He spun around. “Georgiana, of course! I thought the face looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place you. Lovely to see you, my dear. Are you just passing through?”
“No, I’m actually here for Christmas,” I said wickedly as I watched Noel struggling to hide his annoyance.
“She’s staying at Gorzley Hall,” Mummy corrected hastily. “They are going to have a frightfully jolly house party there, so I gather.”
“Well, bully for you,” Noel said. “Claire and I will be working. Slaving away, actually, but do come down for a drink sometime, won’t you?”
With that he stomped back up the stairs.
Mummy gave me a commiserating smile. “You mustn’t mind him. He’s awfully grouchy when he’s working. I’m glad you’re here, darling. We must have some girl time together.”
Mrs. Huggins was loitering at the kitchen door. “Does that mean my Queenie has come down here with you, my lady?” she asked.
I remembered that Queenie was her great-niece. “Yes, she’s here with me. I’ll send her down to say hello to you.”
“Is she proving to be satisfactory, my lady?”
I couldn’t tell the brutal truth that Queenie would probably never be satisfactory in her life. “She’s definitely improving, Mrs. Huggins,” I said.
“Well, that’s nice to know, isn’t it?” She beamed at me as she went back into the kitchen.
Noises outside indicated that a ladder had been found and that Bunty was attempting to go up the tree. “I should go,” I said. “I’m supposed to be gathering mistletoe.”
“I hope there is someone worth kissing at your party,” Mummy said. “Such a waste of mistletoe otherwise.”
I came out to find Granddad steadying the ladder while Bunty clung to it precariously. “I volunteered to go up for the young lady,” he said, “but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Quite right. No ladders at your age,” I said.
“I’m not over the hill yet,” he said. “By the way, what was all that fuss about in there? I heard weeping and wailing.”
“Rosie’s uncle was found drowned in a brook this morning. Rosie’s saying it’s the Lovey Curse striking again. Two deaths in two days in the village.”
“Hmm,” Granddad said. “You know what my old inspector would say about that, don’t you?”
“Well, in this case your inspector would be wrong, I suspect,” I said. “One man shot himself by accident and the other fell off one of those little stone bridges in the middle of the night after he’d drunk too much. I don’t think you can read a curse or anything else into that, can you?”
“Let’s hope not,” Granddad said. “I’d like a nice quiet Christmas, personally, with no complications.”
* * *
BUNTY HAD JUST climbed down, waving a sprig of mistletoe triumphantly, when a motorcar drew up.
“Oh, Lord,” Bunty said as several policemen got out. “I thought we’d seen the last of them.”
Chapter 8
One of the policemen headed straight for us. He was wearing a fawn raincoat and a matching fawn hat and had a droopy fawn mustache. If he’d had the words “detective inspector” tattooed to his forehead it couldn’t have been more obvious. “Morning, Miss Hawse-Gorzley,” he said, raising his trilby to reveal thinning fawn hair, neatly parted down the middle.
“Good morning, Detective Inspector.”
“I suppose you’ve heard this latest news. Two deaths in two days. And just when I thought I’d be getting time off to do some Christmas shopping with the wife, too.”
“But they were both accidents, surely,” Bunty said.
“Let’s hope so, Miss Hawse-Gorzley, let’s hope so,” he said. “But I have to wonder about Ted Grover. Not usually the type who goes stumbling around drunk, would you say? Holds his liquor pretty well, so I’ve been told. Which makes me ask myself whether one of them convicts might still be hiding out in the neighborhood and encountered Ted last night.”
“If I were those convicts I’d have headed for Plymouth as quickly as possible and boarded a ferry for France,” Bunty said.
“You would, no doubt, Miss Hawse-Gorzley, but then you’re a young woman of the world. Those criminal types would be lost on the Continent, not knowing how to parley-vous and all that. They’d stick out like sore thumbs and be caught instantly. If you want to know what I suspect, I suspect that they haven’t strayed too far. What’s more, I suspect that someone around these parts is hiding them.” He looked at my grandfather. “Now, take the folks who are renting this cottage, for instance. Moved in just around the time of the breakout, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but one of them is Claire Daniels and the other Noel Coward,” I said. “They’re supposed to be in seclusion, writing a new play together, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be harboring escaped convicts.”
“And how about you, sir?” the inspector asked. “Are you one of their servants?”
“I am Claire Daniels’s father, Albert Spinks,” Granddad replied stiffly, “and what’s more I was on the force for thirty years with the Metropolitan Police.”
The inspector took a step back, then stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, sir. Inspector Harry Newcombe. What a stroke of luck that you’re here. I’ll be calling upon your expertise, if you don’t object. So you’ve been at the cottage these last few days. And I notice that the cottage garden looks directly onto the orchard where the man shot himself. So did you happen to hear a shot in the early hours of yesterday morning?”
Granddad shook his head. “No, I can’t say I did, but then, I sleep quite soundly. Have they ascertained the time of death?”
“No, I haven’t had the doctor’s report yet,” the inspector said, “seeing that he was off delivering a baby at Upper Croft Farm on the moor, but we reckon it had to be early yesterday morning. I can’t imagine that anyone would go tramping through an orchard and climbing trees in the dark, so that would make it seven thirty or later. And it had to be before Sir Oswald went on his morning rounds with his dogs.”
“I was up by seven,” Granddad said. “But maybe I was shaving or getting the fires started and a little rifle like that doesn’t make much noise.”
“It’s strange that nobody heard the shot, though,” the inspector said. He patted my grandfather heartily on the shoulder. “It’s going to be a boon to have someone like you on the spot here. You’d be in the position to notice any strange goings-on in this village, wouldn’t you? My men can’t be everywhere and there are so many little villages like this where the blighters could be hiding.”
“These convicts,” Granddad said thoughtfully. “I did read something about the breakout when I was coming down on the train, but I didn’t take in the details. Local men, are they, then?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. Two of them were entertainers of sorts—an escape artist turned safecracker; we reckon he picked the locks on their shackles—then a bloke who used to have an act in the music hall and the third one was a bank clerk who’d been involved in a railway heist. We reckon he was the brains. Quiet little man on the surface but absolutely ruthless. Slit your throat as soon as look at you.”
Bunty shivered.
Granddad nodded. “But none of them with connections around here?”
“Well, the bank clerk had a sister in Plymouth. You can bet we’ve got a close eye on her place. And of course that big heist was on the Penzance-to-London express, but further up the line in Wiltshire. You no doubt remember it.”
Granddad nodded. “Very well,” he said. “The money was never recovered, was it?”
“It was not. So the Wiltshire police will be keeping their eyes open near the spot where it happened. And both the entertainers had spent a fair amount of time in the West Country—played summer shows on the piers in Torquay and Weston-super-Mare. What’s more, this music hall bloke, Robbins, he was inside for swindling his landladies out of their life savings. And we reckon that he bumped off a few, including the last one down here in Newton Abbott.”
“Why wasn’t he hanged for murder, then?” Bunty asked.
“Got off on a technicality. Couldn’t actually prove that he pushed her down the stairs, so it was reduced to
