Corpse in a Gilded Cage (16 page)

‘Right. Though why should they go up a runt of a corridor that leads nowhere? One reason was given me by Miss Michele (a hard little bitch, by the way). She said Chokey had been going round ever since he came examining all the portable property, as if seeing whether it was worth nicking. And Sam's been showing a pretty close interest too. So they may have taken in that little corridor on their travels, though God knows you'd think there were several acres of more interesting territory.'

‘Does it tie in with anything, sir? With their accounts of what they were doing during the night?'

‘Oh my God, what they were doing during the night,' said Hickory, recalling the tedium of his interviews with the individual members of the party. ‘It was a case of “Please, Nanny, I was asleep like all good boys and girls.” Except in one case. This Sam Barton says he was awoken by something about one o'clock. Now that ought to be of interest, oughtn't it?'

‘Of course. Where's his bedroom?'

‘That's it. Miles away, towards the far end of the Blenheim Wing. If the Earl was clocked with the Benares ware jug at the top of the stairs—though actually the docs say it was a manual blow—there wouldn't be a chance in hell of his hearing it from there.'

‘Whereas if he were sleeping in Milady's chamber—?'

‘He could have heard. Mind you, Dixie's room isn't
that
near: you've got to remember the scale of this place. But he could have heard a body falling from the landing to the hall. He swears he was in his own room, though.'

‘Any news of the butler and cook?' said Medway, pursuing a thought of his own.

‘None: everybody alerted, both to them and the car. Ports and airports especially alerted, but of course by now we're probably shutting the stable door. I suppose you're thinking that if Sam Barton was in his room—'

‘That he wasn't so far from where this pair were hiding.'

‘Well, actually he was half the length of Whitehall. But that doesn't alter the fact that that precious pair could have been up to something around that part of the house . . .'

Suddenly Hickory jerked himself out of his contemplative lethargy and seized the phone with the speed and accuracy of a lively bird seizing on a worm.

‘I've had an idea . . . Headquarters? Hickory here. Look, I want you to get on the phone to the Yard, and ask them for a list of all the reputable domestic agencies—the
class
ones, the ones that fill positions in the residences of the nobs. Nobs English and nobs foreign. Just get the list, and we'll do the rest.'

He put the phone down.

‘I should have remembered. That dry stick of a lawyer mentioned these places. Said they came from one, so the chances are they'd go back there to get themselves another place. If another place is what they want, that is.
Right, I think we'd better go and have another look at Sam Barton's bedroom.'

•   •   •

It was not until the afternoon that Phil and Mr Lillywaite went on their tour of the house and estate. Dixie had cooked dinner, and Phil had helped her. They had been left alone in the kitchens by common consent, dearly though the others would have liked to hear what was said. Dixie had planned this as her first opportunity to get Phil alone, and had driven into Chetton Lacey earlier in the day to buy up mountains of steak (causing the butcher to speculate whether the good times might not, after all, be returning at the Big House). Phil peeled masses of potatoes, and they had a cosy chat about the future, during which Phil was rather more noncommittal than Dixie would have liked. They found an enormous old saucepan which could cope with chips, and several frying-pans for the steak. Mr Lillywaite was invited to what he insisted on calling luncheon, but he urbanely declined to (as he expressed it) put them to so much trouble. He went to the little hotel in Chetton Lacey, where they were serving fillet steak and French fries.

When he returned, around two o'clock, the new Earl was having a bit of a zizz—but he jumped up when he heard the lawyer's voice, and they began a tour as wide-ranging and unrestricted as it could be with a whole battalion of policemen cluttering up the route. Phil's eye, as they went slowly from room to room, was appreciative. Mr Lillywaite hoped it was appreciative of artistic worth, but he feared it was of cash value. Not that it mattered—
now,
he said to himself. When they had mounted the Great Staircase and were beginning the tour of the upstairs rooms, Phil turned to his guide and said:

‘You know this house and I don't. Would you notice if anything was missing—you know, swiped?'

Mr Lillywaite turned a troubled face in his direction.

‘I'm afraid not, Lord Ellesmere. I know this floor only very superficially. I was always seen by the Earl in the study, exceptionally in the Drawing-Room. I have not been up here for several years, except for one visit to the Earl in his last illness—a distressful occasion when I was far from observant.'

(Mr Lillywaite, in fact, had been worrying about his position under the new Earl, a young man of casually impertinent manners and tearaway disposition.)

‘Oh well,' said Phil, ‘I suppose the fuzz is on to it.'

‘You are thinking of Parsloe?'

‘Is that the butler berk? Yeah. I was thinking that even if the police do nab them, they could have stashed things away pretty effectively by now.'

Mr Lillywaite was silent. He felt, not quite logically, that he bore some share of responsibility for the Parsloe episode. Throughout the rest of the tour of the house he contented himself with pointing out the most remarkable architectural features, the most magnificent of the family possessions. Phil nodded, and seemed to be taking it all in.

When, finally, they proceeded downstairs again, they passed through the little-used Morning Room and out into the Dutch Garden. Here the Earls of Ellesmere could obtain the most magnificent view of their domain, and Mr Lillywaite paused, that Phil might do so. He had prepared a quote from Sacheverell Sitwell's essay on the house, but Phil got in first:

‘Phew!' he said.

It did as well, Mr Lillywaite thought. Phil stood there among the dusty flowers and shrubs, clearly impressed, his feet planted firmly on the paving stones: confident, substantial, watchful. He registered (one could hardly fail to) the hefty, middle-aged police constable at the top of the steps leading down to the fountain. Then his eyes strafed the horizon. He seemed to have remarkably efficient long sight.

‘I suppose it's mine to the end of that field,' he said, pointing into the distance. Mr Lillywaite squinted painfully.

‘I expect you mean Parson's Field,' he said. ‘Yes. The estates stretch considerably further in all other directions, but to the west of Parson's Field there is a strip of land that the Spenders have always failed to acquire. It was the subject of acrimonious litigation in the eighteen-forties with a farmer called Boythorn.' He turned to Phil with an expression on his face that was close to suspicion. ‘How did you know?'

‘There's a bloke who just must be a reporter in the field beyond,' explained Phil. ‘And a rozzer keeping an eye on him from our side of the hedge.'

They walked down the steps and past the fountain where Charles James Fox had tried to wash away the effects of seventy-two hours' continuous drinking. Then they began along the Countess's Walk. Mr Lillywaite had again fallen silent. He was trying to digest the foregoing conversation. Really the Spenders—
these
Spenders—sometimes surprised him. They had a sharpness, a quickness—on
some
subjects—that disconcerted him. Of course, he told himself, it was not
intelligence.
But nevertheless . . . Even that creature the new Earl's wife had it . . . When they came to the end
of the walk, Phil once again gazed around him. They were now at one side of Parson's Field, and Phil seemed fascinated by the figure of the reporter, who was taking photographs from beyond the opposite hedge. Surely, thought Mr Lillywaite, he could not be thinking of
talking
to him? He hurriedly turned the conversation to the topic he had all along been intending to bring up.

‘This,' he said, in his thin, acid voice, ‘was a favourite spot of your late father . . . in his all too brief residence here. I wonder if we might have a brief preliminary discussion of what your situation is, after his sad and sudden death.'

Phil frowned.

‘Stow it,' he said. ‘The old boy's not buried yet. Let's do the decent and wait till he's cold, eh?'

Mr Lillywaite felt he had been reproved. No other heir, in his experience, had refused to discuss his financial position at the earliest possible opportunity. Gloomily he wheeled round, and they began to walk back towards the great house.

•   •   •

‘Not much to be got out of this,' said Superintendent Hickory, surveying Sam Barton's bedroom with the gloom of a farmer for whom all types of weather apparently portend crop disasters.

‘Presumably it's a sort of
pied-à-terre,'
agreed Medway, with a rather magnificent French accent. ‘The permanent residence is along the way.'

‘Though young people do just dump things down where they land up, and live out of haversacks. These days they do.'

‘He's been at Chetton four days,' pointed out Medway.

‘Granted. And perhaps he's just come along and taken what he needed and gone back to Her Ladyship. What I don't see is why he should lie. To save Her Ladyship's delicate feelings? She seems as brassy as a country pub. Fear of the jealous husband? By your account Phil is the complaisant husband
par excellence
(if you'll pardon the pronunciation). And you notice there's a book by the bed. So let's assume for argument that on the night of the murder he was here—either for part or the whole of the night.'

‘Right. And since it's miles from the staircase, he simply could not have heard the Earl fall. So forget the murder—'

‘And start thinking about what else he could have heard. There are these two jokers camped in the wing. I rather agree with the late Earl that they had a bloody nerve. That being so, they could have decided to play games with the Earl's property. Presumably with some of the less famous
items. That displaced picture is much too far away, so let's go walkabout and see what rooms there are in the vicinity here.'

They went out into the corridor and scouted around, pushing open doors until Hickory gave a grunt of satisfaction.

‘What about this?' he called.

The room he had come upon had been remodelled in William IV's reign by the same architect who had built the Dower House—a local man who still looked back on the Bath of the Woods as the epitome of elegance. The room was high, airy and well-proportioned, and its purpose was to display the fifth Earl's magnificent collection of clocks. Around the walls were the more imposing specimens, while the body of the room held the smaller items in a series of display cases and on tables. Here were the lifetime's acquisitions of a chronomaniac: the Nuremberg watch from the 1530s; the cumbersome English church clock, dismantled and reassembled, from around the same date; the gilt clock with porcelain figures from Caffieri's; the enamel watch by Fazy. On the brightness of it all the dust lay thick. The old Earl (who had no intellectual interests to speak of) had regarded his ancestor's hobby as an incomprehensible eccentricity, and had not even been particularly willing to show the collection to the enthusiastic amateurs who on occasion applied. The room had been forgotten, or at any rate neglected, until the dust had temporarily been disturbed by the hokey-kokey party two nights earlier. Here there were clocks, but no ticking. Time dominated but it stood still.

‘Now,' said Hickory, ‘if there was noise from here—'

‘Noise made in the course of nicking something—'

‘—then Sam Barton could easily have heard it. Let's have a good look. You go round—gently, now—to the far end, down there. I'll take this side of the arch.'

It was less than five minutes before Medway made an exclamation of discovery. Not ten feet from the archway that divided the room was a table which, even from the most cursory inspection, seemed to have something missing from it. On it there were five clocks, and an irregular-shaped space on which the dust sat thinly and lightly. Something had been removed.

‘Splendid!' said Hickory. ‘Measure the area and make a rough outline. If we find that clock, we'll know where it came from. I wonder: could there be a catalogue of the collection?'

He lumbered up to a shelf at the far end of the room, and came back with a slim, leather-bound volume.

‘Privately printed in Bristol, in eighteen-forty-seven. Ah—
with
some
handwritten additions at the back. I'd be willing to bet the collection hasn't been added to since that particular noble collector died. Now—this is going to be a bit of a fag. Would you like—?'

‘No,' said Sergeant Medway. ‘Why don't you put WPC Hillier on to it. She's bright and very thorough.'

‘Good idea. Right, I'll go and send her along.' Superintendent Hickory stood in the corridor and looked along the great, dark expanse that stretched in the direction of the older parts of the house. ‘This place gives me the same feeling I get when I go to London with the wife and she decides to “do” Oxford Street,' he said gloomily, and set off at a modest pace, his bulk forcing up squeaks of protest from every other floorboard.

Sergeant Medway completed his measurements of the vacant place on the table, and was just beginning to get his things together when he saw through the window Sam Barton—also carrying a sketch-pad and pencil—approaching across the lawns towards the Blenheim Wing. The architect, Leoni, had been generous of entrances to his massive extension, and Sam's nearest one was through the Music Room at the far end of the ground floor, and up the elegant stairway which Parsloe and Nazeby had used in all their comings and goings. Medway waited in the corridor to intercept him.