“Has Trevor actually been arrested, Giles?” I asked. “Or is he simply ‘helping the police with their inquiries’?”
Giles thought for a moment. “Probably the latter.” He deflated visibly. “It’s all over the village this morning that Detective Inspector Chase had Trevor taken in late last evening. And you know how tongues will wag and magnify.” He grinned.
“Sit down, Giles,” I told him a bit sternly. The time had come to get to the truth of certain matters.
Uncharacteristically solemn, Giles did as he was bid. Unsmiling, he stared at me from across the cluttered surface of my desk. I had managed to undo some of his diligent work of the day before, and Giles grimaced at my handiwork.
“What is it, Simon?” Giles asked me when I had sat and stared at him for a moment without saying anything.
“Do you think Trevor Chase could have murdered Abigail Winterton?”
Giles sat back in his chair, surprised by my question. “To be honest, no, I’ve never thought of Trevor as the murdering type.” He waved his right hand in the air. “I know that probably anyone can, and will, commit murder under the proper circumstances. But Trevor, despite his penchant for obsessional behavior, has never impressed me as the homicidal type.”
“Would he murder someone in order to spare himself great humiliation?”
“Because of his past, you mean?” Giles said, his face clouding momentarily.
“Yes,” I answered, watching him closely.
“Look, Simon,” Giles said, leaning forward in his chair. “Trevor did go to somewhat abnormal lengths to be near me, to no purpose, but I think basically he’s harmless. He’d be rather upset if he were exposed to ridicule by the village, but it wouldn’t be the end of his life. He could sell the bookshop or simply close it up and move away, and he wouldn’t be in difficult financial straits. There isn’t that much tying him to this village, actually, but he does seem to like it here. I don’t think he would have had enough motive to kill Abigail Winterton.”
“Not even if she were blackmailing him?” I asked, wanting to put it clearly to him.
“Not even then,” Giles said, his voice firm with certainty.
“Then let me ask you this,” I said. “The other day, when I met you in Trevor’s shop, I overheard what Trevor said to you when I was coming down the stairs. What he said could easily have been construed as a threat to you. And to Abigail Winterton.”
Giles thought for a moment, trying to recall the incident. Then his face cleared, and he laughed. “Oh, that! Simon, that’s evidence more in Trevor’s favor than against him. He had already told me that Abigail Winterton had been trying to get money out of him but that he refused to pay her anything. She had dug up something about him, something that happened when he was right out of university, in his first teaching post. Something scandalous, evidently, though Trevor wouldn’t tell me just what it was. And apparently she kept trying to wheedle money out of him, but he told her where to get off.” Giles eyed me speculatively, but I gave nothing away.
“Trevor flatly refused to give her any money,” Giles repeated when I remained silent.
“And what was the context of his remark to you? It wouldn’t get you anywhere, either, or words to that effect?”
Giles glanced away for a moment; then he faced me, turning on every ounce of his charm. “Well, Simon, there I have a confession to make. That play that I submitted to SMADS? Trevor helped me with it, but when I presented it to the group, I just happened to leave Trevor’s name off the page.”
“And Trevor was insisting that he get proper credit?” I asked. So Giles was something of a gold digger, after all.
“Yes,” Giles said. He heard the sudden coolness in my voice, and he shrank back in his chair.
“I knew it was wrong of me, Simon, you have to believe that. But something just came over me when I told my mother about the play. She was so thrilled to know that I had actually written something. I tried to tell her that I had written it with Trevor, but she got so carried away with the notion that her darling son had written a play, she didn’t give me much chance to explain. And then I let the misunderstanding continue.” The self-mockery in his voice lessened my disappointment in him.
“I confessed to my mother that night, when we got home. She took it better than I expected, actually. Though she wasn’t too keen on my having much to do with Trevor.”
“I can understand your wanting to avoid a scene with your mother, Giles,” I said dryly. “But you simply cannot go around taking credit for other people’s work. At least not if you want to have anything to do with me.” No matter how appealing he was, he had committed one of the cardinal sins of writing, and I wouldn’t let him do that to me.
Either Giles was a consummate actor, a true loss to the ongoing success of theater in the West End, or he was horribly stricken by the thought that I might cease to be his employer and putative mentor. He stood, eyes abjectly on the floor. “Please, Simon, if you’ll give me another chance, I promise I won’t do anything underhanded. I’ll make it up to Trevor as well. You can trust me. I’ve learned my lesson, believe me. Please.”
I invested my voice with every ounce of menace that I could muster. “If I ever discover that you have been dishonest with me over anything like this again, you will not enjoy the consequences.”
Giles shivered where he stood. His eyes wide with surprise, he stared at me. Perhaps I had gone too far. I forget just how frightening I can be when I make the effort. “No, Simon, I’m sure I won’t.” His voice held the slightest quaver. Then, quickly, his natural buoyance asserted itself. “But you won’t have to doubt me, ever again. I swear it.”
“Then you’d best get on with your work, hadn’t you?” I smiled, and he happily gathered up several files from my desk and started putting them back into order.
I thought I had best clear out of the office for a while and let him have some time to himself. He needed a chance to ponder our conversation, and frankly, so did I. I needed some physical distance in order to think clearly.
“I almost forgot,” Giles said, reaching for his satchel. “I stopped by the post office this morning and picked up your mail for you.” He pulled his hand out of the satchel and brandished a fistful of envelopes of varying sizes. I hadn’t the stomach to deal with correspondence just then, so I told him I’d look through it when I returned from my walk.
I chose a hat from the hall tree, put on my sunglasses, and headed out the door. I needed a good ramble to clear my head. Like the late Abigail Winterton, I generally preferred to take such walks during the middle of the night, when there was little chance of encountering anyone else. Instead of heading down the High Street into the main part of the village, I turned in the opposite direction, ambling past the few cottages on the other side of mine. My destination was just down the lane, a public footpath leading through the nearby countryside. I had walked it a couple of times in the dead of night (I do love unintentional puns, don’t you?), and I might as well see what it looked like with the benefit of sun.
Clambering over the stile, I paused on the other side for a moment to get my bearings. The footpath meandered along the edge of a wood, through a field overgrown with grass and brightly colored wildflowers. Once upon a time it had been used as pasture for livestock, but now it stood quiet and empty of visible animal life. The sun dallied behind a light cover of clouds, so the light was muted, and the air was noticeably cooler than that of the day before. I sniffed at the wind. Perhaps we were in for some much-needed rain; this had been rather an unusually warm and dry summer. I was delighted to know that it wasn’t typical. I had had more than enough of hot and humid back in Houston.
I moved slowly, savoring the fresh smells of the natural world around me, plodding down the footpath in the shade of trees on my left side. My mind emptied as I gazed around me. The tranquility of the setting could have mesmerized me had my mind been capable of being still for more than a few seconds.
Sighing, I kept walking while my thoughts returned inexorably to the murder of Abigail Winterton. Pathetic though she may have been in some respects—I couldn’t help thinking of what Jane and I had seen of her very private self in her bedroom—she nevertheless seemed to have been a veritable spider, gathering victims into her web and feeding on them over the course of many years.
Which victim had finally turned on her? Which one had inevitably been pushed beyond endurance and reacted with violence?
If Everard Stevens had a good motive, I could easily imagine him killing Abigail Winterton. Or, at the very least, ordering his brutish manservant to do so for him. Samantha Stevens had impressed me as a woman not to be crossed lightly. She and her husband made a formidable team, in some ways, though I’d be willing to bet neither of them trusted the other very much. One of them was going to end up dead before too much longer, I’d be willing to bet.
The Stevenses were more than capable of murder. But what motive would have compelled them to commit such an irrevocable act? Samantha Stevens was obviously frustrated, thwarted by her husband from continuing in London the types of activities she seemed to thrive on, and evidently Lady Prunella Blitherington and Abigail Winterton, between them, had managed to keep her from gaining much power here in Snupperton Mumsley. Was she so frustrated by this that she had resorted to murder to remove one of the stumbling blocks in her way?
That was possible, I thought, but it seemed even more likely to me that Samantha Stevens was biding her time, waiting for the right opportunity to divest herself of her odious husband in an innocuous and apparently innocent manner. If Everard Stevens didn’t die “accidentally” in the next year or so, I’d quit writing mysteries.
The Stevenses weren’t the only viable suspects, of course. Lady Prunella herself could be standing at the head of the line. If it turned out that she had truly cuckolded old Sir Bosworth and presented him with a son and heir who wasn’t truly his, she could have been horribly embarrassed by the ensuing scandal. But—I thought this one out further—surely if there had been any question about the identity of Giles’s father, it would have surfaced when Giles was born? What would be the point of resurrecting it a quarter of a century after the fact? Bastardy was still potentially embarrassing, I supposed, but it was rather old news, wasn’t it?
But if one had inherited an estate that one wasn’t legally entitled to, then one might have a most excellent motive for murder. As much as I’d like to, I now admitted to myself, I couldn’t take Giles’s name off the list of suspects. Yet.
Then there was the vicar and his wife. A bit of a mystery lingered there, according to that clipping Abigail Winterton had, about the death of Lester Clitheroe. Had Neville Butler-Melville, in his youth, done something despicable? Had Miss Winterton somehow discovered proof of it and been using it to increase her hold gradually over the vicar and his wife? Letty Butler-Melville was so protective of her husband that I couldn’t imagine her letting Miss Winterton get away with much unless the threat was rather serious. How far would Letty go to protect Neville? Would she murder for him?
I certainly couldn’t imagine Neville exerting himself to save Letty. Though handsome and charismatic, he nevertheless was a bit of a wanker. He just didn’t have the gumption, I suspected, to murder someone, no matter the reason. But he could always depend on Letty to do it for him.
How was Colonel Clitheroe connected? If he was indeed the father of the mysteriously dead Lester Clitheroe, how did that relationship connect him to the present crime? Did he, too, suspect Neville Butler-Melville of having murdered his son? Was that why the colonel had settled in Snupperton Mumsley around the same time as the Butler-Melvilles? But, again, there was the aspect of timing. Why wait twenty or so years? What had happened recently to bring the situation to a head?
Trevor Chase had been called into the police station. That was a fairly serious step, as far as I knew. Not actually an arrest but an indication of more than ordinary interest in a suspect on the part of the police. I considered the possible evidence against Trevor. If the story about his early teaching job were true and if the Ml story of his pursuit of Giles were told around the village, he would no doubt be a laughingstock, if not worse. In my brief exposure to him, Trevor had proved more than a bit prickly, not as easygoing as he had seemed upon our first meeting. Would he remain in Snupperton Mumsley if his past were exposed to ridicule and censure by the locals?
Of all the people connected with the case, Trevor seemed to have the strongest motive. There could be another suspect lurking somewhere in the background. There was Giles, naturally, who might be motivated by the same reasons as his hideous mother, but I really preferred not to think of him as a potential murderer.
Besides Giles, the only other person of my current acquaintance in Snupperton Mumsley was Jane Hardwick. I laughed at the thought of Jane as the murderer.
Then I caught myself up short Maybe the idea wasn’t so ridiculous, after all. If I interpreted recent events in a certain way, I could see that Jane had stage-managed me (or maybe “manipulated” would be a better choice?) into following just the paths that she wanted me to. After all, Jane could easily have sneaked into Abigail Winterton’s cottage with none in the village the wiser, and Abigail would probably have little reason to fear Jane. Jane, despite her small size, was strong enough to have throttled Abigail Winterton.
And it was certainly interesting, I thought abruptly, that Jane had known where to “find” evidence of Abigail’s blackmailing activities. What if Jane herself were the blackmailer and had planted that evidence in Abigail Winterton’s bedroom? Jane had led me there like a fatted calf to the slaughtering pen.
What could be the motive in that scenario? I thought disgustedly. Had Abigail Winterton somehow discovered Jane’s true nature?
I was getting more and more twisted in my thoughts, and nothing was clear except that I was accomplishing nothing. Fat lot of good this walk was doing me, I thought sourly as I climbed back over the stile and marched down the lane to my cottage.
Inside, I hung up my hat and went back into my office. Giles looked up from his work to smile briefly in my direction, but a glance at my face warned him that I was in no mood for idle chatter. I plopped myself down behind my desk and pulled the pile of mail toward me. As long as I was grumpy anyway, I might as well deal with the mail.
Several of the envelopes obviously contained bills, and I set those aside for later. Giles could handle those as part of his duties as secretary. One large envelope bulged with what looked like a manuscript. Struck by a sudden thought, I picked it up and ripped it open. Surely it couldn’t be?
The pages spilled out on the desk, and I snatched up the tide page.
Here was Abigail Winterton’s missing play.