“I never wrote my book on the case, you know. I planned a work entitled The Colebrook Croft Mystery, or Who Killed Augustus Boxdale? But the answer was all too obvious.”
“No real mystery?” suggested Dalgliesh.
“Who else could it have been but Allegra Boxdale? She was born Allegra Porter, you know. Do you think her mother could have been thinking of Byron? I imagine not. There’s a picture of her on page two of the notebook by the way, taken by a photographer in Cannes on her wedding day. I call it beauty and the beast.”
The old photograph had scarcely faded and Great Aunt Allie half-smiled at Dalgliesh across nearly seventy years. Her broad face with its wide mouth and rather snub nose was framed by two wings of dark hair swept high and topped, in the fashion of the day, by an enormous flowered hat. The features were too coarse for real beauty but the eyes were magnificent, deep set and well spaced, and the chin round and determined. Beside this vital young Amazon poor Augustus Boxdale, clutching his bride as if for support, was but a very frail and undersized beast. Their pose was unfortunate. She almost looked as if she were about to fling him over her shoulder.
Glatt shrugged. “The face of a murderess? I’ve known less likely ones. Her counsel suggested, of course, that the old man had poisoned his own gruel during the short time she left it on the washstand to cool while she visited the bathroom. But why should he? All the evidence suggests that he was in a state of post-nuptial euphoria, poor senile old booby. Our Augustus was in no hurry to leave this world, particularly by such an agonising means. Besides, I doubt whether he even knew the gruel was there. He was in bed next door in his dressing room, remember.”
Dalgliesh asked: “What about Marguerite Goddard? There’s no evidence about the exact time when she entered the bedroom.”
“I thought you’d get onto that. She could have arrived while her step-grandmother was in the bathroom, poisoned the gruel, hidden herself either in the main bedroom or elsewhere until it had been taken into Augustus, then joined her grandfather and his bride as if she had just come upstairs. It’s possible, I admit. But it is unlikely. She was less inconvenienced than any of the family by her grandfather’s second marriage. Her mother was Augustus Boxdale’s eldest child who married, very young, a wealthy patent medicine manufacturer. She died in childbirth and the husband only survived her by a year. Marguerite Goddard was an heiress. She was also most advantageously engaged to Captain the Honorable John Brize-Lacey. Marguerite Goddard, young, beautiful, in possession of the Goddard fortune, not to mention the Goddard emeralds and the eldest son of a Lord, was hardly a serious suspect. In my view defence counsel, that was Roland Gort Lloyd, remember, was wise to leave her strictly alone.”
“A memorable defence, I believe.”
“Magnificent. There’s no doubt Allegra Boxdale owed her life to Gort Lloyd. I know that concluding speech by heart:
“ ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I beseech you in the sacred name of Justice to consider what you are asked to do. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to decide the fate of this young woman. She stands before you now, young, vibrant, glowing with health, the years stretching before her with their promise and their hopes. It is in your power to cut off all this as you might top a nettle with one swish of your cane. To condemn her to the slow torture of those last waiting weeks; to that last dreadful walk; to heap calumny on her name; to desecrate those few happy weeks of marriage with the man who loved her so greatly; and to cast her into the final darkness of an ignominious grave.’
“Pause for dramatic effect. Then the crescendo in that magnificent voice. ‘And on what evidence, gentlemen? I ask you.’ Another pause. Then the thunder. ‘On what evidence?’ ”
“A powerful defence,” said Dalgliesh. “But I wonder how it would go down with a modern judge and jury.”
“Well, it went down very effectively with that 1902 jury. Of course, the abolition of capital punishment has rather cramped the more histrionic style. I’m not sure that the reference to topping nettles was in the best of taste. But the jury got the message. They decided that, on the whole, they preferred not to have the responsibility of sending the accused to the gallows. They were out six hours reaching their verdict and it was greeted with some applause. If any of those worthy citizens had been asked to wager five pounds of their own good money on her innocence, I suspect that it would have been a different matter. Allegra Boxdale had helped him, of course. The Criminal Evidence Act, passed three years earlier, enabled him to put her in the witness box. She wasn’t an actress of a kind for nothing. Somehow, she managed to persuade the jury that she had genuinely loved the old man.”
“Perhaps she had,” suggested Dalgliesh. “I don’t suppose there had been much kindness in her life. And he was kind.”
“No doubt, no doubt. But love!” Glatt was impatient. “My dear Dalgliesh! He was a singularly ugly old man of sixty-nine. She was an attractive girl of twenty-one!”
Dalgliesh doubted whether love, that iconoclastic passion, was susceptible to this kind of simple arithmetic but he didn’t argue. Glatt went on: “The prosecution couldn’t suggest any other romantic attachment. The police got in touch with her previous partner, of course. He was discovered to be a bald, undersized little man, sharp as a weasel, with a buxom wife and five children. He had moved down the coast after the partnership broke up and was now working with a new girl. He said regretfully that she was coming along nicely, thank you gentlemen, but would never be a patch on Allie and that, if Allie got her neck out of the noose and ever wanted a job, she knew where to come. It was obvious, even to the most suspicious policeman, that his interest was professional. As he said: ‘What was a grain or two of arsenic between friends?’
“The Boxdales had no luck after the trial. Captain Maurice Boxdale was killed in 1916, leaving no children, and the Reverend Edward lost his wife and their twin daughters in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He survived until 1932. The boy, Hubert, may still be alive, but I doubt it. That family always were a sickly lot.
“My greatest achievement, incidentally, was in tracing Marguerite Goddard. I hadn’t realised that she was still alive. She never married Brize-Lacey or, indeed, anyone else. He distinguished himself in the 1914–18 war, came successfully through, and eventually married an eminently suitable young woman, the sister of a brother officer. He inherited the title in 1925 and died in 1953. But Marguerite Goddard may be alive now for all I know. She may even be living in the same modest Bournemouth hotel where I found her. Not that my efforts in tracing her were rewarded. She absolutely refused to see me. That’s the note that she sent out to me, by the way. Just there.”
It was meticulously pasted into the notebook in its chronological order and carefully annotated. Aubrey Glatt was a natural researcher; Dalgliesh couldn’t help wondering whether this passion for accuracy might not have been more rewarding spent other than in the careful documentation of murder.
The note was written in an elegant upright hand, the strokes black and very thin but clear and unwavering.
Miss Goddard presents her compliments to Mr. Aubrey Glatt. She did not murder her grandfather and has neither the time nor the inclination to gratify his curiosity by discussing the person who did.
Aubrey Glatt said: “After that extremely disobliging note, I felt there was really no point in going on with the book.”
Glatt’s passion for Edwardian England evidently extended to a wider field than its murders, and they drove to Colebrook Croft high above the green Hampshire lanes in an elegant 1910 Daimler. Aubrey wore a thin tweed coat and deer-stalker hat and looked, Dalgliesh thought, rather like Sherlock Holmes, with himself as attendant Watson.