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THE SERVANTS’ STAIRCASE was constructed from plain pine.
‘Men on this floor, women on the top,’ Hesketh recounted as we made our way up, my dresses brushing the whitewashed walls on either side.
This third level was much smaller than the first and second, and had only two doors facing each other.
‘We are in the front of the tower now, miss,’ Hesketh puffed. ‘The rest has been closed off and is empty.’
‘So much house going to waste.’ I was slightly short of breath myself.
‘Mr Nathan wanted the house as secure and easily searched as possible,’ the valet explained. ‘It was one of my duties to check the entire house every night.’
‘Why do the women have to climb the furthest?’ I objected.
‘So that the male staff have no excuse to go past their chambers,’ Hesketh replied. ‘In the old days the men were accommodated at the other end of the house.’
‘Brian Watts, the footman, put up a fight,’ Inspector Pound said softly. ‘He was a powerfully built man with a neck like a prize bull. It was hacked about and he had a gash on his cheek and on both hands.’
‘And a struggle was indicated how else?’ Mr G clacked his halfpennies together.
‘The room was all but destroyed. The washstand had been knocked over and the bowl thrown across the room and smashed.’ The inspector took a pinch of the Murray’s Mix from his left hand and deposited it into the bulb of his meerschaum. ‘The leg of a wooden stool was hanging loose and there was blood on all the walls.’
‘All?’ Sidney Grice tossed the coins from hand to hand.
‘Every one plus the window.’ Pound lightly tamped the tobacco. ‘And in several places on the floor.’
‘How many is several?’ My guardian caught one coin in each hand.
Pound grimaced in irritation. ‘I do not remember exactly. About twenty with a large pool where he fell.’
‘Astonishing.’ Mr G made two fists. ‘Because several is generally taken as being a number greater than three but less than eight.’ And when he opened his fists the halfpennies had vanished.
‘I found a broken penknife blade in the cellar.’ Inspector Pound put his pipe away. ‘Much too small to be used as a weapon, though.’
‘Some might say including eight,’ Sidney Grice ploughed on with his theme.
I beat some of the whitewash off my dress. ‘The Garstangs must have been very proper.’
‘Indeed they were, miss,’ Hesketh concurred, ‘as Mr Mortlock increasingly became, though he was less rigorous in his approach to alcohol. Mr and Mrs Garstang would not have it in the house.’
‘No wonder the brewer’s horse did not like it here,’ I remarked and Hesketh raised his eyebrows.
‘I would not pay too much attention to that story, miss.’ Hesketh opened the door and stood aside.
The valet’s room was comfortably appointed, with a narrow window too high for me to see out of, an immaculately made bed and a small pine wardrobe. On his chest of drawers stood a patchily silvered mirror, a varnished button box, a splayed hairbrush, a wooden wedge and a sepia photograph of an elderly lady resting on a garden seat with a studio backdrop of Venice behind her.
‘My mother.’ Hesketh smiled fondly.
‘What a striking woman,’ I said. Even the fixed pose that photography requires could not hide the way she sparkled. ‘She must have been pretty in her youth.’
‘Hah!’ Mr G snorted and pounced upon it.
‘My father swore she was the belle of the village.’ Hesketh hovered anxiously. ‘I only wish we were not so far apart.’
Sidney Grice had his pince-nez on and was scrutinizing the back of the frame.
‘Did you never marry?’ I picked up the wedge as the least personal item I could find. It did not feel right to pry with him at my side.
‘A live-in servant can only marry another.’ He gazed out of the window. It was too high for me to see anything through it. ‘And a valet cannot consort with a scullery maid.’ He straightened his neckerchief. ‘The opportunities are few and far between.’
‘Do you regret it?’
Hesketh turned towards me.
‘Perhaps Miss Middleton could start a marriage agency.’ Sidney Grice replaced the picture exactly where he had found it. ‘She appears to have nothing better to talk about.’
‘Whose is the next room?’ I turned the wedge in the pretence of examining it, but it was just a wedge – no telltale stains or dents.
‘Easterly’s, miss.’
Mr G grasped the window grille, hauling himself up to peer out while I looked at the back of the door.
‘Is this where the police found the curtain rope?’ I touched the hook.
‘So I believe, miss.’ Hesketh tore his eyes away from my guardian’s antics. ‘I was not present while my room was searched.’
‘Why is there no lock?’ I asked, and Sidney Grice let go and landed on his feet with a crash that rattled the cheval mirror in the corner.
‘That was to be my next question, though more intelligently structured,’ he complained.
Hesketh scratched his neck. ‘Mr Garstang was of the opinion that a servant had no business excluding him from any part of the house.’
Sidney Grice dropped on his haunches.
‘He sounds like a tyrant.’ I put the wedge back, though not with my guardian’s precision.
‘Which tyrant?’ Mr G quizzed me. ‘Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus perhaps? Or that unusually resourceful Frenchman, the self-appointed Emperor Napoleone di Buonaparte?’
‘I never knew him to enter our quarters.’ Hesketh eyed my guardian as Mr G pulled open the bottom drawer of the dresser and checked around it with an outsized dental mirror. ‘Though Mrs Garstang was known to enter the maids’ chambers unexpectedly.’
‘I have heard of many mistresses doing that.’ I picked up a coiled iron holder with the stub of a candle in its base.
‘Mr and Mrs Garstang were very strict in their religious views,’ the valet conceded. ‘There was a terrible fuss when they saw that drawing. Master Nathan was thrown out of the house and only allowed back when he swore he had destroyed it. But they were good people at heart. They were fair employers and kind to their poorer relatives, and when Masters Nathan and Lionel came to stay, Gethsemane rang out with laughter.’
Mr G put his mirror away.
‘It is difficult to imagine merriment here.’ I picked a waxen dribble off the stand.
‘There has not been much in recent years,’ the valet agreed sadly.
Sidney Grice rooted through the neatly folded clothes.
‘According to Bartwell’s Guide to Occult Objects, sixty per centum of things hidden in a triple-compartmented chest are to be found in the lower drawer, twenty-eight per centum in the middle and the remaining twelve in the upper.’ He ran his long fingers through the pockets of a pair of trousers before lifting the garment to one side. ‘And this,’ he held up a small bunch of envelopes, ‘would appear to fall into the first category.’
Mr G remained on his haunches as he opened the letters on the thin rectangular rug.
‘Those are from my mother and brother, and a very old one from my father.’ For the first time Hesketh flared. ‘And, if I may say so, sir, they are personal.’
‘In a murder investigation,’ Sidney Grice flicked though the correspondence, ‘the only thing personal is the detective.’ He perused the handwriting. ‘These, however,’ he reassembled the pile, ‘have depressed dullness into a tedium deeper than I had realized was possible.’ He replaced the letters and the clothes, smoothing a shirt before sliding the drawer regretfully back into place.