Simon was exhausted by the time he got home to his rooms on Wednesday evening. He made his way slowly up the stairs, holding on to the banister and favouring his leg. Bloody thing was aching like buggery, he’d been on it so much. He could have a hot bath before supper if he got a move on, perhaps that would help.
He shucked his clothes and wrestled his way into his dressing gown, continuing to ponder the day as he made his way down the hall to the bathroom with his towel. He shared it with Phillips, the other boarder with rooms on this floor. But the other man usually ate out in the evening and wasn’t often home if Simon got back at a reasonable time. Lucky for Simon and his leg. No-one liked a bathroom-hogger.
He didn’t know why he stayed really. He had enough of a wage these days to keep a house of his own and even savings to buy one if he’d wanted. He quite liked having other people about though, knowing they were in the house somewhere. A place of his own would be empty to come home to at the end of each day. And the job meant he wasn’t home all that much. It was convenient for the station. He liked his landlady, who was a pleasant woman about the same age as him. She’d taken over from her mother, who’d been running the place when Simon first arrived twenty years ago as a young copper. He’d graduated from one of the smaller rooms on the second floor to his sitting-room-and-bedroom set on the first as he’d shed his uniform for a detective’s position and his wage had increased.
He slid into the hot water of the bath, gritting his teeth against the initial heat. That should work wonders along with the Epsom salts he’d added. He was sick of being in pain. It was manageable most of the time, just a nagging awareness that something wasn’t quite right; but when he got tired or over-exerted himself, it screamed blue murder at him.
That took his thoughts back to the day. He shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the back of the bath, letting his muscles go slack and his mind run free. On the surface he had a very nice solution to his murder. Witnesses attesting they had heard Lucy Hall-Bridges come back to speak to the victim. A motive—she was angry the victim had struck her and had come back for revenge. The drawing room windows open as the victim had fled from the murderer, getting as far as the village green.
But…something didn’t quite add up. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his closed eyes with his finger and thumb.
He believed Lucy Hall-Bridges, that was the problem. He’d spent three hours questioning her this afternoon. She was perfectly sincere. Her story remained the same. Mrs Fortescue—all these nobs with their nob-names—had taken exception to the halting of the séance and struck her, quite hard. They’d left. She’d gone to bed and stayed there until morning.
He also believed the women at Lilac Villa. They weren’t as down to earth as the woman they were accusing, but they were sincere. Miss Leamington had heard someone she was certain was Miss Hall-Bridges talking to the victim in the hallway and going into the drawing room with them, from her own position at the first floor landing. She hadn’t heard any sort of altercation, but that wasn’t the point. The doors and walls in the house were sufficiently robust to muffle sound and the door to the drawing room had closed behind them. Anything could have happened in there.
And then there was the story the body told. Simon always liked to think of the passive contribution of his murder victims as being their voice telling their own part of the narrative. She must have been very frightened, to run from the house all the way to the centre of the village in her bare stockinged feet. In fact…where were her shoes? What had happened to them?
He sat up, blinking water out of his eyes. There were grazes on the bottom of her feet. She’d definitely run barefoot. Had she slipped her shoes off in the drawing room? Or did she lose them on the way to the pond? Did that even matter? He’d send someone to look for them in the morning.
He pondered the rest of it as he washed. She must have been struck on the head at the edge of the pond and fallen in. Miss Hall-Bridges didn’t have the strength to move a body after death. But Mrs Fortescue couldn’t have fallen into the water whilst she was still breathing as there was no water in the lungs.
He got out of the cooling bath, drying himself off, and cleaning the bath round after himself like the responsible boarding-house resident he was. He and Phillips were good at sharing a bathroom and had been doing it for years. Phillips usually bathed in the morning before he left for work. Simon usually bathed in the evening after he came home. Neither of them scattered their things around and they picked up after themselves. Simon would probably be more motivated to move on or move back into the family home with his sister’s family if it wasn’t all so comfortable.
He pottered back to his room and began to get dressed again for supper, still turning all the facts and suppositions over in his head.
Miss Hall-Bridges had been very composed after her initial shock at being arrested. Very earnest in her desire to help. He really could not believe that such an open young woman had done what she was accused of doing. But she was still hiding something. Simon’s policeman’s nose told him so. Just like it told him Walter Kennett and Dr Marks were being deedy as well. The whole trio of them weren’t being straight with him about something…possibly something that would exonerate Miss Hall-Bridges completely or at least give her a robust alibi.
Her father’s solicitor would be down tomorrow, he was sure. That was why he’d spent the rest of his day at her, before she had the legal support. She was perfectly composed throughout though, perfectly ladylike, and perfectly consistent with her story. Keen to help him work out what was going on, even. She didn’t seem to have realised she could be hung as a murderess. Or perhaps she did and this calm reaction was her way of dealing with it.
He frowned. The only thing that had been odd was her reason for stopping the séance. I felt uncomfortable, she’d said. It didn’t feel right. She hadn’t really expanded on that. Simon had put it all down to a lot of mumbo-jumbo. So many people were turning to that sort of thing these days, desperate in their grief. It was sad and a little stupid, that they were so keen to grasp at broken straws. But he couldn’t blame them for trying to imagine themselves some comfort.
If Dr Marks had called a halt to the séance because she’d thought it ridiculous, empty play-acting, that Simon could easily understand. But…Miss Hall-Bridges stopping because it felt wrong…that was something different. The implication there was that there was a right way for it to feel.
Hmm.
He tied his tie and slipped the jacket of his lounge suit on over his waistcoat and went down to his boarding-house supper.