MR. QUINN SPOKE VERY LITTLE on the ride to the cottage once he’d gotten us settled inside his carriage. All of his attention was on his driving, checking his gauges, and fiddling with the levers. At first, I was worried that there was something wrong with the carriage, then I realized he’d just gotten it and still found every detail of it fascinating. That allowed me to lean back and enjoy the scenery, or enjoy it as much as I could while thinking about a murder.
But the steam gig proved to be fast, and the journey was over before I’d really gotten a chance to consider what little I knew of the case, not that I was planning on investigating it. Although it would have been nice to know how Mr. Hoyt’s body had gotten into the sitting room to begin with.
Constable Palmer was waiting for us outside the cottage. “Sergeant Harris said you ladies were to be allowed back in, but to stay out of the sitting room. The barriers will show you what’s off-limits.”
Mrs. Albright and I both went to the front door and looked inside. The entryway was open, as was the staircase going up to the bedrooms, but there were crime scene barriers—long strips of cloth that attached with magnets—across the end of the entryway leading into the sitting room. Someone had brought the rest of our cases in from the shed and piled them by the staircase.
Constable Palmer interrupted our examination by asking, “Is this all of your luggage here? I’d be happy to get it upstairs for you.”
I suspected it was a peace offering, but it was also an offer I wasn’t about to turn down. “That looks like all of it.”
Mrs. Albright was just as ready to accept the assistance. “I’ll show you what goes in which room.”
While Mrs. Albright went to supervise the moving of our luggage, I went in further to see how bad the situation was.
Mr. Hoyt had been moved, that was something at least. I didn’t fancy sleeping with a corpse in the room below. Not that it would be the first time, although it would have been the first time I’d done it knowing the corpse was there. Otherwise, the whole set-up was as inconvenient as I had feared. The small entryway opened directly into the sitting room, which then opened into a small hallway that led to the kitchen and whatever else was on the ground floor of the cottage. The way into the sitting room was completely blocked at both the ends, the one leading into the entrance where I was standing and the one going to the kitchen. The tape stretched from the banister of the staircase to the umbrella stand that had been moved to the edge of the door, meaning there wasn’t anyplace for us to go except upstairs. I supposed that was something; at least we could get to the bedrooms. I leaned forward to get a better look at the sitting room.
The place where Mr. Hoyt had been lying was outlined with string on the carpet. The carpet itself did not seem to be damaged, which meant he hadn’t bled much, and despite the soaking his front seemed to have taken, there hadn’t been much water on his back. Drowning seemed likely then. When I heard Mrs. Albright directing Constable Palmer through to the staircase, I remembered my original intent and looked at the tapes blocking the way into the sitting room.
“There isn’t a second staircase, is there?” I asked as Constable Palmer bent to pick up one of our trunks.
“Just the one. No back way down to the kitchen, I’m afraid.”
“I had hoped.” It was hardly the holiday we’d been expecting. “How do we get to the kitchen?”
“The back door, I’m afraid.”
“So if I want a glass of water in the night, I have to come downstairs, go out the front door, walk around the house in the dark, find the backdoor, then repeat the whole thing to get back upstairs?”
At least Constable Palmer looked apologetic. “I left two very nice police lanterns for you. They should light things up very nicely and scare away any—not that there are any animals to scare away beyond foxes and such, but still, they won’t like the light. And if you’d like me to stay the night in a chair...”
I glanced at Mrs. Albright and was relieved to see her give a small shake of her head. “No, we’ll be fine. But if you could convince the sergeant to let us have a path to the kitchen...”
“I’ll do my best.” He shifted the trunk so he could pull it upstairs. “Why don’t you go around and see if you have everything you need for the night? If you want to go to the shops, I can drop you in the village on my way back to the station.”
I knew he was trying to be helpful and that it wasn’t his fault we’d had a body in our sitting room, so I collected up Mrs. Albright’s parcels, went out the front door, around the cottage, and in through the kitchen door. As we’d had a substantial tea in Stow-on-the-Wold, and Mrs. Albright had stopped to buy tea and scones and quite a few other things while Sergeant Harris had been questioning me, we were well enough stocked for the night, but it did get me out of Constable Palmer’s way and gave me a chance to look around.
The Oakwood Cottage kitchen was small but well planned, or would have been if there hadn’t been the inconvenience of a crime scene in the sitting room. The kitchen was small and filled with enough modern conveniences to make even my tinkering friend Kate proud. The only thing it seemed to be lacking was a back staircase to the upstairs bedrooms, but then the designer had most likely not anticipated a body in the parlor. I doubted even Kate would plan for that eventuality, and she’d known me for ages. As I was putting away Mrs. Albright’s purchases, I found a tea kettle and put it near the hob for when we needed it. Murders did seem to require tea. I could hear footsteps above me and the sound of trunks being dragged about, then water running somewhere above my head, and finally footsteps going towards the stairs. I went back outside, around the cottage, through the front door, and into the entryway to see if Constable Palmer had anything else to tell us.
“I’ve got the cases moved, and the lanterns are there on the entryway table. Do you see how to use them?”
They were similar to some of Kate’s fancier lanterns, so we were both familiar with their features. Once Constable Palmer was sure we were settled, he bid us good evening and left.
Once we’d seen Constable Palmer off, Mrs. Albright and I took the lanterns and went around to the kitchen to start a pot of a tea. Well, Mrs. Albright started the tea. I went to stand in the doorway leading to the sitting room and tried to get a better look at things. “Should we be locking the front door when we come around? Anyone could walk in and go right upstairs while we’re back here.”
Mrs. Albright didn’t turn away from the kettle. “It’s not like London here. There’s very little noise outside; we’d hear anyone coming up the front steps. Not that we’ll leave anything unlocked overnight.”
“No, not with a crime scene downstairs. You never know who might come to take something away or leave something behind.” I turned back to the kitchen in time to see Mrs. Albright look towards the back door, and I wondered if we would start locking the doors behind us every time we went in and out. It would be terribly inconvenient, but safer. Before I could ask, the kettle started to boil, and I went to find the teacups I’d seen earlier.
I waited until we were settled in with our tea to say, “You said you heard rumors in the shops.”
“Indeed. Constable Taylor seemed to think it would take Sergeant Harris a while to question you, and I knew we’d need some things here at the cottage, so I asked him what sort of shops there were nearby. I remembered hearing about Mrs. Avery at the teashop, and I was hoping I could come up with some way to ask about her without being obvious. It turned out I didn’t need to worry. Everyone was talking about the murder. They barely noticed I was there. It seems it was well known that he had been seeing Mrs. Avery in Donnington, which is a village two towns over, whenever he’d had business there back when he’d still had his sales route. The question seemed to be whether or not he was still seeing her now that he was at the pub, with a good bit of speculation as to whether or not he’d actually gone to Bristol as he’d said he was.”
“That should be easy enough for the police to check. If Sergeant Harris thinks of it, of course. And you thought they suspected me?”
“Well, one of us. They kept mentioning the ladies staying at Mrs. Foster’s cottage, wondering who we were, why we decided to stay here, and it kept coming back to why he was in our sitting room to begin with. They seemed to think he must have come to meet one of us, and that was why we had borrowed the cottage. And half seemed to think Ellen knew about it, and half thought she’d be shocked when she found out what her cottage was being used for.”
I took another scone. “I’d like to know why he was here. It would have been much more convenient for him to have gotten himself murdered somewhere else. Did anyone have any ideas besides him coming to meet one of us?”
Mrs. Albright shook her head. “I don’t think any of them have any proper ideas about what happened, but they do seem to want to suspect us.”
“I suppose the next best suspect is Mrs. Hoyt, particularly if he was carrying on with Mrs. Avery in Donnington, or she thought he was.”
“And from the way they spoke about her, she’s well-liked in the village, and all the sympathy has been with her.”
“So they don’t want to suspect her,” I finished. “I suppose that does make sense. But we have an alibi for most of the day. Once someone determines the time of death, we can figure out who saw us then and be out of it.”
“I suppose,” Mrs. Albright agreed.
I wondered if she wanted an investigation during our holiday but decided not to ask. I for one had no desire to work with Sergeant Harris on the case. “Did you hear about anything else interesting in town?”
“Not really. Just noticed a few shops we might want to have a look at.” She went on to describe them, which distracted us both from discussion of the murder, at least for a little while.
~ * ~ * ~
But we couldn’t ignore the murder for long. Once we’d finished our tea and the washing up, we gathered up the lanterns and went outside, locking the kitchen door behind us. I noticed we both turned the knob before starting around the side of the house. We’d left the front door unlocked so we got in easily enough and left the lanterns on the table near the door in case we needed to get to the other half of the cottage in the night. It was very hard to ignore a murder when the body had been so inconveniently placed. And as we couldn’t use the sitting room or anything beyond it, there was nothing else for us to do but go up to our rooms.
As we climbed the stairs, I realized we had the best view we were going to find of the hearth rug where the body was found, and paused to have a look. Mrs. Albright noticed I’d stopped and came back to see what I had seen.
“You didn’t think to bring a telescope, did you?” I asked as I pointed to the string marking where Mr. Hoyt had been found.
“I’m afraid not. I didn’t think checking murder scenes from staircases was going to be part of our holiday.”
“Neither did I. Still, we might be able to see something. I wish we had more light.”
We stood on the staircase and stared down at the hearth rug. “It doesn’t seem too damaged,” Mrs. Albright said, “that’s something, at least.”
“I suppose, but it is odd that it isn’t damaged.”
“Go on.”
I knew Mrs. Albright was encouraging me to finish the thought, hoping that I would get caught up in investigating, and it was working. “There wasn’t much blood on him, and none on the rug that I can see, so he couldn’t have bled much. So he must have been hit with the poker after he was already dead.”
“We did think the body had been left here.”
I nodded. “So the question becomes how did he die?”
“He was soaking wet, that seems to suggest drowning.” Mrs. Albright waited for me to think about that idea.
“But the rug doesn’t seem to have suffered any water damage either.”
Mrs. Albright leaned forward for a better look. “Not that I can see. What do you think that means?”
“That he was only soaking wet on the front? So he was face-down in shallow water?”
Mrs. Albright nodded. “So he drowned? The river is quite shallow, particularly by the ford. The Eybry ford isn’t that far from here. Perhaps that’s where he was.”
“But if the water was that shallow, why didn’t he just stand up, or even push up onto his forearms? That would have been enough to keep his head out of the water.”
“The blow to the head? But no, we decided that was after death. And the poker was here.”
I nodded. “So maybe he wasn’t drowned either. It will give me something to think about, anyway.”
I could tell Mrs. Albright was taking that as a good sign.
The stairs let out into a hallway that separated the first floor of the cottage in half. Mrs. Albright gave me a quick tour of the rooms. “The bath is at the end of the hall, there. I hope you don’t mind, I put you in the room facing front. They’re almost the same size.”
I took that to mean Mrs. Albright wanted the view of the garden. “I don’t mind at all.”
“Then have a good night. There’s a good set of fire irons in both rooms if we should need them.”
I doubted she meant for tending a fire. “That’s something, at least. Although I hope we don’t need them. Good night.”
My room took up most of the length of the cottage, with two windows facing the front garden and one facing the side yard with a small desk in front of it. The bed that was pushed under the slope of the roof looked comfortable. My luggage had been conveniently stacked near the wardrobe. I opened my trunk and got out what I’d need for the night, then unpacked my books and knitting and arranged them on the nightstand. If it hadn’t been for the corpse that had recently inhabited the sitting room and the policemen that it brought with it, it would have been an ideal spot for a holiday. And of course, the only way to get rid of the policemen was to see the murder solved. With that in mind, I started to prepare for bed. When I’d finished, I sat at the desk and did exactly what I’d told Mrs. Albright I would do, started thinking. That was always the best way to start an investigation, if I was going to investigate.
It seemed likely that Mr. Hoyt’s body had spent some time in the shallow water near the ford, so it stood to reason he was killed there. But as I thought about what I’d seen, that didn’t seem to fit. He’d been wet from head to toe, but only on the front, as if he’d been dropped face down in the water. Surely if there had been some sort of fight ending with his head being held under water, the top half of him would have been wet, and possibly part of his legs if he’d fallen on all fours, but his torso ought to have been dry. And I was fairly certain any blow to the head had been postmortem. There was so little blood. So how had he died? There wasn’t anything logical for it being the river, unless he’d been hit over the head there by a rock or something and then drowned. And a blow with the poker used to cover up the original wound. That made some sense.
But then how had he ended up in our sitting room? That was still the question. Had there been something about his placement at the river that pointed to the killer so they had felt the need to move the body? But then why kill him at the river in the first place? Had that been some sort of rendezvous point? Did they think the water would wash away clues? And why drag him all the way to the cottage? I could make pieces of it fit, but none of it made any sense taken all together. But at least now I had an idea. I would go back down to the river and see where there were places shallow enough to have soaked only the front of his clothes and if there were any clues to point to anyone who might have been the killer. If nothing else, finding where he’d been killed should give Mrs. Albright and me alibis and an idea of who would make a good suspect.
With that decided, I debated whether it was worth the effort to go downstairs and have a celebratory cup of tea, heard the wind rattling the window panes and decided it wasn’t, and climbed into bed with my book and read while rain began pounding against the window until I was tired enough to sleep.