Chapter 4
Chapter Four
I wish I could say that I was surprised when he came down the stairs again two minutes later, his face pale and his eyes dark under the brim of the helmet.
I wasn’t, nor was anyone else.
“Dead?” Francis inquired.
Woodin nodded, looking nauseated. “In bed. Bottle of sleeping draught on the bedside table.”
“Suicide note?” I asked, and he gave me a look. I raised my hands. “It’s a fair question, Constable. We’ve had two family members die of Veronal-overdoses in the past few months.”
“Three,” Constance said.
I flicked her a look. “Three, including Constance’s mother.”
“The mother who employed Miss Morrison?”
I nodded, although Lady Peckham’s murder had had nothing to do with what was going on now. That had been explained at the time. “And only one of them was a suicide.”
“Four if we include Kit,” Francis said with a glance at him.
“That was intended for me,” I answered, with a glance of my own, “and he didn’t die—”
Christopher shook his head, and Francis said, “Not that time. Although it was a Veronal overdose. But I’m talking about what happened last month, not what happened at the Dower House in May.”
Ah. “Last month wasn’t intended to kill either of us. Although if we’re considering attempted murders, I rather think Aunt Charlotte tried to get me with a poisoned cup of tea, too, after shooting at me didn’t work.”
Christopher’s brows drew down. “What happened? Why didn’t I hear about that?”
“I didn’t realize it until the event at the Savoy last month,” I said, “with the overturned teacup. The same thing happened at Sutherland Hall in April, only then it was St George who knocked it over. I rather think his mother put something in it, and he saved my life.”
“Good for Crispin,” Christopher said, and turned back to Constable Woodin, who had been looking from one to the other of us with his mouth open.
“Don’t worry about it, Constable. It’s just that we’ve had to deal with a few deaths by Veronal this year, and it’s just as well to make certain that she did it to herself, and on purpose. ”
Woodin opened his mouth and closed it again. And opened it again. “As far as that goes…”
“Yes?” We all sounded politely inquiring. Or so I hoped; I would hate to sound indecently nosy.
“Her complexion indicated that she died from suffocation. Which I suppose can happen if the lungs get compromised—”
He glanced at Francis, who nodded grimly. Woodin cleared his throat. “But there was a pillow on the bed, yet not under the victim’s head, that may have—”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but there was no need for him to go on.
We could all picture it perfectly well. Morrison, sleeping the sleep of the just in her upstairs bedroom.
(I furnished it with a brass bed and a quilted counterpane and sloped ceilings, but it might, of course, look quite different.) A tall, dark figure made its way into the secluded courtyard under cover of darkness.
(Figures are always tall and dark in these circumstances.
Aunt Charlotte had been a dainty thing with Crispin’s platinum blond hair, and that hadn’t stopped her from killing several people, but in my imagination, the figure was tall and dark.) Gloved hands picked the lock on the kitchen door.
Careful feet crossed the kitchen slates and went up the steps.
I imagined the pillow, lifted in gloved hands and pressed to Morrison’s sleeping face.
By the time she woke up, it would have been too late, especially if the Veronal had been her own and she had been under its influence.
If she hadn’t been, then… well.
In my imagination, the pillow was tossed aside and the bottle of Veronal removed from a pocket and placed on the bedside table next to a waterglass, before the perpetrator slipped back down the stairs and out through the courtyard and away.
All while we’d been asleep in our beds in Wiltshire, three-and-a-half hours away.
“I didn’t want it to end like this,” I said helplessly, and Christopher put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me in.
“There, there. You knew, coming up, that there was a chance—”
“Of course I did,” I muttered into the wool covering his shoulder.
“She could have died any time between that weekend in April and now, and I wouldn’t have thought anything of it.
I probably wouldn’t even have known. When Hughes died, it was only because the Bristol constabulary contacted Tom that we heard about it at all. ”
Christopher nodded, patting me. “I know, Pippa. It’s frustrating.”
“If only Shreve would have told someone a month ago, when she first saw Morrison. We could have motored up then, and had the chance to speak to her.”
Constable Woodin cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind, Miss—”
I shook my head. There was nothing to mind so far, at least not beyond the obvious.
“What was it that you wanted to speak to the… to Miss Morrison about?”
“Oh.” I sniffed and straightened. “Just about how she received a phone call in late April and left Lady Peckham’s employ the next day. She didn’t even give notice. Nor did she wait for her wages. Did she, Constance?”
Constance shook her head. “She did say that she would get in touch with Mother when she had a forwarding address, but we never heard from her again.”
“But she did leave of her own free will,” Constable Woodin clarified.
Constance nodded. So did the rest of us. “Just precipitously,” I added.
“And this was more than six months ago.”
“The last weekend in April. More like seven months, isn’t it?”
The constable didn’t answer. “What made you think that something was wrong with Miss Morrison?”
“We didn’t,” I said, with a glance at the others. “We’ve just been worried about her, because she left so abruptly and because she never got back in touch.”
“And because her counterpart at Sutherland Hall died suddenly and suspiciously in August,” Christopher added. “Although that happened in Bristol.”
“At any rate,” I continued, since I didn’t think there was any need to muddy the waters with Hughes’s demise, “when Shreve told us that she had seen Morrison—”
“Shreve?”
“The Countess of Marsden’s lady’s maid. Constance’s aunt.
” I glanced at Constance and clarified, “The countess is Constance’s aunt, I mean.
Not Shreve. Shreve’s the maid. But she was the one who saw Morrison in Lower Slaughter a month ago.
But then she didn’t mention it until yesterday.
We decided to motor up to have a conversation.
We certainly didn’t expect to find her dead. ”
“But when you found the door unlocked, you seemed concerned.”
“Of course I was. After Hughes, and after Grimsby…”
Constable Woodin arched polite brows, and I continued, “She’s the third servant or former servant in my aunt and uncle’s household that has died in the past six months.”
“Four,” Christopher said. When I turned a nonplussed countenance his way, he added, “Wilkins, remember? Although that had nothing to do with this. Whatever this is.”
“Of course not. Completely different situation.”
Wilkins had also ended up taking his own life, but that had been to avoid being arrested for murder, and it was also totally unrelated to Hughes and Morrison and Aunt Charlotte, and whatever had been going on at Sutherland Hall twenty-three years ago, that had resulted in Morrison being banished to Dorset or Hughes to Wiltshire.
“That’s a lot of dead people,” Constable Woodin remarked, and I sighed.
“Tell me about it.”
Francis’s lips twitched. “She seems to have a knack for finding them.”
“Do not!” I said, offended. “It was Aunt Charlotte who found your grandfather—” or she pretended to do, anyway, after she had killed him, “—and Crispin found Grimsby, and Uncle Harold found Aunt Charlotte, and… all right, I suppose Christopher and I found Johanna de Vos, but someone else found Lady Peckham, I wasn’t even there for that, and Gladys Long found Freddie Montrose, and Tom found Gladys, and—yes, I suppose I did find Abigail Dole, but it was only because I was the first one to look out the window that morning… ”
By this point, Constable Woodin stared at me as if I had grown another head, and I hadn’t even got to Flossie Schlomsky or Cecily Fletcher or Dominic Rivers yet.
Or the ma?tre d’ from the Savoy tearoom, although it wasn’t really fair to say that Crispin and I had found him, not when Christopher had spent the past several days with his corpse by the time we got there.
The litany of names had clearly startled Constable Woodin, though, and it was hard to blame him for that. They hadn’t all been murdered, of course—or at least Aunt Charlotte hadn’t been—but still, it was a long list. No wonder that Woodin’s eyes were enormous and his face pale.
“Um…” he said.
“Not to worry. We weren’t responsible for any of them. Just like we’re not responsible for this one.”
Nor would I take responsibility for it in later iterations of this conversation. It was Constable Woodin who had found Lydia Morrison’s body, not me. I had simply suspected that it was there.
“And you can prove where you were last night,” Woodin said, “I suppose?”
The plethora of dead people in our past seemed to have put us on the suspect list. Or perhaps we had been on it all along.
It wouldn’t be surprising, I suppose. The person finding the body is always a suspect.
I should have been more suspicious of Aunt Charlotte right from the start, instead of focusing most of my attention on Crispin back in April.
“We were at Sutherland Hall in Wiltshire overnight,” Francis said. “I don’t suppose you’ll take our word for it, but you can ring them up—is Upper Slaughter on the exchange?—and inquire of the other guests or staff.”
“Wiltshire14,” I said helpfully. “The butler is Tidwell and the housekeeper is Mrs. Mason. The hall belongs to the Duke of Sutherland, but he doesn’t like me, so perhaps don’t inquire of him—”