Murder at Keyhaven Castle Page 17

  Thank God, he’d never be compelled to.

  “Tommy!” Lyndy cried when Tommy Griffiths-King, proprietor of the Sporting Times and Lyndy’s classmate from Eton, swung open the cab door before the muck on the street settled beneath the horse’s hooves.

  “By God, Lyndy, is it true?” Tommy said by way of greeting, stepping aside as Lyndy ducked out of the cab.

  Lyndy couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Tommy, but it had to be years. The man hadn’t changed a bit: that patrician nose, custom-tailored Savile Row suit, those unfortunate protruding rounded ears that stuck out from under his straw boater, and an irrepressible curiosity that lead to his buying a newspaper.

  “Is what true, Tommy?” Lyndy combed fingers through his hair as if to rid it of the stench that had settled on him.

  “Did your future father-in-law get murdered yesterday? Wasn’t the wedding set for tomorrow?”

  Lyndy wasn’t surprised news had already reached Tommy here in London. Stella’s father was a prominent man in their world of horse racing. If anyone knew of his death, it would be the owner of the Sporting Times. But knowing how a “journalist” had infiltrated their engagement party, Lyndy didn’t want to hazard a guess by what means his friend had come by the morbid news.

  “You’re right,” Lyndy said, “on both accounts. But for obvious reasons, the wedding’s been postponed. Didn’t you get Mother’s card?” Mother had been considerate to inform the guests of the delay, without giving too much detail into the reason.

  “I didn’t, but then again, I haven’t been at home since this morning. How is your bride holding up?”

  “That’s why I’m here, Tommy. Shall we?” With Tommy close on his heels, Lyndy yanked the glass door open, not wanting to prolong the visit any longer than he had to.

  Unquestionably, Tommy was an agreeable chap, and Lyndy would have loved to go to the club and catch up—the man published Lyndy’s favorite racing paper, after all. But as Tommy had so succinctly pointed out, Stella’s father had been murdered; Lyndy was a man on a mission. The sooner Lyndy returned with something that could find Mr. Kendrick’s killer, the sooner Stella and he could be married and put this bloody mess behind them.

  Besides, he already felt the need for a bath.

  “You were cryptic when you telephoned,” Tommy said, matching Lyndy step for step as they strode through the open lobby toward the lift doors, the tap of their boot heels echoing on the marble floor. “What are you expecting to find?”

  “A connection between Miss Kendrick’s father and an American jockey who was trampled on the Southampton docks a few days ago.”

  “Jesse Prescott,” Tommy said, shaking his head. “Bad business that. And highly ironic. Man spends his whole life riding horses only to die beneath their hooves.”

  “Yes, I’ve come to learn about the dead jockey. If you recall, Prescott was involved in the Woodhaven Downs scandal a few months back. I’m hoping to read more about it.”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place. If something was printed about the turf, you’ll find it here. And this, my friend, is the man to help.”

  As if he’d been waiting for his cue, a middle-aged fellow wearing spectacles, suspenders, and no jacket approached them.

  “Lord Lyndhurst,” Tommy said formally, “this is Hoyle, my paper’s archivist.”

  “I appreciate you helping me in this, Mr. Hoyle.”

  “Happy to be of service, Your Lordship.”

  “This is when I leave you, old chum,” Tommy said, slapping Lyndy consolingly on the shoulder, “but I’ll toast you at the wedding, whenever it happens.”

  “Thank you, Tommy,” Lyndy said. With a jolly tip of his hat, his old friend strolled back toward the doors that lead out to the street.

  “If you’ll follow me,” Mr. Hoyle said, leading Lyndy into the lift and instructing the attendant to bring them to the fourth floor, “I’ll take you to our newspaper’s morgue.”

  Morgue? Lyndy balked at the sound of that. What kind of macabre sensibilities do these newspaper men have? How could Tommy not have warned me? But Lyndy, having come this far, followed the archivist nevertheless when the lift door opened to the click-click-click of a distance typewriter onto an unadorned, white-washed, empty hallway that resembled a servants’ domain more than a place of reputable business. Lyndy was pleasantly surprised when the newspaperman led him into a well-lit room, furnished with a walnut table as long as the dining room at Morrington Hall and several ladder-backed chairs. Wooden filing cabinets, rising several feet above Lyndy’s head, lined the length of two walls. A few framed news clippings, the paper’s distinctive pinkish salmon color faded to pale peach, hung on the wall. The frame closest to Lyndy preserved the paper’s first issue dated: 11 February 1865. A clerk, in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, pored over newspapers spread out across half the table, not even lifting his head when they entered. The whole place smelled of ink and decaying paper.

  “Every article we’ve ever printed, every photograph we’ve ever taken is here,” Mr. Hoyle said proudly, and understandably so. “What was it you were looking for?”

  “Anything on the Woodhaven Downs scandal or a jockey called Jesse James ‘Pistol’ Prescott.”

  “Do you have a time frame?” The man approached a cataloging system and started to flip through the cards.

  “The scandal would’ve been a few months ago, March or April, maybe?” Lyndy remembered it was before he’d met Stella, but not by much. “I don’t know how long Prescott was a jockey.”

  Mr. Hoyle combed through the cards, wrote down a few notes, and then proceeded to a cabinet on the far end of the room. He pulled open a drawer near the top and plucked out a file folder. Then he located another drawer and then another, pulling folders as he went.

  “If it pleases Your Lordship,” Mr. Hoyle said, indicating the nearest chair at the table.

  At the other end, the clerk’s head sprung up, making Lyndy wonder if he’d been correct in assuming few gentlemen frequented the place. After a remonstrative scowl from Mr. Hoyle, the clerk quickly returned his attention to his collection of files.

  When Lyndy settled in, the archivist laid four folders, three slim and one bulging full of newspaper clippings, on the table in front of him.

  “Please, let me know if you require further assistance,” Mr. Hoyle said, before tackling a stack of folders in a crate, waiting to be refiled.

  Lyndy flipped opened the first folder. Each clipping made some mention of Prescott, chronicling races he rode, first in Kentucky and then all over America. Except for the jockey’s penchant for toting Jesse James’s gun, it was an unremarkable career of an unremarkable man. The second file was much like the first. Only the third had any mention of the Woodhaven Downs scandal, and that was no more than Lyndy already knew. He’d found nothing to connect Prescott to Elijah Kendrick.

  Frustrated, Lyndy slapped the third file closed and swatted at a fly buzzing around his head. He slid the bulging file toward him across the table. The article on top was the one he remembered reading. It was dated April 22, 1905. Lyndy skimmed it, finding nothing more than he’d remembered, and put it aside.

  Am I wasting my time? Lyndy swatted at the annoying fly again.

  He read through several more clippings until he found something useful—a list of names including de Graat, Sallow, and Loughty, all well-known trainers, as well as those of men with whom Lyndy was unacquainted. Like Prescott, every one of them had been banned from ever riding, training, or owning racehorses in America again. Was that why Prescott was in England? Having lost his livelihood in America, had he found work here? Both Inspector Brown and Stella worried Jesse Prescott hadn’t acted alone. Could one of the other Woodhaven Downs miscreants have joined Prescott in search of employment in England? Could one of these men have carried out Prescott’s plan to kill Stella’s father? If so, Lyndy wasn’t any closer to working out why.

  Lyndy made a mental note to tell the inspector to investigate this list of m
en further and kept reading.

  What is this? Lyndy sat up straighter when he got to the end of the article. It insinuated, quite blatantly, that the list of wrongdoers was incomplete, that others had escaped the scandal unscathed. Was it supposition on the journalist’s part, or did he know something he couldn’t put in print? Lyndy noted the journalist’s name in case he needed to contact him, put the article aside, and picked up the next. After skimming several more clippings, Lyndy found no other such speculation and chalked it up to idle conjecture on one reporter’s part. Then he found what he was hoping for.

  Lyndy shuffled the articles back into the folder, grimly satisfied he hadn’t wasted a trip after all. And truth be told, immensely relieved neither his father’s nor his own safety had ever been in jeopardy.

  “Find what you were searching for, Lord Lyndhurst?” the newspaperman asked, turning from his filing work.

  “That and more. Thank you, Mr. Hoyle.”

  Stella had been right. Jesse Prescott had every reason to want her father dead. He’d ruined the jockey’s career. And, as she’d assumed, Prescott had indeed made the same mistake her uncle had. The fourth paragraph of the last clipping Lyndy read included a partial transcript from the ensuing court case. Listed were the name and residence of the man who broke the Woodhaven Downs scandal—Mr. Elijah Kendrick, who “is currently residing at Morrington Hall, the ancestral home of the Earl of Atherly, in Hampshire, England.”

  * * *

  If Stella had reservations about searching through her father’s things, his will, and the questions it sparked, had eased her conscience about combing through the other bedrooms. Stella tackled the room Mrs. Robertson had put Aunt Ivy in first, the gold room, or so Stella called it, named for the color of the curtains, the accent pillows, the carpet, the piping on the otherwise snowy white bedcovers. It was bright and airy. Mindful of her aunt’s potential return, she swiftly sorted through the wardrobe, the dress drawers, Aunt Ivy’s hat boxes, and travel trunks. She found nothing out of the ordinary until she came across a stack of letters with the same return address, tied with a yellow satin ribbon, tucked into the nightstand drawer. Whom did her aunt know in Southampton? Could it be a coincidence these letters came from the same place where Pistol Prescott died? The address, for a hotel, was of no use. She’d have to read one to know more. Humming in the hall stilled Stella’s hand as she tugged at the corner of an envelope. She dropped the stack of letters back where she found them and swiftly closed the drawer.

  When it was safe to cross the hall, Stella tiptoed into the Swensons’ bedroom. Rummaging through Mr. and Mrs. Swenson’s things and then through Penny’s, Stella discovered nothing suspicious or surprising. She hadn’t expected to find anything troubling but wanted to be thorough. Finally, she entered her uncle’s guest room.

  He’d been given the purple room, the smallest in the house. A narrow but comfortable walnut bed, embellished with embroidered violets on the coverlet, a night table, and matching violet embroidered doilies, a wardrobe, and a spindly platform rocking chair were all it could hold. The children’s makeshift nursery, converted from what was once the dowager’s morning room, was more substantial. Not very welcoming of her father to put his brother in this tiny, feminine room. But then again, it was comfortably warm, despite only glowing embers in the grate, and if Uncle Jed had killed her father, this room would seem palatial compared to a jail cell.

  Stella sifted through his clothes, clean but threadbare, hanging in the wardrobe and peeked into his one spare pair of shoes laid neatly out by the bed. Nothing was amiss. The nightstand drawer was empty. Next to a colorful five-cent cigar box on top of the nightstand (with two cigars left inside) was a framed picture of Stella’s Aunt Martha and Uncle Jed on their wedding day. How handsome they both were. Stella remembered Aunt Martha as a quiet woman with long, pretty fingers. She’d died giving birth to Gertie. Both widowed with young children, the brothers should’ve had more in common than most. But they’d veered in different social and economic directions. Had it been her father’s prosperity that drove a wedge between them? Stella suspected the truth was more complicated than that.

  Not giving up, she slid her hand under the pillows, crouched down to peer under the bed, hoisted up the mattress. Nothing. That left his steamer trunk shoved into a corner. Stella slipped off the loose padlock and lifted the lid. Inside was an old, crushed red velvet photo album with a silver clasp and a sack of what looked like dirty laundry. Stella lifted the bag out and emptied it into a pile on the floor: men’s white shirts that smelled of sweat, boy’s stockings that needed darning, a little girl’s stained pinafore.

  Had Stella been wrong to suspect Uncle Jed? He wasn’t the man she remembered from her childhood. But did that mean he killed her father?

  Stella scooped up the dirty clothes, shoving them back into the sack, and dumped the bag back into the trunk. She retrieved the photo album and parked herself on the circular area rug. The album bulged with photographs, each framed in a cardboard page. She opened the padded lid. The top picture was a copy of Uncle Jed’s wedding picture. Stella flipped to the next photograph: Aunt Martha holding Sammy in his christening gown. Touched by the serene expression on the new mother’s face, Stella yearned for her mother again. After Stella’s mother had died, her father had all the photographs of Katherine Kendrick burned. If it weren’t for Aunt Ivy, Stella would’ve been left with the vague recollection of an eight-year-old to rely on. But instead, a cherished photograph, given to her by Aunt Ivy on her tenth birthday, sat propped up on Stella’s nightstand. Another reason Aunt Ivy’s deception pained her.

  Stella turned the page.

  Oh, look at them. This one was of her father and uncle as boys, caps pushed back from their foreheads, each proudly holding the reins of a pony. For sons of a coachman, this was rare. In a time when photographs were less common, such children wouldn’t have the opportunity or means to be captured on film. Despite their differences, it made sense Uncle Jed would cherish such a treasure. Stella flipped to the next page.

  “No!” She was mortified.

  Scooped out of the middle of the album was a large, secret compartment hidden beneath the authentic photo pages in the front. Inside lay a pearl-handled pocket revolver and a man’s wallet. Stella, repelled by the weapon, reached for the wallet. It was a simple leather billfold, worn along the crease, containing a second-class ticket for passage on the American Line’s SS New York, scheduled to sail two days ago, and a half dozen plain white calling cards. If the billfold ever held any money, it was gone.

  Oh, Uncle Jed.

  How he’d gotten them and why were all that concerned Stella, for there was no mistaking whom the things belonged to. The name on the ticket and the calling cards both read Jesse James Prescott.

  CHAPTER 19

  Inspector Brown immediately regretted his second helping of kidney pie when the smell of formaldehyde accosted him. He patted his jacket and trousers pockets but came up empty. No handkerchief. He must’ve left it in his overcoat, doing him no good hanging on the back of his office door. He shivered. “Must you keep it so cold in here?”

  Hovering over the body, Dr. Lipscombe didn’t answer Brown, but said instead, “Are you ready to proceed, Inspector?” Covered up to his chin with a white cotton sheet, Mr. Elijah Kendrick lay waiting, with the patience only afforded the dead. Poor sod.

  Brown wrinkled his nose at the smell and nodded perfunctorily. He preferred not to linger here any longer than needs must. He had two investigations to get back to. Brown plodded toward the examination table in the middle of the starkly bright, whitewashed room, careful to watch where he stepped. Last time he’d been here, he’d ruined his shoes. The elderly medical examiner, his white hair and mustache matching his lab coat, all in need of a good bluing, wordlessly handed Brown a linen handkerchief doused in lavender essence. Brown gratefully held it up to his nose.

  Studying the pale, eerily peaceful face of Miss Kendrick’s combative father, he inquired, �
��What can you tell me, Doctor? Do we have a case for manslaughter, or was it a tragic accident after all?”

  The words echoed, reminding Brown of the last time he’d had to consult with Lyndhurst’s medical examiner over the body of a murdered man. That death hadn’t been what it appeared to be either.

  “As you suspected, there is evidence of strangulation.”

  “So, someone did precipitate the fall that broke our man’s neck?”

  “Yes.”

  Oddly, Brown had hoped to be wrong. Can’t anything be straightforward?

  “And no.”

  The doctor’s contradictory announcement stopped Brown in midstep as he turned to go, believing the examination to be over. “Care to explain yourself, Doctor?”

  “If you’d be so kind as to stay long enough to hear my full report, I’ll do just that,” Dr. Lipscombe chastised.

  Fair enough.

  Brown was impatient to carry on with things, but that didn’t excuse his being less than thorough. “Pray, continue.”

  “Thank you. Now, I did locate several fractured cervical vertebrae. See here.” The doctor pointed to the bones at the base of the victim’s skull. “But that was caused by his descent down the stone stairs.”

  “I thought we’d already established that?”

  “Yes, but his broken vertebrae aren’t the cause of death.”

  “Didn’t you just say our man died of a broken neck?”

  “Indeed.”

  Brown pinched the bridge of his nose. What was Dr. Lipscombe rattling on about? As a rule, the doctor was a congenial man. Was the surgeon purposely testing his patience, or was the formaldehyde pickling his brain? Brown glanced around, expecting to spot a half-empty bottle of whiskey beside the porcelain sink among the trays filled with Brown didn’t want to know what.