“I see.” Sloan made a mental note about that. The contents of the deceased’s pockets would be recorded by the police in due course. Just at the moment they were inviolate behind a portion of armour called a tasset.
Lord Henry frowned. “Ossy would never have left them open like that—or even with the keys in. They’re much too important for that.”
“He might not have had the choice,” Sloan reminded him.
“No, of course not. I was forgetting.” Lord Henry’s gaze rested on the dishevelled room. “There’s another extraordinary thing, Inspector, isn’t there?”
“What, my lord?”
“All this confusion…”
“But no actual damage.”
This was quite true. Disorder reigned supreme, but none of the papers appeared to be torn or defaced.
“Just as if someone only wanted a muddle,” said his Lordship perceptively.
“These documents must have value,” began Sloan. “It stands to reason…”
“To an antiquarian perhaps, Inspector. But not an intrinsic value like the pictures or the books or the china.”
Sloan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “If there was anything missing…”
Lord Henry said carefully, “Then only Ossy would be able to tell you.”
“And he can’t do that now.”
“No.” The younger man paused. “Moreover, Inspector, if he were here to tell us, it would take him a very long time indeed to put this room to rights—even though we may think nothing’s been damaged. Months. Years, perhaps.”
Sloan could see that for himself.
“Presumably,” he said, going on from there in his mind and thinking aloud, “this room would otherwise have told us something useful.”
“But what?” asked Lord Henry, surveying the muddled muniments from the door.
Sloan decided that their message—if any—would have to wait for the time being.
He turned his scrutiny to the floor. There was no blood immediately visible. Mr. Osborne Meredith did not appear to have been killed here. And whoever had created this disturbance had been careful not to stand on any of the papers.
Or had they?
Sloan dropped to his knees and looked along at ground level. There was an imprint of sorts on one piece of paper.
A heel mark.
A heel mark so small and square that it must have come from a woman’s shoe.
Detective Constable Crosby was asking Charles Purvis the Earl’s name.
He did not know it, but this—like matrimony—was not something to be taken in hand lightly.
“It’s for the Coroner,” he began. “I need to know the full name of the occupant of the premises in which the deceased is presumed to have met his death.”
“The full name?” said Charles Purvis dubiously.
“The full name.”
“Henry,” said the Steward. “The eldest son is always called Henry.”
Crosby wrote that down.
“Augustus.” After the Duke of Cumberland—or was it the Roman General?
Crosby wrote that down too.
“Rudolfo.”
“Rudolfo?”
“The tenth Earl was invested with a foreign order. He was the English ambassador to the country at an awkward time diplomatically and… er… carried it off well. Saved the situation, you might say. He called his own son after their reigning monarch of the day—that went down well, too. The name has been kept.”
“I see,” said Constable Crosby laconically. “That the lot?”
Purvis stiffened. “By no means. There’s Cremond, too.”
“That’s the surname, isn’t it?”
“As well.”
“As well as what?”
“As well as being a Christian name.”
Crosby wasn’t sure what Purvis meant and said so.
“Twice,” said Charles Purvis.
“You mean he was christened Cremond as well as having it as a surname.”
“That’s right.”
“Cremond,” Crosby looked incredulous, “and Cremond?”
The Steward coughed. “That dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century when…”
Crosby wasn’t listening. “William Edward Crosby Crosby,” he said under his breath, for size.
“I beg your pardon, Constable?”
Crosby turned back to his notebook, and read aloud, “Henry Augustus Rudolfo Cremond Cremond?”
Name of a name of a name, that was…
“That’s right,” agreed the Steward and Comptroller. “Thirteenth Earl Ornum of Ornum in the County of Calleshire, Baron Cremond of Petering…”
“There isn’t,” said Detective Constable William Edward Crosby of 24 Hillview Terrace, Berebury, with tremendous dignity, “any room on the form for that.”
Sloan methodically sealed the door of the Muniments Room and went back next door to the Library. This was a very fine room.
It was divided into six small bays all lined with books—three bays on either side of the centre. The right-hand three each ended in a window and a window seat with a view over the Park. The left-hand three consisted entirely of bookshelves with a sliver of table down the middle. At the far end was a bust of Lord Henry.
“My great-great-grandfather,” murmured Lord Henry.
Sloan shot a swift glance from the bust of Lord Henry and back again. There was no discernible difference between the two.
“Army,” said Lord Henry by way of explanation. “Too young for Waterloo. Too old for the Crimea.”
Sloan advanced. Apart from the neckwear, the bust might just as well have been Lord Henry. It was as near a replica as he’d seen.
“Mr. Meredith worked here, too, I take it,” he said generally.
Lord Henry nodded. “Spent nearly all his time between the Library and the Muniments, though he was always popping down to have a look at the pictures, too.”
“As to Friday,” said Sloan, “if he’d been working here then, what sort of traces would you have expected to find?”
“None,” said his Lordship promptly. “He wasn’t that sort of scholar. When he’d finished with a book, he’d put it back in its right place.”
Sloan wasn’t surprised. From what little he’d seen of the body that had emerged pupa-like from the chrysalis of the armour, he’d have said Meredith was a neat, dapper little man.
Lord Henry carried on, “He was quite mild about everything else, but it was as much as your life was worth to spoil the order on the bookshelves.”
This wasn’t perhaps the happiest of comparisons, and Lord Henry’s voice trailed away.
“I see,” said Sloan, moving down the three bays.
Everything was utterly neat and tidy. At the end by the door a small stack of papers on the table there was the only testimony that the room had ever been used at all. The first two bays seemed normal enough. Sloan paused at the third.
The casual observer—the untrained eye—would probably have seen nothing.
Sloan did.
What he saw was on the spine of Volume XXIV of The Transactions of the Calleshire Society.
Blood.
This, then, was in all probability where the Librarian and Archivist to the Ornum family had met his death.
Sloan stepped carefully round the thin table and measured a few distances with his eye. The photographers would have to come back and bring the lab boys with them. In the meantime…
At a quick guess the deceased could have been sitting at the inside end of the table, which ran the length of the bay. He had been hit from behind—the pathologist had told him that much—and from above. The height of the book with the blood on it confirmed that.
Lord Henry cleared his throat. “This the spot, then?”
“I think so,” said Sloan. There was nothing much else to point to it. The table might have had blood on it and been wiped clean. There might be drops on the floor. The Library carpet was Turkey red, which didn’t help… and any derangement of chair and table had long ago been made good. And marks of scuffed heels on the pile of the carpet would have…