Page 15 of Lies in Little Sutherland
“Of course I did,” I muttered into the wool covering his shoulder.“She could have died any time between that weekend in April and now, and I wouldn’t have thought anything of it.I probably wouldn’t even have known.When Hughes died, it was only because the Bristol constabulary contacted Tom that we heard about it at all.”
Christopher nodded, patting me.“I know, Pippa.It’s frustrating.”
“If only Shreve would have told someone a month ago, when she first saw Morrison.We could have motored up then, and had the chance to speak to her.”
Constable Woodin cleared his throat.“If you don’t mind, Miss?—”
I shook my head.There was nothing to mind so far, at least not beyond the obvious.
“What was it that you wanted to speak to the… to Miss Morrison about?”
“Oh.”I sniffed and straightened.“Just about how she received a phone call in late April and left Lady Peckham’s employ the next day.She didn’t even give notice.Nor did she wait for her wages.Did she, Constance?”
Constance shook her head.“She did say that she would get in touch with Mother when she had a forwarding address, but we never heard from her again.”
“But she did leave of her own free will,” Constable Woodin clarified.
Constance nodded.So did the rest of us.“Just precipitously,” I added.
“And this was more than six months ago.”
“The last weekend in April.More like seven months, isn’t it?”
The constable didn’t answer.“What made you think that something was wrong with Miss Morrison?”
“We didn’t,” I said, with a glance at the others.“We’ve just been worried about her, because she left so abruptly and because she never got back in touch.”
“And because her counterpart at Sutherland Hall died suddenly and suspiciously in August,” Christopher added.“Although that happened in Bristol.”
“At any rate,” I continued, since I didn’t think there was any need to muddy the waters with Hughes’s demise, “when Shreve told us that she had seen Morrison?—”
“Shreve?”
“The Countess of Marsden’s lady’s maid.Constance’s aunt.”I glanced at Constance and clarified, “The countess is Constance’s aunt, I mean.Not Shreve.Shreve’s the maid.But she was the one who saw Morrison in Lower Slaughter a month ago.But then she didn’t mention it until yesterday.We decided to motor up to have a conversation.We certainly didn’t expect to find her dead.”
“But when you found the door unlocked, you seemed concerned.”
“Of course I was.After Hughes, and after Grimsby…”
Constable Woodin arched polite brows, and I continued, “She’s the third servant or former servant in my aunt and uncle’s household that has died in the past six months.”
“Four,” Christopher said.When I turned a nonplussed countenance his way, he added, “Wilkins, remember?Although that had nothing to do with this.Whatever this is.”
“Of course not.Completely different situation.”
Wilkins had also ended up taking his own life, but that had been to avoid being arrested for murder, and it was also totally unrelated to Hughes and Morrison and Aunt Charlotte, and whatever had been going on at Sutherland Hall twenty-three years ago, that had resulted in Morrison being banished to Dorset or Hughes to Wiltshire.
“That’s a lot of dead people,” Constable Woodin remarked, and I sighed.
“Tell me about it.”
Francis’s lips twitched.“She seems to have a knack for finding them.”
“Do not!”I said, offended.“It was Aunt Charlotte who found your grandfather—” or she pretended to do, anyway, after she had killed him, “—and Crispin found Grimsby, and Uncle Harold found Aunt Charlotte, and… all right, I suppose Christopher and I found Johanna de Vos, but someone else found Lady Peckham, I wasn’t even there for that, and Gladys Long found Freddie Montrose, and Tom found Gladys, and—yes, I suppose I did find Abigail Dole, but it was only because I was the first one to look out the window that morning…”
By this point, Constable Woodin stared at me as if I had grown another head, and I hadn’t even got to Flossie Schlomsky or Cecily Fletcher or Dominic Rivers yet.Or the maître d’ from the Savoy tearoom, although it wasn’t really fair to say that Crispin and I had found him, not when Christopher had spent the past several days with his corpse by the time we got there.
The litany of names had clearly startled Constable Woodin, though, and it was hard to blame him for that.They hadn’t all been murdered, of course—or at least Aunt Charlotte hadn’t been—but still, it was a long list.No wonder that Woodin’s eyes were enormous and his face pale.
