Snobbery With Violence (12 page)

“Good morning, Captain Cathcart.”

He started and turned round. Rose was standing there, heavily veiled, accompanied by Daisy.

“Why are you about so early, Lady Rose?” he asked.

“To accompany you to see the superintendent.”

Harry glared at Daisy, who blushed and muttered, “I only told my lady.”

“And why should you want to see the superintendent?”

“Because I can be of help,” said Rose. Although outwardly calm,
Rose was inwardly frightened he would refuse. She was sure he had been invited to try to hush things up and she was determined to see that he did not do so.

He stood looking at her thoughtfully. Then he said, “You may be of use. But do not interrupt when I am talking to the superintendent.”

Superintendent Kerridge was just sitting down to a breakfast of black pudding, kidneys, and bacon and eggs when the landlord informed him that there was a party from the castle to see him.

“Send them in,” ordered Kerridge.

He stood up as Harry and Rose entered the room. “May I offer you something?” asked Kerridge,

“No, we will breakfast later,” said Harry.

Kerridge waited until they had seated themselves at the table. He studied the captain. Where was the silly ass he had interviewed in Chelsea? This version of Harry Cathcart looked hard and intelligent. He was determined to go on eating. I mean, he thought bitterly, that was the upper classes for you. Drop in and interrupt a good breakfast when it suited them. Well, come the revolution, they’d be singing a different tune. Did they ever stop to think that the food that was no doubt being laid out in the breakfast room of the castle would be enough to feed the poor of this village for months? No, not them.

“You are sneering, Mr. Kerridge,” commented Rose.

Kerridge flushed a guilty red. “Bad tooth, my lady. Now, what is the reason for your visit?”

Harry told him about the disappearing lady’s maid and of Daisy’s brief conversation with her.

“Servants disappear the whole time,” said Kerridge.

Harry then told him about the items hidden under the mattress.

“The thing is,” said Kerridge after he had defiantly munched a kidney, “I do not understand your interest in this. It is not your lady’s maid, Lady Rose.”

“I think she has been murdered because of what she knew,” said Rose. “I think you should get men from the new fingerprint bureau down here to dust Colette’s room. Then you can fingerprint everyone in the castle. The captain’s fingerprints will be there, of course, as will those of my maid, but you can eliminate them.”

“My lady, I am charmed by your interest in modern police methods,” said Kerridge, pointing a sausage impaled on a fork at her, “but what will happen is this. Lord Hedley, I am sure, has phoned several people in high places. Later today, I will be told to close the case.”

“But the doctor will not sign the death certificate!” exclaimed Rose.

“No doubt, given the right pressure, the police pathologist will. Deaths from cosmetic arsenic are quite common.”

“But Colette ... ?”

“A lady’s maid? A
foreign
lady’s maid? A
French
lady’s maid?”

“I will be open with you, Superintendent,” said Harry.

“About time, if I may say so, sir. You played the fool very well when I saw you before about the bombs at Stacey Magna.”

“Oh, that,” said Harry with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Forget that. This is important. I have been summoned here by Hedley to hush this up.”

“Why you?”

“I am considered diplomatic.”

“So why didn’t you keep the maid’s disappearance to yourself?”

“I cannot condone murder, Mr. Kerridge.”

Kerridge sighed. “I will do my best in the short time I am
sure I have got left. But you can forget about fingerprinting the guests, Lady Rose. Can you imagine the outcry? I wish to keep my job.”

“I would have thought a desire to right a wrong and bring a criminal to justice would be more important than your job,” snapped Rose.

“Oh, really? And then what? You lot don’t live in the real world. While you’re up there stuffing your faces, people in this village are starving.”

“You forget yourself,” admonished Harry.

“He is quite right,” said Rose. “The superintendent shall have our help. I shall find out what I can from the female guests, and you, Captain, can concentrate on the men. Daisy and Becket can find out what they can from the servants.”

“We will do what we can,” said Harry with a note of irritation in his voice, for he felt Rose was being downright unwomanly. “I would advise you to keep your radical views to yourself in future, Superintendent, particularly in the presence of ladies.”

“Oh, tish,” said Rose with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“They’re up there a long time,” said Daisy to Becket as they sat in the empty taproom.

“How do you like being a lady’s maid?” asked Becket.

“It’s all right. But so much to learn. I’ve got to wash my lady’s silk stockings and I’m frightened I’ll damage them.”

“You wash them with soap and water and simmer them gently. For a blue shade, put a drop of liquid blue in a pan of cold spring water and run the stockings through this for a minute or two, and dry them. For a pink dye, same process but with one or two drops of pink dye. For a flesh colour, add a little
rose-pink in a thin soap liquor, rub them with a clean flannel and mangle them.”

“ ‘Ere!” cried Daisy, her Cockney accent to the fore. “I didn’t think I needed to colour them. And how do you know all this?”

“I had never been a gentleman’s gentleman before, so I read a great deal on the subject. I often found myself reading advice to lady’s maids as well,”

“What about corsets?”

“You take out the steels in front and sides, lay them on a flat surface and use a small brush and a lather of white Castile soap to scrub the corsets. Run under cold water and leave to dry. Don’t iron.”

“You’re a mine of information. Do you think Colette was murdered?”

“If she knew something, someone might have paid her to go away,” said Becket.

After Harry had driven them back to the castle, he helped Rose to alight and asked curiously, “Do you think you will like detective work?”

“Perhaps.”

He smiled down at her, a smile which illuminated his normally harsh face. “Why are you so interested in helping me?”

“I would like to give you a worthy motive,” said Rose. “It is simply because I am bored.”

The light went out from his face and his eyes had the old shuttered look.

Daisy followed Rose up the stairs to their room. “My lady,” said Daisy, “It may not be my place to say so, but you must learn to flirt.”

“Why?”

“Because one day a handsome man’s going to come along and someone else is going to snap him up.”

Rose looked amused. “Why are you so suddenly interested in my lack of flirting?”

“It was when the captain asked you why you were helping him and he had ever such a nice smile, my lady, and you said it was because you was bored.”

“What should I have said?”

“You could have said it in a jokey sort of voice and dropped your eyelashes like this and then given a little smile.”

“I am not romantically interested in Captain Cathcart.”

“Would do to practice on.”

Rose sat down in front of the dressing-table mirror and stared moodily at her reflection while Daisy took the pins out of her hat and removed it.

“You know, Daisy, it is this pressure of marriage which annoys and depresses me. There are women in London earning their living.”

“Not ladies.”

“There are respectable middle-class ladies working in offices. There is nothing up the middle classes. They have sound moral values,” said Rose as if commenting on some obscure tribe of Amazonian Indians.

“If you say so, my lady.”

“I will now go down to breakfast and see what I can find out. I will start with my new friend, Miss Bryce-Cuddlestone.”

“Don’t get too friendly, my lady. She could have murdered that Gore-Desmond woman herself.”

“Nonsense.”

“Poisoning’s a woman’s game.”

SEVEN

It would be impossible to read poetry properly in these upper-class accents; they have such a wretched poverty of vowel sounds:
Aw waw taw gaw,
they seem to be saying. Much of this
yaw haw
comes down to us from the drawl of the fashionable Mid-Victorian ‘swells’, who were suggesting to their listeners that they were doing them a favour by talking to them at all.

-J. B. PRIESTLEY,
THE EDWARDIANS

In the breakfast room, Rose helped herself to kidneys and bacon and took a seat next to Margaret.

“Have you heard any news of Colette?” she asked.

“Not a word.”

“You should tell the police.”

“They will not be interested.”

Rose hesitated and then said, “I told them myself.”

Margaret stared at her. “When?”

“This morning.”

“Why?”

“A girl is missing. Under the mattress in her room was found a silver locket, a piece of lace and a cigarette case.”

“Those are items I gave to her.”

“Why would she leave them behind? Someone could have
packed up her belongings to make it look as if she had left. Besides, she told my maid, Daisy, that she knew something about one of the young ladies here, implying that one was having an affair.”

Margaret’s face was stiff with outrage. “I find your poking around in things that do not concern you distasteful, to say the least. Now, if you will excuse me ...”

Rose watched her go with dismay. What had she done wrong? Surely it was only natural to want to know what had become of the girl. She suddenly felt very alone again.

She saw Harry, who had just entered the room. She waited until he had helped himself to a frugal breakfast of toast and coffee and called to him, “Captain Cathcart!”

Harry joined her and said, “You are looking distressed.”

Rose told him about her conversation with Margaret.

“I wouldn’t read too much into it,” he said. “You will find all the guests want to forget about the death of Miss Gore-Desmond. They are certainly not going to trouble their heads about one missing lady’s maid. Perhaps Miss Margaret Bryce-Cuddlestone fell from grace herself with one of the men here.”

“Surely not. Surely it is only married ladies who ...” Rose blushed. Then she recovered and said, “I am sharing Daisy with her. Daisy might find out something.”

“It’s worth asking her if she can find out anything. It would explain Miss Bryce-Cuddlestone’s attitude to her maid’s disappearance.”

“Morning, Lady Rose ... Cathcart,” said Harry Trenton, sitting down opposite them, a plate laden high with food. “Jolly fine weather. Nip in the air, what.”

“Haven’t been awake long enough to notice,” drawled Harry.

Other guests began to come into the dining-room. Rose noticed the change in Harry. He seemed to have an endless fund
of vacuous remarks. Perhaps that was how he found out things, she thought. People would slip their guard if they thought they had nothing to fear.

Daisy helped Margaret change into a new outfit for lunch. She was feeling more confident because Becket had told her that any fine items which needed to be cleaned by the lady’s maid rather than given to laundresses were to be brought to him and he would help her.

“Have you been with Lady Rose for long?” asked Margaret.

“Not long,” said Daisy. She had been primed by Rose to find out about Margaret but had not expected Margaret to want to find out about her.

“And before that?”

“I am the daughter of one of the tenant farmers on the Sta-cey Court estates,” lied Daisy. “I am well-educated and it was Lady Hadshire’s kind way of giving me a start in life.”

To her relief that seemed to satisfy Margaret. “Do any of the gentlemen here please you, madam?” asked Daisy.

“Know your place, my good girl, and do not ask impertinent questions. The lace on my oyster satin dinner gown is soiled. Please have it cleaned by this evening.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Hand me my gloves. You may go to your mistress now.”

Daisy held the door open for her, collected the dinner gown and took it downstairs. Rose had said she had no intention of changing for lunch and that she thought the ritual of changing at least six times a day exhausting and silly.

She went in search of Becket, who looked up his books and told her to make a lather of Castile soap, clean the lace with a fine brush after it had been unpicked from the gown, put a little
alum in clean water to clear off the suds, iron it with a cool iron and then stitch it back onto the gown again.

As she worked, Daisy told him that she had been instructed to find out all about Margaret.

“If you want to find out who is sleeping with whom,” said Becket, “you have to watch the corridors at night.”

“What if I’m caught?”

“Just say your mistress can’t sleep and wants some warm milk and you lost your way. This place is a rabbit warren. They’ll believe you.”

“A murderer wouldn’t,” said Daisy with a shiver.

During afternoon tea when the men had returned from shooting and the ladies were fluttering around them, the marquess entered.

“Good news,” he said. “It has been confirmed that Miss Gore-Desmond’s death was suicide. The coroner’s inquest is tomorrow. There is no need for any of you to attend. We can put the whole matter behind us.”

Harry followed him out of the room. “So my services are not required?”

“Glad to say they’re not. But stay on. Be a guest.”

“Thank you. Perhaps I will stay for a few days.”

Harry rang for Becket and told him to bring the car round. Then, taking over the wheel himself, he drove to the Telby Arms.

He found Kerridge in his room.

“Been called off?” he asked.

“The marquess must have powerful connections. But it happened just as I thought it would. I’ve got a friend in the pathology lab. Miss Gore-Desmond had taken a massive dose of arsenic.
Couldn’t possibly have been a mistake with cosmetics. So a murder is being hushed up. You must be pleased.”

“On the contrary. I am staying on for a few days. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”