“Which would be the way the gunman went, do you suppose?” he said at length. “He would no doubt have left the castle by the door below the bridge, but which stairs would he have used? The service stairs are all some distance away.”
“Not all,” James Neate said. “The service stairs are at one end of the great hall, and used by the servants as they come and go. There is also the wider stair beside the garden door, which leads directly up to the great hall, emerging below the main stairs. However, there are two other stairs, narrow spiral affairs set into the walls, intended for the butler or a footman to reach the entrance hall quickly when a visitor arrives. One is just inside the gallery, the other in the library. They are rarely used nowadays, it seems, so there is little risk of encountering anyone.”
“Hmm.” Michael reached for his brandy glass, found it empty and set it down with another sigh. “I was so optimistic that we would find just one person unaccounted for. Ah, well. Nothing about this case has been easy, and this is no exception.Pettigrew, have you heard any more about Miss Wilkes’ home, or the quarrel between her and her father?”
“I have had a reply from the Duchess of Dunmorton,” Pettigrew Willerton-Forbes said, brushing a stray crumb from his waistcoat. “She does not know the Wilkes family personally, but she has a friend who has a relation in the neighbourhood of Warriston Hall, so she is to write and make more enquiries.”
James Neate had been to Scarborough to check on Miss Wilkes’ aunt. “She has lived there for some years, a quiet, respectable widow in a quiet, respectable street. She rarely goes into society, but no one has a word to say against her.”
“I wonder how Mr Eustace met Miss Wilkes, if the aunt is not often in society,” Luce said, looking up from the shirt of Michael’s she was mending.
“One might meet anywhere at a resort by the sea,” Michael said. “Walking along the shore, in the circulating library… anywhere. One does not have to be introduced at a ball or an evening party. Well, it does not seem that there is anything untoward about Miss Wilkes, apart from the estrangement from her father, which I would like to know more about, but cannot easily ask. Luce, can you—?”
Luce shook her head firmly. “The girl closes up the instant her father is mentioned. Even her brothers and sisters are unmentionable — it does seem as if the breach is a serious one.”
“And there are no obvious cracks in her story,” Michael said thoughtfully, “so we must accept the alibi.”
“We’d have to accept it whoever she might be,” Neate said. “The entire household is adamant that no one left the house that night. No horse was taken, remember, and the grooms would know the following morning if a horse had been ridden that distance.”
“Now, why do you want the alibi to be broken, Michael?” Pettigrew said, gently. “Do you have suspicions against Eustace Atherton?”
“I have suspicions against everyone,” Michael said crossly, “but Eustace is everywhere in this story. It is his tower where the smuggling goes on, and where Miss Peach was killed, and he found the body, remember. He heard me talking about the books needed to decode Miss Peach’s notebook, so he could have stolen them.Andhe was inside the castle when Bertram Atherton was shot. He could easily have slipped out of the great hall, down to the basement, up through the cheese store and bang! Back the same way, in time to appear outside, only a little late, to offer his help.”
“But Mr Kent Atherton was even later to turn up, and with no one to vouch for him,” Neate said. “He is everywhere in the story, too — the smuggling, finding evidence of Miss Peach at the tower, he was at the castle the night of Nicholson’s murder and no alibi in his bed, either.”
“That is all very interesting,” Michael said thoughtfully. “Yet he has an alibi for the time the books were stolen. Both Eustace and Kent have alibis for some occasions and not others. We are assuming, are we not, that all three events are connected? That is, Nicholson’s murder, Miss Peach’s murder and the shooting of Bertram Atherton.”
“It would be incredible if they were not,” Pettigrew said.
“Quite so. Three separate events, then, but deriving from the same cause, and two men with only partial alibis. Suppose they were working together? The smuggling… they mustbothhave been involved in the smuggling. We know that Kent Atherton was… no, heisa part of the operation. Eustace must have known about it, at the very least, since the tower was his. So either he turned a blind eye or he took a share of the profits. Maybe he was more actively involved… we cannot say. But they must bothbe part of it. So suppose that Nicholson found out about it and threatened to betray them to the Excise men.”
“More likely he wanted a cut,” Neate said. “He is all about money, the sainted chaplain. Pay out a large sum or Customs and Excise will be told what is going on here.”
“Blackmail! Yes, yes! Very likely! So Eustace leaves an axe hidden in the urn at the castle, and Kent slips out of his room one night and does the deed, knowing that Eustace has a solid alibi. Back to his room, clean nightshirt on in time to appear with everyone else when the screaming starts. Then he tells us he thought he saw someone running down the main stairs.”
“Which no one else saw,” Neate added.
“Precisely. But then, Miss Peach finds out what is going on, and Kent… or Eustace, or both, strangle her, and get the body to Tonkins Farm. It would be easier with two people, I should think, to manage that undetected. Eustace stole the books while Kent had an alibi. And then…”
“And then they shot Bertram, and for what reason precisely?” Luce asked sweetly.
“Eustace wanted to marry Bea Franklyn,” Michael said at once. “He was jealous of Bertram, and decided to get rid of him. He arrived on the scene very swiftly when she noticed someone watching her in the woods, so he could have been following her about. And he proposed three times, after all.”
“She also refused him three times,” Luce said. “Why would she accept him at the fourth attempt, even if Bertram is out of the way?”
“I agree,” Pettigrew said. “Eustace is clever, so I doubt he would take such a phenomenal risk for the slender hope of winning Miss Franklyn’s hand in the end.”
“Then it can only be that Bertram discovered something about the smuggling ,” Michael said. “Pettigrew, you are looking smug. Where are the holes in my argument?”
“Two holes,” he said, with the satisfied smile of a cat seeing the mouse approaching. “Any Excise man is going to be very, very wary of approaching two sons of a belted earl, even if they are smuggling. He has to have an eye to his own career, and making a mistake of that magnitude would end it very swiftly. I doubt that would be much of a threat, to be frank. As for blackmail… Michael, you have not properly considered Nicholson’s character.”
“He was a devious rogue, up to no good in a multitude of ways,” Michael said savagely.
“So he was, but remember when you were first here? I was still in town then, but your letters were full of‘the sainted chaplain’.No one had a bad word to say for him. However much deviousness he was up to, it was allsecret.Stealing the tenants’ rent money — secret. Cheating the late earl at piquet, which he assuredly did — secret. Making paste copies of his wife’s jewellery — secret. Collecting money for non-existent charitable works — secret. His brothel at Pickering, the profits funnelled through legitimate businesses — secret. Even his illegitimate son — secret, until the lady got drunk one night. But blackmail — that is not secret at all. It is a nasty, underhand business, and blackmailers are thoroughly disliked — hated even. It is an excellent motive for murder, but it is not a secret, not from those subjected to it. Nicholson was no blackmailer.”
Michael sighed. “I do not know why I remain friends with you, Pettigrew, when you puncture my theories with such enthusiastic glee.”
“Oh, not glee, my friend,” Pettigrew said, grinning. “Never that. Enthusiastic, perhaps, for that is my rôle in this little band of investigators, to bring my superior intellect to bear on your wilder flights of fancy… Ow!” he cried, as Michael threw a cork at his head. “But I do it more in sorrow than pleasure.”
