Enter Pale Death (27 page)

Ben confirmed Cecily’s account of the night he’d been put on watch. When they arrived at the door of Lavinia’s room on the first floor, he stood back. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s not locked. You can go in, I suppose.” And then, with a grin: “I’ll stay outside and keep cave, shall I?”

The room was entirely orderly, vacuum-cleaned and polished. Swept clear of any useful information, Joe suspected. He went first of all to the dressing table where he knew most women left clues to their personality, their plans, their hopes. Even the silver-backed hairbrush had been cleaned. Not so much as one stray black hair remained to bear witness to its owner. Her clothes were still in the wardrobes, her underwear in the drawers, her hats all in their boxes. He wondered without finding an immediate answer why the room had not been cleared, her effects handed on to the female staff, in the traditional way.

A door to the left opened onto a well-equipped bathroom. Here too every surface sparkled. The waste basket had been emptied. A cake of Pear’s soap stood ready in the dish on the washbasin, freshening the enclosed space with its lightly astringent scent. A second door in the wall to the right of the extravagantly large bed would not open when he turned the knob. Locked from the other side, he supposed.

Joe returned to Ben, who was standing to attention like a good guardsman. “Ben, I want you to show me where Grace Aldred’s room is and then show me where you took up position to keep watch on the night your mistress died.” He put up a hand to silence the man when he sensed he was about to launch into an explanation, a speech of self-justification or declaration of innocence. “Later!”

Ben led the way along the corridor. “This here’s Sir James’s room. Kept locked. No one’s allowed in there except for cleaning. It’s right next to her ladyship. Connecting but not connected, if you know what I mean.”

Joe could imagine what he was meant to read into that and smiled but he followed up with: “Surely there’s a connecting door between the two rooms?” He glanced around. “The usual thing …”

Ben replied rather reluctantly. “There used to be when the old master occupied the rooms but Sir James keeps it locked. He’s a man who likes his privacy.” Into Joe’s quizzical silence he ventured to add, “If he were ever minded to take her ladyship a cup of cocoa he’d nip down the corridor. He preferred things that way.”

At the end, some three doors away, Ben pointed. “That’s Gracie’s room. You can’t get in though. She got the key off Mrs. Bolton and locked up afore she went off to see her ma. She doesn’t like anyone poking about in her things.”

“Is that allowed, locking up?”

Ben shrugged. “Mrs. B. and Gracie are like that.” He crossed
two of his fingers. “Her ladyship picked Gracie for her personal maid and she liked to keep her close by. Huh! Lucky to have a room of her own—and down here on the nobs’ floor. She should try roughing it with the rest of us under the tiles …”

“That’s ladies’ maids for you,” Joe said easily. “Spoilt. Goes with the position.”

“You said it, m—Commissioner. Still, she deserved a bit of something, did Gracie, what with having to deal with her ladyship day in, day out. Our Gracie,” he spoke with a look of affectionate indulgence, “isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer if you know what I mean, but that suited her ladyship. Anyone smarter wouldn’t have lasted a week with
her
. She sacked her first three maids for what she called ‘impertinence.’ ” Ben rolled his eyes. “Grace never complained. Kept the mistress off everyone else’s back, though I’m speaking out of turn saying so …”

“Speak no ill of the dead, eh? That’s a load of codswallop. Ben, I’ve always found that the dead were quite often less than angelic when they were alive. Which often accounts for their demised condition.” He spoke this nonsense in a knowing, confidential voice.

“Know what you mean, sir. I expect you get a lot of that in your line of work.” Ben stopped in front of a three-quarter-sized brown-painted door and nodded. “This is where the old mistress put me to keep watch, sir.”

“This” was a disused slops cupboard which had once, before the introduction of bathrooms on every floor, been used to house chamber pots on their way down to and back from the sluice room. It was conveniently at the angle between two corridors. It was cramped but sufficient room had been found to insert a small upright chair. Not much chance of Ben’s falling asleep on the job in this musty little space on that hard chair, Joe calculated and, for a moment, had a bleak thought of the sleepless, tedious hours of the night, watching over someone you didn’t care for, unsure
as to why the surveillance was necessary and with no distraction from the darkness but your own thoughts.

He looked about him. From this point, the footman had a view over Lavinia’s door, James’s door, Grace’s door and also a clear sight of the corridor leading down the east guest wing and away to the north. Cecily was running a spy system—spying on the members of her own family and her guests.

“You must have been dying for a smoke! How often did they lumber you with that duty?”

“Not often, thank God! Once, twice a month. More often when there’s company. She likes to know where everyone is,” he added with a knowing look. “And why not?” he said loyally. “Sometimes they fetch up where they’re not supposed to be. It helps the old mistress to know what’s going on in her own house. She has a right, I reckon.”

Joe grinned. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll lock my door tonight. Wouldn’t want to risk any illicit nocturnal visits. Not from the present company anyway.”

Ben blinked and then grinned back. “This is the way to the Old Nursery. It’s quite a hike. I think in the old days when there were little ones about they used to like to keep their noise well away from the rest of the house. Funny that, don’t you think, sir? That she should have put someone right away down here when there were at least two guest rooms unoccupied down this corridor?” His question was clearly meant to raise an informative or speculative remark from Joe.

Joe instinctively put his own gentling techniques into operation. “I expect you can think your way through that, Ben, as well as I can. Better. You were on the spot after all and from what Cecily tells me …”

Ben nodded again eagerly and quickened his pace. Silently thanking Hunnyton for his plan of the house, Joe managed to keep a handle on their progress and knew they’d arrived when
they reached a short corridor off at an angle. A run of four doors made up the deserted nursery suite. Day nursery, night nursery, a room for Nanny and a room for Nanny’s assistant, no doubt.

“Disused, I take it?” Joe asked.

“Ever since Master Alexander went away to school, they say,” Ben told him. “Though—and this is a bit weird—it’s been kept as it was. In fact redecorated every year. Living in hope, I expect. Anyhow, this was where her ladyship chose to put the young woman.”

“Miss Joliffe?”

“That’s her. No love lost between her and the mistress. Nasty argument over dinner. The young lady stood up for herself something fine but it ended in tears.”

“Whose tears, Ben?”

“Miss Joliffe’s, of course. Nothing makes … made … the mistress cry. I was on coffee duty when the ladies withdrew. Miss Joliffe handed me her cup and announced she was going up to her room. There were tears in her eyes, I reckon. All that baiting by those upper-class ninnies! They behave like a pack of hounds when they think they’ve sighted a fox.” Ben took himself in control and carried on. “She told the mistress she was leaving first thing in the morning as soon as she could get a taxi to come out from Cambridge and pick her up.”

“How did the mistress take that?”

“Seemed to be just what she wanted to hear. But she said certainly not—she’d ask the chauffeur to take her to the station in the Bentley directly after breakfast. Detaining Miss Joliffe would be the last thing she wanted to do, she said, all sarky-like. Here we are. It’s not kept locked though there is a key always in the lock on the inside.”

Joe went in, trying to guess what had been Dorcas’s reactions to the insult of being allocated this unsuitable room.

He was quite surprised to find it pleasant and spacious, the
lamps, when Ben lit them, casting a warm glow over the comfortable furnishings. The walls were papered with a lively print in which strawberries and nightingales featured. The polished boarded floor was covered in oddly luxurious cream rugs, a cut above the usual practical linoleum that most nurseries seemed to have. The child’s bed—eight-year-old Alex having been the last occupant, Joe supposed—had not been moved out; it was still here, still made up, as though the owner was expected to jump back in and call for a bedtime story from Nanny, who was always on hand right next door.

Lucky little owner, Joe reckoned. He was a happy child who had the run of this pretty space—secure, pampered, his child’s needs lavishly catered for. How very different from the childhood experience of the young Dorcas! What
must
she have made of all this? Alongside were an ancient rocking horse, a dolls’ house, a toddler’s trundle seat and other bits of nursery paraphernalia of a solid Edwardian grandeur. These relics of a cosseted infancy had been pushed over to one side of the room. The rest of the space was occupied by a fully stocked dressing table and an adult-sized bed, freshly made up with plump white pillows and a quilt of yellow Chinese silk.

Joe knew exactly how the insult had affected Dorcas. He had a vision of her dark head sobbing into the pillow and felt a rush of anger towards the dead Lady Truelove. The girl had struggled all her life with the knowledge that she had no place in polite society. The illegitimate offspring of a feckless father and runaway mother, she had received only hatred and slaps from her wealthy grandmother. Scorn from vindictive ladies was something she had grown used to dealing with and she would have recognised this deliberate slight for what it was. The mistress was saying: “You are not worthy of the attention a guest would normally receive. You have no place here.” James and Lavinia were still, the choice of the furnished nursery was suggesting, man and wife and going
about their family duties. “So there, Miss Cleverclogs! Spend a sleepless night realising that whatever claims you might fancy you had on James’s attention are so much moonshine.”

And all this humiliation had been doled out right under the eyes of her respected mentor and fellow academic. Joe’s anger flared again. What the hell was James Truelove thinking to allow such a situation to develop! Joe would have stopped it in three words if he’d been there. If Lily’s Aunty Phyl had it right, the bloke was in love with his student—how could he sit back and watch this scene play out? To Joe, it was reminiscent of the scenes of animal torment Truelove dabbled in under the name of scientific discovery in his laboratories. Joe wondered nastily if the man had been making observations—taking notes. “Influence of social criteria in display of sexual rivalry in the human female” might perhaps have been his heading. Or was he merely terrified into silence by his wife?

He went to run a hand over the pillow. Poor girl! This was a sad way to learn that a man she had admired had no spine, no decency. “She must have spent a miserable night.” Lost in his thoughts, Joe had hardly been conscious of speaking out loud.

He was surprised when Ben answered him.

“Oh, I don’t know about that, sir!” The tone was heavy with suggestion. “She wasn’t lacking a shoulder to cry on.”

“What do you mean?”

Ben took a step closer and flicked a glance to check that the door was closed. He listened for movement in the house. A show of “resident sleuth” put on for Joe’s benefit? Joe didn’t doubt it but he was not about to challenge for the role. He waited, as he was meant to.

“I mean as she had company.”

“Company?” Joe’s thoughts skittered for a moment and then he had it. “Oh! A lady’s maid? Was she allocated one such from the resident staff to help her with her unpacking?”

“Nothing like that. She turned Rosie down and shifted for herself … Naw! She had a
man
in here. I clocked him creeping along the corridor at half past one.” He paused to assess Joe’s reaction.

“At one thirty in the morning? I’ve scanned the guest list, Ben. Now who, of that gouty unadventurous company, would be shuffling along the corridors in his bedroom slippers at that hour?”

Ben gave a scoffing laugh, enjoying the picture Joe was conjuring up. “No slippers! He was still in evening dress! I followed him to see what was going on. ‘Hang on!’ I thought, ‘He’s drunk as a skunk! He’s taken a wrong turning!’ Of course he wasn’t and he hadn’t. Knew very well where he was going. Passed all the other guest rooms and fetched up here. I think he was expected.”

Trying for a calm tone, Joe asked: “Why do you say that?”

“The door wasn’t locked! He didn’t even need to knock. Just opened it and walked straight in.”

“Go on.”

“Well, words or something must have been exchanged because seconds later, out he comes again with the door closed in his face. Quiet but firm.”

Joe began to breathe again.

“Well—he weren’t havin’ none o’ that! He bangs on the door this time and calls out her name, all upset and pleading like …‘Dorcas, you have to let me in!’ ‘Lord!’ I thought, ‘He’s going to rouse the whole house!’

“With any effect?”

“I’ll say! The lass opened up, shushing him, then she reached out, cussed something fierce, grabbed him by the shoulders and heaved him inside. Then she—or he—locked the door.” Ben grinned and confided, “No idea what she did with him after that. Perhaps they had a game of Snakes and Ladders? Anyway—he didn’t come back past my station for the rest of the night. When Grace started moving about before dawn waking up her ladyship
I didn’t know what to do. I thought I’d better follow the mistress like I’d been told.” Ben’s face took on a sharp expression. “But I’ll tell you what—if there’s any question about the death being set up—I can tell anyone who needs to know that Miss Dorcas has got a perfect alibi.” He glowered defiantly at Joe. “If anyone tried to drag that poor young gel into it, I’d have to spill the beans. Position or no position.”