Murder At Wittenham Park Read online

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  To my daughter, Lorna

  1

  “DARLING,” Lady Gilroy was asking, her normally relaxed East Coast voice strained, “is this ‘murder weekend’ really going to make money?”

  “Should do.” Lord Gilroy glanced at his wife across the tea-table, set with Spode china cups and an elegant George II silver teapot. He didn’t like her tone. Outwardly Deirdre Gilroy was straight out of the pages of a society magazine. Her fine blond hair was held back by a black velvet band. Her pretty, though somewhat sharp features, were only lightly made-up. Because this was a chilly early-summer day, she was wearing a cashmere twin set and pearls over neatly tailored fawn slacks. As she poured a cup of Earl Grey tea for him, she looked poised and self-assured. But Gilroy knew that his American-born wife sometimes lacked confidence. Not in herself. In him. And her voice told him this was one of those days.

  “Dee Dee darling, the murder weekend’s a bloody clever idea,” he insisted, feeling able to say so because it had not been his own. “That promoter fellow knows his onions. We’ve got a full house for tomorrow, haven’t we? How can we lose? He said anything to do with Agatha Christie would pull in the punters, and he was damned right. They’ll spend a fortune on booze alone.”

  “You mean we will,” Dee Dee cut in acidly. “You should never have made it all-inclusive.”

  “But they’re paying the earth!” Gilroy protested. “The weekend must show a profit.”

  “I darned well hope so.” Dee Dee was sadly aware that most of her husband’s waking hours were spent devising schemes to make money out of his ancestral home; and very few of them worked. “For your sake I darned well hope it does.”

  Owning a neo-Gothic mansion on fifteen hundred acres of the finest English countryside, and having a title to go with it, might sound like a dream-world; the ultimate distinction in a society of wannabees. The only other thing you would need is cash. But of this Lord Gilroy was perennially short. His grandfather had been given a peerage for “political services” in the 1920s. As the owner of a coal-mine he had been a particularly tough boss during the 1926 General Strike. So he was duly rewarded and soon after bought a massive Victorian “castle” called Wittenham Park to dignify his new title. But in 1946 the mines were nationalized and death duties became crippling. By the time that Algernon, Third Baron Gilroy, inherited Wittenham, there was precious little left except for the title, the land and the impossible house.

  Traditionally British noblemen solved such problems by marrying American heiresses. This was what the outside world assumed Gilroy had done. Unfortunately for him, the outside world was wrong. Dee Dee Gilroy was the daughter of a prominent New York financier who had been a high-roller when she married, but had tripped up in the futures market and lost twenty million dollars almost overnight, leaving her an heiress no longer.

  Worse, Gilroy had a more personal problem than money; one that his bride from Long Island had assumed she could change, but which had proved as ineradicable as a criminal conviction. He looked like a used-car salesman.

  However well Lord Gilroy dressed, he still looked like a man whose dearest wish was to ease you into the driving seat of an insurance-write-off Ford, with a stolen engine and the odometer turned back. He looked like one in a City suit and in grouse-moor tweeds; above all he looked like one in a blue blazer and flannels, his favourite gear. At school his classmates had nicknamed him Fast Buck, after he had tried running a book on the Grand National. In the Coldstream Guards it became simply Buck, which he welcomed, not realizing that his fellow officers were shrewder than he thought, because “Buck Gilroy” made him sound like a womanizer as well as disreputable. And even in the dark blue “boating jacket” of his regiment, tailored at huge expense by Welch and Jefferies of Savile Row, and adorned with gleaming gilt regimental buttons, he still looked as though he belonged in a midtown showroom.

  The explanation may have been that his chin was too round and dimpled, it may have been the way his thick dark hair slicked unevenly across his forehead, as though he were an overgrown teenager, it may have been his all-too-effusive smile, or the way he naturally adopted a self-confidently lounging attitude, as if trying to shake off the discipline of his brief military career. Whatever it was, Buck Gilroy exuded the impression that if he hadn’t just sold you something, he was assuredly about to try. This was why he had never been offered the City directorships that other peers seemed to pick up like flowers from the wayside. Now, yet again, he was chasing a brilliant new idea for improving the family cash flow and, yet again, his wife was getting cold feet about it.

  “Is this promoter on the level?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be?”

  “He says he’s sold all the rooms, but where’s the guest list? Who is actually coming?”

  Her tone made it very clear that if they did not clean up on the forthcoming weekend, there was going to be hell to pay. As a débutante she had imagined that a title and a grand house automatically spelt money; a misconception in which her financier father had encouraged her. Now, at thirty-five, with two children being expensively educated on top of maintaining this vast mansion, she knew better.

  “He promised he’d fax us today. I’ll go and check the machine.”

  In the Agatha Christie thriller on which their weekend was to be based, last-minute news would have arrived by the afternoon post, brought on a silver salver to the drawing-room by the butler. The Gilroys were more reliant on technology, and anyway the butler was having this Thursday off in compensation for working on the weekend. Gilroy had already decided, with what was for him striking originality, that the butler’s role could be that of the butler. Dee Dee bettered that by observing that the simplest way for her to avoid having to be with their guests all the time was for her to play the first “victim.” She could then refuse to appear again, except at meals, which would be hard to avoid, since “dining with Lord and Lady Gilroy in the aristocratic setting of their Wittenham Park dining-salon” was part of the deal. And she could make sure that the family silver did not become part of the “all-inclusive” deal. Dee Dee Gilroy was quite possessive about her husband’s heirlooms.

  When Lord Gilroy returned, holding several flimsy sheets of paper, he had a look of puzzlement on his face, as if he had just inadvertently purchased a rebuilt wreck himself.

  “The bloody man’s gone and hired an actress.”

  “What on earth for?”

  He read aloud. “‘As your lordship appreciates, nothing is worse than guests’ being hesitant about throwing their heart and souls into getting the action going. We have accordingly hired the talented actress Priscilla Worthington to take the part of the villainous companion and co-murderess.’”

  “So talented she’s out of work, I’ll bet,” Dee remarked acidly. “‘Resting,’ don’t they call it. And just how much are we paying her?”

  “Doesn’t say,” Gilroy admitted, realizing he had allowed the promoter far too much
leeway, then defended himself. “Actually, it makes sense. The only people we can rely on to make an effort are that retired insurance fellow and his wife.”

  Only one of the few replies to Gilroy’s original advertisement in the personal columns of The Times had converted into a paid-up booking, and that was from a father and daughter called Jim and Jemma Savage, the father revealing that he had been a professional insurance assessor and that he was mad about Agatha Christie. He had also mentioned that Jemma worked for a magazine called Crime and Punishment and was certain to write up the weekend. Dee Dee recognized at once that they ought to offer a discount to a crime reporter. Accordingly Buck wrote back offering them ten percent off for being the first to book.

  In fact, they had been very nearly the last to book as well, because no one else replied, save for an events promoter who specialized in country-house events. Without him, the weekend would never have materialized and the enthusiastic Mr. Savage would have had his deposit returned; albeit reluctantly, if Buck had anything to do with it.

  “And who else is on the list?”

  Gilroy began reading through the other names, but stopped abruptly half-way through. “George Welch?” he asked his wife. “Why do we know that name?”

  “Welch?” For a second or two she was bemused. “My God, that’s the lousy property developer we refused to deal with! Don’t tell me we have that creep as a guest?” Dee Dee’s normal self-control faltered as she confronted the prospect of entertaining one of the most unpleasant men they had ever met for an entire weekend. “I don’t believe it!”

  If his wife was outraged, Gilroy himself was astonished. He had recently been exploring every possible way of turning some of his fifteen hundred acres into cash without destroying the character of the estate, or losing control of it.

  The estate mattered, both emotionally and practically. Buck Gilroy might look like a crook, but his heart was in the right place when it came to inheritances and his children’s futures. Six years as a Guards officer had taught him that if his son Edward was ever going to marry serious money, he would need the estate. The marriage market, like any other trading business, was getting tougher every year. Too many titled gentry no longer inhabited, let alone owned, an ancestral home. If your parents had donated it to the national Trust and you retained a wing, well, that was acceptable, though it meant you had sightseers swarming all over the place at weekends. But then, most stately-home owners suffered that and spent happy hours counting the gate money on Sunday evenings.

  But a title without any “stately” attached was worth little more than being one of those two-a-penny Italian counts, living in some tumbledown Venetian palazzo that any decently rich American would only go into to get out of the rain; and would regret having done so the moment he started scratching himself. No, in these highly competitive days only the genuine article would bring in the marital punters. Take Dee Dee’s own father … Gilroy sighed to himself, as thoughts and memories ambled through his brain. He actually preferred not to think about Dee Dee’s near-bankrupt father, but what had happened did prove the point.

  Gregory D. Gregorian, a man of whom even Wall Street Masters of the Universe lived in terror at the time, would never have approved of his only daughter’s marrying Gilroy before he spent a weekend at Wittenham. Previously Buck had been the sort of dubious young débutante’s delight on whom ten cents spent was ten cents wasted. In those days he was only Lieutenant The Honorable Algernon Gilroy, and although Dee Dee adored him, Gregorian was sceptical. But then Buck’s father had invited him and his wife, Estelle, up for what the old boy still called “a Friday to Monday”; and Gregory Dwight Gregorian was hooked. The mock battlements might be crumbling, the William Morris tapestries that had come with the house might have long been consigned to Sotheby’s auction rooms, the butler might look like an aging waxwork whose facial structure had begun to droop, but none of this mattered. Wittenham was the real McCoy, with portraits and deer in the park and signed black-and-white photos of royalty in silver frames. Gregorian had been hooked. So had his wife. The butler even overheard Estelle, wandering in one of the stone-flagged “cloister” passages, mouthing the words “Lady Gilroy”; “Deirdre, the Lady Gilroy”; “Lady Gilroy of Wittenham,” as if practising some witches’ chant.

  And then Greg discovered that the father had served on the Allied staff of General Eisenhower. Gregorian himself had been named Dwight on account of the liberation of Europe. That finalized the deal. Dee and Dee and Buck were married that summer at the Guard’s Chapel, in the Wellington Barracks, right by Saint James’s Park, and the names of the wedding guests took up four inches in The Times.

  Even so, Dee Dee’s marriage settlement had not been breathtaking. “Don’t worry, boy,” Gregorian had assured Buck repeatedly, “every cent that is mine will be hers one day. Whoever gets Dee Dee is some lucky guy.”

  If Buck really had been a used-car salesman, he would have wondered about the “whoever gets” bit and recognized the patter. But he was now a newly promoted captain and feeling too good about life to worry. Besides, Greg was unfailingly generous in everyday matters and Dee Dee had a substantial allowance. Then, in what seemed the twinkling of an eye, but was actually a series of events spread over two years, old Gilroy died, Buck was obliged to quit the Coldstream Guards to run the estate, and a new trans-Atlantic phrase impinged itself on his limited financial vocabulary. The phrase was “Filing for Protection under Chapter Eleven.” Gregory D. Gregorian’s company was going bust.

  In practice, going into Chapter Eleven was not the disaster Gregorian pretended. He had to sell his yacht, but only the 120-foot Estelle. Another remained snugly moored up in Long Island, where the five-bedroom clapboard house on Beach Road in Southampton remained in the hands of a trust. The Sutton Place duplex went, but it was replaced with a comfortable apartment on Sixty-seventh Street, near the Frick. And Dee Dee’s allowance went too. As she remarked to her husband, in a moment of disloyalty to Daddy, “Your motto may be ‘Always Faithful,’ ours is ‘Me First!’”

  Gilroy’s accountants soon pointed out that, given the tax bill which he would have to settle, thanks to his father’s early death, Wittenham Park would either have to be made profitable or be sold. Dee Dee set her teeth against selling; and Buck further enlarged his financial vocabulary with phrases like “bottom line,” “deficit carried forward,” and “profit centres.” It was locating the last of these three that kept him permanently scheming.

  Three years ago they had opened a Lion Park. Last year Dee Dee had converted the stables into a Period Gallery, displaying everything from Victorian dresses to an old fire engine. A shop sold Wittenham Park honey and curios, all labelled with Gilroy’s crest of a stag rearing up, apparently trying to escape from a coronet in which its hooves were caught. No one could deny the energy with which Dee Dee threw herself into these enterprises. Why worry that the Marquess of Bath had long been famous for his lions and that the Duchess of Devonshire sold coronet-labelled honey? The moment the Gilroys read about someone else’s smart idea, they copied it. Inevitably, they had the idea of a golf course.

  Gilroy was thrilled. He could visualize a hundred spin-offs, such as selling golf balls adorned with a coronet and a limited-edition membership. Then he discovered that, although they had a suitable five hundred acres of land, the capital outlay would still be vast. This was how they had met the developer, George Welch.

  Precisely how Welch came to hear that there was land on offer at Wittenham Park the Gilroys did not know, though it had coincided with their originating the murder-weekend project. At all events Welch had telephoned back in January and insisted on coming to see them. The moment his Rolls-Royce scrunched on the gravel and halted in the drive, they knew what he would be like. The Rolls was painted in an iridescent apple-green, with white sidewall tyres. In the old days Rolls would have refused to paint a car that colour, and if they’d found one that had been so painted, they would have done their damnedest to buy it back.
/>   Sure enough, Welch had been a burly fifty-year-old, dressed in a Mafia-style blue suit, with wide lapels, and a multi-coloured kipper tie that appeared to have been attacked by a graffiti artist. He referred to his car as a “Roller.”

  “Oh God,” Dee Dee had whispered as the butler announced him, “what have we let ourselves in for?”

  Welch didn’t waste any time letting them know.

  “Hear you’ve got a bit of land up for grabs,” he said, as soon they had sat down in the drawing-room, “now that could be interesting to a man like me.”

  “We’re thinking of a golf-course development.” Gilroy had said, only to be shot down at once.

  “Golf course?” Welch had said dismissively, “what d’you want one of those for? Leave that to the Japs. The whole bloody country’s going to be golf courses soon.” His tone became more aggressive. “Nice little estate you could ’ave ’ere. Very nice little development. Five hundred acres, you said. Do a lot with five hundred.”

  “You mean houses?”

  “Houses?” Utter scorn had entered Welch’s roughly accented voice. “No way do I mean ‘houses.’ Homes is what people want, old cock. Homes, not bloody houses. Right then, five hundred acres. Say four to an acre. Knock off ten percent for roads and such. Eighteen hundred homes, you could ’ave. And you’ve the perfect place for ’em.” Welch had got up and gone to the high windows that looked down towards the lake. “Took a gander at your little property on the way, I did. Got the perfect site down there, you ’ave. Right by the water, good access so long as you widen that drive of yours. How much d’you want, eh?”

  Both the Gilroys had gazed at him in total horror. The man was proposing a vast residential estate in full view of the house.

  “I don’t think you’ve quite understood.” Gilroy had said, almost stuttering with indignation, “the five hundred acres is at the other end of the park, by the old farm buildings. Would you like to see the site?”