Mrs. Morley looked at the butler. “I expect you could do with a cup of tea yourself, Mr. Dillow, after all that fuss and to-do.”
He sank into a chair. “That I could, Mrs. Morley, thank you. It’s bad enough as it is on open days, but finding Mr. Meredith like that… oh dear, oh dear.”
“It’s not very nice, I must say.” Mrs. Morley pursed her lips. “Dying is one thing—we’ve all got to go sometime, Mr. Dillow—but dying in a suit of armour…”
Dillow shook his head. Seen close, he was not as old as he seemed at first sight. It was simply that his occupation and bearing gave the impression of age. “I don’t like it at all,” he said.
“The Press will,” forecast Mrs. Morley, herself an avid reader of the more sensational Sunday newspapers.
The butler said, “I got quite accustomed to the Press in my last position. My late employer… er… almost encouraged them. Always offered them a glass of something.”
“Ah, Mr. Dillow, but then he was in business.”
“Baggles Bearings,” said the butler promptly. “ ‘All industry runs on Baggles Bearings’—that was their advertising slogan. I think they did, too. No money troubles there.”
“Business is different,” insisted Mrs. Morley.
“Free advertising, that’s what he called it every time there was anything in the papers. He used to say even having his art collection mentioned did the bearings a bit of good.”
“Well I never,” said Mrs. Morley, who could not have said off-hand what a bearing was and who knew still less about advertising.
“Mind you,” said Dillow ominously, “once they got hold of a story there was no stopping them.”
Mrs. Morley looked disapproving. “I don’t think his Lordship will favour them mentioning Ornum House.”
“They’ll rake up everything they can lay their hands on,” warned Dillow.
“I’m sure”—stoutly—“there would be nothing that Mr. Meredith would need to hide. There couldn’t have been a pleasanter gentleman.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Meredith, Mrs. Morley.”
The housekeeper looked up quickly. “Master William hasn’t been in trouble again, has he?”
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure, Mrs. Morley.”
Butler and housekeeper exchanged meaningful glances.
Mrs. Morley poured out two cups of tea.
The butler took a sip. “He’s down, that’s all I know.”
“When?”
“I heard he was in The Ornum Arms last night.”
Mrs. Morley clucked her disapprobation. “No good ever came out of his going there.”
“The police,” said Dillow carefully, “are going to want to know when Mr. Meredith was last seen alive.”
“Friday,” said Mrs. Morley. “You did a tea tray for him in the Library.”
“So I did,” concurred Dillow. “Just after four o’clock.”
“Hot buttered toast,” said Mrs. Morley, “if you remember. And fruit cake and petit beurre biscuits.”
“He ate the lot,” said Dillow. “There was nothing left when I took his tray.”
“When would that have been, Mr. Dillow?”
“About five o’clock.”
“And who saw him after that?”
“I couldn’t say, Mrs. Morley. I couldn’t say at all.”
6
« ^ »
Charles Purvis hurried away from the Private Apartments and slipped easily through the complex layout of the house until he reached the entrance courtyard. Still parked there was a coach. It was painted a particularly racous blue and, by some irony too deep for words, it was drawn up by the mounting block used by all thirteen Earls of Ornum in the sweep of carriageway where coaches of an entirely different sort had been wont to go into that wide arc of drive that brought them to the front door.
Michael Fisher was standing on the mounting block and the coach driver was sitting peacefully at the wheel of his vehicle with the infinite patience of his tribe. Sooner or later the missing passengers would turn up, lost time could always be made up on the open road, and in any case there was very little point in starting off before opening time. Rather wait here than outside The Fiddler’s Delight.
Charles Purvis walked across to the coach to be greeted with excited waves of recognition from Mrs. Fisher.
“Ever so nice, isn’t he?” she announced to the assembled coach load, friends and neighbours all, which Purvis was surprised to find annoyed and embarrassed him far more than the deepest insult could have done. “He’s what they call the Stooward…”
He was saved by Michael Fisher doing a sort of war dance on the mounting block.
“Here they come…”
Purvis turned and everyone in the coach craned their necks to see a slightly dishevelled and more than a little flushed Miss Mavis Palmer appear, her boy friend a few paces behind. There were encouraging shrieks from the entire coachload.
“Come on, Mavis…”
“Good old Bernard…”
“Attaboy…”
The driver started up the engine by way of reprimand to the late-comers—who immediately put on a spurt. Miss Palmer, noted Charles Purvis, outpaced Bernard with ease. He did not begin to contemplate the dance she had doubtless been leading the young man through the Park all afternoon, but stood back to let them climb aboard.
With a final burst of cheering and an utterly misplaced fanfare on the coach horn—tally-ho on another sort of coach horn would have been more bearable—the party from Paradise Row, Luston, finally moved away.
Charles Purvis watched for a moment, and then walked across to the doorway.
“Lady Eleanor?”
“Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen…” She turned. “How much is nineteen threepenny pieces?”
“Four and ninepence.”
“Are you sure?”
“Er… yes… I think so.” He was normally a very sure young man, but Lady Eleanor Cremond was able—with one appealing glance—to convert him into a very uncertain creature indeed.
“That comes right then,” she said.
“I don’t see how it can,” ventured Charles Purvis, greatly daring. “You shouldn’t have ninepence at all if you’re charging a shilling and half a crown.”
She smiled sweetly. “There was a man with one leg…”
“Cut rates?”
“I let him into the Park for ninepence. I didn’t think he could walk far.”
Charles Purvis sat down beside her at the baize-coveted table.
“I’ve really come to tell you something rather unpleasant. Mr. Meredith’s been found dead.”
“Not Ossy?” she said, distressed. “Oh, the poor little man. I am sorry. When?”
“We don’t know when,” said Charles Purvis, and told her about the armour.
“But,” she protested in bewildered tones, “he didn’t even like armour. It was the books and pictures that he loved. And all the old documents.”
“I know.”
“In fact”—spiritedly—“he wouldn’t even show people the armoury unless Mr. Ames couldn’t come up from the Vicarage.”
“I know that, too.” He began toying with a wad of unused tickets. “When did you last see him yourself?”
She frowned. “Friday afternoon, I think it was.”
“You’d better be certain,” he warned her. “The police will want to know.”
“The police?”
He nodded.
“It was Friday,” she said slowly. “Just before tea. I went along to the Library and he was there on his own.” She hesitated. “He seemed all right then… no… more than all right. Almost exuberant. On top of the world—you know the sort of feeling. Excited, that’s it.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Say anything? Oh no. I just said I thought he usually took tea with the great aunts on Fridays and he said…” She paused.