Death at Daisy's Folly (23 page)

“To tell the truth,” Eleanor giggled, “I couldn't decide which of them would have the worst of it. Samuel Isaacson is so
old,
and Verena Rochdale is such a prude.”

Lady Rochdale, for her part, asserted in a tone of high dudgeon that she had slept entirely and indisputably alone, her husband having occupied another room some distance down the hall, and that if Mr. Isaacson had attempted to enter her room (mistaking it for his own, no doubt) she knew nothing of it. But there was an apprehension in Lady Rochdale's tone that made Kate wonder if the woman was telling the truth. The upstairs maids were more forthcoming in their replies to Kate's questions, but they had been asleep in the servants' wing of the house, quite distant from the guests' bedrooms, and could only confirm the hours at which their mistresses retired and rose.

Finally, the only lady remaining to be questioned was the Countess herself. Kate was about to go in search of Charles to ask if she should undertake the interview when there was a tap on the door and he came in. Her heart lifted with pleasure and she went to him eagerly, hands out, but stopped when she saw that he was accompanied. The man with him was tall and slightly stooped, in his late thirties, clean-shaven except for brown muttonchop whiskers, and pale, as if he spent most of his time indoors. He walked with a noticeable limp, Kate saw, a kind of quick, crabwise scuttle, his right leg being shorter than the left. His name was John Miles, and he and Charles were obviously well acquainted. He was the surgeon from Chelmsford who had been summoned to perform the autopsy.

Kate extended her hand when Charles introduced them. “I am glad to meet you, Doctor Miles,” she said. “I hope the autopsy has yielded some useful information.”

Miles's eyes widened and he turned to Charles with undisguised disbelief. “Oh, come now, Charlie. You don't mean to say that this
woman
is your associate?”

“And soon to be my wife,” Charles said, and put his arm around Kate's shoulders. “You'll find her, as I have, a remarkable woman, with uncommon interests.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” the doctor muttered in an astonished voice, fixing Kate with a penetrating stare. She was not sure whether she should feel affronted or complimented.

“You certainly will be,” Charles said, “if you go about regularly insulting your friends' wives-to-be.” He smiled at Kate. “Pay no attention to this rogue, Kate. He knows so few singular women that he does not know how to respond when he meets one. Were your interviews productive?”

“I have certainly heard enough lies,” Kate said, rueful. “The ladies seemed remarkably unwilling to part with their secrets, and the servants appear to have none.” She gave the surgeon an inquiring look. “Was anything learned from the autopsy?”

“John is about to tell us,” Charles said. He pulled out a chair at the table and Kate took it. Charles took another, and motioned to the surgeon. “Sit down, John, and give us the gory details.”

“I doubt Miss Ardleigh will want to hear,” Dr. Miles said, seating himself.

“You have nothing to fear in that regard,” Charles said. “Kate is no doubt curious.” He took her hand. “Say on, John.”

The surgeon gave Kate a doubtful look, but obeyed. “Very well, then. From the damage to the cranial region—specifically, the two frontal bones and the frontal lobe of the brain—I have concluded that the path of the bullet was almost perfectly horizontal.”

Kate was listening attentively. “Then he
was
sitting down when the bullet struck him,” she said thoughtfully, “and the assailant was standing.”

The surgeon gave her a searching look. “I believe you are correct, Miss—”

“Kate, please.”

“Kate, then.” He shifted in his chair. “You are correct. The victim was six feet two inches tall. Had he been standing, and his assailant standing, the missile would most likely have taken an upward trajectory.”

“If he were seated, however,” Charles said, “he should have pitched forward and fallen facedown. Yet he was found faceup. His killer must have turned him over. I wonder why.”

“Perhaps to be certain that he was dead,” the surgeon remarked.

“Or to be certain that the note in his pocket should be noticed immediately,” Kate said. “It was loosely folded and inserted into the pocket with a good bit of paper protruding—hardly the way a gentleman would have safeguarded an appointment for an assignation.”

Charles nodded, and she knew he had made note of her point. “I take it that we can discount the probability of suicide,” he said to the surgeon.

“It would have been most awkward for the victim to have held the weapon horizontally in front of his forehead, with the barrel perfectly level,” Miles replied. “In my experience, suicides shoot themselves in the temple or behind the ear, with the muzzle held against the head.”

“When I examined the body,” Charles said, “I noticed powder bums to the forehead, suggesting that the weapon was discharged at a distance of six inches or less, but not in contact with the skin.”

“Agreed again.”

“You recovered the projectile?”

The doctor produced a small glass vial. Charles uncorked it and shook out a lead pellet about the shape and size of his small fingernail. He examined it, then gave it to Kate. It was heavier than she had expected, with a slightly roughened, silvery-gray surface. The base was concave and the nose, originally round, was now somewhat flattened. She shivered, thinking that the thing had just been plucked out of Wallace's brain, and placed it back into Charles's extended hand.

“Soft lead,” Charles said thoughtfully, turning it over in his fingers. “Perhaps a hundred grains, probably thirty-two caliber. Fired from a derringer or a small revolver.” He turned to the surgeon as if for confirmation.

“You're the expert, Charlie,” the doctor said with a shrug. “But yes, I would agree. A derringer or revolver.”

“Why did it not ... go all the way through?” Kate asked.

“Because the handgun in question fires a low-weight, low-velocity bullet,” Charles replied. “It lacked sufficient momentum to penetrate the occipital bone.” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and took out a small leather kit. From it he extracted a short knurled rod with a needle fixed to one end and began to inscribeaWupon the base of the bullet.

“What the devil are you doing?” Miles demanded.

“I am marking the fatal missile with the victim's initial so as to prevent its being confused with any other.”

“But we have no other,” Kate said.

“Not yet.” Charles reached into another pocket and took out a small hand lens. “If, however, we come upon a weapon similar to the one that discharged this bullet, we will fire it and compare the test bullet against this one. The more significant similarities we find, the more confident we can be that we have discovered the murder weapon.”

John Miles brightened. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “As Professor Lacassagne did a few years ago in Lyons. Now,
that
was a brilliant piece of forensic detecting!”

“Almost,” Charles replied. “Good enough to convince the court, at any rate. I fear, however, that the fact that a weapon has fired the fatal bullet does not, in and of itself, tell us who fired it.” He turned the bullet under the lens. “Six grooves,” he murmured, “with a right-hand twist.” He pointed with the needle. “And this groove is noticeably deeper than the others.”

“If I remember what you said this morning,” Kate said, “that means that every other bullet fired from the murder weapon will have six grooves with a right-hand twist, one of which is deeper than the others. And oh, yes, it will be thirty-two caliber.”

“Precisely,” Charles said, giving Kate the smile of a teacher who has just heard the recitation of a star pupil. “I would wager that these characteristics differentiate the weapon that fired this bullet from ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of similar weapons.”

Kate shook her head wonderingly. “It's the tiniest details that make the difference, isn't it?”

The surgeon whistled. “Well, I can see that criminals won't have much of a chance from now on. With information like this, the police will—”

Charles laughed curtly. “The police are ill-equipped and ill-trained to gather information like this. Judges and juries don't know what to do with it, either. Of course, the impact of such testimony can loosen a guilty tongue, and the criminal may confess if he is confronted with facts which he knows to be true. But it will be a great many years before criminals are regularly convicted on the basis of scientific proof of guilt.”

“I daresay you're right, Charlie,” the surgeon said. “The juries I have encountered have very little regard for scientific testimony.”

Kate laughed. “If Conan Doyle only knew about these new techniques, Sherlock Holmes might not have to go through such protracted contortions of logic.”

Charles replaced the bullet in the vial and pocketed it. “Perhaps Beryl Bardwell should educate him.”

“Beryl Bardwell?” Miles asked, looking mystified.

“A mutual friend with an informed interest in such matters,” Charles said, and Kate smiled.

That Edward [the Prince of Walesl loved Frances [Daisyl is beyond question. The open recklessness with which he championed her cause was enough to prove the intensity of his infatuation.... But his letters show more than infatuation: they show the depths of a growing devotion.

—THEO LANG
The Darling Daisy Affair

 

Chatsworth

My Darling Daisy,
We have an enormous but pleasant party here, though everything reminds me so much of the happy days we spent here two years ago! ...
We have had some very pleasant shooting today, many rabbits and some high pheasants.
We go to Town on Saturday till Monday, and on to Sandringham on 13th.
God bless my own adored little Daisy wife!

For ever yours, Your only love, Bertie

 

 

C
harles saw Miles to the hallway, then returned to stand beside Kate's chair. He smiled down at her and touched the thick russet hair piled on her head, untidy now, after an afternoon's work. Ink smudged her cheek and there was a matching stain on her index finger, testimony to the penned notes in front of her.

Charles's glance lingered. He thought that she made an earnest, pretty detective and would make an even lovelier wife. He followed with his eye the curve of her shoulders, the rounded swell of her breasts under the stuff of her dress, the soft waist he felt quite sure was uncorseted. Then, guiltily aware that he was trespassing in dangerous territory and uncomfortably warm with the desire that suddenly coursed through him, he pulled his attention back to the matter at hand. He sat down on the other side of the table, carefully keeping his eyes on her face.

“May I hear the results of your inquiry?” he asked.

“It will be a short recital,” Kate said, and reported what she had learned, adding her surmises at the end. “Of the women,” she concluded, “only Malvina Knightly and Lillian Forsythe can provide corroborated accounts of their whereabouts for the entire night. I am assuming that their statements will be borne out by their companions, as they are by the maids. The other women have no alibis. They all had the opportunity to kill Wallace, but of them, only Felicia Metcalf seems to have had a motive. Jealousy is a powerful passion. It could well have driven her to murder. And she did lie about going to Wallace's room.”

Teasingly, he took her hand. “You speak with authority. Is jealousy a passion you have experienced?”

She shook her head. “No, Charles. Believe me, please. I have never loved before I loved you.” Her face was grave, her hazel eyes truthful, and he flushed, half-ashamed of his banter and marveling once again at her honesty and directness. Most women, schooled in the duplicitous artifice that seemed native to the sex, would have allowed themselves to be reluctantly coaxed to a coy admission of former lovers.

Then her lips curled in a smile, humorously teasing in its turn. “Of course,” she added, “jealousy is Beryl Bardwell's stock in trade. To take away jealousy as a motive for her various murders would be like stealing crimson from an artist's palette.”

He laughed too, delightedly. “Very well, then. Let us assume, on the irrefutable authority of Beryl Bardwell, that Lady Metcalf's jealousy could have driven her to shoot Wallace.”

Kate reclaimed her hand, becoming serious. “Actually, Charles, it would not have been easy for
any
lady to shoot the man, at least as we have reconstructed the crime.”

“Indeed?” He was surprised. “You don't think a woman emotionally capable of such a criminal act?”

“Of course I do,” Kate said firmly. “The female of the species can be even more deadly than the male, given suf ficient provocation. But we have established, have we not, that Wallace was seated when he was shot? I observed at luncheon yesterday that whatever else he was, the man was unquestionably a gentleman. I doubt that he would have remained sitting in the presence of a lady. Of
any
lady,” she repeated, “especially one that he had disappointed. A consciousness of guilt would have brought him to his feet immediately.”

Charles stared at her, dumbfounded. “Of course!” he exclaimed, wondering why he had not thought of this small but significant bit of information. “I myself know how impossible it is to sit in the presence of a standing lady. The body simply assumes the orthodox attitude, with or without the mind's consent. So,” he added, “it is a man we are looking for.” Thinking of Daisy, he felt inordinately relieved.