Down the Garden Path (32 page)

“How did she know about that visit?” I managed.

He flapped a hand at me. “We will have to do something about these tell-tale signs of your middle-class upbringing, won’t we? The servants—they tell Mumsie every morsel of Flaxby Meade sublife. And, my flower, pray don’t interrupt me again. Where was I? Ah, yes, Mumsie’s passion for you. It should have been enough to make me loathe you, if you hadn’t been so decorative. People think I’m gay, you know—as if anyone living with Mumsie could subscribe to such a merry-sounding group. Have no worries, my diamond, I have long yearned for the delights as well as the freedoms of marriage. The row I had with Mumsie last night was over you, you know. The bitch actually insisted on grovelling over to Cloisters and proposing to you on my behalf. Marriage, saith Mumsie, is a subject more comfortably broached woman to woman. You cannot conceive my ghastly humiliation when I realized she had escaped from the clutches of that Krumpet woman and was going to declare herself before breakfast. She’s had these turns before—picking on women I wouldn’t have brushed against in the street—but she has never got away from me or Nurse before. She thinks it’s her heart I worry about, as if I wouldn’t stop her wretched ticker like a watch if I could.”

Curiosity won over revulsion. “So what makes you now think that I would—”

“Accept my hand, when I bend the knee?” Godfrey suited action to words. He knelt before me, his red-rimmed, almost lashless eyes on a level with mine. If I were to poke at those eyes with the toasting fork ... “Oh, you will, my beloved; I now have no fear of being spurned. I am, you see, making you an offer you cannot refuse.”

He rose, pounced across the room to a cabinet, and came back carrying a small fold of tissue paper.

A gentle but terrible rustling. I did not have to look to know what would be revealed. The murder weapon. But when I forced my gaze downwards I wasn’t prepared for the rusty stains still coating the blade, or for its being a fish knife. A fish knife I recognized as the one that had lain on the open bureau shelf at Cloisters.

Now I understood the full horror of blackmail. No need for Godfrey to verbalize how incriminating this missing item of cutlery would be to the Tramwells.

How I yearned to throw Godfrey’s proposal back in his teeth with the authentic Regency cry,
I
would die rather than marry you!
But the ones who would die languishing deaths in prison were the Tramwells. Play for time. I told Godfrey his possession of the murder weapon, if it
was
the murder weapon, placed suspicion squarely where it belonged—on him. He bounced off the balls of his feet in glee. His fingerprints weren’t on the knife. He had used his handkerchief when removing it from Minnie that morning in the garden. And Cheynwind had hiding places that made the priest hole at Cloisters resemble a toy cupboard.

“And, my beloved intended, supposing for the fun of it the Tramwells were innocent, but the murderer had wiped off his prints? You do see what a pickle the sisters are in? Pilchards and pickles, oh! it is all too delicious for words.”

I wished Minnie had bitten him.

He gloated down at the knife surrounded by its frill of tissue. “See how sharp it is? What fun the murderer must have had, honing the blade! And what fun the press will have linking this crime to that long-ago duel. Mother England, bored with the coarseness of women’s lib, frozen quiche, bossy computers, and punks, will positively thrill to the upper-crust drama of ancestral home, a body in fancy dress, and two elderly spinsters tottering into the Old Bailey in appalling hats.”

Alas, alack. Godfrey made an excellent case—not against the Tramwells; I believed in their innocence more vigorously than ever—but for himself as my prospective bridegroom. I wanted to charge at him and yank out his hair. One strand would be enough, along with some fuzz from his angora jumper—Chantal could make me up a voodoo replica of him, and I would stick pins in his lemonade-coloured eyes.

“What did you do with the knife while the police were looking for it?”

Wrinkling his nose, Godfrey made a grotesque attempt at looking lofty. “Haven’t you realized by now that I have a genius for psychology? Policemen are usually tall. And tall people suffer from lumbago—they don’t like low places. My dimpled darling, I hid the knife inside the fuse box in the cupboard under the stairs. How convenient that Hy and Prim are such sentimentalists. Their father objected to a telephone disrupting the mood of outmodedness at Cloisters, and they won’t move it from that cupboard. Another little eccentricity sure to delight the press. How about that sherry to celebrate?” Godfrey was reswaddling the knife. “So sorry I can’t offer you any nibbles, but the servants are all out.”

Mum’s voice was as close as when I would call out for her in the night. “All that matters right now is getting away from this house, then talk to someone you can trust.”

“I need time to think over your ... flattering proposal.”

“My flower, you can take all the time you desire—until tomorrow morning. And by the bye, don’t worry that ours will be a marriage in name only. I am not impotent any more than I am gay. Neither am I marrying you entirely to get rid of Mumsie and my paws on my money. It’s an ill wind  ... and, quite unexpectedly, some other financial irons have dropped into the fire.”

* * * *

Somehow I would save myself from this ghastly misalliance. On the road back to Cloisters I came to a telephone kiosk, hesitated, and entered it. Purely for the sake of the Tramwells I would phone Harry. If he should suffer anguished remorse at the thought of my being laid upon the sacrificial altar, I couldn’t help that. One ring, two, three ... No reply. He had failed me again. I dialed the operator and got Maude’s number. If she were home I would go to her cottage and tell her everything. Someone rapped on the glass. I hung up and went outside. A man stepped around me, lifting his hat. Reverend Snapper. The light thrown by the street lamp was poor and he did not recognize me. Or he pretended he didn’t.

Bleak hopelessness was my escort the rest of the way back to Cloisters. As I entered the grounds Hyacinth appeared out of the shadows. She apparently thought I had only been out for a walk. All she asked me was whether I had seen Primrose. She had told Chantal she was going for a stroll, but Primrose never walked at night, being deathly afraid of stepping on and injuring any mice that might be nocturnally traversing the lawn. Butler was still not back, and now Primrose was missing.

“This is all my doing.” Hyacinth was working her hands together. “My reaction to Primrose’s spending the night with Clyde was not as much outrage as sibling rivalry. I couldn’t stand the idea of her knowing something I didn’t. And now Prim has done something foolish, before I can beg her forgiveness for my immature churlishness.”

“Primrose won’t have done anything foolish.” Putting my arm around Hyacinth I guided her back to the house. That remark of hers had certainly implied that, up until now, both sisters had been virginal.

“Nonsense. The ability to make incredible fools of ourselves is what sets humanity apart from the animals.” We stepped into the sitting room through the French windows. “Tessa, one thing I do want you to believe is that, although Primrose and I are not without our faults, we are not ...”

“Murderers? I know you are not.”

“Naturally. That goes without saying. What I am saying is that we are not cheats. Neither of us would dream of fixing the deck or taking a peek at someone else’s hand. Our form of—collaboration—takes acute observation, quick thinking, and an aptitude for making others less ... aware.” Hyacinth remained at the window. “We know, don’t we, that the murderer must be skilled in those traits himself?”

“If he is to succeed.”

She moved the curtain back an inch, staring into the dark garden. “I have talked to Chantal and agree with her that the police do not have the best qualifications for solving this crime. Inspector Lewjack strikes me as an able man, but the old saying, it takes a thief to catch a thief, is very sound.”

I lifted the crystal decanter from the top of the lacquered cabinet and poured us both a glass of port. The thought of sherry made me shudder. “Don’t you think it biased, expecting Butler to ...”

“I wasn’t thinking only of Butler. The word ‘thief is used loosely. Within this house we have a wide range of unorthodox talents. Butler’s snooping expertise, Primrose’s and my gifts, already stated, Chantal’s mystic vision, and your ...”

“My credentials as a confidence trickster?” I handed her a glass and replaced the stopper in the decanter. “They don’t seem too impressive to me.”

“My child, you must not be so harsh. Your performance since coming to Cloisters has been first-rate. Harry’s intervention does not diminish your talents as an actress. That wistful charm of yours will certainly have its uses. The villain has to be brought centre stage for the unmasking.”

This conversation was taking my mind off Godfrey. I joined Hyacinth at the window. “Maybe I am being thick, but doesn’t your premise create its own problems? If we can enter the mind of the murderer—because it takes a wily bird to know one—the same is true in reverse. And much as I hate saying this, we can’t be positive that we don’t have a Judas among us, nodding agreement, putting in his tuppeny-worth, waiting to stab us in the back.” I almost said with a fish knife, and the dark horror of Godfrey squeezed again.

“Ah, my dear! That is where faith comes in.”

As Fergy would say: “Vicar’s salve for hopeless cases.” Night was swooping down upon the house like a vast black crow. No sign of Primrose, no sound of her feet mounting the verandah steps. Hyacinth, saying she would go out and look for her again, asked me to delay the roast. By now it would be shrivelled to nothing. This whole day had been one of waiting. Waiting for the police. Waiting to be interrogated. Waiting to find out what Godfrey had to say. Waiting for Butler’s return. And now, waiting for Primrose.

As I entered the hall, Chantal emerged from the cupboard under the stairs, holding out the phone.

“Godfrey Grundy.”

Ignoring the questioning of her dark eyes, I doubled over and, fighting nausea, followed the cord into darkness. This was what prison would be like—a cramped black hole. The sisters would never survive. I raised the receiver to my ear.

That terrifying, simpering whisper. “Have you decided to make me the happiest man alive? My sweet, impatience is utter anguish. When I envision marriage with you I get delicious tingles up and down my spine, and—would it be naughty to say—in other parts of my anatomy, too. You are so exquisitely right for the drawing room. Or you will be, when I redo you in softer, more muted shades—tone down your hair and persuade you to glide rather than pounce. Knickers! There goes the doorbell. Where are those wretched servants? Botheration, I’d forgotten. Well, nighty-night, my treasure. I will ring you again in the morning. Must trip along now.” Clunk.

In relief at escaping his voice I stood up and cracked my head. But pain in this instance was therapeutic. I returned to my senses. I wasn’t a mesmerized rabbit. At the moment I could not see an escape from Godfrey’s trap, but I would not run whimpering in circles.

Voices out in the hall. Butler! And Harry—the childish urge to run to him had to be fought back, although telling him about Godfrey would perhaps be the responsible, mature thing to do. As I crawled out into the bright light of the hall, he was talking to Chantal, and I heard Godfrey’s name mentioned.

“How are you, Tess? Anything much been happening?” Harry dug the fingers of his right hand through his chestnut hair and looked at me intently. How long until I could fully appreciate the peaceful emptiness of not loving him?

“No more murders, if that is what you mean.”

“I had just got back into the car after posting the letter to your father when I spotted Butler walking from the village and brought him up. The poor bloke’s had a muckraking time of it, but the police couldn’t hold him. When he left, they had just brought a chap named Whitby-Brown in for questioning. But he doesn’t sound too promising. Claimed he was in a minor motor accident and at the time of the murder was sitting in outpatients’. Butler’s gone in to the sitting room to announce his return. Was that the police on the phone?”

Chantal stood watching us.

“No, it was—” I hesitated and saw Hyacinth coming towards us with Minnie bounding at her heels.

“My dears, Primrose has returned. Dinner will be served immediately, and then we will get down to business.”

Harry was graciously offered a share in the now anorexic roast, but he just as graciously refused, saying he had already eaten. The meal was self-serve owing to protocol having been abolished. Chantal and Butler joined us. Conversation, mainly a matter of “pass the gravy,” “more peas, please,” and between Harry and me, silence was absolute. But Hyacinth and Primrose were reconciled. They were once more a team. Butler, despite his extended visit at the police station, was his old self—almost. Behind the immobile, featureless face I sensed excitement. The ticking of his wits.

“Time’s a-wasting,” said Primrose with the slightest quiver in her voice. We all looked at the clock on the mantel. Nine-thirty. Rolling up her serviette, she replaced it in the silver ring by her plate. “And I have already wasted enough precious time today by behaving very childishly. Disappearing like that, causing Hyacinth so much anxiety, I am horribly ashamed. But if you can all understand, I felt I had to be alone to think. About repentance, primarily. My mind kept flitting back to poor dear Father and what he ... might say to me now. And suddenly I felt extremely vexed. Was the murderer suffering even one shred of guilt while I agonized over my sins? Not a scrap, I’m sure. Dressing up poor Mr. Hunt like a joke indicates to me a smugness incapable of remorse. But I am wasting more time. Shall we have coffee in the sitting room? If instant will suit, I’m willing to make it myself as part of my penance.”

“But I am not doing penance, and you never boil the water, Prim,” retorted Hyacinth. Chairs scraped and we all rose. Butler moved soundlessly out to make the coffee.