Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
“Did you and Tom have a spat?” I inquired as we reached the top of the staircase and Christopher dithered for a moment before turning left.
He flicked me a look. “Whatever do you mean?”
“Something is wrong,” I said bluntly. “You don’t usually carry me off by myself the moment you come inside unless something is wrong. You have to forgive me if I suppose you’ve had a disagreement.”
He shook his head. “No disagreement.”
“If not that, then what? Didn’t want to see the corpse again?”
It was hard to blame him for that. I had been happy to get out of the carriage house and away from the dead man, too.
“I don’t mind the corpse,” Christopher said, and then made a face. “What am I saying? Of course I mind the corpse. But no, that’s not why.”
He steered me around the corner and down the west wing towards my room.
The hallway was empty now. Laetitia was long gone, as of course she would be.
It occurred to me to wonder whether she was inside her room, and if so, whether she could hear us.
It didn’t occur to me until after the words, “What, then?” had fallen out of my mouth, however.
I followed it up immediately with, “Never mind.”
Christopher nodded. “Best wait until we’re inside.”
He opened the door to my bedchamber and scanned the room before pushing me through the doorway. I arched my brows again, but went. He followed, and shut the door behind us.
“I don’t know how we can make it any more secure,” I told him over my shoulder. “If you have a secret to tell me, we may have been better off outside.”
“We may have been, at that. But we’re here now.” He gestured to the bed. “I suppose we’ll simply have to whisper.”
“You’re worrying me,” I said, as he folded down next to me.
“I’m worried myself.”
But that was all he said. After some seconds had ticked by in silence, I prodded. “What are you worried about, Christopher? Are you certain nothing’s going on with Tom?”
“Nothing’s going on with Tom,” Christopher said. “Nothing like what you’re thinking, at any rate. He’s fine, as far as I know. And he came running when I rang him up, so I’d say everything is hunky-dory. Other than the ostentation of dead bodies, of course.”
Yes, other than that. “I believe what you’re talking about is an ostentation of peacocks, but never mind that. If not Tom, then what is it?”
“It’s Crispin,” Christopher said.
I furrowed my brows. “What about him?”
He glanced at me. “I’m worried that he’s mixed up in this.”
I recoiled a few inches, to where I could see him more clearly. “What do you mean? Mixed up in what? Alfred’s murder? The anonymous note? Morrison’s death?”
“All of it,” Christopher said.
I shook my head. “That’s silly, Christopher. He has no reason to be mixed up in any of it. Why would he be?”
He didn’t answer, and I added, “Besides, he was with Laetitia this morning.” Constance had said so, and so had Laetitia herself.
“Only for part of the morning,” Christopher said wretchedly. “They went inside at some point.”
“And Uncle Harold invited Crispin into the study for a business matter,” I said. “That’s what Laetitia told me.”
“But he could have left there, and gone to the village, and then when he came back, killed Alfie so Alfie couldn’t tell anyone that he had taken the H6 out.”
I thought about it. “I suppose it’s possible. But why would he bother?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and I added, “Do you really believe that, of everyone here, Crispin would try to frame me for murder? What happened to ‘he’s been in love with you for five years, Pippa?’ Isn’t he the last person at Sutherland Hall who would do that?”
“He has motive,” Christopher said, half truculent and half glum.
“For framing me?”
“For wanting Alfie dead. If he killed Doctor Meadows.”
“That’s a big if,” I said. “Besides, you saw his writing sample in the drawing room earlier. There’s no chance that he wrote the anonymous note.”
“He could have made it look bad on purpose,” Christopher said stubbornly. “Or perhaps he had Alfie write it for him. Perhaps that’s why Alfie’s dead.”
I stared at him, torn between rolling my eyes and smacking him over the head in order to beat some sort of sense into him. “What has gotten into you, Christopher? You’ve never believed Crispin capable of murder before.”
“I didn’t think that he killed Grandfather,” Christopher corrected. “Or Johanna de Vos. Or Gladys. Or Abigail Dole. Or—”
I raised a hand. “I get it. You didn’t think he was capable of killing anyone else. But you do think he might have killed Doctor Meadows? Why on earth would he have done?”
“Not only that,” Christopher said miserably, “but I think he might have killed Morrison. And Hughes.”
I stared at him. For once he had rendered me speechless.
Not for long, of course. Nothing renders me speechless for long. “Bloody hell, Christopher! What madness is this? Why on earth would he do any of those things?”
“It’s a long story,” Christopher said. He was squirming uncomfortably on the counterpane.
I eyed him for a moment. “Well, it’s a good thing we have plenty of time, isn’t it? Supper isn’t for hours yet.”
Christopher took a breath. “You were there in July.”
“At Beckwith Place?” I nodded. That had been the visit when the celebration of Francis’s 30th birthday and his engagement to Constance had been interrupted by the murder of Abigail Dole on the croquet lawn.
“But that’s all resolved now. We know who Elizabeth’s father was, and how he was related to the Astley family.
Crispin had nothing to do with it. You said so yourself, just now. ”
“Do you remember that afternoon, when Tom spoke to Dad in the study? Crispin rang up the pub and asked Wilkins to bring him a bottle of scotch as an excuse for getting him up to Beckwith Place, and the two of you left the study and went outside and around the house to the study window…”
“And you were there.” I nodded. “Sitting on the ground under the window, listening to the conversation. Of course I remember.”
We had had to be exceptionally quiet when we joined him on the ground, so the group inside the study wouldn’t notice us.
There had been Tom, and Uncle Herbert, and Sammy, the constable from the village—Beckwith, not Little Sutherland—and eventually there had been Wilkins the chauffeur, as Tom confronted him with being Uncle Herbert’s illegitimate son, Elizabeth’s father, and Abigail’s murderer.
“And you remember Hughes blackmailing Dad, before Tom took her and little Bess to Bristol.”
I nodded. It had been quite an unpleasant experience, as a matter of fact. And worse than eavesdropping on the original conversation had been having to discuss it with Uncle Herbert afterwards.
“I wasn’t there for that,” Christopher said, “but you told me about it. About what she said.”
I thought back. It had been four months ago, so hardly a long time, everything considered, but it felt like a lifetime. “She knew about Wilkins. That he was Uncle Herbert’s son with the maid from before Uncle Herbert married Aunt Roz.”
Christopher didn’t answer, and I added, “Until then, Uncle Herbert hadn’t known that Wilkins existed.”
“But she also reminded him that it had happened again,” Christopher said, his face disconsolate.
I nodded. “Yes, she did. And when I asked him, Uncle Herbert said that Aunt Roz knew all about that. Otherwise, I would have been tempted to tell her.”
I loved my uncle, and I owed him for taking me in and taking care of me since age eleven. But my aunt was my mother’s sister, so I owed her more.
“Wait—” I squinted at him. “Are you telling me that your mum doesn’t know? He lied to me?”
“I’m sure Mum knows,” Christopher said hollowly. His hands were clasped between his knees, and he was staring at them, fixedly. “I know, too. I’ve known since July.”
“When you were sitting on the ground outside the study window,” I said, putting two and two together. “They talked about it.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t we hear it? Crispin and I?”
“They’d finished by the time you arrived outside the window,” Christopher said.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything else. I opened my mouth to ask him to clarify, but then I closed it again, and really thought about it. Christopher was concerned about Crispin, that Crispin might have killed Hughes, Morrison, and Doctor Meadows.
And Alfie, I suppose, although Alfie was probably only dead now because he knew something about Doctor Meadows’s killer.
Not like the other three, who had been murdered—or so I suspected—because of something that had happened twenty-three years ago, when Crispin was a baby, and when Hughes and Morrison had switched places.
And then I thought about that afternoon four months ago, of coming around the corner of Beckwith Place beside Crispin, with the sun shining down on us and the bees buzzing, and seeing Christopher on the grass underneath the study window, with tears streaking his cheeks and a look of horror on his face when he had seen us—no, when he had seen Crispin—approach.
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
Christopher didn’t answer, just looked miserable, and I added, “His brother’s wife? Why would your father do that?”
Bedding the maid and begetting Wilkins as a callow youth was one thing. Bedding his sister-in-law while his own wife was enceinte—Christopher was born barely two months before Crispin—was another matter entirely.
“I expect she asked him to,” Christopher muttered.
I stared at him, appalled. “Who? Aunt Roz?”
She would have been in her first trimester when Crispin was conceived—perhaps feeling poorly, perhaps nauseated and disinclined to intimacy—but that was no reason to send her husband to someone else.
You wouldn’t find me doing something like that. If I were suffering with my husband’s spawn, and he wanted to get frisky, he had better just hold that thought until I felt better, or he’d find himself without both wife and child.