The Shadow at Greystone Chase (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 10) (24 page)

‘All right, then, I suppose you’d better come in,’ said Miss Winkworth, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I was never easy about it, and she’s not long for this world so what harm can it do her now?’

They followed her into a dim front parlour, which was evidently kept for best and little used, for the chairs were covered with sheets. Miss Winkworth whisked the covers off hurriedly and invited them to sit. They did so, while she perched awkwardly on another chair and regarded them with something like fear.

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ she said suddenly. ‘She was always simple, and she didn’t understand what it was she’d seen. Then afterwards when Mr. de Lisle came to her and said he wanted to reward her for all her hard work, she believed him. If she’d spoken to me at the time I’d have told her to go straight to the police, but she didn’t tell me about it until long afterwards, and by then it was too late—she’d signed the agreement and couldn’t go back on it.’

‘What did she see?’ said Angela gently.

Miss Winkworth rubbed her hands together in agitation.

‘I can show you her letters, if you like,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll understand why she wasn’t to blame.’

She rose and went across to a large dresser which was loaded down with knick-knacks, chipped teacups, china dogs, framed photographs and hundreds of other things besides, and opened a drawer. Inside was a pile of letters, and she brought them out and began to rifle through them.

‘I ought to have burned them,’ she said. ‘I knew they’d bring nothing but harm in the end. Here.’ She picked out two or three letters from the sheaf and handed them to Angela. They had been written in the autumn of nineteen eighteen, and were addressed in a childish hand to a Miss Maria Winkworth. ‘That’s me,’ said Miss Winkworth helpfully. ‘She’d been living in Deal, in a house Mr. de Lisle found for her. He thought she’d like it there, he said. I didn’t hear from her for months and I thought she’d disappeared, but she got lonely after a while and wanted someone to confide in, so she wrote to me. Eventually she left Kent and came here to live with me, and we got along well enough until she was taken sick.’

Angela read the first letter, then glanced at Freddy and handed it to him without a word. Jemima’s ability to express her ideas was hardly the best, but what she had to say was clear enough. The letter read as follows:

My very dear Maria,

Thank you for your last I am glad you are keeping well and that you found your blue gloves, the weather has been cold here and if Poplar has been anything like it you will be glad of them. I have been thinking about what you said the other day about whether the fortunate position I am in thanks to Mr. Roger de Lisle was quite proper, and there is something I am not easy in my mind about, and I would like to ask your opinion about it. I did not think about it at all then but after what you said I have come to realize there is something not right about what happened. I told you Mr. de Lisle said I must show my loyalty and say nothing to the police about what I had seen if I wanted to receive the money, but truly Maria I had no idea what he meant at the time. But now it seems to me that there must have been something wrong with what I saw even though I had no idea of it then for why should they give me money and send me away if there was nothing wicked in it? They were all so unhappy at the big house that it was nothing to hear snapping and grumbling through a door, and that is why I thought little of it. I kept my head down and minded my own business and kept polishing, and I did not listen to what the man was saying until his voice became so loud I had no choice. He wanted her to do something but she would not, and she was laughing at him. I heard her say he must have been mistaken and that she loved her husband and no-one else, and then she asked him to congratulate her and said how he must be so very happy that he would soon have a grandchild to remind him of his son and carry on the family name. I was listening then because I had not heard that she was with child, and when I passed the door which was open a little way I turned my head just quickly to see if I could see it on her, and there she was with that saucy look as she always wore. I could not see him but I knew from his voice that it was the master. When I came back I saw him, carrying her in his arms. He was very pale and seemed not to know what to do so I stopped and said Oh she has fainted Sir, shall I fetch help? And he said not to worry, but that he would carry her to her room and fetch his wife. He told me to say nothing to Mr. Edgar as Mrs. de Lisle would not wish her husband to know because he would be angry at her for getting up when she was meant to be in bed. Then when she was discovered dead the next day I thought Mr. Edgar must have found out after all and been so furious with her that he had killed her. I believed Mr. Roger de Lisle thought the same because that is when he came to me and said that it was a dreadful affair and that he was afraid Mr. Edgar would be arrested, and for the honour of the family it would be better to say as little about it as possible so as not to make things any worse than they were, then he talked about my hard work and said he was thinking of giving me a handsome pension if I would hold my peace. You know Maria that the work had become hard for me of late, and that the pains in my hands and knees were almost too much to bear, and I did not wish to make things worse for Mr. Edgar who was always very kind, and that is why I agreed to it. It was not as though my silence was of any use to the police since they arrested him anyway so I did not feel I was doing wrong. In any case I had accidentally mentioned her fainting to Mr. Henry Lacey before Mr. de Lisle told me to keep quiet, so he knew about it too and I knew he would know what to do. He was surprised but said that he would speak to Mr. Roger de Lisle about it, but that I should keep quiet about it as I had been told. But now Maria I am wondering whether I have been taken for a fool. It all happened so very quickly that I did not have a minute to think about it carefully. How I wished for you to advise me but I was hustled and bustled about and told not to say a word if I did not want to make things worse, and then Mr. Roger de Lisle took me to Deal and said it was to be my home, and showed me a cheque for twenty pounds and said I was a good girl and should have it now but that if I wanted more I must sign an agreement and in the meantime I must stay hidden. He came back the next day with the papers, and explained to me what all the words meant, and how much I was to receive every month, and in the end I signed because after all what else could I do? But now I see what you have probably understood immediately yourself but which I did not realize at the time. I think now that I saw Mr. Roger de Lisle with the dead body of Mrs. de Lisle and that he killed her even as I was there outside the door polishing a brass vase and blamed it on his son. I do not know what to do about it, Maria. If he is really so wicked then I am also wicked for I have taken money to keep quiet. What if Mr. Edgar is innocent? I know he has escaped from prison but they will surely find him soon and hang him. I want to go to the police but I am afraid they will not believe me or that they will arrest me. What do you think I ought to do? Please write back and give me advice and if you can, comfort.

Fondest wishes

Jemima

‘You see?’ said Miss Winkworth as Angela and Freddy glanced at one another again. ‘She was all alone and easily taken advantage of. She wasn’t to blame, but once she’d signed the agreement and taken the money there was no way out of it for her, and I told her so. The police would have arrested her. An accessory, they call it. She was an accessory, although she didn’t know it. We’ve always been respectable people and it wouldn’t have done to have the police on our doorstep.’

Angela glanced through the other letters. Maria Winkworth had evidently asked Jemima for more details about what she had seen, since they contained a more precise description of the events of the day. Roger had killed Selina at about a quarter to six, and had told Jemima to say nothing but to go and report downstairs that Mrs. de Lisle would be spending the evening in bed. Presumably he had then locked Selina’s bedroom door and put her body in the cupboard in Valencourt’s room. It appeared too that after Selina had been found, Henry Lacey had tried to approach Jemima—presumably since he had by now guessed what had really happened and wanted to know more. However, Roger was keeping a sharp eye on her, and that very evening, while the police were still examining the scene in the wood, he had spirited her away to the house in Deal and told her to stay there until he returned. After she had signed the agreement he warned her that she was now bound by her word, and that if she broke it the police would come and arrest her and she would be thrown into prison for many years for obtaining money under false pretences. Thus was Jemima Winkworth bribed and frightened into keeping silent about the murder she had witnessed—although she had not been able to stop herself from telling all to her sister, who had also kept quiet since she was horrified at the very idea of Jemima’s being arrested for complicity in the crime.

‘Is this enough, do you think?’ said Freddy to Angela after they had read all the letters.

‘I hope so,’ said Angela. ‘If they won’t act after they’ve read all this then they never will. I’m afraid we must take these,’ she said to Miss Winkworth. ‘They’re terribly important and they might just clear Edgar de Lisle’s name. I’m sorry for your sister, but you must understand that we can’t allow this state of affairs to continue.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Miss Winkworth. ‘I expect the pension will stop now. At least the nursing-home is paid up until the end of the month so they won’t throw her out tomorrow. It’s a pity, though; she did so want to end her days in Denborough. Now I suppose she’ll have to come here.’

‘We shall have to see what can be done,’ said Angela, who felt obliquely guilty about uprooting a dying woman from her comfortable bed even though her care had been paid for illicitly.

‘Will they arrest me?’ said Miss Winkworth fearfully. ‘After all, I knew about it too.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Freddy. ‘Although they might want to question you, since your sister can’t speak for herself.’

‘Oh, Jemmy,’ said Miss Winkworth sadly. ‘What have you done?’

There was no suitable answer to that, so Angela and Freddy took their leave and left.

T
HEY HAD PROMISED to call in to see the colonel and report on Miss Winkworth’s health, so they returned to Denborough one last time.

‘One thing I still don’t understand is why Roger deliberately put the blame on his son,’ said Freddy, as the train chugged over the grimy streets of South London on its way to the Kent coast.

‘Perhaps there had been some particular offence,’ said Angela. ‘I can’t believe he did it merely because Valencourt had refused to work for him. I think that would be too much even for Roger. There’s no doubt that he strangled Selina out of jealousy, but I don’t know about anything else. Perhaps it was because Edgar had got the thing that Roger wanted and could never have. Who knows?’

‘So he strangled Selina, then hid her body in the cupboard in order to leave incriminating evidence in Valencourt’s room,’ said Freddy. ‘Then he must have drugged Valencourt to make him sleep soundly, since otherwise it would have been impossible to get her out and take her to the woods.’

‘Yes, Valencourt suspected himself that he had been drugged,’ said Angela. ‘I suppose the removal of the body was just an extra touch by Roger to make his son look even more guilty. Anyone might have hidden Selina in the cupboard, but only Valencourt had a reason to get her
out
of the cupboard, since obviously he wouldn’t want her to be found in his room.’

‘When do you suppose Roger thought of the plan to incriminate Valencourt?’ said Freddy. ‘You don’t suppose the whole thing was premeditated, do you?’

‘No,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t think the murder was planned. Presumably the idea of pinning the blame on his son must have come to him afterwards. It was easy enough to do, after all.’

‘Well, it was ill-natured of him, to say the very least,’ said Freddy. ‘And it does sound rather as though Henry Lacey may have been put out of the way too, since it looks pretty certain he knew what had really happened.’

‘We’ll never prove that was murder,’ said Angela. ‘There’s no use in even trying. Still, I shall mention it to the police and perhaps they’ll look into it again.’

‘Rather terrible to think that he was so dependent on the drink and the morphine that he was prepared to keep quiet about his own sister’s death in return for the money to support his habits,’ said Freddy.

Angela nodded but did not reply. Freddy was jubilant at their success in solving the case and she knew she ought to feel the same, but instead she felt nothing but a bleak emptiness. She had paid off her debt, but at what cost? Now she no longer had any reason to justify the wrong she had done. When, standing in the dock of the Old Bailey, she had denied having ever met Edgar Valencourt in order to save herself, she had done so with his tacit approval—encouragement, even, but then she had been able to find selfish comfort in the thought that, as the murderer of his wife, he deserved everything he got. Now, through her own efforts, she had discovered that it was all a lie; that he was an innocent man—innocent of murder, if not of other things—and because of that the whole edifice of half-truths she had built in her head since January to convince herself that she had not acted wrongly was exposed for what it was: a house of straw which one gust of wind in the form of Jemima Winkworth had now blown away. Her guilt was laid bare and at that moment she knew it would be with her forever.