A thin old lady—the same one as he had seen earlier—appeared. Fortunately she recognised him.
“I’ve seen you before.”
“That’s right, Lady Maude. I wanted to see you again. You and Lady Alice.”
“You did?” Sloan felt himself being scrutinised. “Why?”
“Someone has killed Mr. Meredith.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Have they indeed. You’d better come in. This way.” She turned abruptly on her heel and went back into the room. “Alice, Alice, where are you?”
Lady Alice was—if that were possible—even older than her sister. Old age, however, had not altered the outline of the Cremond nose, which was planted firmly in the middle of a face that in its time must have been striking. Say about the year the Old Queen died.
He stood in front of her. “Good afternoon, your Ladyship.”
A claw-like hand lifted a lorgnette and examined him through it in a silence that soon became unnerving. Sloan hadn’t felt like that since his early days as a very jejune constable—when he was being checked over by his station sergeant before he was allowed out on the beat. Pencil, notebook, whistle… subconsciously he wanted to make sure that they were all there now.
“Who are you, my man?”
“My name is Sloan, Lady Alice.”
“Well?”
Perhaps, conceded Sloan to himself, that hadn’t been such a good beginning after all. Circumlocution was a device for handling the middle-aged, not the very old.
“Someone has killed Mr. Meredith.”
“Ha!” said Lady Alice enigmatically.
Perhaps, he thought, to the very old death was such a near and constant companion that they minded less.
“And I,” he went on, “am a police officer who has come to find out all about it.”
Of course, there was always the possibility that she would have expected him to have been in red. The Scarlet Runners, that was what the Bow Street people had been called in their day.
Or should he have just said he was Sir Robert Peel?
“Good riddance,” said the old lady vigorously.
He had been wrong to worry about upsetting her then.
“Tryin’ to make out that Great-great-great-grandfather Cremond was a bastard.”
“Dear me,” said Sloan, conscious of the inadequacy of his response.
“Thought the title should have gone to someone else.”
“No?”
“Yes,” countered Lady Alice firmly. “Said it was all in the archives.”
The sooner Superintendent Leeyes sent him that dictionary the better. Then he could find out if archives were the same thing as muniments.
“Always knew it was dangerous to meddle in papers,” went on the old lady. “Told m’brother so.”
That disposed of the world of scholarship.
“He should have sacked Meredith when he got past cricket.”
And sport.
“Always wanted to die in the saddle myself,” said the old lady.
Sloan took a second look at Lady Alice. The days of cavalry charges were over, he knew, but in any case surely women had never…
“A good way to go,” she said.
Light dawned. Sloan said, “The hunting field…”
“That’s right. Now, my man, tell me, who killed him?”
The lorgnette was back again, hovering above the Cremond nose.
“I don’t know, Lady Alice.”
“He didn’t break his neck, did he?”
“No.”
“Seen a lot of men go that way. Takin’ fences.”
Lady Alice had obviously taken her own fences well. At the gallop probably.
Full tilt.
Which brought him back to Osborne Meredith.
Full circle.
“What can you tell me about Friday?” he asked.
Lady Alice might be older, but she was less vague than Millicent, her nephew’s wife. “On Fridays Maude and I prepare for Saturday and Sunday.”
“Saturday and Sunday?”
“We do not leave our rooms until the evening on Saturdays and Sundays and Wednesdays.”
Sloan blinked. He had heard that Mohammedans observed certain rules of behaviour between sun-up and sun-down—but not elderly English spinsters of the Christian persuasion.
“All the year round?” he said tentatively.
With the Mohammedans he understood it was during Ramadan.
“April to October,” said Lady Alice.
“And Bank Holidays,” said her sister.
“Except Good Fridays,” added Lady Alice.
“I see,” said Sloan, who was beginning to…
“My nephew is, of course, Head of the Family now, but…”
“But what?” prompted Sloan.
“But neither my sister nor I approve of the House being Open. What our late brother would have thought we do not like to contemplate.”
“Quite,” murmured Sloan diplomatically. “So when the House is… er… Open, you both remain in your apartments?”
“Always.”
It was a pity, that, he thought. Lady Alice and Lady Maude were good value at half a crown.
“Now, about Friday…”
“Yes?”
“Did you see Mr. Meredith at all?”
“No.”
“What did you do after tea?”
“What we always do after tea—play ombre.”
“Ombre?” One thing was absolutely certain about ombre, whatever it was. You didn’t play it for money any more. Inspector Sloan had been a policeman long enough to know all the games you could play for money.
The old lady nodded. “A game our mother taught us.”
That took you right back to the nineteenth century for a start. It was the twentieth that Sloan was concerned about.
“Who won?” he asked casually. That was as good a memory test as anything.
He was wrong there.
“Maude,” said Lady Alice promptly. “She always wins on Fridays.” She waved a thin hand. “It’s so much easier that way.”
“I see.”
“I win on Tuesday, Thursdays, and Saturdays.”
“Friday afternoon,” he said desperately. “Did you see anyone about on Friday afternoon?”
Lady Alice shook her head. “Just the Judge. And that was much later. As I was going along to dress for dinner.”
“The Judge?” Sloan sat up. He really would have to watch his step if there were judges about
“Judge Cremond,” said Lady Alice.
Sloan sighed. Surely there couldn’t be more Cremonds still? Purvis hadn’t mentioned him in his list of those in the house.
He said, “He’s a member of the family, too, I take it?”
“Oh yes.” The old lady laughed. “He’s a member of the family all right.”
“I shall have to interview him in due course, then. I’ll make a note of the…”
The old lady’s laugh was a cackle now, and not without malice. “I doubt if you’ll be able to do that, Mr. Sloan, whoever you are. You wouldn’t even see him.”
“No?”
“He’s been dead these two hundred and fifty years.”
“A ghost?” Sloan sighed. There would have to be a ghost, he supposed, in a house like this, but Superintendent Leeyes wouldn’t like it all the same.
The lorgnette described an arc in the air on its way towards the Cremond nose. “That’s right. Mark my words, young man, someone’s going to die soon.”
Lady Maude chimed in like a Greek chorus of doom. “The Judge always gets uneasy when someone in the family is going to die.”
The Reverend Walter Ames, Vicar of Ornum and Perpetual Curate of Maple-juxta-Handling, was not a preacher of long sermons at any time.
On this particular evening in June he took as his text “unto him that hath shall be given” (a point on which in any case he could seldom think of much to say), said it with celerity, and hurried across from the Church to Ornum House.
He reached the armoury just as Inspector Sloan got back there.
“I’ve just heard the sad news,” said the Vicar somewhat breathlessly. “Terrible. Quite terrible.”