Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [104]
He turned back to the business in hand. Tellman was at his elbow. He had been unaware of him until now.
Everyone else followed Jack to the morning room—except Eudora and Tellman, standing close to the study door. Eudora was staring at Pitt, her face white, smudged across the cheek with dust.
“Mr. Pitt, I’m so sorry,” she said gently. “What Mr. O’Day said was unforgivable. No one can defend us from each other. This is terrible, but it does look as if we have great goodness among us, as well as evil. Lorcan gave his life trying to defuse the bomb. Perhaps we have still the will to succeed, if you can find who … who it was who laid it there.” She stared at him fixedly. “Can … can you? I mean, is there anything? Can anyone tell from what is left?”
“Not from the study,” he replied. “Anyone in the house could have done that, but we shall question the servants and everyone else, and see who came this way, where everybody was. We may learn something.”
“But … but we could all have come across the hall,” she protested. “That doesn’t prove … I mean—” She stopped, her throat tight, her voice thin and high. “I mean …” She shook her head quickly and walked after the others, her dark skirts pale with dust.
Tellman sighed and stared into the study, hesitated a moment, then started to pick his way through the debris towards the desk and the body of Lorcan McGinley. He squatted down and peered at it thoughtfully, then at what was left of the desk.
“I think the dynamite was in the top drawer on the left, or the second,” Pitt said, following after him.
“That’s what it looks like,” Tellman agreed, chewing his lip. “Judging from the way all the splinters and debris are lying. It would all fall outward from the blast, I suppose. What a mess. Whoever put it here wanted to be sure an’ kill Mr. Radley, no mistake. I wouldn’t be a politician trying to sort this lot out.” He moved his attention from the desk to Lorcan’s body. “He must’ve been right in front of it, poor devil.”
Pitt stood with his hands in his pockets, brow furrowed. “It would have been on a wire of some sort, rather than a clock,” he said thoughtfully. “No one could be sure when Jack would come in here. It might simply have blown up with no one, or if it were on top of the desk, under papers and books, it might have been moved by a servant tidying up.”
“D’you think that lot would care?” Tellman said bitterly. “What’s one English servant more or less?”
“Possibly nothing,” Pitt agreed. “But it would achieve no purpose. It would be a risk and an outrage that would serve no end. No, it would have been designed specifically for Jack, put in one of the drawers no one else would open.”
He reached over and searched among the debris for the remains of the drawers. He found one and examined it without success, then a second. He turned it over very carefully, feeling it with his fingertips. There was one side, and a shard of the bottom left more or less attached. He examined the underneath. Across the bottom was a straight line of flat-topped furniture tacks. There was a broken piece of wire under one of them.
“I think we have found where the mechanism was,” Pitt said quietly. “Pinned under the drawer to detonate when the drawer was opened. It must have taken a few minutes to do this. Empty the drawer out, tack this across the bottom, and then replace it all.”
Tellman’s eyes widened and he stood up, his knees cracking as he straightened them. “It’s a great pity McGinley’s dead,” he said slowly. “He could answer some important questions.”
“He was a very brave man.” Pitt shook his head. “I would dearly like to know what he deduced, and we didn’t.”
“Damn fool should’ve told us,” Tellman said angrily. “That’s our job!” Then he colored very faintly. “Not that we’ve exactly done it well this time. I don’t know anything about dynamite. Do you?”
“No,” Pitt confessed. “I’ve never dealt with a murder by dynamite before. But somebody put it here and set it up to explode when the drawer was opened.