I could see that we were getting nowhere. “Look,” I said. “How about this? We could go as gypsies. I’m sure there are red scarves and big golden earrings in the dressing-up box downstairs.”
“I wouldn’t mind being a gypsy,” he agreed. “I’ve always rather fancied the outdoor life.”
“Good. Then that’s settled.” I handed him an outfit with baggy trousers, lacy white shirt and black waistcoat. “Let’s go find Monty.”
Darcy sighed and followed me down the stairs.
Chapter 28
DECEMBER 28
A half hour later we had picked up my grandfather and were ready to embark upon a day of detecting.
“We should start with the first death,” I said. “You don’t happen to know which tree in the orchard it was, do you?”
“Haven’t got a clue, ducks,” my granddad said. “But we could take a butcher’s if you like.”
“A butcher’s?” I asked.
“Butcher’s hook—rhyming slang for look.”
“I’ll never get the hang of rhyming slang,” I said. “It seems to take twice as long to say something as the actual word it represents.”
“Ah, well, the object is that the toffs don’t understand what we’re talking about,” he said.” Rhyming slang and then back slang before it. Private language in a crowded city.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I don’t see any point in going to look at the orchard,” Darcy said. “We know that the police trampled all over it.”
“We could question the man’s servants,” I suggested.
Darcy glanced at my grandfather. “What do you think, sir? Georgie wants to do this, but I don’t want to be accused of stepping on the toes of the police.”
“Well, that inspector has asked for my advice, but I’m not so sure we should go questioning people behind his back,” Granddad said. “And anyway, I heard from the inspector that nobody in the house knew anything. They didn’t hear the shot. They didn’t know he’d gone out. I gather the servants sleep in another wing altogether and he normally didn’t get up before nine.”
“Well, that’s a lot of good,” I said. “I wish we knew who his friends were and whether he’d told any of them that he was planning this prank.”
“What would that prove?” Darcy asked. “He probably told quite a few people that he was planning the prank. If he wasn’t about to carry out some kind of stunt, what on earth was he doing up a tree with a shotgun and wire?”
I sighed. “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”
“Because if these are murders,” my grandfather said, “then someone has put a lot of thought and planning into making them look like accidents.”
“What kind of person would do this?” Darcy asked.
“Obviously a brainy type,” Granddad said. “A loner. Quiet sort, I’d say. And if he really has planned to kill these specific people, then I’d say he’s the kind who’d carry a grudge, maybe for years. A crime spree like this must have taken months of planning.”
“What if it’s a woman?” I asked. “Wild Sal fits those characteristics, doesn’t she?”
Granddad nodded. “It could be that the farmer’s wife, kicked to death in the dairy, was a genuine accident. We’ll just have to see if there are any more deaths. If there aren’t, then bob’s your uncle. Wild Sal it is.”
“We should be moving along if you want to cover all of the crime scenes,” Darcy said. “The second one—the man who fell off the bridge.”
“We can hardly ask the publican what time Ted Grover left, if he was dallying with the publican’s wife,” I said.
“But we could ask some of the other men,” Granddad said. “There’s a couple of them sitting outside the pub right now.”
We went over and I hung back, letting Darcy and my grandfather do the talking. They joined me soon after. “They say that nobody saw him leave. He definitely wasn’t in the bar at closing time, so he must have left well before that. Could have been round the back with the publican’s missus.” My grandfather paused. “And they were surprised he fell off the bridge because he didn’t seem to be drunk.”
There was a clear footpath from the pub across low-lying fields. It was muddy from melted snow and we picked our way carefully until we came to the clapper bridge—just slabs of granite laid over standing stones across the stream.
“Easy enough to fall off here, if you were unsteady on your pins,” Granddad said.
“But they didn’t think he was drunk,” I said. “And if he fell into the stream, it’s deep enough that he wouldn’t have hit his head on a rock, and the icy water would have sobered him up in a hurry.”
“I suspect the stream is much deeper now than it was a few days ago,” Darcy said. “All that melted snow.”
“That’s true.” I stared down at the swiftly flowing waters, trying to picture a man’s body lying there; trying to spot a rock that could have killed him. We made our way back to the road and went to look at the house of the Misses Ffrench-Finch.
“We do know that Wild Sal was admitted to their kitchen on that night,” I said.
Granddad shook his head. “Do you think she’d know about things like turning on gas taps if she lived wild on the moors? And more to the point, would she have any idea about cross-wiring a switchboard?”
“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “It would take a person with experience of electricity to make sure someone was electrocuted when they plugged in headphones.”
We made our way around the house to the side with Miss Effie’s window, and sure enough there was a very large footprint in the flower bed right beneath the window.
“Looks like a large Wellington boot to me,” Granddad said. “A very large one. Doesn’t that half-witted bloke wear big boots?”
“Willum? Yes, but we know he was here the day before Miss Effie died. He helped them carry in packages and get the decorations down from their attic. He could quite possibly have had to fetch something from the shed.”
“Via a flower bed?” Darcy asked.
“Maybe he wanted to peek in a downstairs window,” I suggested. “He’s very childlike.” I looked over to the shed behind the main house. “Oh, and look. There is a ladder propped against the shed. Perhaps he had to fetch that to put up the Christmas tree.”
Granddad stared at the ladder, then at the wall. “If that was extended, it would reach close to that bedroom window.”
“It would,” Darcy agreed. “Now all we have to do is find out who used it, turned on the gas and came down again without being seen.”
“You’re being sarcastic again,” I said.
“I just think this is a fool’s errand,” he said. “Maybe Sherlock Holmes could look at the smallest of clues and know everything, but we can’t. We can’t question everybody in nearby towns, look through police records, hospital records—all the things one would need to do to come up with possible suspects for a murder like this. And even then—if our murderer is a twisted reclusive chap, brooding and plotting from his bedroom, we may have no way of finding him until he makes a mistake.”
“You think he’ll make a mistake?” I asked.
“They always do in the end,” Granddad said. “He can wipe away fingerprints, work hard to make every death look like an accident, but in the end he’ll slip up.”
“I’d still like to look at the other crime scenes for myself,” I said. “And since we have the car, why not?”
“Because it’s cold,” Darcy said.
After a mile or so I had to agree with him. Monty’s motor was an open-topped Alvis Tourer, so we were exposed to the freezing wind. It wasn’t so bad in the front seat, behind the windshield, but I was perched in the poor excuse for a backseat and the wind hit me full in the face. We sat huddled together as we climbed a hill and
