Dorothy Cannell - She Shoots to Conquer

“Did they have trouble getting here?” Ben began pacing, his eyes shifting from me to the door and back. I knew what he was thinking and he was right. I desperately needed a cup of tea or if possible something stronger to keep me from starting to cry. Un-fortunately, if there were a bottle of brandy in the room, a team of detectives would be needed to find it. An automobile accident amply explained by the fog would not have caused investigators to linger on the premises. Routine for them, while to us the deceased was a nameless, faceless stranger, but surely she was someone’s loved one… wife… mother… daughter… friend. What an agonizing shock for the bereaved to receive by phone or a knock at the door!

“It’s what they’re used to, isn’t it? The police and medical people, I mean, getting to places in the worst possible conditions, and of course Lord Belfrey turned on all the exterior lights for them.”

Hadn’t they been on when the woman arrived? This thought blocked out any other.

“Not that they was likely to do much good, that fog being thicker than a sheepskin coat.”

“Lord Belfrey,” echoed Mrs. Malloy, as if prayerfully reeling off the names of a dozen holy martyrs.

“That’s his nibs,” replied Mr. Plunket with a prosaic scratch of a nodule below his lower lip.

“A proper lordship?” Mrs. M pursued hopefully, while sinking into an armchair that looked as if it had been rescued after being set out next to a dustbin a hundred years ago.

“What other kind is there?” muttered Ben, his eyes fixed anxiously on my recumbent form.

“Oh, you know,” an airy wave of a ringed hand, “the sort as is given for your lifetime only-that doesn’t get passed on through the family. Or don’t you get made a lord for being a famous jockey or actor?” Her rouge brightened at this possibility. “Maybe that’s just for sirs and dames and all that lot.”

“The title’s been in the Belfrey family all of six hundred years.” Pride was evident in every throb of Mr. Plunket’s voice. And despite my increasing headache it struck that he had evinced no emotion of approaching scale when describing the appallingly recent death just beyond the doorstep.

“Have they lived here the whole time?” Mrs. Malloy inquired in a breathless rush.

“Give or take the times it was taken away on account of them being on the wrong side politically. Tudor times was the worst, from what Mrs. Foot, Boris, and me understand it. And for what? is what we ask ourselves. Roman Catholic… Protestant! Who gives a flaming candle?”

My mother-in-law for one, I thought dizzily. There is a woman who has never voluntarily missed mass a day in her life and can discuss the impenetrables of transubstantiation with the best of them, including St. Augustine had he paid her a vision. My Jewish father-in-law might not have made him quite so welcome; he’s a crotchety man, not at all welcoming to drop-in guests at the flat above the greengrocer’s shop in Tottenham.

“But there’s an end to everything, even bloodthirsty kings and queens,” said Mr. Plunket as if reading from a pamphlet on sale for twenty pence at the entrance booth. “The Belfreys always came back home to Mucklesfeld Manor, and some of them-the ones that wasn’t given over to living it up wild-went about setting it back to rights, just like his nibs has made up his mind to do. Although who can say as to what will happen now that woman’s been taken away in a body bag. Mrs. Foot and Boris both talk like it won’t make no difference but…”

Mrs. Malloy cut into his ruminations. “Mucklesfeld?” Her voice was sharp-edged with disappointment. “Not Belfrey?”

I heard what sounded like a hiccupping cough, but looking to where Mr. Plunket still stood at the foot of the sofa, I realized he was chortling. In the sallow light cast by the lamp nearest him and others scattered stingily around the vast room, his heightened color did not look good. A decidedly unbecoming greenishorange that confirmed the pimply-gourd effect.

“Belfrey? Now that would set the place up as a joke, wouldn’t it? Bats in the belfry, there’d be no stopping the schoolboy silliness. No, the place got its name from the old muck fields hereabouts. Famous they was; some said the best in all England. Wonderful it was for growing celery. But then they went and dried up, just like the family money did. As his nibs can’t be blamed for.” He stared down at Mrs. Malloy in her chair. “He only came into the title and property last year after his cousin that was then Lord Belfrey died. Spent much of the last thirty years in America, he did-Alaska mostly, although I always thought that was Russia.”

“Whatever, it’s abroad, isn’t it?” Mrs. Malloy responded ingratiatingly. “I’m sure his lordship was glad to get back to the UK; a title in America has to be as much use as a fur coat in the tropics.” If she expected an appreciative chuckle from Mr. Plunket, she was disappointed. He stood smoothing down the too-short sleeves of his jacket.

“From all we’ve heard, the cousin was a miserable old blighter that let Mucklesfeld go to rack and ruin while he shut himself away from the world.”

This topic would have been fascinating if I’d been sufficiently unwoozy to be my usual nosy self. Even though I seriously doubted I’d slipped gracefully to the floor during my faint, I thought it more likely my headache was due to emotional stress than physical injury. For whole minutes at a time my mind successfully warded off the memory of the Metal Knight clawing at my throat, but the nightmarish face peering down at me through the upper banisters refused to be banished. Stupid of me. Once I could think clearly I would hit upon a logical explanation for both incidents, but the aura of malevolence that had accompanied the latter… would I be able to convince myself that it had arisen entirely out of my penchant for the Gothic novel?

“And like I said, his nibs has been hoping to refill the coffers at Mucklesfeld. He’s had to make a decision that many a proud man wouldn’t have the guts for. This television show…”

Ben cut him off. “I realize this isn’t a cottage. But how long should it take for your employer to come back and inquire after my wife or at least send one of the other members of the staff with a reviving beverage?”

“Now then, Mr. H.” Mrs. Malloy sent him the admonishing glance of a nanny who doesn’t appreciate being shown up when bringing a little person down from the nursery into the drawing room. “Mr. Plunket has explained why things are bound to be a bit topsy-turvy this evening. To top it off his lordship has them television people here and we all know how temperamental people in show business can be, even without that poor woman being killed.” No doubt she would have added that it never rained but it poured or something equally platitudinous, but Mr. Plunket was off down his own road.

“Very inconvenient, that was.” His lugubrious tone did not quite make up for his word choice.

“Inconvenient?” Ben raised an eyebrow at him.

“As well as sad,” Mr. Plunket amended, “tragic more like. That goes without saying, of course.”

“Was she… the deceased woman… a relative or close friend of his lordship?” I roused myself to ask.

“Never met or spoken with her. She was one of the contestants, you see.”

“The what?” Ben added his echo to that of Mrs. Malloy, while bending over the sofa to smoothe back my hair and search my face with anxious eyes.

“Contestants.” Mr. Plunket shuffled on his feet, which like his clothes appeared too small for him. “She would have made the sixth. The other five will be getting here tomorrow if it’s not decided to put them off.”

“What are they contesting for?” That was Ben asking, while looking toward the obdurately closed door.