Page 9 of Murder at Hambledon Hall
Harmony picked up a photograph from a side table. “What are we looking for?”
“Anything that gives us a sense of the man, and why someone wanted him dead.”
She showed me the photograph. “I presume the couple in this are his parents.”
It would seem so, going by the way he rested his hand on the seated woman’s shoulder. At her other side stood an older man dressed in his Sunday best. “Shepherd appears to be aged in his mid-twenties when this was taken.”
Harmony returned the photograph to the table. Beside it was another photograph of Shepherd’s parents, taken many years before the other. He wasn’t in it, and I guessed they were aged in their thirties. A teenage girl stood between them, her fair hair tied in ribbons.
“I wonder who she is,” Harmony said.
She went to pick up the framed photograph, but I caught her hand. “Someone has studied it recently and placed it back down, but they didn’t place it precisely in the same spot.” I pointed out the dust pattern. There was a clean space where the frame had been previously positioned.
Had they studied it before or after Shepherd’s death?
We walked around the ground floor of the cottage. The parlor was neat, with nothing out of place, but it needed a thorough clean. The novels hadn’t been removed from the bookshelf for some time, if the layer of undisturbed dust was anything to go by, and a mustiness wafted from the carpet.
In stark contrast to the parlor, the kitchen lacked dust, but the gamekeeper wasn’t one for cleaning his dirty dishes. Flies buzzed around plates and cups piled up in the tub.
I pinched my nose and inspected the food scraps. “There’s mold on some of these. He hasn’t washed up for days.”
“Pig,” Harmony said with a wrinkle of her nose. “How can anyone live like this?”
“I think he lived in this room, and rarely ventured into the parlor except to pass through. There are signs of habitation in here and none in there.”
“Signs of a putrid life.”
She walked out of the kitchen, but I took my time looking around. I found a used train ticket from London that had fallen on the floor under the table, and a newspaper opened to the racing pages. A bunch of keys on an iron ring sat amidst odds and ends in a drawer. Another drawer was used for paperwork, including correspondence from a bank, betting slips, and some private correspondence addressed to Mrs. Mabel Shepherd, the last of which was dated a month earlier. It wasn’t much, but I did learn his first name was Esmond. If this was the sum of Esmond Shepherd’s life, it was rather sad. As far as I could tell, he didn’t have any hobbies except horseracing, and he had no friends or family who wrote to him. Perhaps Harmony found more belongings upstairs.
I joined her in one of the two bedrooms. “Anything?”
She dangled a gold watch from its chain. “This was in the bedside drawer.”
“It looks expensive.”
“And new. It’s in pristine condition. There are no engraved initials or other identifying markings, but there’s also no reason to assume it didn’t belong to him. It wasn’t hidden.”
“What else have you found?” I asked.
She returned the watch to the drawer. “There are some good clothes in the trunk. They also look new, and they’re not the sort of suits worn by a gamekeeper.”
The trunk was the only storage for clothing in the room. Two well-made jackets lay flat on top of folded trousers, waistcoats and shirts underneath. One of the jackets was made from dark gray wool, the other cotton, suitable for summer. I checked pockets as I inspected each item but found nothing. Not even a ball of lint. He may not have even worn them yet.
“They’re more suited for a city gentleman,” I said. “There’s no tweed, nothing sturdy for a winter spent outdoors. These are the sorts of suits Floyd would wear day to day.”
“Precisely. Why would a gamekeeper purchase them? And where did he get the money?”
“He likes to bet on horses, so perhaps he had a good win.” I closed the trunk lid. “No new hats?”
“Under the bed in hatboxes, along with a great deal of dust.”
I knelt and peered under the bed. The dust had been disturbed where Harmony had pulled each hatbox out to inspect the contents. “Is there any sign he brought women up here?”
“It’s cleaner than the kitchen, so he may have. I didn’t find anything pointing to a specific woman, though.”
I stood and dusted off my gloved hands. “You said one of the maids was upset by his death. Just the one?”
Harmony nodded. “According to Lady Kershaw’s maid, the girl was Shepherd’s latest. She was new, the previous girl having left when she was set aside by Shepherd.”
