Page 21 of Ambition (The Chaplain’s Legacy #6)
C aptain Michael Edgerton returned to Corland Castle in an optimistic frame of mind.
He had seen the newly married Mr and Mrs Bertram Atherton settled at a secret location, with instructions not to leave for at least a month, an order with which they seemed perfectly inclined to comply.
The protective body-guard had been drilled in the necessary discipline to ensure that no assassin could get near to Mr Bertram, and the servants were equally on the alert. Michael was satisfied.
As he rode back to the castle with Sandy, his young Scottish associate, he was confident not only that the couple were safe, but that his colleagues would have the name of the murderer awaiting him.
He had left them checking with every single person present at the time of Mr Bertram’s shooting to find out not only where that person was, but everyone nearby, too.
Anyone seen by multiple witnesses could be eliminated, and surely there would be one man who was not seen by anyone, because he had been busy climbing out of the cheese store with a gun in his hand.
Michael knew the instant he entered the old schoolroom and saw their faces that his colleagues had no answer for him.
“Sit down and have a drink,” Luce said, as soon as she saw him.
“Do I need it?”
She merely smiled at him sadly and poured him a large brandy. “If we had known you would be here today, we would have kept some cakes for you, but Pettigrew ate them all. Shall I send for something?”
Michael shook his head. “Just tell me the worst. Is there nobody at all who is unaccounted for?”
“Oh yes,” Pettigrew Willerton-Forbes said. “Seven men and two ladies. There are also six couples who are the only witnesses for each other, and nine people who were seen in two places at once… one in three places, in fact. It is a nightmare, Michael.”
Michael raised his eyebrows, then sighed and took a long draught of brandy. “Well, perhaps we were overly optimistic. Let me have the list of seven men not seen by anyone.”
Pettigrew slid a paper across.
“Ha! There ye are!” cried Sandy, reading over Michael’s shoulder. “That’s yer man.”
“Kent Atherton?” Michael said.
“Aye, and wasn’t he late coming out of the castle after the shooting? He was here when the sainted chaplain was done in, he saw Peachy’s things at the tower, he’s neck deep in the smuggling. Has to be him.”
“Where does he say he was?”
“Went to relieve himself,” Pettigrew said. “Several of the gentlemen took the opportunity, the servants, too.”
“Why was he not seen in the gentlemen’s retiring room?”
“He says he was at the far side of the great hall, so he was nearer to a place below stairs that the servants use.”
Michael tapped the paper thoughtfully. “Yet no one saw him. What of the others on the list? I doubt Sir Hubert Strong is our gunman.”
“He had been arguing a point with Lord Rennington, and went into the library to look something up.”
“The library windows would overlook the spot where the gunman was,” Michael said excitedly. “I suppose he did not see anything?”
Pettigrew shook his head. “He was on the far side of the room, away from the windows, and the gunshot startled him so much, he knocked over his candle. He had to feel his way back to the entrance hall. As for the rest of the list, Lord Farramont was upstairs fetching a shawl for his wife. One of the footmen was in the dining room, and the other was seeing to the fire in the drawing room. No reason to suspect any of them. The butler and under butler were down in the basement, they say. I think we may assume that neither of the ladies on the list climbed that ladder in the cheese store, not in full evening dress.”
“Very well,” Michael said. “You said there were six couples who only saw each other?”
“Two gentlemen and two ladies in their respective retiring rooms,” Pettigrew said.
“Two maids in the buttery, preparing something for dinner. The Cathcart twins, up to mischief in the parlour. The Dowager Countess’s nurse and lady’s maid, watching over their sleeping charge in the tower room at the far end of the gallery.
Mr Eustace and Miss Wilkes were in the Armoury at this end of the gallery. ”
“The Armoury!” Michael said. “Were they, indeed!”
“He wished to show her an Italian wheel-lock pistol from the seventeenth century,” Pettigrew said blandly, as Sandy sniggered.
“Yes, yes, just an excuse,” Michael said. “Still, an engaged couple may be permitted a moment alone together, no doubt.”
“It would have been highly suspicious if the pistol that was fired at Mr Bertram had come from the Armoury,” Pettigrew said.
“If only that were the case,” Michael said sorrowfully, wandering over to the sideboard where the pistol now lay beside the axe.
“Unfortunately, I have spent a great deal of time in the Armoury over the months we have been here, and this pistol was never part of the collection there, nor on the walls.”
“Nor in Mr Eustace’s collection,” Pettigrew said. “He does not recognise it at all.”
Michael carried the pistol back to the table, turning it this way and that, before laying it aside with a sigh.
There was a large plan of the castle’s principal floor laid out on the table, with the positions of each guest and servant marked on it. Michael spent some time poring over this, and comparing it with the lists of names.
“Which would be the way the gunman went, do you suppose?” he said at length. “He would no doubt have left the castle by the door below the bridge, but which stairs would he have used? The service stairs are all some distance away.”
“Not all,” James Neate said. “The service stairs are at one end of the great hall, and used by the servants as they come and go. There is also the wider stair beside the garden door, which leads directly up to the great hall, emerging below the main stairs. However, there are two other stairs, narrow spiral affairs set into the walls, intended for the butler or a footman to reach the entrance hall quickly when a visitor arrives. One is just inside the gallery, the other in the library. They are rarely used nowadays, it seems, so there is little risk of encountering anyone.”
“Hmm.” Michael reached for his brandy glass, found it empty and set it down with another sigh.
“I was so optimistic that we would find just one person unaccounted for. Ah, well. Nothing about this case has been easy, and this is no exception. Pettigrew, have you heard any more about Miss Wilkes’ home, or the quarrel between her and her father? ”
“I have had a reply from the Duchess of Dunmorton,” Pettigrew Willerton-Forbes said, brushing a stray crumb from his waistcoat.
“She does not know the Wilkes family personally, but she has a friend who has a relation in the neighbourhood of Warriston Hall, so she is to write and make more enquiries.”
James Neate had been to Scarborough to check on Miss Wilkes’ aunt. “She has lived there for some years, a quiet, respectable widow in a quiet, respectable street. She rarely goes into society, but no one has a word to say against her.”
“I wonder how Mr Eustace met Miss Wilkes, if the aunt is not often in society,” Luce said, looking up from the shirt of Michael’s she was mending.
“One might meet anywhere at a resort by the sea,” Michael said.
“Walking along the shore, in the circulating library… anywhere. One does not have to be introduced at a ball or an evening party. Well, it does not seem that there is anything untoward about Miss Wilkes, apart from the estrangement from her father, which I would like to know more about, but cannot easily ask. Luce, can you—?”
Luce shook her head firmly. “The girl closes up the instant her father is mentioned. Even her brothers and sisters are unmentionable — it does seem as if the breach is a serious one.”
“And there are no obvious cracks in her story,” Michael said thoughtfully, “so we must accept the alibi.”
“We’d have to accept it whoever she might be,” Neate said. “The entire household is adamant that no one left the house that night. No horse was taken, remember, and the grooms would know the following morning if a horse had been ridden that distance.”
“Now, why do you want the alibi to be broken, Michael?” Pettigrew said, gently. “Do you have suspicions against Eustace Atherton?”
“I have suspicions against everyone,” Michael said crossly, “but Eustace is everywhere in this story. It is his tower where the smuggling goes on, and where Miss Peach was killed, and he found the body, remember. He heard me talking about the books needed to decode Miss Peach’s notebook, so he could have stolen them.
And he was inside the castle when Bertram Atherton was shot.
He could easily have slipped out of the great hall, down to the basement, up through the cheese store and bang!
Back the same way, in time to appear outside, only a little late, to offer his help. ”
“But Mr Kent Atherton was even later to turn up, and with no one to vouch for him,” Neate said. “He is everywhere in the story, too — the smuggling, finding evidence of Miss Peach at the tower, he was at the castle the night of Nicholson’s murder and no alibi in his bed, either.”
“That is all very interesting,” Michael said thoughtfully.
“Yet he has an alibi for the time the books were stolen. Both Eustace and Kent have alibis for some occasions and not others. We are assuming, are we not, that all three events are connected? That is, Nicholson’s murder, Miss Peach’s murder and the shooting of Bertram Atherton. ”
“It would be incredible if they were not,” Pettigrew said.