He kicked moodily at the sodden earth of a flower-bed. “I may be your last chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know you’re called the Ice Queen and chaps say you talk like an encyclopedia. I don’t mind all that, but most chaps would.”
“I am getting cold, Mr Baker-Willis. I find your proposal unflattering. If you will excuse me…”
She hurried away from him round the house and nearly collided with Harry.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed. “What’s all the rush?”
“Mr Baker-Willis has just proposed marriage to me.”
“Has he, by Jove? Why on earth would he do that?”
“Get out of my way, you stupid man,” shouted Rose. She pushed past him and stalked into the house.
♦
“And Captain Harry dared to wonder why anyone would propose to me,” raged Rose to Daisy a few minutes later.
“It does seem odd.”
“Not you, too!”
“I mean,” said Daisy, “it’s not odd that a gentleman should propose to you. Only if the gentleman happens to be Mr Baker-Willis. He hasn’t been making sheep’s eyes at you. Why the sudden interest?”
“I have a very large dowry,” said Rose in a small voice, her anger evaporating.
“That’s probably it. A lot of those fellows are always looking for an heiress. And a title draws them like a magnet.”
“Oh dear,” said Rose. “I called Captain Harry stupid. I thought he was saying I was too ugly to attract a proposal from anyone, including himself.”
♦
Harry and Becket were summoned to the estate office to face an angry Kerridge.
“Sit down, both of you,” said Kerridge heavily. “I had a man on the gate last night. You pair drove out past him. He said he didn’t stop you or question you going or returning because the idiot assumed you had my permission. I distinctly told him to let no one past. But, oh, no, he touched his helmet as you go off and then he lets two thieving servants away as well.”
Anxious to divert Kerridge’s attention from themselves, Harry said, “There was evidently some fuss last night when the ladies left the drawing-room. Becket here says it was the talk of the servants’ hall. Peregrine Stockton had seduced a kitchen maid. Angela Stockton led her off into a side-room. I would assume she paid her off. She and the pot-boy obviously decided to help themselves to a few trinkets as well while we were all the in the drawing-room.”
But Kerridge was not to be distracted. “So where did you go last night?”
“I motored to London to pick up my letters and came straight back. I did not think I was a suspect.”
“Everyone’s a suspect, even you,” said Kerridge nastily. “Don’t ever leave here again until this investigation is finished. We have wired all worried parents and relatives to stay away. If I cannot find anything out today, I will need to let them all go.”
♦
To Rose’s distress, Tristram seemed to have come to the conclusion that his proposal had been too abrupt and so he set about courting her. His method of doing this was to praise her fulsomely and throw her languishing glances.
She could only be glad that her parents had decided to stay in London, having been informed by the police that she would only be required to stay at Farthings for, perhaps, another day. Rose felt sure that if they had arrived on the scene and if Tristram had asked their permission to pay his addresses, and if she proved to have turned down another eligible gentleman, they would, she knew, be furious.
What the newspapers were saying about it all, no one knew, Lady Glensheil having stopped the delivery.
No one wanted to chat or socialize or play croquet any more. Suspicion hung like a black cloud over Farthings.
Guests and staff were painstakingly interviewed over and over again. More detectives arrived, discreetly dressed, to search the whole house.
“They won’t find anything,” said Daisy to Rose. “I bet our murderer, if he took any blackmailing evidence, has got it neatly hidden somewhere in London.”
“Mrs Stockton and Lord Alfred really must be sticking hard to their stories about paying Freddy ten thousand pounds out of the goodness of their hearts,” said Rose. “I only saw them talking together once and eavesdropped. It seems that Lady Glensheil is so determined to put an end to all this that when Kerridge got permission to search their homes in London, they could do nothing to stop it, because she has more influence in high places than either of them. But although they seemed furious at the intrusion, neither of them seemed particularly worried that the police would find anything.”
“When I was growing up in the East End,” mused Daisy, “there never was any privacy. And one day after the show at Butler’s, this stage-door Johnny gave me a box of chocolates. I knew if my brothers and sisters saw that, I’d never get any. So I hid it up the chimney. Wouldn’t you know it? Next day was a cold snap and Ma lit a fire and the whole box tumbled down into the flames.”
Rose stared at her. “Daisy, I wonder if the police searched up the chimneys?”
“Let’s go and put it to Kerridge.”
“No, wait a bit.” Rose was desperate to prove to Harry that she was better at detecting than anyone else. “The police would announce they were searching the rooms again. One of the servants would see them searching up the chimneys and the news would go around like wildfire. I know, at dinner tonight I’ll suddenly say I feel faint. You help me out of the room.”
“I’ll help you make up to look pale,” said Daisy eagerly.
“Not white lead. I do not know why women will still use that cosmetic. So many of them die of lead poisoning.”
♦
Harry fretted over the soup at dinner. He kept stealing glances at Rose. She was so very white and there were blue shadows under her eyes.
Then he heard Rose mutter an excuse and rise from the table. She left the room, supported by Daisy. Harry, being neither relative nor husband, had to remain where he was and resist the impulse to run out of the dining-room to find out what was wrong with her.
“Now,” whispered Rose as they made their way up the stairs. “Mrs Stockton’s room first.”
There was no electricity laid on at Farthings, nor gaslight, and so they had taken one of the bed candles from the hall table to enable them to read the names on the cards on each door.
“Here we are,” said Rose at last. “Let’s hope her maid is in the servants’ hall.”
Rose had a stab of worry that the door might prove to be locked, particularly after all the petty thefts, but to her relief it opened. Oil lamps were burning in the little sitting-room, so she blew out the candle.
“I’ll look,” said Daisy. “If anything’s hidden, it’ll be on the little ledge above the hearth.”
“These are Tudor chimneys,” Rose pointed out. “They probably go straight up. Don’t take off your evening gloves, Daisy. If there’s anything there, we don’t want to leave fingerprints.”
Daisy crouched down on the hearth and reached up into the chimney. She felt around. “Nothing,” she declared, sitting back on her heels. She tried the bedroom chimney, but there was nothing there either.
“Let’s hurry and try Lord Alfred’s chimney.”
Another search along the old twisting corridors until they found Lord Alfred’s room.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” said Daisy. “I don’t want that manservant of his returning and finding us. He frightens me.”
Again, she knelt down to search up a chimney.
“Nothing here either.” She then searched the bedroom chimney. Nothing but soot.
“It was a mad idea anyway,” said Rose. “I know, let’s try Mr Jerry’s room, or rather, his wife’s bedroom. If the killer was in a hurry, he might have hidden it there.”