Chapter Sixteen #2
‘All true,’ agreed Lady Hardcastle. ‘But that’s only half the story.
Only a fraction of the story, actually. If you’ll all indulge me a little, I need to go back to some conversations we had.
I should have been more suspicious from the start, but why would I doubt friends of JB?
When we first met you, Lily, you were introduced as a photographer hired to record the transformation of Guardians Rock from a Tudor fort to a weekend retreat.
You and I talked about our mutual love of photography a little later and you described your equipment.
You said you have a Graflex Speed Graphic with an f/2. 9 lens, yes?’
Lily looked doubtful for the first time. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve had my eye on the Graflex for a little while and it doesn’t have a lens anywhere near that fast. I let it pass, but later events made me wonder if you might not be all you seem, especially when I realized I’d not once seen you with a camera in your hands.
You, too, Mr Wilson, may not be all you seem.
It might be that you have an interest in antiquities, but you claim not to have been to the fort before and to know nothing about it. ’
‘It’s true,’ said Wilson. ‘First time I’ve been here.’
‘I can’t prove it’s not,’ said Lady Hardcastle, ‘but when we were talking about the electricity generator, you seemed to know an awful lot about the construction of its shed.’
‘JB told me. You know what he’s like.’
‘I do. And he might have. But these little discrepancies from both of you began to ring alarm bells when combined with something Miss Armstrong discovered this afternoon. Florence?’
‘Oh. Yes,’ I said. ‘The dumb waiter. You’ve all been as impressed as I am by the dumb waiter.
A wonderful invention. Very popular in America, I believe.
You’ve seen it here in the dining room as Crawford lifts out crockery and dishes of delicious food, but you probably haven’t noticed that the car itself – the box that goes up and down from the kitchen to here – is a good deal larger than it appears.
In here it looks about the size of the kitchen cupboard in a small flat.
But the box is actually huge and there’s an opening on the floor above us that’s big enough for a person to get inside.
So I did. And it turns out the lift goes from the wood-panelled corridor on the second floor all the way down to the outside storeroom.
Which you’d expect, really, wouldn’t you?
It’s handy to have a way of getting supplies up from the store as well as getting food up to the dining room.
And being able to lift other heavy or bulky items up to the second floor must be a real boon.
So that all made perfect sense. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was the secret mezzanine room between the kitchen and the dining room. ’
Now Lily looked positively anxious.
‘It was there that I found a set of outdoor clothes in Lily’s size, along with a pair of plimsolls that I believe would also fit her, a pair of the same soft shoes that would fit Mr Wilson, and the jewels that Lady Hardcastle has just returned to their owners.
I also found a bloodstained shirt in Mr Wilson’s size – the one the killer was wearing when he moved Everett’s body from the long gallery to the storeroom on the second floor. ’
‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ said Lily.
‘Or disprove either of our stories,’ said Wilson.
‘Your stories, yes,’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘Let’s get back to the stories, shall we?
I have alternatives for all three. We’ll start with Lily arriving on Friday.
Now that we know one can get from the outside storeroom to the mezzanine room without going into the fort, it seemed possible to me that Lily could have arrived secretly on Thursday with the supplies and hidden herself away before any of the rest of us got here.
We don’t know anything about Vickerman the Fisherman, but I doubt he’d be above taking a few bob to make an additional human delivery along with the food and wine.
She made herself comfortable – Florence found a mattress and the remains of a packed lunch – and waited until the evening.
Once dinner was done – she’d have known dinner was over by the sounds coming from the kitchen below her hiding place, and because the dumb waiter had finally stopped going up and down – she took that same dumb waiter up to the second floor and let herself out into the corridor there.
We were all down on the ground floor in the library so she would have had the run of the place.
Even if she didn’t know for certain that Dotty and Patience would have valuable pieces with them, it was a fair bet that some of us would have.
So she took a couple of the priciest items and scurried back to her hidey-hole. ’
‘All nonsense,’ said Lily. ‘I arrived on Friday. You saw me.’
‘We did. Clarice, what did you tell me about Lily’s arrival?’
‘I said her clothes smelled of fish stew,’ said Clarice.
‘Which you didn’t mention out of politeness – she had, apparently, just arrived on Vickerman’s fishing boat after all, so perhaps it was that. But what did we eat on Thursday evening?’
‘Bouillabaisse,’ said Patience. ‘It was delicious.’
‘Indeed. Clarice, was the smell bouillabaisse or just fish?’
‘Definitely the stew. There was garlic, fennel, onions—’
‘Thank you, dear,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Now, the mezzanine room isn’t quite above the kitchen, but it does seem to trap the smells, doesn’t it, Florence.’
‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t smell anything in there this afternoon apart from tonight’s dinner.’
‘So what simpler explanation could there be for the smell of bouillabaisse on Lily’s clothes than that she and her clothes had spent the night in the room above the kitchen?’
All eyes were on Lily now.
‘So let’s move on to Wilson’s stories,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Clarice, do you have a cold?’
‘No?’
‘But I distinctly remember you sniffing when Wilson came back in from his walk on Friday afternoon. I thought you might have a sniffle.’
Realization began to dawn on Clarice. ‘Ah, no. I was puzzled by something, that’s all, so I tried to get a better whiff.’
‘Puzzled by what?’
‘You remember I said that people smell different when they’ve been outside in the cold?
You can sense the coldness and smell an outdoor freshness on their clothes.
It doesn’t last long, but the longer they’ve been out, the stronger the effect.
Wilson didn’t smell of the outdoors when he came back from his walk, he smelled faintly of cooking.
Actually, he and Lily didn’t smell of the outdoors when they came into the library after their long walk on Sunday, either.
Barely any fresh air smell at all. On Sunday it could have been that too much time had passed and the scent of outdoors had gone, mind you. ’
‘Thank you,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘So here’s my alternative for both those stories.
We were all going about our business, moving between rooms, chatting in little groups, when Wilson announced that he was going for a walk.
We heard him go and get his coat and boots, then we heard him talking to Peggy in the kitchen.
Peggy remembers seeing him leave through the kitchen door.
Patience and Dotty joined him briefly and saw him set off, but then doubled back because it was too cold for them.
The official version is that he then went for a long walk and sat in the grotto with his thoughts, then returned to the kitchen, where he was seen by me, Florence, Dotty, Clarice and Peggy before going back to his room to change.
But I don’t think that’s what happened at all.
I think he waited until Patience and Dotty were safely inside, then went into the storeroom, where he summoned the dumb waiter and rode it up to the mezzanine room.
He took off his coat and changed his boots for plimsolls, then he waited.
Just before three, he took the lift up to the second floor and slipped quietly down the stairs to the long gallery to wait for Everett. ’
‘No, wait a moment,’ said Bridgewater. ‘How did he know Everett would be there?’
‘Oh, you’ll like this part,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘Everett had a note in his pocket telling him to meet the sender in the long gallery at three. It was signed “GB”.’
‘Well, I’ll be—’
‘Quite. But we’ll get to the notes in a moment – there was another on Sidwell-Plant’s body, you see, and I want to cover them both together.
When Everett arrived in the long gallery, he might have been a little surprised to see Wilson, but perhaps he thought Wilson had been summoned there, too.
Whatever he thought, he wouldn’t have been expecting Wilson to run him through with the narwhal tusk.
With the dreadful deed done, Wilson carried Everett’s body upstairs and hid both it and the murder weapon in one of the box rooms on the second floor.
Then he returned to the mezzanine room to wait until enough time had passed to put him completely in the clear.
He dressed once more for outdoors and then reversed his journey down in the dumb waiter, out through the storeroom and back into the kitchen, to be seen by a great many more witnesses than he could possibly have hoped for. ’
‘Bilge,’ said Wilson.