Villa von Düchtel
1906
The next day, Colin and I met again with all the servants, again using the butler’s room. This time, we explicitly focused on little details from the day of the murder. Had anyone staying in the house surprised them? Been where they hadn’t expected them? Were any of the servants missing, even briefly, from their posts? Had any of their tasks been derailed? We asked every question we could think of, but no one had anything different to tell us from what they’d said before, until we spoke with the laundress, who admitted to having washed a knitted wool hat the day of the murder.
“What was odd about it is that it was crusty. There were bits of tree in it. When I washed it, the water turned red. The hat’s a kind of rusty color and I figured the dye must be running. That’s why I didn’t mention it before. But now you’re here once more so I thought, I might as well say something. Maybe it was red because of blood.”
“Do you still have the hat?” Colin asked.
She pulled a wadded mass of wool out of her apron pocket. “The trouble is, I’m good at my job. If it was blood, there’s none on it now.”
Given the specifics of the attack on Sigrid, it made no sense that the killer’s clothing would’ve been spattered with blood. When we finished speaking to the rest of the servants, none of whom admitted to recognizing the hat, we took it upstairs and showed it to Cécile and Ursula in the gallery.
“It is obviously not mine,” Cécile said. “It is hideous and shapeless. Please remove it from my sight.”
“It’s too small for a man’s head,” Ursula said, examining it. “I can’t say I remember seeing anyone wear it. It looks as if it’s more likely to belong to one of the servants than to one of us.”
“If I were a murderer, I would dress in servants’ clothes to do my evil deed,” Cécile said. “Anyone might have taken this from one of their rooms in order to cast suspicions elsewhere.”
“If I were a murderer, I wouldn’t have bothered with servants’ clothes.” Ursula flung the hat onto the settee next to her. “You’d be more likely to draw attention to yourself by going belowstairs than by staying away. If the hat had blood on it, why not just burn it?”
“That’s an interesting thought, Baroness,” Colin said. He motioned for me to join him and started for the stairs. I followed, stopping only to straighten the Klimt portrait of Cécile, which was once again hanging at an angle.
“Where are we going?” I asked, catching up to him.
“I’m not sure how—or if—the hat is significant, but Ursula’s comment makes me want to examine the fireplace grates in the bedrooms.”
“If the killer fired from a tree, his clothes wouldn’t have been covered with blood,” I said.
“No, but if he was being careful, he’d be worried someone might have seen him and, after returning to the house, might have burned whatever he’d worn when he fired the shot.”
“An overcoat is awfully bulky,” I said.
“A skilled skier doesn’t need a heavy overcoat, only a light sweater.”
“It’s been days since the murder and cold as anything. The fires will all have been burning constantly.”
“It’s a long shot, but perhaps there’s a shard of something left behind.”
I knew, then, that he was becoming frustrated. We had evidence against Birgit, Kaspar, and Hans, yet nothing incontrovertible, nothing that could prove beyond doubt who had killed Sigrid. Colin wanted to find something solid. A button, a fastener, a brooch. Something that could point to the identity of the guilty party.
We went from room to room, poking at the fires, starting in ours, where we discovered two small pieces of a German newspaper had escaped the flames and were lodged at the edge of the hearth.
“That’s not something we brought with us,” I said.
Colin frowned. “Anyone could have come in and used the fireplace to destroy evidence.” The bedroom doors had locks, but they were flimsy at best and could easily be opened with a set of simple picks.
We went to Birgit’s room next, where we found a scrap of ribbon wedged in the side of the tiled firebox. All of the hearths were long, like those found in old Norman houses, large enough to contain a Yule log, but the grates that held the wood were narrower and placed in the center. As a result, the far edges remained relatively cool, even when a fire was burning.
“She might have used it to tie together her letters from Kaspar,” I said. “Once Sigrid was dead, she was afraid they could prove a liability.”
“You sound suddenly convinced of her innocence,” Colin said.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
There were bits of sheet music in Max’s fireplace; a small, industrial, oval metal ring with an opening and a metal nail in Liesel’s; a glass bottle in Ursula’s; a key in Cécile’s; more nails in Kaspar’s and Birgit’s; and a pen in Felix’s.
“Who burns a pen?” I asked.
“The more pertinent question is why?”
Felix was in the sitting room with Kaspar, Max, and Birgit, playing Schafkopf, a Bavarian card game whose rules I did not fully understand. The best I could tell, they varied widely based on who was playing.
“Brinkmann, might I have a quick word?” Colin asked. Felix followed us into the corridor. “Did you have a reason for burning this pen?” He held up the charred remains of the instrument.
“Ought I to? I don’t even recognize it.”
“It was in the fireplace in your room,” I said.
He took it from Colin. “It looks perfectly ordinary to me, other than it’s having been burnt to a crisp. There’s nothing special about it. It might’ve been in there for ages.”
“Not quite,” Colin said. “This house party is the first time the residence has been fully occupied since it was built.”
“One of the servants could have found it on the floor and tossed it in the fire instead of putting it away,” he said.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to put it on the desk?” I asked.
“Look, it’s not mine, that’s all I can tell you,” he said. He pulled his brows together and looked at it again. “I guess that’s not true, but it’s not exactly false, either. It could be mine. Or, rather, it could’ve been in the room when I got there. I haven’t written anything since I arrived, but there must have been at least one pen on the desk. Does it matter? It’s not as if Sigrid was killed with it. The pen is not, it appears, mightier than the pistol.”
We pulled Max aside next and showed him the bit of sheet music. He beetled his brows. “It’s mine, from ‘Einzug der Gäste’—the Entrance of the Guests—in Tannhäuser. I wondered what had happened to it. I couldn’t find it the other day.”
“Do you remember exactly when you were looking for it?” I asked.
He crinkled his brow. “Actually, it was last night, just before dinner.”
Next, we checked with the housekeeper, who confirmed there ought to be a pen on the desk in each room, and showed Ursula and Cécile, who were chatting in the former’s study, what we’d found.
“The key is to one of the bedrooms,” the baroness said, picking it up and examining it. Colin took it upstairs and returned a few minutes later.
“It’s to Brinkmann’s.”
Cécile laughed. “I assure you I don’t need a key to get in his room, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t have tossed it in the fire when I’d finished with it.”
“Have you been in his room?” Colin asked.
“Monsieur Hargreaves, you know better than to ask a lady a question like that.”
“I apologize,” he said. “That’s not what I was driving at, however. If you’ve been in his room, whoever left the key might have noticed and, as a result, picked your fire to deposit it in.”
“Fair enough,” Cécile said.
“I recognize the bottle,” Ursula said. “It’s laudanum. I keep some in my room but promise you I didn’t use it to drug Kaspar’s coffee the night before the murder.”
“Has it gone missing?” I asked.
She rushed upstairs and checked. “No, it’s still there.”
“The nails and the metal ring could be left from the construction of the house,” Colin said, “and could’ve wound up in the fireplaces by accident. The newspaper in our room might have been used by one of the maids to light the fire. The bottle, the pen, the key, and the sheet music, however, are not so easily explained.”
“It’s important, all of it,” I said. “We’re getting closer now, I can feel it. Our murderer is not quite so clever as he thinks.”