Page 48 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
“But I wouldn’t whack her over the head with a croquet mallet,” I said. “I’m not a murderer, Christopher!”
“Of course you aren’t. I just can’t think of anyone else who would do such a thing, either.”
No more could I. However— “I don’t think Sammy Entwistle is going to care who we think is capable of it, Christopher. He’ll be more concerned with alibis, I’m sure. I don’t have one. You and St George were together in the other attic room. Did either of you leave at any point?”
He shook his head. “Not after Crispin came upstairs. But that was after I did. So there was a period of time—long enough to hit someone with a mallet—that we weren’t together. He might have been with someone else?—”
I made a face. Laetitia, most likely. Lip-locked in a dark corner somewhere.
“—but I wasn’t.”
“Francis and Constance were together in the library,” I said. “But Francis was sleeping off a drunken binge, and I don’t suppose he would have noticed if Constance slipped out.”
“And Constance might not have noticed if Francis slipped out, either. I don’t know how soundly she sleeps.”
“Not that soundly. I shared a room with her at the Dower House for a couple of nights. Besides, she was curled up in a chair, and probably uncomfortable. I doubt she would have stayed asleep had Francis started stumbling around in the dark. But again, I don’t think Sammy would take my word for it.”
Christopher hummed agreement.
“Laetitia had Constance’s room to herself,” I said. “She might have been afraid that Abigail was going to point the finger at St George this morning. And her room has a window onto the croquet lawn, so she could have seen Abigail arrive. If she were awake.”
Christopher glanced up at the house, and the window to Constance’s—currently Laetitia’s—room. The curtains, pale blue, were still shut against the morning sun.
“Uncle Harold also has a private room,” I added. “Right next to the stairs, too. It would be easy for him to come and go.”
“But no window on the lawn.”
No. But that didn’t matter. He might have been looking out the front window just at the time when Abigail turned the corner from the lane into the driveway, which wasn’t any more unlikely than that Laetitia had looked out onto the lawn and spied her.
And we didn’t know that it had happened by chance, anyway. Uncle Harold might have had a pre-arranged assignation with Abigail. She might have contacted him at Sutherland Hall and arranged to meet him here. She might even have traveled up from Sutherland in the Crossley with him and Wilkins. We didn’t know that she hadn’t. Crispin had motored up on his own, so he wouldn’t have known. They could have set her down in the village and instructed her to walk the rest of the way here. If she had been Crispin’s paramour, and Uncle Harold wanted Crispin to marry Laetitia, he had reason to want Abigail gone. Bringing her here to Beckwith Place, where the suspects were more plentiful, before he did away with her, made sense in that context.
“Geoffrey slept alone, too,” Christopher said, derailing my train of thought, “but I don’t suppose there’s any reason to think he’s involved.”
Sadly not, although he was someone else I wouldn’t be disinclined to frame for murder.
“I would love it to be him,” I said. “He pokes little Geoffrey into anything that moves, so it wouldn’t be at all surprising if he had gotten some poor girl with child at some point or another. Although he wouldn’t need to say he is the grandson of the Duke of Sutherland to make himself sound important, would he? He could claim to be the next Earl of Marsden, and it would come to the same thing.”
Christopher nodded. “Unless he was specifically trying to put the blame on one of us. But in April last year I didn’t even know who he was, and Crispin hadn’t taken up with Laetitia yet then, either.”
“Nor does he have fair hair,” I said regretfully. “Besides, it’s really a bit too much of a coincidence that he’d be here the weekend she shows up, isn’t it?”
“Probably so,” Christopher agreed, his voice equally regretful. “I wish it were this easy.”
I nodded. And then we both turned towards the edge of the lawn as a strapping young constable wheeling his bicycle through the trees looked around and said, “What’s all this, then?”
CHAPTERELEVEN
Up close,Constable Samuel Entwistle was eminently recognizable as the young lout who had made Cousin Robert’s life a misery during his formative years. He had the same carrot-red hair, the same snub nose, and the same sneer on his round face as he had had back then.
Of course, I hadn’t been around for much of that—it had mostly happened before Robbie went off to Eton at thirteen, at which point I was still just eight years old and living with my own parents in Germany.
But I did remember him from a few holidays after I arrived in England, when Robbie and Francis were home for the summer, before they had to go off to France and fight in the war. Robbie, with his fine clothes and fine manners, had turned the head of one of the village girls that Sammy had his eye on. At this point I couldn’t even remember her name, but I did remember the incident. Sammy had convinced his foul friends to pile on Robbie after the latter had dropped the girl off at her home in the village one evening, and Robbie had staggered into Beckwith Place two hours later with a black eye and a bloody lip and torn clothes and two flat tires on his bicycle. Uncle Herbert had wanted to involve the constabulary and come down on them all like the wrath of God, but Francis had prevailed upon his father to let him take care of it. Two days later, it was Sammy walking around with a fat lip and a black eye. Needless to say, there was not much love lost between any of the Astleys and Sammy Entwistle.
I did my best to calm what I assumed would turn out to be turbulent waters. “Constable. I’m Philippa Darling. I don’t know if you remember me from when we were children…”
He sneered. “My lady’s German niece, aren’t you?”
That was distilling it into its basest form, and without any provocation at all. I gave up any hope of civil discourse and narrowed my eyes. “Listen, you?—”
