“Has anything like this happened before,” Michael said. “Not shooting, necessarily, but… accidents, say? Something in the last year or two that looked like an accident but might not have been?”
“No, nothing. I am not prone to accidents, as a rule, so I would notice,” Bertram said. “Walter is the one for accidents, but then he tends to be a neck or nothing rider. He had a fall last year that could have been nasty — something broke as he was about to jump — but he landed in the hedge and came off more or less unscathed.”
“There was a stray shot near him last winter, too, do you remember?” Bea said. “He had wandered away from the rest of the shooting party and there was a shot very close to him.”
“Well, Walter is an idiot, in some ways,” Bertram said easily. “He never thinks, and ends up in the line of fire. But I have never even had the smallest accident of that nature, so this has come from nowhere. And why now… here and now? There must be easier ways, less risky.”
“Exactly,” Michael said. “There is an urgency about this that is very striking. The assassin could not wait, and needed to stop you immediately from doing… something. Your marriage, possibly, or a legal matter. Were you about to make a will, or anything of that sort?”
“I have had a will in place since I came of age, and it was updated weeks ago to take my forthcoming marriage into account.”
“Do you have any information that you are about to reveal?”
“Such as what?”
“Anything. The murder of Mr Nicholson, possibly, but it could be anything. Have you recently found out something detrimental to another person?”
“Nothing at all.” He sighed. “I think it must be about our marriage, Bea. Do you have any rejected suitors with murderous tendencies?”
“No. Well, not with murderous tendencies. There was the Marquess of Embleton, but I cannot see him hiding in bushes, can you?”
“And he was not here last night,” Michael said. “I will check, but it seems unlikely. Anyone else?”
“There was only Eustace…”
“Mr Eustace!” Michael sat up a little straighter. “He wished to marry you, Miss Franklyn?”
“Oh, yes. He offered twice before I was betrothed to Walter, and when that fell apart, he offered again, but he only wanted my fortune, you know. He was never in love with me or anything of that nature.”
“How do you know that?”
“A girl knows when a man feels a real passion for her. It is in his eyes, the way he looks at her, the way he hangs on every word, and when he proposes, it all tumbles out. One cannot be in any doubt about it.” She glanced at Bertram, blushing a little. “Eustace had none of that. He told me how well circumstanced he was, his income and so forth, and he talked of attachment but it was all so… socold, somehow.”
“And as soon as you are betrothed to me, he is betrothed to someone else,” Bertram says.
“Exactly! It is hardly a grand passion if he promptly proposes to another woman. He has known her for some time, apparently, so no, he is not nursing a vengeful broken heart, my love.”
“What a pity,” Michael said. “That sounded so promising, too. Still, the fellow’s motive may not be so important this time, because we should be able to discover who it is. He must have disappeared from view inside the castle, and thenreappeared sometime later. Hmm… how much later, I wonder? An interesting question.”
8: Briar House
Bertram and Bea’s wedding went ahead, only a day later than planned, but Olivia was very put out to find that no one was permitted to attend. Captain Edgerton was determined to provide no opportunity for the gunman to have another attempt on Bertram’s life, so only the four parents and Mr Dewar were in church, together with Captain Edgerton, the Scotsman and four burly grooms and footmen who were to act as Bertram’s body-guard.
Immediately after the ceremony, the newly married couple were bundled into a carriage and driven off to an unknown location, escorted by the captain, the Scotsman and the body-guard.
It was all very dispiriting, but since the wedding breakfast had been arranged long before, and the cake made, the rest of the family celebrated the marriage by eating and drinking to excess, and allowing a few gleams of merriment to break through.
The following day, however, saw a resumption of misery, for the captain had left behind Mrs Edgerton, the London lawyer Mr Willerton-Forbes and another man, by the name of Neate. Their task was to find out precisely where everyone was at the moment the shot was fired.
“How foolish,” Eustace said crossly, having been summoned to take his turn being interviewed. “As if anyone is going to say,‘Let me think… oh, yes, I was under the third bush from the right, firing a pistol.’”
Kent laughed. “No, but what they will also be doing, I expect, is asking everyone who else they could see around them. That way they will find out if anyone claims to be in the great hall but is actually missing. It is quite clever, if you ask me.”
When it was Olivia’s turn, she discovered that he was quite right. The table in the old schoolroom was covered by a large drawing of the relevant castle rooms — the great hall and entrance hall, the passageway between them, and the two anterooms — together with the bridge and a section of the drive. Little dots, each labelled with a name, were scattered about. There were not very many dots yet, but she quickly found her father’s.
“And where were you standing, Lady Olivia?” the lawyer said.
“There… just there, beside Papa. I was holding his arm.”
