Page 91 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place
Someone emitted a choking noise in response to this. I expected it to be St George, but when I glanced over, it was Francis who was choking, not on horror but on mirth, as Crispin eyed him irritably.
“No, Pipsqueak,” he told me, voice uneven with the laughter he was desperately trying to suppress, “neither of us would have minded sharing.”
I sniffed and ignored him. “Obviously, when Francis ended up downstairs in the library with Constance, Crispin and Christopher shared the second floor room and I took the empty one. We don’t go out of our way to be shocking.”
It was the Countess’s turn to sniff. She and Laetitia exchanged a look before they both ostentatiously refused to look at me.
“So you spent the night alone,” Sammy said.
I nodded. “I did.”
“And no one can vouch for your whereabouts.”
“Aside from the fact that I went to bed on the second floor, and woke up on the second floor, and nobody saw me in-between, I suppose not. No.”
Sammy nodded.
“Out of curiosity,” I added, “why do you think I might have wanted Abigail Dole dead? That’s what you’re leading up to, isn’t it? That I somehow figured out that she had left the infirmary and made her way here from the village, and instead of letting her in and showing her that her baby was well taken care of, I whacked her over the head with the ubiquitous blunt instrument and left her on the croquet lawn?”
Sammy opened his mouth and then closed it again. I guess he didn’t want to out-and-out say it, but yes, that’s what he thought.
“I had no reason to want her dead,” I pointed out. “I certainly didn’t get her with child. Nobody would expect me to do anything about it. And she didn’t stand in the way of me marrying anyone.”
I had meant it to refer to Laetitia, of course, who had slept in a room of her own and who had every incentive not to want St George to step up and marry Abigail. But instead, Sammy gave Constance a narrow-eyed look. She had little Bess on her lap, and with Francis next to her they looked quite like the happy little family.
I sighed. “Not Constance. She was in the library with Francis.”
“But he was in no condition to hear her leave,” Sammy said triumphantly. “That’s what everyone says, isn’t it? He was too drunk to go anywhere. Too drunk to do anything but sleep it off on the sofa in the library.”
He waited, but none of us could really, in all honestly, disagree with that.
“Well,” Sammy said triumphantly, “if he was too drunk to do any of that, he was too drunk to notice his fiancée leaving, too!”
Well… yes. He probably would have been.
That hadn’t been what I’d been trying to draw Sammy’s attention to, though. I’d done everything except point directly at Laetitia, and apparently I should have done so, because he hadn’t caught on to what—or who—I meant.
“Constance would never—” Francis growled, and Tom put a hand on his arm.
“Have you found the murder weapon?” he asked.
“The croquet mallet—” Crispin began, and then stopped when Tom flicked a glance his way.
Sammy looked sour. “The croquet mallet went to the village with the body.”
“But the croquet mallet wasn’t the murder weapon. You’ve spoken with the doctor since he did his on-site examination of the body, haven’t you?”
“We’re looking,” Sammy said shortly.
Crispin lifted a hand, like a dutiful pupil in class. “Wait a second. If the mallet wasn’t the murder weapon, what was?”
Sammy fixed him with a fulminating stare that would have been more effective had St George been easier to cow. “We don’t know. When we find it, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Oh, will I?”
I cut in, before Crispin could dig himself a deeper hole. “You didn’t find anything in the carriage house?” That must have been what whoever was in there had been rooting around for, after all. The actual murder weapon.
Sammy eyed me sourly. “No. At the moment we’re checking the residence.”
