C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) (33 page)

‘Of course not.’

I continued to look at the lemon moon through the liquid, and if I had kept on staring I might have been inspired to turn the vision into poetry.

But Sir William was becoming irritable. ‘Stop staring and drink up, old chap,’ he snapped.

I raised the glass to my lips and then some instinct of self-preservation stopped me. The gathering of dust on the rim bothered me.

‘I think I might go and get a clean glass,’ I said.

In a moment Sir William was on his feet. ‘I bring you out a glass of fine old brandy and you insult my hospitality by complaining about a little dust. Be a man, Morris! Drink up!’

Now, I don’t like being bullied, not even by biscuit tycoons who have more money than good taste, and to my mind Sir William was not behaving like a gentleman. I put the untasted glass down on the bamboo table and said, ‘In a moment. I’m not in a hurry.’

Sir William had risen from his chair and was standing beside me.

‘As you wish,’ he said. And it sounded as if he was speaking through gritted teeth. The next moment something struck the side of my head. I cried out, and fell sideways in the chair. I think I must have lost consciousness for a moment, because when my head began to clear Sir William was around on the other side of the chair and seemed to be fastening a thick leather belt around my arm—tying it to the arm of the chair.

‘What’s going on . . . ?’ I mumbled, my words coming thickly. ‘What are you doing?’

I tried to rise from the chair and found that my other arm was already strapped down. I pushed with my feet, but the old chair was so heavy it was impossible to lift it. I flopped backwards in the chair and shook my head, trying to clear it.

‘A joke’s a joke, old chap,’ I mumbled, still having some difficulty getting my words out. ‘But this is beyond the pale.’

Sir William paid no attention to my protest. Instead he picked up the glass of brandy I’d left on the bamboo table.

‘Now,’ he growled, ‘you will drink the brandy as I ordered you to in the first place.’

‘Is that what this is all about? Are you offended because I didn’t drink your wretched brandy? Well, let me tell you that your reaction is not that of a gentleman.’

I was still feeling light headed. I think he must have struck me a severe blow to disorient me like that. Slowly things swam into focus, and I began to think clearly again. No one, not even an offended biscuit tycoon, straps his guests to a chair to force them to drink his brandy.

Whatever was happening, it was a good deal more sinister than that.

‘What’s so important about that particular glass of brandy?’ I demanded.

Sir William held it up in his fingers and contemplated it for a few moments.

‘Very well,’ he said at length, ‘I’ll explain. It’s probably reasonable that you should be told what’s about to happen to you. And why.’

He paused and looked at me with a singular expression on his face. No doubt I had an odd expression on my face as well. But if I was wary, he was definitely sinister. Perhaps we resembled a cobra and a mongoose squaring off before they commenced battle—a battle that would be fatal for one of them.

‘What’s about to happen,’ said Sir William slowly, breaking the heavy silence, ‘is that you are about to die. From cyanide poisoning. It will look like suicide. And your suicide will be taken as a confession of guilt—a confession of murder. I’ll probably type out a note to that effect on the small typewriter on your desk in the library.

‘Once you’re dead I’ll remove those straps and leave the note here, on your lap. Inspector Hyde will feel triumphant and vindicated. Inspector Crispin will have no alternative but to return to London. Your celebrated Oxford friend will creep back to his college having failed you completely. And that will be the end of the Plumwood Village murders. The case will be closed, and those of us who have survived will go on with our lives. That is what is about to happen.’

‘You’re mad,’ I gasped, struggling to get the words out—in fact, struggling to say anything in the face of such pathological nonsense. ‘All I need to do is call out and there’ll be people from the house out here in moments.’

‘There’s no one there. The family have gone to the cinema in Market Plumpton. They’ve taken Edmund there as a treat. This, as it happens, is also the servants’ night off. The place is empty. And this house is quite isolated and the grounds are extensive, so you could scream your lungs out and be heard by nothing more than a fox in the woods or an owl on one of those high branches.’

‘No one will believe I killed those women,’ I protested. ‘I have no motive.’

‘You’re a homicidal maniac, Mr Morris—didn’t you know that? Inspector Hyde already thinks you are. Your current wave of killing was triggered by Connie Worth falsely accusing you of stealing a rare book from my library. And when you started killing, you couldn’t stop. Hyde already believes that, and your death will persuade the rest of them that when you couldn’t control your impulse to kill, your conscience wouldn’t allow you to go on living.’

I was breathing rapidly by now and feeling it was important to keep this man talking. ‘The dust on the rim of my brandy glass, that’s cyanide powder?’

‘Indeed it is, Mr Morris. It’s the cyanide that’s going to kill you.’

‘So if you have the cyanide that means you must have committed all of the murders?’

‘I see your Oxford-trained brain has not entirely deserted you. I am the answer to that “whodunit” question that has been troubling you.’

‘You killed Connie Worth and Stephanie Basset and poor Ruth Eggleston?’

He smiled at me coldly, and a shiver ran down my spine as he replied, ‘Guilty as charged, your honour. Not that anyone but you will ever know. But you might as well know, since, very shortly, you will know nothing at all . . . ever again.’

‘We know, and the police know, about the blackmail, so I can see why you might have wanted to kill Connie Worth, but why the others?’

‘All three of them posed threats to me and to my position. And all threats must be eliminated. That’s the philosophy I’ve followed in business all my life.’ (When he said those words, I remembered the conversation Jack and I had overheard.) ‘Consequently I’m regarded as a ruthless businessman, and certainly a dangerous opponent. It was poor stupid Connie who started all this business by trying to blackmail me. She should never have done that. If she had behaved decently towards me she needn’t have died, and the other two would also still be alive. It was her greed that killed her—and the Basset and Eggleston girls as well. All three died because of Connie Worth’s greed. And now you will die too—a fourth victim of that odious woman.’

Trying to control my breathing, I said, ‘Even if there’s no one to hear my cries for help, or to come to my rescue, you still can’t make me drink poison if I don’t want to. For your ridiculous plan to work you need to get that stuff down my throat, and that’s not about to happen.’

‘Oh yes it is, Mr Morris,’ Sir William said in a silken, sinister tone.

He bent over me, pushed my head against the back of the chair with one surprisingly powerful hand and raised the poisoned glass of brandy to my lips with the other.

I pressed my lips tightly closed and tried to pull away, but that heavy, high-backed old chair gave me very little room to move. I pulled on both arms, but the leather straps or belts or whatever they were held me tightly.

‘You’re helpless, Mr Morris,’ cooed Sir William, ‘so the sooner you accept that fact and do as you’re told, the better.’

He pressed the glass against my face and the deadly poison of cyanide-laced brandy splashed up over my tightly sealed lips. I could feel droplets trickle down my cheeks towards my chin. Sir William bent more closely over me and I could feel his hot breath on my face.

I struggled against him, but even though I was an old Rugby blue, my muscles were useless to me—I was too confined, too tightly restricted, to be able to move or resist effectively.

The hand Sir William was using to press my forehead against the back of the chair began creeping down my face. Without releasing the pressure he positioned it so that his fingers could grasp my nostrils. The next moment I was struggling for breath.

‘In a moment, Mr Morris—Tom, my old friend,’ grunted Sir William, as he increased the pressure, ‘in a moment your lungs will run out of oxygen. Then you will either suffocate or your mouth will open and you will gulp down the poisoned brandy. You’ll find that opening your mouth will be an instinctive reaction when your lungs are aching and pleading for air. That’s when you will die from cyanide poisoning.’

He was right. My lungs were begging for oxygen. My brain was shouting to me to open my mouth and gasp for life-giving air. I was close to blacking out, and about to give in and open my mouth wide when all the pressure stopped.

The hand on my head, the glass at my lips—they were gone.

‘Breathe, Tom! Breathe!’ said Jack from just beside me.

My lips flew apart and I hungrily gasped in a large lungful of air. I coughed and spluttered and I could feel Jack unfastening the straps that held me.

As my head slowly cleared I looked up to see Sir William in front of me, held on both sides by the strong arms of Sergeant Merrivale and Constable Nile.

Inspector Crispin was there too. He was speaking to Sir William, telling him he was under arrest.

Then Crispin turned to face me. ‘I’m glad we arrived when we did, Mr Morris. Another minute and we would have been too late to save your life. You can thank your friend Mr Lewis. We were searching the house for you and Sir William and he spotted the light in the summer house.’

I looked up at Jack’s friendly face and managed to croak out, ‘Thanks, old chap.’

‘Come along, Morris,’ said Jack, placing one hand under my arm to help me up. ‘Back to the house. It’s all over now.’

The next hour passed in a kind of blur. I vaguely remember going back to the house and Sergeant Merrivale telephoning for a police car. Then the servants came back from their night off, and the family returned from their evening at the cinema.

I sat quietly in the background while Crispin gathered the family in the drawing room and, very diplomatically, explained the situation. Lady Pamela didn’t break down and weep and wail as I had expected. Instead she seemed to stiffen and harden. Whatever turmoil she was experiencing within, she showed the world a face as cold as marble. Douglas was the one who broke down and sobbed quietly. Edmund and Uncle Teddy both looked confused. Edmund was led upstairs, with Drax taking one arm and young Will the other. Uncle Teddy sat in an armchair gently rocking back and forth and muttering anxiously about who would take care of the biscuits.

The police car arrived from Market Plumpton and Sir William was led away by his retinue of police officers.

Keggs got the household organised and summoned Lady Pamela’s personal maid to take her upstairs to her room.

Jack kept glancing at me, then as the drawing room emptied told me that what I needed was a large cup of tea. He must have disappeared out to the kitchen to speak to Mrs Buckingham because he returned a short time later with a tea tray bearing a teapot, cups and saucers, sugar and milk. We took this into the library, and it was only when we both had large cups of tea in our hands that I asked Jack for a proper explanation.

He paused in thought before he replied. Then he began in that slow, steady rumble of his, just as he did in tutorials, with each word carefully weighed and used precisely.

‘The significant fact for me was the character of Sir William Dyer. You’ll recall one of the maids described him as a “dirty old man”. What she meant was that he was lecherous. It’s now plain that he was a serial adulterer and a serial seducer. I think we may safely assume he seduced a number of the prettier young maids who worked here at Plumwood Hall over the years.

‘The most recent of these, tragically for her, was Ruth Eggleston. I wonder if Lady Pamela became aware of what was going on, and whether that was why the young woman had to leave the Hall and find work in the village. She, of course, imagined herself to be in love with Sir William, and he, for his part, may have told her the sort of lies she wanted to hear.

‘Meanwhile, there was the one real passion of his life: Judith Trelawney, the attractive younger sister of his own wife. He was much too cautious a man to have written revealing letters unless he really was swept away by passion. And we know that in this case he did write such letters.

‘The truth about Judith Trelawney’s death will probably never be known. Did she accidentally fall to her death in Brighton, or was she murdered by the dark and ruthless Connie Worth? Either way, the outcome was the same—a single, compromising letter from Sir William fell into Connie Worth’s hands. Her decision to use that letter for blackmail led not to the wealth she expected, but to her death.

‘When this threat loomed, Sir William exploited Ruth Eggleston’s romantic obsession, getting her to steal a small amount of potassium cyanide powder from the chemist’s shop and cover its loss by forging an entry in the poisons book. It was seeing the connection between that forged entry and the blackmail that began my train of thought.’