Sick of Shadows - M. C. Beaton [65]
Rose was so angry that she barely slept that night, but she was still determined to go to Apton Magna. She rehearsed scene after scene in her mind where she would present Kerridge with evidence that Jeremy was a murderer, and leave the superintendent to let Harry know she had solved the case.
At five in the morning, she and Daisy crept downstairs and into the back garden. They propped the ladder against the wall and climbed up. They sat on the top and pulled up the ladder and slid it down the other side.
Once they were in the lane, they hurried away. Beyond the square, they were lucky in finding a sleepy cabbie, and asked him to take them to Paddington Station, where Rose bought two first-class tickets.
Once the train moved out, Daisy fell asleep, her head bobbing against the lace antimacassar. Rose sat bolt upright, staring unseeingly at a bad oil painting of the coastal town of Deal on the carriage wall opposite.
The carriage was stuffy, so she jerked down the window by the leather strap. The train plunged into a tunnel and smoke billowed into the carriage. She spluttered and choked and jerked the window shut again.
When a waiter called out that breakfast was served, Rose shook Daisy awake and they made their way to the dining-car.
They ate in silence. Daisy was beginning to wonder if Becket would make a suitable husband after all and Rose was eaten up with fury at Harry.
At Oxford, they changed onto the train for Moreton-in-Marsh. It coughed and wheezed and jerked its slow way into little country stations and then sat at each for what seemed like ages before jerking forward again.
They found a cab in the forecourt of Moreton-in-Marsh Station. Rose instructed him to take them to the rectory at Apton Magna and to wait for them.
“It’s Sunday,” said Daisy. “They’ll all probably be in church.”
As they got down from the carriage, they could see the congregation filing into church.
Inside, the pews were like the ones in railway carriages. “Let’s go up to the gallery,” whispered Rose. “We’ll get a better look from there.”
They sat in the front of the gallery and looked down. A smell of unwashed poverty rose up from the well of the church and Rose held a scented handkerchief to her nose.
“I wonder,” she murmured to Daisy, “why the rector ended up in a poor living like this. Perhaps there is something in his past which put him out of favour.”
They got to their feet for the opening hymn. As they sang, Rose saw the rector in his robes walking down the aisle. He climbed up the steps to the pulpit, grasped the wings of the golden eagle which decorated the pulpit and stared down at the congregation.
“Look!” hissed Rose when the hymn finished. Jeremy Tremaine was walking down to a lectern under the pulpit.
Jeremy began reading from the Revelation of Saint John the Divine.
“And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.”
“What’s a sardine stone?” asked Daisy.
“Shhh!”
Jeremy’s voice droned soporifically on. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death.”
He cast his eyes up piously and then they suddenly sharpened and focused directly on Rose and Daisy. He slammed the Bible shut and strode off down the aisle. His father looked down in surprise at his son’s retreating figure and then looked at the gallery. When he saw them, for a brief moment his face was a mask of fury.
Then the next hymn began.
The lady’s maid, Turner, waited to be summoned by Rose. When no summons came, she went to Rose’s bedchamber. Finding it empty, she checked the sitting-room and then Daisy’s room.
Turner became very worried. Only the other day, Lady Polly had threatened her with dismissal if she tried to cover up what Rose was doing.
She went down to the breakfast room. “My lady,” she said, “Lady Rose is not in her rooms. Neither is Miss Levine.”
The earl and countess stared at her in alarm.
Brum gave a discreet cough.