BBC radio interview with Violet Eden on Niall Broadhurst’s “Author’s Nook” broadcast, Sunday, September 2, 1937:
“How do you feel about the Granville’ss reaction to your book and the suit they have filed against you?”
“They are threatening, Niall. I must say it is absolutely mystifying. Mystifying! I was merely there to observe the workings of the household. I needed to know what it was like to live in service, and at the lowest level of service, mind. I was little more than a scullery maid.”
Laughter from Niall Broadhurst. “Are there really such things as scullery maids?”
“No, of course, that’s not what they are called anymore, not with more progressive families like the Granvilles, but the title certainly implies the harsh work I did at Granville Manor.”
“Surely, there is something in your novel that piqued their ire.”
“I cannot imagine. I made no effort whatsoever to uncover anything about the family, present or past, while I was at Granville Manor. In fact, I made every effort not to interact with the family. I rarely saw them, and then only from afar. All of my associations were confined to those in service at my level and to Mrs. Carstairs.”
“The housekeeper.”
“Yes. Frightfully efficient woman. I’m afraid she didn’t think much of me, by the way. I had the hardest time with the accent of the poorly educated girl I was putting on. My rounded vowels crept in much too often for my liking, and I was sure that at any moment I would be found out by Mrs. Carstairs. She’s got a keen eye and a sharp ear that woman.”
“Is there just a little bit of Mrs. Carstairs in your Mrs. Abbey?”
“Oh, no.”
“Come now, Violet. You could be describing either of them right now.”
Short pause and “hmmm” from Violet. “Okay, perhaps a little bit. There now, you’ve made me anger my solicitor and surely put a severe dent in any defense I could put up in court.”
“My apologies.” Laughter from Niall Broadhurst and Violet Eden.
“It’s really very minimal though. Just her personality with those under her. Perhaps she’s quite fun-loving and gay outside of her duties at Granville.”
“You think so?”
Laughter from Violet. “Oh, absolutely not. If I had wanted to find out anything about that family, it would have been absolutely impossible. She runs a tight ship, does Mrs. Carstairs. I encountered not a tiddle of gossip the entire three months I was there. Even whispering was punishable. The staff would not risk it. It could be because there is nothing to gossip about though. Perhaps the family is free of scandal worth gossip.”
“Certainly not. A big family like that, with all the staff and friends and extendeds coming to stay. There’s something there. Surely your author’s mind was on the lookout for it.”
“No. Not at all. As I said, I was merely there to learn what it was like to be in service at a fine old house like Granville Manor with a centuried family like the Granville. How could I tell the story of a poor murdered maid in a great house without knowing what it was like to be in such a place? I did not need to observe the family, family drama and disappointment being too familiar. Of course, I know what it is like to have fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t. Who doesn’t? That was easy enough to add in, but I needed to know how strong those barriers were felt in a household like Granville Manor to really tell her story. And creeping about the house itself was highly instructive in how I could plan and execute the murder and the unravelling of it by my glorious Mr. Leonides.”
Laughter from Niall Broadhurst. “Oh, of course. Let’s move onto your glorious -“
“There are quite a few intriguing characters attached to most large households. I left some key figures out. I’m sure they are probably miffed as well.”
***
“That’s enough.
Chief Inspector George Macklam lifted the arm of the phonograph, cutting off Niall Broadhurst’s sugary effusions over a character who was, in Macklam’s estimation, entirely impossible to credit as a believable detective. Personality quirks and intuitive leaps did not make sound investigations.
“She was a real charmer, her.” Young Wallace Gascoyne’s sarcasm did not please Chief Inspector George Macklam. All victims must be respected in order to maintain professional detachment in solving their case. Gascoyne clearly did not share this view and would need to be educated quickly if he were to continue assisting in this investigation.
Violet Eden’s murder was not the biggest case Macklam had ever tackled, yet he felt a bit more obligation that usual. She had come to him with concerns about a strange man appearing at odd places. She’d decided to address it with the police when she saw him on her porch peeking in the mail slot. “It’s just too much,” she said. “Peeking into my home! It’s too personal. Frightfully creepy. You must find out who he is and put a stop to it.”
He’d been inclined to resist, being in the midst of tracking down suspects in a string of robberies. He just didn’t have to time to follow Miss Eden around waiting for this man to appear. He’d caught his thieves on the afternoon she was found strangled in her kitchen. Someone had come up from behind her at the kitchen table, held a broom’s handle across her neck and pressed until her larynx was crushed.
“Frightful way to die anyway,” Gascoyne said. “Not how you expect the posh ones to go, is it?”
Macklam had deep concerns over how long he would be able to handle young Gascoyne’s opinions. To let one’s personal feeling enter into any investigation – murder or otherwise – rendered coming to a justifiable solution difficult. Macklam did not credit the idea that an inspector needed to allow his own intuition to guide any aspect of investigation. Intuition, the gut-feeling, had no basis in any method he acknowledged. It was fine for the writers of fiction, like Violet Eden, but in real crime detection it had no place.
He could see his new sergeant would not share his view. Sergeant Wallace Gascoyne had come to Macklam’s London precinct from the small town of Haltwhistle in Northern England, right on the Scottish border near Hadrian’s Wall, so he allowed for some of Gascoyne’s annoying eccentricities.
“What details did you hear in that short bit at the end, Sergeant Gascoyne, that gives us our starting point?”
Gascoyne did not hesitate. “She was prowling around that great house for over a month, so she must have seen or heard something. Or been caught at it and worried someone up to no good. Whether she actually knew anything or not would not matter to them.”
“You believe her assertion to Mr. Broadhurst that she discovered nothing scandalous while there?”
“Now Gascoyne did hesitate. “I’m not certain there. She was an authoress. Certainly, that require some skill at fabrication. She could have been holding back during the interview.”
“Her discovery of some bit of secret could constitute motive. She may not have been open on the radio, but she could have shared what she knew with someone else. Someone from Granville Manor perhaps.”
“She must have formed a friendship or two with the other domestics is what you are thinking.”
Chief Inspector Macklam smiled. It had been exactly the thought in his mind. “We start there.”
“One other thing,” Sergeant Gascoyne said as they retrieved their coats and hats. “She said, ‘I know what it’s like to fall in love with someone you shouldn’t. Who doesn’t?’ or something like that. There could be something in that. How long ago did she fall for someone she shouldn’t have? She was a young woman, barely into her mid-twenties. This wayward affair could have been recent enough to bear on her murder.”
“It could have happened at Granville Manor,” Macklam said.
“Ah!”
Macklam turned to the door, hiding his smile. Two possible motives before they even made their first inquiry.
***
Granville Manor prevailed over acres of land in Kent, well outside the jurisdiction of Chief Inspector Macklam, but the Granville butler refused to allow him access to Lord Granville. Macklam did not like to throw his weight about, but perhaps the buttoned up, creased, and stiff-backed man barring his way would only respond to the weight of officialdom. Their verbal parrying continued for a few minutes more, just long enough for Sergeant Gascoyne to begin shuffling about and stifling threats under his breath. Macklam’s quotation of his legal position to investigate matters pertaining to his case in London, politely and patiently, finally broke through the suited barrier of Mr. Burnham.
Macklam and Gascoyne followed the butler into a small sitting room near the kitchens at the back of the house.
“He’s put us here to wait all day!” Gascoyne said. He dropped himself into a worn armchair near an empty hearth. “Look at this,” he gestured at the grate with his hat, “no one’s even used this room in an age. No lord of the manor will be greeting us in this place.”
Macklam agreed. They would be abandoned here until Mr. Burnham felt satisfied of establishing his authority over them in this, his jurisdiction.
While they waited, Macklam moved about the room, touching nothing, seeing every detail. He did not credit himself a Sherlock Holmes, impossible man that, but a steadfast observer. Gascoyne had not been quite right in his estimation on this room’s usage. It had been quite less than an age since its last occupancy. Small evidences of a recent female presence lurked about the room. A small silver band on the mantlepiece and a bit of torn lace upon a compact sewing kit, probably for travel, resting on a side table.
Macklam tried the knob of a door within the room. It gave, and he pressed the door slowly inward, just enough to permit sight into the next room. A bed chamber, small, certainly for a domestic. The bed linens sat folded beneath an uncased pillow at the head of the narrow bed. The room did have a tiny window high above the bed, allowing faint light to shine through the thin curtains. It was a bare room, not meant for extended occupancy. He pushed the door open more fully and passed his gaze slowly around the room, one pass around each layer of the room top to bottom. He paused his final pass at the floor level. A small square object rested under the bed; he could just see one corner of it, the rest concealed behind the bedside table.
“What are you doing, sir,” Gascoyne had crept up behind Macklam, whose mind had been so intent upon the object laying on the floor that Gascoyne’s intrusion had made him jump a bit. The door moved fully open and Macklam took an involuntary step into the room.
“Sergeant!”
Gascoyne stifled his laugh, just barely, and apologized for startling Macklam. “You were standing there like a hound on point. What did you find? A clue?”
A clue, Macklam scoffed inwardly; no need to discourage curiosity in the young inspector. “Just an unused room.”
“Suppose this was her room?”
Macklam did not, at first, but maybe. He thought about it. Could be this room fit the needs of a domestic at the lowest level of service. There was another door on the other side of the sitting room, which means it was certainly a shared space.
Gascoyne made another astute suggestion. “Maybe the pomposity who put us in here did so because this was her room. Might be he’s giving us time to investigate it. He wouldn’t be the type to snitch outright on anyone in the household, family or servants, but he might put us in the way of discovering for ourselves.”
“You base this on what knowledge?”
“No knowledge, sir, just a gut –“
Macklam harrumphed just enough to stop Gascoyne completing the thought. “No room for that, Gascoyne. Use your mind. Your gut is for food.”
He kept his eyes on the book, for that is what lay under the bed. Gascoyne took notice and retrieved it.
“What’s this now?” the young man whispered. “Got her name written right there inside the front cover. Fancy script she had.”
Gascoyne handed the book over to Macklam. “Violet Eden” in a flowing old-style hand Macklam would not have expected of the showy young woman. It looked much like his mother’s had.
“It is a journal,” Macklam stated. He closed the slim volume and slid it into the pocket of his overcoat.
“You aren’t going to look in it?” Gascoyne asked. “We’ve found something there. Maybe some things we might want to ask some of these in the house about.”
Macklam held up a hand, directing young Gascoyne back into the sitting room.
They took their seats just as Mr. Burnham returned to the room. “Lord Granville has time for you now,” he said.
The butler held the door for the inspectors, nodding at Macklam as he passed.
***
BBC radio interview with Violet Eden on Niall Broadhurst’s “Author’s Nook” broadcast, Sunday, September 2, 1937, final minutes of broadcast:
“It certainly sounds an exciting read. When will we be able to purchase Murder in the Family?”
“I do hope it is exciting. It feels to me the most exciting book I have written yet. I haven’t looked at it since the galley corrections, so I can’t wait to read it again myself. It is always a different experience for me, even though I wrote it, once the story is bound between two covers. All that frighteningly suggestive art on the front cover and the tease on the back. It makes me shiver every time.”
Laughter from Niall Broadhurst. “I am sure we all feel the same way!”
“The book will be in the shops tomorrow. Luckily, my publisher held strong, never buckling to the threats of the Granville. I worked very hard on this one, and I will not have solicitors holding it up.”
“Certainly.”
“I shared the completed manuscript with Lord Granville in confidence, hoping that he would assist me in any inconsistencies I may have introduced in presenting the setting and the workings of such a large household. I did not expect he would share it around the house like a schoolboy with a secret or that he would take it so personally. He struck me as a much more intelligent and discreet man than he has proven himself.”
“I am sure I and all of your other loyal readers will thank you for your steadfastness, no matter the reason.”
“Of course.” Laughter from Miss Eden. “I’ll not let some old cat ruin the delight for any of you. I am sure once my manuscript fell into her claws she exerted her usual undue influence in the household. One thing I learned during my brief time as a domestic, should I ever have the pleasure of being mistress over my own household, is not to let one rise so far above their station their voice sounds out louder than my own.” More laughter from Miss Eden.
“Your voice? Such a clever voice.”
“Oh, thank you, Niall. Quite less shrewish than some. I should clam up now or my solicitors will not thank me.”
“Quite. It has been lovely spending time with you. And thank you to all of my loyal listeners. Next –“
***
Macklam cut off the phonograph.
“Did you catch that?” Gascoyne asked. “She put her foot in it there at the end.”
“Much too confident.”
“She says ‘the old cat.’ Who do you think that might be? This Mrs. Carstairs she’s on about so much in her journal?”
Precisely Mrs. Carstairs. Too conveniently Mrs. Carstairs.
“Imagine what old Sherlock could have done with one of these,” Gascoyne said while removing the record disk from the phonograph.
Macklam had no care for what Sherlock Holmes would have done with a modern phonograph. The inconvenience of a return to Granville Manor and the random nature of Gascoyne’s commentary causing an undue peevishness, he said, “Listen to it no doubt!”
“Of course,” Gascoyne said, missing the annoyance in his chief’s voice. “They did have a sort of thing like this in the Victorian days, you know. All cylinders and wax, I think. Could record right on them too, it seems. I read that in Dracula. Good book that.”
“Dracula!” The course of Gascoyne’s mind astounded Macklam.
“Yes, sir. The story’s all told through this Dr. Seward’s recordings and the journals and letters of the others. Even some newspaper cuttings. Hey! Like us.” He held up Miss Eden’s journal and gestured at the phonograph.
Macklam had no words. He spluttered a bit.
“All we need are some letters,” Gascoyne said.
“Letters!” Macklam burst like a dam. Then he sat. “Put that disk back on, the one right in the middle when she mentioned exchanging letters with someone at Granville.”
Gascoyne chose the disk and placed it on the turntable. “Somewhere about the middle wasn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t remember where it was on the recording, just play –“
“Not very observant, sir. I watched it turn ‘round while we listened, to concentrate. Let me see, right about here.”
BBC radio interview with Violet Eden on Niall Broadhurst’s “Author’s Nook” broadcast, Sunday, September 2, 1937,15 minutes into broadcast:
***
Laughter from Violet Eden and Niall Broadhurst.
“Oh, Miss Eden. You should be more kind.”
“I should, yes, I know. Some people do make it difficult. I exchanged letters for weeks setting up my position at Granville. We worked out the ruse to keep my identity concealed very carefully, so it was not as if I had snuck in under anyone’s nose like a snoop. Then to be accused of such.”
“Terrible to be turned on like that.”
“Oh, yes. It was best to keep the Granville themselves out of the whole undertaking. They would not have been natural, you see.”
***
“That’s enough,” Macklam said. “Good eye, Gascoyne.”
Gascoyne smiled. “Yes, sir. Was observation helped me crack that smuggling bit back home. On the ground I was.”
“You did not employ disguises did you?”
Gascoyne grimaced. “Didn’t get the chance.”
“I would like to get hold of those letters, Gascoyne.”
“To be sure. May be some motive there.”
“Precisely,” Macklam leaned back in his chair, eyeing the journal filled with constant invective against Mrs. Carstairs and some young chap named Grover. “Gascoyne. This is much like Mr. Stoker’s novel. We have parts of the story on phonograph and in Miss Eden’s journal. These letters we must locate and newspaper articles pertaining to Miss Eden and the Granville could provide more of the story.”
“Then we piece it all together just like in the book. Only without vampires.”
“Maybe not the supernatural sort, but vampires come in all sorts.”
“Cryptic that,” Gascoyne said. “You aren’t getting whimsical on me are you, like that Mr. Leonides or Mrs. Christie’s Belgian chap?”
Macklam’s grumble of disgust answered Gascoyne’s question. “Even Mrs. Christie? You are a tough one.”
Macklam and Gascoyne left Officer Smithers to transcribe the radio recording. Gascoyne took the time to instruct Smithers on the careful handling of the disks and the importance of getting every word right and noting every sound on the recording. Macklam admired the young sergeant’s precision. It quite made up for some of his impulsivity.
“I just had a thought,” Gascoyne shut the door to the small office much too strong, eliciting muffled curses from Smithers. “Sorry,” he rapped his knuckles on the door. “We need to look back at that transcript once he’s done. Miss Eden said there at the beginning of her interview that keeping up her guise with Mrs. Carstairs was difficult, which means the housekeeper could not have been her contact at the house.”
“Yes, and she did not explicitly state that her contact was in the household at Granville, but if it was they may have been upset at putting them in a bad situation with her book.”
“Betrayed trust, eh? We need those letters.”
“First, we send Officer Tate to searching news archives.”
Macklam had no intention of straining his own eyes over faded newsprint or wasting Gascoyne’s sharp eye on the task. He needed the young man at Miss Eden’s town house and his ear back at Granville for an inquiry with the infamous Mrs. Carstairs. Their interview with Lord Granville the previous day had been ineffectual; Lord Granville being too caught up in the guilt of Violet Eden’s death. Not much Macklam could do to alleviate the man’s feelings. It most likely was, as the man thought, someone in his household who had done the woman in. Some loyal staffer creeping around Miss Eden’s townhouse awaiting the opportunity. Gascoyne had pushed for inquiries among the staff, but Macklam had been too eager for a return to the station. The journal too hot in his pocket and in his mind. He’d thought to find the answer there.
“Back to Granville then?” Gascoyne asked.
“Stop off at Miss Eden’s first.”
“Find those letters, right. Put together our own epistolary tale of mystery and murder like old Mr. Stoker.”
Macklam did little more than nod, wondering if he too had been so inconsistent when he was young.
***
The letters proved easy to find. Miss Eden had been a very efficient woman. Her writing desk neatly ordered, and her files carefully labeled and organized. All materials for her recent book had been boxed up and put away in the bottom of a large Georgian bookcase. Similar boxes for her previous six books were stored away there as well. Gascoyne had wandered a bit, losing sight of their purpose for want of exploring the box containing information on his favorite Violet Eden mystery, hoping to satisfy some minor curiosity about the source of one of her characters. Macklam had snapped him into focus readily enough, and they’d found a series of letters to Miss Eden from an address in Kent.
The murdered authoress had been corresponding with a Mr.Christopher. He not only provided a letter of recommendation for Miss Eden, but also helped plan her disguise and instructed her on the rudiments of her position. He wrote in his final letter, Do remember to contain your vibrancy at Granville. Carstairs will not favor such in a minor member of staff. You must never be noticed in such a position. Hard as this will be for you, all success depends upon you stifling any joy you possess.
“Bleak, that,” Gascoyne said.
Macklam found the intimate tone much more pertinent than the tenor of the advice. “Find her phone book, Gascoyne, and get this fellow on the phone.”
The only information on the mysterious Mr. Christopher they could uncover was contained in the five letters. No other evidence of communication with a person by such a name existed in her address book or other correspondence. The address on the letters tracked to the office at which they had been posted. Across town from Granville Manor, but close enough to confirm the detectives’ growing assumption that someone associated with the manor had conspired in establishing her placement with the Granville household.
“We can ask at Granville,” Gascoyne suggested. “Someone there knows the man, or his recommendation letter would have held no value.”
Macklam disliked revealing a line of inquiry to civilians. If he had not been put off by Lord Granville’s secondary guilt over Miss Eden’s murder, he would have asked more direct questions, perhaps learned of Mr. Christopher much less circuitously.
***
Once re-entry to Granville had been obtained, Macklam and Gascoyne waited in a more comfortable parlor alongside Lord Granville’s study. Macklam surveyed this larger, more well-furnished and elaborately decorated parlor as meticulously as he had the smaller staff sitting room on his previous visit. Gascoyne nosed through the books left lying about. This parlor seemed to Macklam a room of tables – coffee table, end tables, console table along one wall and behind the small couch, petite lamp tables near each door. A smattering of tables, each bearing a book.
“They just scatter the books about,” Gascoyne observed.
“Look more closely,” Macklam said. He lifted a book left open-faced on a lamp table near the hallway door.
Gascoyne did a turn-about. His eye finished on a book lying face down on the coffee table next to him. He reached down a picked it up, reading the spine, “Murder on Bartleby Street by Violet Eden. This was her first,” he said. “So-so. Entirely improbable solution.”
“They are all books by Miss Eden.”
“Someone’s got a bit of an obsession.”
“Emotional state of the reader?”
Gascoyne scanned the positions of the books again. “Tossed down, no care. I would say the reader is angered.” He put Miss Eden’s first effort back on the coffee table with care. “If you are meaning to return to the book or if you have any fondness for it, you do not toss it down, leave it open for the spine to crack or hanging half off a table near a doorway. Multiple copies of each book also; more than one reader.” He tapped a bound stack of papers on a table at the near end of the couch. “The galley of the new book she sent to Lord Granville?”
Before Macklam could assess Gascoyne’s deductions, Lord Granville burst through the adjoining study door. He dispensed with greetings and charged right to the point of the visit. “Took me some time to find this,” he waved an open letter in Macklam’s direction. “Mr. Christopher is an alias, you know. I don’t know the chap’s real name.”
“Yet you trusted his recommendation?” Macklam asked, moving closer to Lord Granville, who had seated himself abruptly on the sofa.
Granville held the letter up to Macklam. Gascoyne sat in the chair opposite. He asked, “Have you read Miss Eden’s recent novel? The one she researched while here?”
“She sent it along and my wife read it. Mysteries do not interest me. My wife and daughters find them scintillating. There is no end to their meal-time conversations. Fancy themselves amateur sleuths, I am sure.”
Macklam folded the letter, “We will need to hold onto this.”
“Of course.”
“Who is Mr. Christopher?”
“No idea of his actual identity. It was the cover name used for a man who had established himself in a key post on the German side during the Great War. I cannot tell you more than that, of course. It gave me a turn when I saw his name on this letter.”
“You were his contact?”
“Not at first. I took him over during some restructuring of duties in the War Office in 1915.”
“When you received this letter of recommendation you were not concerned?”
“Startled at first to see his name on personal correspondence. I thought at first it must be a coincidence, but certain phrasings in the letter confirmed his identity.”
“What phrasings in particular?”
Macklam handed the letter towards Lord Granville, who waved it away. “No need. Three specific phrases he uses had coded meanings: ‘careful eye’ and ‘timeworn observation’ and ‘unflappable mind.’”
“Why would Mr. Christopher need words with coded meanings to recommend someone to service in your household?”
Granville laughed. “I took it for a joke at first. That war is long behind us and I was a very young man then. Perhaps it was a bit of nostalgia for us both.”
“You did not consider the phrasings were used purposefully to pick up the coded meanings?”
“The meanings of those phrases and the context of the letter do not fit together. They could be nothing more than a means to verify to me his identity. I am sure that is their purpose. Carstairs and Burnham handle hiring staff, but I did ask her to question Miss Smythe, who we now know as Miss Eden, about her acquaintance with Mr. Christopher. Her answers confirmed that she knows him as Mr. Christopher.”
“Or,” Gascoyne suggested, “she claimed to know him as Mr. Christopher. She obscured her identity, so why not obscure his as well?”
“That doesn’t follow, young man, unless Miss Eden knew I would only recognize him by a name other than his own. As I am still publicly attached to the War Office, this would certainly have revealed his role to someone as observant as Miss Eden. He would not have taken that risk. He must be living his life fully under his alias. This does concern me, and I attempted to initiate correspondence with him, but have received no replies.”
“We have found no leads on identifying him as yet,” Macklam said.
“If you do manage to locate the man, please inform me.”
“I will, sir.”
Gascoyne picked up Murder on Bartleby Street from the coffee table and flipped through the pages. “Lord Granville,” he said, “why are these books scattered about the room?”
“Lady Granville and my daughters have become quite hooked on discovering who else the characters in Miss Eden’s books may be based upon. They spend every day after tea in here stalking about the room and shouting out theories. I’ve taken to working in the library at that time.”
“Have they made any matches?”
“My dear wife has suggested that Lord something or other in the book Miss Eden wrote before she came here must be me. Daughters, a wife, a peerage, and a love of pickles are all the evidence my wife needed.” He laughed and waved the idea through the air with a flip of his wrist. “She hadn’t even met me yet! It has put Mrs. Carstairs’ back up, though. She came to me complaining of how their obsessions, as she put it, had begun to get the staff’s interest piqued as well. It seems they are all reading Miss Eden’s books now and making a game out of their own detection of familiar characters.”
“She afraid she might be in there?” Gascoyne asked.
“There’s no doubt the home and staff in Miss Eden’s new book are based on Granville. Yes, she is one unhappy lady. Efficient as hell, but she has been off her game since the news of Miss Eden’s death. Not sure she is feeling as responsible as I am for inciting the act with my public ire.”
“How does she seem?” Macklam asked.
“Quiet. Beyond her complaints about my daughters, I have seen much less of her than usual. She sends her reports to me via Burnham. In fact, her visit yesterday to complain about my daughters was the first time she has come to me personally since word of Miss Eden’s death.”
“The identity of Mr. Christopher could be important to this investigation. Could you discover his
identity?”
“I could not possibly share it with you if I did.”
“Thank you, sir. We need to put some questions to Mrs. Carstairs.”
“I believe it is her day off. If she is here, Burnham will take you to her.”
Mr. Burnham stood waiting outside the study door. Mrs. Carstairs was indeed enjoying her day off, and Mr. Burnham, being uninterested in her activities beyond the household, did not know where she had gone. As they followed him through the manor, Macklam observed the butler more closely. He kept his personal appearance neat. Small moustache, much like Lord Granville’s. Hair kept short and combed neatly back from his forehead. No gray there. The more Macklam observed, he realized it was merely Burnham’s manner that made him seem so much older than the genial, boyish Lord of the manor. Burnham and Granville were of an age.
“Is it Grover’s day off as well?” Gascoyne asked.
“Grover, sir?” Burnham looked puzzled. “We do not employ anyone who answers to Grover.”
Macklam smiled at Gascoyne. “Ah, yes, I had quite forgotten about Grover. Miss Eden mentions him frequently in her journal.”
“You found her journals, sir? They must be quite useful to you, though may not paint quite the lovely picture of her time here.”
“They do not,” Macklam said.
“How could you know what impression she had of her time at Granville? Did you read her book?”
“Of course not. Mystery twaddle. The girl was awful at her job. Mrs. Carstairs and those who had to clean up after her messes or pick up her slack complained endlessly. I am sure they made her quite miserable.”
“If she was so poor at her job, why was she kept on for over a month?”
“You would have to ask Mrs. Carstairs. She believes the core of her job to be hounding the staff, though, so her views may not be entirely helpful.”
“It seemed odd to you that the girl, er, Miss Eden, stayed on so long,” Macklam stated.
“It did. She did not have a talent for subterfuge, and I caught her copying out a conversation between Mrs. Carstairs and Lady Granville in her first week. She revealed herself to me with very little questioning. She took Carstairs’ haranguing in stride, so there was something to admire in that.”
“You did not inform Lord Granville that he had an authoress undercover in his house?”
Burnham grimaced. “Too much curiosity for my own good. I have apologized to him, and, being a man of curious nature himself, he understood.”
They had arrived in the front hall. Macklam stayed Burnham’s hand as he reached for the front door.
“Why not just give us her journal instead of leaving us in the sitting room until we found it for ourselves?”
Burnham smiled. “Then I would have robbed you of the chance to employ your masterful skills of detection. I will endeavor to discover who this Grover person she wrote of may have been.”
“Thank you,” Macklam said. “Good day, sirs.”
Gascoyne pressed Macklam all the way back to the station but got not a peep out of the chief. Not even when he insisted that “uppity butler was making fun of us!”
Officer Smithers had the transcription completed when they returned, and Macklam sent him off to Kent on a records search of Mrs. Carstairs. Vital information only: birth, relatives, marriages, possible arrests.
Then he planted himself in his office with the transcript and the journal. Gascoyne left for Miss Eden’s townhouse. He had some reading of his own in mind.
***
Gascoyne burst into Macklam’s office next mid-morning waving a bound book in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. “It’s coming together, old man!”
Macklam sputtered, clinking his tea cup much too hard into its saucer “Old man!”
“Sorry, sir, the excitement. Didn’t intend the familiarity. Unprofessional, sir.”
“The familiarity isn’t the problem,” Macklam said, wiping tea from his moustache with his handkerchief. He pressed his index finger into the radio transcript. “Sit down. We need a different perspective on this thing.”
Gascoyne sat, his anxious twiddling with the book and papers not unnoticed by Macklam. He ignored it, arranging the transcript sideways so they could both read. “Get closer, Gascoyne. Put those papers aside for now.”
“What are we doing?” Gascoyne grudgingly set the book and papers in the chair next to him and scooted closer to Macklam’s desk, turning his chair side on to better see the words on the page.
“We are going to role-play, Gascoyne. Like children in school.”
“Sir?”
“You read Niall Broadhurst’s part. I will read Miss Eden’s, and we will listen to one another with their ears.”
“This is rather more fanciful than usual.”
“Wife says I should look at things sideways,” he smacked the transcript with the flat of his hand. “Nonsense, of course, but it put an idea in my head. She said it while reading a play. She loves reading plays, says it lets her play all the parts so it’s different every time she reads it.”
“Ah,” Gascoyne caught on, “because she’s hearing it all from new ears.’
“New mind, yes. Now, listen to what Miss Eden says with Broadhurst’s view. Play the part.”
“Do his voice, you mean?”
“Lord, no, just think about her words like he might as an interviewer trying to get the goods for his audience.”
Gascoyne nodded. Macklam put his finger on the first line to be read and spoke Miss Eden’s words in his almost-gruff male voice, “It was rather challenging, Niall.”
Gascoyne snickered.
“You want me to put on the lady’s voice, Gascoyne, give you a good show?”
“No, no,” Gascoyne composed himself, “I’m hearing her voice in my head and yours in my ears. Funny effect, that.”
“Good. Means you’re fully engaged. Go on, your part now.”
Gascoyne cleared his throat and read, “I can imagine. You have the motive and know how the murder was carried out, but you didn’t know who did it?”
Macklam as Eden, “Quite. It’s not like I’m a real detective tracking down a case, following clues, and interrogating suspects. I’m an author who has no control over her creation.”
“Maddening,” Broadhurst/Gascoyne said.
“Quite. More is expected, in a way, from an author. We cannot leave mysteries unsolved as they may be in life. We must help our readers find the answers, bring order in a way. That’s what books are for.” Macklam muttered “Nonsense” and continued, “I knew I would discover the culprit by the end, so I just kept putting little pieces into place.”
Gascoyne/Broadhurst said,” What if you hadn’t found him out?”
“Or her,” Macklam as Eden corrected.
“Of course, of course,” Gascoyne/Broadhurst conceded, “Or her. Don’t want to lead or mislead readers. Women murder as well.”
Gascoyne/Broadhurst laughed. Macklam as Eden did not, he said, fully in his own voice with punctuation, “It would have bothered me immensely not to see the murderer acknowledged.”
Gascoyne grabbed the book, Miss Eden’s latest novel, and dropped it onto the transcript. “She did it. The chambermaid did it!”
“You were at Miss Eden’s. Had a patrol watching the place due to neighbor complaints about sight seers. Morbid bunch.”
“Right. Shooed some of those off the stoop when I arrived. Stayed there all night, stopped to pick up her newest book on the way. Read it in two hours. Found some interesting connections in some others. There’s a Grover in Murder Will Tell and a Mr. Christopher in Time for Murder. That’s the one with the complicated clock clues. Bad book all around, too clever and no way to solve it yourself. Fully unsatisfying. Goes right against what she said in her interview, it does.”
Macklam nodded. “And.”
“The Grover character has a mother that he is estranged from. And the Mr. Christopher character serves in household with a woman who is estranged from her son.”
“Is he a butler?”
“No, a footman.”
“Burnham’s first post at Granville Manor,” Macklam said. “Moved into his current post after his grandfather retired.”
Gascoyne gasped and put the small sheaf of papers in front of Macklam, “Smithers typed up a report on Carstairs’ background. Never married, so not a Mrs. She had two children during the war. Paternity unknown. Both fostered out to families unknown.”
“Grover,” Macklam said. “And Violet.”
“It fits!” Gascoyne said.
Macklam reached across the desk and clapped Gascoyne on the shoulder. “Now this transcript.” He read again, with emphasis, “It would have bothered me immensely not to see the murderer acknowledged.”
“Odd word choice, you think?”
“Absolutely. Why did you burst about the chambermaid when I read it?”
“Miss Eden was maid at Granville, and in here she’s made herself into a character along with everyone else in that household. I can fully see why they are so upset. She’s captured them all perfectly. Which means, this Grover fellow who helped the chambermaid kill the butler and the lady of the house is real. And he’s a bitter, mean young man not much older than the chambermaid. In fact, he is one year older just like Carstairs’ boy over her daughter. Miss Eden made a point to correct Broadhurst’s assumption that the murderer in her book might have been a man. She knew all along it very well could have been a woman because she was playing out her fantasy of offing Carstairs, her mother.”
“But she didn’t,” Macklam said. “someone murdered her.”
Gascoyne groaned.
“Don’t worry. You’ve helped me put something together. Now listen to this.” He turned back a few pages of the transcript and searched for his line. “Here we are. This is Miss Eden speaking in answer to a question about ‘planning murders all day.’ She says, ‘Oh, don’t say it like that! You make me sound ghoulish. I am not planning murders just imagining them in my head. The murders don’t matter at all anyway, not as much as the motivations and satisfactions of the characters. Not at all as much. The murder is just the attraction.’”
“More odd words. How did we miss this when we listened?”
“We weren’t listening the right way. We weren’t questioning her like Broadhurst was.”
“You think he knows something,” Gascoyne leaned onto the desk, eyes wide with new possibilities.
Macklam grumbled, “Good lord, boy, think, don’t jump.”
“We were looking for clues to who murdered her the first time instead of trying her for information, for clues.” He stood. “Back to Granville. Burnham’s got to give up what he knows.”
Macklam put the transcript back in order and slotted it neatly into Miss Eden’s novel. “Bring all that along.” He tucked Miss Eden’s journal into his jacket pocket.
***
They found Granville in some new uproar when they arrived. Constables on scene and a coroner’s van pulled up near the duck pond. Lady Granville stood weeping near the van and complaining quietly about the water violets crushed under its wheels.
Macklam and Gascoyne joined the constables at the pond’s edge.
“Curious no one saw this happen,” one of them said to Macklam, “this pond being right here alongside the drive, in full view of every grand window in their manse.”
Macklam concurred. “When did they find her?”
“Claimed the gardener found her this morning when he came out just after dawn to feed the ducks. I feed the ducks down to the park with my children every weekend. At dawn they’re still curled up together, not waiting for scraps of bread to be tossed at ‘em.”
“It’s Mrs. Carstairs,” Gascoyne said.
“The chambermaid didn’t do it.”
“Oh no,” the constable said, “no chambermaid did this. It was a man for certain.”
They all turned at the sound of Lord Granville’s voice from the drive. He approached them swiftly, calling for Macklam. “Chief Inspector Macklam, you will take this over won’t you. No disparagement meant to you lot,” he nodded to the constable, “but this must be related to the death of Miss Eden. You are already on that case, and I have my family’s safety to think of.”
“Think this is some vengeful fan do you?” the constable asked with no little hint of his own disparagement.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“Lord Granville,” Macklam said, “we came to speak with Mr. Burnham. He may be able to help us with both incidents.”
“Burnham? You would not think that he –“
Gascoyne cut him off. “We do believe he is holding back knowledge that could assist us in our investigations.”
Lord Granville smiled. “Old habits.”
“Sir?”
“He is in the front entryway, coordinating staff inquiries with the local chief constable.” He turned from them and hurried now to remove his wife from the distressing scene at the pond.
***
Burnham had the air of a man who held answers and expected to be pressed for them. When Macklam and Gascoyne sat down with him in a small receiving room at the front of the house, he had been prepared for Macklam’s immediate discovery.
“You are Mr. Christopher.”
Burnham stiffened momentarily then relaxed back into his assured posture. He was a man used to secrets. He simply nodded confirmation.
“No need to disclose anything to us other than your association with Miss Eden before she arrived at Granville and anything you know about Grover.”
“Her brother,” Gascoyne said.
This elicited a smile from the congenial butler and man of mystery.
“We are just here to solve the murder of Miss Eden and Mrs. Carstairs. They are associated,” Macklam said.
“You suspect Grover,” Burnham said. “As you should. He’s a dangerous man who I warned Mrs. Carstairs to keep far from Granville after his first visit last year. He’d discovered her from his adopted grandmother. Quite gone with dementia. They live in town. Carstairs had been giving them money for the boy’s upkeep since his youth. Her daughter had been sent to a much wealthier family that did not require, or welcome, any assistance. I would presume they did not want her unpleasant influence to enter Miss Eden’s life.”
“When did it?”
Burnham settled into his chair, divulging Miss Eden’s story and his connection to her. This was, Macklam and Gascoyne realized, a man accustomed to uncovering, collecting, and synthesizing information about others into focused intelligence reports. Old habits, indeed, Macklam thought shortly into Burnham’s report. Lord Granville knew all along Burnham was his Mr. Christopher. It wouldn’t surprise Macklam to learn that Burnham had lived with his grandfather in the butler’s cottage at the head of the drive or that Granville had cultivated Burnham’s talents when they were younger men together at the estate.
He wouldn’t press this conjecture. It did not matter to Macklam’s current inquiry, and quickly passed from his interest when Burnham revealed a startling connection to Miss Eden.
“She was too young when we met, yes, so I kept her affections at a distance. The war separated us, but she never left my mind, nor I hers,” Burnham smiled, “I kept my eye on her during the war and after. Easy to do in my line, you know. I recognized bits of my Mr. Christopher identity in her Mr. Leonides, though I could never pass for Greek,” he laughed.
“When did you reconnect?” Macklam asked. “You did supply her letter of reference as Mr. Christopher, but surely she knew you as Burnham by then.”
“After her second book. She used distinct moments of our flight from Italy back into England. Her adoptive father and I were both serving in the secrets trade; he as a contact, I as a field agent. I felt that perhaps time and age would have created a buffer to our affections. They had not, and we entered into an intimate relationship rather quickly.”
Gascoyne struggled, poorly, to contain his surprise. Burnham nodded at him. “I know, surprising. Fifteen years older and beginning to show a bit of my age, but often those things don’t matter quite as much as the spark that ignites between two people.”
Macklam did manage to contain his disdain for this bit of romanticism. He kept it solicitously out of his question, “You did not kill her?”
“No.”
“Nor Mrs. Carstairs?”
“No.”
“Ideas on who did?”
“Grover, of course.”
***
After a cursory, and in Gascoyne’s estimation slipshod questioning of the household en masse, they left Granville. Macklam maintained a grim demeanor most of the way back to the station. Gascoyne did not attempt to break the silence; he did not want all of Macklam’s curses to his driving abilities repeated. Instead, he let his mind wander over the case. They would need to track down this Grover character. He looked the most likely suspect with his surprising ties to Carstairs, his mother, and Miss Eden, his sister. Gascoyne shook his head. Right out of one of her novels this was.
“So why did he do it?” Macklam broke the silence. “I cannot parse it, Gascoyne. Not at all.”
To Gascoyne, the motives were clear. “Hard to say without meeting the man, but I’d venture a guess he may be unstable as Burnham suggested. Anger at his mother for abandonment and poisoning any relationship he could have forged with his sister.”
Macklam grunted. “Grover, then?”
“Yes, sir, Grover,” he said, puzzled by the response.
“Not Burnham? Not Lord Granville?”
***
Tate had combed newspaper and magazine interviews with Violet Eden, scouring for any tidbit of information about her time at Granville, and transcribed them into a report for Gascoyne. When they arrived back at the station, he threw himself into the reading. If Macklam thought Burnham and Granville more likely suspects, he would find some way to help the old man prove it.
He discovered Miss Eden had much to say about her days at the manor after Lord Granville kicked up a fuss. At first, she had been angry, seriously affronted by the accusations Lord Granville made. Her subterfuge had not, she insisted, been malicious. When pressed on why she could not have approached Lord Granville directly and keep her real identity secret only from the staff, she claimed that would have tainted the experience. She needed complete anonymity to really observe how the household ran top to bottom.
Gascoyne’s research did not bear any real fruit until Miss Eden had begun to relax into the “pseudo-scandal” as she called it in a Times interview. She poked fun at both Carstairs for being a “harridan” and Granville for being “much too proper for his own good.” The real juicy give away came from something she said in a U.S. ladies magazine. “She has all the symptoms of a woman scorned in love, you know. There’s a handsome skeleton in her closet and she can’t stop opening the door to look at him.”
Why would she think that, the astute reporter enquired. To Violet Eden the answer was obvious. “She can’t get away from him. He’s right there in the house with her.”
Gascoyne may have written this off as catty, if not for what she said to Niall Broadhurst about love in her last radio interview.
He had rushed Macklam’s office with the transcript and the lady’s magazine interview.
“She said, ‘I know what it is like to have fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t. Who doesn’t? That was easy enough to add in, but I needed to know how strong those barriers were felt in a household like Granville Manor.’ Miss Eden was not talking about herself, but about Mrs. Carstairs, who would have been a young maid herself when Miss Eden and her brother, Grover, were born.”
Macklam grinned at Gascoyne, who was living up to his reputed wits indeed. “Which you think means that Mrs. Carstairs’ lover, Miss Eden and the mysterious Grover’s father, is still at Granville Manor.”
“Oh, absolutely, sir.”
“Don’t break your neck nodding it about like that. Tell me who this man may be.”
“Burnham.”
“Evidence?”
“Burnham is Mr. Christopher, we know that. He had a friendship with Miss Eden. We know that. It makes more sense than that long story he told us about meeting her family during the war.”
Macklam watched Gascoyne roll this around in his brain a bit. When the young man sat, he sat hard.
“He is her father! He’s her father and he let us believe that he had an affair with her. Ugh.” He sat back, curling the transcript in his hands. He smiled. “Clever.”
“Indeed.” Macklam stood. “And Grover?”
“His son, of course.”
“Yes, of course. Don’t be obtuse.”
“Oh, he gave him up. Didn’t protect him at all as the murderer, which means that Grover is not the murderer.”
“Maybe.”
“Why would Grover kill his sister? He wouldn’t. He might kill Mrs. Carstairs, though. Perhaps.”
“Under what condition?”
“If Miss Eden and Grover connected as brother and sister while she was at Granville and this alarmed Mrs. Carstairs, as it might, she may have murdered her own daughter to protect the man she still loved. Then Grover, aggrieved at the lost of his sister, would have murdered his mother.”
“Sounds downright Sophoclean.”
Gascoyne laughed. “It does!”
“Why would she need to protect Burnham from discovery?”
“If Miss Eden continued to defend herself in the press and Lord Granville continued to press suit against her, then inquiry into the veracity of his claims might out Burnham as Leonides all along, which would eventually uncover him as Mr. Christopher. His life might be in danger, but it might be more likely that he would lose his livelihood.” Gascoyne frowned. “That’s thin. Lord Granville doesn’t seem the type to turn his back on a man as loyal as Burnham has – Oh, hell!”
“Sophoclean.”
***
It took Gascoyne and Macklam two days to pull together all of their evidence. They questioned the staff at Granville again, particularly those under direct supervision by Mrs. Carstairs. From a cook they learned that she had been away from the house for two days visiting an ailing aunt in London on the day of and before Miss Eden’s death. An older woman of indeterminate position claimed Carstairs had no living relatives outside of town. Gascoyne and Macklam already knew this from their prior records search. However, the old woman’s disdain for Carstairs’ sudden aversion to the Lord Granville was telling.
“Near jumped out of her skin, she did, when I waved the broom at those dogs of Lord’s. They’re always skulking about the kitchens. She’s waved a broom or two at them herself. Then she came over all giddy-kipper when we heard about Miss Eden’s murder even though she’d always treated the poor girl like a pariah. Had a crashing row with Burnham over some thing to do with Lord Granville and stopped meeting with him altogether. Guilt it was for causing such a fuss about that poor girl’s book. Didn’t like her portrayal, I’m sure, maybe cut too close to true.”
Circumstantial as the old woman’s information was, it still satisfied Macklam.
It merely took another records search to confirm Lord Granville had been in residence at the manor during the time Mrs. Carstairs was initially employed. A bit of time in the pub yielded stories about Granville’s youth and his sudden shipping off to school by his otherwise doting father and overprotective mother. The timing matched up to the time between the births of Carstairs’ children.
None of this would gain them warrant to arrest a Lord, but he could nab the butler.
Lady Granville had much more to cry and complain about when Macklam and Gascoyne arrested her butler and made suggestive claims about her husband. She refused to believe that a man of Lord Granville’s station would have dallied with a maid, even in his youthful days before the war, before she and he had even met.
Even as they arrested Burnham and escorted him out Granville Manor’s stately doors, she continued to insist Burnham acted alone. She spilled all the secrets. Told them she knew Burnham had been an agent during the war, that her husband had been his superior. Lord Granville was a loyal and honorable man protecting those who had shown him and their country loyalty.
For their part, Granville and Burnham did not protest. They fully lived up to their reputations as gentlemen.
Lord Granville even arrived at the station for a voluntary questioning and to support his loyal man.
He insisted, respectfully, as he seated himself for questioning, “It takes more than village gossip and offhand comments by a pulp authoress to convict someone of murder in the 20th century.”
Burnham maintained his assured posture, but dropped the veil of subterfuge. “I, for one, could never kill a woman I loved. I loved Violet.”
Macklam placed Miss Eden’s journal on the table and gently turned the pages until he reached the middle, a few entries before her last day at Granville. He read as Gascoyne watched Burnham’s face transform through a mystifying mixture of grief and guilt. “Right here near the end of her entry on a confrontation with Mrs. Carstairs over ‘my lingering presence in hall outside the daughters’ rooms’ she says something I find touching. ‘She upsets me so with her haranguing. There is no compassionate bone left in the woman. Burnham’s smile and gentle pat upon my hand as I passed through the hall to my room filled me with some hope. I can sleep now with feel of his touch lingering there, a balm to my nerves.’ Quite misread that one before you revealed your connection to her.”
“She was, in truth, a gentle girl still. She projected an image, the worldly authoress, mistress of murder.” He smiled slightly, but it did not remain.
Gascoyne pulled the book his way and turned to the entry of her final day at Granville Manor. He slid it slowly towards Burnham. “Could you read the final paragraph?”
The detectives both closely observed Burnham. He turned the book with one hand and tenderly smoothed the pages with the other. He cleared his throat, composed his face, and read softly, “Their argument shook the walls of the servant quarters. Surely everyone heard. Everyone must know now. I fear I have quite ruined things here for them. I will leave in the morning to remove the irritation from their lives and hope that this will be enough to resolve their rancor and return Granville Manor to the peaceable routine they have worked so hard to maintain. I will miss seeing him every day, but we will continue to endure as always.”
He broke a bit on the last lines. “I loved her. I did not kill her. I have tried to give you what you need without betraying him.”
“He killed Miss Eden, his daughter?” Macklam asked.
“Why did you let this go?” Gascoyne burst out. “You loved her so much you protected her murderer?”
“I am as much to blame, bringing her there in the house with that woman just so we could be close for a while. She wanted to just to see him with a family, curiosity only. She held no romantic notions of reuniting with a family she never knew. I was enough for her, yet he was always between us.”
“And Carstairs?”
“She took him there,” Burnham said. “Violet’s one flaw was that she talked too much, let people get under her skin. It would have come out eventually as Lord Granville pressed his suit against her for writing that book. She was not there when he did it, but knew it was him. As did I.”
“And you protected him,” Gascoyne said again.
Burnham merely nodded. He turned his eyes to Macklam, who nodded in return. “Loyalty is a kind of love, as strong a bond even. You had to silence Mrs. Carstairs.”
Again, Burnham gave them no more than a nod. He pulled the journal closer and bent to it, slowly turning each page. Macklam left him with it.
***
“We were wrong,” Gascoyne said.
Sargeant Macklam enjoyed his celebratory pint and listened to his new junior officer put all the pieces together for their colleagues at the pub.
“Miss Eden was there out of curiosity about her father’s family and to be closer to Burnham. When you read the journal and listen to her speak publicly about Carstairs, knowing the woman is her mother, it is much easier to hear disappointment in her jibes and her rancor. And Carstairs’ hate for gossip was for fear of being found out as she was still living in the same house as the lover of her youth. These little clues were there all along, but if you didn’t already know the big secret they were out of reach. Seemingly immaterial.”
“Imagine what it must have been like for the high and mighty lord of the manor with his youthful indiscretion working right there in his own house all those years,” one of the other men said.
“Pah,” Gascoyne waved off the comment, “you’d think, but he didn’t seem put out by it all. Told us he’d held no ill-will towards her and decided to keep her on. Was his mother took her into service in the first place, and since she’d seen no reason to turn the girl who bore her grandchildren out, there was no need for him to do so either. Bred into him this attitude, you see. Carstairs was just a dalliance, not to be taken seriously. Downright charitable they thought to keep her around since she was so compliant about putting the kids out of the way and not making reputation damaging demands of the future lord of the manor.”
Macklam made sure Gascoyne saw his scowl. He spoke up, “Don’t let your opinions get in the way. Apprise the subject’s character independent of his station. He was a man used to keeping secrets. His children and his former lover were filed away, part of the past resurfacing. There was no attachment to Miss Eden for him. She was a resolved situation.”
“And this Burnham,” the same man asked. “What of his covering for the man who murdered the woman he claimed to love? The much younger woman, eh.” He poked a bawdy elbow into Gascoyne, who, Macklam was pleased to note, did not engage in the coarse rejoinder. Macklam raised his pint to love. “There is more than one kind of love. He left us small clues, maybe too small, but it felt the most he could do. When Mrs. Carstairs became more and more agitated after Miss Eden’s murder, Burnham knew the secret would come out eventually. He murdered her to get us crawling over the place again, asking more questions.”
“And to punish someone for Miss Eden’s murder. Carstairs did lead Lord Granville right to Miss Eden’s house long after the girl was safely out of his reach,” said Gascoyne.
“What about this brother, Grover was it?” another man asked.
Macklam and Gascoyne shared a look. Burnham told them Grover had a new name, a new identity, and a new position in the War Ministry, far away from Granville Manor.
“Unsatisfying, that,” proclaimed a sour-faced officer so close to his retirement Macklam held his tongue.
Gascoyne did not. “Peripheral to our main investigation. He had no hand in any criminal activity in our-“
“Not that you know of,” the sourpuss said “The great lord sent him off, out of your way under some secret government cover you aren’t likely to get him back from. Makes more sense to me he’s your culprit. At least in the maid’s murder.”
“She wasn’t a maid. She was-“
“Why’d this butler put himself in danger? His loyalty’s to his master; war history there. Most likely he was looking after the girl on the continent at the lord’s request. Much less likely he’d engage in lustful behavior with her being who she was. These two are good at subterfuge, they are. Besides that,” he leaned in, big smile like a cat about to sink into a juicy mouse, “the boy lived in the village. Much more opportunity to form an attachment to that one. You didn’t keep that in mind did you Macklam?”
The man’s words riled Gascoyne, who launched into a defense of their theory founded on Burnham’s confessions, which, of course, did not hold up under the old guy’s theory that Burnham and Granville were manipulating them.
Macklam stayed quiet, sipped silently at his ale. Burnham confessed to killing Carstairs and implicated Granville in Miss Eden’s murder. Granville wouldn’t talk, had called in his War Ministry superiors. Likely he would not suffer any reprisals for the murder of Miss Eden. If he’d done it.
He reached out, tugged at Gascoyne’s elbow. “Do you have doubt, Wallace?”
Gascoyne shook his head. “No, sir. We solved this one. Don’t let him get in your head. Never solved a case like this in his whole career. Sour grapes, it is.”
“Sure,” Macklam stated.
Gascoyne heard it as a question, “I think so. The point about their skills at subterfuge are well taken.”
Gascoyne asked, “Why would the boy have killed either of them?”
“Because he was left out,” Macklam said. “She told Broadhurst in that interview that there were people she left out of her book who would be ‘quite miffed.’”
“Miffed enough for murder?”
Macklam wondered how hard it would be to suss out the mysterious Grover.
“We still have her glorious Mr. Leonides in custody. Maybe we should put these new questions to him.”
BIO
Gina Sakalarios-Rogers lives in Pensacola, Florida. She has published fiction in Toasted Cheese, The Bare Root Review, Flash Fiction Online and Foxing Quarterly. She was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize and was voted a notable story of 2006 in StorySouth Million Writers Award.
