Murder At Wittenham Park

 

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To my daughter, Lorna

1

“D
ARLING
,” Lady Gilroy was asking, her normally relaxed East Coast voice strained, “is this ‘murder weekend' really going to make money?”

“Should do.” Lord Gilroy glanced at his wife across the tea-table, set with Spode china cups and an elegant George II silver teapot. He didn't like her tone. Outwardly Deirdre Gilroy was straight out of the pages of a society magazine. Her fine blond hair was held back by a black velvet band. Her pretty, though somewhat sharp features, were only lightly made-up. Because this was a chilly early-summer day, she was wearing a cashmere twin set and pearls over neatly tailored fawn slacks. As she poured a cup of Earl Grey tea for him, she looked poised and self-assured. But Gilroy knew that his American-born wife sometimes lacked confidence. Not in herself. In him. And her voice told him this was one of those days.

“Dee Dee darling, the murder weekend's a bloody clever idea,” he insisted, feeling able to say so because it had not been his own. “That promoter fellow knows his onions. We've got a full house for tomorrow, haven't we? How can we lose? He said anything to do with Agatha Christie would pull in the punters, and he was damned right. They'll spend a fortune on booze alone.”

“You mean we will,” Dee Dee cut in acidly. “You should never have made it all-inclusive.”

“But they're paying the earth!” Gilroy protested. “The weekend must show a profit.”

“I darned well hope so.” Dee Dee was sadly aware that most of her husband's waking hours were spent devising schemes to make money out of his ancestral home; and very few of them worked. “For your sake I darned well hope it does.”

Owning a neo-Gothic mansion on fifteen hundred acres of the finest English countryside, and having a title to go with it, might sound like a dream-world; the ultimate distinction in a society of wannabees. The only other thing you would need is cash. But of this Lord Gilroy was perennially short. His grandfather had been given a peerage for “political services” in the 1920s. As the owner of a coal-mine he had been a particularly tough boss during the 1926 General Strike. So he was duly rewarded and soon after bought a massive Victorian “castle” called Wittenham Park to dignify his new title. But in 1946 the mines were nationalized and death duties became crippling. By the time that Algernon, Third Baron Gilroy, inherited Wittenham, there was precious little left except for the title, the land and the impossible house.

Traditionally British noblemen solved such problems by marrying American heiresses. This was what the outside world assumed Gilroy had done. Unfortunately for him, the outside world was wrong. Dee Dee Gilroy was the daughter of a prominent New York financier who had been a high-roller when she married, but had tripped up in the futures market and lost twenty million dollars almost overnight, leaving her an heiress no longer.

Worse, Gilroy had a more personal problem than money; one that his bride from Long Island had assumed she could change, but which had proved as ineradicable as a criminal conviction. He looked like a used-car salesman.

However well Lord Gilroy dressed, he still looked like a man whose dearest wish was to ease you into the driving seat of an insurance-write-off Ford, with a stolen engine and the odometer turned back. He looked like one in a City suit and in grouse-moor tweeds; above all he looked like one in a blue blazer and flannels, his favourite gear. At school his classmates had nicknamed him Fast Buck, after he had tried running a book on the Grand National. In the Coldstream Guards it became simply Buck, which he welcomed, not realizing that his fellow officers were shrewder than he thought, because “Buck Gilroy” made him sound like a womanizer as well as disreputable. And even in the dark blue “boating jacket” of his regiment, tailored at huge expense by Welch and Jefferies of Savile Row, and adorned with gleaming gilt regimental buttons, he still looked as though he belonged in a midtown showroom.

The explanation may have been that his chin was too round and dimpled, it may have been the way his thick dark hair slicked unevenly across his forehead, as though he were an overgrown teenager, it may have been his all-too-effusive smile, or the way he naturally adopted a self-confidently lounging attitude, as if trying to shake off the discipline of his brief military career. Whatever it was, Buck Gilroy exuded the impression that if he hadn't just sold you something, he was assuredly about to try. This was why he had never been offered the City directorships that other peers seemed to pick up like flowers from the wayside. Now, yet again, he was chasing a brilliant new idea for improving the family cash flow and, yet again, his wife was getting cold feet about it.

“Is this promoter on the level?”

“Why shouldn't he be?”

“He says he's sold all the rooms, but where's the guest list? Who is actually coming?”

Her tone made it very clear that if they did not clean up on the forthcoming weekend, there was going to be hell to pay. As a débutante she had imagined that a title and a grand house automatically spelt money; a misconception in which her financier father had encouraged her. Now, at thirty-five, with two children being expensively educated on top of maintaining this vast mansion, she knew better.

“He promised he'd fax us today. I'll go and check the machine.”

In the Agatha Christie thriller on which their weekend was to be based, last-minute news would have arrived by the afternoon post, brought on a silver salver to the drawing-room by the butler. The Gilroys were more reliant on technology, and anyway the butler was having this Thursday off in compensation for working on the weekend. Gilroy had already decided, with what was for him striking originality, that the butler's role could be that of the butler. Dee Dee bettered that by observing that the simplest way for her to avoid having to be with their guests all the time was for her to play the first “victim.” She could then refuse to appear again, except at meals, which would be hard to avoid, since “dining with Lord and Lady Gilroy in the aristocratic setting of their Wittenham Park dining-salon” was part of the deal. And she could make sure that the family silver did not become part of the “all-inclusive” deal. Dee Dee Gilroy was quite possessive about her husband's heirlooms.

When Lord Gilroy returned, holding several flimsy sheets of paper, he had a look of puzzlement on his face, as if he had just inadvertently purchased a rebuilt wreck himself.

“The bloody man's gone and hired an actress.”

“What on earth for?”

He read aloud. “‘As your lordship appreciates, nothing is worse than guests' being hesitant about throwing their heart and souls into getting the action going. We have accordingly hired the talented actress Priscilla Worthington to take the part of the villainous companion and co-murderess.'”

“So talented she's out of work, I'll bet,” Dee remarked acidly. “‘Resting,' don't they call it. And just how much are we paying her?”

“Doesn't say,” Gilroy admitted, realizing he had allowed the promoter far too much leeway, then defended himself. “Actually, it makes sense. The only people we can rely on to make an effort are that retired insurance fellow and his wife.”

Only one of the few replies to Gilroy's original advertisement in the personal columns of
The Times
had converted into a paid-up booking, and that was from a father and daughter called Jim and Jemma Savage, the father revealing that he had been a professional insurance assessor and that he was mad about Agatha Christie. He had also mentioned that Jemma worked for a magazine called
Crime and Punishment
and was certain to write up the weekend. Dee Dee recognized at once that they ought to offer a discount to a crime reporter. Accordingly Buck wrote back offering them ten percent off for being the first to book.

In fact, they had been very nearly the last to book as well, because no one else replied, save for an events promoter who specialized in country-house events. Without him, the weekend would never have materialized and the enthusiastic Mr. Savage would have had his deposit returned; albeit reluctantly, if Buck had anything to do with it.

“And who else is on the list?”

Gilroy began reading through the other names, but stopped abruptly half-way through. “George Welch?” he asked his wife. “Why do we know that name?”

“Welch?” For a second or two she was bemused. “My God, that's the lousy property developer we refused to deal with! Don't tell me we have that creep as a guest?” Dee Dee's normal self-control faltered as she confronted the prospect of entertaining one of the most unpleasant men they had ever met for an entire weekend. “I don't believe it!”

If his wife was outraged, Gilroy himself was astonished. He had recently been exploring every possible way of turning some of his fifteen hundred acres into cash without destroying the character of the estate, or losing control of it.

The estate mattered, both emotionally and practically. Buck Gilroy might look like a crook, but his heart was in the right place when it came to inheritances and his children's futures. Six years as a Guards officer had taught him that if his son Edward was ever going to marry serious money, he would need the estate. The marriage market, like any other trading business, was getting tougher every year. Too many titled gentry no longer inhabited, let alone owned, an ancestral home. If your parents had donated it to the national Trust and you retained a wing, well, that was acceptable, though it meant you had sightseers swarming all over the place at weekends. But then, most stately-home owners suffered that and spent happy hours counting the gate money on Sunday evenings.

But a title without any “stately” attached was worth little more than being one of those two-a-penny Italian counts, living in some tumbledown Venetian palazzo that any decently rich American would only go into to get out of the rain; and would regret having done so the moment he started scratching himself. No, in these highly competitive days only the genuine article would bring in the marital punters. Take Dee Dee's own father … Gilroy sighed to himself, as thoughts and memories ambled through his brain. He actually preferred not to think about Dee Dee's near-bankrupt father, but what had happened did prove the point.