Free The Peculiar Case of Lord Finsbury's Diamonds: A Casebook of Barnaby Adair Short Novel (The Casebook of Barnaby Adair) by Stephanie Laurens Page B

over the threshold to allow their eyes to adjust.
     Penman was the first to move. He took three steps forward, then stopped and let out a low whistle. “Well, I’ll be.” He glanced back at Frederick and Gwen. “Looks like I remembered aright. This is where the foot-trap must’ve been, and whoever took it knew it, too.” He tipped his head toward an area screened from their sight by a pile of old crates.
     Taking Gwen’s hand, closing his fingers around her cold ones, Frederick walked with her to join Penman. Looking in the direction the old gardener had indicated, they instantly saw what he meant.
     Several large plow shares, an old iron trough, and a massive wooden yoke had clearly all been shifted and restacked to one side to give access to a specific spot on the floor. That spot now stood empty, just bare boards where something obviously had previously rested.
     All three of them edged past the piled plow shares to take a closer look.
     Penman pointed. “See there? Those round spots in the dust are the feet of the trap where the pegs go through to anchor it to the ground. And there?” He pointed to a smudged area to one side of where the trap had sat. “That’s where the peg bag was. Old Smithers was always careful with his pegs.”
     Frederick glanced around, then eased back, drawing Gwen with him. “We shouldn’t touch anything—the police need to see this, as near as possible to exactly how we found it.”
     Penman seemed to suddenly realize what their discoveries meant. “Aye.” Likewise avoiding disturbing the dust around where the trap had sat, he followed Frederick and Gwen back toward the door.
     Gwen looked back at the pile of old machinery the murderer had shifted to get to the trap. “Well at least we now know the murderer couldn’t have been a woman. No woman could have lifted all that.”
     “Oh, aye.” Penman gave the pile a cursory glance, then waved Frederick and Gwen ahead of him through the door. “A man’s work it was, getting to that trap.”
     After agreeing that for the moment they should keep their discoveries to themselves, at least until they could tell the police when they returned the next day, Frederick and Gwen parted from Penman, leaving him to get back to his orchard while they returned to the house via the shrubbery.
     Neither spoke, but both were thinking furiously.
     Pausing in the garden hall, Frederick caught Gwen’s eye. “As far as I can see the location of the foot-trap doesn’t only indicate that the murderer is a man, but also that it’s highly unlikely that any of the guests could have committed the murder—they couldn’t have known the trap was there.”
     Gwen forced herself to nod. “Or the sledgehammer. How could they have known where that was, either? It wasn’t visible even from the barn door.”
     Frederick hesitated, then in a careful voice said, “We’ll have to tell the inspector when he returns tomorrow.”
     Gwen drew herself up and nodded, stiffly but determinedly. “Yes, we must.” Even though that would highlight the fact that the one man who had known Mitchell, had known he would be walking up the woodland path at the specific time, and who could well have known where the sledgehammer and foot-trap were kept was her father.
     If her father was found guilty of murder…
     Gwen didn’t want to think about that.
     
    * * *
    “M itchell. Mr. Peter Mitchell?” Jessup, the senior doorman at White’s, scrunched up his face in his effort to drag details from his copious memory; his ability to remember patrons was legendary.
     Leaning against the frame of the doorman’s booth just inside the club’s front door, Barnaby waited patiently. It was late morning and the club was open for business, but few gentlemen had as yet passed through its portals; from experience Barnaby knew that this was the best time to seek information from the staff, before they became too busy with the demands of the lunchtime