The Missing Diamond Murder Page 3

  ‘We do indeed. There are sea views from most of the main rooms in the house. It’s a pity that you’ve come so early in the year, for there’s really no chance of bathing here until at least the end of May.’

  ‘Do you have to walk far to get to a beach?’

  ‘It’s only ten minutes through the garden. Of course, it’s much better now that the beach hut has been built. When we first lived here we used to have to carry all the picnic chairs and shrimping nets and so on, up and down from the house whenever we wanted them, whereas now we can keep all manner of kit down there.’

  ‘It must be very nice to live so close. Does it get crowded down there in the holiday season?’

  ‘Oh, it’s our own private beach,’ Eddie assured her, just as if having one’s own private beach was the most normal thing in the world. ‘Our land runs well to either side, so it isn’t overlooked or anything tiresome like that.’

  He slowed the car for another steep bend and seconds later Fran found herself looking up at a large, modern house with grey stone walls and a grey-tiled roof.

  ‘Welcome to Sunnyside House,’ he said.

  FOUR

  Someone must have been watching for their arrival, because the front door was opened before Fran had time to unlatch the car door and three strides brought a uniformed butler to a position where he could open it for her, while a maid simultaneously reached into the back of the car and hoisted out the suitcase, which suddenly looked shabby in these rather grand, modern surroundings.

  A moment later a slim young woman of about Fran’s own age, who she guessed immediately must be Eddie Edgerton’s sister, Henrietta, appeared on the doorstep and extended her hand. ‘Hello, Mrs Black, do come in. Tea is already laid out in the drawing room and you must be dying for a cup.’ She drew Fran into the hall as she spoke, adding, ‘Let Jamieson take your hat and coat and I will show you where you can wash your hands.’

  Though Eddie seemed to have handed her on to Henrietta, Fran’s sense of being swept along by a whirlwind in no way decreased. After divesting herself of coat and hat she followed her hostess a short way along a broad passage to where Henrietta indicated the downstairs cloakroom, which was twice the size of her bathroom at Beehive Cottage, though it only contained a water closet and a basin. She noticed also the electric light switch on the wall. They must have their own generator, she thought.

  ‘When you are done,’ Henrietta said, ‘just turn right, follow the passage to the end and you’ll come to the drawing room. You can’t go wrong.’

  Oh dear, thought Fran, who had already decided that one could very easily go wrong in the home of people who owned their own beach and enjoyed the services of a butler. She fervently wished that Tom had accompanied her. It had been a mistake to come here alone.

  After washing and drying her hands, she obeyed Henrietta’s instructions, following the passage back the way she had come until it doglegged beyond the front porch and ended in a pair of double doors. Taking a deep breath, she opened them. She found herself looking into a lovely room, flooded with sunlight thanks to its having windows on three sides, which faced north and west into the garden and south towards the point where the land sloped away to the sea. The drawing room itself was most unusual, for the doors opened on to a raised area, from which a trio of polished steps descended into the main body of the room, making it feel rather as if one were making an entrance in the theatre.

  Fortunately there was only an audience of four: Henrietta and another young woman, who remained seated on the comfortable modern sofas, while Eddie and a young man Fran correctly assumed to be his brother, Roland, naturally sprang to their feet the moment she came into the room. All of them smiled in a welcoming fashion as Eddie Edgerton took the lead in making introductions.

  ‘Mrs Black, this is my brother, Roly – the two of you have already spoken on the telephone. This is his wife, Mellie, and of course you have already met my sister, Hen. My mother, needless to say, is out in the garden somewhere and will probably not grace the gathering with her presence until dinner.’

  Fran took each of the extended hands in turn, saying, ‘Mr Edgerton, Mrs Edgerton, Miss Edgerton,’ as appropriate.

  ‘Oh, I say,’ Eddie protested. ‘Do let’s drop the formality.’ He turned to his siblings, as if seeking agreement. ‘Mrs Black is here as our guest and I’m sure we’re all going to become terrific friends.’

  ‘Perhaps Mrs Black prefers formality.’ Mellie Edgerton spoke for the first time. Just as well spoken as the rest, her voice was a tone higher than Henrietta’s and Fran marked her down as being possibly the nervous type.

  ‘Oh no, not at all,’ Fran said quickly. ‘Please, do call me Fran.’

  ‘Fran it is.’ Eddie looked extremely pleased. ‘Do take a seat and have some tea, Fran. Mellie is playing mother, in the usual absence of the real thing.’

  ‘Please don’t think that my mother is snubbing you by not being here,’ Roly put in, as his wife leaned forward to reach for the teapot. ‘It’s just that she tends to get wrapped up in whatever she is doing, whether it be her painting, or her gardening, or even if she is just reading a book.’

  ‘That’s perfectly all right,’ Fran said.

  ‘Do you have some more luggage coming on from the station?’ Henrietta enquired.

  ‘No, there’s only the suitcase I arrived with. I will have to go and unpack when we’ve finished tea.’

  ‘Oh, I expect Jane will have unpacked for you by then. You know, Mellie,’ Henrietta turned towards her sister-in-law, ‘Fran has had a fearfully long journey today. Why don’t we skip dressing for dinner this evening?’

  ‘Oh.’ Mellie Edgerton seemed slightly surprised. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so.’

  She doesn’t get it, Fran thought, whereas kindly Henrietta had observed the size of her case and guessed correctly that she had not brought the right kind of frocks for formal dining, it probably had not occurred to Mellie that anyone would arrive without an appropriate wardrobe.

  ‘We’ll have to get word to your mother,’ Mellie said to Roland.

  ‘Leave a note on her dressing table, where she can’t help but see it,’ Henrietta said briskly. ‘Mother won’t mind anyway. Not having to fag about getting into her finery suits her down to the ground.’

  ‘Actually,’ Eddie put in, ‘I’m a bit surprised that Mother isn’t here. I mean, it isn’t every day that one gets to meet a lady detective.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Mellie nodded. ‘We have all been frightfully curious, ever since Roly told us that you had agreed to come down. I expect you have had a great many adventures.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Fran said, pushing aside a memory of one particular adventure, which had led to her almost being murdered in her own front parlour. ‘I am not really a detective at all. As I have tried to explain to … Eddie …’ she hesitated to use the first name of someone she had barely known an hour, in spite of the demand for informality, ‘… it’s only that I have been lucky enough to work out the solution to a couple of mysteries recently. And in those cases I was helped a great deal by my friend Mr Dod and a little bit by another friend, Mrs Gallimore. I do hope you are not expecting too much.’

  ‘We can only ask that you do your best for us, Fran,’ Roland Edgerton said. ‘If you cannot get to the bottom of our little mystery, at least you will have tried. We will offer you every possible assistance, of course. Ask whatever you need, question whomsoever you wish.’

  ‘We only ask for your discretion,’ Mellie put in.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Fran said, ‘you can tell me what it is that you are hoping I will find out. You see, at the moment, no one has told me anything at all about this mystery.’

  ‘Straight down to business!’ Eddie exclaimed approvingly.

  ‘Are you sure you want to be burdened with the details now?’ Mellie asked. ‘You have only just arrived and must be very tired after your journey.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be wet, Mellie,’ Henrietta said. ‘Anyone can see that Mrs Black – I me
an Fran – isn’t one of those soppy women who has a fit of the vapours at the slightest obstacle or exertion.’

  ‘Well, you were the one who cried everyone off from dressing for dinner.’ Mellie looked petulant.

  Fran pretended not to notice the slight spat as she retrieved her small notebook and pencil from out of her handbag.

  ‘Aha.’ Eddie looked almost childishly pleased. ‘Equipped to take notes, eh? Anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence and all that.’

  ‘So,’ said Henrietta. ‘Who is going to begin? Roly?’

  ‘Very well then.’ The eldest brother inclined his head in assent. ‘I will do my best to explain, but if I’m to do the talking, then everyone else had better shut up and not keep on interrupting, otherwise Fran will get completely confused and we’ll never get the story straight.’

  ‘I’ll be quiet as a mouse,’ said Eddie.

  ‘We’ll only need to interrupt if you get anything wrong,’ said Henrietta, earning herself a pulled face from her older brother.

  ‘Silent as the grave,’ Eddie intoned in a deep voice. ‘Ne’er a word shall be uttered …’

  ‘Just ignore them, Roly,’ Mellie said. ‘Do go on, darling.’

  ‘Very well then.’ Roland took a breath. ‘My late grandfather was a man named Frederick Edgerton. His origins are a bit obscure to tell the truth. He never spoke much about his early life, but we do know that he went out to Africa as a young man and got involved with some sort of mining expedition, with the upshot that he did rather well for himself and returned to Europe a rich man. He dabbled in various things and, before he was forty, he’d done so well that he was able to buy his way into society – to a certain extent at least – and bag himself a jolly good class of bride.’

  ‘Really, Roly!’ Mellie was the first to interrupt. ‘That is hardly a nice way of putting things.’

  ‘Come now, sweetheart, we all know how these things work. It is most unlikely that my grandmother would have been allowed to marry him if he hadn’t had a fortune to lay at her feet. Anyway, he and my grandmother were married and they had a family. Poor old Grandmother died giving birth to their fifth child, so none of us ever knew her, though there’s a portrait on the stairs and she looks jolly sweet.’

  ‘Did your grandfather remarry?’ asked Fran.

  Roly hesitated. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But there was—’

  ‘There’s really no need to go into that,’ Mellie interposed firmly. ‘It’s not a nice story and I can’t see that it can possibly be relevant.’

  Roly hesitated again and then continued. ‘Grandfather naturally employed staff to look after the household and take care of the children while he continued to bolster his business empire. In due course Father and his younger brother, our uncle Charles, went away to school while our aunts, Lettie, Catriona and Sybil, were all tutored at home. In time, they all made pretty good marriages.’

  ‘Everyone knew that the Edgertons were only trade,’ Eddie put in, ‘but money talks and Grandfather ensured that his offspring were all well provided for.’

  ‘The family were based in London for many years,’ Roly continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘But Grandfather’s dream was to build his own place, down here in Devon, which was where he’d got into the habit of taking a house for the summer, year after year. He was familiar with Lutyens’ work at Castle Drogo and Bailie Scott’s house at Blackwell, up in your neck of the woods, Fran, and he had some very clear ideas about what he wanted for himself. He eventually found the right piece of land, and as soon as the war was over he commissioned Oswald Milne and Sunnyside House is the result. It only took three years from start to finish. Of course, by now Grandfather was getting on a bit and it had always been his intention that the house should go to his eldest son, our father, so as soon as it was ready not only Grandfather but also all of us moved in here.’

  ‘Which meant that Mother was effectively the lady of the house from the very beginning and was able to have a free hand in designing the garden,’ Henrietta put in.

  ‘As I said before, Grandfather was getting on a bit.’ Roly resumed his story. ‘And it wasn’t too long before he had the first of his strokes. He recovered quite well from that, but by the summer of ’twenty-six he was needing a wheelchair to get around the grounds and before too long he decided that he’d like to have a nurse. Initially he got a strong young fellow who could wheel him about – Grandfather was a tall man and quite heavy. The first young chap stayed for a while, but I don’t think he liked it much – we’re quite out of the way here, you know – so he gave notice and another nurse, Monica, was engaged. She was a funny old thing, but Grandfather seemed to like her – well, initially at least – and she soon worked out how to manage his moods.

  ‘He got to the stage where he couldn’t really walk anywhere at all, although he still had enough strength in his arms to push himself about in the chair when Monica wasn’t around. Then the summer before last …’

  ‘You’ve missed out Father’s death.’

  ‘Nonsense, Hen, Father doesn’t really come into this at all.’

  ‘Of course he does. Otherwise how is Fran to understand why you inherited? You’ve got us all moving here with Grandfather, then suddenly Grandfather dies and you inherit. I mean, obviously she needs to know about Father, otherwise that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Fair point. Very well, just to backtrack a moment, our father was most awfully keen on motors and he liked to drive rather fast, which is hardly a problem around here, because apart from the Baddeleys no one but ourselves has a car on the peninsula. Unfortunately Father was out in the motor one evening when he came round a bend and went slap bang into the back of some fellow driving a horse and cart, loaded with logs.’

  ‘It was Nicholas Cload,’ Eddie supplied.

  ‘Father’s car ended up in the ditch, with him pinned under it. He was dead by the time they got him out. That was back in September 1923, which as my sister evidently wants me to explain, is how I came to be Grandfather’s principal heir.’

  ‘Very helpful. Thank you,’ said Fran, who was still wondering where on earth all this could possibly be going.

  ‘Righty-ho. So then, after we’d all got over the shock of Father’s death, life went on much as it had before. The three of us were finished with school, so we were all living here most of the time, apart from odd trips away and a week here and there in London—’

  ‘The family still has a house up there but that doesn’t really come into this either,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Darling, do shut up or Roly is never going to get to the meat of things,’ protested Henrietta.

  ‘So anyway’ – Roly shot his siblings a look – ‘by that final summer, Grandfather was getting a bit frail and the old boy’s mind was starting to wander occasionally. He was pretty much totally reliant on his wheelchair by then.’

  ‘That must have made life rather difficult,’ Fran said, eyeing the steps which were a feature of the drawing room.

  ‘Oh, Grandfather never came in here,’ Henrietta said, picking up on Fran’s point. ‘After his strokes he used the library as a sort of sitting room and bedroom combined into one. From there you have a level passage into the dining room, or out on to the terrace and the upper lawn and even along the path to the cliffs. The rest of the garden is full of slopes and steps, but that particular path runs pretty level for its full length. By the last year of his life, he had stopped eating with us in the dining room too. He said the meals went on too long and there was always too much noise for him, so he used to have his meals on a tray in his room.’

  ‘He did sometimes come out for tea on the terrace,’ Mellie reminded them.

  ‘Mellie’s right.’ Roland nodded. ‘He still occasionally came out for a piece of cake and a cup of tea, but he never stayed long. I think he found it too much. Too many people, too much noise. He much preferred to be quiet towards the end.’

  ‘You see, the thing is,’ Eddie explained, ‘it’s always been rather
open house here in the summer. Grandfather started it himself. He liked to have his other children – our uncle Charles and our aunts – come to stay here with their children. And of course everyone is always very keen to come because it’s such a jolly spot and we’ve always had a lively time.’

  ‘It was much quieter, the summer after Father died,’ Henrietta said, having, like her younger brother, apparently forgotten that it was Roland who was supposed to be telling the story. ‘You know, out of respect for Mother’s feelings and everything, but by 1926 things had got pretty much back to normal again, the place full of relatives, cousins and friends all summer long, and it was much the same the year that Grandfather died.’

  ‘Do I take it,’ asked Fran, ‘that the mystery you would like me to resolve is in some way associated with your grandfather’s death?’

  ‘Oh, bravo!’ exclaimed Eddie. ‘What a capital detective you are, Fran. There, you see.’ He turned triumphantly towards his siblings. ‘Didn’t I say, the moment I set eyes on her that she was a clever woman?’

  ‘Really, Eddie,’ Mellie chided. ‘Please don’t mind him, Mrs Black. He doesn’t mean to be rude, talking about one as if one wasn’t in the room.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, Mellie’s right, of course. I’m just an idiot, first class. Please forgive me.’ Eddie sounded genuinely contrite.

  Fran could not help but laugh at the sorrowful countenance he affected. ‘So perhaps you could tell me the circumstances of your grandfather’s death?’ she prompted.

  Roland Edgerton took up the tale again. ‘You see, Fran, that’s possibly the crux of it. Grandfather went over the edge of the cliff in his wheelchair and was killed by the fall. No one saw it happen.’

  ‘I … I see. There must have been an inquest?’

  ‘Oh, naturally, yes. The coroner, Doctor Vereker, was very good about it. Scotched any suggestion of foul play or suicide pretty firmly and went for accidental death.’

  ‘Which it could easily have been,’ put in Mellie.