She Shoots to Conquer Read online

  “I can’t see! I’m blind! Blind!” Her screech was one of reverberating panic. Immediately, Ben was at her side making the necessary adjustment to what I realized, on the verge of hysterical laughter, was a lamp shade. His attempts to pull it off completely were unsuccessful. Apparently the hat underneath, having first dibs, refused to give an inch.

  “Why are you wearing that?” I asked her in a voice as deadened as the rest of me.

  “It dropped from above.”

  “Better a lamp shade than the roof of the temple. Poor old Samson had it worse!” Ben laughed comfortingly while placing an arm around her, drawing her into a hug, a gesture I would have found endearing had I been capable of the least flicker of emotion. “I expect someone took it off to dust and set it down on a piece of furniture or even the banister railing, forgot about it, and some vibration sent it toppling off balance.” His words may have helped soothe Mrs. Malloy but did nothing for me.

  “Unfortunately, it’s not becoming,” I pronounced tonelessly. “Suit yourself, but I wouldn’t make it the basis of any future outfits.” Somewhere deep inside I recognized the cruelty. I should have told her that the lamp shade elongated her figure… provided an Audrey Hepburn elegance… but when one has come close to being murdered by a suit of armor something within the soul dies.

  “Ellie!” Ben protested. Could this be the wife he revered except for those times when she failed to pass on telephone messages or interrupted when he was watching football?

  “Oh, that’s all right!” responded Mrs. Malloy with a pathetically resigned look on her face. “Some people can never bear others being the center of attention, even when it’s the nasty sort.”

  At that I started to shake. “A lamp shade fell on your head! Go ahead and sue his nibs! Insist that he tear down this horrible mausoleum. You won’t get any complaints from me. That thing… that evil thing kicked me, and that… that was before it attempted to choke me.”

  “What thing, sweetheart?” Ben was at my side in an instant.

  “That!” With an immense effort I twisted around to face the suit of armor, my pointing finger gyrating out of control.

  “It looks harmless now.” The laughter that had been in Ben’s voice was back. And, adding insult to injury, Mrs. Malloy relented toward me, saying magnanimously that after all we’d been through it wasn’t any surprise that I was overwrought.

  “Probably you bumped into it and it tilted forward. Them legs and arms have to move some or the person inside wouldn’t have been able to stagger into battle holding his crossbow, or sword, or whatever.”

  Of course what she said had to be true. It must have happened that way. But it hadn’t! It hadn’t! I stared at that metal, triangular-fronted face with hatred. If I’d had a tin opener at the ready, I would have gone whirring into action as if it were a tin of Heinz Tomato Soup. “Take that, you metal cretin!” I railed silently. In my defense, it had been a tense evening from the moment the fog descended through to our entrapment, or so it seemed, in this oppressive hall. It is almost certain I would have rallied to laugh with Ben and Mrs. Malloy at my overly vivid imagination, but recoiling from the disbelief in their eyes I looked up to see a face above the banisters.

  Its features were blurred, but even without the distortions of distance and shadow it was grotesquely, terrifyingly recognizable by its straggling locks and toothless gape as the face of the wardress of the insane asylum in which Wisteria Whitworth was incarcerated by her brutal husband. Could there be any doubt that I was on the verge of a similar fate? Under such melodramatic circumstances, there was only thing to do. Regrettably, I did not have a history of fainting, but it’s amazing how quickly one can develop the knack. The room spun, the floor went out from under me, and I went down into blessed oblivion.

  2

  I was vaguely surprised that the flagstones onto which I’d swooned weren’t as hard as might have been expected. Indeed, they felt reasonably comfy. I explored them gingerly with my hand… the word horsehair seeping into mind… before opening my eyes to see someone standing over me. This person resolved into Ben, and behind him stood someone who closely resembled Mrs. Malloy, except that she was considerably taller than I remembered.

  “It’s the lamp shade,” I whispered, and saw a relief flood Ben’s face. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

  He knelt down to take my hand and I forced my eyes to blink my surroundings into clearer focus. We were no longer in the hall, although this huge room, whatever it was, bore a decided resemblance in overcrowding, and there was the same sense of decaying antiquity. The lighting, however, was somewhat better, although not sufficiently strong to hurt my eyes. It was the back of my head that ached. Not terribly, but with a dull throb.

  “I’m on a sofa.” I stretched out my feet tentatively and saw, as if looking through a telescope, that they appeared properly attached. It was my shoes that had been removed. “Did you carry me in here?”

  “That was our host; he came out into the hall, saw you on the floor, and insisted.” Did I detect resentment in Ben’s voice? Surely not. What husband achingly concerned for his beloved would resent another man doing what he could to help by swooping her up into his manly arms? I remembered driftingly that I had pictured his nibs as being almost as ancient as his abode and the thought of him tottering precariously across the flagstone under my weight became so sad that I blinked back tears. I peered around, searching for a figure huddled in a chair shakily trying to find his face with an inhaler.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Gone to tell his housekeeper to bring you a cup of tea and a blanket.”

  “Thank God, you’ve come round, Mrs. H!” Mrs. Malloy pressed a heavily ringed hand to her bosom. “I could have sworn you was a gonner.”

  “Now don’t say that!” a male voice exclaimed rather too loudly for my head. “One death this evening is more than enough! Very difficult these last few hours for his nibs! And him so looking forward to the filming. Not fair to him is what Mrs. Foot, Boris, and me-that works taking care of the house-has been feeling.”

  A face swam into view. Even to my numbed thinking, this could be no other than Mr. Plunket. My glimpse of him through the front doorway had called to mind the image of a medieval saint, but that had to be due to a blurred halo of saffron light surrounding poorly delineated features. It was Mrs. Malloy’s description of his having a face like a gourd that told the tale. A flesh-colored gourd sprouting pale nodules, not an attractive sight for someone coming out of a faint. His nose was flat, his eyes lacked color, and his mouth was no more than a horizontal crease among the vertical ones. Not that he could help any of that. Not all men are born to be as darkly, dashingly handsome as Ben. Indeed, as she had demonstrated when unloading the fog, Mother Nature had her moments of being difficult just for the malevolent joy of it. Mr. Plunket was also not helped by his attire. He was wearing a threadbare navy suit, several sizes too skimpy for a man of his rotund build, a dishwater-gray shirt, and a badly creased tie, all of which looked as though they had previously been used as polishing cloths.

  “Who died?” Interest stirred… coupled with the insensitivity of hope. If the deceased had been strangled by the suit of armor, it would be proved beyond argument that I had not imagined his attempt to attack me. As for the face above the banisters, I would think about her later… much later.

  “Ellie, try to relax, you gave yourself a real crack on the head.” Ben placed a soothing hand on my brow before getting to his feet and staring around the room as if in search of reinforcements. Had a doctor been sent for? Surely not? To disprove the need, I attempted to sit up. Unfortunately, my head went into orbit and an accompanying ringing in my ears forced me to lie back down.

  “Who died?” I repeated fretfully.

  “One of the”-Mr. Plunket paused, and despite my still swimming head I sensed he was making a verbal adjustment-“people… expected to descend on his nibs for the coming week. The others aren’t due till tomorrow morning. But th
is one asked if she could show up this evening. Had been invited to spend the day with someone in the area, she said. Why she couldn’t have spent the night with whoever it was is what Mrs. Foot, Boris, and me wondered, but his nibs said he’d no objection.”

  “So what happened?” Mrs. Malloy is not one to suffer the long-winded gladly, with the exception of herself, of course.

  “It was the fog…”

  “An accident on the road?” Ben’s gaze met mine. He had to be thinking this could have been our fate if we had gone on, and feeling better about having followed the van onto the private drive. How puny was embarrassment to the male psyche when compared to the hovering visage of the Grim Reaper.

  “No, right outside.” Mr. Plunket pointed to the window behind my sofa. “Happened three hours or so ago, when the visibility was even worse than when you got here. His nibs had said for us to keep our ears open for the sound of her car approaching the drive. And it was Boris that went out, but not quick enough. If he hadn’t lost time looking for a torch and not finding one, things could have been different.”

  “So, cutting the story short,” urged Mrs. Malloy with all the authority provided by the lamp shade still on her head.

  “I blame myself for not getting outside ahead of him with the hurricane lamp that’s kept in the grandfather clock, to guide that poor woman in safe.” The nodules on Mr. Plunket’s face were the more evident as he moved closer to the standing lamp at the foot of the sofa. “Gone off the drive she must have done onto the side lawn and through a broken section of a garden wall, down into the ravine that’s thick with trees. Like I said, Boris got out of the house too late. When we heard the crash, his nibs, Mrs. Foot, and me followed as quick as we could with the help of the lamp. But there wasn’t nothing could be done. It was a job getting the car door open but we managed between us. Luckily the interior lights worked. His nibs felt for the pulse in her neck. Nothing. She’d snuffed it all right and we come back inside so he could phone the authorities.”

  “Did they have trouble getting here?” Ben began pacing, his eyes shifting from me to the door and back. I knew what he was thinking and he was right. I desperately needed a cup of tea or if possible something stronger to keep me from starting to cry. Un-fortunately, if there were a bottle of brandy in the room, a team of detectives would be needed to find it. An automobile accident amply explained by the fog would not have caused investigators to linger on the premises. Routine for them, while to us the deceased was a nameless, faceless stranger, but surely she was someone’s loved one… wife… mother… daughter… friend. What an agonizing shock for the bereaved to receive by phone or a knock at the door!

  “It’s what they’re used to, isn’t it? The police and medical people, I mean, getting to places in the worst possible conditions, and of course Lord Belfrey turned on all the exterior lights for them.”

  Hadn’t they been on when the woman arrived? This thought blocked out any other.

  “Not that they was likely to do much good, that fog being thicker than a sheepskin coat.”

  “Lord Belfrey,” echoed Mrs. Malloy, as if prayerfully reeling off the names of a dozen holy martyrs.

  “That’s his nibs,” replied Mr. Plunket with a prosaic scratch of a nodule below his lower lip.

  “A proper lordship?” Mrs. M pursued hopefully, while sinking into an armchair that looked as if it had been rescued after being set out next to a dustbin a hundred years ago.

  “What other kind is there?” muttered Ben, his eyes fixed anxiously on my recumbent form.

  “Oh, you know,” an airy wave of a ringed hand, “the sort as is given for your lifetime only-that doesn’t get passed on through the family. Or don’t you get made a lord for being a famous jockey or actor?” Her rouge brightened at this possibility. “Maybe that’s just for sirs and dames and all that lot.”

  “The title’s been in the Belfrey family all of six hundred years.” Pride was evident in every throb of Mr. Plunket’s voice. And despite my increasing headache it struck that he had evinced no emotion of approaching scale when describing the appallingly recent death just beyond the doorstep.

  “Have they lived here the whole time?” Mrs. Malloy inquired in a breathless rush.

  “Give or take the times it was taken away on account of them being on the wrong side politically. Tudor times was the worst, from what Mrs. Foot, Boris, and me understand it. And for what? is what we ask ourselves. Roman Catholic… Protestant! Who gives a flaming candle?”

  My mother-in-law for one, I thought dizzily. There is a woman who has never voluntarily missed mass a day in her life and can discuss the impenetrables of transubstantiation with the best of them, including St. Augustine had he paid her a vision. My Jewish father-in-law might not have made him quite so welcome; he’s a crotchety man, not at all welcoming to drop-in guests at the flat above the greengrocer’s shop in Tottenham.

  “But there’s an end to everything, even bloodthirsty kings and queens,” said Mr. Plunket as if reading from a pamphlet on sale for twenty pence at the entrance booth. “The Belfreys always came back home to Mucklesfeld Manor, and some of them-the ones that wasn’t given over to living it up wild-went about setting it back to rights, just like his nibs has made up his mind to do. Although who can say as to what will happen now that woman’s been taken away in a body bag. Mrs. Foot and Boris both talk like it won’t make no difference but…”

  Mrs. Malloy cut into his ruminations. “Mucklesfeld?” Her voice was sharp-edged with disappointment. “Not Belfrey?”

  I heard what sounded like a hiccupping cough, but looking to where Mr. Plunket still stood at the foot of the sofa, I realized he was chortling. In the sallow light cast by the lamp nearest him and others scattered stingily around the vast room, his heightened color did not look good. A decidedly unbecoming greenishorange that confirmed the pimply-gourd effect.

  “Belfrey? Now that would set the place up as a joke, wouldn’t it? Bats in the belfry, there’d be no stopping the schoolboy silliness. No, the place got its name from the old muck fields hereabouts. Famous they was; some said the best in all England. Wonderful it was for growing celery. But then they went and dried up, just like the family money did. As his nibs can’t be blamed for.” He stared down at Mrs. Malloy in her chair. “He only came into the title and property last year after his cousin that was then Lord Belfrey died. Spent much of the last thirty years in America, he did-Alaska mostly, although I always thought that was Russia.”

  “Whatever, it’s abroad, isn’t it?” Mrs. Malloy responded ingratiatingly. “I’m sure his lordship was glad to get back to the UK; a title in America has to be as much use as a fur coat in the tropics.” If she expected an appreciative chuckle from Mr. Plunket, she was disappointed. He stood smoothing down the too-short sleeves of his jacket.

  “From all we’ve heard, the cousin was a miserable old blighter that let Mucklesfeld go to rack and ruin while he shut himself away from the world.”

  This topic would have been fascinating if I’d been sufficiently unwoozy to be my usual nosy self. Even though I seriously doubted I’d slipped gracefully to the floor during my faint, I thought it more likely my headache was due to emotional stress than physical injury. For whole minutes at a time my mind successfully warded off the memory of the Metal Knight clawing at my throat, but the nightmarish face peering down at me through the upper banisters refused to be banished. Stupid of me. Once I could think clearly I would hit upon a logical explanation for both incidents, but the aura of malevolence that had accompanied the latter… would I be able to convince myself that it had arisen entirely out of my penchant for the Gothic novel?

  “And like I said, his nibs has been hoping to refill the coffers at Mucklesfeld. He’s had to make a decision that many a proud man wouldn’t have the guts for. This television show…”

  Ben cut him off. “I realize this isn’t a cottage. But how long should it take for your employer to come back and inquire after my wife or at least send one of the oth
er members of the staff with a reviving beverage?”

  “Now then, Mr. H.” Mrs. Malloy sent him the admonishing glance of a nanny who doesn’t appreciate being shown up when bringing a little person down from the nursery into the drawing room. “Mr. Plunket has explained why things are bound to be a bit topsy-turvy this evening. To top it off his lordship has them television people here and we all know how temperamental people in show business can be, even without that poor woman being killed.” No doubt she would have added that it never rained but it poured or something equally platitudinous, but Mr. Plunket was off down his own road.

  “Very inconvenient, that was.” His lugubrious tone did not quite make up for his word choice.

  “Inconvenient?” Ben raised an eyebrow at him.

  “As well as sad,” Mr. Plunket amended, “tragic more like. That goes without saying, of course.”

  “Was she… the deceased woman… a relative or close friend of his lordship?” I roused myself to ask.

  “Never met or spoken with her. She was one of the contestants, you see.”

  “The what?” Ben added his echo to that of Mrs. Malloy, while bending over the sofa to smoothe back my hair and search my face with anxious eyes.

  “Contestants.” Mr. Plunket shuffled on his feet, which like his clothes appeared too small for him. “She would have made the sixth. The other five will be getting here tomorrow if it’s not decided to put them off.”