Christmas is Murder (6 page)

“The old man served himself coffee by mistake,” Anthony recounted. “He was already sitting down and since I was going to get more tea for myself, I offered to get him some as well. We were discussing how bad sugar was for the health, and he mentioned wearing dentures from eating too much of it. I noticed he was spooning the icing out of his tart. Why are you asking? Has this anything to do with Miriam?”

Rex stirred his coffee. “Possibly.”

“You’re suggesting that Lawdry was murdered too, aren’t you?”

“We don’t know for sure.”

A brief chat with each of the other guests who had been present at tea corroborated Anthony’s account and that of Patrick earlier that day. All the guests had been in the drawing room except Charley and Yvette Perkins. Lawdry helped himself to the coffee and iced tart. Anthony was on his way back from the table with Lawdry’s cup of tea when the old man succumbed to a seizure. Patrick came to his assistance first. Anthony left to get Charley from the honeymoon suite. By the time the medic reached the old man, he was dead.

As Rex recalled, the cook had mentioned Anthony and Miriam coming into the kitchen on occasion, but anyone could have snuck in, just as Clifford had managed to smuggle the sherry and dog past her. And yet, if someone had tampered with the tart, how could that person have known whose plate it would end up on? Just as perplexing, the old man didn’t appear to have any personal connection to Ms. Greenbaum. Perhaps a dusting of the candlesticks would produce the necessary leads.

“Rosie, would you be kind enough to fetch the rest of the staff?”

With everyone in attendance, Rex proceeded to sprinkle the talc from the tin of Yardley’s over one of the candlesticks. A sweet smell of rose tickled his nostrils.

“What a lovely fragrance,” Helen said to Yvette. “I’ll have to get some.”

Taking extreme care, Rex blew away at the powder until it adhered only to where oil had been left by someone’s fingers. He then taped over the prints, which he peeled off and placed on the upturned black lacquer tray. Distinct patterns of arches, loops and whorls stood out clearly before him.

“Well, I never,” Charley said.

Mrs. Smithings bent over the tray. “Reginald, you never cease to astound me.”

Rex asked Clifford, Anthony and Charley to step forward. “Since each of you carried at least one of the candlesticks, I’m going to start with you. All your prints should be here. Then we can identify who else’s prints are present.”

“Whaaa—what are you doing?” Clifford asked as Rex reached for his hand and attempted to position one of his fingers on Mrs. Smithings’ stamp pad.

“The police used this technique in the late 1880s—that’s about a decade before this manor was built. They coated a person’s fingertips with ink, like so … and deposited the prints on white paper.” Using gentle pressure, Rex rolled the old man’s inked finger on the blank inside of a Christmas card. “This way, they could match up prints with the patterns of lines found at the crime scene.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Clifford protested.

“I just want to eliminate your prints since you carried the candlesticks from the scullery.”

“But if he committed the murder, the prints won’t prove anything,” Anthony pointed out. “Same goes for me and Charley.”

Rex gave Clifford a damp rag to wipe off his fingers. “I realize that. What will be interesting is if we find a fourth set of prints.” He compared Clifford’s card to the samples on the tray and found matches. “I saw a box of Tiddlywinks somewhere. Could someone bring it to me?”

Patrick handed it to him. Rex extracted yellow discs and placed them above Clifford’s prints on the tray. He repeated the inking procedure with Anthony, color-coding his prints with red discs, and Charley’s with blue. All the prints on the tray were now accounted for. No fourth set of prints existed.

Rex sprinkled the second candlestick with talc and found no prints on it, not even Clifford’s, even though he’d carried both candlesticks into the kitchen. His prints appeared only on the first, along with Anthony’s and Charley’s, who had both taken it down to the cellar. As these constituted the only sets on the tray, it was unnecessary to fingerprint anybody else.

The experiment availed nothing except to prove that the second candlestick tested was the murder weapon, the killer having taken care to wipe it clean.

“And what other magic tricks do you have up your sleeve, Reginald?” Mrs. Smithings asked.

“I’d like to check the rooms upstairs, if I may.”

“The guest suites? And why, pray?”

Rex intercepted a startled look from Yvette to her husband. “Ms. Greenbaum’s manuscript is missing from its file. It might lead us to the perpetrator.” Rex checked his watch, calculating the time difference with the States. “And I’d like to contact her office if possible to notify someone of her death before tomorrow, as the agency is probably closed on Christmas Eve. The manuscript had the phone number on the first page.”

“The phones are out,” Helen reminded him.

“With any luck they’ll be restored.”

“Perhaps it’s in her room,” Mrs. Smithings said.

“I looked, and in any case she was working on it just before she went in to dinner.” Rex glanced around the circle of guests and staff. “I understand what an imposition this might be, but if you would permit me to search all your rooms, it might speed up proceedings when the police finally get here.”

“I don’t mind,” Patrick said. “It would provide a diversion. There’s not much else to do.”

“A real-life game of Cluedo might be fun,” Charley agreed. “Was it Clifford in the kitchen with the candlestick, or—”

“Look ’ere!” Clifford interrupted, bristling with impotent drunken ire.

“Just kidding, mate.” Charley turned to Rex. “Since you wasn’t here when poor old Henry croaked, or in the kitchen when Miriam got whacked with the candlestick, you’re the only one in the clear and the only one we could trust to check our rooms. Just don’t tell anyone what you find in ours,” he added with a chuckle.

“I’ll be the soul of discretion,” Rex assured them all. “In the meantime, I’m going to appoint three groups to search downstairs: Charley, Helen, and Mrs. Smithings will form the first group; Anthony, Wanda, and Clifford, the second; Patrick, Yvette, and Rosie, the third. Mrs. Bellows will come with me.”

He thought the female residents would feel less of a sense of violation if he took a woman with him while he snooped through their personal effects. “May I trouble you for a pair of rubber gloves?” he asked the cook. Her hands were almost as big as his.

“And what exactly are we looking for?” Mrs. Smithings demanded as the cook bustled out of the room.

“Ms. Greenbaum’s manuscript and anything else remotely suspicious.”

“Do we get a prize for the best find?” Helen joked.

“Aye, a kiss under the mistletoe from me.”

Helen let out a delightful trill of laughter. “I’m game,” she told him.

Rex was glad to see she had recovered her spirits.

“This isn’t an Easter egg hunt, you know,” Anthony reminded them. “Miriam is lying dead in the cellar.”

Wanda humphed. “You weren’t so concerned about her when she was alive.”

“And I’ll regret it to my dying day.”

“That won’t do her any good now,” Charley said pragmatically. “You should just be grateful it’s not you that got clobbered.”

“I urge everyone to please be respectful of property,” Mrs. Smithings shrilled. “And to put everything back exactly as you found it. Where shall we start?”

Rex divided the downstairs rooms between the three groups and coughed apologetically. “I’ll need the keys for upstairs.” He decided not to let everyone know he had a master key—it might prove a useful card up his sleeve later on.

“I’m sharing with Rosie,” Mrs. Bellows said. “The room’s unlocked. You’ll not find much of mine there, except for the clothes I arrived in.”

“I wouldn’t want just anyone prying into my things,” Rosie added. “But you seem like a decent sort of bloke and you are in the legal profession, which makes it all right, I suppose.”

“My room’s a mess,” Wanda warned him, handing over her key.

“I know this may seem highly irregular,” Rex said, “but we must get to the bottom of this for everyone’s peace of mind.”

For the peace of mind of the innocent, at any rate, he thought wryly; for the culprit it would be a different matter.

Even if he found
nothing conclusive, Rex reasoned that a search of the guest rooms might provide him with insightful character clues. Much could be revealed by a person’s possessions. As he exited the drawing room, the dog bolted after him from the direction of the kitchen.

“What’s that dog doing here?” Mrs. Smithings demanded, her displeasure tightening the angles of her face. “I thought when I first heard about it that it was a joke.”

Clifford shuffled forward. “Ee got loose. ’Ere, boy!”

“Pets are not permitted in the establishment. Clifford, you of all people should know better. Whose dog is it anyway?”

“It’s mine,” Rex confessed. “At least temporarily. I found it by the train station, and Clifford is being kind enough to keep it in the scullery until we decide what to do with it.”

“Well, it’s not in the scullery now, is it?” Mrs. Smithings asked rhetorically. “And it’s not even a pedigree!”

The puppy yapped, jumping up at Rex’s feet, waiting for him to produce a treat from his pocket. “I’m sorry it’s no a corgi,” he said.

She put a hand to her temple. “Such a trying noise! As soon as Clifford has finished his part in the search, he must take that—that
dog
back to the scullery and keep it there.”

Rosie crouched by the puppy and fed it a sugar lump while Mrs. Smithings swept down the hallway with Charley and Helen in tow to perform their part of the search.

Sticking his thumbs in his ears, Charley wiggled his fingers behind the proprietor’s back. Helen threw Rex an amused smile as Mrs. Smithings disappeared into the parlor-office.

“All right, Mrs. Bellows,” Rex said. “Are you ready?”

The puppy made to follow Rosie as she joined Yvette and Patrick, assigned the library, kitchen, and scullery—then changed its mind and trailed Rex up the stairs.

Feeling like a clumsy cat burglar in his latex gloves, borrowed from Mrs. Bellows, Rex started with the rooms in the west wing. Disregarding basic articles of clothing and hygiene, he wrote down a summary of items in his notebook:

Patrick Vance (#1): Homebrewed valerian root sleep aid, blank sketchbook, leather manicure set.

Anthony Smart (#2): Rogaine, vitamin supplements, library edition of
The Razor’s Edge
by Somerset Maugham, half-empty bottle of Courvoisier brandy stowed away in a tallboy.

Working his way down the corridor, he skipped his own room and crossed the landing to the east wing. Unlike Patrick and Anthony’s suite, Wanda’s room looked like a grenade had exploded, dispersing clothes, purses, and shoes in every direction.

“Lordie,” Mrs. Bellows exclaimed when she saw the crammed contents of the medicine cabinet.

Rex made a brief inventory of the arsenal of lethal-sounding products designed to fight wrinkles, defend against free radical damage, and attack excess pounds, and added:
Incense tapers (patchouli), 2 issues of
Cosmopolitan
, fitness magazines, photo album, key labeled “Master” in bedside drawer.

That
, he thought triumphantly, was how she had been able to get into number four to pay the dead Mr. Lawdry a visit.

Next came Helen’s bedroom. Rex felt a ripple of voyeuristic anticipation and found himself experiencing a sense of relief that, though her room had a lived-in look, it in no way resembled the chaos residing in Wanda’s.

Helen d’Arcy (#6): Knitting needles, sundry balls of wool, textbook on child psychology, unfinished letter to “Clive.”
What was this? He read it to find out.

“… I’m sorry I couldn’t go skiing with you in Aviemore, but I felt we needed some time apart. I’m not the person you think I am …”

Mrs. Bellows tut-tutted as Rex perused the private letter.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he told her. Where had he heard that before? “Well, no sign of the manuscript so far.”

He locked the door and proceeded to the last occupied guest suite. “Lucky number seven,” he said, opening the door to the honeymoon suite. “Stay,” he commanded the dog, which paid no attention and shot in between his feet.

Unlike the other suites, where two adjoining rooms shared a bath, this was a double room dominated by a canopy bed draped in rumpled yellow floral chintz. A teddy bear stared out from the snowy starched pillows. Picking it up, Rex saw it was zippered at the back, the inside lined with red quilted satin. Under Mrs. Bellow’s baleful eye, he tipped it over the bedspread, and an oval cameo brooch tumbled out from among the silky folds of a negligee.

Upon closer examination, he found that the brooch was in fact a locket containing a worn engraving, which he couldn’t make out, even when he held it under the bedside lamp. He would need his magnifying glass. The cook scowled at him when he pocketed it.

“Evidence,” he explained, scribbling in his notebook.

Mr. & Mrs. Perkins (#7): Soft toy containing ivory cameo brooch approx. 5 by 4 cm with gold grapevine border; intact packet of oral contraceptive; massage oil; book entitled
Hot Sex for Cool Couples.

“Oooh, I like the sound of that,” Mrs. Bellows said when she saw it on the bedside table. “Wonder if they’ve discovered something new since me and the old man got wed. After thirty-five years I’d as soon have a cup of tea.”

“Perhaps you could get a copy from the local library. Now then, on to the staff accommodation,” Rex directed, letting her lead the way down the corridor. He whistled to the puppy to follow.

“Mrs. Smithings’ is this door here,” the cook informed him. “Best keep the dog out.”

Facing south over the garden, the suite consisted of a sitting room, bedroom, and bath. Unlike the parlor-office downstairs, it was almost Spartan in its furnishing. The few pieces in the rooms, however, were choice, including a cherry wood chest of drawers and an intricately carved armoire, which Rex opened. An aroma of mothballs and lavender enshrouded the black dresses that Mrs. Smithings favored.

Next, he lifted the lid of a colored glass jewellery box on the dressing table. “I thought Mrs. Smithings owned a great many jewels,” he commented to the cook, his voice seeming to echo in the absolute silence of the room.

“Most are kept in a safe downstairs.”

A framed sepia photograph of Mrs. Smithings’ late husband, one booted foot resting on a felled elephant, stood on the mantelpiece beside a marble and ormolu clock pointing to ten on the hour. The blue Victorian tiles decorated with white swans surrounding the fireplace were cracked. It must cost a good deal of money to maintain this drafty old place, Rex reflected.

Another photograph, this one of her son at the officer cadets’ Passing Out Parade at Sandhurst took pride of place by her bedside. A framed newspaper cutting headlined “Troop Commander Captain Rodney Smithings, Royal Artillery, Killed by RPG in Iraq” hung on the wall among a series of botanical watercolors.

Feeling here more than elsewhere that he was intruding, Rex concluded his tour of the owner’s rooms and succinctly noted:
Mrs. Smithings’ suite: Jewellery box containing one pair of pearl earrings; Rodney memorabilia; painkillers for rheumatoid arthritis.

“You didn’t write much,” Mrs. Bellows observed.

“Didn’t find much.”

The cook eased the door shut behind them and glanced at her watch. “It’s a quarter to ten. Just Rosie’s room now, thank goodness—I’m ready for bed.”

Rex checked his own watch. “The clock on Mrs. Smithings’ mantelpiece must be fast.”

Mrs. Bellows lit the wall sconces and turned into a corridor skirting the east wall of the house. Behind a door at the end of the corridor rose a flight of narrow stairs, and Rex suddenly recalled the way to his old attic room through what he used to pretend was a secret passage.

A warren of erstwhile servants’ rooms burrowed under the roof.

“Most of the rooms are used for storage,” Mrs. Bellows explained.

When Rex opened a door upon a dark space filled with sports equipment and a broken rocking horse, a squeaking horde of hump-backed shapes scurried away across the floorboards. One ran onto his foot and up his pant leg. Mrs. Bellows shrieked. Grabbing a broom, he swept the rat into the air and leaped out the door, slamming it shut.

“Now, why did you have to go in there for?” the cook asked, her bosom heaving with emotion. “Clifford’s supposed to keep the rats under control. They’ll gnaw away at the timber until there’s nothing left.” Whisking the broom from his hands, she shielded herself with it and hastened down the corridor.

Rosie’s room was off to the left. Squeezing through the door to the sloping-walled room, Rex bumped his head and careened into a walnut chest of drawers, sending a pile of Mills & Boon novels toppling onto the carpet. Above one of the twin beds hung a series of photos and an advent calendar sparkling with glitter. That day’s paper window remained closed. As a boy, Rex couldn’t wait to open the windows, each morning awaking in growing anticipation of ever bigger Christmas scenes.

“That’s Rosie’s bed,” Mrs. Bellows said. “No room to swing a cat in here, is there?”

Rex came to from his memories. “What happened to Rosie’s sister? I heard she used to work here.”

“Oh, it was a terrible tragedy. They were like two peas in a pod.” Mrs. Bellows lifted a corner of her apron and blotted her eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me—I get all teary when I think about it.”

“An illness?” Rex probed.

“Train wreck.” She peeked through the twill drapes on the dormer window. “The snow’s eased up at last.”

“Good. I’ll take the dog out for a quick walk before bed. Which reminds me, where is the wee devil?”

“He must still be downstairs.”

After poking his head round the bathroom door in the corridor, Rex flipped to a fresh page in his notebook.

Rosie Porter (attic room): Romance novels, advent calendar, several photos of self.

He thought this quite narcissistic. Thanking the cook for her assistance, he made his way back down the narrow stairs, calling to the dog at intervals. He stopped by his room and with the aid of his magnifying glass deciphered the inscription inside the brooch before returning it to the honeymoon suite. It was only when he was halfway down the main stairway that the impact of what he had copied suddenly hit him.

With a tingly feeling that he might be on to something, he opened the guest book on the tripod table in the foyer and scanned the page until he found Lawdry’s entry:
Henry D. Lawdry, The Paddocks, Hillcrest, Surrey.

Rex compared the initials to the engraving from the locket.
To my beloved girl—Eternally Yours, H.D.L
.

What was a brooch inscribed with the dead man’s initials doing hidden away in the Perkins’ suite?