and looked up; Jacqueline smiled fleetingly, distantly. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll retire for a while. I’m rather fagged.”
“Yes, of course, dear.” Millicent set down her cup. “I’ll look in on you later.”
With a nod, a wan smile and a fleeting glance at him, Jacqueline turned to the door. Gerrard watched as she walked out; he didn’t like the empty look in her eyes.
He turned back to Millicent and Barnaby.
Barnaby caught his eye. “I’m off to walk the path Thomas must have followed.”
He nodded. “I’ll come with you.” He needed air, and he needed to think.
Leaving Millicent in the drawing room, they walked out onto the terrace. They retraced the route Thomas and Jacqueline had taken more than two years before, then went on, turning down the path along the northern ridge, confirming that all Jacqueline had said was true; she wouldn’t have known if someone had met Thomas at the junction of the paths, nor could she have gone so far with him, not with her mother expecting her back.
They walked on through the gardens of Demeter and Dionysius, Barnaby speculating that, if the crime had been committed along the path, given Thomas’s height, it would have occurred at the steepest stretch, where the path dipped into the Garden of Hades. Using Gerrard as a model, Barnaby concluded the murderer was at most three inches shorter, a man Thomas had known well enough to be comfortable having close at his back.
Barnaby pulled a face. “I must engineer a meeting with Lady Entwhistle. Mothers always know who their darlings are consorting with. She’ll know who Thomas considered a close friend.”
They rounded a bend in the path and looked up at the spot where Thomas’s body had lain. “Looks like they’ve taken the body away.” Only Wilcox and Richards remained, the former leaning on a shovel.
Barnaby led the way up the steep slope, clambering over the thick roots of the cypresses clinging to the incline.
Wilcox and Richards straightened as they neared and touched their caps. Gerrard nodded in greeting.
Barnaby dusted his hands. “I was just wondering…you were both here when Entwhistle disappeared, weren’t you?”
“Aye.” Both men nodded.
“Do you recall any gentleman being near the gardens about the time Entwhistle left the house?”
Wilcox and Richards shared a glance, then Richards volunteered, “We’ve all been scratching our heads, trying to remember. Near as we can recall, young Mr. Brisenden was out walking along the cliffs, like he often does. Sir Vincent Perry, another local gentleman, was here calling on Lady Tregonning and Miss Jacqueline-he left the house when young Entwhistle arrived, but he didn’t come to get his horse until sometime later. Howsoever, he often walked down to the little bay-not the cove in the gardens, but the one down past the stables-before he came to fetch his horse. As for others…” Richards looked at Wilcox, who took up the tale.
“Both Lord Fritham and Master Jordan often walk in the gardens-we’re never sure when we’ll see one of them about. And there’d a’ been plenty of local lads out that day-fishing, hunting, it were the season for both. While they don’t normally come into the gardens, they sometimes cut through. Everyone hereabouts knows the paths over the ridges, and how they connect. Fastest way from Tresdale Manor lands across to the cliffs to the north.”
Barnaby pulled a face. “Why would any local lads want to kill Entwhistle? Was he well liked?”
“Oh, aye-very amiable young gent, he was.”
“We was all hoping he and Miss Jacqueline might marry-everyone knew that was the way things were heading.”
Barnaby’s gaze sharpened. “So there’s no known reason for anyone to kill Entwhistle, other than, just possibly, jealousy over Miss Jacqueline?”
The two older men exchanged a glance, then nodded. “Aye,” Richards said, “that’s true enough.”
Gerrard looked down at the mound of freshly turned earth. “Did you find anything more?”
“Not anything from the poor lad, but”-Wilcox pointed up the slope-“I’d be surprised if that rock there wasn’t what had done for him.”
To the side some yards upslope lay a heavy rock, roughly rectangular and close to the size Barnaby had postulated.
Barnaby scrambled up and across. He hefted the rock, using both hands, then glanced at Gerrard. “This would have done the trick.” He looked around. “That suggests he was killed here, or close by…” Noticing Richards and Wilcox exchanging looks, Barnaby stopped. “What is it?”
“Well.” Richards waved around them. “There aren’t many rocks hereabouts, not big ones like that. It’s the trees knit the bank together-the soil’s not all that rocky.”
“Only place you find rocks like that is up top of the ridge.” Wilcox pointed up the slope. “Up there, it’s all rocks, just like that one.” He indicated the rock Barnaby set down. “We was thinking if young Entwhistle and the blackguard who killed him had climbed to the ridge, then when Entwhistle was struck down, well, he’d roll down to here, most like, and the rock with him.”
“Easy enough then to cover him with old cypress needles.” Richards kicked at those underfoot. “There’s always a carpet of them here. In time, he’d become just part of the bank.”
“Nothing much for my lads to do up this way,” Wilcox added. “The trees look after themselves, and the needles don’t need to be raked.”
Gerrard stared up at the ridge; it rose to a point, an outcrop of weathered rock that crumbled away to the edge of the sea cliffs. “Why would any gentleman go up there?”
“Ah, they all do. A bit of a scramble, it is, but all those who grow up hereabouts know-from there you can see the blowhole. When the sea’s turned just right, it’s a grand sight.”
“Aha!” Barnaby’s eyes lit.
It didn’t take much persuading to get Richards and Wilcox to show them the way-the only way-up to the top of the ridge. From there, it was apparent that the head gardener and head stableman’s conjecture had merit; a body falling down the slope would indeed land amid the cypresses.
“And,” Barnaby said, his eagerness barely contained as, parting from Wilcox and Richards, they strode back to the house, “it accounts for the one point that stumped me-how did the killer bend down and pick up a huge rock without Entwhistle noticing?”
Gerrard glanced at him. “The killer would still have had to pick up the rock, even if they were standing on the ridge…” He broke off as a picture of two men on the ridge formed in his mind.
“Yes, but it would have been easy.” Barnaby’s voice held a note of triumph. “One, Entwhistle was absorbed, watching Cyclops. Two”-Barnaby caught Gerrard’s eyes-“Entwhistle wasn’t standing. You saw the area-what’s more natural if you were chatting with a friend and looking out into the distance than to sit?”
Gerrard’s mind raced. “That means the killer doesn’t have to be tall.”
“No-any height at all.” Barnaby frowned. “Damn! That increases our list of suspects dramatically.”
“But he still has to be a he-a man.”
“Oh, yes. The size of the rock-and there’s a good chance it was that very rock-makes that certain. Even with Thomas sitting down, a woman would have had difficulty picking it up-and with a lady, Thomas would have noticed. More, manners would have ensured if she stood, then he would have, too. No.” Barnaby shook his head. “It couldn’t have been a woman.”
They reached the steps to the terrace; with a fleeting grin, Gerrard took them two at a time.
“What?” Barnaby asked, eyeing that grin.
Gerrard glanced at him. “There’s another, even more definitive reason why the murderer wasn’t a lady.”
Barnaby scrunched up his face, cudgeling his brains, then sighed. “What?”
“Getting onto the ridge-we only just managed without serious damage.” Gerrard pointed to a scuff mark on his boot, and a smudge on his trouser leg. “As Wilcox said, it’s a scramble. No lady in a tea gown could have managed it, then returned to the house
“Excellent point,” Barnaby conceded. “It definitely wasn’t a lady.”
“Therefore,” Gerrard concluded, his jaw firming as he led the way into the house, “not Jacqueline.”
She didn’t come down to dinner.
“She asked for a tray in her room,” Millicent said in response to Gerrard’s query. “She said she needed a little time alone to absorb the shock.”
