Island of Bones (39 page)

‘He is too busy chasing Casper around the hills, I imagine.’ She leaned against the trestle table on the left of the space, then realised that on it lay the coffin and boiled bones of the Jacobite and straightened up again rather smartly. She was irritated to see that Crowther had noticed.

‘I can tell you that Mr Hurst was not an entirely vigorous specimen.
His liver was rather engorged and his heart clogged and fatty. If he came here to walk the hills, it would probably have killed him as neatly as that arrow did.’

‘You are certain it was an arrow then?’

Crowther shrugged on his coat and smoothed down his sleeves. ‘Something very like an arrow was driven into his brain from a low angle with considerable force. You know I am seldom certain of anything, Mrs Westerman, but I present my evidence.’ He picked up a saucer from the table behind him. Harriet registered, rather uneasily, that the pattern was that of Mrs Briggs’s breakfast china. On it lay a wooden splinter, some two inches in length and rather black. She looked up at him with her eyebrows raised. ‘I removed it from the brain. The incline of the wound shows it was driven upwards.’

‘Not fired from a distance then, if it was an arrow.’

‘I can think of no scenario where firing from a distance would have caused this injury.’ He paused, and only continued when she had nodded. ‘I have taken a number of measurements. The puncture is roughly three inches in depth. Death would have been immediate.’

‘How did you manage . . .?’

He smiled and produced a folded paper from his pocket. Within were three quills, blunt at the end. At a point about three inches along each was nicked. Harriet was delighted. ‘What an excellent idea! You introduced the quill into the wound . . .’

‘And when I felt the resistance of uninjured matter, made a nick with the scalpel on the shaft. It also confirmed the angle. The results are consistent. I would also say that as far as I am able to tell, the wound does not narrow.’

‘I supposed a thin stick of any sort, or the narrow end of a billiard cue . . .’

Crowther shook his head. ‘Given the force required, I would think an unworked branch thin enough to match the wound would have shattered, and a billiard cue would have left a wider wound, do you not think? Aside from the fact one is more likely to have an arrow to
hand in the woods close to where an archery competition is in progress, than a billiard cue.’

Harriet shrugged, conceding the point, but only to a degree. ‘What if he were murdered elsewhere then transported some distance to his burial site. You have noted he did not seem the type to go traipsing in the fields for pleasure.’ Crowther smiled slightly and Harriet found herself doing so in reply. ‘Crowther, what else? And can you also explain to me how you seem so much more improved in spirits when you have spent all night with a corpse rather than when you actually sleep?’

‘To the latter I can say nothing. To the rest, look at his shoes.’ Harriet turned to the neat pile of clothing behind her and lifted the shoes. Leather, rather soft, and with large buckles on them. Shoes more appropriate for a drawing room than a country lane. They were dusty though around the toes, as they would become were a man walking on dry paths, and the heels scuffed. Dragged a little way, having walked.

‘I see,’ she said simply. Crowther seemed pleased with his night’s work, but for all that she could not feel they had advanced greatly. She thought of the argument she had heard in the library the night before, and twisted her mourning ring.

She was still considering the matter when they emerged from the old brew house. Crowther turned to secure the lock, so it was Harriet who first noticed Felix standing a little way away on the lawn and waiting for them. As Felix stepped forward, he did not have any of his usual ease and he seemed unsure what to do with his hands. Crowther leaned on his cane and waited for him to approach them, but though Felix looked as if he wished to speak, Harriet spoke before he could begin.

‘How were the Falls by moonlight, Felix?’

He blushed. ‘I spent the evening at the Black Pig, Mrs Westerman. I was considering what I should do, and wished to do so away from my—away from Silverside.’

But Crowther, it appeared, was uninterested. ‘When did you last see Mr Hurst, Felix? Do try and be exact.’

Felix opened and closed his mouth. ‘I have come here to be as frank with you as I may, and against my mother’s wishes, so I shall be as exact as I can, sir. It was during the garden party. I left for a few minutes to speak to Mr Hurst before the archery competition. I had arranged to meet him on the path above Silverside at about that time.’

Crowther studied his nephew carefully. ‘To give him the money that you had received from selling your watch.’

‘Yes indeed, but how did you know?’ Felix looked afraid. Harriet stepped forward and placed the watch into his hand. However much he had frightened her, she could not help feeling a little sorry for him now.

‘Tell us exactly what passed between you,’ Crowther said.

‘I gave him the money, and told him it was all I had. Then he laughed at me. He liked laughing at me. I had played cards at his house for some months, and he enjoyed telling me how much he had despised me the whole time.’

‘He was not angry?’ Harriet queried. ‘He had had a long journey from Vienna to Keswick for three pounds!’

‘I expected him to be so, but no. He had been pressing since his arrival in the village, for a greater sum, but then it was as if he did not care, or was suddenly content to wait until I . . .’

‘Inherited?’ Crowther said icily. ‘And exactly how much of my fortune have you spent already?’

Harriet interrupted. ‘You were humiliated by him then. Angry enough to kill him?’

‘I was, but I did not. I left him enjoying my dismay and returned to the party for the competition.’

‘At which you performed badly, as I recall,’ Crowther said. It was interesting, Harriet thought, that he had bothered to observe his nephew’s performance at all.

Felix went rather red. ‘I was not myself. I went onto the jetty to try and calm myself, then Mr Quince appeared at my side with a message from Mr Hurst’s daughter. Then I . . . It was unforgivable, Mrs Westerman.’

‘Was there something offensive in the message?’ Crowther asked.

His nephew shook his head. ‘Not at all. It was exceedingly generous.’

‘Generous?’ Harriet repeated.

Felix hurried on. ‘She sent me her best wishes and said she hoped to see me during their stay. But having just come from her father . . .’ He ran his hand through his hair and straightened his back. ‘Sir, the nature of my relationship with Mr Hurst altered some weeks before my mother and I left Vienna. I owed him a considerable amount, far more than I could pay, more than I knew my mother could pay, despite your generosity. He promised at that time to put off pressing for payment until I inherited if I . . .’ He paused and lifted his chin. ‘In short, sir, I married his daughter. Miss Hurst is my wife. We married secretly in Vienna four months ago.’

‘That poor girl,’ Harriet said softly.

Felix flushed, but did not protest. He carried on speaking, studying the ground in front of him. ‘A few days later, my mother received an anonymous letter informing her of the marriage, and demanding I support my wife. She was very angry, and before I knew it had bundled me away up here. Mr Hurst followed us. Lord knows how he found us – bribed the servants, probably. My mother has never learned how to keep the loyalty of her household. He arrived only a few days before you did, sir, and was demanding that I acknowledge Sophia. He had the legal documents with him. I took them to your lawyer with the intention of having their validity checked, but I’m afraid my cowardice overtook me.’

‘Do you still have them?’ Crowther asked.

‘Mr Hurst waited outside Mr Leathes’ office – he did not trust me.’

‘And when you emerged, Felix?’ Harriet’s small store of sympathy for the selfish, self-deluding boy had dried up entirely.

‘I told him they were in order. I knew they were, in truth. He seemed in need of funds at once, so I told him I’d pawn my watch. I also said,’ he had the grace to lower his eyes at this point, ‘that I had hopes my long-lost uncle might advance me some money. We then arranged to meet during the garden party.’

Crowther was looking at him with disdain. ‘And what did the Vizegräfin have to say to
that
?’

Felix remained staring at the ground in front of his feet. ‘She told me she was sure she could persuade you to buy him off. She said you owed her that.’

Harriet heard something behind her. Miriam was hurrying towards them from the house, calling their names.

D
OUGLAS DODDS WAS NOT
a man inclined to alter a carefully planned itinerary because someone had been murdered. His business associates called him resolute. It was the word he thought of as he looked in his shaving mirror each morning. He saw his pale pink face, narrowed his pale pink eyes and called himself resolute. But he was also wise. That had been said of him too and more than once; he rejoiced in the description. At first then, when the news reached him that a gentleman had been killed in Keswick, he considered the tender feelings of his wife and daughter and wondered if they might give up viewing the terrible beauty of Borrowdale for an additional day in Ambleside, but a fellow traveller, to whom he had confided his worries, assured him that the murdered man was hardly a gentleman at all apparently, having left bad debts and a reputation for a foul temper at every coaching inn he had passed through. Knowing his own credit and manners were regarded as excellent, Mr Dodds found this reassuring. When his new acquaintance added that the man was also a foreigner, Mr Dodds’s wise fears were done away with entirely and his resolution returned. Many people, otherwise reasonable and hospitable, might find a dozen reasons to kill such a man.

As he drained his glass and called for another, and another for his good friend here, whose name he had yet to learn, Mr Dodds began to think that the killer had done a public service by removing such a sorry
Island of Bones character. He found himself therefore on the following morning ordering accommodation for his family at the Royal Oak with a sanguine mind.

As the luggage was being taken down and stowed by Mr Postlethwaite’s neat-looking servants, Douglas Dodds’s feelings were soothed again by his landlord’s description of the murdered foreigner, and he agreed his death was probably due to some unpleasantness that had followed him out of Europe like a bad wind. Mr Postlethwaite then added that he had nothing against the young lady, however, who was generally liked, and carried herself almost like an Englishwoman. Mr Dodds had not heard there was a young lady in the case. On enquiry, he learned that she was now staying at the vicarage until such time as her father could be buried, and that a collection had been started in the village to provide for her travelling expenses back to her native country. Mr Postlethwaite indicated a large jar hanging in a corner of the room from a convenient beam.

‘All sorts are putting their pennies in,’ he said, and tucked his thumbs into his waistcoat. ‘Child of Nox the carpenter, who I know has fed himself on weeds more than one season, dropped a penny in there this morning.’

Mr Dodds was touched, touched and proud that even the most humble of his countrymen proved themselves such fine examples of feeling and charity. While his daughter and wife searched among the luggage for Eliza’s sketchbook, he reached into the coat pocket where he kept his travelling money, and with a significant and friendly smile to the landlord shook a guinea into his soft palm, then, with his good English chest swelling, he stepped over to the jar and dropped the coin in through the narrow neck. It landed fortunately, glittering at the edge of the jar where it would be most visible. He turned and fancied he saw shining in the face of his host a sense of satisfaction much in tune with his own.

When his little party arrived at the museum, however, the first wrinkle in the day appeared, like the lone dark cloud on the horizon just when the picnic meats are set out on the lawn. The museum was housed in
a neat, two-storey building of rather more modern construction than its neighbours, with a short flight of scrubbed stone steps lifting to its front door, but the door was shut. Mr Dodds knocked. Mr Dodds received no reply. Mr Dodds was confused. The advertisements stated, and Mr Postlethwaite had confirmed, that the museum was open to the viewing gentry from ten o’clock in the morning. Mr Dodds withdrew his pocket-watch and studied it. He looked up to see the time displayed on the town clock. His watch was confirmed. The hour had struck some twenty minutes previously. He raised his fist to the street door and knocked again. Again no answer.

Eliza tripped down the stone steps and approached the window, shading her eyes with her kid-gloved hand.

‘Oh Papa, I think I see . . .’ As Mr Dodds turned towards her, she screamed and stumbled back into her mother’s arms. Her sketchbook slipped. A number of her pencil drawings of the more charming ruined cottages they had encountered on their tour were in danger of getting dirty. Mr Dodds bustled down the stairs in some alarm and resolutely approached the window to see what had frightened the poor girl. On the floor, amongst the remains of a shattered display case, surrounded by glass, split wood and gleaming minerals, lay a man. His eyes were wide open, his head thrown back, his face waxen and his tongue protruding obscenely between his purple lips.

Eliza’s sketches were always to lack a view of Derwent Water. Mr Dodds was back on the road to Kendal with his women white and trembling opposite him within the hour, and he felt the wheels could not rattle along fast enough, shaking off the dust of the low murderous little town in a furious and indignant spin. The last thing he saw as he left the Royal Oak was his guinea, glinting and swinging in the jar. The sight of it caught in his mind. It was like seeing a felon justly hanged and dead suddenly look up at him and laughing, wink.

The temporary servant of Mr Askew had never been trusted with a key to the museum. Harriet and Crowther arrived at the bottom of the
steps to find Mr Sturgess instructing the Constable to break his way in with a crowbar. They looked in through the window as the wood of the frame cracked and broke around the lock, and the door swung open. Mr Sturgess started up the steps at once, and pushing his man to one side, entered the room at a dash.