Murder at the Spring Ball: A 1920s Mystery by Benedict Brown (romantic novels in english .txt) 📗

if he was carrying them to complement his outfit or because his detective’s instincts had never left him.

We scanned the room from the doorway, though I failed to spot anything out of the ordinary. Beside the window was a small table with a plain white cloth draped over it. The walls on either side held locked cabinets which contained various tools, glasses and paraphernalia for serving. Fellowes would have poured the champagne here, but there were no traces of white powder, unusual objects, or hidden trapdoors. In the mystery novels I’d read, these were guaranteed signs of foul play.

Happy with his initial sortie, Lord Edgington stepped over the threshold and began a closer examination. Far faster than I could manage, he sought out a popped cork which was lying at the bottom of the thick velvet curtains. He crouched to inspect the floor around it, then raised it to his eyes.

As he’d invited me along on the mission, I felt I could at least ask a question. “Sorry, Grandfather, what are you looking for?”

He didn’t answer at first, but, rotating the cork steadily between his gloved finger and thumb, he held it to the light. “What do you notice?”

I didn’t like to be put on the spot and felt quite nervous. “Well… um. Nothing?”

“Exactly.” He let this word sit between us, as if it revealed a great deal. I wondered whether I had time to pop to the petit salon for a chocolate éclair whilst he was thinking. “There are no holes or unusual indents. It is in every way a typical cork from a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne, which tells me far more than I was expecting to find out at this point.”

I tried to keep up with him. “Do you mean that no one tampered with the bottle?”

I could already sense a shift in the old police officer. The emotion he’d shown just moments earlier had been shut away in some dark chamber of his heart and he was focussed on the task at hand.

“That’s right. Assuming that the champagne was poisoned, we’re left with far fewer options for how it came about.” He paused and looked up at me. “Either the bottle was already infected fifty years ago – the probability of which seems low – or the poison was added this evening, after the cork was popped.”

I’d been carrying a dark thought with me ever since I’d seen Belinda collapse, and felt compelled to let it out. “It couldn’t be the delphiniums, could it?”

Grandfather looked at me like I had the wits of a stickleback. “No of course not. Where would you get such an idea?”

My thoughts came out in a jumble. “You said yourself that delphiniums can be toxic. Wasn’t that why we wore gloves to handle them?”

“Yes, but-”

Now that I’d started, I had to get all my fears out in one go. “I thought perhaps that, with so many together, the scent or pollen or what have you could turn to poison.”

Pocketing the cork in his waistcoat, Grandfather stood up to explain how far from the truth I’d already led us. “Delphiniums contain high levels of alkaloids. They’re toxic, but not poisonous enough to kill so quickly or violently. Depending on the amount you ingested, you’re more likely to get an upset stomach than keel over dead.”

I felt awfully silly, but that didn’t stop me talking. “So what did kill Aunt Belinda?”

I could see him consulting the book of poisons he kept neatly filed in the library in his head. “There are very few substances which would act so swiftly and many of them are only available in far-flung places. Indigenous South Americans use arrows tipped with poison extracted from Chondrodendron plants to incapacitate their prey. There are also a number of venomous sea creatures which could provide you with a suitable weapon, but I think it was something far simpler and more readily available.”

I assumed that he was considering one of the famous poisons that crime novelists love to make use of. Arsenic, strychnine or…

“Cyanide, I’d say.” He rid his mouth of the words as though they had a bitter taste to them. “A short intense death. I’ve heard people say that it’s painless, but it doesn’t look that way to me. And this is not the first time I’ve seen what it can do.”

He took the cork from his pocket and held it to his nose.

I fell for it and instantly had to ask, “What can you smell, grandfather?”

“Champagne, of course, boy.” He looked displeased with me once more. “We’ve already established that the poison was added after the cork was popped. To discover how that was possible, we must talk to our first witness.”

Chapter Ten

We left the drinks room and crossed paths with Todd on his way back to the ballroom.

“The police say they’ll be here within the hour,” he told us. “The local lot might make it earlier but they’re sending someone from Scotland Yard. Some inspector who lives nearby.”

“Jolly good,” Grandfather said as he strode along with the gait and motivation of a much younger man. “Help Halfpenny keep the guests in order. I’ll send Fellowes along once I’ve spoken to him. Oh, and lock the drinks room door until the police arrive, we don’t want any stray gawkers to interfere with the evidence.”

“Crime, Milord?” Todd had a rather innocent expression on his face just then. “So you do think it’s murder?” There was a quickness to the man that told me he’d make a far better assistant than I could.

“It looks that way. Though you should try to play it down if our guests are getting agitated.”

The two men swapped places and carried on along the corridor in different directions.

We found Fellowes in the kitchen. I did not consider it the obvious choice of location to store a lethal substance, but I’m sure he had his reasons. Chief among them, no doubt, was the chance to break the bad news to his colleagues.

I was surprised to