C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (26 page)

As he spoke my heart sank. It seemed to me that so far Inspector Hyde had just been tootling around and now he intended to roll up his sleeves, spit on his hands and really get to work—the job of work in question being yours truly, Suspect Number One. If Hyde started throwing his weight around there was no telling what he might pull off. I feared the next time I saw Hyde I might have to fight him off with a blackjack.

‘How is the search for Ruth Eggleston going?’ Jack asked.

‘No news so far,’ said Crispin.

‘Do you believe her disappearance might be linked to the murders?’

‘I very much fear it is. That’s why I’ve sent word to every town in the vicinity, and put every local village constable on door-to-door inquiries. I’d be delighted if she turned up and said, “What’s all the fuss about?” but I fear that’s unlikely to happen.’

Some silence followed as we applied ourselves to our food with the diligence it deserved. Jack as always ate quickly, and this time he saluted Mrs Rose’s efforts by cleaning his plate in a matter of minutes.

When Inspector Crispin had caught up, he said, ‘Now, Mr Lewis—I respect that deductive, detective mind of yours. No doubt at some time in the near future there will be tourist coaches bringing goggle-eyed visitors to your door just to catch a glimpse of your mighty brain.’

Jack roared with laughter. ‘They’ll have to wait until I’ve finished with it,’ he said. ‘Then it can be pickled in formaldehyde and put on display in a local museum.’

‘But right now,’ Crispin persisted, ‘I want you to apply it to this baffling mystery of ours. Who poisoned Connie Worth? And how on earth did they do it? Getting cyanide into her slice of cake, and hers alone, seems plain impossible. So how was it done? And who murdered Miss Stephanie Basset? And why? What hints or suggestions can you offer, Mr Lewis?’

This question prompted a long and detailed discussion. As it got underway, Sergeant Merrivale pulled out his ubiquitous little black notebook and began jotting down the ideas the two men threw up.

Jack and the Scotland Yard detective began by going through each of the possible suspects, starting with the family members at Plumwood Hall: Sir William Dyer, Lady Pamela, the boys Douglas and Will, and strange old Uncle Teddy. Then they went on to discuss the staff: Keggs the butler, Mrs Buckingham the cook, the various maids, and the head gardener, Hugo Franklin. They then considered the villagers and their possible involvement, with a special focus on the missing girl, Ruth Eggleston.

Crispin brought the discussion back to the first victim, Connie Worth, to focus on his theory that understanding the victim was the key to the solution. And she did seem to be the thunderstorm that started this whole thing. They talked about her as the probable murderer of her husband Charles, the possible murderer of her cousin Judith Trelawney, and the likely blackmailer of Sir William Dyer. They weighed up the possible value of confronting Sir William with the blackmail question, but seemed doubtful of the value of doing so at the moment.

But the talk always came back to the method: how was a fatal dose of poison delivered to a single slice of freshly baked cake, invisibly, in front of a table full of witnesses?

Crispin scratched his head and admitted he hadn’t a clue, and then asked, ‘What about you, Mr Lewis?’

A little reluctantly, Jack said, ‘I have a vague idea forming in my mind. It’s so strange I need to think it through before I share it. This notion doesn’t seem very probable but it’s beginning to look possible—and it would explain everything.”

And that’s all he would say on the subject.

The discussion moved on to the supply and delivery of the poison. And throughout all of this, much of the talk was in cryptic hints that may have meant something to Jack and Crispin, but which I couldn’t follow.

Inspector Crispin was lighting a cigarette and Jack had his pipe going when a red-faced Constable Nile came huffing and puffing into the beer garden.

‘Ah, I’ve found you,’ he gasped. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’

‘What’s up, constable?’ growled Sergeant Merrivale, flipping closed his notebook and returning it to his pocket.

‘A body’s been found.’

He stopped after this cryptic utterance and had to be urged to continue.

When he did, he said, ‘A young woman’s body. It’s been spotted by some fishermen at the foot of the cliffs not far from Plumpton-on-Sea. And I’ve turned up nothing with my door-to-door inquiries, sir, and so I thought perhaps . . . possibly . . . it might be young Ruth.’

‘The body hasn’t been identified?’ asked Inspector Crispin.

‘It hasn’t been recovered yet, sir. It’s at the foot of steep cliffs, and the waves are strong, so the fishermen who spotted it haven’t got to it yet.’

Crispin and Merrivale looked at each other—a dark, knowing look. Then with one accord they both rose from the table.

‘We’d better go and take a look ourselves, constable,’ said the Scotland Yard inspector. ‘Sergeant, bring the police car around to the front of the pub. Constable Nile, you come with us.’

Crispin nodded in our direction, then the three police officers left.

‘What do you make of that?’ I asked, turning to Jack.

‘The inspector is right,’ said Jack as he slowly rose from his chair. ‘We need to go and take a look for ourselves.’

‘You mean us two?’

He nodded and asked, ‘How can we get to Plumpton-on-Sea?’

‘Well, there’s a local train . . . I don’t know when the next one is due.’

‘Then it’s off to the railway station to find out. Come along.’

As we hurried up the village street towards the station, I asked why it was important for us to be there when the body was examined.

‘I have a suspicion,’ said Jack earnestly, ‘that this corpse
will
turn out to be Ruth Eggleston. If it is, then her death, and the manner of her death, will tell us something more about the murderer, and about how desperate the murderer is becoming.’

At the railway station we found the one and only permanent employee (the station master cum porter cum ticket collector), who told us that a train would arrive in half an hour and sold us tickets.

The local railwayman turned out to be as reliable as Bradshaw, and thirty minutes later we were steaming towards Plumpton-on-Sea.

The slow local train consisted of two carriages and a guard’s van pulled by an ancient locomotive. This clanked and hissed and wheezed asthmatically, and when faced by the smallest hill seemed to pause to contemplate early retirement rather than tackle a slight upward incline. Finally, with a deep steamy sigh of relief, the little engine got us to our destination—Plumpton-on-Sea.

In golden sunshine, and with a fresh breeze blowing in from the sea, Jack and I walked down the hill from the railway station to the little town and the sea front.

The tide had retreated, leaving most of the local fishing fleet lying on the mud bank. No policemen were in sight. In fact, the sea front was deserted except for a group of men standing, in a listless way, in front of the Fishermen’s Co-op.

As we walked up to them Jack, who could be at ease in any company, introduced us and asked about the body that had been found.

‘Aye, Jeb saw it this morning—when he was collecting his lobster pots out beyond the wash,’ said one of the older men slowly, doling out each word as if it was a gold coin and he wanted to spend it carefully.

I asked if the police had recovered the body yet.

‘Oh, aye,’ replied the same old man, seemingly the spokesman for the group. Then he fell into a lengthy silent meditation on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. This seemed to exhaust him because he lowered his aging bones onto an upturned barrel before he went on, ‘Two of the young chaps climbed down the cliff to where the body was. It was George’s boy, Caleb, it was, and young Jeb. Aye, they climbed down and fastened a rope onto the body, so the police could pull it up to the top of the cliff, like.’

He continued in his slow, methodical way to explain the risks that George’s boy, Caleb, and young Jeb had run climbing down that cliff.

‘That rock crumbles, it does. Not safe at all. But the tide is rising, so you couldn’t get around the base of the cliff. No one could. And there’s a swell today. We saw that when we went out, didn’t we, boys?’

The boys, all of whom were middle aged, nodded and muttered in agreement that there was indeed a swell and that they had indeed noticed this fact when they took their boats out that morning.

‘So that means waves, you see,’ continued the old man of the sea, squinting at Jack. ‘Big waves. So you can’t walk around the cliffs, and they had to get the body up quick like, before the waves picked it up and carried it out to sea.’

Jack managed to indicate that he was deeply interested by this detailed narrative before asking if they’d succeeded.

‘Oh, aye. They did that. They brought poor wee girlie into the village and put her on a bench in the old boathouse over there. The police doctor is looking at her right now.’

Jack, who seemed to have picked up on the conversational etiquette that these fishermen expected, then chatted about the weather and asked them about the catch.

When these conversational decencies had been observed, we thanked them for their help and made our way to the old boathouse on the far side of the stone breakwater that protected the little harbour.

The door to the boathouse was standing ajar and voices were drifting out as we approached.

Inside we found Inspector Crispin, Sergeant Merrivale, Constable Nile and Dr George Henderson, the district GP. Lying on a wooden bench was the pale, battered body of poor young Ruth Eggleston. Their voices fell quiet as we entered the boathouse.

I felt a surge of mixed emotions—part sadness at the loss of so young a life and part anger at whoever had done this. I choked up a bit, and had difficulty getting my words out as I made some fatuous comment along the lines that it turned out to be Ruth after all.

‘Do we know how she died?’ Jack rumbled, and I could hear the faint tinge of anger in his voice.

Dr Henderson looked at Crispin as if asking for permission to speak. The inspector nodded and Henderson said, ‘Not from the fall.’

He paused to draw a tarpaulin up to decently cover the corpse. Then he continued, ‘There was almost no bleeding, you see. She was dead long before she went over the clifftop.’

‘So it’s clear, Mr Lewis,’ said Crispin, ‘that it’s not suicide. She didn’t kill herself out of remorse for that concocted farrago about the cyanide missing from the chemist’s shop. It’s a bit grim in here—let’s get back out into the sunshine.’

We all thankfully followed his lead. Constable Nile was despatched to make a phone call to arrange for the body to be collected. Inspector Crispin turned to face the sea and took in a lungful of fresh air.

‘Another murder,’ he said.

‘Do we know how?’ I asked.

‘I won’t be able answer that,’ replied the doctor, ‘until after the autopsy. But I can say now there are no marks of violence on the body.’

Jack raised his eyebrows and nodded at Crispin who nodded back. Then Jack turned to me and explained their wordless communication. ‘Most likely another poisoning,’ he said.

In sombre silence the small group walked across the top end of the sloping, cobbled ramp that led down to the water towards Plumpton-on-Sea’s waterfront pub. We all felt the need of a drink.

Five minutes later we were standing in the front bar parlour of
The Mermaid and Fisherman
, each with a pint of bitter in his hand.

‘He’s getting desperate,’ said Jack, addressing his remark to Inspector Crispin.

‘More than that,’ the Scotland Yard man said, ‘I think he’s starting to panic.’

‘He,’ barked Sergeant Merrivale in his bulldog growl, ‘or she. We haven’t even settled that yet.’

‘We’re not getting any further forward,’ Crispin agreed. ‘What do we do? Wait until every suspect bar one is murdered and then arrest the last person standing?’

‘Be assured, my dear inspector,’ said Jack more cheerfully, ‘that almost all the pieces of the puzzle are now in place. Almost all. There’s one mystery my young friend Morris stumbled across last night. I believe it has no connection to the murder. Once I have assured myself of that fact, then much of the undergrowth will have been cleared away and I will see much more clearly.’

‘So how do you piece together the story of Ruth Eggleston’s death, Mr Lewis?’ asked Sergeant Merrivale. ‘What do you think happened?’

‘Given the transparently false story she told us when we visited the chemist’s shop,’ Jack replied, ‘she had some connection with the murderer. Based on that connection, and on what she did to protect the villain, it now seems fairly certain that the murderer came to see her as a threat. So last night he—or, as you say, sergeant, she—arranged to meet Miss Eggleston privately. Clearly, if this is another case of poisoning, something was consumed. Perhaps the murderer bought drinks. However it was done, Miss Eggleston was murdered. In the early hours of the morning her body was transported . . .’

‘So the murderer must have a car,’ Crispin interrupted.