Page 38 of Death at the Dower House
“Just lead me to Mr. and Miss Peckham, if you please, and we’ll get it all out of the way at once.”
“Dining room,” Christopher told him, gesturing to the door. “We were having a late breakfast when we realized that Johanna had never come down, and then, when we found her, we locked the door and kept everyone in the dining room.”
“Who found her?” Tom looked from Christopher to me and back as we made our way towards the door to the dining room. “You two?”
“By happenstance. We checked the upstairs. Francis and Constance looked around the ground floor, and Dawson asked the staff.”
“Any trouble last night?”
“Let me count the ways,” Christopher said, but by then we had reached the door to the dining room. “Perhaps later will be better.”
He opened the door instead of going on. “Gentlemen, ladies. This is Detective Sergeant Thomas Gardiner from Scotland Yard.”
There was a moment of silence while everyone looked at Tom. Gilbert Peckham appeared concerned. So did Marsden. Laetitia assessed him the way she probably did any young man—or any man, young or old—who crossed her path: for looks, money, and the likelihood of a title. Constance blinked, and the rest of us, of course, all knew Tom and had seen him quite recently.
“That was fast,” Francis commented, and Tom shook his head.
“Coincidence. Hello, Astley. St George.” He nodded to them. Geoffrey Marsden and his sister must be strangers to Tom, because he contemplated them for a moment, but without greeting them, before he turned his attention to Gilbert and Constance. “Mr. Peckham, Miss Peckham. I’m afraid I have unwelcome news.”
Constance immediately turned pale. Gilbert flushed. “Worse than Johanna being dead?”
Tom looked at him for a second, perhaps to try to determine whether the death of his mother would strike Gilbert as more or less bad than Johanna’s death.
“It’s your mother,” he said finally. “I’m sorry to say she ingested something that proved fatal last evening. She was found lifeless in bed this morning.”
Constance’s eyes filled with tears, and she turned to Francis, wordlessly. I’m sure he would have liked to have put his arms around her, but not only were they in public, they were on two separate dining chairs. The best he could do was reach out and put his hand on top of hers, and then pass her his pocket square when the tears overflowed.
“What?” Geoffrey Marsden said blankly.
Tom turned to him. “I’m afraid I haven’t the pleasure…?”
Marsden stuck his chest out. “I’m Geoffrey Marsden. This is my sister Laetitia. We’re cousins to the Peckhams. This house is Marsden property.”
Tom nodded. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that your relative, Lady Peckham, died overnight. We suspect a fatal dose of Veronal.”
Francis started, and so did Constance. Gilbert’s jaw dropped. “Veronal?” he repeated.
“My mother wouldn’t take her own life,” Constance protested. “She was only forty-seven, and healthy. She had everything to live for. And Veronal…”
She flicked a glance at Francis and then away again. “It’s a sleeping draught, isn’t it? She didn’t have trouble sleeping.”
“At this time, we’re not excluding the possibility of suicide,” Tom said, “but it’s more likely to have been an accidental ingestion. The substance was mixed with her own medicine. She had intestinal issues?”
Constance nodded. “She called them her tummy troubles.” Her voice shook. “She’d eat something that didn’t agree with her, and then she’d have to take a dose of her medicine to feel better.”
“So a curative medicine,” Tom said. “Not a preventative.”
“If you mean that she took it after she was feeling ill, then yes.”
Yes. I could picture it clearly. Supper with Uncle Harold, and with Aunt Roz and Uncle Herbert. Mrs. Sloane, the cook at Sutherland Hall, doesn’t spare the rich ingredients. There’d be butter and cream, and perhaps truffles and sweetmeats. Indigestion might have crept up on Lady Peckham after supper, and before bed she had taken a dose of what she thought was her stomach medicine. And instead, she had ingested a fatal dose of sleeping draught and had drifted off, all alone, away from her son and daughter and the young woman she had loved like her own child, never to wake up this morning.
It was rather sad. Although if nothing else, it sounded as if it would have been a peaceful way to go. Not like the one Christopher and I had seen upstairs.
And she had been spared the knowledge that her beloved ward had been strangled, and in her own bed. That was something to be grateful for, anyway.
“Her fingerprints were on the bottle and the stopper,” Tom said, “as well as on the waterglass beside the bed. There’s every reason to think she gave it to herself.”
Gilbert looked relieved at this statement. Perhaps he didn’t realize that it in no way meant that his mother hadn’t been murdered. It just meant that whoever had murdered her hadn’t poured the poison—or medication—down her throat him- or herself.
