A Corpse in Shining Armour (30 page)

Since he wanted to talk, as many people do in shock, I asked when he’d last seen Lady Brinkburn.

‘I saw her walking on the lawn yesterday evening with her little dog, like she usually did.’

‘Not after that?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hear anything out of the way last night or in the early hours of the morning?’

A grim set came to his mouth and he looked sideways at me.

‘No. I locked up last night like I usually do, and after that I didn’t see or hear anything out of the way. Don’t look at
me like that. I’m not lying, not now. I’ve done with all that, and I don’t care what anybody says. I don’t care about my position
either, now she’s gone. I’ll see things as right as I can for her sake, then I’ll give notice and go to my pigs.’

‘Pigs?’

‘I own a cottage and three acres from money I’ve put by over the years. Nothing grand, nothing I didn’t work for and earn
above-board. I like pigs. They don’t ask anything from you beyond what’s reasonable.’

We were nearly at the front door. I could see faces peering out from the window curtains, then drawing back. Staff discipline
was already breaking down. He was on the defensive now, so there was nothing to lose.

‘Just one thing,’ I said. ‘Who besides you has keys to the outside doors?’

He sighed. ‘Mrs Bream has a key to the kitchen door, in case the scullery maid needs to take rubbish out early. That’s all.’

‘None of the family?’

‘Certainly, the family has keys. Her ladyship has one…had one…in case she takes a fancy to go out early.’

‘And Mr Stephen and Mr Miles?’

‘Of course. If they happened to come down from London late one night, they’d want to get in without waking everybody up.’

‘Did that happen often?’

‘Not lately, no.’

We went up the steps. He paused with his hand on the door, as if reluctant to go inside.

‘Mr Carmichael said to ask you to break the news to Betty first,’ I said.

Another sigh from him. I guessed he was fearful of women’s tears.

‘Would you like me to do that?’

‘If you would, miss. It might come better from a lady.’

‘Perhaps you’d ask her to come out here,’ I said, pointing to a garden bench in the shade at the side of the house. ‘I can
tell her while you’re talking to the others inside.’

‘Very well, miss.’

He squared his shoulders, pushed the door open and walked in. I waited on the bench, looking across the lawn to the line of
yellow irises fringing the river.

After a minute or two, Betty came along the gravel path. She was pale and already crying. I patted the bench. She hesitated
and sat down on the edge of it, as if she had no right to be there.

‘I’m afraid it’s true,’ I said. ‘Lady Brinkburn is dead.’

She put her hands over her eyes and started rocking to and fro on the edge of the seat. When I moved closer and slid my arm
round her shoulder, she leaned against me and sobbed without reserve. We stayed like that for some time before she pushed
herself upright.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’

‘I’m the one who’s sorry, to have to tell you. Do you want me to call Mrs Bream?’

I thought the housekeeper might be better at comforting her than a near-stranger like me, but she shook her head.

‘Her ladyship liked you.’

I was surprised.

‘She said so?’

‘After that first time when you came to tea. She said you were the sort of woman she could trust.’

It hit me hard. At that meeting, Lady Brinkburn couldn’t have trusted me in the least. I was a hired investigator, sent to
discredit her.

‘Did she drown, ma’am?’

Betty asked the question in a small voice, looking down at the gravel. I could have turned the question back on her as I’d
done with Whiteley, but decided against it.

‘No. It isn’t certain yet, but it looks as if she’d drunk too much laudanum.’

‘Oh.’

She sounded sad, but not surprised.

‘You knew she was in the habit of taking laudanum?’

‘To help her sleep, yes.’

‘You were concerned she was taking too much?’

‘Yes, we were, ma’am.’

‘We?’

‘Mr Carmichael and me.’

She seemed open and trusting. The garden and house were silent, as if the shock had stunned them. Distant Sunday bells sounded
from across the river. I thought about it for a while, then decided to repay trust for trust, hoping I wasn’t making a mistake.

‘Did Mr Whiteley tell you anything about where we found Lady Brinkburn?’

‘No. Only that there’d been an accident and she was dead.’

‘She was in her boat, on her own. It had drifted down the river. Nobody seems to know how it happened. Do you mind if I ask
you some questions?’

Her mouth had dropped open in surprise. She closed it, then nodded permission. I knew I was taking advantage, but the questions
would have to come at some time.

‘Did she say anything to you about intending to go out in the boat?’

‘No.’

‘What time did you last see her?’

‘Half past seven yesterday evening, or thereabouts, when I went up to collect her supper things. She said she wouldn’t be
needing me after that.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘No, ma’am. Quite often, when she didn’t need me in the evenings, she’d let me know so I didn’t have to listen for the bell
all the time. She was always kind about things like that. Always so kind.’

The tears started again. I put my hand over hers and waited until she was calmer.

‘Were you there when she drank her laudanum last night?’

‘No. She usually took it just as she was getting into bed.’

‘When you saw her yesterday evening, did there seem anything at all unusual about her manner?’

She thought about it.

‘She was sad. Sadder than usual, and mortally tired.’

‘Did she seem nervous or frightened?’

‘Her poor nerves were bad. She was always jumping at loud noises, if a door slammed or anything. I always tried to move quietly
round her, not drop things.’

‘Worse than usual yesterday evening?’

‘I think so, yes. And the storm had upset her nerves.’

‘Did she say anything about her son’s visit?’

‘No, ma’am.’

I didn’t think Betty was concealing anything. If Lady Brinkburn had quarrelled with her son, it would hardly be something
she’d discuss with her maid.

‘Did she say anything about what she intended to do with the rest of the evening after you left her?’ I said.

‘No. I supposed it would be as usual.’

‘What was usual?’

‘About eight o’clock or half past, while the servants were having their supper, she’d take Lovelace out for a walk out on
the lawn before they settled for the night.’

‘Did she do that last night?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I didn’t see her, but Ruth had to go outside for something, and she did.’

‘Was Lady Brinkburn alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she always walk the dog on her own in the evening?’

‘No. Sometimes Mr Carmichael was with her.’

She blushed but looked me in the eye, as if challenging me to say something. I guessed that she’d had to defend her mistress
against gossip among the other servants. It would be cruel to embarrass her any more on that score.

‘Did you notice her writing anything yesterday?’

‘I didn’t see her writing, but she had been.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘She had ink on the inside of her finger, where you get it when you hold a pen.’ She held up her fingers to demonstrate. ‘I
noticed because sometimes when she gets ink on her fingers she asks me to bring a bowl of warm water and a pumice stone to
get it off. She didn’t last night.’

‘Did she give you a letter to post or deliver to anyone?’

‘No, ma’am.’

I still didn’t believe I’d find a suicide note, but this was a trail that had to be followed.

‘Betty, Mr Carmichael has asked me to go through Lady Brinkburn’s rooms and see if she left a note. If you can bear it, I’d
be very grateful if you’d come with me.’

She bit her lip and nodded. We went together into the hall. The maid Dora was polishing the stair rail. Her eyes were pink
and the edge of her white apron crumpled as if she’d been using it to mop up her tears, but the stare she gave us was greedy
for more news. We went past her and up the stairs by the library. Sunlight was streaming through the windows of Sophia’s sitting
room, on to a pot of auriculas on a table. Instinctively, Betty ran to the curtains to shut out the light.

‘Leave them for a while,’ I said. ‘Is there anything here that looks different from when you saw it yesterday evening?’

She looked round and shook her head. To me, it was almost exactly as it had been when I’d had supper with Sophia. Even a novel
on the window seat was splayed open, cover uppermost, just as I remembered. I picked it up, just in case there should be a
note underneath it. Nothing. She’d been in the middle of a chapter.

Betty and I made a fairly systematic search, though I could see her heart wasn’t in it. I opened the drawers of the writing
desk and found nothing but blank paper, wafers for sealing letters, a half-used stick of wax. After a while we went through
to her bedroom. A green afternoon dress with ribbon trim was flung over the back of a chair. Automatically, Betty gathered
it up and shook out the creases in the skirt.

‘Is that what she was wearing when you last saw her?’

‘Yes.’

The coverlet on the bed was smooth and unrumpled.

‘Would anybody have come in to make the bed this morning?’ I said.

‘No, I always made her bed myself. I knew just how she liked it.’

So the bed hadn’t been slept in.

‘Where did she keep her nightdress?’

‘In here.’

She opened the top drawer in a chest of drawers, on to lavender-scented emptiness.

‘It’s gone.’

I thought I’d caught a glimpse of white lace under the cloak when they’d moved Sophia out of the boat. So she’d taken off
her dress, changed into her night-dress and drunk her dose of laudanum. At least that much made sense. The empty bottle was
there on a cabinet by her bed, the glass beside it. Why, having drunk it, didn’t she get into bed? I turned back the coverlet
and felt under the pillows, the bolster and the sides of the mattress for a note. Nothing, of course.

Betty was crying again, still holding the green dress in her arms. Before we left, she insisted on hanging it up in the wardrobe.

We were walking out of the bedroom into the sitting room when a thought came to me. I turned back into the bedroom.

‘Betty, would you come here and look at the bottle, please.’

She came, looking puzzled. An ordinary empty dark green glass bottle of the kind you find by the dozen in any chemist’s shop.
I’d seen it in Sophia’s hand the night before last. Only I hadn’t.

‘Does anything strike you about the shape of it?’ I said.

She peered at it, then made a shape with her hands.

‘It’s got…’

The shape she was making was of a bottle with shoulders.

‘And what was it usually like?’

‘Straight down, like this.’

This time the shape was of a smoothly tapering bottle.

‘What were they usually like, her bottles?’

‘The smooth ones.’

‘Not like this one, then?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Can you recall ever seeing her take laudanum from a bottle this shape?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Have you any idea at all where this bottle might have come from?’

‘No.’

She looked both puzzled and scared. I told her to leave the bottle and glass as they were, and asked whether she could lock
the bedroom. She nodded, went back to the sitting room and took the key from the drawer of a table. Once the door was locked,
she insisted on drawing the heavy curtains of the sitting room to shut out the sunlight before we left. We went back down
the stairs that led to the library door.

‘What shall I do now?’ Betty said.

I felt like telling her I had no idea. I supposed there were a dozen places I should be looking, hundreds of questions I should
be asking, but my mind was a blank.

‘I think you’d better ask Mrs Bream,’ I said. ‘I’ll wait in the library for a while.’

Wait for Robert Carmichael to come back. I knew that most of those questions should concern him.

It was a relief to walk into the high, sunlit library, not so full of her intimate presence as the rooms upstairs. For a while,
I simply walked from bay to bay, among the ranks of tooled leather spines and gold lettering, books nobody had read for generations,
old sermons, county records, European genealogies with quaint crests. My wanderings took me towards the table where I’d read
her journal, thinking of the secret that she’d come close to telling me and now never would. Sunlight was coming through the
window under the half drawn-down blind, just as it had been on the morning when I’d last sat there. A leather-bound volume
was lying closed on the reading desk. At first I thought I was imagining it because I’d been thinking about her journal. But
it was the journal itself. I was sure Robert Carmichael had put it back on the shelf after I’d read it. Who had taken it out
again?

I sat down at the desk, opened the journal at random and found myself looking at the Antwerp entry with its picture of the
boy wrapped in a blanket, holding the cup of tea she’d brewed for him. The young Handy. Now that I knew his name and her opinion
of him, it seemed that there was something shrewd and knowing about the eyes, too old for his round boyish face. I read on,
hoping to find something I’d missed on first reading that might give a clue to the story she’d almost told me. There was nothing
new, except my sense of loss for the observant and talented young woman she’d once been and how all that had ended.

Her account of the storm by Lake Como was almost unbearable now, reminding me of the night I’d spent with her. I turned the
page, steeling myself for that diagonal scrawl across the two pages:
This morning Lord Brinkburn has told me something terrible, terrible.
It was still there, but it wasn’t alone any more. Both pages, above it and below it, were filled by neat and level lines
of writing, in what was unmistakeably her hand. At first I wondered if I’d made some ridiculous mistake and the writing had
been there all the time. Then, at the start of the line in the top left-hand corner I saw yesterday’s date. I read on.