Magic most deadly, p.6
Magic Most Deadly, page 6
That left young Spencer, both of the vicar’s sons, Sir Bertram Grimes, and Saunders as possible suspects among the house party guests alone. That didn’t even begin to cover the people who were there only for the dance.
Len was inclined to think the murderer must have been a gentleman in social standing, though clearly not in behavior, simply by the way he spoke and carried himself, so he didn’t think he needed to worry about adding the servants to his suspect list, though as potential witnesses they were invaluable—they saw everything and were rarely noticed by others. He’d set Becket to learning all he could from them, which wasn’t much, given the work they all had clearing things up after the dance and seeing to their masters and mistresses.
By four in the morning Len had enough, and he finally crawled into bed to get what little sleep he could for what remained of the night. He was awakened about two hours later by a housemaid’s shrill scream.
Screams, in Len’s experience, usually meant immediate danger and the need for a quick escape. He shot upright, leapt out of bed, snatched up his dressing gown and jammed his feet into his slippers, and was halfway down the hall before his brain caught up with him and he realized this particular scream was not likely to indicate enemies were after him.
Little Oaks didn’t have a guest wing, as so many great houses did, but rather the entire back side of the first floor was given over to spare bedrooms. Len’s was on the far right as one faced the house, the side closest to the gardens, with a window that looked out over lawn toward the woods that separated Little Oaks from Stanbury Manor, home of Miss Whitney. Next to his room was a shared bathroom, and then another bedroom, this one occupied by Freddie Winters. Judging by the lack of alarmed or irritated heads poking out of the other bedroom doors, including Freddie’s, Len came to the brilliant conclusion that the housemaid’s scream must have been uttered directly beneath his open window, which was why he heard it when no one else had.
Therefore it behooved him to make his way down to the ground floor and thence to the gardens, to see whether her scream had been caused by an overeager visiting valet trying to steal an early morning kiss, or something rather more serious.
And wouldn’t he feel like a fool if it was the former!
He arrived in the garden at the same time as Julia, Dan, and the formidable housekeeper Mrs. Blackwood, all in various stages of dress and irritation.
But all other considerations were driven out of their minds when they saw what had caused the housemaid, still standing frozen in terror with a bucket of water clutched tightly in her hands, to scream.
A dead body, sprawled facedown between the rosebushes.
In addition to the shock and horror the others were, presumably, experiencing, Len also felt a deep sense of incredulity. Even without seeing the face he could tell this was the same dead body he had left in the woods not seven hours previously, to be reported by Miss Whitney to the police. How, then, had it ended up here? And when?
And, dash it all, why?
Most importantly of all, what was he supposed to do about it?
Upon seeing her employers, a guest, and the housekeeper, the maid dropped the bucket and began to sob. Len stifled a curse and jumped back as the water spilled and seeped toward the toes of his slippers.
As though it were a signal, the clang of the bucket released everyone’s tongues and movements.
Mrs. Blackwood said, “Hush, girl! What will the gentry think?”
Julia, a trifle pale but otherwise in good control of herself, said, “Daniel darling, am I going mad, or is that a corpse in our roses?”
Foy rubbed his chin and said, “God bless my soul!”
Len remembered his role and said, “I say, Foy, what’s all this?”
Foy looked at Len across Julia’s head, and as the two men’s eyes met Len saw that the other had a shrewd idea that Len’s image was just that—an image—and perhaps even that Len had better knowledge of the corpse than anyone else there.
Harrison must not have been as subtle as he thought in wangling this invitation for Len.
“Julia dearest,” Foy said gently, “go inside with Mrs. Blackwood and—what’s your name, my dear? Sarah?—and Sarah, please. Mrs. Blackwood, could you kindly see to it that Sarah and Mrs. Foy—and yourself, of course—have a cup of tea to help recover their nerves?” As Julia opened her mouth, presumably to protest that her nerves were fine, he added in an undertone, “I need you to keep the rest of the staff out of here until we know what’s happening, my love, as well as any other early rising guests.” Julia closed her mouth and nodded. “And ring the police to tell them we’ve found their missing body,” he finished.
Len’s head swiveled from the corpse to Foy. “I’m sorry, did you say the police’s missing body?” he demanded.
Foy waited until the ladies had retreated toward the house, Mrs. Blackwood leading the way, her back stiff with outrage, Julia with a comforting arm around the still-weeping maid. Then he said,
“Yes, it’s rather curious. Late last night, after most of the non-staying guests had left and the rest of you had toddled off to bed, we received a telephone call from the local police asking if we had an injured or dead man stashed away somewhere. It seemed someone had reported a body in the woods but when the police arrived nothing was there, and they thought perhaps it—or rather he—might have made its—his—way to Little Oaks as the closest residence. At the time, of course, the question seemed nonsensical, but now it looks as though there was something in it after all.”
“How peculiar,” Len said, feeling the inadequacy of the word. What the devil was going on?
“Isn’t it just,” Foy said, looking Len squarely in the eyes. He coughed and added, “I had best pop inside in case the police want to speak to me over the ‘phone. It’s a terrible imposition, I know, but since you’re already here, would you mind keeping an eye on things to make sure nobody interferes with the body? I don’t know much about how these things work, but I believe the police tend to get squiffy if people trample all over the scene of a crime. Even if the crime didn’t take place exactly here,” he added. “Unless moving a body from one spot to another is a crime. In any case, I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to.”
Len understood the unspoken message clearly. Foy was willing to give him space to do whatever his job entailed, but did not want to be involved more closely in any of it.
Fair enough—Len preferred it that way.
“Right-oh,” he said. “I’ll see to it the jolly old body doesn’t get up and wander away yet again before the police arrive. Dash it, you’d think the fellow didn’t want to be found, vanishing like that and popping up here! You can count on me, old chap.”
A half smile twisted Foy’s lips. “I’m sure I can.”
Then he, too, retreated back into the house, leaving Len alone for a few precious minutes before the police would arrive. It was early enough that it wasn’t likely any other guests would come wandering out, but he would still have to be careful in case of curious servants coming to see the sight.
No time to waste, then.
He couldn’t go closer to the body without leaving footprints in the soft loam around the flowers—there was no spell to lighten a man enough so that he would leave no sign of his passing, and while Len knew a spell to smooth the dirt after he was finished, that would eliminate any other useful prints that were there as well. No sense in making things simpler for whoever had brought the body here.
No matter—he’d already seen the body last night, and he had no need to re-examine it. What he wanted now was a chance to look around before the police arrived. Footprints, yes, but other signs that they might not notice. And most especially, signs of magic.
Magicians could see the residue of their own magic, but no one else’s. Whenever Len cast a spell, it left a faint bronze glow around his hands. When he was first learning to use his magic and hadn’t yet developed the ability to concentrate it in specific spells projected through his hands, he would sometimes look down to see his entire body coated in a bronze shimmer. It would be dashed useful if he could use a spell now to identify and follow someone else’s magic, but no such thing existed.
What he could do, however, was cast a general spell to identify if magic had been used at all in the area. Like called to like, and magic always reacted to itself. If it was a magician who had brought the body here, and if that magician had cast a spell while here, Len would be able tell. If the person had cast a spell in the woods, then Len was out of luck, but he would at least start with the most obvious search and then go from there.
He cleared his throat, gathered his concentration, and said, “Similis ad similem.”
Invisible to anyone else, but clear to his eyes, bronze light left his open palms and curled around the garden, whisking across shrubs and skimming above the ground, continually on the hunt for something like itself. Len had about given up hope after a few minutes of fruitless searching and was on the verge of canceling the spell when the light pulsed once, flashing immediately above the ground near the body.
Something at last!
Len walked around the garden bed, being careful to stay on the graveled path or the grass as he did. He bent down to see if he could identify what sort of a spell his hunter had found. The ground looked empty and innocent enough to his eyes. He passed a hand over the spot, careful not to touch the dirt, and felt something odd in the air, a sort of stickiness as though he’d touched a cobweb. He grinned. This spell, he knew—it was the one he’d been thinking of but saw no point in using.
First to end his hunter spell. Len curled his free hand closed. “Finiatur.”
The bronze light vanished. Len then passed his hand three more times through the stickiness, then wrapped it all up in a fist and pulled both physically and magically. This was no spell, just a brute force use of magic. It was frowned upon in English circles, but he had learned it from a chap in the Middle East and found dashed useful in some out-of-the-way spots.
The force of his pull wrenched the other magician’s spell loose, and it broke apart, showing two footprints as plain as day. Len shook his head. Sloppy! Far better to have scuffed the ground and then used the spell to hide the scuff marks rather than relying on magic alone to cover the prints.
Well now, what did this tell him? Whoever had brought the corpse here was a magician, that much was clear. Was it the murderer, Corbin, or another magician?
Harrison believed that Corbin was selling the papers to a non-magician. There weren’t many people in the world who knew about magic without being able to use it themselves. Part of that was due to the nature of magic, as it tended to slip from people’s memories when they weren’t exposed to it regularly, and part of it was due to the deliberate choices of magicians for generations to hide themselves from the rest of the world to avoid either persecution or the temptation to power that came from having an ability others did not. There were some non-magicians, though, especially since the war, who had inklings of the truth and were always searching for proof. The papers that Corbin stole contained that proof, written down so no one could forget it, and if a non-magician got a hold of them and chose to reveal them to the world … that was the end of magic as it was now known, and would throw the world into another catastrophe the likes of which would make the war seem a mere triviality.
If Harrison was right, then, it wasn’t the murderer that had brought the corpse here. Which made sense—if the murderer was a guest at Little Oaks, he wouldn’t want to advertise his involvement by bringing the body closer to where he was staying.
That left either Corbin or an unknown magician. Len discarded the unknown magician theory—it was possible, but unlikely, especially given how secret this entire affair had been kept. But Corbin—he was furiously angry at the murderer, both for killing his valet and for cheating him out of the price they’d agreed upon for the papers. If he knew, or guessed, that the murderer was a guest at Little Oaks, he could have returned to the scene after Len and Miss Whitney had left it and brought the body here in an attempt to draw the police’s attention to this spot and the guests. And this sort of shoddy spell-work was exactly what Len would expect of a magic-user who had never progressed beyond the apprentice stage.
Very well, then, the working hypothesis was that Corbin had returned sometime after Len and Miss Whitney had departed, and brought the body here in order to throw suspicion on the murderer. The question that followed, then, was: how did this information help Len identify the murderer?
Reluctantly, he had to admit he had no idea how to answer that one.
No more time to think about it, either, as the police came rattling up the drive and stopped in a spray of gravel. Len cast a quick glance around the scene to ensure there weren’t any other clues he’d missed, and braced himself to perform the “good-natured blithering idiot” role that was his greatest defense from ever being identified as an MI agent, or even a person of any sort of intelligence at all.
* * *
Len didn’t have a chance to slip away from Little Oaks until after the cold luncheon that Julia had managed to persuade her staff to put together despite the events of the morning. After he’d been questioned by the police, Len had secured himself a spot where he could witness the reactions of each of the guests to the information that their enjoyable weekend house party had been interrupted by the discovery of a murder victim in their hosts’ rose garden, and they were all going to have to be questioned as to whether or not they knew anything about it.
Freddie Winters looked on it as a bit of a joke, with the well-bred amiability Len would have expected of him. His sister Hermione was outraged and threatened to leave at once, though Len suspected that was more due to the fact that she had lost badly at cards the previous night than a genuine distress over the dead body and police presence. Freddie talked her down.
The Danvers lads, nice chaps that they were and vicar’s sons to boot, seemed genuinely distressed by the news, and offered to help in any way possible. Len supposed one or both of them could be an accomplished liar and a secret murderer and treasonous snake, but it didn’t seem likely.
Mrs. Saunders had swooned and Mr. Saunders seemed highly nervous. That was about what Len would have expected from people of their class, though, so it wasn’t necessarily suspicious, though it didn’t leave them above suspicion, either.
Both Miss Laura Spencer and Miss Merry Whitney burst into a diatribe against police brutality and the way in which the laws of England favored the upper classes while the working class were always overlooked. The rants were similar enough to each other than Len cynically wondered if they’d been rehearsed ahead of time and held in reserve if ever the young ladies had a chance to use them. If it hadn’t clearly been a man he had seen leaving Little Oaks for the woods the previous night, he might have suspected the ladies—if they despised their own class for holding themselves above others, how much more would they hate magicians for having something no one else could possess?—but neither of them seemed capable of murder, however irritating they might be.
Timothy Spencer seemed concerned and wary, but that could possibly be the natural reaction of a barrister’s son who was more aware of the legal difficulties that could arise from this sort of situation than the others were, as opposed to fear of being discovered as a murderer. Besides—while it was not at all professional to dismiss someone from his suspect list because of a feeling, Len’s instincts told him young Spencer could not possibly have been the cold-blooded killer he’d heard the night before.
Sir Bertram Grimes did not react much at all, merely raising his eyebrows and proceeding to the breakfast room after expressing his willingness to aid the police in any way they deemed necessary. Not enough to speak for or against him—a hard-headed businessman like him wouldn’t be likely to give himself away if he were the murderer, and if he weren’t, he’d probably consider it a matter of pride to take anything in his stride.
Miss Electra Whitney screamed and attempted to swoon into Len’s arms when Julia told her the news. Luckily Len had started to move out of the way even before her figure began to gracefully droop in his direction, and she’d had to catch herself on the balusters of the stairs instead.
“How horrible!” she cried, fanning herself vigorously. “Will Scotland Yard be called out? Shall we all have to be fingerprinted? Oh, I just know I shall faint when those awful policemen question me! Mr. Davies, you’ll be sure to come with me and protect me, won’t you?”
She made so much noise that the police sergeant and Foy came out of Foy’s study, where they’d been closeted, to see what all the fuss was about.
“Ah,” said the sergeant. “I should have known it would be you, Miss Ellie.”
Miss Electra stood up straight, her faintness forgotten, and glared at him. “If you’re in charge of the case, Ray Andrews, we’ll all be stuck here forever waiting on you to solve it!”
He grinned up at her. “Not to fret, Miss Ellie, the Chief Constable will soon decide if this is the sort of case a lowly sergeant like myself is capable of solving or if we need to reach out for more help. I’m sure you’ll be able to persuade anyone else who has to question you of your utter innocence and delicacy of mind.”
The constable, who had trailed out behind them, turned beet red and coughed frantically into his sleeve.
Miss Electra came the rest of the way down the stairs in a huff. “Well … good,” she said inadequately. Before entering the breakfast room, she turned and offered what she clearly believed to be a Parthian shot. “And at least I don’t look like a caterpillar crawled onto my upper lip and died there!”
It was Len’s turn to have to turn a laugh into a cough. It was true that Sergeant Andrews sported a truly impressive mustache, but it was the mental image of Miss Electra with a luxuriant, bushy growth of hair above her upper lip that had him wanting to howl with laughter.
Sergeant Andrews maintained his cheerful grin even after Miss Electra’s parting words. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said to Foy, half-including Len in the apology. “It’s hard for some people to have respect for you when you were their escort to their first dance, at which they humiliated themselves by drinking too much champagne and then being sick in the bushes outside, after which they decided they never wanted to see you again.”
