Sharyn McCrumb - Missing Susan

“Perhaps,” said Rowan. “Or she may have felt that suspicion was hanging over the family. And she offered herself as a scapegoat to remove suspicion from the rest of the household.”

“If she didn’t do it, who did?”

“Let’s leave that for a bit,” said Rowan. “Did you read the newspaper accounts of the initial police investigation?”

“Yes. The police were allowed to search the servants, but not the family.”

“There’s more to it than that. When the officers first arrived at Road Hill House, Mr. Kent offered them something to eat. He showed them into the kitchen and gave them plates of food.”

Elizabeth stared. “Victorian hospitality? Not even my aunt Amanda would be that gracious with a murder in the immediate family. I speak from experience,” she added.

“There’s more. When the Trowbridge policemen had finished their meals, they got up to continue the investigation, and found that the kitchen door was locked. No one let them out for two hours.”

“Good God!” said Elizabeth. “That wasn’t Constance’s doing. No one would let a teenage girl get away with that if they really wanted the murder solved.”

“Well put,” said Rowan carefully. “If they really wanted the murder solved. Indeed.”

She considered the implications. “They were hiding something. Then it couldn’t have been one of the neighbors or a marauding tramp, could it?”

“I think not.”

“One of the family, then. And you think Constance was protecting the killer?”

“Or the family was protecting Constance,” Rowan suggested. “Let us be open-minded for now.”

Elizabeth was silent for a few moments while she digested this information. Then she began to reason it out, speaking slowly and ticking off the suspects on her fingers. “Not the stepmother. There was no love lost between her and Constance. Not the nursemaid. Why should Constance bother to help a servant? One of her sisters perhaps?

“I doubt it,” said Rowan. “Constance had the most spunk of any of them. Besides, all that you said about teenage girls not being able to lock up policemen applies equally to them.”

“Daddy!” whispered Elizabeth. “She’d have confessed to save Daddy!”

“Most daughters would. And Samuel Kent certainly ruled the roost at Road Hill House. If he locked the constables in the kitchen, no one would have dared to let them out.”

“But he wouldn’t kill his own baby son,” Elizabeth protested. “It was such a violent murder.”

Rowan raised his eyebrows. “Well?” he drawled. “Was it?”

She flipped through her notes. “Oh, wait. The throat-cutting was done postmortem, wasn’t it? For effect. And the child was actually smothered in his bed. We know that because the impressions were still there on the mattress.”

“Yes,” said Rowan, nodding approvingly. “So Constance might have gone in during the night and smothered the sleeping child, but that would be a risky sort of murder, wouldn’t it? The nurse was sleeping nearby, of course. Why not take the child out for a walk one afternoon and drown it in the river when no one was around? Much safer.”

“Yes. Why didn’t she do that? Why would anybody kill a child in a nursery with two other children and the nursemaid present? Why would Mr. Kent do it?”

The guide contrived to look innocent. “Why would he be there in the first place?” he said casually.

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “Well, he fooled around with the first nursemaid, didn’t he? We know he did, because he took her for carriage rides while the first Mrs. Kent languished in her bedroom. And when his first wife died, he married the nursemaid! Mary Pratt, who was baby Savile’s mother. So you think he was up to his old tricks again?”

“I can see how it might be habit forming,” said Rowan, thinking of various escapades on his boat.

“Okay.” Elizabeth nodded, following the sequence now. “Mary Pratt Kent is asleep. Samuel gets up and goes into the nursery to fool around with the new nursemaid Elizabeth Gough. Baby Savile wakes up and sees them. Perhaps he starts to cry, which might wake the household-and then their little tryst will be discovered.” She was staring off into an expanse of blue sky, picturing the scene in the dark nursery at Road Hill House. “Samuel Kent just wants the child to shut up. He tries to make him stop crying, but he doesn’t know anything about child care or he’s too excited to be cautious, so he slams the baby’s face into its mattress and holds it. A little too hard, a little too long.”

“It wouldn’t take much,” Rowan pointed out. “Children are more fragile than adults. A minute. Not much more.”

Elizabeth shuddered. “The child suddenly goes limp and he realizes he’s killed it. Elizabeth Gough knows, though, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but what can she do? It’s 1865. If she admits she was having it off with her employer, her character is ruined and she’ll never get a husband or another job. She might even be charged as an accessory to the murder.”

“And instead of thinking about his poor dead son, Samuel Kent worries about his own reputation. He wraps the child in the crib blanket and carries it out of the house.” She flipped through her notes again. “Which is why the housemaid found the door ajar at five A.M.! And then to make it look like an outside killing, he cut the baby’s throat.”

“Murderers have done that sort of thing,” Rowan remarked. “In the 1970s the Green Beret doctor Jeffrey MacDonald killed his wife in an argument, and then murdered his two toddlers to make it appear that a band of drug-crazed hippies had killed the family.”

Momentarily distracted from the Road Hill murder, Elizabeth smiled. “Any band of hippies that would kill two babies and a pregnant woman, and then leave a husky Green Beret soldier with only a scratch, would have to be on a ton of drugs. I don’t think there’s that much stupidity in the world.”

“No, but he nearly got away with it. It took ten years to get the civilian trial that convicted him. And Samuel Kent got away with it, too, didn’t he? He was an upstanding man, well-to-do, and obviously sane. Although people did suspect him, they were finally persuaded to believe the confession of an unbalanced adolescent.”

Rowan pointed to Elizabeth’s newly purchased crime book. “Did you find a transcript of Constance’s confession in there?”

“I remember seeing it,” she said, leafing through the pages. “Here it is. Shall I read it? Okay, this is in 1865, after she’s confessed to her half brother’s murder, and everybody wants to know why she did it. Her lawyer, Mr. Coleridge, asks the court’s permission to say two things on Constance’s behalf:

“ ‘First, solemnly in the presence of Almighty God, she wishes me to say that the guilt is hers alone, and that her father and others who have so long suffered most unjust and cruel suspicion are wholly and absolutely innocent-’” With a thoughtful expression Elizabeth looked up from the book. “You think that’s why she confessed, don’t you? Because suspicion was still lingering over the household, perhaps damaging her father’s career. The tension of continuing scandal was probably very hard for a young girl to bear. Maybe she thought she had the least to lose.”

“And the second part of her statement?”

Elizabeth ran her finger down the page. “Here it is. ‘Secondly, she was not driven to this act, as has been asserted, by unkind treatment at home, as she met with nothing there but tender and forbearing love …’ What a crock! So she supposedly had no motive at all for killing her young half brother? Just a whim, huh?”

“So she would have us believe,” said Rowan in a carefully neutral voice. “Let me see the book. I’ve been told by a fellow crime buff, a Mr. O’Connor, that we will find her explanation of the crime most informative.” He skimmed the pages of the chapter on Constance Kent, paying special attention to the blocks of print in smaller typeface, denoting a quotation from court documents or other primary sources. “This must be it,” he said. “Dr. John Charles Bucknill, the physician who examined Constance by order of the government to determine whether she was of sound mind, published an account of her confession in several newspapers, supposedly at the prisoner’s request.” Rowan considered. “Well, perhaps she did ask him to publish it. If her intention was to divert suspicion from the rest of the family, she would need to convince as many people as possible of her own guilt.”