Chapter Seven #2
‘You keep saying “they” and “them”, like you don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman,’ said JB. ‘But surely none of the ladies here could have carried his dead body upstairs. It must be one of the men.’
I shrugged. ‘I could carry him – it’s as much technique as brute strength. But you’re right – a woman on her own might not have managed it. Two working together, though . . .’
‘That doesn’t bear thinking about,’ he said.
‘It’s something we must think about,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We need to consider all possibilities.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘is it possible that we’re not alone on the island?’
An odd hope dawned in JB’s eyes. ‘You mean it might not be one of my guests after all? That would be a relief.’
‘But is it possible?’
‘Sure. There are plenty of places to hide on the island. There’s a cave on the south side we’re pretty sure was used by smugglers early in the last century. You could land a small boat there and hole up without anyone knowing.’
Lady Hardcastle looked less happy. ‘That’s rather alarming, actually. That would mean there’s an unseen killer lurking just out of sight.’
‘And you think that’s more frightening than a killer right in our midst?’ said JB. ‘We’re in a fortress – we can keep out an invading army if we have to.’
‘Unless they’re already in here,’ I said.
They both sat in silent contemplation for a few moments.
‘We’d better get the police out here as quickly as we can,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
I nodded. ‘As soon as possible. What are we going to tell the others?’
‘Nothing,’ said JB emphatically. ‘We just say Everett’s dead and that Crawford will fetch the authorities.’
‘And if they ask for details?’
‘Evade. Obfuscate. Offer bland reassurances. Comfort Clarice and tell everyone else that everything’s going to be just fine.’
By the time we went to find the others, they had retired to the library – everyone’s favourite spot, it seemed.
I went at once to Clarice and took her hand. She didn’t speak but she gave my own hand a tiny squeeze.
‘Well?’ said Sidwell-Plant.
Lady Hardcastle’s face was impassive. ‘Well what, dear?’
‘Everett. Is he—?’
‘Dead? I’m afraid so. It was quick, though.’
‘What was it?’
She paused a moment. ‘His heart.’
That wasn’t a lie, at least – the tusk had certainly pierced his heart.
‘Poor chap,’ said Bridgewater. ‘Just goes to show, you never know when your time’s up. Could happen to any of us at any moment. One minute you’re going about your day, minding your own business, the next—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Dotty. ‘Do shut up for once, won’t you? Clarice has lost her husband and you’re wittering on like . . . like . . . Oh, I don’t know. But I do wish you’d stop.’
‘The world’s a better place without him,’ said Sidwell-Plant.
Patience was aghast. ‘Robert! You can shut up as well. Think of poor Clarice.’
‘You had a soft spot for him, did you? Was he the one? But he was a cad and a bully. Everyone knew it, and Clarice is better off without him.’
Patience gave a pfft and crossed her arms.
‘It’s a shock, I know,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘but we’ll send for a doctor and the local constable at once and—’
I’d noticed a flash outside the window a second or two before, and now the thunder sounded with a loud bang and a sound like ripping canvas. Dotty shrieked. Sudden, fierce wind threw rain against the glass like a child throwing handfuls of gravel.
‘I’m not sure anyone’s going to make it out of the door in this,’ said Wilson, ‘much less sail to the mainland and back.’
Everyone started talking at once.
JB held up his hands for quiet. ‘It’s just an Atlantic storm. We get ’em all the time. Nothing to worry about. They blow up wild and then pass through just as quick. By morning it’ll be calm as a millpond and we’ll send Crawford ashore then.’
It would take a day or two for the sea to become properly calm, I knew, but the idea was sound: sit tight and it’ll soon be over.
What I didn’t know, though, was whether we could keep everyone ignorant of the truth, nor what the killer might do next.
I didn’t really believe my own suggestion that it might be a mysterious stranger and was actually convinced that someone in that room had killed Everett.
This was not a safe place for any of us to be overnight.
‘Can we at least telephone the police?’ I said. ‘The sooner we report the matter, the fewer questions we’ll have to answer.’
‘No can do,’ said JB. ‘No phone line, remember? Your GPO have been dragging their heels. “We can’t lay a cable under the sea, Mr McIntyre.” There’s cables all the way to North America, I told ’em. But they insist they can’t do it.’
‘Radio?’ suggested Lady Hardcastle.
‘Don’t have a radio set, no. But who would be listening, anyway? Look, the storm will be gone by morning and we can do everything the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper and a loyal messenger on a boat. Until then, how about some games to keep our spirits up?’
‘I’m not in the mood for games,’ said Sidwell-Plant. ‘I think I’ll retire.’
‘Me, too, actually,’ said Lily, who hadn’t said anything up to this point and seemed to be the most shaken of the group.
One by one, the rest of them expressed a desire to take themselves off to bed, with Sidwell-Plant offering to help Clarice.
‘I hardly think it’s proper for you to be accompanying a woman to her bedroom,’ said Patience.
Sidwell-Plant looked at his wife coldly and was about to reply when Dotty spoke up.
‘I’ll take you, dear,’ she said. ‘Nothing improper in dotty Dorothy showing a pal to her room.’
A brief flurry of activity followed as the guests said their goodnights and made their way up to their bedrooms. Lady Hardcastle had another quick word with JB before grabbing two brandy glasses and ushering me out the door.
I sat in the armchair in Lady Hardcastle’s room while she sat cross-legged on the bed with her notebook and mechanical pencil.
I sipped my cognac. ‘How sure are you about Everett dying at three o’clock?’
‘Not nearly as sure as I tried to convince JB I am. From what Sim says it’s all a bit general and vague, and whenever we press him on time of death he always gives a window of a couple of hours.
But we have both blood pooling and rigor to go on, so I’m going to stick to three-ish as the centre of our window, at least, but it could be an hour or so either side, really. ’
I nodded.
‘I’d be a little more certain if I could have taken his temperature, but even that would have been an estimate with him lying there on that cold stone floor all afternoon.’
‘Out of curiosity, why did you tell JB it was definitely three o’clock?’
‘People don’t want their experts to be equivocal, dear.
They want firm answers. They don’t want “it could have happened any time between two and four but we can’t even say that for certain because the methods we’ve used are inexact”.
They want “it was three o’clock on the dot and I’d stake my reputation on it”. ’
‘Fair dos,’ I said. ‘So can we plot everyone’s movements after Everett’s row with Clarice?’
‘When was that? About half past one, would you say?’
‘About then.’
‘So that’s the opening of our time-of-death window.’
‘You were with JB when Patience, Lily and I overheard Everett and Clarice, weren’t you?’
‘And George Wilson, yes. We were in the long gallery talking about JB’s maritime collection.’
I was ticking people off on my fingers. ‘Dotty went off for her nap. Sidwell-Plant and Bridgewater went off to the drawing room to play billiards. Then Lily, Patience and I tried to go to the sitting room, and that was when we overheard Everett and Clarice.’
Lady Hardcastle was making notes. ‘So that’s where everyone was at the moment of the row. I presume Everett stalked off afterwards?’
‘He did. Then Lily took Clarice off to her room—’
‘Clarice’s room or Lily’s room?’
‘I don’t know. Clarice’s, I assumed, but I can’t say for certain. But Patience and I stayed in the sitting room until you arrived.’
Lady Hardcastle made a note. ‘For my part, I have to assume that Wilson and JB went straight to the library, but I can’t be certain, either. Then you and I had some tea with Patience, but she left . . . when? About two-ish?’
‘Something like that. Maybe a little later. And then you and I went to the library to be sociable. Dotty and Patience were there, heads together – I remember that.’
‘JB was there, too. And Bridgewater was telling his interminable jokes to Lily and Wilson.’
‘Do you recall seeing Sidwell-Plant?’
‘Not at all, no. Then Wilson went out for a walk. Patience and Dotty left to go with him and we gave up and went back to the sitting room with Lily.’
‘That was at about three,’ I said. ‘I remember hearing the hall clock striking while Wilson was talking to Peggy Crawford on his way out through the kitchen door.’
‘Lily left us almost immediately,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘and we saw no one until we took our teacups back to the kitchen at four.’
‘When Dotty and Clarice turned up in time to meet Wilson coming back in from his walk.’
‘And we’re sure he didn’t sneak back in before that?’ I asked.
‘We can’t be absolutely sure. Dotty said he strode off into the distance when she and Patience turned back, so he was definitely out at that point.
And there are only two ways in and out: the front door and the kitchen door.
The front door squeals – Crawford told us that – and Peggy didn’t move from the kitchen.
If he came back and went out again, he’d have been seen or heard.
He was definitely outside for the whole period. ’
‘So, we have Everett available to be murdered from about half past one until your time-of-death window closes at four.’
‘Yes. Any earlier and . . . well, we’d all have noticed someone stabbing him with a narwhal tusk at the dining table, wouldn’t we? Any later and rigor mortis would have been much less advanced by the time we examined him.’
I started ticking people off on my fingers again.
‘We have Dotty going off for a nap at half past one. Lily and Clarice go off shortly after that. Patience is with Lily and me but leaves at about two. Sidwell-Plant is unaccounted for after his billiards game, but both Lily and Dotty are back in the library by the time we join them before three.’
‘I think that’s right, yes.’
‘Then we leave them all in the library, but we know that Wilson goes for his walk, Dotty and Patience briefly join him, and Lily goes for a lie-down. We still have no idea where Sidwell-Plant is. We don’t see Clarice until she turns up in the kitchen with Dotty, and then Wilson comes in from his walk. That’s around four.’
Lady Hardcastle consulted the notes she’d been taking. ‘So by my reckoning, we’re reasonably sure where JB, Bridgewater and Wilson were for the two hours in question, but Dotty, Patience, Clarice, Lily and Sidwell-Plant are all unaccounted for at various points.’
‘Sidwell-Plant is a reasonably vigorous chap – he could move a body on his own. And he definitely has a thing for Clarice.’
‘All the men have a thing for Clarice, dear,’ she said.
‘She’s a beautiful, talented woman. Add the blindness and their “manly” instincts take over.
They all want to protect her, to keep her safe from the dangerous, wicked world.
I don’t think it’s occurred to any of them that she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. ’
‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But only Sidwell-Plant had the opportunity to do Edgar in, no matter how much the others might have wanted to.’
‘True. But I’m still not ruling out two or more of the women working together. With help from Dotty, Patience or Lily, even dear, beautiful, vulnerable Clarice could have put an end to the cruelty.’
‘You’ve said yourself more than once that women are more inclined to poison their victims.’
She shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t. You’d have broken his neck or stabbed him with the knife no one but me knows you keep strapped to your forearm.’
‘Of course. But that’s because I have certain skills. Even I wouldn’t take down an ornamental narwhal tusk and run someone through with it.’
‘You might if there were a sudden altercation and you needed to defend yourself.’
I sighed. ‘Very well. Yes, in that specific circumstance I might grab whatever was close at hand, even if it was a whale’s tooth.’
‘And so what if Clarice was in the long gallery with Dotty, or Patience, or Lily – or all three of them, come to that – and in comes Everett, all swagger and sneer? What if he started another argument, calling her names – calling the others names? What if they argue back and he loses his temper and raises a hand to one of them?’
‘If all of that happened, then perhaps one of them would grab the tusk in a fit of rage and run him through,’ I conceded.
‘And then they’d clean up and hide the body. The clean-up was very proficient – can you imagine Robert Sidwell-Plant putting everything back in its place and mopping the floor?’
‘But if they were so careful and efficient,’ I said, ‘would they really do such a shabby job of hiding the body and the murder weapon?’
‘They ran out of time. We’ve all agreed that moving the body would be arduous, so they had to do the best they could without being away for ages. Both were hidden well enough for the time being – perhaps they intended to make a better job of it later.’
I hmm’d. ‘Perhaps. But what’s your William of Occam thing again? Fewest assumptions?’
‘If we’re going for the solution with the fewest assumptions, then it has to be Sidwell-Plant. Means, motive and, probably, opportunity. We need to find out where he was after the billiards game.’
I nodded. ‘We need to find out exactly where everyone was.’
‘Indeed. But first we need another little glug of this excellent cognac.’