“Is he dead?” I asked, and while I did a passable job of keeping my voice steady, I could hear the emotion threading through it. Shock, mostly, with a bit of horror.
Collins nodded. “I imagine he would have to be. I can’t think that anyone would have survived a blow to the head like that one.”
No, I couldn’t either. I turned on my heel and buried my face in Christopher’s shoulder. He peered into the room over my head and made a gagging noise.
We had both seen broken skulls before. There had been Freddie Montrose in London in June and then Abigail Dole at Beckwith Place in July. (And when I put it like that, I realize that I make it sound like we deal with an awful lot of dead bodies. I suppose we do, or at least we have done in the past few months. I’m not sure how that happened, exactly.)
At any rate, Dominic Rivers’s skull was clearly broken. There was an indentation on the back of his head, and quite a lot of blood, and then there were the shards of what had been a lovely art deco vase with an image of birds and flowers, that were scattered across his back and the carpet surrounding him.
I swallowed hard. “The vase came from the alcove over there.” I waved vaguely in the direction of the staircase, but without lifting my head from Christopher’s shoulder. “I noticed it yesterday.” It had been full of peacock feathers, of all ostentatious things.
“Someone from downstairs, then.” Christopher eyed the alcove from where we were standing. It was between Rivers’s room—and my room, and Wolfgang’s room, and for that matter Cecily’s room—and the staircase.
I nodded. “It would have to be. When he—” my eyes flickered to the corpse on the floor and away again, “came upstairs, everyone else was in the dining room. Except for you two and St George, you were outside. There’s only one staircase up to this level. Anyone who came this way, would have walked past the alcove and the vase.”
“Weapon of opportunity?” Christopher suggested.
“Most likely. There are better things to hand—I have a lovely chamber pot and slop jar in my room, in heavy earthenware; there’s even a handle to make swinging it easier—but someone would have to know that it was there in order to use it.”
“Safer to use something from the common rooms,” Christopher said. “That way it doesn’t point the finger at anyone in particular.”
I nodded. “Looks less premeditated, too. Here, they just grabbed the vase on their way past. If they had made a stop in one of the rooms to fetch the weapon, or brought it from downstairs, it would have been planned.”
“It’s still planned if the vase only came from here,” Collins said without looking up. He was squatting next to the body with a hand on Rivers’s wrist. “If it had been directly beside the door, maybe not. But someone picked it up and carried it to the door with them. That’s premeditation. If only a few seconds’ worth.”
Yes, of course it was. “He’s dead, I assume?”
“As a doornail,” Collins said, and pushed to his feet, “I’m afraid.”
“He turned his back to the door.”
The dead man’s feet were just inside the room, and he had fallen forward, towards the window.
Collins nodded. “Someone must have knocked, and he opened the door to them. Whoever it was, didn’t seem to be a threat, so he turned away.”
“He must have missed the vase,” Christopher said. I don’t think it was sarcasm, although sometimes he surprises me.
“It’s a rather large thing to miss,” I said, “isn’t it? I think I would have noticed if someone showed up outside my door holding a vase. Or at least I would have done if they were holding an empty one; if there were flowers in it, that might be a different matter.”
“No flowers in this one,” Collins said. “No water, either.”
I shook my head. “No, it was full of peacock feathers this morning. I noticed it when we came up to see whether Cecily wanted to play croquet.”
There was a moment of silence.
“That’s two murders in one day,” Collins put word to it, finally. “Or at least this makes it less likely that Miss Fletcher’s death was anything but a murder.”
I nodded. “He must have known something he didn’t know he knew. Or perhaps he knew it and just refused to tell me.”
“He said that he hadn’t provided Miss Fletcher with pennyroyal,” Collins said as he got to his feet and brushed hishands off. There was nothing on them, nothing I could see, but I imagined that the feeling of Dominic Rivers’s cold skin must be present.
“He did,” I agreed. “He also said that he wouldn’t tell me what he might have brought here for anyone else. Client confidentiality, he called it.”
But it was pretty obvious after this that Cecily hadn’t been the recipient of whatever substance Dom Rivers had brought to Dorset. She hadn’t been in any condition to kill him. Someone else must have done that.
“A pity,” Collins said succinctly. After a moment, he sighed. “I hadn’t even started to interview the guests properly. Not aside from you two and Lord St George. Now I suppose I’ll have to talk to them about this, as well.”
“You know we’re off the hook,” I told him. “We were down the road picking pennyroyal. You saw us walk away.”
