Let There Be Blood (A Lord Ambrose Mystery) Read online

  Why had he taken the linen? I guessed, but I could not tell Marie. To wipe the blood of his victims from his hands. If he had stolen the watch from Crawshay, he must have had to dabble in the old man’s blood in order to reach into his pocket, where the watch would be fastened. Better not be mentioned now.

  Marie seemed exhausted. She lay back and closed her eyes. I had to ask her one more question.

  “The weapon. Where did it come from?”

  She spoke with her eyes closed, but clearly.

  “Weapons. It was a brace of pistols. I believe they had both been fired. They were on the dresser.”

  That explained the speed of the killings, and why the murderer had not needed to reload between shots. Little knowledge of firearms had been needed, therefore. Only the cold-blooded ability to hold the pistol steady, aim it at another human being and pull the trigger. And when that fellow creature had exploded into blood and torn flesh, the determination to repeat the act.

  Marie was speaking again.

  “My husband had been cleaning the pistols. They were an old pair, never used, as I remember. I think they’ve been in the family for a long time. Edmund took it into his head to clean them up — I expect he loaded them then. He had left them on the dresser in the dining room. He should have put them away, shouldn’t he, and not left them loaded? He made thing easy for his murderer. Poor Edmund — he always made things easy for everyone!”

  Was there a flicker of contempt in her voice? If there had been, it passed and she lapsed into silence, breathing in harsh gasps.

  In that English farmhouse, I stood in the August heat and recalled myself as I had once been — young, glowing for liberty, ready to use all my powers in its cause — ready even to die for it, as Tom Granby had doubtless been ready to die for his King. Young men don’t know what death is like. They think, they are taught, that it is glamorous and beautiful, a noble crown for heroes to seek out, a painless martyrdom, achieved without suffering. Heroes have no blood, no sordid guts, no bones to splinter, no bowels to burst and leak.

  The deaths I had seen in war were as dirty and squalid as those at home — worse, even, than what I had seen today, the stolid farmers with their blood and brains scattered over the trestle tables where they lay like butchered animals.

  The gypsy had committed the murders, almost certainly. Almost.

  But what if he had not?

  If he was innocent — and Marie had not, even by her own drug-fevered account, seen him actually pull the trigger — then someone else had killed Edmund Crawshay and his father, here in this house.

  And that someone was still at liberty.

  I would make sure that young Granby was posted here tonight. He seemed one of the more reliable of the local turnips — a brawny, sunburned lad, not too bright, but sensible enough.

  I had never been inside Crawshay’s before, but I was able to guess the layout of the farmhouse. The passage, barred by doors at either end, allowed access from the lane that ran along one side of the house, and from the farmyard at the other side. Beasts and muddy loads could thus be taken right through the house along the passageway, without dirtying or disturbing the household.

  The parlour had probably once, a couple of centuries before, been a cattle pen, when humans and animals lived under the same roof in wintry weather, huddled up for warmth, their breath and body heat mingling in the smoke from the hearth. Later Crawshays had added refinements, the beasts had been excluded to stand dumbly in their sheds outside, and now the farm boasted a smart parlour fit for ladies to sit in. On the side of the passage opposite the parlour was the principal room, which had once been the great hall of the farmhouse: I pushed open the door and walked into it, gazing round in the dusty sunlight. Here Crawshay had held to the old ways. There was a great fireplace at one end, where the cooking for the whole household must still be done, in the traditional way. There was a huge and tunnellike bread oven built into the thickness of the wall at one side of the fireplace, and beside it stood the long-handled rakes and shovels with which the loaves were put in at the back of the oven, and pulled out when they were cooked, too hot for the touch. A tripod hung over the empty grate basket in the fireplace. They would not have been making fires and eating hot food in this weather, but bread would still be baked, and the fire would probably be lit once a week for that purpose, even in summer. The arrangements were such as could have been seen in country houses three centuries ago; even for this remote place, in the depths of the countryside, they would be considered very old-fashioned.

  I took my time and moved away from the bread oven with reluctance — it had suddenly stirred a memory of sweet fragments of warm milk-bread, newly baked, handed to a drowsy child cradled on a nurses lap.

  On the other side of the fireplace was a small staircase, closed at the bottom by a door, which would lead up behind the chimney stack to the bedrooms. This, too, was an old arrangement I was familiar with in the houses hereabouts. Once this would have been the only staircase. A grand wide staircase sweeping up from the entrance hall was often added later on, when a bit more grace and show were called for. The Crawshays had not thought it worth their while.

  A huge dining table had been placed, not in the middle of the room, but close enough to the fire to get its warmth in winter. This was where they had been seated, Crawshay and his son, at the table, near the empty grate, and this was where they had died. It was probably in all innocence that the bodies had been removed to an outhouse, to spare Marie Crawshay the ghastly thought that the men of her family were left sprawled in an ugly death, lying as they had fallen, in the next room, but it meant I had to reconstruct what had happened here from the traces that were left.

  There were deep stains on the wood of the table. They would never get them out of the unvarnished old timber. They might scrub the table with lye, with silver sand, but already the blood had soaked deeply into the grain, as I could see. The blood had sprayed out, splashing the walls, and had formed two pools, one very heavy, at the end of the table nearest the door that led into the passage. The most blood was in front of a great carver chair, the kind used by the master of the house, and traditionally reserved for him alone. The other stain was smaller and less blood had soaked into the wood, but underneath the table there were black clots of it still, in the rushes that were strewn on the floor in the old-fashioned way. Probably they had not yet been noticed, and the rushes would eventually be cleared from the stone-flagged floor. Very few people used them nowadays, but Crawshay must have been a tyrant in insisting on the old country ways.

  I could picture the scene now. The old man, old Crawshay, with his shock of white hair and his angry jowls, seated facing the door as the killer entered from the passageway. The murderer had perhaps not expected to find the two men at home at all — they were usually out on the farm for most of the day, and now, at harvest-time, every available creature would be needed in the fields, even such a delicate animal as Edmund Crawshay. If the Crawshays had not been doing the accounts, they would not have been here in the house at all.

  I moved around the table, trying this way and that, trying out how the two men had sat, trying to see what they had seen.

  Old Crawshay had been here, at the head of the table, facing the door as the killer entered. Edmund had sat at the side, not facing his father. They had slumped forward after the shots, and the blood had collected in pools beneath their heads.

  And what of the weapons? Yes, just inside the door. There was a dresser against a side wall and on it a cleaning rod and some oily rags. Helpful Edmund, as Marie had said, cleaning the pistols ready for use.

  Someone had retrieved the pistols after the murder, and put them carefully back on the dresser, side by side. I lifted one, weighed it in my hand, turned it over. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship. The pistols, a matched pair, were duelling weapons, a splendid brace, made with a skill and elegance that could scarcely be surpassed. I looked closely at the steel damascening and the chased silver butts.
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  I put the pistols down, and concentrated on what had happened in that room. Probably, no one would ever know all the details. But the gypsy had come to the house — it was his habit to do so, old Seliman had told me, to come every day. The gypsy was helping out in the fields during the harvest, and though he was not fed with the other labourers at the end of the day, Marie usually gave him a pitcher of milk or some cider and a bit of bread to take with him. But on this occasion, Marie, according to her story of events, had been out in the dairy with her son. So the gypsy had pushed open the door, unlocked as always, and stepped along the passage. He had no business to do so, of course. And perhaps Crawshay had heard his footfalls; perhaps he had flung out a challenge, called out suspiciously at the sound of the movement outside the room.

  And then, if the gypsy had even been accused of theft, two such substantial witnesses as a stout local farmer and his son would be enough to get the man convicted at the next assizes, and hanged as speedily thereafter as might be managed.

  So when the man realised what such an accusation would mean, that he would inevitably hang from a gallows tree, when he looked around and saw the pistols, bright and gleaming after Edmund had cleaned them, it was the work of a second to reach for them and point them at his accuser. And then the work of a few moments to fire, perhaps at old Crawshay as he was still in the act of rising from his chair and calling out his accusation, and at his son, Edmund, there by his side. Now I understood that vicious amazement on the dead man’s face, I thought to myself, that look fixed there until the flesh itself should decay, an appearance of surprise and shock, rather than fear, the look of one who has seen a black beetle turn on him as he is about to crush it.

  The gypsy fired a pistol, and the ball caught Crawshay full in the throat. He pitched forward, and his life’s blood ran out.

  And then there was Edmund. He would have had no time for thought — just moments enough perhaps to turn and look with horror at his assailant, before the second pistol exploded death and the gypsy fired at Edmund’s innocent head, blasting through the side of his skull.

  Yes, that, or something very like it, was what had happened in this room.

  I had arrangements to make about Crawshays recently deceased, and could not spend time speculating about their ancestors. Yet the atmosphere of the house, the plain solidity of its origins, the tradition of honest labour and simple pleasure which it exuded, was working away at something in my mind. Perhaps it was a long-buried affection and attachment to a country I had come to despise, perhaps a return to some things, stolid, solid English things, certain plain and strong realities, the hard surfaces of wood roughly planed by some local carpenter, the dark, secure roof beams, the clean-cut grey stone. These stable, stuffy, hard-edged traditions of farmhouse living found some chord within me, struck deep down at some old notes, some rough country music, some feeling for the land around me that I had not experienced since my return from the wild, hot shores of Greece.

  I went back into the hall; there must be, besides the rooms I had already seen, quarters for work and storage. I found a passage that led to a series of work rooms, stone-flagged like the hall and passageway, cool even in this weather. There was a huge walk-in larder with marble slabs for shelves, and flitches of bacon, wrapped in muslin, hanging from hooks in the ceiling. The window was covered with a fine mesh against flies. And there was a still room, with nothing much left on its shelves, a few jars of jellies and preserved fruit, the labels peeling off and difficult to read.

  Beyond was proof that Marie Crawshay’s marriage had brought her to hard labour. There was a washhouse next to the still room, with tubs and wooden scrubbing-boards, and, the only modern note, an iron boiler with a stove grate to heat the water. There was a servant, Mattie, who came in from the village, I recalled, so perhaps she had done some of the heavy work here, but there were piles of linen waiting to be washed, both coarse rough farm shirts and smocks and some fine ruffled shirts. Marie, as she was at present, shocked and weeping, looked as if she could scarcely have lifted the pile of linen, in those thin, blue-veined arms.

  Curious. There was a faint warmth coming from the wood-burning stove that heated the boiler. I picked up a pair of tongs that lay nearby and lifted the lid of the stove. Inside was a pile of ash, and over the bars that would have contained the logs were some silvery splashes, as if something molten had dropped on to them.

  I made nothing of them at the time. I raked through the ashes, idly. There were some fragments of cloth, blackened, but with a small, neat pattern still faintly visible upon them.

  The passage from the front door ran straight through the house. The door at the other end, into the farmyard, had massive bolts on it. They were secure. I checked them carefully. There were only the two entrances, front and back.

  I walked back along the passage and stepped outside the front door of the farmhouse. Enough of these cloddish farmers and their history.

  The gypsy had done it. That was a certainty. Yet there was a faint shadow of doubt. Marie had not actually seen him fire the shots. If I were to make the supposition that he had not committed the crimes — in short, if I were to treat him as the law says we must treat a man who has not yet been tried, that is, as if he were innocent till proven guilty … if he had not done it?

  If the gypsy was innocent, then the real murderer was roaming free.

  And if the real murderer suspected that Marie Crawshay had seen him? Or even the child — the child might have seen something. In that case, their lives would not be worth a silver pin.

  Tom Granby was waiting outside. The crowd of men had dispersed, and he stood alone, his face ruddy in the hot sunshine, waiting patiently, as soldiers wait for orders.

  “Where did you serve, Tom?”

  “In France, my lord. I went as a drummer-boy and served for fifteen year, all told, till we was disbanded wi’ the peace and all.”

  “And what do you now? Do you have a trade?”

  “I’m a carpenter, my lord, but there’s little work hereabouts.”

  I was not truly concerned with his occupation, but rather satisfying myself as to whether I had a disciplined and solid fellow whom I might make my lieutenant, as it were. Tom Granby was good enough.

  “Tom, I want you to spend the night here. You are to make sure there is no attempt to enter the farmhouse, do you understand? You will make up some sort of bed in the passage inside the door of the farmhouse. The only other entrance is at the back and it’s securely bolted. I’ll send a rifle and some ammunition over from the gun room at Malfine. There’s some smoked ham in the dairy — cut yourself a slice or two for your supper. As for Mistress Crawshay — Mistress Crawshay is not to be disturbed. If you need anything, call for the governess, Miss Anstruther.”

  I was puzzled about something.

  “Tom, how came the alarm to be raised? How did you know in the village? It’s three miles or more from the farm.”

  “The governess — Miss Anstruther — she had just come back with the cart from Callerton. She said she had just turned into the yard when Mistress Crawshay started hollering and screaming inside the house. So Miss Anstruther, she leaps up in the cart again, whips up the old pony, and down to the Village with the news. I was first in through the door when we got here.”

  “Did you see the gypsy?”

  “Nay, but Mistress Crawshay were yelling and screaming as how the gypsy-man had done it — killed them Crawshays, both of them, and run off beyond the house. So some of us makes after him, like, and finds him just along the road there, same as old Seliman said.”

  “Mistress Crawshay — did you see any blood on her gown? Had she touched them?”

  “I didn’t see no speck of blood on her. Miss Anstruther, she had a great smear of blood across her gown, I saw that all right, but she said how she’d bent over old Crawshay and tried to lift his head up — and then she saw as how he’d been shot in the neck. But Mistress Crawshay, she were as clean as a whistle. Not a speck of blood anywh
ere. Reckon she must have kept well clear of them.”

  I suddenly felt desperately tired; the great newly healed scar across my body began to throb. This English countryside was my retreat from that cruel, stony land in which I had recently fought: this should have been my green, secured and ordered hermitage. And yet it had turned into this parched and murderous terrain. The stench of the dead, the blood, the laudanum-drugged woman — these had no place here …

  Yet they were not delusions, but horribly real enough, though death and tragedy did not belong here in this stolid English farmhouse, and neither did I. The wounded animal, myself, needed peace to nurse its scars, to get to my own ground, to my den, my lair, if you like to call it, within the encircling walls of the mansion of Malfine.

  “Tom, help get the bodies moved from here to the icehouse at Malfine.”

  Tom gave a dry laugh.

  “I reckon that’s the only place for them in this hot weather, my lord. Your worship won’t be fancying any cold drinks for a while, though.”

  I drew a half-sovereign out of my pocket and gave it to Tom.

  “Get yourself a bottle of brandy. You’ll need some for this work.”

  Zaraband was tethered outside the farmhouse. I swung into the saddle, she danced for a moment to show me her paces, and then I turned her head for Malfine.

  CHAPTER 6

  When I returned from Crawshay’s after my encounters with the living and the dead, I stepped gratefully into the cool hall of Malfine. Belos brought me a glass of hock. There was no ice, of course: as I said, the icehouse that would serve as a temporary tomb for the Crawshay men had been unused for many a year. Belos, who did not stand on his dignity as butler, because I gave him no chance to do so, helped me off with my boots and brought the hock with his usual diplomatic anticipatory speed.

  “Belos, have you heard the news?”

  He had, from the men who came with the gypsy in the cart.

  “But if the gypsy is not guilty, my lord … ”