Docketful of Poesy (24 page)

“But you
are
making headway?”

“Yes.”

“Can you at least tell me when they died? That will
be a matter of public record shortly.”

He sighed. “The coroner is setting the time of death
sometime after eleven o’clock on Wednesday night. And before you
say anything, I’m already aware that you were with Peter Fox at
least part of Wednesday evening because Tracy Burke was able to
confirm it.”

Now there was irony: having to be grateful to Tracy
for corroborating the alibi I was going to supply Peter.

I said, “Peter and I were together the entire
night—until seven o’clock the following morning.”

He sighed. “Grace —”

“It’s true, Brian. Surely you know me well enough by
now to know that I wouldn’t lie to protect Peter if I believed he
was guilty of murder?”

“I suppose not,” he said grudgingly. “But just
because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“I would know if Peter were capable of killing
someone in cold-blood. If Peter were the kind of man capable of
cold-blooded murder he wouldn’t be who he is.”

“Don’t push it,” Brian said dryly. “I believe you if
you say you were with him the night of the twenty-fourth. I’m not
buying the plaster-saint makeover.”

“Fine. Don’t. But isn’t Peter entitled to the same
protections and freedoms as anyone else in this country?”

He was silent.

“I believe your original suspicion was correct. I
believe these attacks on Peter were made by—or, rather, hired by
—criminal associates. But not like you think. Not current
associates. I think these are past acquaintances. I think this has
to do with the jewel robbery that went wrong in Istanbul.”

“Not the Curse of the Serpent’s Egg again,” Brian
said, shaking his head.

“I think so. Because nothing else makes sense.
According to Peter, they broke into Topkapi with a six man team.
Well, technically a five man—person—team including him. After they
stole the jewel, Peter and Catriona Ruthven were cornered. He gave
her the jewel and a few moments head start. He was taken prisoner.
She escaped and eventually handed the jewel off to their fence, the
man who had brokered the heist. His name was Gordon Roget and he
disappeared with the jewel. The problem is, the only people who
knew Peter didn’t have the Serpent’s Egg for longer than a minute
or two were Catriona and Roget. And neither of them apparently
bothered to tell the remaining three thieves.”

“And you think these remaining criminal confederates
are now out to get Peter?”

“I think it’s a possibility. I know Peter thinks it’s
a possibility, whether he’s willing to admit it or not. Until that
possibility arose, I think he was truly bewildered as to why anyone
would want him dead.”

Brian’s eyes looked almost dark in the firelight. “Do
you know the names of these men?”

I shook my head.

“That’s why you’re telling me this,” he said
slowly.

“Yes,” I admitted. “You have the resources to find
out who these men were. Or at least you have a better chance of
finding out than I would since I would have no idea even where to
start.”

“Do you know where Fox is?”

“No.”

“Is he looking for these men?”

I tried to consider this objectively. “I don’t think
so. At least…he didn’t seem to have any interest in pursuing it. He
may have thought better of it.” I remembered that awful morning…in
fact, it had been
this
very morning, although it felt like
days ago. Peter had been…angry. Shocked, I thought. I hadn’t
registered it at the time. I had been too angry and shocked
myself.

Now it occurred to me that something had happened to
him. Something had changed his attitude. What? He had been fine the
day before. We had talked and laughed, and he had not seemed to
take my suspicions about his former cronies in crime all that
seriously.

That evening he had stood me up without a word, and
when I saw him the following morning he had been packing to
leave—and he had told me to go home to the States.

So what had happened in the interim?

A little wearily, Brian said, “All right, Grace. I’ll
look into it. I’m not making any promises, mind. But I will look
into it.”

*****

What had happened to change Peter between Friday
morning and Saturday? The question still haunted me after I had
undressed and climbed into bed that night with my Laetitia Landon
book.

Though my eyes moved down the faded pages describing
L.E.L.’s strange engagement to Governor MacLean, little registered
on my consciousness. This was not a part of her story I enjoyed or
understood. It seemed clear from the exchange of letters that
MacLean had serious doubts about marrying Landon—in one letter to
Letty’s brother he had even denied the engagement existed. He had
done everything but flat-out refuse to marry her,
citing—mostly—that the Cape was no place for a gently bred white
woman. Why he hadn’t simply and finally cried off was a mystery to
me—second only to the mystery of Landon’s determination to marry
him
and leave England.

She had been deserted once; perhaps that was part of
it. She bore the burden for supporting her family, financing them
through her prolific literary output, and perhaps she sought
stability and security of her own—if so it seemed to be the
stability and security of a reed buffeted by the wind.

At first her friends tried to try to talk her out of
it. Later they rallied and—for the most part—supported her
decision. Her enemies seemed mostly amused by her odd choice. No
one seemed to believe that the marriage would last. No one except
Laetitia Landon.

As the date of her wedding drew nearer she settled
all family business, completed all her works in progress, sold her
home, and gave away the possessions she could not take with her.
She made her farewells. MacLean would not consider a formal
wedding, so they married in a parish church with only their
witnesses in attendance.

A short time later they sailed for Africa on the
Governor MacLean
.

In “The Polar Star,” written on that long, horrible
voyage that Landon spent mostly sick in her cabin, she wrote:

Fresh from the pain it was to part —

How could I bear the pain?

Yet strong the omen in my heart

That says—we meet again.

I laid aside my book, took my spectacles off, and
frowned into the distance of memory. One thing that I knew for sure
that had happened to Peter yesterday was that he had gone to
deliver a pair of chairs to the Honourable Angela Hornsby.

And what in the world could have happened to rock him
so at the estate of a middle-aged Member of Parliament? Probably
nothing. It was very unlikely, but what else did I have to go
on?

Brian had said he would check into Peter’s unknown
accomplices in Istanbul, and I knew he would. He had given his
word. But I had no idea how long that might take—and there was no
guarantee that the answer to the attempts on Peter’s life lay in
Istanbul. Perhaps the solution was closer to home than I’d
dreamed.

Perhaps the solution lay on the other side of the
sleeping village: yet another secret concealed within the walls of
the old Monkton Estate.

Chapter Nineteen

I
spent Sunday morning making
phone calls from Sally Smithwick’s house. I couldn’t take the risk
of being overheard phoning from the downstairs lobby at the Hound
and Harrier; so I called my sister-in-law Laurel from Sally’s
kitchen while Sally fed me cocoa and gingerbread cake, and her
enormous black cat—formerly belonging to Miss Webb of the Innisdale
Historical Society—watched me balefully from the sunny window
seat.

“Am I going to help you solve a mystery?” Laurel
asked. “Not that I’m unhappy to sit and read
People
magazines all day, but is there a higher purpose?”

“I hope so,” I said. “It’s a long shot. But Miles
seems pretty predictable in his habits—and his tastes.”

“Okay. I’m on it,” Laurel assured me. “I meant to
ask: how are things going with Peter?”

“Ah,” I said. “Interesting.”

“Good interesting or bad interesting?”

“Oh, you know.”

“Or…you-can’t-talk-right-now interesting?”

“That would be it,” I said.

“Gotcha. Do I call you back at this number or wait to
hear from you?”

“If you find something, leave a message at the Hound
and Harrier, and I’ll run over here and call you back.”

Laurel agreed, I rang off, and Sally, who was
cleaning up the morning dishes, said, “The papers are full of that
poor actress lady. I didn’t realize she was the one from that
police show.
Blue Angel
. It ran over here for a few
years.”

“What do the papers say?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Mostly they go on about the time she
tried to shoot that director, Mr. Friedman. And they talk about her
marriage to that actor. The one who died in that car wreck. And
then her second marriage to that other actor. The one she divorced.
Her daughters are both actresses, did you know?”

“No. I don’t know much about her.”

“She was very active in a number of political causes:
animal rights and clearing mine fields and vegetarianism.”

Was being a vegetarian a political cause? I said,
“Did it sound like the police were making any headway in the
investigation?”

“Oh, they never say much, do they? The police, I
mean. Not ’til they’re ready to make an arrest. There were
reporters prowling through the village this morning.”

“I know. They’re camped outside the Hound and
Harrier.” I glanced over the headlines of
The Clarion,
which
was spread out over the opposite side of the large kitchen table.
It looked very like Innisdale was once more being tagged as the
Murder Capital of the Lake District. “Has there been any news on
the investigation into the death of the February brothers?”

Sally finished loading the dishwasher and turned it
on. “It didn’t sound that way to me. They’ve connected those two
louts to the shootings at Rogue’s Gallery through some shell
casings.”

“Well, that was only a matter of time.” I gazed at
the cat, which was now dozing lightly in the patch of sunlight.
“Did you know them?”

“The February boys? I knew of them. Between them they
didn’t have the brain of a dizzy weasel. If someone really hired
them to murder Mr. Fox it was someone not from these parts. No one
here would be that foolish.”

I thought that over as I called Brougham Manor and
asked for Cordelia.

We chatted briefly, then I asked, “Can you think of a
way you might be able to use your family connections to get in to
see Angela Hornsby?”

“The MP?”

“Yes.”

“Are we sleuthing again?”

“Maybe.”

She laughed merrily. “Leave it to me!”

We made arrangements to meet later that afternoon, I
thanked Sally for the use of her phone and kitchen—which she waved
off, and I walked back to the Hound and Harrier.

*****

Partly to distract myself, and partly because I had a
deadline looming, I spent most of the time before lunch working on
my book.

After glancing through my notes, I reread the final
pages of both fictionalized biographies of L.E.L. Whatever dramatic
and possibly erroneous conclusions Enfield and Ashton might have
drawn, Landon’s letters spoke for themselves. She did her utmost to
make the best of a bad situation. Her husband, whatever kind of
government official he was—and he was apparently a competent and
conscientious one—was an indifferent and selfish spouse. In one of
her final letters she wrote:

He is the most unlivable-with person you can
imagine…He says he will never leave off correcting me ’til he has
broken me of my temper, which you know was never bad.

With the exception of Mrs. Bailey, her serving woman,
Landon was the only white woman on the coast. As well as being the
seat of the Gold Coast colonial government, the fort was a bastion
of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The legendary Gates of No Return
were the exit through which slaves passed as they were herded onto
the waiting ships. The company of slavers, bachelor officers, and
merchants was a far cry from the literary salons of London. Landon
was untrained and mostly unprepared for her new life, for days
filled with cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping.

There was little time to write, but she did manage to
keep in touch with her family and friends, though her connection to
her old life grew more and more tenuous as the months passed. As
she was no longer producing stories and poems in feverish
quantities, the fickle public began to forget her. Yet she
apparently resisted returning to England, and was not entirely
unhappy. Though she seemed to spend most of her life in a state of
near-exhaustion, Landon appeared to view herself as someone living
a great adventure in a new, exotic life.

As for MacLean, he seemed essentially to have lived
his life in a parallel but separate existence to Landon.
Undoubtedly, his was a position of great pressure and
responsibility. He could hardly have chosen a less suitable wife,
but Landon clearly did her best. Perhaps MacLean had loved her in
his own inexpressive and self-occupied way. Or it may have been
that he was pressured into the marriage by guilt and chivalry, and
felt he did not owe Landon much beyond giving her his name and a
home. He probably did not expect her to last long—and she didn’t.
Though whether he expected their marriage to end in her death
remained shrouded in mystery.

*****

“Ouch!” Cordelia complained as I tightly plaited her
long, blond hair. “I don’t understand why I have to go collecting
for charity while looking like I’ve escaped from a nunnery.”