gratified.

Unfortunately, in choosing Auguste Didier, he had miscalculated. Auguste, for all his French upbringing and training in the classical cuisine of France, had an English mother who had once worked as a kitchen-maid under Richard Dolby at the Thatched House Tavern. Consequently Auguste asked nothing more than to be allowed to raise a pork pie, produce a celery forcemeat for a plump Aylesbury duckling, a quince sauce for a leg of veal. Of the basic superiority of English food he was firmly convinced, just as he was of the infinite superiority of the Frenchman in cooking it.