Wishtide
2nd December
My dear Mary,
I rather think I have reached the wrapping-up stage of my business here. I wish I could tell you exactly when to expect me home, but I am still waiting to make my final report to Sir James; I will give you all the notice I can.
In the meantime, please do not forget to have the chimney swept, and please use Jakes; he may charge a little more than Fulton, but he doesn’t leave such a mess. We’ll keep a pail of soot for the garden; it’s the only thing that kills the black spot and I’m determined to have a better show of roses next year.
If there is sufficient money in Windsor Castle, please place an order (with Nupton, and definitely not with Brown, who sent such bad candied peel last year) for the components of my mincemeat. I fully intend to be at home in time to make it. Please put the currants to steep in brandy as soon as you get them. It will soon be Christmas; of course you and I will be keeping the day itself with our respective families, but Christmas has twelve days and we’ll choose one of them for our own private celebration.
It is bitterly cold here; the servants say the wind comes in straight from Russia. I hope Hampstead is warmer – and that little Anny has obeyed my instructions and built you generous fires for your rheumatism. When I am home, I will make you my embrocation of goose-fat and sage leaves.
Talking of ‘sage’ – I have missed your sound opinions and have a great deal to tell you.
Yours faithfully,
Laetitia Rodd
I opened my eyes in the grubby light of early dawn, and became aware that someone was knocking urgently at the door of my chamber.
It was Mrs Craik, breathless and dishevelled as I had never seen her, in a flannel wrapper with a shawl thrown carelessly over her head.
‘I beg your pardon for disturbing you, Mrs Rodd – but I don’t rightly know what to do – it’s the Frenchwoman, ma’am – the Frenchwoman’s been murdered!’
It took me a couple of minutes to get at the plain facts; first I had to hear what a pity it was that the family were from home, what an appalling outrage – et cetera. But the sum of it was that Mlle Thérèse had been found in the stableyard by the head groom, the back of her head beaten to a bloody mess.
Poor Mrs Craik had no idea what to do, and was happy to let me take charge. I hurried into my dress and cloak and went downstairs to the servants’ hall, where people stood about in various stages of undress, whispering fearfully to each other. I sent the oldest footman for the local constable, over in Horncastle, and Mrs Craik recovered her wits enough to notice that the kitchen range had not been lit.
It was a cold, dark morning and I asked for lanterns; I knew it would be important to see all the details of the scene. The stables at Wishtide were a good distance from the house; I had walked that way once and seen a large quadrangle of imposing grey stone buildings around an enormous cobbled yard. I followed the bobbing lights held by the two pale stable lads who were guiding me through the sluggish dawn (the entire household wanted to join us, but a crowd of people would have disturbed the scene of the crime, and I refused to let them treat this tragedy as a spectacle to gawp at).
Brody, the head groom, stood with his own lantern in one corner of the yard, guarding the black, still body at his feet. He was a short, spry little Irishman, a former jockey, with a wizened goblin’s face and the bandiest legs I had ever seen.
I told him we had sent for the constable.
‘I found her,’ he said. ‘I nearly fell over her.’
‘What time was this, Mr Brody?’
‘An hour or so ago – just before first light,’ Brody said. ‘I was up before the cock had even cleared his throat, ma’am, owing to one of the hunters being poorly with the colic.’
‘Have you moved her at all? Is this precisely how you found her?’
‘I turned her over, ma’am; when I found her she was the other side up, and the back of her head all beaten in.’
I lowered my lantern to throw a light upon the face of the murdered woman.
As I have said before, dead bodies hold no fears for me; I know they are but discarded husks. As the wife of a clergyman, working amongst the poorest of the parish, I have laid out corpses of every age, often horribly ravaged by illness. As a private investigator I have seen the sad remains of several victims of murder. But the sight of this dead body made me gasp.
The Frenchwoman’s face was frozen into a ghastly expression – fury, shock, the shadow of an unspeakable horror lingering in those empty eyes.
And her head lay on the stones like a mask, the back of it quite flattened in a mess of bonnet, hair and a pool of black, congealing blood.
She saw her killer, I thought; she turned her back on him and tried to run away.
The shock of such a sight, combined with the early hour, gave me a moment of giddy sickness; I swallowed hard, and said a silent prayer for the repose of the dead woman’s soul.
Aloud, I said, ‘I think you may cover her with a blanket, Mr Brody, until the constable arrives.’
Wishtide
4th December
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Fred,
As I promised in the hasty note I sent yesterday by special messenger, I shall set down the facts I have. The official investigation of this savage murder is in the hands of the local constable – who strikes me as a rather knuckle-headed fellow. So far, all he has done is frighten the younger servants. He brought with him a Dr Walters, from Horncastle, who placed the time of death five or six hours before the body was discovered (in other words, around midnight). There is still no sign of a weapon, though Brody had the stableyard swept to within an inch of its life. He insists that he has no idea what Mlle Thérèse might have been doing in the yard at such an hour, and I see no reason not to believe him; he barely knew the woman and thinks only of horses.
The body of Mlle Thérèse is now lying in the Horncastle lock-up, awaiting the inquest, and order has been restored in the house – though the very walls are whispering with rumours. The fact is that none of the servants here liked the Frenchwoman – ‘a spitting old cat’ was how one of the young men described her – and there is a regrettable tendency to treat the murder as an entertaining novelty.
They are careful, however, to maintain a proper manner in front of Mrs Craik, who was so dreadfully upset that she was pale and trembling. Once I had observed the body being taken off in a covered wagon, I returned to the blessed warmth of the kitchen and made poor Mrs Craik sit down with me in her private parlour. A girl by the name of Martha (the same obliging little farmer’s girl who brings my suppers) was waiting upon us; I sent her off to fetch tea and bread-and-butter.
Mrs Craik is mainly worried about what this scandal will do to the family name. She feels badly for not being as sorry as she might. And she couldn’t tell me anything useful about the dead woman – nobody belowstairs speaks a word of French, and Mlle Thérèse made little or no effort to learn English.
Question: what was the dead woman doing in the stableyard in the middle of the night?
Nobody could give me a satisfactory answer to this.
‘I’d say she had to be meeting someone there,’ Mrs Craik said. ‘Though I couldn’t say who; she didn’t know anybody round about. She spent all her time hovering around Her Ladyship and the girls – I was surprised when they didn’t take her with them to Yorkshire.’
‘Was Mlle Thérèse angry to be left behind?’ I asked.
‘Well, you’d have thought so,’ Mrs Craik said. ‘But she was in a better temper than usual once they’d gone – kept chortling to herself, like she had some private joke at the expense of the rest of us.’
‘And she talked a bit,’ Martha said (she had just come back into the room with a tray of tea-things). ‘She started having a few little drinks of an evening, which I never saw her do before, and it made her want someone to talk to.’
‘Did you understand any of it?’
‘Not really, ma’am.’ The girl’s friendly, snub-featured face flushed a little. ‘I think she was trying to talk about lovers and sweethearts. She showed me and Ruthie Watson a gold locket with a picture of a man inside it. She went “AMOOR!” and kissed it a dozen times. She was all excited and fluttering her hands about, and she goes, “’Ee comes!”’
These are Mlle Thérèse’s only two recorded words of English; I think we ought to assume she was expecting to see the ‘amoor’ in the gold locket (I will find this when I get a chance to examine the dead woman’s effects). Martha added that a month or so ago, she saw the Frenchwoman in Horncastle, which surprised her because the woman normally never left the estate. It was market day and very crowded, but she thinks she saw Mlle Thérèse going into the town’s one decent inn, the Calderstone Arms.
Naturally when I heard this I commandeered a carriage and went to Horncastle to make inquiries at the inn; the enclosed page is a list of men who have stayed there over the past three months; I don’t recognize any of the names. The landlord, a Mr Hinton, recalls seeing Mlle Thérèse entering the coffee room of his inn upon the market day in question, but did not see her speaking with anyone. My impression of the Calderstone Arms is that it is well-appointed and so perfectly respectable that I myself could stay there without risk to my reputation.
This, my dear Fred, is all I know. When I return to town we must talk about the Calderstones. I assume Sir James has been informed. I have written to Lady Calderstone; there are questions I wish to ask her about Mlle Thérèse.
You might like to point out to Sir James that both he and his wife have the strongest motives for wanting the woman out of the way. There is a connection to the Savile murder that must be looked into. The business of his son’s marriage is pretty much settled; now I must ask him questions that will make him angry and uncomfortable. I don’t know on whose behalf I’ll be making these inquiries – but I’m in too deep now, and cannot let go of this matter until I know that right has been done.
Your affectionate sister,
L
The girl Martha took me up to the dead woman’s room; the attics in which the servants slept were light, bare and spotlessly clean. Mlle Thérèse had been given a room to herself, slightly larger than the others, and set apart on a landing. I unlocked the door with the key given to me by Mrs Craik; though I naturally intended to hand it over to the constable, this chance to get a first look was too good to miss.
Martha was trembling, and I sympathized; there is something deeply disturbing about the room of someone recently dead (entering the study of my beloved Matt on the day after I had lost him was one of the hardest things I have ever done; everything spoke of him so strongly that his absence was an outrage I simply could not understand; how could dumb objects outlive him?).
The Frenchwoman’s attic room still had her scent – but it was empty. There were no clothes in the little bureau and no brushes or pins on top of it. Underneath the bed was a small band-box of inlaid wood, open and empty.
‘She packed up and left!’ exclaimed Martha.
‘So it appears,’ I said. ‘She must’ve had at least one bundle with her when she met her murderer – yet nothing was found near the body.’
‘He robbed her into the bargain, the villain,’ Martha said.
I sat up until the fire’s last gasp that night, listening to the sounds of the sleeping house and the owls hooting in the great stillness outside, and fretting over a story that refused to make sense.
Mlle Thérèse had known about what happened to Lady Calderstone in Switzerland. Savile had boasted in his cups of being in the same place. They had both been brutally murdered.
I knew what Fred would have said; he believed that the great majority of Murders Aforethought boiled down to matters of money and property, and liked to quote St Paul’s maxim that the love of money is at the root of every evil. But I think – especially in cases involving women – that fear can also be the driving force in a killing.
Helen Orme feared exposure of her past, and had the best motives for wanting Savile dead if he knew anything about it.
But why would she need to kill Mlle Thérèse?
Sir James had excellent reasons for wishing the pair of them out of the way – but a man with his means and connections would surely have been able to ‘bump them off’ (one of Fred’s favourite expressions) far more discreetly.
No, I simply could not make it all fit together.