“I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are, and you are not taking that so-called maid, Daisy, with you. You will have a proper lady’s maid.”
Rose burst into tears. Lady Polly patted her shoulder and then snapped at Daisy, “Don’t just stand there. Do something.”
“I think you should leave her to me,” said Daisy firmly. “My lady, now is not the time to upset her by telling her she’s going to India.”
Lady Polly shifted from foot to foot. She had never known Rose to cry before. It was all too embarrassing.
“Very well,” she said curtly.
Rose’s father poked his head around the door. “Dreadful business,” he said. “Place is full of murderers. I’ll send for two of the gamekeepers. They’ll do a better job of guarding Rose. Keep her in her room and get her meals sent up.”
Rose sobbed into her pillow.
“Well…harrumph…don’t cry,” said the earl. “Everything will look different in the morning.”
He and his wife left. Daisy hugged Rose, rocking her back and forth. “There, now, Daisy’s here, and as long as Daisy’s here you won’t be going to India.”
“They’ll make me,” wailed Rose.
“Not if we run away.”
She handed Rose a handkerchief. Rose scrubbed her eyes and sat up. “Run away?”
“Why not? We could go back home after this is all over and really make sure our typing is perfect. Then we wait till your parents are off visiting someone and off we go.”
“But they’ll put Captain Cathcart on the job and he’ll find us!”
“I think not, if we talk to him first. Think of it! You and me independent and free as the air, living in London.”
Rose smiled. “I am feeling better already. But I wonder who was out to get me this evening.”
♦
Kerridge had taken a statement from John when a constable entered the study and said that Miss Frederica Sutherland was anxious to speak to him on a matter of importance.
“Show her in,” said Kerridge wearily.
Frederica entered the room swathed in a pink satin robe. “I thought you ought to know,” she began.
“Know what? Pray take a seat, Miss Sutherland.”
“I saw him.”
“Who?”
“Sir Gerald Burke.”
“When, and what was he doing?”
“It was like this. I wanted a cup of cocoa, but it was late and the servants can get very uppity if you haven’t ordered in advance.”
“Go on.”
“I thought I would go down to the kitchens and make myself some. I opened my bedroom door a crack to make sure there was no one about. John the footman passed me carrying a tray. I waited to make sure he had really gone but I heard footsteps. I saw Sir Gerald go up the stairs after John, and then I heard a voice call, ‘John’, I thought that there were really too many people about, so I went back to bed.”
“The voice that called out – man or woman?”
“I couldn’t say. Could have been either. It sounded muffled somehow.”
“Thank you, Miss Sutherland. We may have to speak to you again in the morning.”
After she had left, Kerridge drew forward a plan of the guests’ rooms. “That’s odd,” he said. “Burke had no reason to be in that tower. He’s in the other one, the east tower.”
“Maybe he was visiting one of the ladies,” said Judd. “Although he looked a bit of a daisy to me.”
“We’d better see him and find out what he was doing. Where’s Curzon and that list?”
At that moment the door opened and the butler walked in. “I cannot find it,” he said. “The list has gone.”
Kerridge sighed. “Go and take another look. Send Sir Gerald Burke.”
“He may be asleep.”
“Then wake him!” snapped Kerridge.
After ten minutes, Gerald appeared. He held out his wrists. “Put the handcuffs on,” he said. “It’s a fair cop. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Only in penny dreadfuls,” said Kerridge. “Do sit down and tell us what you were doing in the west tower. You followed the footman, John, up the stairs. And yet your room is in the east tower.”
Gerald wrapped himself more closely in an elaborately embroidered dressing-gown. He extracted a long cigarette-lighter, a gold cigarette-case and a box of matches from his pocket and proceeded to light a cigarette with maddening slowness.
“Sir Gerald. I am waiting!”
“I lost the way,” said Gerald. “Simple. I was half-way up when I saw the Trumpington female’s card. So easy to get lost in this pseudo-medieval horror.”
Kerridge consulted his notes. Harry had told him about Lady Hedley’s conversation with Rose and how Mary Gore-Desmond had been a guest of the Hedleys during the season.
He stared at Gerald, who smiled back through a wreath of cigarette smoke. Kerridge decided to take one of his leaps in the dark. “You were very friendly with Miss Gore-Desmond when she was staying with the Hedleys, were you not? In fact, her parents thought you might make a match of it.”
“Ridiculous. I admit I did squire her about a bit. It was Hedley’s idea. He said he’d promised her parents to try to get her engaged but he said that maybe she would look more attractive to the fellows if I could be seen paying her a bit of attention. But she began to take me seriously and I knew I’d better get out or that desperate little thing would be suing me for breach of promise or something. Too, too fatiguing. Not as if she had much of a dowry, either.”
“And when you found that out, that was when she became boring?”
“Don’t inflict your middle-class morals on me, my dear, dear chap. One has to look after oneself in this wicked world. My tailor’s bills alone would keep someone like you in luxury.”
“Were you intimate with her?”
“I do not go around seducing virgins.”
“So you say the reason you were in the west tower was because you lost your way? I find that hard to believe.”
“Think, dear Super, just think what this wretched place is like at night. Hedley’s father went to great expense to get gas piped to the castle and now everyone who is anyone has electricity. The gaslight all over the house and in the corridors is turned off at night and we are all expected to collect our bed candles from the table in the hall.
“I turned left at the first landing instead of right, that is all. A simple mistake. I must inform you, I am known to the crowned heads of Europe and am not in the way of having my word doubted by a common policeman.”
Kerridge comforted himself with a sudden vision of himself, three stone lighter, and twenty years younger, manning the barricades while the limp body of Sir Gerald hung from a lamppost.
“Sir Gerald, I would advise you to co-operate with the police. We are now looking on the death of Miss Gore-Desmond as murder.”
Gerald got languidly to his feet. “Oh, do let me know how you get on. Will that be all?”
“For the moment.”
Gerald swarmed out. “Insufferable little tick,” raged Kerridge. “I’ll bet he did it.”
“Doesn’t look to me as if he could do anything with any woman,” said Judd.
“Oh, that kind would lay the cat if there were money in it. Get the cook up here and then the rest of the kitchen staff. It’s going to be a long night.”
♦
Fortunately for Rose, her mother had instructed the doctor to see her after he had examined the policeman. The sympathetic doctor reported back to Lady Polly that it would be unhealthy to keep her daughter confined to her room and might bring about a crise de nerfs.
She went down for a late breakfast. There were only a few guests present. Rose knew that her mother, like some of the others, preferred to take breakfast in her room.