A moment of silence

There was only one exception to this general passion for cards and that was Mr William Lomax. When the tables were brought forward, he would excuse himself and retire to the fireside with a book.

Having observed this, on the evening after her walk to Belston, Dido pleaded a slight headache and moved away from Mrs Harris’s table as the first cards were being dealt. She had no particular aim in view, other than to try what a little conversation with the gentleman might produce. She could hardly make direct enquires; she could not ask whether he was my lady’s lover. But, she thought, she would see where their talk might lead.

‘You do not play at Speculation this evening?’ Mr Lomax enquired, politely laying his book aside as she took a seat near the fire.

‘No,’ she said with a smile, ‘the speculation is a little too wild for me today.’

‘Ah yes!’ he replied with instant comprehension.

At the table behind them Mrs Harris, who, it seemed, was a great advocate of divination, was strenuously maintaining her conviction that a fashionable practitioner of that science from Bath should be employed to discover the name of the dead woman. Meanwhile, her youngest daughter was expounding her own ideas of how that poor, unfortunate creature had come to be in Sir Edgar’s shrubbery. Dido did not quite comprehend the details of Miss Sophia’s theory, but the general idea seemed to be of a highwayman choosing – for some unspecified reason – to hide the body of his victim in the baronet’s pleasure grounds, and the story made up for what it lacked in sober reasoning with a great deal of riding about in the dark and shooting with pistols.

‘And yet,’ said Mr Lomax after listening for a moment or two, ‘it is a subject which must arouse speculation in us all. The discovery cannot be easily explained.’

‘No, it cannot,’ Dido agreed. ‘But that does not authorise us to invent brigands and strangers blundering about, miraculously unobserved by the household.’

‘Maybe,’ he said with a smile. ‘But,’ he continued, looking at her very earnestly indeed, ‘my dear Miss Kent, if we do not include strangers – and strangers with evil intentions – in our explanations, does that not lead us to a very distressing, and I might say, even more unlikely conclusion?’

Dido coloured and did not quite know how to reply. The steady regard of his grey eyes was disquieting and she found it necessary to lower her own gaze. They were both silent for a while. At Mrs Harris’s table gossip had given way to play and Miss Sophia was now in eager negotiation for a queen with Tom Lomax – who was allowing himself to be cheated shamelessly. At the other table a sedate silence prevailed, broken only by a little satisfied snap as her ladyship laid down a trump card.

‘Miss Kent,’ pursued Mr Lomax at last, ‘if we do not include strangers in our accounts, does not that lead us to conclude that an inmate of this house committed the terrible deed?’

Dido was discomfited; it was extremely unpleasant to admit to such suspicions – and yet she was determined not to lose the opportunity for the conversation at which she had aimed when she left the card table.

She spread her hands and gave a self-deprecating smile. ‘You must forgive me, Mr Lomax. I am only a woman and I know little of how to reason – or how to draw conclusions from facts. Yet I must confess that, terrible though such a prospect may be, it seems to me to be the least unlikely.’

‘Does it indeed!’ He left his seat and moved to one closer to her. ‘And, may I ask,’ he continued in a lowered voice, ‘why you should think such a thing?’

‘Well…’ It was, she found, rather difficult to think clearly when he was so close and watching her so very intently. ‘Well, if the guilt does not lie within the house, then we must suppose that someone – some stranger – entered these grounds carrying either a dead woman, or else a shotgun. And this, Mr Lomax, could not have occurred under cover of darkness, for the body was not in the shrubbery at nine o’clock and yet it was there at dusk. So it must have arrived there in broad daylight.’

‘I see.’ He thought for a moment, resting his chin on his interwoven fingers. ‘Well, I grant you that the carrying of a body unobserved seems extremely unlikely. But is a gun so very improbable?’

‘What?’ cried Dido raising her brows. ‘On the property of such a sportsman as Sir Edgar? A stranger walk across the park and into the very gardens with a gun upon his arm? Mr Lomax, I doubt whether the most adventurous poacher in Belston has ever achieved such a thing undetected on a moonless night in the most distant copse upon the estate!’

He smiled. ‘Well, well, you argue very convincingly.’ He was silent for some moments, tapping his foot upon the carpet and watching her with a kindly expression. ‘But I think that this conviction gives you no pleasure.’

‘Naturally it does not.’

‘Then perhaps you will allow me to put your mind at rest, by showing to you that, though the intrusion of a stranger might seem improbable, the deplorable alternative is even less likely; that it is, in fact, impossible. Miss Kent, I assure you that the woman could not have been murdered by any one of us.’

‘I shall be very glad to hear your proof.’

‘Very well then, I shall do my best to persuade you.’ He leant forward intently and, speaking in a quiet tone that was easily covered by the laughter and chatter from the nearby card table, he began. ‘I think we are agreed that the murder must have taken place between ten o’clock and one – while we were all shooting over in the spinney. Do you allow that to be true?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Dido. ‘It must have been then, otherwise the shot would certainly have been heard and remarked upon.’

‘So, we have to consider how everyone was employed during that time.’

‘Yes, I agree.’

He smiled courteously. ‘It is not, of course,’ he said, ‘permissible to suspect ladies of murder. But even if it were, we would not, in this case, have to do so. For during that time all the ladies were together in the house – except for yourself, Miss Kent who, I believe, did not arrive until…?’

‘About four o’clock.’

‘Exactly. So the ladies can all vouch for each other. And so, I find, can the gentlemen – for we talked it all over after the ladies retired from the dining room yesterday, you see. As it happens, we were split into two parties that day. Tom and Harris went down on the south side of the hill while Sir Edgar and the colonel were shooting more to the east – and I was with them.’

‘And the two parties were not in sight of one another?’

‘You are a keen questioner, Miss Kent! No, the two parties were not in sight of each other. But, and this is my main point, every man is sure that he did not lose sight of the rest of his party all morning. Tom and Harris are sure that they were together all the time and I will personally swear upon my honour that neither the colonel nor Sir Edgar left the spinney.’ He paused and then leant a little closer in order to add, ‘And, since I must not suppose that I am not included in your suspicions, I will add that both Colonel Walborough and Sir Edgar are willing to take an oath that I did not run away to commit murder either.’

‘I am very glad to hear that you can prove your innocence, Mr Lomax,’ she said with a smile. And it was true; it would be awful to have to suspect such a charming man of murder.

Of course, nothing that he said actually removed the suspicion of adultery; but his open, pleasant manner of talking made it very hard to believe that he could have any guilty secret to hide.

…and all of this – this elegant proof that none of the gentlemen from the house could have carried out the crime – ought to be very consoling, Eliza, as I am sure Mr Lomax intended it to be. And yet, I confess that I cannot be at ease about it. I keep remembering those boot-marks in the ha-ha and the chairs that had been so recently occupied. I cannot rid myself of the conviction that someone left the shooting party for a meeting in the hermitage. And it must have been a secret assignation, for why else would anyone use such a place on a cold day in September? Furthermore, I am almost convinced that that person was Mr Tom Lomax. Though this is founded on no more than his liking for sitting with a cushion behind his head and my own prejudice which makes me feel that if any of Belsfield’s inmates must be proved guilty of murder and surrendered to the punishment of the law, I would give up Mr Tom with an easier mind than any other. Supposing, Eliza, that he had seduced poor Miss Wallis, got her with child and then abandoned her in order to make his fortune by marrying one of the Harris girls. And she had pursued him, threatening exposure…

But Mr Lomax says that his son did not leave the spinney that morning. If what he told me holds true, then a stranger must have been responsible. It is certainly the only explanation which has been put forward by anyone in this house – and no one from the village has yet been so impertinent as to connect the Belsfield family with the crime.