Seen together, the Earl and his son were absurdly alike. Seen sitting between his father and mother, Lord Henry would have done for an illustration for one of Mr. Mendel’s textbooks on hereditary characteristics. He had her skin, his colouring, the Cremond nose, her vague manner, his mannerisms.
Lady Eleanor, their daughter, who was there too, was less certainly a Cremond in appearance. More definite than her mother, less pessimistic than her father, more practical than either, she had been leavened by a vein of common sense in sheer reaction to a mother as distrait as hers.
The four of them were in the sitting-room of the Private Apartments. They looked like a tableau vivant of a family.
Until the Earl spoke.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “It’s not like William not to be short of money.”
“No,” agreed Lord Henry.
“Always has been.”
“Yes.”
“Should have thought he always would be.”
“Yes.”
“After all, there’s no reason for him to change.” The Earl pulled his moustache and corrected himself. “There’s no reason that we know of for him to change.”
“No.”
“His father was the same. Never a bean.”
Henry nodded.
“My father,” went on the Earl gloomily, “had to support his father or else see m’sister starve. Couldn’t do that.”
“No.”
“And you, my boy, will probably have to support his children.”
“Yes.”
“Can’t let them starve either. Not family.”
“ ’Course not,” murmured Lord Henry.
“But William isn’t married yet, dear,” said the Countess.
“He should be,” retorted her husband cryptically.
The Countess looked blank.
“More than once,” added her husband.
“Harry, what do you mean?”
“A roving eye,” said the Earl warmly, “that’s what that young man’s got. And no money to go with it.”
“But he hasn’t got any children, dear, surely.”
“Their mothers say he has.”
“No!”
“I understand,” said the Earl drily, “that there have been several unsuccessful attempts to get him as far as the altar.”
“You mean…” A wave of comprehension swept over Millicent Ornum’s face.
“I do. Paternity and maintenance.”
“Well, really, Harry, I do think that’s the…”
“Mother, there’s no use making a fuss now,” Eleanor interrupted her realistically. “After all, it comes from our side of the family.”
“Eleanor!”
“Well, it does. Aunt Elizabeth wasn’t known as Bad Betty for nothing.”
This was too much for the Countess. She appealed to her husband.
“Harry, I don’t need to remind you that your father would never have her name mentioned in this house as long as he lived.”
“True, my dear, very true.” The Earl’s hand sought solace by his moustache. “Perhaps he was wiser than we knew. It does seem to lead to trouble. Shall I apply a similar interdiction?”
But by then his wife had caught up with an earlier imputation.
“Eleanor.”
“Yes, Mother?”
“William’s mother was not on our side of the family.”
“She was…”
“She was on your father’s side, which is different.”
This being true of all families, noble and otherwise, Eleanor did not debate it. “Yes, Mother,” she said obediently.
“I must say it’s not like William not to be on his beam ends by the time he comes down to Ornum,” Lord Henry changed the subject with the deftness of long experience.
“I don’t like it,” reiterated the Earl. “I don’t like it at all.”
Lord Henry, who lacked a moustache to tug, instead fondled the tassel of the chair cushion. “Laura and Gertrude don’t exactly hit it off, do they?”
“Never have,” said his father. “Difficult woman, Gertrude.”
“Laura’s no peacemaker either,” said Eleanor.
“Rather not,” agreed Henry. He cleared his throat. “She and Miles were late for dinner on Friday.”
“I noticed,” said the Earl heavily.
“And she went to bed uncommonly early.”
“I know.” A permanent air of melancholy seemed to have settled on the Earl of Ornum.
“They’re staying on—Miles and Laura, I mean,” said the Countess, “because of this business about poor Mr. Meredith, and Dillow’s not having his day off today because of all the reporters coming.”
There was a moment’s gloomy silence, and then:
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” said Lady Eleanor.
Her brother looked up. “What’s that?”
“Something that no one seems to have thought about,” said Lady Eleanor. “We all think poor Ossy was murdered because he knew something.”
“Yes…”
“What we don’t know is why someone went to all that trouble to put him in the armour.”
“To stop him being found,” said Lord Henry promptly. “His sister is away. He isn’t going to be really missed for ages.”
“Exactly.” Eleanor waved a hand. “That’s what I mean. He might not have been found for days.”
“So?”
“So the delay was important. That’s right, Father, isn’t it?”
The Earl sighed. “I’m afraid so, my dear.”
“Why?” asked Lord Henry immediately.
“I don’t know.”
Every now and then Millicent Ornum came into the conversation with a remark that proved she had been listening.
She did so now.
“I expect,” she said brightly, “it’s because of something that hasn’t happened yet.”
11
« ^ »
Inspector Sloan telephoned Charles Purvis, the Steward, at Ornum as soon as he could.
“You’ll be having some visitors at the House today,” he said.
“If you mean the Press,” responded Purvis promptly, “they’re here now.”
Sloan hadn’t meant the Press. “No, the Vicar. I want him to be there when we open up the armoury again, and some people from our Forensic Laboratory. They’ll want to examine the Library and the Muniments Room and so on…”
“Very well, Inspector. I’ll see that they are allowed in.”
“And the County Archivist.”
“Ah…”
“With the Earl’s permission, that is. We’ve asked him to come over from the County Record Office at Calleford to examine the Muniments for us.”
“He’ll come all right,” said Charles Purvis cheerfully. “Like a shot.”
“Oh?”
“He’s been trying to get a really good look at them for years, only Meredith would never let him.”
“Really?” Sloan tucked that fact away in his mind, too. “And I would like to see the four regular guides to the House, please. The ones who took people round this weekend.”
Purvis promised to arrange this with them straightaway. “About eleven o’clock suit you for that, then, Inspector?”
Sloan said that would do very nicely and rang off.
Then for the second time P.C. Crosby drove him out to Ornum. On this occasion they stopped first in the village itself.
Cremond Cottages was a neat little row of four dwellings, with the initials h.c. carved into a small tablet in the middle over the date 1822. Though it was by no means early by the time they knocked on the door of number four, William Murton had not yet shaved.
“Ah, gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to my humble home.” There was the faintest of ironic stresses on the word “humble.” He ushered them in. “I thought you’d be along sooner or later.”
The downstairs rooms of the cottage had been knocked together into one and decorated in a manner more redolent of Town than country. There was a painting hanging over the fireplace that Sloan took to be an abstract. There was a large eye in one corner of it; the rest was an unidentifiable mixture of colour and design.