‘Interesting. His last meal was rabbit in cream-and-mustard sauce?’
She nodded.
‘And you prepared it all yourself?’
‘That’s right. I bought the cream in the market, along with the mustard seeds. The gardener provided the rabbit himself. It was still warm, so I knew it had only just been killed.’
Sherlock racked his brains for something else to ask. Nothing sprang to mind. He looked at the woman as she sat there on the hard metal bench, her face tearful, grief-stricken, and yet hopeful. She was depending on him to prove her innocent, just as Amyus and Virginia Crowe, Matty Arnatt and Rufus Stone were depending on him. He couldn’t let them down, but he couldn’t see how Aggie Macfarlane could be anything else but guilty. If what she had told him was true, then Sherlock couldn’t see any way that the meal could have been poisoned. Yet if Aggie Macfarlane was guilty, wouldn’t she have given him a story that provided some chance that the food might have been poisoned by someone else? She was likely to be convicted and hanged because of her own honesty.
‘I need to see the house,’ he said lamely, ‘to look at the scene of . . . of the crime. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know.’
He left her there, in the cell, staring after him with newly kindled hope in her eyes.
He told Dunlow and Brough that he wanted to visit Sir Benedict Ventham’s manor house next. They raised their eyebrows, but they set off without a word.
The journey took another twenty minutes. Sherlock checked his watch at least five times, counting the minutes and the seconds.
They turned off the road and into a driveway that curved up to a large, forbidding house. Instead of stopping at the front, the carriage kept going, past the house and down a side road to the back.
‘Servants’ entrance,’ Dunlow explained.
They got out of the carriage, and with Dunlow in the lead and Brough bringing up the rear they walked towards a door at the back of the house. It opened as they got to it. A tall, thin man with a pencil moustache stood there, looking at them. He was dressed in striped trousers and a black jacket. His left cheek appeared to be slightly swollen, and Sherlock wondered if he had been in the middle of eating something when they turned up.
‘What in heaven’s name are you two doing here?’ he hissed. ‘I’ve paid your employer his blood money this week. Get out of here!’
‘Macfarlane wants this kid here to see the place where Sir Benedict died.’
‘This is not a tourist attraction,’ the man said. ‘We do not conduct sightseeing tours.’
‘Are the police here?’
The butler shook his head. ‘They said they already have everything they need.’
‘Then there’s no reason you can’t show us the room where your boss died, and the kitchen where the meal was prepared. Or do you want to explain to my boss that you don’t want to?’
The butler hesitated. He looked at Sherlock. ‘Just the boy, then, and only for a few minutes. No more than that.’
Dunlow looked at Sherlock.
‘That should be enough,’ Sherlock said.
The butler led the way into the house, moving from the servants’ area, where the walls needed painting and the carpet was threadbare, to the main part of the house, where the paint was immaculate and the carpets were so thick and so comfortable it was like walking on clouds. He led Sherlock into the main hall. A grandfather clock was set against one wall. It ticked loudly, counting down the seconds. The butler turned to one side, into a dining room. Sherlock noticed that he was chewing something.
‘This was where Sir Benedict died,’ the butler said. He nodded to a chair at the head of the table. ‘Sitting there, he was.’
The smell of tobacco drifted across to Sherlock as the butler spoke. That explained the swollen cheek – he was chewing tobacco.
‘Who brought the food in?’ Sherlock asked. He already had the cook’s answer, but he wanted to check that she had told him the truth.
‘Aggie Macfarlane.’ The butler’s lips wrinkled. ‘Very close to Sir Benedict, she was. Too close, if you ask me. She came in carrying the plate like everything was normal, but she knew that there was poison in it.’
‘You’re sure she poisoned the food?’ Sherlock asked.
The butler scowled. ‘Who else could have done it?’ he asked.
That was a fair question, and Sherlock was asking himself the same thing. ‘What about the plate?’ he asked. ‘Could the plate have been coated with poison?’
The butler paused before answering, and Sherlock noticed that he was shifting the chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘The cook had strict instructions always to wash the plate just before she dished up the meal,’ he said eventually. ‘Everybody was aware of that. There would be no point in poisoning the plate.’ He paused, thinking. ‘And I was told that the police fed a dog with some of the food – not from the plate, but from the oven dish she’d cooked it in. The dog died. That surely must mean that it was the food that was poisoned, not the plate.’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock said slowly, ‘but that means the food was poisoned before it was cooked. Why poison the food and then cook it? The poison might be destroyed by the heat of the oven. It makes more sense to put the poison on the food after you’ve served it up.’ He felt a little flutter of excitement in his chest. This was the first real evidence he had that Aggie Macfarlane might actually be innocent. It wasn’t enough to clear her name with the police, but it suggested to Sherlock that he was on the right track.
The clock in the hall made a sudden noise as the cogs and gears inside shifted. Sherlock glanced at its face. He needed to be on the right track.
‘I need to go to the kitchen,’ he said.
‘Follow me.’
As they walked back through to the servants’ area he checked his watch. Ten thirty in the morning. Two and a half hours left – and half an hour of that would be wasted in getting back to Macfarlane’s warehouse. He was running out of time.
The kitchen was almost identical to the one at Holmes Manor – a large table in the centre stained with years of use, a big range with plenty of oven doors, a dresser stacked with plates and dishes, a rack hanging from the ceiling where the bodies of pheasants and rabbits dangled, a large, square sink . . . all the usual paraphernalia of the culinary arts. There were no dirty plates or food-encrusted saucepans – either Aggie had tidied up as she went along or she hadn’t been arrested straight away.
He wasn’t going to learn anything here.
‘The rabbit that was poisoned,’ he said. ‘I need to see where it was caught.’
‘That,’ the butler sniffed, ‘is not my area of expertise. My domain is indoors, not out. I will fetch the gardener.’ He walked across to a door that led outside, to the garden, and opened it. He spat the tobacco out of his mouth in a brown stream that hit the ground to one side of the door and called, ‘Hendricks! Come here!’
The butler turned back to Sherlock. ‘Hendricks will answer any more questions you might have. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a new position to seek.’
He walked off, leaving Sherlock alone. Sherlock stood there, in the kitchen doorway, gazing out on the well-tended garden, aware of the dark odour of the tobacco rising up from where the butler had spat it out. He felt slightly sick at the smell. He couldn’t see the point in tobacco – either smoking it or chewing it. They were disgusting habits. He had no intention of doing either when he grew up.
A figure appeared at the end of the path, through a gap in the hedge. He was in his forties, with short salt-and-pepper hair and beard, dressed in a dark green jacket and moleskin trousers. ‘Did someone call?’ His voice was a rich Scottish brogue, completely unlike the butler’s strangled accent.