“By all means let us play backgammon. There is a board on the shelf over there.”
He set up the pieces and they began to play, but he too seemed preoccupied, and after one rather muddled game, they abandoned the board, refilled their glasses and settled down to conversation.
“Do you truly believe you can find Miss Peach?” Tess said, before the captain could begin one of his anecdotes from India.
He sighed. “I am not optimistic. Nor do I feel I make much progress on finding your father’s murderer. This investigation is turning out to be one of my most spectacular failures.”
“I am sorry Tom Shapman threw everything off course by his foolish confession,” she said quietly. “And for my part in that, I also apologise. I am too prone to speak without considering the consequences.”
“There is no need for any apology, Miss Nicholson. You did not ask him to confess, after all. But even if he had not done so, I am not at all certain that I would have been any further forward. There is no trace left behind at Corland to point a finger. The axe was accessible to anyone. The room was easy to find, your father’s habits known. No one appears to have benefited by his death, apart from you, but I do not see you as a murderer. No one had a grievance deep enough to suggest murder as a solution. Until I can find a reason why anyone should have wished to murder your father, I cannot begin to guess his identity.”
“My father was a wicked, thieving man, Captain. Someone must have hated him.”
“Actually, no. He was generally well liked. Not generous, but despite the penny-pinching, he paid his bills on time. The managers of the businesses he owned all said he treated them respectfully. No bullying or shouting, nothing untoward at all. He would call once a week to collect the takings, leaving the agreed sum for wages and expenses, sign the account books, drink a glass of sherry and chat for ten minutes, then away. He belonged to a political society here, but they all speak well of him, too. If he had any vices, he kept them well hidden.”
“Any vices other than stealing from people, you mean,” she said acidly.
The captain grinned. “Yes, apart from that, but none of those defrauded knew of it. There might have been suspicions, butnothing more than that. But while it is infuriating to be unable to find his killer, I find myself fascinated by the man himself. For thirty years he has been quietly lining his own pockets, amassing a fortune, and for what? He had no need of money, one might think. He was very comfortably situated at Corland, happily married, wanting for nothing, and yet all the time he was squirrelling away his gold bars. Have you any idea why?”
She sipped her wine, considering the point. “He said to me once that money is the real power in the world, that money means not being beholden to anyone. It is freedom… oh, and the ability to recover from a disaster. I wonder if he feared a disaster?”
“Ah… if someone were to find out he was not ordained, perhaps? That would be a crime too great to ignore, but if his secret were uncovered, with a fortune in his hands, he could make a run for it and start a new life somewhere else.”
“Do you think someone found out?” she said. “That would be something that might drive a man to murder, perhaps.”
“It might,” he said thoughtfully. “But if he wished to hide that secret, murder is not going to help, and if he wished to expose it, there are better, safer ways, without risking the gallows. It is a puzzle, is it not, Miss Nicholson? An insoluble one, perhaps, yet I cannot quite let it go. Then there are all those strange little disconnected matters that niggle at my mind. Hiding the axe in the urn, for instance. Mr Eustace collecting a lady from a Pickering house of ill-repute. Miss Peach’s disappearance, muttering about laudanum and mule droppings. Miss Franklyn seeing a man in the woods, watching her. And that clock…”
He turned his gaze on the mantelpiece, where the ormolu clock ticked away.
“I have seen a clock very like it somewhere else, but I cannot for the life of me remember where.”
***
It took Michael just two days to find the clock again, although it was pure happenstance. He had begun again on his round of all those who had known Mr Nicholson, and after the distinguished members of the Pickering Political and Philosophical Society, he had moved down the social scale to the businesses that Nicholson had owned. The chandlery was the most important, for it was where Miss Peach had taken lodgings, and so he talked to all the other residents. The last of them was a well-dressed widow of around sixty, Mrs Clegg, who lived in two rooms on the top floor.
“I am so sorry to trouble you again, ma’am, but Miss Peach is still missing, and I should like to ask you one or two more questions, if it would not be too much of an imposition.”
“Not at all, Captain Edgerton. Do come in. May I offer you some tea? Or a glass of wine?”
“Thank you, but Mr Cartwright downstairs filled me full of port and macaroons. If I take another mouthful I shall burst.”
She laughed, and ushered him into the room. And there it was on a shelf, for it was too large for the mantelpiece, an ornately exotic ormolu clock in a room filled with unpretentious furniture and virtually no other decorative piece. When she had repeated all that she knew of Miss Peach, none of which was new to him, Michael asked the question buzzing in his head.
“What a lovely clock! Elephants — so unusual.”
“A parting gift from my employer,” she said, but he thought her smile seemed a little strained.
“Do you know Apstead House?” he said.
“I do, yes.”
“Have you ever been inside it?”
“Why do you ask, Captain?”
“Because there is a clock there which is almost identical to this one. Perhaps itisidentical, for I can detect no difference. That is a curious coincidence, is it not? One might almost suppose that two such similar clocks might have been intended for the same house, one for each saloon, perhaps. One wonders just how such a handsome timepiece comes to grace the lodgings of a widow of modest means.”
“You think I stole it?”
