Staring down at the manuscript of the play, I made a quick decision. I put the manila envelope down on top of the tide page to obscure it from view.
“Giles,” I said casually, and he looked up from his work, his face cautious. I smiled, and he relaxed.
“Yes, Simon,” he said. “Is there something you want me to do?”
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking that as long as I’m going to have an assistant, he should have his own computer. There will be work you’ll need to do, and having a computer to yourself will make that work much easier.” I grinned. “I really don’t like sharing my computer with anyone.”
Giles smiled broadly. “That makes sense, Simon. I have a computer at home, and I could bring it here if you like.”
“No, Giles, you should keep that at home for your personal use,” I said. “I thought you might go into Bedford and shop around for something.” I glanced at my watch; it was nearly noon. “Why don’t you go on now? Take your time, have lunch, look around. Chalk it up to expenses, and I’ll reimburse you, since it will be a working lunch. Get the specs on what you think will be necessary and bring them back to me tomorrow. We’ll go from there and get you set up with your own equipment.”
Giles’s face clouded momentarily as he eyed the stacks of papers that yet needed to be organized in my files.
“There’ll be plenty of time for all that later,” I assured him. “Besides, having the computer, not to mention your own printer, will help you get me organized that much more quickly.”
He laughed at that. “True enough,” he said, standing up and stretching, letting me have a long look at the muscular torso beneath his snugly fitting shirt. “So you want to get rid of me for the rest of the day. You’re the boss.”
“Cheeky!” I said, smiling.
Giles picked up his satchel and cast me one last grin as he headed out of the office. “See you tomorrow, then!”
As I heard the door close, I sat and contemplated the pile of papers in front of me. I picked up the envelope again and felt something still inside. I drew out a thick piece of heavily embossed notepaper. Abigail Winterton’s name and address were emblazoned across the top in scarlet Gothic lettering, and the paper was an expensive, creamy stock. Miss Winterton had written me a letter in neat, crabbed handwriting. I squinted, deciphering it.
Dear Dr. Kirby-Jones:
I beg you will pardon my forwardness in sending you this with no forewarning. [Goodness, I thought, she sounds like the heroines in my historical romances.] Jealous and prying eyes surround me, and I am entrusting myself to your reputation as a scholar and to your status as a newcomer to Snupperton Mumsley. Having read your works and having chatted with an academic acquaintance who shares your specialty, I know that you have the bona fides of a true member of the literati, unlike some others in this village with pretensions far beyond their abilities, meager at best. Discretion being ever the better part of valor, I decided, after having announced to my fellow members of the SMADS the existence of this play, I would ask an impartial witness to read it and pass judgment before I shared it with the world at large. I do trust that you will give this work your undivided attention and discuss with me, at your earliest convenience, its suitability for production by the SMADS. I have little doubt that the enclosed work of fiction [and the word was heavily underscored] -will pack the house, as the saying goes.
If you agree, I mil then share the manuscript with the rest of the committee. For the moment, they can wait, as do I, for your decision.
Yours most sincerely, Abigail Winterton
I could picture the murder victim sitting at the desk in her bedroom while she penned this note with great self-satisfaction, drawing me into her web. In my mind, I saw her scurrying downstairs to the post office and placing the envelope in the appropriate bin or pile, then going on about her business. Happy with the turmoil she had created among the members of SMADS, she fed off the ensuing fear and anxiety until at some point, one person, pushed beyond endurance, had come and killed her. That person might have found any other existing copies of the play and taken them away to be destroyed, thinking he or she had gotten away with them all. Miss Winterton might yet have the last laugh.
I should have called Detective Inspector Chase immediately to report what I had received, but of course I was much too nosy to let this chance go by. I decided to exercise some self-restraint, however, by making a copy of the manuscript and not handling the original further before reading it. Rummaging around in the kitchen, I found a pair of very thin latex gloves, which allowed me, in a clumsy fashion, to handle the manuscript with some attempt at care. Once the copying was done, I put the pages back in the envelope and settled down for a quick scan of the copy before I called the police.
There wasn’t much to the play, only about sixty pages, and since I read quickly, I was done with it in perhaps fifteen minutes. Abigail Winterton had been no stylist, but what she lacked in literary ability she made up in venom. The portraits of my acquaintances in Snupperton Mumsley within the pages of Village Affairs: a Modem Morality Tale contained vituperations of the nastiest kind.
One Lady Prudence Blister made a brief appearance, with her bastard son, Miles, in tow, happily announcing to the world that she and her son were to be at long last reunited with her one true love (and, incidentally, Miles’s real father), a former gardener on her estate who was returning from Australia, having made a fortune in some unspecified fashion. Which helped, naturally, since Miles would be disinherited, the truth of his base birth now broadcast to one and all.
June Bartwick, however, was highly upset, because the police were in her garden, tearing apart her flower beds, looking for the bodies of several young men who had disappeared, in succession, shortly after dining with her. June apparently had a habit of consorting with men much younger than she, young men who seemed to vanish abruptly after having been seen entering her cottage a time or two late at night.
Everett Stewart and his blowsy, slatternly wife, Susie, were currently at the mercy of die Inland Revenue for various offenses that were never made quite clear.
Tristan Case wandered through, with a handsome, noticeably effeminate, young choirboy in tow, insisting loudly to anyone who would listen that he was just tutoring the boy for his A-levels, nothing more.
Finally, there was the vicar and her husband, Lottie and Greville Baker-Mandeville. (A most interesting switch, I thought, and perhaps the most telling one in all of the twisted portraits thus far.) The vicar went about minding everyone’s business but her own, running the parish into the ground by ignoring the offers of assistance from those who knew better than she, while her husband remained at home, where he did little to help. Instead, he sat around all day, eating chocolates and devouring romance novels by the dozen. Greville was rumored to have a dark secret in his past, one that precluded his serving the church despite his degree in theology and his training for the priesthood. He was often observed wringing his hands in the manner of Lady Macbeth (Miss Winterton did not forbear to quote the Scottish play, sadly) when he thought no one could see him.
I put the pages aside and fought the urge to wash my hands. Instead, I picked up the phone, found the card that Detective Inspector Chase had given me, and dialed the number of his office in Bedford. When someone answered, I asked to speak to Detective Inspector Chase but was politely informed that he was unavailable at the moment I identified myself and informed the person at the other end that I had just come into possession of important evidence in the Snupperton Mumsley murder case and asked if he would please let the Detective Inspector know I would be at home whenever he could come by. After receiving an assurance that the message would be forwarded to the detective inspector with all due speed, I rang off and sat back in my chair.
I was tempted to get a pair of tongs from the kitchen and transport my copy of the play (a sad misnomer) and deposit it in the garbage can. But putting aside my finer feelings for the moment I instead forced myself to think about the implications of what Abigail Winterton had written.
How much of it was simply a spite-driven interpretation of innocuous fact? Was any of it based on at least a grain of truth? And had Abigail Winterton really believed the play would ever have been performed? What was she trying to do in forcing this on her neighbors?
In Trevor Chase’s case, certainly, there was a bedrock of truth present in the play. Trevor had, at least once, become involved inappropriately with a minor, if Abigail Winterton’s distant friend, Parthenope Foxwell, were to be believed. Trevor had also become obsessed with Giles Blitherington, although the obsession seemed to have faded. At least Giles no longer appeared troubled by Trevor’s presence in the village, whereas in the beginning, he must have been uncomfortable.
What if Giles really were illegitimate? There did seem to be some sort of story there. Abigail Winterton could be making it up out of whole cloth. I thought back to the clipping in her collection, the one telling of Sir Bosworth Blitherington’s antipodean trip. The timing was odd, given the date of Giles’s birth, but there could be an innocent explanation. And certainly a DNA test could probably answer the question, should it ever come to that point. What would happen if I simply asked Giles point-blank? The idea made me uneasy. Perhaps there was another way to get at the information. At the moment, however, I couldn’t think of one.
The charges against Jane Hardwick were far more serious. I had taken Jane at face value, delighted to find a fellow vampire in Snupperton Mumsley, someone with whom I could truly let my hair down. Had I been willing to take too much on trust? Tristan Lovelace had said not a word about her, and surely he would have warned me against her if there were something not quite cricket about her. I could easily see Jane having a taste for young, attractive men. I could even imagine her, in the days before our wonderful little pills were invented, satisfying her urges by feasting on such young men. But the Jane I had met had not impressed me as reckless or stupid—both of which she’d have to be to behave in the manner imputed in the play. Abigail Winterton had intuited some of the truth about Jane, but I didn’t think she had managed all of it.
The question now was, should I confront Jane with this? Simply show it to her and laugh it off? Or take a sterner stance and demand an explanation? To be honest, I wasn’t all that keen on a showdown with her, because she frightened me. She had been a vampire a hell of a lot longer than I had, and she was correspondingly more knowledgeable and more dangerous. She hadn’t survived over four hundred years as a vampire without being well able to take care of herself, and that made me nervous about trying to question her.
I put Jane aside for the moment and went on down my mental list. Abigail Winterton seemed to have included the Stevenses only as a matter of course. She obviously had a score to settle with them over her lost nest egg, but the vagueness of her portrayal of them in the play was telling. She didn’t have enough on them to make them viable suspects in her murder. As attractive as Everard Stevens might be in the role of cold, conscienceless killer, this was one dog that wouldn’t hunt, I concluded regretfully.
That left me with Neville and Letty Butler-Melville. The contempt in Abigail Winterton’s characterizations of them was vicious. She had cast Letty as the strong partner in the marriage. Even I, who barely knew the Butler-Melvilles, could see the truth in that. But how much of the rest of her interpretation was sheer spite? Had Neville Butler-Melville really been responsible for the death of Lester Clitheroe all those years ago? Had his guilt been hanging over him all this time? And what would Letty Butler-Melville do to protect her husband? Would she have murdered Abigail Winterton to stop her from spreading such an ugly story?
For the life of me, I couldn’t see what kind of evidence that Abigail Winterton might have had in order to convince anyone that Neville Butler-Melville had a death, accidental or otherwise, on his hands. I supposed, however, that rumor might be enough to get him in serious trouble, especially combined with the fact that it was Letty who seemed to shoulder the burdens of the parish rather than Neville himself. I wondered, suddenly struck with the idea, whether Letty even wrote his sermons for him. I had attended one service during a quick weekend trip to Snupperton Mumsley two months ago, and at the time, Neville had impressed me with the erudition and style of his sermon. Having been around him a bit more, though, I was now suspicious. He had an actor’s ability to sell himself in a role, but did he also have the ability to write his own dialogue?
I checked the time. Getting close to one. Jane wouldn’t be back from Oxford for a while yet, probably not until after teatime at least. I wondered whether she would forgive me readily for turning the play over to the police without letting her see it first. I wondered just what she would do once she was aware of the accusations against her in the play. Would the police be bound to search her garden? I couldn’t help admit curiosity as to what they might find if they did.
Time for some tea, I thought, getting up abruptly from behind my desk. Surely Detective Inspector Chase would arrive soon, and I could turn this mess over to him. I had been intrigued by the puzzle of Abigail Winterton’s murder, but now that I knew more about all involved, I was disgusted by the sordidness of it all. Even if the remnants of an all-too-human curiosity were still lodged within my brain.
I was sipping at my tea some fifteen minutes later, staring blankly at the manuscript on my desk, when the doorbell rang. Setting down my teacup, I was all set to dash to the door, but then it occurred to me that I should put away my copy of the play. It wouldn’t do to have Detective Inspector Chase spot the evidence of my illicit activity! Casting about for a hiding place, I decided to stuff it in the bottom drawer of my desk, where small mammals could disappear for months at a time.
The doorbell rang again, and I almost ran to the front door. Detective Inspector Chase was going to get a welcome he wouldn’t soon forget, with me at my most innocently helpful.
I swung the door open, a huge smile of greeting blasting out at the handsome policeman.
Except that it was Colonel Clitheroe standing patiently on my doorstep.