The Mystery at Underwood House (An Angela Marchmont Mystery) (22 page)

‘
A kind of blackmail, you mean?’

‘
I doubt she saw it in that way, since the money was rightfully hers, but yes, I suppose one could call it that.’

‘
The Hayneses ought to be grateful to you for rescuing those two letters from the attic,’ said Jameson. ‘Had they got burnt then there would have been no evidence of a secret trust and the money would have gone to Mr. Faulkner’s heirs instead of Philip’s.’

‘
Was there nothing else in writing, then?’

‘
Nothing that we could find. But thanks to the letters there should be no difficulty now in returning the money to Ursula and Susan.’

‘
So Ursula’s plan worked in the end,’ said Angela. ‘She will be glad of the money now that she has to fund her son’s legal costs. Do you think they will be very hard on him?’

‘
Who knows?’ said Jameson. ‘Peake’s seem to be rather embarrassed that they allowed a trusted employee to get away with stealing so much money, and so they are attempting to maintain a discreet distance. But that doesn’t alter the fact that a crime has been committed.’

‘
True,’ said Angela, ‘and it’s not as though there were any mitigating circumstances either—Robin simply got greedy and took what was not his. However, he has Ursula on his side.’

‘
Yes,’ agreed Jameson. ‘I shouldn’t like to bet on the might of the law winning out against a Mrs. Ursula Haynes on the warpath.’

The inspector shortly afterwards took his leave and Angela was left to her own reflections. On the whole she was satisfied at the way things had turned out, although she was sincerely sorry that Guy had come to such an unfortunate end even if he had tried to murder her. He had been a most charming and clever young man. Who knew how he might have turned out had he been more fortunate in his family history?

But Philip Haynes: what kind of man must he have been, to have wanted to cause such chaos among his family even after his death? John had suggested half-jokingly that his father’s will had been designed especially to set the Hayneses at each other’s throats, and sure enough he had been right. Philip’s malice had led to the untimely deaths of at least three of his children and one of his grandchildren, as well as his solicitor. John was the only child now; thank God he had turned out a sensible man, since he was the only one left to pick up the pieces after the destruction wrought by his father. It would be a long, hard task.

A few days later Angela received a visit from Louisa, who was dying to talk to her about the whole affair.

‘
I’m so glad you are much better, Angela,’ she said as soon as she entered the room. ‘I have been feeling quite dreadful, because of course it was all my fault. I ought never to have asked you to do it, but I assure you I never
dreamed
that you should be plunged into danger like that. Please say you will forgive me.’

‘
There’s nothing to forgive, so you needn’t worry in the slightest,’ said Angela. ‘I am only sorry the thing couldn’t have been resolved without burning your house down.’

‘
It’s not quite as bad as that,’ said Louisa. ‘Obviously there’s been quite a bit of damage to the roof and some of the upstairs rooms will be uninhabitable for a while, but luckily the men managed to put the fire out before it took a proper hold.’

‘
That is a relief,’ said Angela. ‘John would never speak to me again if I destroyed his beloved Underwood House. How is he, by the way?’

‘
Exceedingly upset and ashamed, and doing his best to hide it by being as bad-tempered as possible.’

‘
Dear me. Poor Louisa—are you having to bear the brunt of it all yourself?’

‘
Don’t worry about me. Had I been offended by John’s manners I never should have married him in the first place. He has been truly distressed by the whole affair, so we are all being kind to him.’

‘
How did he know who Guy was?’

‘
He accidentally overheard Philip talking to Mr. Faulkner about it a couple of years ago, at about the time Philip was drawing up the final version of his will and creating the secret trust. He kept quiet about it because Guy hadn’t mentioned it himself, so John thought he must be ashamed of it.’

Angela hesitated.

‘
Louisa, you don’t suppose he knew that Guy—’ she stopped.

Louisa sighed.

‘
Truly, I don’t see how he could have known who Guy was and not have suspected that he was behind the deaths, but John is a stubborn old fool and, as they say, there are none so blind as those who will not see. Guy was the son of his favourite sister, so naturally John didn’t want to believe he could have been guilty of anything so terrible. I know my husband very well, Angela, and I know that he wouldn’t have let the murders continue had he been fully aware of who was behind them. I simply choose to think that he had shut his eyes to the truth.’

‘
Has he forgiven Ursula for her outburst the other night?’

‘
Oh, those two,’ said Louisa in exasperation. ‘Do you know, I believe they enjoy fighting. He knows she is highly-strung and yet he insists on goading her.’

‘
But you must admit she was wrong about Donald.’

‘
She was, and I don’t imagine Don will ever forgive her. And yet, she was right about the will, wasn’t she?’

‘
Yes,’ said Angela. ‘She knew about the secret trust, but had merely mistaken whom it was destined for.’

‘
It was an understandable error, I suppose. Donald’s history wasn’t generally known, and we had been vague about it even to him, as what good would it do him to hear the truth when we are the only parents he has ever known?’

‘
What is the truth?’

‘
Very prosaic, I’m afraid. His mother and father were tenants on the estate here, but she died giving birth to him and the father was quite unable to look after the baby alone, so we took him in and promised to look after him. Oddly enough, his mother had something of a reputation in the district for second sight, and I’ve always assumed that that is where he gets his occasional fey fits from. His father died a few years ago, so he has no real family left now.’

‘
It was an easy mistake for Ursula to make, then,’ said Angela. ‘I had considered the theory myself, but the dates were wrong. Donald is in his early twenties, but Christina’s son was born more than thirty years ago. Guy was far more of an age to fit the description. I suppose they have removed his body by now.’

Louisa dabbed at a tear.

‘
Yes, poor boy,’ she said. ‘I wish I had known about him years ago, when he was a little boy. We should have been more than happy to take him in after Christina died and bring him up as we did Donald. What a dreadful end. I feel so terribly sorry for him. If only he had confided in John, then all this might have been avoided.’

Angela nodded but said nothing. Only Inspector Jameson knew the full truth about how Guy had met his death, and they had agreed that it would be better not to make the knowledge public. Angela was relieved: although she knew herself to be perfectly justified in what she had done, since she had been fighting for her life against a murderer, she felt the blood on her hands and was unwilling to have her actions and motives thrust into the spotlight. The official version of the story was that Guy had fallen into the flames accidentally while attempting to grab the document box, and as far as Angela was concerned the Hayneses were more than welcome to believe it.

‘
So, then, I suppose that’s that,’ said Louisa. ‘Ursula was quite right when she said that there was a murderer among us. I can’t thank you enough, Angela, for all you have done. The atmosphere at Underwood was growing quite poisonous, but now you have solved the mystery we can start to—not return to normal, perhaps, but at least return to living in some kind of peace.’

‘
There are one or two questions that I should still like to have answered,’ said Angela. ‘The first is: where was John when Winifred fell? He claimed to have been in his study, but Donald said he wasn’t. Perhaps he was doing something quite innocent, but I am curious to know.’

‘
I know,’ said Louisa. ‘He told me. He was out walking in the grounds. He had seen Guy return earlier and thought nothing of it, but then when all the commotion began and Guy pretended he had turned up an hour or two later than he actually did, John didn’t want Guy to know he had been seen, and so pretended he had been in his study all afternoon rather than outside.’

It sounded like a pretty thin story to Angela, and she wondered whether there was something more to it than that. Had John, in fact, seen Guy climbing down the ivy from Donald’s bedroom and chosen to keep quiet about it? Naturally Louisa was reluctant to believe that John had known of Guy’s guilt, but Angela was not so sure. However, there was no use in pursuing the point; Guy was dead now, and John was old enough to look after his own conscience, so she wisely resolved to remain silent on the subject.

‘
What of Stella and Donald?’ she asked. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that they have made it up.’

‘
My dear, I shouldn’t have expected it myself either, but strange to tell they seem to have done just that. I don’t know quite how it happened, as the things that go on between young couples nowadays are quite beyond my comprehension, but I shouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the engagement is back on.’

A day or two later Angela heard the whole story when she received a visit from the girl herself. Stella arrived looking at once embarrassed and pleased, in order (she said) to make certain that Mrs. Marchmont was quite all right after her adventure in the attic, and to thank her for solving the mystery and proving once and for all that Donald was not guilty of killing half his family.

‘
But how on earth did you get the idea into your head that he was the murderer?’ asked Angela.

‘
Oh! Wasn’t it ridiculous of me?’ she replied. ‘I hardly know how it started, but just after Philippa died we had one of our usual blow-ups about something or other, and things got rather heated and Don got one of his funny fits and started intoning portentously—idiot that he is—about how we should be careful about quarrelling at Underwood, since the house was susceptible to human emotions and might turn on us.’

‘
I have heard him in similar vein,’ agreed Angela.

‘
I tell you, sometimes I think he’s quite mad, but Aunt Louisa says he is just sensitive and needs a practical sort of girl to put him right. Anyhow, of course I told him not to be such a fathead, but that just made him worse and he started talking about how Philippa had disliked the house and had died as a result. Perhaps I was in an odd mood myself, but something about the way he said it made me see him suddenly in a new light and I started to wonder whether these fits of his were quite as harmless as they seemed, or whether there was something more serious behind them.

‘
Things went on as usual for a month or two, then one day Don started saying that he could feel something not quite right in the air. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was saying to begin with, but he became quite insistent. He was worried, he said, that something terrible was about to happen, but he couldn’t say what it was. Shortly after that, Winifred fell over the balustrade and died.’

Angela suddenly remembered something.

‘
Louisa said that when it happened, you ran over to Donald and cried, “Not another one!” or something like that.’

‘
Did I?’

‘
Perhaps you were thinking about what he had said about the house turning on those who disliked it.’

‘
That’s quite likely,’ agreed Stella. ‘But I didn’t suspect him of having had a hand in it—not then, at any rate.’

‘
When did you start to suspect him?’

‘
When Edward died. A week or two before the family meeting he went all funny again, and started saying that he could feel something wrong. It was just like when Winifred died, only this time I listened to what he was saying and began to be terribly afraid. That night, after Edward rushed out of the house, Don left the room and I didn’t see him for the rest of the evening. The next day Edward was found in the lake, and people started asking questions and I didn’t know what to think. The police wanted to know what we had all been doing that evening after the row, and Don told them that he’d gone to sit quite innocently in the library with a book, but by that time I didn’t know whether I ought to believe him or not.

‘
Of course, I didn’t think he had set out deliberately to murder his aunts and uncle, but he had behaved so oddly at around the time of each of the deaths that I thought he might have had some kind of brainstorm and killed them without knowing it. I thought that perhaps he had been working too hard and needed to see a doctor. I tried to ask him gently about it, but he just got cross every time I did and we ended up rowing again. By then I had fully convinced myself that he was the killer, and it was coming up to the date of the next family meeting and I was getting very scared. Oh, Mrs. Marchmont,’ she said, ‘What a fool I made of myself that evening! When Ursula started accusing Don I thought it
must
be true. I thought he would never forgive me after that night.’

‘
Then you never cared for Guy?’ said Angela.

Stella shook her head, eyes wide.

‘
Of course not,’ she said. ‘He was amusing company, that’s all. Of course, I’m sorry about what happened, but he was a murderer—there’s no escaping the fact—and so he deserved it.’

‘
You don’t feel sorry for him?’

‘
No,’ she said with decision. ‘I know one ought to feel sympathy for his difficult childhood and all that, but I don’t. Lots of people have difficult childhoods and don’t go about killing people. Murder is wrong and that’s that.’

‘
That’s that,’ repeated Angela to herself later when Stella had left. She was a little surprised at the girl’s uncompromising attitude, but supposed it was only to be expected given the resilience of young people these days to tragedy and disaster.

She sat for a while in thought, then stood up and looked about her. She was growing restless after several days indoors and determined to go out.

‘
What I need is a new hat,’ she said, ‘and perhaps a scarf and some gloves. Now, where did I see that darling little red silk cap the other day? Bond Street, I think it was.’

She rang the bell for Marthe, but it was William who answered.

‘
I beg your pardon, ma’am, but I was coming to return this,’ he explained when he saw her look of surprise. He looked round, reached into his pocket and brought out the little revolver that she had lent him a few days earlier. ‘I guess you need it more than I do,’ he said.

‘
Thank you,’ she said, taking it from him. ‘It was one of a pair, but the other is no more so I suppose I ought to try and keep this one safe.’

He shuffled a little and looked sheepish.

‘
I’m sorry I failed you the other day, ma’am,’ he said in a rush.

‘
You didn’t fail me, William,’ she said. ‘It was a miscalculation on my part. I ought to have predicted that he would have doubled back into the house.’

‘
A whole hour I wasted searching through those woods for him,’ he said angrily. ‘When I got down to the little cove I wondered why the only person I could see there was Mr. Donald Haynes sitting on a tree trunk with his head in his hands. It took me far too long to realize I’d been tricked. You ought never to have had to face him alone.’