Enter Pale Death(78)

“Ben, I think you’ve guessed! I think it might be to the advantage of the mistress and her family, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, if any film shot on the premises were to be, um …”

“Fiddled with? Exposed to the light? Before it leaves the house? I know how to do that. My uncle’s got a Rollei. I can’t be seen cruising about down the female staff’s corridor but I can show Rosie what to do.” Ben made his calculations and said, but without triumph in his tone, “Ah! I didn’t get it wrong then—you do think someone killed her? Bashed her head in with a horseshoe and blamed the horse? Wouldn’t be the first time. Someone who knew what she was up to?” He concentrated hard. He had the intelligent, absorbed face Joe had seen so often in his police recruits. Replying to Joe’s uncomfortable silence, he said more firmly: “Her ladyship had no visitors that night. When Grace said good night just after midnight and left to go to her own room that was it. She was alone until Grace woke her and dressed her to go off down to the stables. She dismissed her on the doorstep and off she went with just those two poor little old lads. No. Gracie’s in the clear. She came and had early breakfast with the rest of us lower servants in the kitchen. Whatever happened to Lady Truelove, it was all her own doing. She riled that horse off her own bat. Nobody helped her. Just because a fair number aren’t sorry she’s a goner doesn’t mean any of them done her in.”

The footman wriggled with a sudden rush of uncertainty. “Look, sir. Grace told me something … I wasn’t to mention it to a soul unless it looked like they were going to kick off an investigation and try to put the blame on someone. Then I was to get hold of Adam Hunnyton and bend his ear. Adam would know what to do she said, him being the police.”

“Go on, Ben, Adam and I are working on this together.”

“She said she’d kept something back and put it in her own room. A memento of her mistress, or some such, she said.”

“She didn’t say what it was?”

“No. She said what it wasn’t. Not jewellery, not a gown, not a picture, nothing she might be accused of stealing. You had to be very careful around Lady Lavinia.”

“Ben, I need to take a look in Grace’s room. Right now. Take me to Mrs. Bolton.”


THE NERVE CENTRE of the whole house, Joe thought. The Housekeeper’s Room. On the ground floor, it was strategically placed close to the company rooms and the kitchens and butler’s suite.

Mrs. Bolton had made no reference to the lateness of the hour when Ben had signalled to her across the crowded kitchen. A quick word to deputise one of the older women, and she had come out of the hurly-burly and led them into the calm of her parlour next door. Doors were lying open to let the air circulate, one onto a still-room in blue-and-white Delft tiles where Joe glimpsed a central table loaded with pots of strawberry jam and bottles of green cordial and another open onto a capacious pantry which, he guessed, adjoined the butler’s rooms. A third, which remained discreetly closed, he assumed to be the housekeeper’s bedroom.

A fine set but it would be impossible to separate work and personal space, Joe thought. The Housekeeper, inevitably, became the heart of the House. Still, he knew some Metropolitan officers who appeared to live their lives in their office and sleep at their desk. He’d felt the compulsion himself on many occasions, had even, in his earlier years, been physically hauled out of his chair and bundled off home by his landlord. Ex–police inspector Alfred Jenkins had known the dangers.

“At this hour I usually treat myself to a tisane. I’m having lemon balm, gentlemen. Would you like some?”

Joe gratefully accepted for both of them. Mrs. Bolton snatched up a large handful of a sweet-smelling herb from the windowsill, stuffed it into a big white teapot and filled it with water from a kettle singing on the stove.

“Will you be staying, Ben?” she asked.

After a quick exchange of looks with Joe, Ben said, “Just long enough for a swig o’ your tea, Mrs. B. Just what the doctor ordered at this time of day.”

“Then make yourself useful, my lad, and draw up a chair for the commissioner by my tea table. We’ll take it over there at the window. Might as well catch a cooling breeze while we can.”

Ben bustled to and fro setting up a folding tray-table with white cloth and china mugs and borrowing three chairs from a large round central table already laid out for the upper servants’ breakfast. Joe counted eight places. Orders for the day would be dished out with the porridge, gossip exchanged with the toast and marmalade.

Feeling suddenly clumsy amid the practised dexterity, Joe moved his large form away from the scene of action and went to stand by a dresser whose upper shelves were crowded with books. He noted the essential Burke’s Peerage, an Olde Moore’s Almanack, a dictionary, and smiled to see a very ancient copy of The Accomplish Ladie’s Companion, the essential reference book of every woman in charge of a household since 1685. His mother had had one always within arm’s reach of the stove. He remembered that the title page of this book was crowded with lively illustrations of ladies in long gowns and headdresses taking delight in roasting, boiling and pastry-making as well as the more arcane arts of distilling “spirituous liquers,” preserving herbs and composing medicinal ointments, some of a very dubious nature. Joe had good reason to believe that the cure for croup in infants, as laid out for the “accomplisht ladie,” was decidedly more dangerous than the ailment itself. At least the recipe for macaroons did not appear in the same chapter as the one guaranteed to rid a household of rattus rattus and all his fleas. “Almonds” and “arsenic” were sensibly segregated.