Page 65 of Marriage and Murder
Monty shook his head. “I didn’t look. What was the point? She was dead.” He lifted his manacled hands as if to gesture, then let them fall back. “She was just lying there, dead.”
Stokes studied him for an instant, then mildly inquired, “So what did you do?”
Monty exhaled and fixed his gaze on the table between them. “I just stared. I was frozen for I don’t know how long. It was…horrible. Then it slowly sank in that if she was dead, I’d lost all hope of paying O’Reilly.”
To Penelope, that rang true. She glanced briefly at Henry and Madeline and saw that Henry was holding Madeline’s hand, and Madeline was gripping his as if it were a lifeline.
As Penelope returned her attention to Monty, he went on, “It was like a terrible nightmare unfolding in my mind. I suddenly thought, what if you found the jewelry—the bracelet and necklace? You’d realize the stones were paste and check the jewelers, and Jacobs could identify me as the man who had the stones replaced—as he just did.” Monty’s voice had taken on a fearful edge. “I panicked. And then I looked at her and realized she wasn’t wearing either piece. Ever since I gave her the necklace, I never saw her without both. She was delighted with them and always wore them whenever she was with me.” He twisted his clasped hands, and the manacles clacked. “I hadto get those two pieces back, then there’d be nothing to connect me with Viola. So I searched. I started with her bag, the tapestry one she always carried whenever she went out. She always left it sitting on the hall table, just inside the front door, but someone had been there before me, and the bag was upended and dropped on the floor and the contents strewn everywhere. No necklace or bracelet, but I didn’t really think she would have carried her favorite jewelry in her bag. I went upstairs and searched her bedroom. I searched there and everywhere else I could think to look.”
His expression stated he was reliving those moments in his mind. “I even searched in the kitchen. I’d heard that sometimes women hid their jewelry there, in the cupboards or the flour bin, but there was nothing there either.”
Penelope leaned forward and asked, “After searching in the flour bin, did you go back to the body?”
Monty looked almost shocked at the suggestion. “No. I didn’t see any reason to.” Then, with obvious candor, he added, “I couldn’t make myself go back in there, where she was lying dead, anyway.”
Penelope nodded and sat back.
Monty gave her a wary look.
“So what happened next?” Stokes asked.
After a moment of thinking, Monty picked up his tale. “I was getting more and more desperate, and I knew time had to be getting on, so I left. I went out through the kitchen door, through the woods and on through the fields. I was in such a state, imagining this and that and thinking of Viola lying there, that I wasn’t as careful as I usually was. I went over the stile and dropped onto the Tollard Royal-Ashmore lane just as the minister was driving past in his gig. He saw me and smiled and saluted with his whip. I had to drum up a smile and wave back. I don’t know how well I managed, but he didn’t stop, just bowledon, and as soon as he was out of sight, I pelted across the lane and into the field where I’d left my horse and rode home to Bowerchalke.”
Stokes flipped back through his notes, read, then said, “You arrived at one-thirty. Judging by the extent of your search and the time you spent before starting it, it must have been two-thirty or thereabouts when you encountered Reverend Foswell.”
Monty shrugged. “About that. Perhaps the reverend can tell you when he saw me.”
“You can be sure we’ll ask,” Mallard rumbled.
Monty looked at Mallard, then ran his gaze over the faces of Stokes, Penelope, and Barnaby. “But you believe me, don’t you? I didn’t kill her. She was already dead when I got there. Without her”—he raised his hands in a defeated gesture—“I wouldn’t have had anything. I needed her alive.”
Stokes shut his notebook and tucked it into his pocket. “As to whether you’ll swing for Viola Huntingdon’s murder, I can’t yet say, but you will be charged with the theft of her aquamarines, which we recovered from Jacobs. As he’s already identified you as the man who commissioned him to swap the stones, and we have witnesses aplenty that the substitution wasn’t carried out at Viola’s behest, that charge will stick.”
Oddly, Monty was nodding, his expression suggesting he was almost eager to face the lesser charge. “And you’ll find who killed Viola, won’t you? Then you and everyone else will know it wasn’t me.”
Stokes’s expression turned stony. He regarded Monty for a moment, then stated, “We’ll definitely be pursuing Viola’s murderer, but you may be very sure that the notion of saving you from the hangman’s noose won’t contribute in even the smallest way to our motives for doing so.”
With a look of utter disgust on his face, Stokes rose, as did everyone else. Without another word to Montgomery Pincer, they turned and quit the room and left him to his fate.
In procession, they trooped up the stairs and halted in the foyer.
Stokes sighed. “He’s not our murderer. If we say that the murderer broke the clock to give themselves a cast-iron alibi—and by Carter’s account, that’s the only viable explanation for the broken clock—then Monty has no strong alibi for three-thirty-three.”
Grimly, Barnaby stated, “The murderer—the real murderer—does have that invincible alibi for three-thirty-three. The only mistake they made in setting that up is that they didn’t allow for Monty arriving at one-thirty and finding Viola already dead.”
Penelope wrinkled her nose. “If Monty hadn’t turned up, the chances are this case might never have been solved.”
Barnaby nodded. “The murderer thought they were being very clever in resetting the clock and breaking it, but in reality?—”
“In light of the very short list of suspects,” Penelope stated, “through that action, the murderer turned the finger of suspicion directly at themselves.”
CHAPTER 11
It was too late to reach the inn at Tollard Royal in time for dinner, so they requested a private room at the Haunch of Venison, and after dispatching Phelps, Connor, O’Donnell, Morgan, and Price to take their ease in the taproom, the investigators gathered around the oval table to satisfy their appetites and, ultimately, decide how best to proceed.
As per Stokes, Penelope, and Barnaby’s habit, while they ate, they talked of other things. Mallard, Henry, and Madeline were faintly puzzled by that behavior but followed their lead.
Eventually, their plates were empty, and the liquids in their glasses had sunk to acceptable lows. The serving girls came in and cleared the platters and plates, and Stokes and Barnaby refilled everyone’s glasses.
