I CONTINUED DOWN THE LANE and went up to the gate to get a good look at the lodge. It was situated close to the riverbank, close enough where the prospect of fishing could be offered as a feature. The front gate was wide open and looked as if someone had bent the latch at some point, stopping it from locking. That seemed to be an open invitation for walkers to go in, or at least something that could be taken to be an open invitation, so I went through into the front garden.
I decided the best thing to do first was to have a look at where the property met the river. If it was too far away, I could be wasting my time. And if the residents were guilty, they were hardly likely to allow me to have a look, particularly once they heard where I was staying. A quick glance at the front of the house showed that the curtains were drawn and there was no sign of anyone outside. It seemed unlikely I’d be spotted, and if I was, I could always say I thought it was a walking path. I cut across the lawn to the side garden, avoiding the path that led to the main house in case anyone happened to glance out of a window.
The river was still shallow along the edge of the garden, although not as shallow as near the ford, and the side garden did indeed pass very close to the river. In fact, what I took to be the kitchen door opened out onto a little sort of stone terrace that had been set up as a place to have tea or breakfast, and the small area ended just before the reeds along the side of the river. Any body found there would definitely point to the residents of the cottage as suspects. And the terrace was used by the current residents. At least, someone had left a spoon under the table, and there was a coffee-stained napkin hanging over one of the bushes that still looked damp, although I had no desire to investigate that further. It seemed I’d found a likely spot for Mr. Hoyt’s murder.
So what to do with it? I’d have to tell Sargent Harris, although as there appeared to be both money and a title involved, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he were reluctant to do much investigating without some sort of proof. And it wouldn’t surprise me if he would rather be investigating me or Mrs. Albright, no matter how unlikely we were as suspects. If I wanted to get a look at the two best suspects so far, I’d have to do it now. Mindful of Miss Hayworth’s opinion of them, I slipped one of the more lethal-looking pins from my hat and transferred it to my pocket. It never hurt to be prepared. Then I started for the front door.
As no one seemed to have noticed I was there, I didn’t bother pretending I had just come through the front gate but crossed the lawn in the most direct way to the front step. The morning post was sitting on the welcome mat, and what I took to be the evening post was sticking out of the slot. Apparently, no one in the house was expecting any important letters. I picked up the envelopes from the ground—I certainly wouldn’t want them to get any wetter than they already were—and flipped through them, but there was nothing particularly interesting. Several bills from shops in London, although none seemed to be marked urgent or past due, a letter from a bank to Mr. Briggs, a few advertisements. Nothing for Lord Hector, I noticed. I considered trying to cram the letters into the slot, but there seemed to be more than one day’s mail sticking out of it, so I held onto them and tried the knocker, which was a large, plain brass sort, boring but heavy enough to make a good sound. I waited, but there was no sign of life inside. I wished I hadn’t used that phrase in my head and reached for the knocker again.
When there was no response to my second knock, I hit the knocker against the door for a third time and waited, wondering what to do if no one came. I assumed there would be a valet or footman of some sort to open the door and mind the place, and was rather hoping he would be a recent hire and not a loyal retainer who’d known them since they were boys and would refuse to gossip or complain about his employers. Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs did not sound like easy charges or the sort to do for themselves. So I was quite surprised when the door was flung open and a blond man not much over thirty in shirtsleeves and a waistcoat said, “Ladies, welcome to Trillwell Lodge!” and flung his arm out with more enthusiasm than balance, nearly knocking my hat off in the process. Avoiding my hat at the last moment caused him to stumble into the doorway, and I could see there was another man behind him, also in shirtsleeves and also having trouble staying upright.
“Not who I was expecting,” the one who opened the door said. “Collecting? Think I gave at the office. Hope I did. Bit short otherwise.”
The man behind him attempted to look over his shoulder and managed to bump into him instead. “Thought there were three coming down.”
I stayed quiet and waited to see if there was going to be some sense in that sentence.
The man continued to ramble over his friend’s shoulder but didn’t make any more sense. “We definitely said we wanted three down from London. Or was that for next week? Is it next week? She’s not the normal sort they send.”
“I don’t think she’s the one from London,” the slightly less inebriated one said.
I gave him my best glare, the one I normally saved for Inspector Wainwright when he was being particularly annoying, and said, “I am most definitely not down from London to see you. But I would like to know why you left a corpse in front of my fire.”
That sobered them up, or at least the one at the door. His friend continued to stumble between the entryway and the parlor. “You’re sure she’s not the one from London?”
“Shut up, Freddie,” the man at the door snapped over his shoulder. “You’ll have to forgive him, he’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Lord Hector Gibbons, at your service.” He stuck out his hand and stumbled into the door frame. I stayed where I was and watched as he managed to catch himself before he fell. “Not quite sober myself, but as you said, we’ve had a corpse. How did you know? I could have sworn we dumped him at Foster’s place.”
“Deserved it too. Always complaining ’bout us. Said we’re always loud and drunk. We’re not loud.”
“Freddie, go in the kitchen.”
“Why? I’m not the cook.”
“Kitchen! Coffee!”
I assumed Freddie was Mr. Briggs. He muttered something but stumbled in what I assumed was the direction of the kitchen.
Lord Hector turned back to me. “Anyway, terribly sorry. Could have sworn we dumped him at Mrs. Foster’s cottage. You’re certain you found him in yours? You didn’t stumble into hers by mistake?”
“I take it that’s something you do often? Stumble into the wrong cottage?” I arched an eyebrow and waited a beat to let him think I was expecting an answer, then decided that, as he seemed to be making something that resembled an effort I’d give him a little bit of information. “We’re staying at Mrs. Foster’s cottage.”
“Oh. Good. Thought I was already drunk when we moved him, and I didn’t start drinking until after. Not that day anyway.”
As he seemed willing to talk, I thought I might as well try to question him. “Did you know him?”
“Never seen him before. Tried going through his pockets when we found him out in the water, but there wasn’t any identification. That’s what they look for, i-den-ti-fi-ca-tion.” He said the last very clearly, as if he were having a bit of trouble with the longer words.
“And how long have you been staying here?”
“Weeks, weeks. Father doesn’t want me in Town, and Oxford doesn’t ever want me again, so we’re here. And now you’re wondering why I didn’t know him if I’ve been here weeks and weeks, but I haven’t been to the village. Not much. They don’t like us there, I blame the vicar. I always blame the vicar. No one else does, and you know they’re always up to something. So we have everything sent down from London. Food, wine, clothes, ladies. Want some Fortnum & Mason’s ham? Just came down in the hamper. Or foie gras?”
I wasn’t about to go into the cottage with him. “What time did you find him?”
“Dunno. It was before tea. About quarter to two or so.”
That seemed quite specific from someone who claimed not to know and was at least partly drunk, although I was beginning to wonder how much of that was an act. “Very well. I’m sure Sergeant Harris will be very interested in all this.”
“You’re not going to the police, are you?” For a moment, he looked perfectly sober, then he leaned against the door again. “I mean, think of the ladies. Poor girls, just down from London. Sergeant Harris might get the wrong idea. You wouldn’t want to get them in trouble.”
“I’m sure they will be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, even if it means throwing you on the tender mercies of Sergeant Harris. I’m sure he’ll be by to call later. Here’s your mail. Mostly bills, I think. Enjoy your foie gras.” I hurried down the path before he could try convincing me not to go to the police.
Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs were definitely interesting suspects, but Lord Hector had said they found Mr. Hoyt in the water, which suggested they hadn’t put him there. Still, I thought at least part of his drunkenness was an act; he could have used the word deliberately to throw me off. Or they might have been so drunk when they killed him they didn’t remember doing it. Or it could have been his friend who’d killed Mr. Hoyt. I hadn’t spoken to him, not that I would have gotten any sense out of him in the state he was in. Still, it was something to bring to Sergeant Harris, or perhaps Constable Taylor would be a better choice. He could take credit for it or put it down to an anonymous source. Of course here, everyone would guess it was either me or Mrs. Albright.
As I approached the gate leading to the lane, I realized there was a woman waiting at the end of the path, holding a folding easel. She waved as I approached. “I was ready to cosh him over the head if you needed the escape.” She made an abbreviated coshing motion with her easel. “But it seems you managed him just fine on your own. And now that I look, you do seem to have some rather lethal-looking hatpins. You’ll have to tell me where you find those.”
“Miss Dyer, I presume?”
“Right you are. And a much better detective than our sergeant, who can’t find his own hat more often than not. Am I right to think you’ve met Nora, then?”
“I have, yes.”
Miss Dyer picked up the box of paints she’d put down while preparing to come to my aid and started down the path towards her cottage. “Whyever did you go to visit those two? I don’t think they’re actually dangerous to know, but only because they’re normally too drunk to answer the door. You’re not related to one of them, are you?”
“Most certainly not.”
“And you hardly look like their normal run of female visitor.”
“Thank you for that.”
“But it does make one curious as to why you were calling there. It can’t have been for the conversation, or the hospitality, and I doubt either one of them has given a farthing to any cause that didn’t involve liquor.”
I considered what was the wisest answer to give her, but as Miss Hayworth had known all about our body already, and I was fairly certain that meant either that Miss Dyer already knew about him or would as soon as she got home depending on whether Miss Hayworth had learned of it before or after Miss Dyer had left for her painting, the truth seemed safe enough, or at least the general outlines of it. “I wanted to get a look at them. We’re staying at Oakwood Cottage.”
“I’m sorry. Not about the cottage, which is quite nice, but about the rest of it.”
So she did know. “Thanks. I was trying to see where the body might have come from, and that seemed a likely place, so I wanted to see what the residents were like. Miss Hayworth had told me there was money and a title, so I wanted to know what I’d be facing if I went to Sergeant Harris with the theory.”
“Sergeant Harris wouldn’t know what to do with a theory if he found one in the middle of his desk, neatly laid out and wrapped in shiny paper with a bow on it.”
“So I’ve noticed. He’s convinced Mrs. Albright and I managed to fit killing him in between coming down here, searching for Mrs. Otway to let us into the cottage, and searching for lunch.”
“Oh my.” She worried at her lower lip for a moment then asked, “Do you have an alibi?”
“Several, not one of which he’ll listen to.” And then something in her tone made me stop walking and stare at her. There was something under her words, not concern, or not only, more like guilt. “You left him outside their kitchen door, didn’t you?”
Miss Dyer stopped and gave me a rather sheepish grin. “I was wondering if I ought to say something. I suppose I should have. Considering it was Mr. Hoyt, it seemed like a lovely symmetry. And an excellent lesson for them, and Lord Hector’s father would certainly see that they were well represented in court. He’s gotten his son out of all sorts of lesser jams. And I rather liked the idea of panicking them a bit. I never thought they would move him, though. I didn’t think they’d go to the trouble or manage to coordinate the process. I am sorry he ended up in your parlor. That was never my intention.”
I had almost hoped she’d say she hadn’t. If she had put the body there, there was less of a chance that either Lord Hector or Mr. Briggs had killed him. “Where did you find him?”
She answered readily. “In our front garden. Someone had tipped him right over the wall. He was just sprawled out there at the most awful angles. We were getting ready to go to the village to buy some stamps for Nora, she had some articles to send out, she’s a writer, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh, historical analysis is her main interest. Her latest is on some paintings found on a wall in Pompeii and how they expand our knowledge of the role of women in the Roman Empire. And she writes on all the sort of almost scandalous modern things that sell better and pay better. She has a very good short piece on rational dress in the next issue of Woman’s World.”
While that was all very interesting, I nudged her back in the direction of Mr. Hoyt’s corpse. “Was he wet when you found him?”
The change of topic didn’t bother her. “Wet? You mean like he’d been out in the rain?”
I shrugged, hoping I didn’t make it sound too important. “Or dumped in the river.”
She knew what I meant at once. “Oh, that was us. We didn’t mean to dump him in the river, but on the lawn. It’s much harder to dispose of a corpse than they would have you believe. No, he wasn’t wet when we found him.”
That made it easy to ask the next question. “What do you remember about finding him?”
“Everything. I think it’s burned in my memory. We were just going out the front door when we spotted him. I ran over and checked for a pulse in case he’d had some sort of a fit. Nora ran out into the lane to see if there was anyone who could help. There wasn’t. And by then it was quite clear that he was dead, and we knew he hadn’t been killed in our yard or we would have heard it. He looked like he’d been in some sort of a fight, and we hadn’t heard anything like that. We were just talking about how we were dreading having to go speak to the sergeant when I realized we could just pass him along. He wasn’t killed in our garden, so there wasn’t anything there that would help figure out what had happened, so there didn’t seem to be any harm in making him someone else’s problem. So we got the wheelbarrow and rolled him down the lane to the lodge and dumped him out. I had planned to leave him on the front stoop there, but the steps were too high, and anyway I don’t think they use the front door regularly for anything but storing the post, so I tipped him out of the wheelbarrow near the kitchen door, just where the terrace almost meets the riverbank. I thought that was the end of it, but the ground must be slanted there since he slid downhill and landed facedown in the river. That wasn’t intentional, but it didn’t seem to hurt him, and I know those two keep bottles in the water there when they haven’t enough room for them inside, so I knew they would find him pretty quickly. Then we took our wheelbarrow and brought it back home and then went on to the village for the stamps.”
Her story did seem to account for the facts as I knew them, although it did make it even less likely that Lord Hector or Mr. Briggs was the killer. Unless of course they’d killed him and left the body in Miss Dyer’s front garden, then decided to move him farther away when he returned. “What did you mean a lovely symmetry? Was there some trouble between them?”
“Not as far as I know. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’d never been introduced. Lord Hector rarely goes into the village. No, I meant they’re the same type. I suppose you noticed when you were up there that Lord Hector and Mr. Briggs are hardly gentlemen, and they frequently invite down ladies from London who aren’t ladies, if you understand what I mean.”
I nodded, wondering if I ought to shock Miss Dyer by calling a spade a spade, or perhaps a jade a jade would be a better analogy, but she was still speaking, so I waited to hear the rest.
“And Mr. Hoyt, well, it’s quite well known that he has ladies in every village in the area, including Lower Slaughter, Donnington, Barton, and I think the governess up at the manse, although that’s unconfirmed gossip. I don’t know why Mrs. Hoyt never divorced him. There’d be a bit of a scandal surely, but the sympathy would all be on her side. Most particularly as anyone who wasn’t sympathetic would be assumed to be one of his ladies. Showing them the wages of sin and all that. I really didn’t mean to get anyone else involved.”
“And Miss Hayworth?”
“Oh, Nora was rather against the idea. She only helped because I insisted. You certainly can’t blame her for any of it.”
I sighed. “We’re going to have to tell the police.”
“I suppose I knew that would happen. And it will make us look involved, won’t it? Although I suppose we are, but only with moving the body, I assure you. We had nothing to do with the murder, and no motive to do him in.”
I wasn’t prepared to take her word on the motive, but I knew I wouldn’t get more from her on that subject, so I changed the subject. “Do you want to go to Sergeant Harris, or would you rather I did?”
“Why don’t we wait for the Scotland Yard man to come down?”
“Has one been called?”
“I would think so. Mr. Hoyt does have some standing in the area, and well, you’ve met Sergeant Harris. Would you trust him to investigate your murder?”
I considered telling her that I wouldn’t trust anyone but myself to investigate my murder, but that seemed to lead to interesting if lengthy questions about pronouns and investigating things postmortem, so I merely shrugged.
“It should be amusing anyway. We haven’t had anyone from Scotland Yard down here in ages. The last time was the scandal about the church funds being stolen two years ago, but that was in Chipping Campden and it turned out they weren’t stolen at all. Mrs. McBride had put them somewhere safe, then went in hospital and forgot to tell anyone she had.”
I smiled as I imagined the poor detective who’d been sent down to investigate that. “Do you remember who they sent?”
“I think he was named Hamilton, but he was such a very normal sort of fellow, it’s hard to remember.”
That sounded like the Inspector Hamilton I knew, and he was the sort of person who would see that sort of investigation as a nice break rather than a waste of time. “I wonder if he’ll be sent here again.”
“I don’t know how it works, do you?”
I shrugged. “I’m from London, so no, I don’t.”
By then we were at her front gate. Miss Dyer swung the gate open without dropping either her easel or her paint box. “Would you like to come in for some tea?”
“No thank you.”
“You’re wondering how to ask if we’re going to tell Sergeant Harris about our part in Mr. Hoyt being moved. We’re going into town this afternoon anyway, we’ll stop by and see him then, all right?”
“That would be best. Especially if you can get to him before Lord Hector, so you’re seen as the one doing your duty and all that.”
“An excellent motive to see we do it quickly. I’ll tell Nora you said hello.”
I thanked her and watched her walk up the path, then turned towards the village myself. I had traced the corpse from Mrs. Foster’s sitting room to the river, but he hadn’t been killed there. I had hoped that figuring out how he got from the river to the cottage would point in some useful direction, but it seemed quite obvious that that wouldn’t be the case. So where had Mr. Hoyt been before he ended up in Miss Hayworth’s and Miss Dyer’s front garden? I considered the problem as I walked.
Whoever had moved him there wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked just so, and even then it was completely possible they would deny it, so simply asking wouldn’t give me my answer. Then what would? Behavior, of course. Who didn’t act as they normally did? It would take a bit of time and effort to move a corpse, and as much as a murderer would try to look like there was no change to their routine, there would be something off. How would I figure that out? I didn’t know the rhythms of life in the village. I wouldn’t know if someone was behaving strangely.
Except I did know of one person, or group of people I ought to say, who had behaved very strangely that day. And if a body had been moved twice, who was to say it hadn’t been moved a third time? Mr. Elliott and his shop. I had thought it was odd that no one had come down when we’d rung, and that no one had been minding the counter just when they’d be expecting mid-day business, but finding a corpse would surely explain that. I would have to find out if there were any motives there, but by my own logic, it was unlikely they had killed Mr. Hoyt. Had it been their own victim they’d been hiding, self-preservation would have sent someone running down the minute they heard the bell in an effort to get rid of whoever was there.
So this was not their corpse, but if they could describe what they saw and why they thought moving it was a good idea, I might get some idea of where he started out. Perhaps I would even get lucky and one of them would have noticed something useful, a leaf on his shoe from a tree that only grew in one yard or something equally helpful. It turned my steps towards the cheese shop.