THE NEXT MORNING, I WAS RESOLVED to go out and find out where our body had come from. The river seemed the best place to start, of course, but where on the river? From what I’d seen, the ford itself was really quite anonymous, so no need to move him. If I had a map, I thought, that might help. I considered the question while I dressed, choosing a comfortable tweed walking suit because it had a sensible number of pockets, and my best walking shoes. I filled my pockets with a notebook and pencil and a pocket watch and a small box of matches and brought my small-brimmed blue hat downstairs with me, mainly because it required four pins to keep it in place and I had brought my sharpest ones, as they seemed to come in handy surprisingly often. I paused on the staircase as I went down and looked at the hearth rug, but even in daylight, nothing suggested itself. No clue that would solve it, at least.
Mrs. Albright was already in the kitchen when I got downstairs, out the front door, around the side of the cottage, and back in through the kitchen door, although she couldn’t have been there long as the kettle hadn’t started boiling yet. She looked up when she heard me close the kitchen door. “Good morning. How was your room?”
“Very comfortable. And yours?”
“The same. Now if I could just find the plates, we’d be able to toast the crumpets and have some breakfast.”
As Mrs. Albright had already made it through half the cupboards, I thought it best to let her finish the hunt for the plates and went to see about toasting the crumpets. Mrs. Albright had managed to find a toasting fork, so it was a simple-enough task.
“Here they are. Now why would anyone keep plates there? Oh well, here’s a platter for the crumpets. I’ll look for the jam.” Mrs. Albright left a platter near my arm, and I could hear her going through more cupboards. “Did you have any plans for today?” She was trying too hard to be casual, so I knew she wanted to know if I’d decided to investigate.
“I thought I’d see if I could figure out where Mr. Hoyt landed in the river, if that is where he got wet. It might point to some suspects.”
“An excellent plan. Have you decided where you’ll start?”
“I thought I might look at a map first and see where the likely places were.”
“Mrs. Foster said she would leave a map on the bookshelf.”
I sighed. “And the bookshelf is in the sitting room, isn’t it?”
“I would suppose so. Normally, that would be quite convenient.”
I slid the last of the toasted crumpets onto the platter and went to the sitting room door to lean over the tapes and have a look. “It’s by the window. I don’t think I can reach it from here.” It might have been possible to knock something off of the shelf with an umbrella or walking stick or even the toasting fork, but there would have been the difficulty of pulling it over to the door, and the complication that it was generally not a good idea to take things from a crime scene. I stepped back into the kitchen.
“If you need a map, I can ask Mrs. Otway if she has one.”
Which would lead to questions about why I needed it and where I was going. “No, I was just going to have a look at the river. It’s probably better for me to walk along it anyway.”
Mrs. Albright put a plate of butter down beside the platter of toasted crumpets. “So you are investigating, good. I won’t say a thing about it to Mrs. Otway, at least not until we know if we can trust her with something like that or not.”
By which I knew Mrs. Albright meant whether or not she could be trusted not to gossip. I slathered one of the crumpets with butter and tried to consider the best way to begin my search.
By the time we’d finished breakfast, I’d come up with a few questions that I could try to answer. First, why would someone move the body? That was the place to start. If it was in a field or along a walking path, it would be far simpler to remove whatever in the area might connect the killer to the spot. Plenty of people would have walked past before, so with a little care, there wouldn’t be much chance of figuring out who had been past at the moment Mr. Hoyt was killed. That meant the body had to have been somewhere with a connection to the killer that was harder to hide.
The cottages along the river were the obvious first place to look. The ones near Eybry were fairly close, so that seemed a place to start. Whoever moved the body couldn’t have brought him very far without being noticed, not in the middle of the afternoon, and as he’d still been sopping wet when we’d found him, he hadn’t had much of a chance to dry out, making the closest cottages seem the most likely. That was something that would have been easier to determine with a map, but as I didn’t have one, I’d have to make my best guess. There was a good path between Oakwood Cottage and Eybry. That would be useful for moving a body, and it meant there was little chance of me getting lost on my way to investigate.
That seemed to be the way to start, then. If the times didn’t work out, I would know the body hadn’t come from the direction of the village. And if I needed to experiment further, I could find something in the house to get wet and see how long it would take to dry. But first I needed to know how long the walk to the village houses took. I arranged everything in my pockets so I could quickly check my watch and note down times as I walked, then got my hat secured with my four sturdiest hatpins, just in case things didn’t go as planned, and went outside. When I got to the gate, I took out my watch and noted the time down in my memorandum book, then started down the lane until it met the riverbank, then followed it along towards what I thought were the closest cottages.
The river was not what I would have called a river, coming from a place with the Mississippi and Missouri, not that I’d seen either in person. This was more what I would have called a stream or a brook, being no more than five feet across at its widest and probably not much deeper, but still, it was deep enough to drown someone. I kept an eye on the riverbank, but I didn’t see how a body left there could be connected to anyone unless they left evidence behind. Far simpler to clean up the area than move the body.
After about ten minutes, I approached Eybry. I checked my watch as I walked and noted down the time (nine minutes and twelve seconds since I’d left) and continued on. There was a row of honey-colored stone cottages along the lane in front of me, putting them on the outskirts of the village. That seemed promising. They were near the river, far enough from the main part of the village that, with a bit of care, someone could walk towards Oakwood Cottage without being spotted, but close enough that a dead body would be found there before long. I glanced at my watch and noted the time again, then kept walking to see how far the cottages went before they were too close to the village to be good prospects, trying to keep a steady pace. I could look for signs of recent disturbances once I knew the most likely spots to check.
It really was a good area for what I had in mind. The riverbank had a good number of trees along the far shore, along with hedges and tall grasses. It would be easy enough to walk along the lane unnoticed from that side, meaning the killer only had to worry about the few cottages I was passing. My theory was beginning to seem very possible.
I had walked past four cottages in a row, a large stone cottage that could have been a rectory at the curve of the lane and three smaller ones of the same honey-colored stone along the straight bit, when the trees began to thin out on the other side of the river. After the fifth, a good-sized cottage with climbing rosebushes out front and a low wall with Mulberry Cottage painted in ornate script on the front gate, the lane became a more substantial thoroughfare as it approached the place where it crossed the main road into the village. At the same time, the river became quite shallow until it was only a few inches deep, where it formed a shallow ford over the main road. There was a footbridge not far from the ford, connecting a footpath to the lane I was on. I glanced at my watch to note the time then continued on to the ford.
The area around the ford was much more open than the rest of the lane had been. The road past the ford seemed to lead directly to the main square, and in the few moments I spent looking down it to determine where it went, two different people walked by with what appeared to be market baskets. The killer might have tried passing the ford, but it seemed more likely, if they’d come from the other side of it, they would have gone in the opposite direction, out towards the fields, shielded by the hedges on that side, making the cottages on my side of the ford the most likely candidates. It seemed I had come to the end of my first experiment. I stepped away from the ford and looked down the lane.
The four cottages along the lane were far enough from the river that a body found there would not be immediately connected to them. At best, they would be called as witnesses. But the large stone cottage at the end of the lane, just past the curve in the road, was a different story. It was at the end of the lane and perpendicular to the other houses, so it was possible its side garden ran along the river. That seemed suggestive. From where I stood, I could see the front garden had planted with a bit of care but no creativity, placing a few plants near the door and doing little else. At some recent point it had been groomed, but, while it had not had time to run wild, it was clearly not being cared for between visits of the gardener, not even to move a branch that had fallen on the path to the front door, or, I noticed, a stocking from the bush near the window. So the cottage was most likely a rental, and whoever was letting it now was not overly concerned about caring for it. That seemed to be one way to be in the area for a murder, to rent a cottage in the same village as your victim. Although not the most sensible, as I was sure there was plenty of gossip about the newcomers. Still, Mrs. Otway would most likely know who lived there, and Mrs. Albright would know how to ask so she would tell us. And I had my first suspect. All that was left was to put my notes into some sort of order that I would understand later, then I could decide if I wanted to try another path or investigate the house further.
I took out my notebook and noticed that the low stone wall around the garden of the rose-covered cottage had flat-topped finials at the ends, just the thing for leaning a notebook on to write. I hoped the owner wouldn’t mind and proceeded to do just that. I copied my scribbled walking notes into a proper timeline with readable times and notes on the precise places I had made the notes, then added my observations on the area and the possible ways for a body to get from there to Mrs. Foster’s cottage, and even drew a small diagram of the cottages and the ford. It seemed a bit much if I wasn’t investigating, but at least I would have my observations in order.
I was putting the finishing touches on my diagram when I began to feel I was being watched. I closed up my notebook and tried to glance casually around in case the person watching me happened to be involved in the murder.
It was the resident of Mulberry Cottage. She was roughly my age, with dark hair, wearing a sensible green cotton skirt and shirtwaist. She had come outside while I’d been making notes and had set up an easel in her side garden, and now she was sitting beside it, watching me. As she was doing so quite openly, I thought it unlikely she knew I was investigating, or if she did, that she was involved. When she realized I was looking at her she stood up and crossed the lawn.
“I didn’t like to disturb when I thought you were sketching, but that was much too quick.”
I smiled back. “Just taking some notes.” I noticed she had an easel set up. “Do you paint?”
“Strictly amateur, but it gives my mind a nice rest. Helen is the real artist here. Helen Dyer. I can see you haven’t heard of her, no, it’s quite all right, but she has had a few showings in London. And I’m Nora Hayworth.” She held out her hand.
“Miss Cassandra Pengear,” I answered and shook her hand.
“And are you on a walking holiday, Miss Cassandra Pengear?”
“Just a holiday. At Oakwood Cottage.”
“Oh dear, that means you’ve not had the best time so far.”
It seemed news traveled as fast as I would have expected. “So you’ve heard about our discovery?”
“Yes, most unfortunate. Although I suppose if anyone around here was going to be found murdered, Mr. Hoyt was a good candidate.”
So village gossip did include the victim’s name. That was good to know. “Why do you say that?”
She leaned closer to the wall. “Well, he has a reputation. Between the distraught abandoned ladies, the incensed betrayed ladies, and the various angry husbands, there are quite a lot of good suspects in the village.”
That sounded like what Mrs. Albright had found out in the shops. “Was there anyone in particular who might have done it?”
“Not that I know of. It’s all heresy and rumors for the most part, but from very reliable sources, which sounds suspect, I know, but really...”
“You?” I asked, hoping I sounded commiserating and not like I was interrogating her or suspected her.
“No, not for want of trying on his part. I sent him packing with a flea in his ear. Same with Helen, although she managed to be quite subtle about it. I was far more direct.” She looked at me, then grinned a little and said, “A friend of ours, a portrait painter. She was staying for the summer and decided it would be an experience. But she’s a terrible suspect. She knew exactly what she was getting into going into it, and she’s been in Paris for at least a month now. We did see him having quite a cozy chat with Mrs. Greene down by the mill, but that was a while ago, and Mrs. Glynn, that’s the miller’s wife, didn’t seem to know anything about it, and she would have, I assure you. But you can tell from the way people look at him, who avoids him in the village while glaring, who pretends to avoid him while sneaking looks. You know that sort of thing.”
“I suppose I do.”
Miss Hayworth nodded and leaned against the gate. “Are you staying at Oakwood Cottage by yourself?”
“No, I came down with a friend.”
“Oh?” she asked, clearly hoping for more information.
“My landlady, Mrs. Albright. She’s friends with Mrs. Foster; that’s how we were invited to stay.”
“I see. If you were alone there, I was going to ask if you wanted to kip out on our settee. It can’t be nice being in a house where a body was found, but to be there alone...”
“It’s kind of you to think of it.” It was a kind thought, but she did seem to know quite a bit about local gossip and was more than a bit interested in our corpse, so I decided against asking about who had access to the river. I didn’t want the killer to know we had seen the body was wet, and while Miss Hayworth didn’t strike me as much of a one for spreading gossip, she certainly seemed to collect it, and news clearly traveled quickly. To be safe, I decided to sneak up on my questions. “This is a pleasant part of the village.”
If she thought the change of subject odd, she didn’t give any sign of it. Perhaps she thought I didn’t want to talk about the body anymore. “It is. We were happy to find Mulberry Cottage. It’s close enough to the village to be convenient to the shops, but not so close that you’re running into everyone all day. We were spoiled in London for being close to things, but there was no room in our little flat. It was a relief to be able to move out here.”
“And you have nice neighbors?” Perhaps I wouldn’t have to rely on Mrs. Albright talking to Mrs. Otway.
“Well, the best part, aside from the size—when we were living in London we were always tripping over her easel and my notebooks—is that the Brooks, who own that cottage,” she pointed to the one right beside theirs, “are almost never here. He’s a banker in London and they only come down when he has a holiday, so we can use the garden without worry.”
“That does sound nice. And he’s not there often?” I hoped she’d respond by telling me when he’d last been down.
“Not more than two or three times a year. Makes you wonder why he bothered to buy the place at all.”
I decided the Brooks’ schedule was something Mrs. Albright could get from Mrs. Otway easily enough. “And what about the people next to them?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Khan. He used to own the greengrocers in the village until he sold it to a nephew and retired. They’re a nice, quiet couple. I think they’re as pleased as we are to have the Brooks between us. No one to disturb his bird watching.”
Someone else who would know the Brooks’ schedule. “And the large cottage at the end of the lane?”
“Trillwell Lodge. That’s rented out. The latest are Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs.” I could tell from her tone that they were not the sort of neighbors she approved of.
“Have they been there long?”
“All summer, and I don’t think we have much chance of getting rid of them in the fall either.”
“I take it they’re not as easy as the Brooks.”
“The very worst of what you’re imaging of two men with money and time and nothing to fill it. Drinking, carousing, whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably worse. Just last week, Mr. Briggs was so drunk, he was walking along the lane without his trousers, yelling about how the delivery wagon was late. Mr. Khan heard him carrying on and went down to tell him to be quiet, and the argument that ensued, well, I’m amazed the whole village didn’t come running down to see the show.”
I wondered if that made them good suspects. Perhaps one or both of them had been drunk, and leaving the body in someone’s sitting room had seemed a good idea at the time, although if they had killed him... And there was still the question of the wet clothes. “A pity. It seems like they’d have a good view of the river.”
“It seems so, doesn’t it? Quite nicely situated. But I don’t want to keep you.”
I suspected she wanted to return to her painting, so gathered up my notebook and pen. “I should be starting for home myself.”
“I hope to see you again.”
“Likewise.” I started slowly down the lane, hoping that I looked as if I were still looking at whatever she thought I’d been taking notes on. By the time I was outside the Brooks’ cottage, she seemed absorbed in her painting, and fortunately was facing the back of her garden, not the lane. I didn’t want to have to explain why I was going to pay a call on the disreputable Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs.