Chapter 5 #2
“Good, good. Right you are. Now, who’s going to telephone London and tell them about these mysterious records of Lady Eva’s? Like me to do it, would you, my dear chap?”
“You’d better, sir, seeing I don’t have your connections at the Yard. You’ll be wanting me to assist this DCI, will you, then?”
“Yes indeed. He may bring down a sergeant, but they’re bound to need your help.” Sir Leonard waved his hands at the spread of papers on the desk. “All the information at your fingertips, eh? That’s the stuff. I expect you have a list of everyone in the house?”
“Not yet,” Crummle admitted grudgingly.
“I expect Mrs. Walsdorf can tell you, Sir Leonard,” Daisy suggested. “She’s Lady Fotheringay’s niece but most of the business of running the household seems to land on her shoulders.”
“Sounds like a German name. Married a Jerry, eh?”
“No, he’s from Luxemburg. He’s Lord Haverhill’s secretary.”
“Ah. Righty-ho, then, Mrs. Walsdorf it shall be. I’ll hand the list on to you, Inspector, when I’m done with it. Now I’m going to go
and find a telephone elsewhere and leave you to finish your little chat with Mrs. Fletcher.”
Turning, he bowed to Daisy with a wink which confirmed to her that his “London DCI” was indeed Alec. As he limped out, she wondered how Alec felt about his summons to Haverhill for a murder three days before he had been due to arrive for a wedding.
Alec stood in the doorway of Lady Eva’s private sitting room in her house in Belgravia. His immediate impression was of luxury, brocades and velvets in rich colours, gleaming wood, thick-pile carpet, and everywhere photographs in silver frames.
Beside him, Lady Eva’s housekeeper twittered on.
“Yes, the house belongs to the Devenish family, but her ladyship lives here alone—lived, I should say. I can’t take it in she’s gone, and that’s a fact.
Full of life, she was when last I saw her, looking forward to seeing Miss Lucy wed, that she’s so fond of.
What a nasty business! I don’t know what the world’s coming to, really I don’t. ”
“The Devenishes visited often, I suppose?”
“Well, not to say often. Sir James, that’s her ladyship’s son, he’s a countryman through and through, if you know what I mean.
Mr. Edward, the young master, has his own flat in town he shares with friends, doesn’t care to live with his gran, well that’s natural, isn’t it?
He came to tea now and then, not as often as she’d’ve liked, I dare say.
Lady Devenish comes up for shopping, and of course the young ladies had their presentations—before the War that was—and all married well enough, saving Miss Angela. ”
“Miss Angela’s not married?”
“Nor like to be. That’s why my lady left most of her own money to her, and some to Miss Lucy. She liked an independent spirit in a young lady, she’d tell me, long as everything was quite proper.”
Dismayed to hear Lucy had a motive for doing in her great-aunt, Alec glanced back to see if Ernie Piper was taking notes. The young detective constable’s pencil was busy.
“Much money, is there?”
“No lack,” said the housekeeper complacently.
“No fussing about the price of coal in this house, I’m glad to say.
Besides the income the late Sir Granville left her ladyship, she has her own fortune from an aunt that married well and had no children.
There’s a nice bit going to Miss Angela and Miss Lucy, and what’s left over to the young master.
Of course the house belongs to the master, Sir James. Part of the estate it is.”
“Lady Eva seems to have confided in you a good deal.”
“Bless you, sir, I’ve been with her ladyship thirty years.
You can’t live with someone that long without you learn something of their affairs, whether you will or no.
A word or two here and a word or two there, if you know what I mean.
And no fussing about the price of coal, like I said.
Lordy, Lordy, I can hardly believe she’s gone.
There’ll be changes around here, for sure.
I only hope Sir James won’t go and sell the house out from under me. ”
“Is that likely?”
“He hasn’t got any use for it himself, and it’d bring a pretty penny, I don’t doubt.”
“No doubt.” Alec gestured towards a large kneehole desk on the other side of the room. “Is that where Lady Eva kept her private papers?”
“That’s right. Account book and receipts and cheque book top left, letters top right, everything in its place, she always says …
said. The middle drawer’s just stationery and stamps and what-not.
Second down, invitations on the right, and likely you’ll find a copy of her will on the left.
The bottom drawers are locked. She keeps …
kept her big notebooks there, that she was always scribbling in. ”
“Do you have a key, or know where she kept it?”
“Not me, and no more does Miss Parsons that’s her maid,” the housekeeper said warily. “‘It’s Pandora’s box,’ her ladyship said once to Miss Parsons, ‘or rather, two Pandora’s boxes. If anyone but me
opens them, there’s nothing but Trouble going to fly out, like in the old story. The key’s in a safe place and nobody’s going to find it.’”
“Thank you, madam. You’ve been very helpful. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind going downstairs now with Sergeant Tring and answering a few more questions, names and addresses, that sort of thing, just for the record?”
“I’ll bet you’ve got a good memory,” Tom Tring said jovially. “I’ve never known a housekeeper that didn’t.”
She went off with him quite willingly. On hearing that they were heading for the abode of an earl, Tom had changed out of his robin’s-egg blue-and-white check summer suit.
In the dark suit he kept at the Yard for dealing with “the nobs,” he was the essence of respectability, as well as looking several sizes smaller.
He’d have the housekeeper eating out of his hand in no time, in a way Alec couldn’t hope to match.
Ernie Piper joined Alec at the desk. While Alec leafed through the contents of the second drawer on the left, Piper pulled the centre drawer all the way out and set it on the blotter on the desk-top. A twist and a click and he had in his hand a small brass key.
“Too easy,” he said, disappointed, returning the wide, shallow drawer to its place. He went down on one knee to unlock and open the bottom drawer on the right.
Alec peered into a large manilla envelope. “Here’s her will. What have you got there?”
“Several loose-leaf ledgers. Arranged by alphabet and date, looks like.” Piper took out the first ledger, balanced it on his knee, flipped it open and started to read. “Whew! Looks like Mrs. Fletcher’s given us the goods again, Chief.”
“The Met was brought into the case at Lord Haverhill’s request, nothing to do with Daisy,” Alec said firmly but without much belief in his own veracity.
“She just happens to be at his house. I was going down on Friday anyway, so I’m the obvious person to send.
Checking Lady Eva’s papers was the Chief Constable’s suggestion. ”
“I bet Mrs. Fletcher put him up to it.” Piper’s faith in Daisy was boundless.
“How would he know what her ladyship was up to? Listen to this! ‘Teddy escorted Genevieve Rendell to a house-party at the Varleys’, not a month after her husband divorced her.’ Then there’s brackets with ‘see 1924 R.’ Must be another book. ”
“Who’s Teddy?”
“No surname. Prob’ly one of the family. This book’s A to D, and Lady Eva’s a Devenish. Teddy’d be Edward, wouldn’t he? There wasn’t an Edward Devenish on the list the CC read to me over the ’phone.”
Alec didn’t ask if he was sure. That was the sort of detail at which Ernie Piper excelled, and his fast, accurate shorthand was the reason he’d been put on the ’phone to take down the names of those staying at Haverhill.
He looked at his watch. “Right-oh, there’s just time for Tom and me to catch the next train if we hurry, so we’ll leave you to it. You know what we want.”
“Anything recent on anyone on the list …”
“Six months, say.”
“That looks like they might kill to keep it quiet.”
“Yes, not the births, marriages and deaths, obviously.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard if her system’s as simple as it looks.”
“Good. Do a quick check around the house for anything else of interest, then come and join us. I gathered from the CC that the local inspector isn’t too happy about our being called in. If he won’t cooperate, we’ll have our work cut out for us.”
On his way down to find Tom and the housekeeper, Alec contemplated with foreboding the investigation before him.
An uncooperative local man would be merely an extra fly in the ointment.
The aristocracy were always awkward to deal with, regarding the most innocuous questions as impertinence and expecting deference even as one delved into their sordid secrets.
This time there was the added complication that in another few days he would have been the earl’s
guest. He wondered whether Lord Haverhill had asked for him, rather than for any DCI the Met chose to send, because he expected special treatment.
And then there was Daisy.
Reaching the kitchen, where he found Tom Tring enjoying a cup of tea and a piece of pie, Alec gladly postponed consideration of Daisy’s place in the scheme of things.