“Ah, but you may not be aware of it,” Michael said. “Just imagine, if you should have noticed something odd, perhaps a day or two before the murder, if you were to mention it to me, it might be the vital clue that leads me to the murderer. Think what a hero you would be then.”
“Oh… a hero…”
“So let us start with you, shall we? When did you first know you were illegitimate?”
“I’ve always known it, Captain, sir. Leastways, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t.”
“What did your mother tell you about your father?”
“Only that he were a married man, animportantman, but he were kind to her… special, she called him. A proper gentleman. I were a gentleman’s son, she said, so I were special, too.”
“But she never told you his name?”
“Never. Said it were best I didn’t know.”
“But then, somehow, you found out.”
Whyte shook his head. “Not me. I weren’t there. It were around Easter, when one o’ the Wishaw girls were wed, and ma took most of a bottle of old Ma Wishaw’s gooseberry wine. She came right out w’ it, seemingly, that it were Mr Nicholson done it. Mind you, she remembered nowt about saying it afterwards, but everyone else remembered it, right enough, and two o’ me uncles came up here to tell me. But it’s nowt to me, sir. I never cared who it was got me ma wi’ child. I had a good family roundme, and never felt no lack. And now I’ve a good place here, and Mr Moreton says if I keep doing well, happen I’ll end up as head groom when he retires, which is more than I’d ever dreamt when I were a lad. There’s no way I’d ever do anything that’d put me in a hangman’s noose, not when I got prospects here.”
“Of course,” Michael said. “But some of your family were quite angry about it, I understand. There was a meeting at the White Horse one evening, and tempers were high. Or so I heard.”
Whyte shifted uneasily. “Aye, that were me grandda and me uncles. When they’ve had a few, they get a bit wound up. Two of me uncles had bumped into Mr Nicholson one day, and asked him straight out if he intended to do anything for me ma, seeing as how she’s nobbut a laundrywoman still, and he said he didn’t know her! They were spitting fire about that, I can tell you! So they got a bit agitated and talked a lot of nonsense about going up to t’castle to force him to own up to it, but me ma told them not to be so stupid and it all died down again.”
“So none of your friends or relations went off to the castle that night and took an axe to Nicholson?”
“No! Course not! They’d have marched in and thumped him on the nose, maybe, but creeping around at night? Not anyone I know.”
“Can you think of anything odd that happened around that time?”
“Oh, the vital clue?” Whyte said. “I wish I could think of something, but I don’t remember anything out of the way happening. And no one I’ve talked to has the least idea who might have done it.”
Which was no more than Michael had been told by countless others. He let Whyte return to his duties, and tucked his notebook away with a sigh.
“It is a frustrating mystery,” Atherton said sympathetically. “One would suppose there would besomeevidence left behind to identify the culprit, but everyone seems to have been virtuously tucked up in bed on the night in question.”
“Not necessarily virtuously,” Michael said, “but tucked up in bed, certainly.”
Atherton chuckled. “Yet one person at least was not, and I do not believe it was merely a passing stranger. It must surely have been someone who knew Nicholson, and bore him a grudge for some reason.”
“That is the very heart of the matter.‘For some reason’.I can find any number of ways in which the sainted Mr Nicholson was less than perfection personified, but none that would rile a person so much as to plan his murder.”
“It was planned, was it?”
“Oh yes. The axe was carefully hidden away, ready for use.”
“I thought it was part of the display on the stairs? One of my nephew Eustace’s assemblages of weaponry, where anyone could have removed it on the spur of the moment.”
“That was certainly what we thought originally, but experiment showed that it could not easily be removed from the display in the middle of the night. When I tried it, I brought the whole edifice crashing down. It would take the utmost care to remove one item from the display.”
“I see.” Atherton frowned. “So someone saw the opportunity, removed the axe at a convenient moment, hid it away until needed and then retrieved it on the night of the murder. I will not ask how you know all this, Captain. But what will you do now that you have talked to Whyte?”
“I must go back to Pickering,” Michael said, “and pick up the threads that were dropped there when Shapman confessed. Foolish man! So much time has now been lost. And I have takenenough of your time, sir. Thank you for permitting me to see Whyte.”
“Anything we can do to help,” Atherton said. “It is a ghastly business, and the sooner the murderer is apprehended the better.”
Out in the yard, as Michael waited for his own horse to be brought out, another horse was being saddled.
“What a fine creature!” he said, walking all round the animal.
