Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery Part 17

"We found a wonderful old croquet set under the stairs at the vicarage last summer, so croquet has become all the rage at ours. Miranda has grown quite skilled at it." He paused as Max aligned his feet before his ball and considered the scene, the manicured lawn, the neatly trimmed boundary hedge, the undulating roof of Egges...o...b.. Hall peeking above the trees. "It's lovely to have a garden where she can play games. In Bristol, our back garden was a postage stamp."

"Oh, bad luck," Jane murmured as Maximillian's blue ball stalled in front of the wicket.

"Worse luck," Tom added in a lower voice after a moment when Miranda's red ball, a dead cert to bash Max's and push on through the wicket, tiddled feebly across the short gra.s.s to a sad halt an inch in front of the blue ball. "She seems to have gone off her game suddenly."

"Dominic!" Lucinda called across the lawn, diverting their attention to the silhouetted figure under a tree conversing with Gaunt, who had earlier arrived with a drinks trolley. "Your turn."

Dominic waved a dismissive hand and continued talking to Gaunt as the latter shook a c.o.c.ktail shaker.

"I'm told the Gaunts were once staff to Dominic's father," Tom said in a low voice as they waited. He glanced at Marguerite in a wicker sun chair some few feet away from Dominic and Gaunt. She appeared to be sleeping behind a pair of sungla.s.ses.

Jane swung her mallet idly. "Yes, Georgie mentioned that to me. I think she was a little reluctant to employ them because of their a.s.sociation with the family during an unhappier time, but, well, you know the old saw ..."

"Yes-It's so hard to find good help these days."

"Don't laugh. It is sometimes. But the Gaunts had excellent references from the Arouzis and of course with Hector's previous staff having run off to Malta with their lottery winnings, he and Georgie were pretty much up against it." Jane stopped in her mallet swinging. "Tom?"

"Yes?"

"I've been thinking about something else: DI Bliss's remark that Oliver's mobile is missing."

"I'd been having the same thought: If Oliver's phone has gone walkabout, and if Hector really did remove something from Oliver's pockets this morning, as I suspect he did, then isn't it logical that Hector took his phone? Unless Oliver left it at that barmaid's cottage."

"You haven't spoken about this to the police yet?"

"No, as I said before, I'd prefer to have a quiet word with Hector first. At least now I've a better idea what he may have taken."

"Hector's in hot water anyway, I think." Jane glanced over the croquet lawn towards Dominic. "Well, I suppose it would have come out before very long in any case. Someone would have mentioned it."

"Most likely," Tom murmured, though he thought Dominic needn't have made quite such a show of it-It being a video clip of Hector and Oliver's sky-high punch-up, which had slipped through the sluice gates of social media with the usual unseemly haste. When DI Bliss had exited to attend to the matter of the demanding intruder, Blessing had remained, a damper to ordinary conversation. In the awkward pause, Dominic had pulled his mobile from his pocket, and Tom had watched his face s.h.i.+ft from detachment to curiosity to amus.e.m.e.nt as his fingers danced over the screen.

"Look at this, Hector," he'd said, pa.s.sing the instrument, "you've come a cropper on YouTube. Thirty thousand views and it's not yet five in the afternoon."

Lord Fairhaven's face suffused with blood and his nostrils flared as his eyes held steady to the instrument, provoking his wife to a tentative enquiry as to his health.

"This is an outrage!" Hector thrust the phone back into Dominic's hands. "It's CCTV-closed-circuit television. How could it possibly-"

"Easy enough to copy and upload, Hector," Dominic said with a shrug. "Hector and Olly's bout of fisticuffs up there," he announced to everyone, gesturing with his thumb, "is now online."

"You needn't take quite so much pleasure in it, Dominic," Jamie said.

"I am not taking pleasure."

"You are."

"I'm simply preparing Hector for the coming brouhaha. It will be on television next. Are you still intending to stand for Parliament, Hector?"

"Perhaps you can have it pulled off the Internet somehow," Jamie addressed Hector, who appeared mute with anger.

"Not b.l.o.o.d.y likely," Dominic muttered as everyone, as if pulled by invisible strings, turned to DS Blessing to gauge his reaction to this episode. He looked up from his notebook, as if the same string had yanked at him. The Grand Guignol smile he cast them actually softened his homeliness.

"And what were Your Lords.h.i.+ps fighting about?" he asked.

"None of your b.l.o.o.d.y business," Hector snarled.

But Tom thought now, as they waited for the match to resume, it very well was their b.l.o.o.d.y business.

"Dominic," Lucinda called again.

"Play through!"

"You can't 'play through' in croquet! Where did he get 'play through'?" Lucinda appealed to Tom and Jane. She had a mallet in one hand and a gla.s.s of something pink in the other. "This isn't golf!"

"You hit it then."

"My dear chap, that is not on," Max shouted.

Dominic stepped quickly across the lawn, mallet in hand. Using a quick side-style swing, he sent his black ball rocketing towards the boundary hedge before returning to Gaunt, who was pouring some liquid into a tall gla.s.s.

"Perhaps we stand a chance after all," Tom remarked to Jane, as Max groaned in disgust. "Your turn."

He watched Lady Kirkbride position her mallet and send her yellow ball trailing over the short gra.s.s, hitting Lucinda's green ball with a satisfying click, sending them both scooting through the wicket.

"A roquet," Jane said, gripping her mallet, "two bonus shots! I'm afraid I have you now, Lucy fforde-Beckett," she added with evident relish, resting her shod foot on her ball and sending Lucinda's boundary-bound with a quick flash of her mallet. The ball came to rest under the hedge.

"What a s.h.i.+t you are, darling Jane Allan," Lucy said without malice, raising her c.o.c.ktail to her lips.

"Croquet is a metaphor for life," Jane declared, lining up her next shot. "It occupies a middle ground between sophistication and savagery. Like the upper cla.s.ses," she whispered to Tom, then raised her voice: "I read that somewhere."

"Then I am in the slough of despond." Lucinda took another sip. "But-ha!" She laughed as Jane's stroke failed to send the ball through the next wicket. "Tables may turn."

"Tables may," Jane responded with light humour as Lucinda handed her gla.s.s to Max and glided over the gra.s.s to claim her ball.

"Everyone is lying ... or maybe dissembling is the word." Jane presented a furrowed brow to Tom as she resumed their earlier conversation. "Even me. Maybe I've lived in England too many years. You English are all great dissemblers, you know. Putting on false appearances, concealing facts or intentions or feelings under some pretense or other."

"One of my mothers is American. That lets me half off the hook, perhaps." Tom smiled. "Then what are you dissembling about?"

"I did see something from my bedroom window, Tom. Or at least I think I did. The thunder woke me from a dream, so wisps of the dream may have been clinging to me, but I thought I saw a figure down on the lawn near the parked cars. There's a motion-sensor light there."

"Your bedroom faces north?"

"Yes, towards the moor."

"Did you recognise the figure?"

Jane lowered her voice to a near whisper. "Not at the time. I looked down and thought, oh, someone is checking the drainpipes-the kind of dopey thing you think when you're half asleep. I remember seeing my father do it once, when I was girl, and we had a fierce storm in the middle of the night. But our house was tiny, and Egges...o...b.. is huge-I have no idea how water drains, and the staff are on holiday anyway and wouldn't check drains at night in any case."

"Then ...?"

"Hector. I'd forgotten what I saw, as you do when you awaken in the middle of the night, but then when Jamie and I came across him in the Labyrinth in that white robe, I suddenly remembered what I thought I'd seen."

"What will you do?"

"I don't know. Is it anything meaningful?" Jane swung her mallet absently. "What I thought I saw-if I really saw anything at all-might have been some time before Olly returned to Egges...o...b... I didn't look at a clock-"

"The Met might have times for the storm activity on the moor."

"-and I'm loath to drop Hector in the soup. He's part of my husband's family and they've had more than their share of trouble. Georgie's baby strangled; Georgie, Oliver, and Lucy's father falling and hitting his head playing tennis; Dominic's father drowning on that insane solo round-the-world sailing venture; now Olly murdered. They're not a family for dying in their beds. My husband's a sweetheart, but my detecting efforts make him a little cross sometimes. He's a bit old-fas.h.i.+oned when it comes to women's careers, but my failure to be of any use over his brother's murder years ago, when I had had successes elsewhere, I think has put him off my sticking my nose in."

They paused to watch Lucinda's shot, which ably took her green ball almost the width of the court and-amazingly-through the next wicket at a challenging angle.

"Ha! I told you tables would turn," she called to Tom and Jane, taking her gla.s.s from Max for a quick sip before addressing the ball to take her bonus shot.

"And," Jane frowned, "I find Lucinda's story about spending the entire night with Dominic not entirely convincing, don't you?"

Tom started. "Well ..."

"She wasn't in her room when I went looking for her this morning, but her bed had been slept in at some point. Besides, I know the room Dominic was a.s.signed. It's in what they used to call the bachelors' corridor. The bed isn't large, and there's no daybed, as far as I can remember. They might have spent some time in his room after the party last night, I suppose, but all of it?" She shrugged. "They're really thick as thieves, the two of them. Which is fascinating since Charlotte essentially abandoned Dominic's father-and Dominic-to marry his brother. You'd think resentment would have thrived like weeds. Anyway, they were probably in Dominic's room hatching a scheme of some nature." A look of horror flashed across Jane's face. "I didn't mean-"

"I know."

"Your turn, Tom," Jane said as Lucinda's ball failed to achieve further glory.

Gingerly, Tom planted his feet into a straddle before his ball, thinking that his ankle really did feel much healed. The shooting pains had almost vanished. But somehow the cast boot made his play awkward.

"Don't put too much pressure on it yet," Marguerite cautioned from the sideline.

"I thought Marve was having a pre-dinner nap," Jane muttered, as Tom scored the wicket, but achieved nothing on the next. His orange ball piddled to a rest in the middle of nowhere.

"I used to be half decent at sport," he said, as Max called from up the court, "Poor show, Mr. Christmas."

"I'm not sure this is a sport," Jane commented. "More a game."

They watched Maximilian ably smack the ball through the wicket and claim a bonus shot.

"That's better," Jane observed of the boy's play.

Miranda was next. Her ball missed the wicket.

"Oh!" Tom exclaimed, disappointed. "That's not my girl."

"She's usually much better?"

"Much."

"Where do we learn to do this?" Jane sighed.

"Learn to do what?"

"I think your daughter's letting Max win."

"Perhaps she's simply being a gracious guest."

"Perhaps. But have you considered that she may be developing an interest in boys?"

"May I keep my head firmly rooted in the sand?"

Dominic now returned to the court after retrieving his black ball from the hedge where it had earlier landed. His shot sent Miranda's ball out of bounds.

"I remember letting a boy beat me at badminton when I was thirteen," Jane mused. "My mother told me to never give less than my best. So I did, and boys were still interested anyway, so it was good advice."

"Moments like this when I miss her mother."

"Shall I say something to her? I could even say it en francais. Few of them understand a word of French, even though some of them summer in France."

"You're too kind. But I'll have a word."

"I'm up." Jane moved a few feet up the lawn and took a stroke. Her ball hit the upright, trapping itself in the jaws of the wicket. "Oh, d.a.m.n.

"As well," she continued, glancing back to Marguerite, her mind seemingly tethered to their earlier conversation. "Something's not square at the dower house. I think we both caught Marve's ..."

"Dissembling?"

"Yes, I think so-her dissembling about Roberto being with her last night, though he said at his studio this morning that he had worked all night on his sculpture."

"Not all night."

"No, Marve was insistent it wasn't all night." Her eyebrows shot up. "I don't know what that means. But there's something else, Tom. You recall I cleared the table in Marve's kitchen?"

"Yes."

"I cleared three place settings, not two. I don't know if you noticed."

"I noticed you noticing something."

"There were plates and cups and cutlery for three. Marve suggested Roberto had breakfasted alone, after she'd gone into the village, which may be true. If so, who was the person Marve breakfasted with? Who else might have been at the dower house this morning? Who else was in Egges...o...b.. Park so early in the morning?"

"One could ask."

Jane flicked a worried glance at the dowager countess. "Marve is the last person I want to believe has any connection to this terrible death. It would be like finding out my mother-in-law is a cat burglar. I adore my mother-in-law. She's the only one in Jamie's family possessed of pure common sense. But," she added after a pause, "she is highly protective of those she-"

"Come on, you two," Lucy broke in, "pay attention. It's your shot, Vicar."

Tom glanced down the court to see Lucinda's ball inches from the fourth wicket. He regarded his hedgehog, but his flamingo wasn't up to the task. His orange ball veered pointlessly to one side.

"Oh, Daddy!" Miranda called.

"Sorry, darling, I'm not in top form today. Perhaps," he murmured to Jane, "I should ask Lady Fairhaven to take my place."