Walking Into Murder (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Laura closed her eyes and turned away, feeling nauseated. “No,” she agreed faintly. “No. This is not the same woman.”

Tom Smith peered over her shoulder and breathed a long sigh of relief. Slowly, his pallor receded, but he still looked grim and shaken.

“So this is a different woman,” he muttered. “How very peculiar.” He looked appraisingly at Nigel.

“You mean to say,” Nigel asked, “that Angelina’s right and someone else was here before?” His eyes widened and he began to grin. “Who would have believed it? Good old Lottie. What a glorious trick on us all. She must have put a mask on her face earlier to fool us. I wonder how she managed it.”

“Who is Lottie?” Laura demanded, appalled at his cheerful tone. Did he feel no pity at all for the dead woman?

“My governess,” Angelina answered promptly. “She’s very stupid and I can always play tricks on her.”

“Well, this time, Angelina dear, she’s played a trick on you,” Nigel said, still grinning in delight. Stuffing the monocle and the pipe in his pocket, he turned toward the woman on the bed.

“Well done, Lottie old thing,” he crowed. “I didn’t think you had it in you. But I still want to know how you managed to do the mask by yourself. That’s one hell of a trick to pull off! I ought to know!”

Laura frowned. Was Nigel the mask maker? It sounded that way. Maybe he had created the grande dame mannequin, too. But who had put the cat mask on Lottie’s face? She certainly couldn’t have done it. Nigel might not realize it yet, but Lottie really was dead, at least she thought so.

Nigel’s voice continued, cajoling, jocular. “Did somebody help you get it on and off? Come clean, Lottie darling. Come clean for Nigel.” There was no answer.

Nigel went closer. “Come on, Lottie old thing, time to get up,” he went on, a tinge of worry in his voice. “The game is over. We’ve found you, so it’s all right to get up.”

The woman on the bed didn’t stir. “I say, old thing, this is carrying the joke too far,” Nigel objected, sounding alarmed now. “No need to lie there all day!” He reached out and shook her limp arm. His hand, as Angelina’s had, shot back quickly.

“Lottie!” he said urgently, and now there was real fear in his face. “Lottie!” he repeated. “Get up!”

Nigel turned to his grandmother, his eyes filled with horror and a kind of desperate appeal. “We were just practicing,” he told her weakly. His skin had turned a greenish hue, and Laura saw that he was close to tears. “We were practicing for the mystery game. It was just a game. Lottie said she would be the victim, would be in the green room. I meant to tell you…” He closed his eyes suddenly and rushed into the bathroom. They heard the sound of retching.

His grandmother went slowly to the bed and looked down at the woman lying there. Gently, she reached out and touched the cold hand. Her erect posture sagged. Even her face seemed to lose its taut structure. Laura felt very sorry for her.

Angelina’s scream cut into the silence. “It’s wrong,” she howled. “It’s wrong again, and I don’t like it this way. I want the game to be right…”

Laura put an arm gently around the girl’s heaving shoulders and touched Antonia’s arm to rouse her. The woman looked numb with shock. She also looked terrified. “Take Angelina away,” Laura told her quietly.

After a horrified glance at the bed, Antonia obeyed. For once, Angelina didn’t resist. Sobbing violently, she ran out of the room.

Laura looked at the grande dame. Her back was straight again, but her face looked older, and very weary. She stood perfectly still, head bowed, as if gathering her strength.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, raising her eyes to Laura’s. “I fear this is not the welcome you deserve. I shall try to place you elsewhere.”

“There is no need,” Laura told her gently. “I’ll be fine. You have enough on your hands without worrying about me. Please let me know if I can help in any way.”

The old lady nodded. She turned back to the bed to look once more at the still figure, and a terrible sadness came into her face, as if something greater than a single life had been lost. Laura wondered what it was.

When the grande dame had left, she turned to face Tom Smith. He had to be involved in all this somehow, and it was past time she got answers from him. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” she demanded.

Tom Smith paid no attention. He was bending over Lottie, examining her with careful fingers. There was no sign of faintness in him now, only intense concentration and a kind of clinical detachment.

Anger suddenly suffused Laura. She welcomed it, felt it shove aside the confusion and shocks of the last few hours. “Who are you and why are you here?” she repeated. “I’m in no mood for more lies, either. I want the truth, and I want it now. Otherwise you can forget this ridiculous farce.”

“I want the truth, too,” Tom Smith answered grimly as he straightened up. “Believe me, I want it as badly as you.”

He stared into space, thinking, but when he looked at her again, the inscrutable look had vanished. Once again, he was debonair, charming.

The man was incapable of being serious, Laura thought furiously. Didn’t he care that an innocent woman was lying there dead, had probably been murdered? Why else all the subterfuge, the mask that must have been deliberately placed on the victim’s face earlier to hide her identity? And then someone must have come back and removed it…

She shuddered, aware for the first time that a member of this household could be a murderer. But who? Not Nigel, surely, even if he was the mask maker. He had been genuinely upset when he realized Lottie was dead. More likely someone else was taking advantage of his talent, must have counted on using Nigel’s life-like mask to conceal the real victim, perhaps to buy time as well as confuse people.

Tom Smith interrupted these morbid speculations. “Shall we find a more suitable space in which to exchange confidences?” he asked lightly. “I for one have had enough of the green room for the evening.”

“I have no confidences to make,” Laura retorted. “As far as I can see, all the confiding has to come from you – starting with why you told these people that I was your wife.”

Tom Smith regarded her speculatively. “That isn’t completely true,” he countered. “For instance, you might confide what sort of a doctor you are. I really ought to know, if I’m to be your husband.”

“That is
not
guaranteed,” Laura shot back. “But if you must know, I am a professor. I teach and do research at a college in the United States, and I am in England to teach a seminar as well as to walk. Now let’s get back to you.”

“What kind of research?” His interest sounded genuine.

“On sex differences,” Laura replied maliciously, “like why men prevaricate when asked questions about themselves. And why they hide their emotions behind various facades, like charm.”

“Ouch!” Tom Smith looked suitably chastened. “Is that really what your research shows they do?”

“Not exactly,” Laura admitted. “It’s a good deal more complex than that and in my case goes back a few thousand years to the evolution of gender differences. Now – who are you? And no more prevarications, please.”

The sound of water running in the bathroom reminded them that they weren’t alone. When it stopped, Nigel appeared. “Sorry,” he said. “So sorry.” He slouched toward the door, his face twisted with tears, and hurried down the hall.

“Poor guy,” Tom Smith commented when Nigel was out of hearing range. “He really didn’t know. He must feel terrible. He’s talented, though, isn’t he, at impersonation as well as mask making.”

“More talented than you,” Laura replied coldly as they left the room. “Tom Smith – really! Couldn’t you have thought of a more original name?”

He chuckled. “Sorry. Unfortunately, that is my name. Gets me in and out of all sorts of trouble. If you like, you can call me Thomas instead. It sounds loftier, more suitable for solving crimes, which at the moment I seem called upon to do. Or perhaps Langley. That’s my other name.”

“Is that really your name?” Laura asked suspiciously.

“Which one?” he countered. “Tom Smith or Langley?”

Exasperated, Laura regarded him stonily. The man changed personalities – and names as far as she knew - from one moment to the next, and she couldn’t for the life of her tell what was real and what a pose - or whether to believe a word he said. Relying on him to help her was definitely out. If she hadn’t been able to trust Donald, a man she had often sworn would never in his whole life do anything unexpected, how could she trust a man who never did anything predictable at all?

Laura rubbed her aching forehead. The more she knew about gender, the less she seemed to understand the kind of men who inhabited the world today.

“Both, I guess,” she replied faintly, and sank down on a bench in the hall. Her legs felt too weak to support her, and a welcome numbness seemed to be setting in. She couldn’t seem to think coherently anymore, either. Too much had happened, too fast.

Tom Smith sat down beside her. “I have three names: Thomas, Langley and Smith,” he told her, counting them off on his fingers.

“You sound American,” Laura remarked.

“Half of me is American,” he replied enigmatically.

Laura raised an eyebrow wearily and didn’t bother to reply.

“Sorry,” he said. “Now, what are you going to call me? If we are going to get to know each other better, and I sincerely hope we are, you will need to use a name.”

Laura considered. She always used full names with her students because she had found that too much informality led to endless requests for extensions on papers. Perhaps a more formal name might dampen this man’s persistent insouciance as well.

“All right then, I shall use Thomas,” she told him severely. “And do you really intend to solve this crime, Thomas?”

“Yes,” he answered, unsmiling again. “I intend to solve this crime. And now let’s go downstairs. Being near dead bodies make me nervous.”

“You sound as if you have encountered a lot of them,” Laura remarked.

This time Thomas was saved from answering by the Englishman. He strode toward them as they descended the stairs, looking every inch the country gentleman with his unruly hair, graying now at the edges, his ruddy cheeks and sleepy blue eyes.

“Glad to say I got Senator back,” he told them proudly, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. “Couldn’t catch the girl, though.” He shook his head sadly. “Too bad. Would have taught her a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Gave me a terrible start. Looked exactly like the girl on the bed! Those big green eyes, don’t you know.” The last three words slid together into a rumbling phrase that sounded like “doncherno.”

Laura felt a surge of relief. The girl with the green eyes was alive and well. But could she really be the missing wife - if there was one? She had looked so very young.

Thomas made a noise somewhere between a cough and a curse and clenched his jaw hard. Laura regarded him with interest. Could he be angry because Cat was a young trophy wife who was tiring of him?

The Englishman chuckled. “Can’t think why I was fooled in the first place,” he went on. “Should have known better. Nigel is always making those damned masks. Jolly good, some of them. Fool almost anyone. I really thought for a minute the girl was dead!”

Laura opened her mouth to tell him that the body under the mask he’d seen really was dead, but the Englishman waved his hand. “Drinks first,” he insisted. “We’ve treated you both abominably. Sorry about that. Had to fire the damned butler and the cook vanished yesterday. Can’t think why. Paid her a whopping salary.”

He frowned, puzzled. “Odd, she didn’t seem the type to vanish like that. No color, if you know what I mean. Just an ordinary cook. But I suppose they don’t stay long these days, do they?”

As he delivered these random thoughts, he ushered them down the hall into a large room lined with bookshelves. A cluttered desk stood at one end of the room and a fire blazed at the other. “My study,” he explained. “Only room with a good fire these days, seems to me. Now, what will you have? Drinks on us, you know. You’re our guests, Antonia tells me. Sorry I didn’t know earlier. I thought…” He stopped abruptly. “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” he resumed finally. “Just got things a bit mixed. Silver’s been disappearing as well. That’s why. Bit of a bother, actually. Makes one suspicious.”

“As I said at the time, I was looking for my wife, not your silver,” Thomas remarked dryly. “And I’ll have a whisky.”

“Yes, of course,” the Englishman agreed, looking embarrassed. “Good thing you found her, what? I mean to say -”

“There is always the possibility,” Thomas interrupted mildly, “that the disappearing silver and the disappearing servants are connected.”

“By jove! Never thought of that!” The Englishman sounded genuinely startled. “Jolly good idea. Have to follow up on that one.”

He turned to Laura. “Now, my dear, what will you have to drink?”

There was no wine in evidence, so Laura decided on whisky too. A good strong drink might help. She felt almost dizzy with fatigue, or perhaps it was hunger. She still hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. More likely, she realized, it was shock. A strong drink was supposed to be good for shock.

“I’ll have a whisky too, a small one,” she told the Englishman gratefully. She took a large gulp when he handed it to her.

“Good gel,” the Englishman drawled approvingly. “Like to see a woman who’s not afraid of whisky.

“Occurs to me,” he added in an even stronger drawl, “that I haven’t introduced myself. Circumstances a bit odd, doncherno. Got off on the wrong foot, I fear.” He turned to Laura and bowed low over her hand. “Barkeley Smythington–Witherspoon, Baron of Torrington, at your service. My friends call me Bark, say I talk in barks, like the dogs.”

He frowned. “Where are the dogs anyway? Antonia’s always locking them up. Need to have dogs about the place. Too damned stiff without them.”

“How do you do, Baron Smythington-Witherspoon?” Laura replied, conscious that Thomas was laughing behind them. She wondered if one shook hands with a Baron or curtsied, a skill she lacked. She decided to raise her glass to him instead. He seemed to appreciate the gesture, since it gave him the opportunity to drain his whisky. Laura drank some of hers, too. It was really quite strengthening. Maybe she should try drinking it at faculty functions. They often engendered a need for a good stiff drink.