Ten Lords A-Leaping: A Mystery Part 13

"As I indicated, I was given a scorecard earlier."

"... our father's disastrous investment on Baisse in the West Indies, where I was born, incidentally." She paused in her application of cream. "Why don't you sit down? You're casting a shadow. Pull that sun lounger over here."

Tom chose instead a deck chair, which seemed less louche. Like his hosts, he judged sunbathing-or even the appearance of sunbathing-in the circ.u.mstances of family tragedy ill considered. With his free hand, he dragged the chair across the tiles, wood sc.r.a.ping paving stone, sensing her eyes resting on him rather like a cat's on a mouse. He felt uncommonly uncomfortable.

"I take it you're here to talk to me," Lucinda said as Tom settled himself into the chair. "Not take in the sun."

"Yes."

"About last night," she murmured throatily, resuming the application of sun cream.

"About the early morning."

"The early morning? Oh, do tell."

Tom took a cleansing breath. "You know, don't you, that I was the one who found your brother's-"

"Half brother."

"-half brother's ... body-"

"Yes."

"-in the centre of the Labyrinth. Well, in the short time before that I thought I saw-"

Lucinda looked at him expectantly. "Yes ...?"

Tom had paused. "You haven't had a conversation with the CID yet, have you?"

"No. I wasn't expecting to."

Tom raised an eyebrow. Can she be so ingenuous? "I don't doubt we'll all be interviewed by them before very long-helping them with their enquiries, as the saying goes."

"I can't think there's much I can tell them." Lucinda affected to stifle a yawn.

"Unfortunately, there are one or two things I may need to tell them."

"Really?" she drawled, popping her sungla.s.ses in place over her eyes.

"One of them," Tom persisted, "has to do with what I saw when I entered the Labyrinth-"

"Thought you saw, you said."

"Yes, all right, 'thought.' It was a head, the back of one, at any rate."

"Perhaps it was Egges...o...b..'s famous ghost."

"I'm told Egges...o...b..'s ghost is male," Tom responded, glancing at his own vexed reflection in her sungla.s.ses. "I'm fairly sure I saw the back of a woman's head."

"A woman's." Lucinda pushed the gla.s.ses down her nose. "Do you mean like mine?" She twisted on the sun lounger, exposing the mane of reddish blond hair parting gently to reveal a few wispy hairs on her neck.

Momentarily distracted-there was something so vulnerable about the back of a woman's neck-Tom could only murmur, "It was very early, the light was poor-"

"You think it may have been me." Lucinda twisted her body back round. "You must or you wouldn't have bothered to come all this way."

"I'm not saying that at all. I'm merely saying that I saw a woman."

"Thought you saw a woman."

"In either case, I feel duty-bound to say so, which means the police may ask certain ... questions-awkward questions-of the women at Egges...o...b... Well," Tom amended, "of all of us, really."

Lucinda lifted an editorial eyebrow. "Well, it couldn't have been me. I took a cup of coffee on the terrace about eleven and that was the first time I was out of doors today."

Tom found himself fidgeting with his wedding ring with rising embarra.s.sment. It occurred to him that in the midst of His innumerable concerns, G.o.d had paused to lend an interested ear. Helplessly, he glanced up at the sky, past the Gaze Tower, as if expecting the divine auricle to manifest itself among the wisps of clouds over Dartmoor, and saw only a lean figure-possibly Dominic from the white of his costume-leaning out of the tower's window looking their way. It didn't matter that Dominic lacked G.o.d's omniaudient attribute; Tom was made to feel uncomfortable anyway. He returned his eyes to Lucinda and said the words before he had any more time to think: "When did you leave my bed?"

Her lips parted in the beginning of a smile. "When? Why, Vicar, I haven't the foggiest. It was dark."

"And you returned to your room?"

"Ah, a trick question! But Jane has already told me she went looking for me early this morning and couldn't find me. I'll tell you what I told her-I was in Dominic's room." She pushed the sungla.s.ses back up the bridge of her nose. "I took a nightcap with me to Dominic's room after the party last night and fell asleep on the daybed in his room. And then, later, after we, you know ... I returned to his room."

"Why?"

"Why?" The question seemed to catch her unawares.

"You might have stayed with me."

"Is that something you would have wanted?"

Tom could feel a blush creep up his throat. Yes, d.a.m.n it, he very much liked to wake up with a woman, but he felt absurdly as if doing so breached some country house weekend etiquette.

"It occurred to me," she continued when he didn't reply, "that ... well, that you might not want your daughter to find us together. Children are known to barge into their parents' bedrooms, are they not?"

"Yes," he said, though he sensed she was improvising. He wasn't sure Miranda would know how to find the Opium Bedroom without a trail of bread crumbs.

"Anyway, you mustn't worry, Tom. I shall swear I was with Dominic all night-should I have to, of course. Your secret is safe with me. Now, would you be a lamb and rub some cream on my back?"

"No," Tom responded more vehemently than he intended.

"No? How very unkind."

"I meant, you must be forthright with the police." Though he realised his response lacked honesty-he didn't at all look forward to anyone knowing.

"Must I?"

"If you want your brother's-your half brother's killer found."

"I'm not sure I do. Or care, really. A lot less Olly in the world is purely beneficial as far as I can see."

"You can't mean that."

"But I do."

"A human life has been s.n.a.t.c.hed away," Tom protested. "He was to marry. He is expecting a child!"

"I meant beneficial to me, Vicar." Her mouth twisted unevenly. "Olly has dominated and bullied the family Trust in the years since our father died and mismanaged what's left of the estate terribly. Georgie has no idea what's been going on. She likes to keep her head in the sand, but then in marrying Hector she has the wherewithal to do so. Olly's been selling properties like mad without any discussion, looting Morborne House while my mother and I have been away-and, Dominic told me this weekend, putting up fake pictures in their place. Dom thinks he's been doing it for years! Then Olly said he was going to sell the house itself, claiming the Trust can't afford the costs of maintaining it and the money is best placed elsewhere. But what he really wanted was the house to himself and Serena, who needs to have her head examined for a.s.senting to marry him. 'It's a Trust decision,' he always said." She popped her gla.s.ses down her nose again and fixed him with her gaze. "I shouldn't bore you with this, because it is such a bore! But I got back from visiting mother in Cap Ferrat on Friday to find the locks on the house had been changed. He claimed to me yesterday we had received notice to vacate the house by August first. We received no such notice. My mother has a life right to the use of Morborne House, according to the terms of Daddy's will, and that only changes if she remarries."

"Is she? Remarrying?"

Lucinda looked away. "No. Well, not yet. Anyway, I've only the clothes in my suitcases, you know. Everything else is in Morborne House. Olly's rendered me homeless. And worse ... !" She paused. "I suppose all this could const.i.tute motive, couldn't it? I might be a character in one of those country house murder-mystery weekend thingies-which I shouldn't be surprised is on offer at Riseley Castle." She held out her hands. "But for these." She wiggled her slim fingernails tipped with the faintest pink varnish. "I don't think these could strangle a man, do you?"

Twitching with the memory of those hands running down his back, Tom failed to respond immediately. Her hands were not flaccid mittens. They were strong hands; Lucinda was fit, gym-toned. But her hands were a woman's hands, and besides ...

"Well, do you?" She broke into his thoughts.

"Lord Morborne was strangled with a ligature of some nature," he said dumbly, still remembering her hands.

"Really? I didn't know." Lucinda shifted on the sun lounger. "What exactly?"

"It's not clear."

"You mean whatever was used hasn't been found?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

Lucinda's lips formed a thoughtful moue. Then she flicked her head suddenly, as if alerted by a movement in her peripheral vision. She put her hand to her brow to shield her eyes and stared up to the Gaze Tower. "Is that Dominic?"

"I believe so. He's been up there awhile."

"Dominic!" Lucinda called and waved. "Come down from there! Come here!"

Tom watched as Dominic leaned from the opening, his hand cupping his ear. Lucinda shouted again, but Dominic shook his head.

"He can't hear me. Pity. I'd have him put sun cream on my back." She flicked Tom a sardonic glance.

Tom watched her take up the sun cream once again and continue her toilette, spreading the white liquid along her legs in strong strokes. The front of her was now almost unashamedly glistening with sun cream-a sunblocking SPF 90, he noted, wondering at the point of lying in the sun if you didn't wish to encourage a bit of a tan. An aroma of coconut and Bounty bars wafted in the tepid breeze to his nostrils, redolent of bucket-and-spade holidays on the Isle of Wight with his mothers. One summer they had gone to the south of France, when he was about Miranda's age. Not Cap Ferrat, though. Somewhere much less grand.

"What might be worse than homelessness?" he asked, his mind returned to their earlier conversation.

"A philosophical question?"

"No, earlier, when you said your ... half brother had rendered you basically homeless, you alluded to a worse condition."

"Oh." She regarded him steadily, arrested in her movements. "There's something about you that makes me want to tell secrets. What is it?"

"I've been told I have a kindly face." Tom laughed for the first time that day. "Or that people think priests are of necessity discreet."

"Aren't they?"

"I am."

"Well, then ..." She restored the cap to the bottle. "Illegitimacy is worse. Oliver had it in his fat melon that our father did not properly divorce his mother, thereby making our father's marriage to my mother bigamous and illegal. Which in turn would make me a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. From there, he could challenge my right-and my mother's-as beneficiaries of the Trust, and deny us our t.i.tles."

"That seems malicious."

"That is precisely Oliver fforde-Beckett. I'm sure that as a child he pulled the wings off flies."

"Is there any foundation to his belief? I would have to say that when I glanced at an entry on the Morborne marquessate on the Internet a few weeks ago, my eyes did pa.s.s the words bigamous marriage."

"It's absolute nonsense. Uncle Anthony-Dominic's father-made the accusation years ago, at the time of the trials, but there was no proof. Anthony insisted that our father-Olly and Georgie's and mine-married my mother before he was properly divorced from Olly and Georgie's mother, Christina-that there had been a secret wedding on Baisse and so on. The High Court dismissed it. Oliver claims now that he had been rummaging recently through some of Daddy's old papers he'd collected when he was wrapping up our father's affairs in Baisse six years ago and found something that proves Uncle Anthony's claim, which is rubbish. Anyway-he chose to spring this on me some weeks ago, before I joined Mummy in Cap Ferrat. He was gleeful! It was a b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sault! Mummy was properly outraged when I told her. It's one of the reasons I returned from France when I did. I wanted to know what Olly's been up to."

"But surely, others ..." Tom cast about for an explanation. "Oliver's mother, for instance, wouldn't she have knowledge of this?"

"Pooh! Christina had already ingratiated herself with the richest man in Central America and was set to marry him. He has absolute br.i.m.m.i.n.g pots of money. She wasn't that bothered by divorcing Daddy, and I don't think she would be at all pleased with Olly's recent busywork. But then Olly loathed his mother's remarriage as much as he loathed his father's. For someone who's spread himself about and lived so immoderately, he can ... could be surprisingly middle-cla.s.s in his conventions. The hypocrisy of it all. He's treated me all my life-and Dominic, too-as if somehow his parents' estrangement was our fault. All the nonsense with Daddy's divorce from Christina happened before I was born!" She looked towards the Gaze Tower, its summit now empty. "It's Dominic who suffered the most. His father went to bits when our mother left to marry his own brother. Before he was packed off to boarding school, his nanny and the Gaunts were mother and father and whatever. There's Gaunt now."

"The Gaunts?" Tom asked as they both looked past the brick wall to where Dominic and Gaunt appeared to be in conversation at the base of the tower.

"Funny they should be working for Georgie and Hector now, but then it is awfully hard to find good help. Uncle Tony, Dominic's father, you see, retained custody of Dominic. He had enough pluck to do that, at least, before he descended into drink. He drowned, you know, in the Indian Ocean. They really shouldn't let an alcoholic sail around the world alone."

"Then surely your mother would have then taken over your brother's care."

"Dominic's? Oh, nominally. He was at boarding school for most of the year, of course, and came to us in London or Baisse on holidays. I adore Mummy, I do, but really, a b.i.t.c.h sow would be better at mothering. She never quite got the hang of it." She smiled. "Now I've told you much too much about the fforde-Becketts. Of course, I know in the circ.u.mstances you'll be discreet. As-" She paused and narrowed her eyes. "-shall I."

Her meaning was not lost on Tom. She would not embarra.s.s him about their a.s.signation, if he did not air the fforde-Becketts' dirty laundry. He moved to leave, uncertain if he had spent the time usefully, when Lucinda interrupted: "Whatever can they be talking about? Dominic!" she called again as the two men began walking away from the base of the Gaze Tower. Dominic heard this time. He waved in her direction absently and the two men disappeared past a row of trees.

"Oh, well." Lucinda sighed. "Are you sure you won't take a dip, Tom? You don't really need a bathing costume, you know. I shan't really be surprised by anything, shall I?"

"I have no towel," Tom pointed out, growing a little tired of her flirtation. "And the water probably wouldn't do the bandage good." He gripped the ends of the chair preparatory to heaving himself up, casting about for a polite excuse to make his exit, when Dominic pushed through the gate in the wall and strode towards them.

"According to Gaunt, we are to a.s.semble in the great hall at four thirty," he announced without preliminaries. "Hullo, Vicar."

"We? Me and thee?" Lucinda searched Dominic's face. With his eyes covered by sungla.s.ses, he appeared expressionless.

"Thee, me ... he." Dominic gestured at Tom. "All of us, except Maximilian and ..."

"Miranda," Tom supplied.

"Marve and Roberto?" Lucinda continued to search his face.

"Apparently."

"I suppose it's the police who want us at this a.s.sembly."

Dominic nodded.

"A summons, then. I'm not sure I care to be summoned." Lucinda lifted her watch and frowned at it. "I had planned to stay here well into the c.o.c.ktail hour." She glanced to the summer sky, scrimmed by a few high white clouds, and sighed. "I should never have left Cap Ferrat."

Dominic lifted his sungla.s.ses to his forehead and regarded her thoughtfully. "No, perhaps you shouldn't have."