Anne Perry - A Christmas Homecoming

She also realized that Eliza Netheridge had never experienced those gifts of happiness and love. Even now she felt a stranger in her own house, as if her mother-in-law still watched her every choice with disapproval.

Caroline made a sudden, rash decision. “Eliza, I wonder if you can help me. We may at the very least be able to make certain that some among us could not have killed Mr. Ballin. I imagine it could not have been any of the servants, but let us save them from police questions and suspicion by making certain ourselves. I have no authority and no right to ask them, but you do. If you are careful, and precise, you may be able to find some sort of proof that clears them all. Especially if you promise them that whatever they were doing, there will be no blame in this instance. You may need to tell them that something very unpleasant occurred, and it is absolutely necessary that they tell the truth, whatever that may be.”

Eliza took a deep breath, but she seemed perfectly steady. “Yes, of course I can do that,” she said with determination. “I shall begin immediately. Will you speak to your own people?”

Caroline smiled at the thought that the players could be seen as “her” people. “Yes. I’ll begin with Mercy and James. That should be easy enough.”

But it was not. She found Mercy in the writing room busy with what looked like a pile of letters. Caroline was quite blunt about what she was asking, and her reasons. She had already decided that an attempt at deviousness would be highly unlikely to fool anyone.

“Between half past ten and midnight?” Mercy repeated, blinking rapidly. “I was in my bedroom, reading a book for a little while, then I went to sleep. You can’t imagine that I killed Mr. Ballin. I wouldn’t have the strength, apart from the … the violence of mind.”

“No, I didn’t really think you did,” Caroline agreed. “But I have to ask everyone, or else it will look as if I think only certain people are guilty.”

Mercy smiled. “I can see how that would be very awkward. Why do you want to know? The police will ask all those questions anyway. Why are you bothering?”

Caroline had already prepared an answer to that question, as it was one she had anticipated. “Don’t you think it would be much less unpleasant if we can tell them that some of us could not be guilty, before they have to ask? You never know what else they may inquire into, once they start.”

Mercy looked appalled.

“Not that it would be criminal,” Caroline went on. “Just private.”

“Of course. Yes, you are absolutely right.” Mercy smiled with considerable charm, and a degree of honesty. “I underestimated you, Mrs. Fielding. I apologize.”

“Think nothing of it,” Caroline said airily, convinced that Mercy would do that anyway. “Will James say the same thing?”

“Ah … well.” Mercy cleared her throat. “That’s it, you see. He was restless and he couldn’t sleep. He said he was going to rehearse somewhere where he wouldn’t disturb me. So, no, he won’t—not exactly the same thing, that is. But it would mean the same, of course.”

“Rehearse,” Caroline repeated. “Are you avoiding saying that he went back to the stage?”

Mercy was perfectly still. “Well …,” she breathed out. “I don’t know where he went, do I? I was here. He may have gone to the billiard room. There would’ve been nobody there at that hour.”

“Did he say where he was going?” Caroline pressed.

“I don’t think so.”

And that was all she could learn. She knew that persisting with Mercy would only make an enemy of her. And of course, if she did not know for certain where James had been, then in reverse, he did not know where Mercy had been, either. That sort of testimony covered both people, or neither. She thanked Mercy and went to look for James.

She found him in the billiard room alone, practicing sinking the balls into the pockets around the table. She bluntly asked him where he had been at the time Ballin had been killed.

“Probably asleep in my bed,” he answered, putting the billiard cue down across the table and staring at her. “Why? Do you think I killed him?”

It was a far more aggressive answer than she had expected, and it was interesting, as if he had foreseen the question and was prepared for it. Perhaps he was a better actor than she had given him credit for.

“I find it difficult to think of any of us doing it,” she replied. “But the police may not have the same trouble. They don’t know us, and to them we are a band of actors, traveling people with no roots and no respectable profession. And it is either one of us who murdered him, or one of the highly respectable Yorkshire people, citizens of Whitby whom they have known for years. What do you think they will be disposed to believe, James?”

His face blanched. For a moment he held on to the edge of the table as if he needed it for support.

“I think you take my point,” she said quietly. “Mercy said you took your script and went out of the bedroom to practice, so as not to disturb her. The natural place to do that would be the stage. Is that where you went? If you did, you had better say so now. To lie about it, and get caught later, could be seen as damning.”

“I … er …” He blinked and shook his head, as if he were plagued by flies buzzing around him. “I … went to the stage, but it was cold and rather eerie there by myself. I decided not to bother, and I brought the script back and sat in the library. I didn’t really want to rehearse so much as think of some way of making my part more heroic at the end. Ballin wasn’t in the corridor then, I swear. I could hardly have failed to see him if he had been. Not if he was lying on the floor, as you say.”

“No,” she agreed. “Thank you. I don’t suppose you asked a footman to bring you a drink, or anything?”

“In the middle of the night?” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve got more sense than that. I don’t want to be on the wrong side of Netheridge.”

She believed him. “Thank you.”

“Mrs. Fielding?”

She was almost to the door. She turned. “Yes?”

“Who the devil was Ballin? Does anyone know? And where’s his body gone to?” His face was white in the pale daylight of the room.

“Someone must know who he is,” she answered him. “You don’t sharpen a broom handle into a dagger to kill a stranger in the middle of the night, especially when you are snowed in with an entire group of people.”

He put his hands over his face. “Oh, God! And the body?”

“I have no idea. Have you?”

“Me? No!”

“I thought not. Thank you, James.”

Vincent Singer was no more help. Caroline went to him next because it was the encounter she looked forward to least and she just wanted to get it over with. She had little confidence that she could persuade him to talk, still less that she could trick him into saying anything he did not wish to, certainly not to reveal anything that would betray a vulnerability on his part.

She found him in the library, reading Netheridge’s copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

“Decay always fascinates me,” he observed, putting a piece of paper into the book to mark his place before closing it. “You look troubled. Are you also afraid that Ballin is perched upside down in the rafters somewhere, waiting for nightfall to come and suck our blood?”

“I think he is far more likely to rot in the warmth, and attract rats,” she said tartly.

He gave a long sigh. “What a curious woman you are, all sweetness and respectability one moment, and violent imagery of the charnel house the next.”

“If you think that is surprising, then you know very little of women,” she retorted. “Especially respectable ones. We usually only faint to get out of a situation we find embarrassing. I am surprised so many people believe it. Well, that, and on occasion, there are those who lace their corsets too tight.”