Page 78 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #2)

Giles came into his bedroom looking for his pen, and found Hook there, packing his trunk – or, rather, staring with a frown at the items laid out for packing.

He gave his servant a sharp glance but had no intention of engaging in conversation.

But Hook first cleared his throat in a significant way, and finally, as Giles bent over a bedside drawer, said, ‘I beg your pardon, my lord.’

Giles straightened. ‘Yes?’ he said irritably. When a valet began with, ‘I beg your pardon, my lord,’ no good thing ever followed.

‘This trip, my lord, to Egypt, I presume . . . That is to say, I suppose . . .’

‘Oh, spit it out, man!’

‘Your lordship will be staying in Cairo? In a hotel?’

‘For the first night. Then it’s out to the dig. The Valley of the Kings,’ he elaborated. ‘Why?’

‘In the Valley, my lord, of the Kings, I suppose there is a hotel for all the English gentlemen?’

‘Why the devil should you suppose that? We live in tents. There are no towns nearby.’ He narrowed his eyes as Hook shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you asking stupid questions?’

Hook had not really believed what Speen had said about living in tents and eating scorpions, but from various snippets he had overheard while serving dinner to the Arthurs, he had begun to wonder.

And then his lordship had vetoed so many of the things he had been intending to pack for him, saying he wouldn’t need them . . .

‘It’s just that I’m not sure I’ll be able to look after you properly, my lord,’ he blurted, ‘in a tent. The fact is, I’ve never—’ He intercepted Giles’s glare and descended into a mumble. ‘It isn’t . . . I can’t . . . Not really an outdoors person—’

Giles breathed out hard. ‘Let me understand you – do you refuse to accompany me to Egypt?’

The word ‘refuse’ silenced Hook for a moment. But the vision before him was too awful. ‘I don’t see that I would be much use to you, my lord,’ Hook said in subdued tones. ‘Not in a tent.’ He didn’t mention the scorpions, but they loomed large in his imagination.

‘Then you had certainly better not come,’ Giles said. ‘I have little enough need of a town valet on a dig – of an unwilling one, none at all.’

‘Thank you, my lord,’ Hook began.

Giles held up a hand to silence him. He was furious at the impertinence – the man’s presuming to choose when he would deign to do his duty and when he would refuse!

His first impulse was to sack Hook out of hand, but a second thought suggested a punishment that would make him suffer more.

‘You are no longer my valet. You may return to your former position of footman, at a footman’s salary. ’

Hook’s mouth opened and closed – for once he was lost for words.

‘Or, if you prefer,’ Giles went on with poisonous kindness, ‘you may leave my employ entirely. A month’s notice would not be appropriate, since I shan’t be here, but you may take a month’s wages in lieu and go at once.’

Hook’s nostrils flared as his temper rose.

Nobody dismissed James Hook! But go back to footman?

It would be humiliating. He managed to swallow the words that sprang to his tongue.

A month’s wages wouldn’t go far, and what if he didn’t get another place right away?

He was used to his comfort – he didn’t want to pig it in cheap lodgings while he looked for a place.

And he hadn’t had time to carry out his plan of take-stuff-and-blame-Speen yet.

Better to take a month or so as a footman and leave at a time of his own choosing, than have everyone say he was dismissed.

He’d find some way of making it seem as if he’d been clever, getting out of going to Egypt.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said with an effort. ‘I’ll serve as footman, if you please.’

‘You may go, then. And ask Crooks if he’ll come and finish my packing.’

‘M-my lord?’

‘It is a job for a valet. You are no longer a valet.’

Hook swallowed, bowed, and backed out.

Giles felt a moment of satisfaction, but it quickly faded. Petty triumphs over servants did little to assuage the pain of a torn mind.

The presence of a policeman below stairs was disturbing.

PC Holyoak was darkly handsome, and had a commanding presence.

The maids found a surprising number of reasons to scuttle along Piccadilly and past him in the minutes he was waiting there.

His head was politely bare, and his dark hair, curly as a ram’s fleece, almost brushed the low ceiling of the passage.

He was altogether thrilling. Even the kitchen staff peeped out, and Brigid made so bold as to offer the young Dionysus a cup of tea – which he politely refused.

Moss was apprehensive when Holyoak was shown into his room. A visit from the police is never comfortable for a butler. It never meant good news. The last time, it had been to announce that Mr Richard had been in a motor-car smash and was close to death.

‘How can I help you, constable?’ he asked.

‘You have a footman here, name of William Sweeting?’

‘Yes – yes, we have.’

‘I’d like a word with him, if you please.’

‘He’s a good, quiet lad. A good worker, never any trouble. What is it about?’

‘I have received information that he may have been involved in an incident. Would you send for him, please? I’d like a word with him.’

Moss got up and went to the door. There was no difficulty in securing a messenger – all too many people were hanging around innocently engaged in nothing very much.

In the following interval, the policeman waited with positively geological patience, which made Moss feel fidgety and ill at ease by contrast – a mayfly beside a mountain.

When William appeared hesitantly in the doorway, Holyoak said, ‘I’d like to speak to the young man alone, if you don’t mind. ’

Moss felt he was on firmer ground here. ‘But I do mind. I am in loco parenthesis to all my staff, particularly the younger ones. I must be present.’

Holyoak looked questioningly at William, who blushed under scrutiny and managed, with an heroic effort, not to put his hand to his face. The scratch had been a deep one, and the healing line was still visible. ‘I don’t mind,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d like Mr Moss to be here.’

‘Very well, then,’ said Holyoak. He took out his notebook and consulted it – not that he needed to, but people expected it.

It impressed them. ‘I have received information that you were out of the house on the evening of Wednesday, the fourth of November.’ William’s lips moved as he calculated the date. ‘ Last Wednesday. Where did you go?’

William glanced at Moss as if he might answer for him, but then was captured by the mesmeric gaze of the policeman. ‘I went to see my mum.’

‘It was your evening off?’

‘No, I had a message she was ill. One of her neighbours sent for me.’

‘What neighbour was that?’ Holyoak appeared to be writing down what William said, which disconcerted him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. A burst of inspiration came to him. ‘Ma lives in Acres End Row. She’s got lots of neighbours. They all look out for her in the Row. She – she has these funny turns. But when I got there, she was all right again. So I come back.’

‘And did you see this neighbour, at your mum’s house?’

William had to think. ‘No. No, she’d gone home. ’Cause my ma was all right.’

‘Did she mention which neighbour it was who helped her?’

‘She never said. Or I don’t remember. I was a bit upset. I was worried about her. It’s all a bit muddled in my head.’

‘I see. And what happened on the way back?’

William chewed his lip, his eyes fixed desperately on the dark, handsome face. ‘I – I fell into a ditch in the dark. It was all brambles. I couldn’t get out. I kept slipping in the mud. I got all scratched.’ His hand got halfway to his cheek this time before he dragged it back.

The constable’s pencil moved implacably across the page. ‘Did you meet anyone else on the way there, or on the way back?’

‘No,’ William said. He chewed his lip.

The pencil stopped. The dark, steady eyes looked up, into William’s, straight through the back of them and into William’s head. ‘Are you quite sure? No one at all? No man, woman or child?’

‘I never met no one,’ William said.

Holyoak moved his feet slightly more apart, making himself even more unrockable.

With his weight spread and anchored into the ground, an earthquake would have had a job knocking him off balance.

‘Now, I want you to be quite clear about this, William Sweeting. Did you at any point on that evening meet, or see, or speak to, or have any dealings with Edgar Speen, valet in this house?’

‘No! I never seen him. Why you asking me this?’ William said, a little wildly. There was a bead of sweat on his upper lip. ‘I never done nothing. Tell him, Mr Moss! I’ve never been in trouble.’

Moss opened his mouth to speak, but Holyoak stopped him with a glance. ‘That’s all right, William. You can go now.’

When they were alone, Holyoak turned to Moss and folded over a new page in his notebook. ‘Now, Mr Moss, when that young man got back on Wednesday evening, you went to meet him at the back door, is that right? Why did you do that?’

Moss bent his brow in apprehension. ‘It wasn’t his evening off. He shouldn’t have gone out. I went to reprimand him and ask where he’d been.’

‘And he told you the same as he’s just told me.’

‘Yes,’ said Moss. He thought of something, hesitated, then said, ‘Yes,’ again.

‘And what was his condition?’

‘Condition?’

‘Was he agitated?’

‘No, I can’t say he was.’

‘You noticed a scratch on his face?’

Moss stirred. ‘How do you know all this? Who told you about William being out?’

‘Information was placed before me,’ Holyoak said. ‘What about the scratch?’

‘Yes, I noticed a scratch on his cheek and some on his hands. He’d got them on the brambles, trying to get out of the ditch. Like he just told you.’

Holyoak wrote in silence. Then he looked up. ‘Have you heard anything from the valet, Speen, since that evening?’