Blood on the Wood (16 page)

‘If you're sure…'

‘I'm sure. You'd better get out on the steps and wait for the gig.'

*   *   *

Perhaps it took Adam a long time to wake up the groom, because the sky was getting light by the time the gig came round to the front of the house. It was going to be another fine day, the air warm, a cock crowing. Bobbie scrambled up beside Adam and I watched them going away down the drive, relieved that one problem was out of the way at least. I went back into the house and found Carol waiting at the foot of the stairs.

‘Daniel wanted to see her. I couldn't stop him.'

I didn't know whether she meant sleeping Felicia or dead Daisy, but her face gave me the answer.

‘He pulled the cover back, took her hand and kissed it. Now he's gone to his room.'

She was much less hostile to me than Adam. Looking after Felicia together seemed to have brought us close in a short time, almost as if we were family. I offered to go up and see if Felicia needed anything and she said she'd come with me. I wondered if that was simple need for companionship or whether she wouldn't run the risk of Felicia waking up and saying something to me unguardedly. She wasn't to know that it was too late already. When we opened the door and looked in Felicia had turned on her side but was sleeping peacefully. Carol closed the door and took a long breath, looked down at her dressing gown and bare feet.

‘She's all right for the while, then. I suppose I'd better go and get dressed before the police get here. Do ask Annie for some coffee or anything else you'd like.'

Left alone in the big house, I went back to the room where we'd had our discussion. It felt rancid with all the talking and the smell of the lamps, the furniture smeared with our plotting and bargaining. Because that was what we'd been doing, no getting away from it. We could claim it was in a good cause – or at least in the cause of not making a bad situation even worse – but it didn't feel good to me. I went round turning out the lamps and opened the windows wide to let some air in. Full light now, roses waving in a dawn breeze. How long before the police got here? Would Bobbie be on a train soon? When I turned back into the room, Annie was already there with a tray of coffee.

‘Should I take some up to Mr Venn?'

Asking me, a stranger. A picture robber. I said leave it for a while, sat down and poured myself a strong cupful. I was hardly halfway down it when Oliver Venn walked in.

‘Good morning, Miss Bray. Is that coffee I smell?'

He'd managed a miracle and turned himself back into the rounded and confident little man he'd seemed when I first met him. Or almost. He'd changed into a freshly laundered shirt and a dark brown linen suit, a white silk cravat at his throat, eyes rinsed and bright, tonsure of grey hair carefully combed. But he couldn't stop his hand from trembling a little when I handed him a cup of coffee. The skin on the back of the hand was thin and tight-stretched, pied with brown liver spots. He gave me a wan smile of thanks and settled himself in an armchair.

I said, ‘Did Daniel give you back Philomena's revolver yesterday evening?'

I hadn't intended to come out with it like that, but his resilience annoyed me. I couldn't forget that he'd used his charm and nice manners to deceive me once already. He stared at me, eyes hurt, slopping coffee.

‘Why do you ask me that, Miss Bray?'

‘Because the police are going to be asking us all about that revolver sooner or later, and we'd better have our stories ready.'

‘I have no story, as you put it, Miss Bray. I simply have no notion what happened to poor Philomena's gun. Until this appalling business, I'd even forgotten she possessed one.'

‘Where was it kept?'

He blinked. ‘In the drawer of the bureau in my study, I believe. I have a vague memory that Philomena asked me to take it some years ago. She used to keep it in her glove drawer, but apparently the oil on it made her gloves smell unpleasant.'

He wrinkled his neat little nose at the thought of it.

‘Have you checked if it's in your bureau now?'

He shook his head.

‘Not checked, or not there?'

‘The latter.'

He admitted it reluctantly, voice low.

‘And Daniel didn't give it to you or say anything about it to you yesterday evening?'

‘No. Why should he? Why should Daniel be talking to me about guns?' He was indignant and it was a fair point. Daniel had believed, because of what I'd told him, that Felicia had taken his aunt's gun to kill herself. If he'd given it back to his Uncle Oily he'd have had to explain why, which would have been another betrayal of Felicia. The sensible thing would have been to lock it up somewhere until things calmed down. But had Daniel been in any condition to be sensible? I needed to talk to Daniel before the police arrived, but could hardly barge into his room.

Oliver and I sat in silence, drinking our coffee. After a while, Carol came in. She'd changed into her damson-coloured dress with a black jacket over it. As it happened, the colour of the dress matched exactly the tired crescents under her eyes, but I don't suppose she'd chosen it with that in mind. Her crinkly hair was screwed into a tight knot at the back of her head. Oliver's eyes went to her and I could see the relief in them, probably because he knew she'd protect him from me.

‘How is Daniel, my dear?'

‘Pacing up and down his room. I could hear him, but I didn't go in. I think he's best left to himself until Adam gets back.'

We were on to our third pot of coffee and the garden had warmed up and was beginning to spread its scents into the room by the time we heard wheels on the gravel. Oliver gave a little shiver then stood up and went to meet his guests, Carol following him. There were heavy official boots in the hall outside, deep voices speaking staccato words with Oliver's lighter twitterings underneath them. Asking, I shouldn't have been surprised, if they'd had a good journey and would they like some lemonade. I stayed where I was, regretting a lot of things.

Chapter Eleven

A
S I SAT THERE I HEARD
the murmur of voices and heavy feet in the studio next door. They'd want to see Daisy's body first. Adam must have given them some account of what had happened before they left the police station. A long half-hour passed then Adam came into the room with a police officer behind him, an inspector. He was a big broad-shouldered man, nearly a head taller than Adam. He stared at me. It wasn't a hostile look exactly, but it wasn't reassuring either. His grey eyes were watchful and his otherwise clean-shaven face had a tuft of bristles on one cheek, as if he'd been summoned from his home in a hurry. I'd expected them to start questioning members of the family before getting round to me and felt off balance.

‘Miss Bray, I'm Inspector William Bull. I gather that you discovered the body of the deceased. I'd be grateful if you could spare us a few minutes of your time.'

Sarcastic too. He must have known I'd been sitting there waiting. Not a countryman's voice. At a guess, he'd started his career in Birmingham, although only the trace of an accent was there. An ambitious man, I thought, pleased rather than disconcerted by a murder in his area. Later I found out that he came from headquarters in Oxford and had happened to be seconded to the Chipping Norton station working on another case. He was in his mid-thirties and probably set on being a superintendent by the time he was forty. Not being a country man he showed no particular deference to landowning families like the Venns.

‘Certainly,' I said.

I expected him to sit down at the other side of the coffee table, but he stayed where he was.

‘Upstairs, if you wouldn't mind.'

Adam stood aside to let me through the door. I gave him a long look as I passed, trying to pick up any message from his expression, but saw nothing there but concern. The inspector said ‘Excuse me', very politely, as an apology for preceding me up the main staircase. I followed him along the corridor, through a doorway and up another staircase to a room that must have been directly above Oliver Venn's study. It looked like an architect's afterthought, small and narrow with a long window giving a view of the gravel sweep outside the front door. The furniture was solid schoolroom stuff, with none of the elegance of the rest of the house, a battered table with three upright chairs round it, a bookcase stuffed with dusty books, most of them on property and company law. A constable, young and round-faced, got up from his chair as I came in. The inspector, still too polite for comfort, pulled out another chair for me, facing the window, and settled himself opposite me.

‘Now, Miss Bray, would you be kind enough to give us your full name and address?'

The constable had a notebook and pencil and wrote down painstakingly Eleanor Rebecca and the rest.

‘I understand from Mr Venn that you recognised the deceased as a Miss Daisy Smith. Was she an acquaintance of yours?'

‘She was staying at a camp on Mr Venn's land and so was I. I spoke to her a few times but didn't know her well.'

A creature as insubstantial as the bonfire flames, playing wild violin. A scared girl watching other girls pick blackberries. A scream in the dark,
Don't let him take me.

‘Do you know anything about her family?'

‘I think she came from somewhere around the Marlborough Downs. I don't know the family.'

Daniel could tell them about the farmhouse where he found her. Daniel could tell them a lot of things, but would he?

‘We need to find a member of her family for a formal identification of her body. After all, if you'd only seen her a few times, you might have been mistaken.'

‘I might have been mistaken, I suppose.'

But I knew I hadn't been. If not exactly telling lies, I was implying untruths. It was like trying to find a way down a scree slope, with stones sliding away underfoot faster than you wanted to go. Inspector Bull leaned forward, painfully polite.

‘What I don't entirely understand…'

Which was when everything started avalanching. There were a lot of things I hoped not to have to tell him – for Felicia's sake, Daniel's sake, even Bobbie's sake – but at some point or other we had to touch tact and this particular lot of facts were a threat to nobody but me. So that was when I told him I was in the house because I'd been trying to remove a picture from Mr Oliver Venn's study. He took it calmly enough, but the constable made a gulping sound and got a glare.

‘Are you in the habit of stealing pictures, Miss Bray?'

‘I've never tried it before. I shouldn't have tried it now except that I didn't regard it as stealing.'

I explained, because at least this was one of the things I could explain, about Philomena's bequest to the WSPU, Oliver Venn's bad faith and my regrettable decision. All the time the constable's pencil went scratch scratch and I had to stop twice for him to catch up. I noticed that the inspector's dishwater-grey eyes narrowed when I mentioned the WSPU. He didn't like suffragettes any more than socialists.

‘You realise that you have admitted to being in Mr Venn's house without invitation with the intention of depriving him of an item of property. I shall have to inform him and it will be up to him to decide whether to bring charges.'

‘I understand.'

I thought, He won't dare, but didn't say it.

‘And was Miss Daisy Smith your accomplice by any chance?'

‘She most certainly was not. I didn't even know she was in the house until I saw her in the cabinet.'

‘Why did you open the cabinet?'

‘I needed somewhere to hide the picture. I'd … made a noise in the studio and I knew somebody would be coming down.'

‘Had you equipped yourself with a gun for this enterprise?'

‘Of course I hadn't. Was it a gun that killed her?'

‘How did you gain entry to the house?'

‘The studio door was unlocked.'

‘So you went through the studio twice, on your way in and on the way out?'

‘Yes.'

‘What time was it when you came in?'

‘After midnight, I think. I didn't look at my watch.'

‘How much time in between coming in and going out?'

I thought of the struggle to unhook the picture, hiding in the broom cupboard.

‘Probably about half an hour, or more. I'm not sure.'

‘On the first occasion, did you look in the cabinet?'

‘Of course not. I didn't need to.'

‘So you've no idea whether the deceased was in the cabinet on that first occasion?'

‘I suppose she must have been.'

But even as I was saying it, something struck me that made me hesitate. Bobbie had stumbled in the dark going past the cabinet on the way in. I'd assumed she'd tripped over a rug, but if Daisy's stiff foot had been sticking out … Bull didn't miss the hesitation.

‘And why should you suppose that, Miss Bray?'

‘If somebody had brought her in while … while I was upstairs, wouldn't I have heard?'

Another hesitation, with two reasons for it. One was that I'd nearly said ‘we' instead of ‘I'. The other was that I
had
heard somebody downstairs and it might have been Felicia.

‘So you opened the cabinet and found the body. What did you do then?'

‘Adam Venn had heard the noise and come down. We lifted her out and … laid her on the floor.'

‘Why did you lift her out instead of leaving her for us to see? Did you think she might be still alive?'

‘No. I don't know why we did it.'

Useless to explain the impossibility of leaving her there looking so uncomfortable and undignified, even though she was dead. He'd got me off balance, so I said something I hadn't intended.

‘I noticed her body was quite stiff already, the neck and the arms and legs.'