madam. I actually saw the damned thing fall. Nobody near it, I can attest to that.”
“Then perhaps if you’d be good enough to stay, and any others who saw the actual accident, we can allow everyone else to go home.”
“And I to my bed,” the dowager countess said. “That woman was asking for trouble with all that trailing fabric near live flames.” And she stomped off, clearing a way through the crowd with her stick.
“I think we should go to bed too,” Colonel Rathbone said. “This has quite upset my wife and she’s not a well woman.”
My mother sidled over to me. “Noel wants to stay in case anything exciting happens, but I feel it’s too, too ghoulish. I can’t get that image out of my mind—that poor woman going up in flames. I said to Noel, ‘That could have been me.’ I’m sure this fabric is just as flammable as hers.” She put her hand up to my cheek and patted it. “We’ll see you tomorrow, I suppose. Noel is frightfully keen to watch the ridiculous Lovey Chase thing. I expect it’s all those young men in shorts and singlets that excites him.” She cast a wicked smile in Mr. Coward’s direction as she went to join him.
One by one the guests departed until the ballroom had that abandoned feel of the day after a party. I took Darcy aside and murmured my suspicion to him. He frowned, considering this. “Frankly, if he’d wanted to do away with her, a simple cigarette to her skirt would have done the trick, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe he wasn’t taking any chances. All those candles at once meant that her costume would catch fire in many places. And there was a chance she’d be knocked out as well, therefore not able to do anything.”
“You’re a grizzly little thing, aren’t you?” He slipped his arms around me, gazing down at me fondly. “And I was so looking forward to my last waltz with you—a chance to dance cheek to cheek.”
“There will be other chances, I hope,” I said. “Right now I wish we could escape from here. Until now it was people we didn’t know. Now it’s finally come here. I can’t stop wondering who will be next.”
One of the footmen was about to close the French doors. “I don’t think you should touch anything until the police arrive,” I called to him. He looked startled, but stepped away. I went over to stand beside the candelabra. “Was this exactly where it stood before?” I asked.
The footman looked around the room at where the other candelabras had been placed. “Pretty much, my lady. Maybe a few inches to the left.”
I went to move it and couldn’t. It was too heavy for me. And as I held the shaft in my hand I looked down and saw something moving in the strong wind that was now blowing icy cold air into the room. I dropped to my knees. “Look at this,” I whispered to Darcy. It was a small piece of black thread caught on one of the curly legs of the candelabra.
Chapter 31
VERY LATE NOW, DECEMBER 28
Inspector Newcombe arrived about a half hour later. He looked bleary-eyed and grumpy, as if he had been roused from his bed. He took statements from those who had seen the candelabra topple. Nobody recalled seeing anyone standing nearby. I suddenly thought of the person in the gorilla suit I had noticed at the beginning of the evening. I hadn’t seen him since supper. I mentioned him and no one had any idea who he was.
“Any other time I would have guessed it was old Freddie, if he hadn’t . . . you know,” Mr. Crawley, my hunting friend, said. “Just the sort of thing he’d do. Probably would have swung from the chandeliers too.”
Nobody had seen the gorilla leave. He hadn’t appeared at supper. Certainly he hadn’t been seen standing anywhere near the candelabra, so the inspector dismissed him as unimportant. A constable was dusting around the French door for fingerprints. I waited until the inspector went over to examine the candelabra, then brought his attention to the piece of thread that had been caught on one of its legs.
“You’re suggesting that this was attached to the candelabra and at the right moment someone tugged it over?” he asked.
I nodded.
“It’s a thin sort of cotton to shift a great thing like that.”
“I suspect it’s something like button thread, which is quite strong,” I said, fingering it. “But the candelabra is clearly top-heavy and the least little jerk might have achieved the desired effect.”
He stared at the open door, the candelabra and the spots of melted wax still on the floor.
“So you want me to believe that someone rigged up a way to topple the candelabra in the hopes that Mrs. Sechrest might come and stand in the right spot sometime during the evening? That seems like a long shot to me, especially when it might be rather hard to stand anywhere alone in a crowded ballroom.”
I sighed. “I agree, unless she wasn’t particularly the intended target. If someone just wanted to cause mischief and chose a target at random, that would be different.” Or if her husband wanted to get rid of her, he’d simply push the candelabra over onto her, I thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to say those words. Instead I said, “We have to assume this was today’s intended death, don’t we?”
“Ah. Do we?” He rubbed his chin, which was in clear need of shaving. “I had a word with the lord lieutenant of the county and he decided we shouldn’t call in Scotland Yard on this matter. It was his feeling that we can’t prove we’re looking at a single murder here. We’ve no motive, no clues, no weapons.”
“What about Wild Sal? Presumably you arrested her because she was seen near the spot where the master of hounds vanished and her footprints were seen where the van went off the road.”
“Ah,” he said again. “I’ve had to release her. The lord lieutenant felt that we had no real evidence against her. Purely circumstantial, he said.”
“What about the wound to the horse’s leg? We know that was deliberate.”
“Not necessarily. Could have been trying to jump a wire sheep fence and hit the top strand.” He tried to give me a kindly look. “Look, we could speculate that some of the deaths were intentional—that telephone switchboard incident is definitely fishy, if you ask me. So maybe the telephone switchboard girl had overheard something she shouldn’t and needed to be silenced. Blackmailing someone, perhaps. I could go along with that. Maybe the old lady had been bullying her sisters or someone else in the house and they turned on the gas tap. That would make sense too. But there was no possible connection between them, was there? The lord lieutenant said he felt that we were just looking at a run of unlucky accidents, and that such things happen from time to time.”
“So you won’t investigate this as a potential crime?”
He rubbed his chin again. “When I thought that the convicts might be responsible, I did try to find forensic evidence of a crime at the scenes. Didn’t come up with anything, though. But there would be no reason for a convict to risk going into the middle of a busy town, where he might be spotted, to cross-wire a switchboard, and no reason for him to be anywhere near the farm where the woman was kicked by a cow.”
“So maybe that one could really have been an accident,” I conceded.
“We’ve no witnesses to any of the incidents, unless you count tonight. I’ve tried to take fingerprints but the room with the telephone switchboard was badly burned. There were no strange prints in the old lady’s bedroom. And the rest of the deaths happened outdoors. So until I find someone lying with a bloody great knife stuck in his back I’m afraid I’m going to have to drop the idea of a mass murderer at work. I never quite believed it, anyway. Didn’t make sense, did it?”
“I suppose not,” I said, fighting back my anger. “So how long are you going to let these deaths continue? Until January? February? Summer? The local population will be seriously depleted by then, won’t it?”
He winced as if I had struck him and immediately I felt bad. He was just doing his job, following orders from much higher up, and I wasn’t actually angry with him. I simply was frustrated that none of us had managed to do anything to stop people from dying.
“I think we should all go to bed,” he said. “We’re all tired and there’s nothing more we can do here tonight.” He summoned the constable who had been dusting for fingerprints, and the two of them left. Darcy came to my side as I made my way up the stairs.
“Cheer up, old thing,” he said and put his arm around my shoulder. “I know it’s upsetting to see something like that, but there’s nothing more we can do.”
“We just have to wait for someone to die tomorrow, is that what you are saying?”
“I’m saying that there is a perfectly good police force in the village and we need to leave it to them. Oh, and we watch our backs too, just in case.”
“It’s lucky we’re not from around here, isn’t it?” I said.
