Christmas is Murder (2 page)

“I still can’t get over poor Henry’s death,” Helen announced to the room.

Her friend Wanda shivered. “Imagine us staying here with a dead body upstairs.”

“There’s no helping it,” Helen said. “Swanmere Manor is two miles uphill from the village and sixteen miles from the nearest town. The country lanes will be impenetrable until a snow plough can come to the rescue. What a dreadful time to pass away!”

Yvette Perkins, who had joined them and was sitting hand in hand with Charley on the loveseat, dabbed her nose with a handkerchief. “Henry told me he lost his wife last February. His daughter died years ago and his son emigrated to Australia. He came to Swanmere Manor so he’d have company at Christmas.”

“That is so sad,” Helen exclaimed. “I hope this doesn’t put a damper on your honeymoon.”

“Well, I’m not going to let it spoil things.” Yvette tucked a strand of bleached hair behind her ear. “I mean, this was a wedding present from my mum. She chose this hotel because it’s quiet and has really good home-cooked food.”

Helen and Wanda murmured assent.

“It’ll be a hard act to follow,” Yvette continued. “I hope Charley here doesn’t expect me to cook him four square meals a day.”

“No, but I expect other favours four times a day.”

“Oh, he’s a bad one!” Yvette chided with a blush while the others laughed—until they remembered poor Henry Lawdry upstairs and grew sober-faced again.

“Funny to think you’re here celebrating your wedding while I’m celebrating my divorce,” Wanda observed.

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Yvette said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. He was a wanker.” Wanda appraised Charley. “But I think you have a keeper here, love.”

The newlyweds squeezed hands. “Oh, I think so,” Yvette said.

Rosie reappeared carrying glasses the size of thimbles and began dispensing sherry. “I’m sorry dinner will be a bit delayed this evening owing to the circumstances,” she faltered, serving the women first.

“What quaint little tumblers,” Miriam Greenbaum hooted. “No danger of us letting our hair down, is there?”

“Just as well,” Anthony replied, patting his bald pate.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Patrick said, accepting a glass from Rosie. “What are you busy working on, Miriam?”

The literary agent rooted around in a big box file. “
A President for Our Time: A Biography of George W. Bush
,” she replied, pulling out a hefty manuscript.

“Must be fiction,” Anthony quipped.

“Ah, now, I won’t be drawn into a political discussion with you, Anthony.”

“Anthony,” he corrected, placing the emphasis on the ‘t’. “The ‘h’ is silent in the English pronunciation of the name.”

“Anthony is very particular about these things,” Patrick hurriedly explained.

“Well, it
is
my name and I object to Yanks coming along and corrupting every word in the English language. Not to mention—”

Miriam Greenbaum opened her mouth to speak.

“Er-um, I’ll go and get a progress report on dinner,” Rosie murmured as she finished making the sherry round.

“Oh, wonderful,” Helen said. “I’m starving. Are you, Wanda?”

“Well, they do say funerals make you hungry.”

“This is a bit like a funeral,” Yvette agreed. “Us sitting around all formal and sipping sherry.”

Wanda Martyr turned to Charley. “Do you think Henry might have choked on his dentures? He said they were always coming loose.”

“Unlikely. However, he was taking medication for a weak heart.”

“Charley was advising Henry on his medications,” Yvette said proudly.

“Well, not advising, exactly,” her husband corrected, “but he did discuss his condition with me.”

“Mercifully, it was quick,” Anthony said.

Miriam Greenbaum glanced up from her manuscript. “Until the proper authorities get here, I guess we won’t know exactly what happened. Someone could have murdered the poor old guy, for all we know.”

“What makes you think that?” Anthony demanded.

“It would be pretty easy. I happen to rep some of the best mystery writers in the business, so I’m something of an expert. I bet I could commit the perfect murder and get away with it.”

Rosie returned at that moment to summon the guests into dinner.

Patrick set aside his sketchpad. “I hope you’re wrong about the food poisoning, Miriam. I’ve got a very delicate stomach.”

“
E. coli
or
salmonella
could have crept into the kitchen,” Anthony supposed aloud.

Miriam rose from the sofa with an indulgent smile. “Oh, how you do fuss, An
th
ony!”

Anthony Smart stared daggers at the American’s back. “Why couldn’t it have been her instead of Henry?” he murmured to his partner as they followed the others to dinner.

Huffing and puffing up
the gently sloping hill in the snow on tennis racquets laced to his boots, Rex caught his first glimpse of Swanmere Manor after almost forty years. The steep-pitched roofs with verge board trim bristled with chimneys, crushed beneath the weight of the leaden sky.

He remembered the house only vaguely from when he’d visited as a child, before the Smithings fell on hard times and turned it into a hotel. The late Colonel Smithings had made unwise investments in the Far East, forcing the couple to take in paying guests, though Mrs. Smithings drew the line at actually advertising her establishment. Reservations were by invitation only—once she had made the necessary inquiries. Nobody off the street was permitted to stay, and consequently, there was not as much as a sign at the driveway entrance.

The invitation rested in his trench coat pocket where he had placed it the day before. No matter that Mrs. Smithings and his mother had gone to boarding school together and their husbands had served in India at the same time: Dahlia Smithings was a stickler for formality. In his other pocket snuggled a half-grown, white-and-tan puppy that he’d found whimpering in the snow by the station. Other than weighing down his coat on that side, the dog proved no trouble. Rex had no idea what he was going to do with it.

As he passed through the tall, wrought-iron gates, he fancied he recognized the dormer window of the attic room where he’d spent a childhood summer. Coiffed with snow, it peered blearily from above the board-and-batten siding of the second story. Bereft of their leaves, climbing vines clung to the red brick as though for warmth, the circular driveway that once welcomed visitors to the stone porch buried beneath the snow. Only the smoke billowing from the chimneys gave any sign of habitation, and yet Mrs. Smithings had said there would be a half-dozen guests for Christmas dinner.

Tramping across the white-carpeted lawn on the pair of racquets, a suitcase skating behind him at the end of his belt, Rex watched as the front door opened and a figure in black stepped onto the porch.

“Reginald, my dear, you got here after all,” Dahlia Smithings cawed across the driveway. “I would have recognized you anywhere with that shock of red hair, but my, how you have grown! Last time I saw you, you were in boy’s shorts with your socks constantly escaping your garters,” she said as he reached the porch. “I trust your mother is well?”

Rex winced inwardly at the vision of himself as a lad. He had indeed been an untidy-looking child, his mother attempting to anticipate his gargantuan growth spurts by buying him oversize clothes. Down to his last breath, he barely managed to gasp a greeting in reply as icy flakes stung his cheeks. Just a few more steps and he would finally,
finally
arrive.

“What on earth are those contraptions on your feet?” Mrs. Smithings asked. “Oh, I must say, how very resourceful of you. You must have trekked the two miles from the station.”

“I was hoping to play tennis while I was here,” Rex explained haltingly, recovering his breath on the doorstep. “I remembered playing on the lawn court. I never anticipated all this snow.”

So far, Mrs. Smithings had not noticed the puppy whose black muzzle peeked from his coat pocket, and Rex decided it was just as well, certain there was a no pets policy at the hotel.

“No, the snow is most unusual,” she agreed. “The weather is going to the dogs, just like everything else in this country. Cliff-ORD! Where is that beastly man when I need him? Clifford, there you are. Take this gentleman’s suitcase up to the green paisley room.”

Rex’s gaze landed upon an old man in tattered tweed whose face looked as though it had been hewn out of bark.

“Wot, carry it up all them stairs?” Clifford asked Mrs. Smithings, cupping his ear as if he couldn’t be hearing correctly.

“Do you have a better idea how to get it up there?”

He stared hard at Rex unstrapping his makeshift snowshoes, clearly trying to convey to his employer that the new guest was three times his strength and size, and she must be blind and half-witted not to notice.

“Clifford, you are worse than useless. Then perhaps you can carry the racquets and that bag he has over his shoulder.” Mrs. Smithings closed the front door and addressed Rex. “Whatever you do, don’t tip him like our American guest does. That will only encourage his idleness. I will show you your room. Tea is at four-thirty in the drawing room. Do you recall where that is?”

Rex glanced past the staircase to the end of a passage to his right where a set of French doors stood open, releasing the sound of desultory chatter.

“Aye, not much seems to have changed since I was a lad.” Except that the manor had shrunk and wore a stiff and outmoded look, he thought.

“Well, Clifford, as you can see, is immensely changed in that he is more useless than ever. I only keep him on because he has been with the family so long, and his father before him.”

Clifford trailed behind them up the stairs, Mrs. Smithings leading the way. Rex wondered if Clifford’s feelings had been hurt by her insensitive remarks, but fortunately, the old man didn’t appear to hear very well.

“There have been changes made upstairs,” she continued. “We added bathrooms. All the suites are taken, but as Mr. Lawdry is no longer with us, you will have the men’s bathroom to yourself. Rosie put a pile of fresh towels in there for your use.”

The staircase angled to the left upon a short gallery, then left again, climbing to a first-story landing, which forked in opposite directions. Mrs. Smithings led Rex to his room in the west wing.

“This will do me fine,” Rex said, glancing around at the Victorian furniture and hand-stitched quilt embracing a brass four-poster bed. The window overlooked the driveway, the impressions made in the snow by his racquets already losing definition as flakes white and chaste as communion wafers floated down past the panes and superimposed their predecessors on the ground below. Even as he watched, the flurries thickened and picked up a furious pace.

“The heating is on,” Mrs. Smithings said behind him, “but you may light the fire in the grate if you wish. Thank you, Clifford. Now go and ask Cook if she needs your dubious help in the kitchen.”

She waited until Clifford was out of earshot and then turned to Rex. “I’m afraid we lost one of our guests,” she told him. “A Mr. Henry Lawdry.”

“Lost him?” Rex asked, imagining him having taken a wrong turn somewhere on the estate and disappearing into a snowdrift.

“He died yesterday afternoon, of a stroke, apparently. He was very old. I thought I should mention it before one of the guests does. We called an ambulance but no one could get here. So I have locked him in room number four, next door, with the window wide open to preserve the body until someone can attend to it.”

“How are the guests taking it?”

“They are a trifle upset. He was a popular old gentleman, a decorated veteran.” Mrs. Smithings turned on a table lamp, dispelling the winter gloom. “We now have eight guests including yourself: Charles and Yvette Perkins, the newlyweds; two men from London in the interior design business; two ladies from Derbyshire holidaying together; and a New York literary agent by the name of Miriam Greenbaum. I shall make the formal introductions at tea.”

She paused, gazing at Rex with a faraway look in her faded blue eyes. He wondered if she was remembering her son killed on active duty in Basra two years before. Rex had not seen him since he was last here, and hadn’t much wanted to, unable to keep up with young Rodney’s insatiable enthusiasm for shooting anything covered in feathers or fur—when he wasn’t busy peeping through the maids’ keyholes.

“
Tempus fugit
,” Mrs. Smithings uttered wistfully, commenting on the all too swift passage of time.

“
Ita vero
,” Rex agreed, already deploring his next birthday.

“Keeping up with your Latin, I see. I suppose you need it in your profession. Your mother tells me you took silk a few years ago. Do you still prosecute?”

“Aye, someone has to bring the criminals to justice. Just when I think I’ve heard what must surely be the last remaining mitigating plea ever to be dreamt up in someone’s defense, I am surprised anew.”

The last one, which he was too modest to cite in present company, being the PMS plea. A lawyer had actually argued that his client never would have doused her deceiving husband’s
membrum virile
in lighter fluid and then set fire to it had she not been suffering from the hormonal effects of Aunt Flo’s impending visit.

“Quite, but desperate times call for desperate measures,” Dahlia Smithings remarked as though reading his thoughts. She crossed to the door. “I trust you will have a pleasant stay, in spite of this infernal snow.”

“I’m sure I shall,” Rex replied, bowing slightly as she left—at the same time wondering why he felt compelled to revert to such anachronistic behavior in her presence.

Closing the door, he began unbundling himself of surplus clothing. Mercifully, the puppy was still asleep in his pocket. Rex planted himself at the oak washstand that would have held a bowl and pitcher prior to indoor plumbing and now accommodated a sink. As he smoothed down his beard and whiskers, he speculated on the pair of single women from north-central England and the American lady whom Mrs. Smithings had mentioned.

He was not free
per se—
Mrs. Wilcox had fulfilled his bachelor needs quite satisfactorily since his wife passed away years before—and yet the company of women could add charm to a room. His mother’s absence from Edinburgh would have provided an ideal opportunity to spend Christmas with Mrs. Wilcox, but alas, she too had left on an errand of mercy. His brush hung in midair as he pondered what might have befallen Moira. Even if the phone lines were down in her part of Baghdad, she could have written to him or at a pinch sent an e-mail if she had access to a computer. He wished he could have managed to persuade her to stay, but Moira Wilcox was a very stubborn woman.

The cold wind and exercise lent a ruddy glow to his already florid complexion, making the green of his eyes all the more vivid. Rex did not consider himself a vain man, but he believed in making the most of what God had seen fit to bestow upon him. Accordingly, he now donned the powder blue lamb’s wool sweater his mother had knitted, fretting as she always did about his catching the flu, as if anywhere could be as bleak and bitter cold as Scotland in the depth of winter. With a glance at his watch, he decided to dispense with the unpacking and go down to tea. As he descended the stairs, he schemed how he might sneak some cake back up to his room for the stray puppy. He hoped it didn’t bark. In his experience, the smaller the dog the more predisposed they were to yapping.

All seven of his fellow guests had congregated in the drawing room by the time he arrived. Mrs. Smithings adroitly made the introductions and then excused herself, leaving the others to sit with cups and saucers in hand, nibbling on cake and sizing up the newcomer.

“So you’re an advocate from Edinburgh?” Anthony Smart asked from a fireside armchair, swinging his shoe over his knee. “Is that the same as a barrister?”

“Aye, it is.”

“Do you defend the buggers or put them away?”

“Put them away. Almost without exception.”

“Our dear Ms. Greenbaum is from New York, so I expect she is very familiar with your breed.”

The lady in question, a forthright person of fifty or thereabouts, sat on a sofa jabbing at a handheld gadget. She peered at Rex over the rims of her glasses. “Hate them—can’t live without them. Publishing lawyers aren’t so bad. Criminal lawyers and personal injury attorneys are the worst.”

“I’m a criminal lawyer.”

“Ah, well. But then, it’s a more respected profession in England.”

“And Scotland.”

Miriam Greenbaum looked blank as though she thought Scotland was in England, and Rex remembered why he sometimes lost patience with Americans.

“The poor man hasn’t been here five minutes and here we are laying into him,” the pretty blonde on the sofa said with a laugh.

Rex had already decided he preferred Helen d’Arcy of the three single female guests. She was approachably attractive, her thick, lackluster hair worn in a casual sweep to her shoulders, a pale shade of pink on her lips. Her friend Wanda looked the neurotic type, and the New Yorker came across as more irritating than a kilt with burrs up the inside. Yvette Perkins, the fourth female guest, sat Velcro-stuck to her husband on a loveseat located by one of the windows.