Page 93 of Blackmail at Beckwith Place

The young man nodded, brandishing it. He’d had the foresight to keep his gloves on, I was happy to see. After all, this trench club, whatever that was, must be important if he had carried it down to show it off.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, looking from one to the other of them, “what is it?”

By now Francis had also reached us, and was looking at the club with revulsion. “That,” he told me, with a nod to it, “is the handle of an entrenching tool. Standard issue during the war. They came in two parts: this handle,” he flicked his finger at it, “and then a metal part that was a spade on one side and a pick axe on the other, with a hole in the middle. We’d use it to dig trenches and latrines and graves, and sometimes to break heads.”

So a weapon. “I don’t see a spade.”

Francis shook his head. “That’s gone. What you’re looking at is just the handle. Someone’s fitted it with hobnails to use as a melee weapon.”

I eyed the rounded head of the stick with its small metal protrusions (and dried blood) and tried to imagine it making contact with Abigail’s head. “That’s barbaric.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Francis said grimly.

Tom nodded. “We all have.”

“A man in my outfit at Ypres had one with spikes running through it,” the constable holding it said. “Not something you’d want to meet on a dark night.”

Definitely not. Not at Ypres or in the garden of Beckwith Place, either. “So that’s the murder weapon?”

“So it seems,” Tom qualified. “Where did you find it?”

The constable glanced at Sammy, who told him, grumpily, “This is a DS from Scotland Yard, name of Gardiner.”

The constable arched his brows, but told Tom, willingly enough, “It was under the mattress in one of the bedrooms on the second floor.”

“My brother’s and cousin’s room?” Francis shook his head. “Neither of them were old enough to have been in France.”

Sammy eyed him. “You sure this isn’t a souvenir of yours from the war, Astley?”

Francis’s jaw clenched. “I’m positive, Entwistle. I still have the Webley. It’s in the gun cabinet in the study. But that’s all I brought home. If I never see one of these again, it won’t be too soon.”

Sammy smirked. “Gone soft?”

“I killed my share of men in the war,” Francis said. “I’ve no desire to do it in peacetime.”

His voice turned rough. “For God’s sake, she was a tiny little thing. Just a slip of a girl, with a new baby to care for. What kind of man picks up a trench club and bashes in the head of someone like that?”

“Someone with nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Sammy said.

CHAPTERTWENTY

A quick roundof questioning elicited the information that no one present had seen the weapon before, and only a few people knew what it was. Among them, the Earl of Marsden.

“Oh, yes.” Maurice nodded knowingly. “That’d do it.”

“It wasn’t in the young gentlemen’s room,” the other constable finally got around to saying. “It was in the other bedroom, where the young lady slept.”

Everyone turned to look at me, and I could feel myself turn pale. “That can’t be. I would never?—!”

“Blood spatter?” Sammy inquired, and his colleague shook his head.

“None so far.”

If I was reading the shorthand correctly, whoever had wielded the weapon—me in this scenario—was likely to have gotten some of Abigail’s blood on him or her, and so far, none of our rooms had yielded any bloodstained clothing.

“May I be excused?” I asked tightly. “I’m not hungry.”

The display of food was actually turning my stomach. Sammy opened his mouth, took one look at my face—it was probably green—and closed it again. Aunt Roz nodded. “Off you go, Pippa. Do you need anything?”