Wherever trouble turns up, there am I at the bottom of it. -- Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise
The next person to question was obviously Lord Kilskeery himself. Yo-han, standing at the main door after the constable's departure, looked around for Eames. Neither he nor any of the other servants were anywhere to be seen.
Yo-han went back towards the kitchen. Seven servants were there, gossiping among themselves. He listened outside the door for a minute. All he learnt was that none of them were surprised Mrs. Lennox had been murdered, and the general belief was that her husband had killed her.
If they had been able to explain how one half-starved man could have committed two violent murders almost simultaneously and then dragged the bodies away from the scene of the crime, he might have agreed with them. In the meantime, he was keeping an open mind.
He knocked the door before opening it. "Excuse me, could someone tell me where Lord Kilskeery is?"
"In the nursery," a middle-aged woman grumbled. "Barged in and shoved me out, he did!"
Yo-han remembered one of Lennox's complaints: 'She won't let me see my children.' Now Lennox was in the nursery. Significant? Possibly. "And where is the nursery?"
He followed the extremely confusing directions as best he could. When he inevitably got lost he resorted to opening every door he passed. He discovered that the vast majority of rooms were uninhabited and mostly unfurnished.
Finally he opened a door and found himself in the nursery. He paused on the threshold. It was a large, bright room, much more cheerful than any other he'd seen so far. Its large windows looked out over the treetops. The house on the other side of the river was visible. It still looked deserted.
Two cribs were placed side-by-side against the wall. A low armchair stood beside them. Alexander Lennox sat in it, reading aloud to two small babies.
In the minute before he noticed Yo-han's presence, Yo-han observed the three of them closely. The babies, probably twins, were very young. He thought of his half-siblings as babies and decided these ones were less than a year old. They wore identical blue baby-grows. Both had brown hair. One was asleep. The other peered owlishly up at their father.
Lennox was still abnormally thin, but he looked as if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. He did not look like a man whose wife had just been violently murdered. Yo-han looked at him and tried to imagine him swinging an oar at his wife's head.
"'Then the magician brewed a powerful potion out of nine sorts of herbs which he had gathered himself all alone by moonlight, and he gave the youth nine spoonfuls of it daily for three days, which made him able to understand the language of birds.
"'At parting the magician said...'[1]"
Lennox stopped. He looked up at Yo-han. There was no fear or hostility in his eyes. He smiled, the first smile Yo-han had seen from him that didn't have a bitter edge.
"Hello, Mr. Seo. I hoped you'd investigate this."
Yo-han found himself in the unfamiliar and disagreeable position of not knowing what to say. He settled for the blatantly obvious. "You've heard about the murders?"
Lennox nodded. He looked briefly grim, but not remotely grief-stricken. "When I said I wanted to be free of my wife, this wasn't what I hoped for. I know everyone will suspect me. What I have done already and what I intend to do next will only make them suspect me more. Yet in spite of appearances I swear I'm innocent."
That was less discouraging than he probably expected. Yo-han had dealt with many cases where the evidence seemed to condemn an innocent person. Only two months ago he'd solved a case of theft: deeds had been stolen from a bank vault while a guard sat in front of it. The police assumed the guard must have either stolen them himself or been an accomplice to the thief. Yo-han had proved that the thief had actually been one of a group of electricians working on the alarm wires. While supposedly setting the alarm, he had actually cut through the vault's ceiling and stolen the deeds. The guard and all the other witnesses had known about the electricians and dismissed the noise as part of the normal work.
Some of Lennox's words caught his attention. "What exactly have you done? And what do you intend to do?"
Lennox closed the book and held his sons closer. "I've dismissed the boys' nurse. She drank. I don't believe there was a single evening when she wasn't tipsy. And I intend to ask my old housekeeper to come back and take over running the household again. Most of the current servants are utterly incompetent and I intend to dismiss all but McCullagh and one or two of the housemaids."
"That would be very unwise just now," Yo-han said. He noticed that Lennox didn't mention Eames as one of the servants he intended to keep. "Everyone would say you're afraid of the servants finding something incriminating, and the servants would want revenge. Wait until your housekeeper returns."
"David said the same," Lennox said with a faint smile. He pronounced the name oddly, as if it ended with a T instead of a D.
There was no other chair in the room. Yo-han walked over to the window and peered out for a minute. He discovered that the nursery window almost directly overlooked the scene of the murder, but only the top of the greenhouse roof could be seen from here.
"Do you know where your wife and her... guest... were killed?"
He watched Lennox's reflection in the glass while still appearing to admire the view. Lennox looked puzzled, nothing more.
"In front of the house," he said. "Dav— Eames says... It sounded horrible. Made him sick to see it."
Yo-han took note of that. Eames' attitude earlier confirmed what he said. "No. They were murdered at the greenhouse and dragged to the front of the house. There were two murderers. Each used a different weapon. Why do you think they moved the bodies?"
Lennox continued to look puzzled. "To hide them?" He realised how stupid that was as soon as he spoke. "No, they wouldn't leave them in front of the house if they wanted to hide them. I don't know. Because they wanted them discovered?"
That was probably part of the reason. But there was another, even more important one. "The bodies were publicly hanged from a tree. Like criminals. I think the murderers believed they were administering justice. So I ask you," he turned to face Lennox, "who hated your wife enough to kill her? And who hated her lover enough to not only kill him, but also to cut him all over as if they were trying to flay him?"
Lennox flinched. Before he answered he got up and carried the twins to their cribs. One of them slept through the whole thing. The other stared at Yo-han with a mildly judgemental expression, as if he wondered why this stranger was in their room.
"Are you aware of how I came to be married to that woman?" Lennox asked, staring down at the twins. His uncombed hair fell over his face so Yo-han couldn't guess his thoughts.
Was this the time to admit he had already deduced certain facts? Yo-han decided it would be better to stay silent on that point for now.
"From what I've seen I expect it was an arranged marriage," he said diplomatically.
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Lennox laughed bitterly. "You could say that. She arranged it. She saw... It was my fault entirely. I behaved in a... I did something I shouldn't have done. She saw me and blackmailed me into marriage. She wanted a title, you see. And my parents wanted me to marry her for her father's money.
He fidgeted with the sleeve of his shirt. "What do you call it, when a woman forces herself on a man?"
Yo-han didn't know how to answer. Lennox didn't seem to want one.
"I asked my lawyer if her behaviour was grounds for divorce. He didn't even believe what I experienced was possible. The law has no punishment for what she did.
"She wanted a child, you see. And she wanted to punish me for... what she saw. So..."
Lennox was silent. He continued to fidget with his sleeve. Yo-han could deduce the rest of the story.
"Since she arrived in Enniskillen she fought with everyone: my mother, the servants, the neighbours, the rest of my family... She even fought with her parents so much they won't talk to her any more. She fought with Çelik Bey every time they met, but somehow that was the only relationship she mended afterwards. Recently she fired a maid for no reason. I might be the most obvious suspect, but I can think of twenty other people who hated her."
Yo-han thought of the only time he'd met Mrs. Lennox. He could easily believe all of that.
"As for Çelik Bey, I know virtually nothing about him. Gwladys's father makes cars and Çelik Bey's father imports them. I don't know anyone who had a grudge against him specifically."
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Most women would have been alarmed to hear their neighbour had been murdered and their guest had been called in to investigate. Phil, who had accidentally caused one death and discovered a murder, was only mildly upset.
"I suppose her husband did it," she said when Mr. Seo returned for lunch.
"No, I think I can say with certainty that he's the only person I can rule out," he said, to her surprise.
The dining room windows faced over the lough. Mr. Seo looked out at the other bank as if he expected to find the answer there. "Miss Patton, do you have a boat?"
Phil sensed where this was going. "Yes, over at the jetty. You think the empty house has something to do with the case?"
Mr. Seo nodded grimly. "From there the murderer could see everything happening at the house. If I search it I'm sure I'll find proof someone was hiding there."
Phil finished her sandwich. She got up. Her brown-and-white day dress was too good for a boating expedition, but she had an old grey dress which she normally used for gardening. "Give me five minutes to change, then I'll row you across."
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Phil didn't have a boathouse at the bottom of her garden. Instead she kept her boat at the jetty a short distance away, where most of the tourists moored their boats. She and Mr. Seo passed several groups of picnickers as they walked down to the jetty.
The Little Swan — named by Vi, and Phil still didn't know what she'd been thinking — was a small boat with both oars and a sail. Vi was the one who mainly used it. Phil could row, but had never gotten the hang of sailing and couldn't be bothered to learn.
She climbed down into the boat and put the oars in place. Mr. Seo followed more slowly. He stumbled on the last step from the pier and sat down abruptly. Phil untied the boat. They started across the river.
Another pier ran along the bank at the other side. A small boat was tied to it. They landed beside it.
The empty house was about two minutes' walk from the pier. Mr. Seo stopped every few steps to examine something along the way. Phil watched, bemused, as he removed what looked like a few threads from a briar.
An overgrown hedge surrounded the house. The gate was rusty. Oddly, it opened easily and noiselessly when Phil pushed it.
Most of the windows were cracked. The front door stubbornly refused to open. The path was a mass of nettles. They walked round to the back. A cobblestone yard, now practically buried beneath weeds, led to an equally overgrown lane.
The back door had fallen off one of its hinges. It lay half-open, hanging into the hallway beyond. Mr. Seo tried to open it fully. He had to jump back because the doorframe sagged and creaked ominously. Phil caught a glimpse of a pile of debris behind the door.
"Part of the ceiling has fallen. No one could get in there," Mr. Seo said.
He examined the windows closely. Phil followed him round to the other side of the house. From here Lennox House was visible above the tops of the trees. The river glimmered in the sunlight. A few sails dotted here and there showed where someone was out in a boat.
Mr. Seo gave an indistinct exclamation.
Phil stared at the window. Almost all of the glass had fallen out. The frame was rusty and buckling under its own weight. But she didn't see anything remarkable about it.
"Here's where they got in," Mr. Seo said.
Phil tried and failed to guess what he'd seen that she didn't. "How do you know?"
He pointed to the windowsill. "The lichen has been scraped away here and here. Someone climbed up here. And the frame has bent. They used it to pull themselves up." He clambered onto the windowsill, heedless of the dirt he'd get on his trousers. "The floorboards are broken under here. They jumped down too hard, and the wood was too rotten to bear their weight."
He took the precaution of stepping down from the windowsill instead of jumping. "Footprints! Several sets, going back and forth. Some quite muddy. All the same person, I think."
Phil weighed up the indignity of climbing through a window in broad daylight versus the disappointment of not witnessing this investigation. She looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then she followed him through the window.
The house was completely empty. No furniture, no wallpaper, not even any interior doors. Trails of muddy, indistinct footprints crossed the room. They faded as they reached the doorway.
Phil followed Mr. Seo into the hall. The stairs were on their left. The last stair was almost directly outside the door. A few traces of mud showed the intruder had gone upstairs.
Compared to the rest of the house, the stairs were in excellent condition. They were made of stone and only mildly weathered. The second storey was also mostly intact. The floor sagged in places, and one wall had partially fallen down, but the building didn't collapse around them.
Mr. Seo went into the room on the left-hand side at the top of the stairs. He looked out the window, then turned and went into the smaller room that adjoined that one. Phil followed nervously. She didn't like the look of those cracks on the ceiling.
The small room had probably been a nursery once. It still had bars on the windows. And Lennox House was clearly visible from it.
"Here's where the murderer put her blanket." Mr. Seo pointed to a clean patch on the floor. "She stayed overnight at least once. A discarded match? Very careless. No fallen crumbs or empty tins, so I don't believe she ate anything here. That means she has a house of her own somewhere in the area."
"She?" Phil repeated, surprised.
"Didn't you notice those footprints? They were made by boots. A woman's walking boots. And I found strands of wool on the hedge. From a woman's dress, I believe. Men usually don't wear blue wool when they're breaking into a house."
Phil considered this. "Did Mr. Lennox jilt someone to marry..."
For some reason Mr. Seo found this highly amusing. He burst out laughing before Phil could finish her sentence. She stared, unsure whether to be offended at this reaction.
"No," he said, shaking his head ruefully, "I don't believe there's a jealous woman from Lennox's past in this case. And this woman had an accomplice in the household. One of them killed Mrs. Lennox, one killed—"
Abruptly he stopped. He turned and stared at the house. Then he looked almost wildly around the room.
"A sword!" he exclaimed, which made no sense whatsoever. "Where would you leave a sword?"
Phil was the wrong person to ask. She'd never owned a sword in her life. She stared at him and wondered if he'd gone mad.
He paced around the room, staring at the floor and the walls. Suddenly he exclaimed again. "There!"
Phil looked at the scrapes on the windowsill. They could have been made by a sword. That seemed a highly unlikely explanation, though.
"I don't understand," she said.
Mr. Seo ran his finger over the scrapes. "She struck the windowsill, maybe in anger when she saw Çelik Bey, maybe when she was practicing swinging the sword."
Phil repeated, "Çelik Bey?"
"Yes," Mr. Seo said. He looked up, and from his expression she could tell he'd solved most of the mystery. "The woman killed Çelik Bey with a sword. The man killed Mrs. Lennox with an oar. They hung the bodies to show justice had been done. So the question is, why did this woman hate Çelik Bey so much?"
"A hired assassin?" Phil suggested, thinking of Leopold.
"No. Not with the injuries she inflicted. This was a personal vendetta."
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When they returned to the Little Swan they found a young girl in the boat beside theirs. She was playing some sort of game. Pretending to have a sword-fight with the mast, apparently. She stopped when she saw them.
"Are you the detective?" she asked, staring at Yo-han as if he was a visitor from outer space.
"Yes," he said.
She sprang out of the boat. "I'm Katy Bennett. Something funny's happened at that house! Granny won't tell me what, but I know something! It's important but she tells me to stop making things up!"
Phil looked at Yo-han. Yo-han looked at Phil. Both of their thoughts ran along the same lines: had this girl witnessed the murders?
"Why don't you tell us about it?" Yo-han asked.
Katy scrunched up her face. "It was... last year. Before my brother left home."
Disappointment swept over Phil. If Yo-han felt the same, he kept it off his face.
"I was in my boat. And I saw him! He didn't see me but I watched him through my telescope." Katy pointed to the telescope in the boat for emphasis.
"Who did you see?" Yo-han asked.
"The one whose pictures are in the papers. Lord Something."
"Kilskeery," Phil said.
"Yes, that. He was down by the river. And another man came along. I think they were arguing. I couldn't understand them. And then..." She stopped and looked around furtively. "Granny slapped me and told me not to tell lies, but I'm not lying! I really saw it!"
Phil's patience began to run out. "What did you see?"
"The second man kissed Lord Kilskeery!"