“You sneak!” I exclaimed, both shocked and tickled by Kit’s bold act of thievery.
“I had to do something,” he said, pulling his flashlight from his pocket and switching it on. “Leo’s been running scared for nearly forty years. I can’t allow him to run again before I clear his name.”
Kit was so absorbed in his thoughts that he was walking at a relatively moderate speed, for which I was profoundly thankful. It was easier to avoid the track’s boggy spots when the flashlight’s beam wasn’t bouncing around quite so much.
“You meant it, then,” I said, peering up at him. His finely sculpted profile was silhouetted against the starry sky, but it was too dark to read his expression. “You’re really going to prove that Leo didn’t kill Maurice DuCaral.”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “While you were confusing the issue with irrelevant questions about Charlotte’s nonexistent siblings, I was counting up the holes in Leo’s story.”
“I wasn’t confusing the issue,” I protested. “I was trying to figure out who Rendor might be.”
“Let’s set your imaginary monster aside for the moment and concentrate on my very real uncle, shall we?” Kit said brusquely, and went on without waiting for a reply. “We don’t live in the Middle Ages, Lori. Madeline DuCaral couldn’t have simply bunged Maurice’s body into the family mausoleum without notifying the proper authorities—a doctor, the police, a coroner. There would have been an inquest in a shooting death, and the inquest would have been covered by the local newspaper. Yet we didn’t find one word in the Despatch about a fatal shooting accident at Aldercot Hall.”
“Not one word,” I agreed meekly. Kit had been so even-tempered all day that his sudden curtness had taken me by surprise. It was like being snapped at by a puppy.
“Apart from that,” he continued, “everything we’ve learned over the past four days contradicts Leo’s story. We have it from Henrietta Harcourt as well as Ruth and Louise Pym that Maurice DuCaral was an invalid for nearly forty years and that Charlotte nursed him until his death three years ago. Which means that he was still alive when Leo left him lying in the bracken, all covered in blood. The worst that Leo could have done was injure Maurice. He certainly didn’t kill him.”
“But, Kit,” I ventured hesitantly, “Maurice didn’t have a pulse when Leo left him. He wasn’t breathing. Unless Lizzie Black has been right all along and Maurice DuCaral was a vampire, so he could have been dead one day and alive the next, I’m not sure how you’re going to get around the part where he doesn’t have a pulse and he’s not breathing.”
“I’ll get around that part when I come to it,” Kit declared, his jaw hardening. “My uncle committed petty misdemeanors in his youth—scrawling graffiti, brawling, boozing—but he wasn’t a hardened criminal. It would have been totally out of character for him to commit murder.”
“He was drunk at the time,” I reminded Kit.
“Precisely,” he said in an oddly elated tone of voice. “He was drunk.”
I could almost hear the gears clicking in his brain, so I did nothing more to disrupt his concentration until we reached the Mini, when I said, “I assume you’re concocting another cunning plan.”
“It’s a fairly straightforward plan, actually,” he said. “Meet me here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, and be prepared for a hike. We’re going back to Aldercot Hall. I need to speak with Henrietta.” He smiled down at me so suddenly and so sweetly that it was as if the sun had risen in the night sky. “You had it right from the start, Lori. Leo is a nice man. He and I are going to be great friends.” He gave me a quick, strong hug, then spun on his heel and headed for the courtyard and his flat.
I leaned against the Mini, to recover from the smile and the hug, then slid behind the wheel and started the engine. As I drove back to the cottage, I marveled at the powerful pull of family ties. A few short hours ago, Kit would have recoiled in horror from the thought of revisiting Aldercot’s kitchen for any reason. Now he was so bent on proving his newfound uncle’s innocence that he was willing to place himself within Henrietta Harcourt’s astonishingly long reach and risk having his pretty chin chucked yet again.
I’d taken a bullet for my children, but my sacrifice seemed trivial compared to the one Kit was making for Leo. Families, as Kit had so wisely noted, were funny things.
It was half past nine when I walked into the cottage, and everyone, including Stanley, was in bed and asleep. I regretted missing the twins’ bedtime, but when I went upstairs to look in on them, I reminded myself that, since the odds of a train filled with chlorine gas derailing next to their school yard were microscopic, there would in all likelihood be many more bedtimes to come.
When I went back downstairs, I found a message from Annelise lying on the kitchen table, conveying the wonderful news that Bill would be home on Thursday, barring further cat fights within the Shuttleworth clan. I crumpled the message and tossed it into the wastebasket, then went to the study to fill Aunt Dimity in on the day’s events. After giving Reginald’s ears an affectionate twiddle, I lit a fire in the hearth and sat in the tall leather armchair with the blue journal in my lap.
Aunt Dimity’s handwriting curled across the page as soon as I opened the journal.
Did you and Kit have any luck in Upper Deeping?
“Yes,” I said, “but it wasn’t the luck we expected. We didn’t discover anything new about the DuCarals, but we found out who Leo is.”
The Leo who’s camping in Gypsy Hollow? The cad who toyed with Charlotte DuCaral’s affections?
“Yes and no,” I said. “Leo is camping in Gypsy Hollow, but he never meant to toy with Charlotte’s affections. You’re not going to believe this, Dimity, but it turns out that Leo is Kit’s uncle. Kit’s mother was Leo’s older sister, and she invited Leo to stay at Anscombe Manor forty years ago….”
I launched into a dramatic recapitulation of Leo’s story, telling Dimity of his misspent youth, his transformative love for Charlotte, her parents’ staunch opposition to the match, and the midnight elopement that had ended in heartbreak and tragedy. When I finished, several minutes seemed to pass before Aunt Dimity responded.
Well? What are you going to do about it?
“What am I going to do about what?” I asked.
What are you going to do to exonerate Leo Sutherland?
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but Kit has a plan. We’re returning to Aldercot tomorrow morning to talk with Charlotte’s cook, Henrietta Harcourt. I don’t know what Kit hopes to accomplish, but he seems to think—” I broke off as Aunt Dimity’s fine copperplate sped across the page.
You’re being obtuse, Lori. Kit is trying to find out if Leo killed Maurice DuCaral intentionally, accidentally, or at all. Since there’s a great deal of difference between murder, manslaughter, and grievous bodily harm, I think you’ll agree that it’s important to establish the facts. Leo was drunk at the time of the shooting, so his account of the affair is unreliable. Maurice and Madeline DuCaral are dead, so Kit can’t turn to them for the truth. There is, however, one other person who was there that night and who might be willing to tell Kit what really happened.
“But Henrietta’s only been at Aldercot Hall for a year or so,” I said. “She won’t be able to—”
Not Henrietta, my dear dunderhead! The gamekeeper!
“Oh. Oh.” My eyebrows shot up as the penny finally dropped. “I’d forgotten about the gamekeeper. He was on the scene before Madeline showed up. He may have witnessed the whole encounter between Leo and Maurice.”
And Kit wants to speak with Henrietta because…?
“Because he wants to ask her if the gamekeeper is still alive,” I said, spurred on by Aunt Dimity’s prompting. “If he is, we’ll track him down and find out everything he knows about what happened on the night Maurice DuCaral was shot.”
Bravo. Honestly, Lori, I thought you’d never cotton on. You’re not usually so slow on the uptake, my dear. In truth, you’re far more likely to jump over the facts in order to reach your conclusions more rapidly, but you seem rather distracted this evening. Is something bothering you?
“As a matter of fact, something is bothering me,” I admitted. “Don’t get me wrong, Dimity. I want to do right by Leo. But in all the excitement about proving his innocence, we seem to have forgotten about Rendor.”
Oh, dear, so we have. Were you able to learn anything about him in Upper Deeping?
“Nothing,” I said gloomily. “But I found out from Leo that Charlotte had only one sibling, an older brother, who was setting up a children’s clinic in Africa on the night Maurice was shot and who died two years later in a plane crash. He was setting up a children’s clinic, Dimity. Why would the Pyms describe him as a man with shameful desires that had to be concealed? He sounds more like a saint to me.” I frowned unhappily. “Leo isn’t Rendor. Charlotte’s brother isn’t Rendor. There aren’t any guests at Aldercot Hall who could be Rendor. My theories are being knocked down faster than pins in a bowling alley.”
I suppose we must ask ourselves once again: Who is Rendor?
“I’d begin to suspect Bellamy the butler if he weren’t so old,” I said. “But he’d never make it from Aldercot Hall to the apple tree and back again without blowing a heart valve. And Henrietta’s the exact opposite of thin and pale. So who did I hear in the attic?”
Perhaps you heard a “what” rather than a “who,” my dear.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I mean that you may have heard bats. Not a vampire in bat form, but plain, ordinary, common or garden-variety bats. Their squeaks might easily be mistaken for a creaking floorboard.
“I had my ear pressed to a door covered in bats?” My toes curled in disgust. “Gross.”
There’s nothing remotely gross about bats, Lori, and I won’t have you maligning them. Bats are exceptionally helpful little creatures. If it weren’t for bats, the world would be overrun by midges and mosquitoes.
“I’ll take your word for it, Dimity,” I said, shuddering. “But even if I did hear bats in Charlotte’s attic, it doesn’t explain who Will and Rob saw on Emma’s Hill or who left the boot prints and the scrap of crimson silk there.”
No, I’m afraid it doesn’t. But take heart. Gamekeepers are trained observers. They know the lie of the land. They know what belongs on their property and what doesn’t. I imagine they see many strange things during the course of their careers.
“The DuCarals’ old gamekeeper might know who Rendor is,” I said, brightening. “Gosh, Dimity, I hope he’s still alive.”
As do I. And since it sounds as though you have yet another active, outdoor day ahead of you, I suggest that you get some sleep.
I didn’t need coaxing. I said good night to Aunt Dimity and to Reginald, put the blue journal back on its shelf, turned out the lights, and went upstairs to bed.
As I nestled my head into my pillow, I tried to focus my mind on how happy Leo would be when Kit proved that he wasn’t a murderer, or on how happy I would be when the gamekeeper revealed Rendor’s true identity, or on how happy we all would be when Bill came home on Thursday, but the last thought that floated across my consciousness was…Bats? Yecch!