Page 63 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
“I’m afraid not, Euphemia, dear. When poor Grimsby was shot in the Sutherland Hall garden maze in April, all we could do was wait for the police to finish their job and let us go home. I’m afraid it’ll be the same now.”
“We’ll have to figure out what to do with the baby,” Francis said, and sounded as if the words were dragged out of him by force. “If the girl… if her mother isn’t here to take care of her, what do we do? We can’t simply keep her.”
He glanced at little Bess, snuggled up on his mother’s shoulder with her thumb in her mouth, and quickly away.
“Of course not,” Aunt Roz said, rubbing the baby’s back. “Not unless someone in the family wants to claim her. I assume none of you has changed his mind since yesterday?”
She waited. No one had, of course, and it was hard to blame them for that. If it had been difficult to claim responsibility for little Bess before the murder, it was doubly hard now.
“We can put Tom on figuring out who she belongs to,” I said, “once he gets here. I’m sure there are records somewhere in London. Abigail may have had other relatives. Parents, or a sibling. A flat-mate, even. Someone who can be notified about her death. And there’s the baby’s father, unless he’s the one who killed her. If he did, giving him the baby wouldn’t be a very healthy thing to do, I suppose…”
There was a beat of silence. Crispin, of course, was the first one to break it. “Which one of us are you accusing, Darling? Kit, Francis, or me?”
I met his eyes. The gray was darker today, and troubled, like storm clouds. “None of you, St George. You’ve all told me it wasn’t you, and I trust you. All of you.”
“Who else is there, though?” Constance wanted to know, with a shrill hint of hysteria in her voice. She was clutching Francis’s hand with both of hers now, instead of him keeping her hand enfolded in both of his. “I mean… just look at that baby. That can’t be a coincidence!”
We all stared at the baby. She blinked back at us with those big blue Astley eyes, under that fuzzy mop of fair Sutherland hair.
“A lot of babies have fair hair and blue eyes,” Maurice said. “Why, even Geoffrey when he was little?—”
His wife and son both sent him matching looks of fury, and he snapped his mouth shut.
“All I know is that she isn’t mine,” Francis said into the silence that followed. “And I certainly didn’t kill her mother. We were together all night, Connie. You know that.”
Constance nodded. “I know, Francis. But someone did. And I imagine it must have been one of us.”
There was a beat of silence. Then?—
“Well, I never!” Laetitia said, at the same time as her mother exclaimed, “Really, Constance!”
“Sorry, Aunt Effie. But what are the chances that someone random came onto the grounds and murdered her? She wasn’t a local. Nobody here knew her.”
She glanced around the room. No one spoke up.
“If she had been from here,” Constance continued, “Pippa would have recognized her when she saw her in London last week, and so would Doctor White, surely. And Lady Roslyn and Lord Herbert, not to mention Francis…”
“She wasn’t local,” Christopher interrupted. “You can forget that idea. None of us have ever seen her before.”
Francis nodded. So did Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert.
“Well,” Constance said, “then what are the chances…?”
“She might have gotten a lift from the village,” I suggested, “late in the night or early this morning, and something happened.”
“The croquet mallet, though, Darling,” Crispin said. “Who outside the family would have known where to find that?”
Not many people, for certain. He did, obviously. He wasn’t a resident of Beckwith Place, but he had spent enough time here to know where the croquet sets were kept. Uncle Harold might have known, too. Everyone in the family probably did. Constance would have figured it out by now for certain.
But it also wasn’t impossible that one of the others had wandered into the carriage house sometime between their arrival yesterday afternoon, and Abigail’s arrival in the middle of the night.
Lady Laetitia had been glued to Crispin’s side every time I had seen either of them yesterday, but before Christopher and I arrived, she might have done a recce of the grounds, including the carriage house. I couldn’t picture either the Earl of Marsden or his wife clambering around our carriage house—why would they?—but again, they could have, had they chosen to. And the same was true of Geoffrey. I had no idea why any of them, save for Laetitia, would have wanted Abigail dead, but any and all of them might have known where the croquet mallets were kept.
Crispin had even mentioned that Geoffrey had not been with the others in the drawing room last night, hadn’t he? Geoffrey might have decided to motor into the village last evening. He’d had access to several of the motorcars, his parents’ Daimler or Constance’s Crossley, at least. He slept alone, so no one would have noticed him being gone. And Geoffrey was definitely the type to pick up a lone female begging a lift up to Beckwith Place.
Abigail had been out of her element here in the countryside. The walk from the village to Beckwith Place was a distance in the dark, especially for someone not familiar with the shortcut through the fields. The dark and silence of the country can be quite disturbing when you’re used to the hustle and bustle of Town, too. So yes, if a nice-looking gentleman in a nice car—and Geoffrey Marsden was decidedly nice-looking, for all that I can’t stand him—if he had offered Abigail a lift, she might have taken it.
And if he had done, he was also the type who would have expected something in return. And when Abigail refused—which surely she must have done, considering what the consequences had been the last time she had let some smooth-talking, good-looking bloke wheedle his way into her unmentionables…
