A Christmas Homecoming - Anne Perry [40]
Whom could she ask for help? The only person she trusted without question was Joshua. However, he would be fully occupied trying to keep up morale and sensible behavior among the cast, especially now that there would be no performance, at least in the foreseeable future. He would have to find them something to do, to keep them at bay and hold them together as a group. Any old jealousies or squabbles that surfaced now might result in near hysteria, and things could be said or done that could not be mended.
Someone must find out who had killed Ballin, and prevent the wrong person from being accused. She, Joshua, and the rest of the players were strangers here in close-knit Whitby. Who would suspect Douglas Paterson, never mind Netheridge himself, when they had the perfect scapegoats in a group of strangers, and actors at that?
She must squash down her own emotions and think clearly. What would her son-in-law, Thomas Pitt, do? He would ask questions to which there would be precise answers and then compare those answers. If she did the same, with luck a picture would emerge, even if it was merely an understanding of who was lying and who was telling the truth.
Maybe she would be better equipped if she knew more about everyone present. For a start, she would definitely need the help of Eliza to speak to the servants. She did not imagine for an instant that any of them had killed Ballin; why on earth would they? But they should be eliminated as suspects all the same.
She found Eliza in the housekeeper’s room. After waiting several minutes for her to complete her conversation, she followed Eliza as she walked back to the main part of the house.
“I was wondering if I could be of help in any way,” Caroline began. “I don’t know if you have told the servants or not.”
Eliza looked very pale in the white daylight reflected off the snow outside. The fine lines around her eyes and mouth were cruelly visible.
“Charles said I should not,” she replied. “He has told them that Mr. Ballin was taken ill. We were going to say that he had died and we had placed him in the coldest storeroom until the authorities could come, but of course now we don’t know where he is.” She stopped and turned to Caroline, her face tight with misery. “Where on earth do you think he could be? Why would anyone move him?” She was trembling very slightly. She seemed to want to say more, but some discretion or embarrassment prevented her.
Caroline longed to be able to help her. Eliza looked frail and a little smaller than she had seemed only yesterday. Had she been about to ask Caroline if she had any belief in the supernatural, but stopped because she feared seeming ridiculous?
“Perhaps to frighten us,” Caroline answered with a very slight smile. She meant it to be reassuring, but was suddenly anxious in case Eliza imagined that it was out of mockery, or amusement at her superstition. “And they’ve succeeded,” she went on hastily. “We are all unnerved by it. But honestly I think it is probably for a more practical reason. If we were to look at the body more closely we might learn something that would indicate which one of us killed Ballin.”
Eliza looked close to tears. She stood still and stared at the huge hall with its magnificent decoration and its oil portraits of various Yorkshiremen of note, portraits that were the choice of a rich man who had local roots, but no ancestry of which he was proud.
Eliza gazed at them one by one on the farthest wall, her face filling with dislike.
“I don’t even know who they are,” she said softly. “Charles’s mother chose them, and there they hang, watching us all the time.”
“There aren’t any women,” Caroline observed.
“Of course not. They’re councilors and owners of factories who gave great gifts to the poor,” Eliza told her. “I think they look as if they parted with their money hard.”
“They look to me as if they had toothache, or indigestion,” Caroline answered.