Chapter 3
They followed Gearing to a door at the end of the wing.
“Here we are.” Gearing opened the door and stood back.
Penelope walked in and immediately halted.
Following at her heels, Barnaby came to a screeching stop. Over Penelope’s head, he stared at Vincent Underhill, who was standing in the middle of the room and looking faintly chagrined. And guilty, too.
Having left his mother’s parlor behind them, Vincent had to have come directly there, presumably for some purpose.
Barnaby stepped aside as Stokes came in and, on seeing Vincent, firmly shut the door.
“Vincent,” Penelope said. “What are you doing here?”
Her tone suggested she was merely curious, but Vincent colored, then glanced around in the same vague fashion he seemed to have been doing when they entered.
When he looked at them again, he’d managed to summon a bored expression.
When the three of them simply waited, plainly expecting him to answer, he shrugged. “Now Papa’s gone, I suppose this room will be mine. I came down to take a look.”
Knowing we’re interested in the contents of the study.
Barnaby glanced around. The three internal walls were lined with shelves, all packed with ledgers and account books with rolled maps tucked between.
A heavy mahogany estate desk sat before one side wall, while on the opposite side of the room, facing the desk, a fireplace was inset between the bookshelves.
The external wall featured a pair of glassed doors that gave onto a small, paved area beyond which the lawn rolled away to a distant line of trees.
Long curtains framed the glass panels, which were flanked by two pedestals supporting ivory busts of Greek philosophers.
Penelope made for the desk. Walking past Vincent, she rounded one end and pushed aside the large admiral’s chair to stand directly behind the expanse. Studying the piles of documents stacked on the desktop, she frowned. “These have been searched.”
Vincent had swung to track her. “What?” He, too, frowned. After a second, he suggested, “Perhaps it’s just as Papa left it…although he was usually neat and tidy with his papers.” Frowning more definitely, Vincent nodded at the desk. “As you can see.”
“Indeed, I can.” Penelope started opening drawers, pausing to stare at the contents of each before closing it and opening the next.
Going from one drawer to another, she shook her head.
“People know where they keep things in their own desk. They rarely forget and so don’t need to rummage through everything to find whatever they’re after.
They don’t need to disturb every pile, every drawer.
So, I repeat. This desk has been searched. Recently. Since Monty was last here.”
She shut the last drawer and looked at Vincent.
Stokes and Barnaby also fixed their gazes on him.
His eyes now wide, Vincent shook his head.
“It wasn’t me.” He paused, then added, “You saw me leave Mama’s parlor behind you.
I came straight here, but I hadn’t even had time to decide what to look for before you arrived.
” Somewhat sulkily—shades of his sister—he admitted, “I thought you were going to start talking to guests or something. If you must know, I came down to see if there was anything valuable lying about that I should take before you lot came and searched.”
Stokes tipped his head. “And did you find anything worth taking?”
“No!” Petulantly, Vincent insisted, “I just told you. You arrived before I had a chance to even look.”
For a second, they allowed silence to reign, then Barnaby mildly asked, “Given you are here, is there a safe?”
Vincent glanced at him from beneath his brows—as if wondering if there was some trap in the question—then he pointed at the painting of some ancestor that hung above the fireplace. “Behind that.”
As Barnaby crossed to the painting, Vincent added, “I don’t know where Papa kept the key, but I think he hid it somewhere in here.”
“Ah.” Penelope opened the top drawer of the desk and extracted a heavy key. She held it up. “I suspect this will be it.”
Stokes reached across the desk and took the key. “Let’s see.” To Vincent, he added, “As you’re here, you can bear witness to what we find inside.”
Vincent had lost his sulky look and, with every appearance of being perfectly amenable, followed Stokes to the fireplace.
Barnaby had swung back the painting, revealing a standard wall safe. He stepped aside to allow Stokes to fit the key into the lock and glanced at Penelope. “I take it our searcher would have found the key?”
“Most definitely,” she assured him. “It was tossed on top of everything else in the drawer, with no attempt at all to hide it.”
With Vincent holding aside the heavy painting, Stokes swung open the safe’s door.
Barnaby joined Stokes and Vincent in peering inside.
For Penelope’s benefit, Barnaby reported, “Jewelry cases, as one might expect. And cash—quite a stack of notes.” He reached inside and picked up a red pouch. It clinked. He hefted it, then replaced it. “Guineas—the pouch is full of them. Nothing else.”
“No ledgers or anything like that?” Penelope asked.
Barnaby shook his head. “Just the cash and jewelry.”
Stokes looked at Vincent. “Is this what you expected to find in here?”
Vincent grimaced. “I really don’t know.” His gaze returned to the pile of cash. “But such an amount doesn’t seem…well, unusual.”
Stokes looked at Barnaby. “What do you think?”
“I think,” he replied, “that this is a working estate of some size, with a large household and associated staff. There’ll be wages to pay and supplies to be bought and so on.
” He glanced at Vincent. “This doesn’t seem excessive.
More like the usual amount one might expect Underhill to have on hand. ”
Stokes turned his gaze on Vincent. “Your father dealt with the estate, didn’t he?”
Vincent nodded. “Well, him and the estate manager, Simms. But Simms lives in Wallington and only comes in once a week to meet with Papa and go over the books and what’s happening in the fields.
Papa was always the one who held the money to pay for things.
” Studying the contents of the safe, Vincent tipped his head.
“From what I recall seeing before, at this time of the month, that’s about what I would have expected him to have in there. ”
“Right.” Stokes swung the door shut and locked the safe.
Vincent asked, “Can I have the key?”
Stokes pulled the key from the lock and slid it into his pocket.
“The key will be handed to the executor of your father’s will.
” At Vincent’s faint frown, Stokes added, “You might speak with your mother, and if she hasn’t already done so, send word to the family solicitor.
They will need to attend the funeral, whenever that’s held, and bring and read your father’s will.
The police will hold the key until we can hand it to either the solicitor or the will’s executor. ”
Vincent digested that, then glanced at the clock on the mantel. “I’ll go and speak with Mama now, before she starts dressing for dinner.”
Penelope had wondered whether Pamela would rejoin the company and decided Vincent was probably correct. Pamela would want to know how her guests were reacting to the situation.
Vincent nodded to Penelope, Barnaby, and Stokes and left the study, closing the door behind him.
Stokes regarded the door, then shook his head. He looked at Penelope. “Was he the one who did the searching?”
“I seriously doubt it, and only if he’d searched before, and I don’t think he did.
” She gestured to the desk. “Whoever went through here was thorough and reasonably careful. I can see they’ve pushed things around, and they’d just dropped the key back in the drawer on top of everything else, but in general, if one didn’t know what signs to look for, the searching wouldn’t be obvious. ”
“So whoever it was,” Barnaby said, “they weren’t in a tearing rush.”
“No. They were thorough and deliberate, and if Vincent had done this earlier, I can’t see why he would have been standing in the middle of the room for us to walk in on.”
“More telling,” Barnaby said, “is that it seems the searcher found the key to the safe and, presumably, opened it.”
“Yet all that money,” Stokes said, “is still there.”
Barnaby nodded. “Exactly. So whatever our searcher was after, it wasn’t money. Or jewelry.”
Stokes grunted. He looked at the shelves of ledgers. “So, what now? If this place has already been searched—and I suppose we can assume the searcher was also the killer—what are the chances that there’s anything incriminating still lying around for us to find?”
Barnaby had also been glancing around. “There’s no sign our searcher grew frustrated, but can we therefore assume he found what he came for?”
Penelope hummed, then replied, “I’m not sure we can.
He was careful and methodical, presumably intent on leaving few clues that he’d searched at all.
So even if he was unsuccessful, he might be clever enough not to have let his temper get the better of him.
He might well think to come back and continue his search later.
” She surveyed the myriad ledgers. “He can’t have searched all those.
He can’t even have pulled each of them out and looked behind them. That alone would take hours.”
“True,” Stokes said. “So we know the desk, at least, was thoroughly searched and the safe as well, but we can’t tell whether our searcher found what he was after.”
Penelope nodded. “That’s the situation in a nutshell.”
Barnaby glanced at the clock. “Time’s caught up with us. I vote we call it a day and head for the Red Lion. We can eat and think through what we know to this point and clarify what our next steps should be.”
“That,” Penelope said, “is likely our wisest course.”
“Even wiser,” Stokes stated, “given that our murderer is very possibly in the house, and just in case there’s something in here he hasn’t yet found, I’ll leave a constable on guard overnight.”