Free The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird

o’clock.”
    â€œAnd who saw him after that?”
    â€œI couldn’t say, Mrs. Morley. I couldn’t say at all.”

6
    Charles Purvis hurried away from the private apartments and slipped easily through the complex layout of the house until he reached the entrance courtyard. Still parked there was a coach. It was painted a particularly raucous blue and, by some irony too deep for words, it was drawn up by the mounting block used by all thirteen Earls of Ornum in the sweep of carriageway where coaches of an entirely different sort had been wont to go into that wide arc of drive that brought them to the front door.
    Michael Fisher was standing on the mounting block and the coach driver was sitting peacefully at the wheel of his vehicle with the infinite patience of his tribe. Sooner or later the missing passengers would turn up, lost time could always be made up on the open road, and in any case there was very little point in starting off before opening time. Rather wait here than outside The Fiddler’s Delight.
    Charles Purvis walked across to the coach to be greeted with excited waves of recognition from Mrs. Fisher.
    â€œEver so nice, isn’t he?” she announced to the assembled coach load, friends and neighbors all, which Purvis was surprised to find annoyed and embarrassed him far more than the deepest insult could have done. “He’s what they call the Stooward …”
    He was saved by Michael Fisher doing a sort of war dance on the mounting block.
    â€œHere they come …”
    Purvis turned and everyone in the coach craned their necks to see a slightly disheveled and more than a little flushed Miss Mavis Palmer appear, her boyfriend a few paces behind. There were encouraging shrieks from the entire coachload.
    â€œCome on, Mavis …”
    â€œGood old Bernard …”
    â€œAttaboy …”
    The driver started up the engine by way of reprimand to the latecomers—who immediately put on a spurt. Miss Palmer, noted Charles Purvis, outpaced Bernard with ease. He did not begin to contemplate the dance she had doubtless been leading the young man through the park all afternoon, but stood back to let them climb aboard.
    With a final burst of cheering and an utterly misplaced fanfare on the coach horn—tally-ho on another sort of coach horn would have been more bearable—the party from Paradise Row, Luston, finally moved away.
    Charles Purvis watched for a moment, and then walked across to the doorway.
    â€œLady Eleanor?”
    â€œSeventeen, eighteen, nineteen …” She turned. “How much is nineteen threepenny pieces?”
    â€œFour and ninepence.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œEr … yes … I think so.” He was normally a very sure young man, but Lady Eleanor Cremond was able—with one appealing glance—to convert him into a very uncertain creature indeed.
    â€œThat comes right then,” she said.
    â€œI don’t see how it can,” ventured Charles Purvis, greatly daring. “You shouldn’t have ninepence at all if you’re charging a shilling and half a crown.”
    She smiled sweetly. “There was a man with one leg …”
    â€œCut rates?”
    â€œI let him into the park for ninepence. I didn’t think he could walk far.”
    Charles Purvis sat down beside her at the baize-covered table.
    â€œI’ve really come to tell you something rather unpleasant. Mr. Meredith’s been found dead.”
    â€œNot Ossy?” she said, distressed. “Oh, the poor little man. I am sorry. When?”
    â€œWe don’t know when,” said Charles Purvis, and told her about the armor.
    â€œBut,” she protested in bewildered tones, “he didn’t even like armor. It was the books and pictures that he loved. And all the old documents.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œIn fact”—spiritedly—“he wouldn’t even show people the armory