A Dangerous Time For Love by Louise Allen

Author:Louise Allen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Time travel
Published: 2020-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Fortunately the Lesters and the McNeils were too well bred to bolt off home the moment the waters dropped, which they did to a passable level by mid-afternoon. The Dowager did her best to discover if Lady McNeil, Lady Lester and Mrs Greenstreet had heard or seen anything suspicious while James and Luc played billiards with Sir Hugh, Sir Andrew and Thomas McNeil and asked much the same questions. They all reported drawing a complete blank.

I gathered Elizabeth Greenstreet, Marianne Lester and Rowena McNeil and tried to pick their brains. Unfortunately, in Elizabeth’s case, I wasn’t finding much brain to pick. I suspected the girl had been trained to flutter and dither and be sweetly idiotic, but I persevered in the hope of getting at least two neurones to spark together.

‘I do not understand why the Constable hasn’t arrested anyone,’ she said, big brown eyes wide.

‘Difficult, as we have no idea who it was,’ I pointed out.

‘I thought it was a tramp, some vagrant.’

‘No,’ I said bluntly. ‘Someone who was inside this house last night was involved.’

She squeaked.

‘I wish Mr Winslow was here,’ Marianne said.

‘A very good thing he was not.’ Rowena, at least, had her mind engaged with the problem. ‘We know he can be eliminated as a suspect.’

‘So someone here is a murderer.’ It appeared that Elizabeth had finally grasped the seriousness of the situation.

‘Not necessarily,’ I soothed. ‘But if not, then they must have let in whoever it was and know about it. It is very important to think whether we heard or saw anything at all suspicious or out of the usual, or even slightly peculiar, last night.’

‘Or yesterday evening,’ Marianne said. ‘It must have been planned, don’t you think?’ She brooded for a moment. ‘We all knew that the jewels were kept upstairs and not in the silver safe in the butler’s pantry because Lady Radcliffe made a remark about the footmen bringing them downstairs. And all the guests saw how wonderful they were.’ She glanced at me. ‘Do you think the footmen had realised how much there was before they had to carry it all together like that?’

I nodded. ‘I take your point, but I think this had been planned for longer than a day.’

‘But if it was planned, then we guests would not know about the jewellery, would we?’ Elizabeth asked, surprising me.

‘But we did know,’ Rowena said. ‘At least, we did, because when we called two weeks ago Lady Radcliffe was talking to Papa about the Indian jewel, the Heart of Winter, and saying that Mr Pendrew was going to be staying and working on the collection. And your Mama and Papa were there, Marianne, because that is when we met them for the first time.’

‘Well, Mama and I knew nothing about it, because we were hardly acquainted with Lady Radcliffe at all before we came here to stay,’ Elizabeth told me earnestly. ‘Mama met her at a ball in London and said something about Marianne and I being particular friends and how I was going to miss Marianne when she went to live in Suffolk.

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