The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(52)

‘Just answer her,’ Rycroft snapped, although he too wondered why the infuriatingly useful woman wanted to know. He wondered just where she could possibly be headed with the seemingly irrelevant question.

‘Yeah, it is,’ O’Keefe said slowly.

‘Is it dry?’

‘Yeah, it is.’

Jenny nodded. ‘So why did you cover it with plastic?’ Rycroft, who’d been becoming impatient with the cook’s continual questions, suddenly began to look alert.

O’Keefe, too, stared at her. ‘I didn’t,’ he said at last. ‘I found it on the wood this afternoon. I was the one that took it off — it can make the wood sweat, see, in this kind of heat. Which is the last thing I need.’

‘What time this afternoon?’ Rycroft cut in, not because he thought the answer important, and not because he could see any significance in it. He just wanted to get the question in before the cook could.

But Brian shrugged. ‘I dunno. After lunch sometime. Before we started off. Just coming up to three, summat like that.’ He shrugged in obvious indifference. Or was he just faking it?

Jenny felt her heartbeat quicken. So, she was right! But knowing how a murder was done was not the same thing as knowing who had done it.

Rycroft, sensing that the cook was now way ahead of him, as usual, snarled at O’Keefe to get going, then stared at the woodpile and the sheet of innocuous plastic. But try as he might, he couldn’t see what wood, plastic and the engineer had to do with anything.

Jenny, rather wisely, chose that moment to excuse herself and check that her fruit tarts weren’t burning.

Rycroft made no move to stop her. Only when they were safely alone did he turn to Graves, one eyebrow lifted.

‘Well?’

But Graves couldn’t see what the cook had been getting at either. It left both men feeling rather frustrated, not to mention nervous. So far, no policeman had out-thought the cook. Both of them were anxious to be the first, and thus restore honour to the Oxfordshire constabulary. But they were beginning to lose their previous self-confidence.

Which went part of the way, at least, to explaining why they were so hard on Lucas Finch when they returned to the dining room some ten minutes later.

By then, the soup had been mostly consumed, and Jenny put two servings of the main course into the oven to keep hot, for the policemen to enjoy later. When they stepped back into the dining room, she was just emerging from the galley with a large, shortcrust pastry tart, filled with apricots, raspberries, blackcurrants and plums, in an apricot-brandy jelly. This she put onto the side table to come to room temperature, which is when it should be served to be at its best, and noticed the pinched and disapproving look on Rycroft’s face. Graves, she noticed, for once did look grave.

The parrot on Lucas’s shoulder dipped its head from side to side. ‘What’s up with you, shortarse?’ it asked, rather loudly.

Rycroft went beetroot.

Lucas, for once, could have throttled the bird. ‘Don’t mind him, Inspector,’ he said hastily. ‘It’s what I’m always saying to him. First thing in the morning, I open up his cage — he always sleeps in one at night — give him a raisin and say, “What’s up with you, shortarse?”’

He trailed off miserably as he became aware that his explanations and apologies were falling on deaf ears.

Rycroft, with the manner of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, took a fairly thick wad of papers from out of his suit breast pocket and said grimly, ‘Do you recognize these, Mr Finch?’

It was immediately apparent, to Jenny at least, that Jasmine Olney certainly recognized them. She watched them pass across the table, from policeman to her host, her eyes widening.

She’d seen her husband reading them several times over the past week. If only she’d known that they were so important!

Her look of vexation made Jenny wonder what else Jasmine Olney might have overlooked.

Lucas went white, then grey, then back to white again. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes, I recognize them,’ he croaked.

David Leigh glanced at Lucas, his solicitor’s instincts coming to the fore. His firm was courting Lucas Finch and his accounts assiduously. If he could leap into the breach now and come to the rescue, who could say how grateful Lucas might be? But before he could open his mouth to reassure Lucas that he needn’t answer any of the inspector’s questions, Rycroft was steaming ahead.

‘Are they accurate?’

Lucas flinched. ‘They’re accurate,’ he agreed. ‘In as far as they go.’

Dorothy Leigh pushed her untouched plate of food away, and gave Lucas a sympathetic look. She touched her husband’s arm, silently urging him to step in.

But David had had time to think things through, and was, as a consequence, somewhat more cautious than he might have been just a few moments earlier. ‘Lucas, if you need legal representation, then you can hire me now, on the spot. At least then you’ll be covered by legal privilege if—’

But Lucas held up his hand. ‘I don’t need a solicitor, thanks, Dave. What the inspector has there are army records of an old court martial. A court martial in which I was cleared of any wrongdoing. Isn’t that so, Inspector?’ Lucas raised his voice, and his chin.

Obviously, Rycroft thought, he intends to bluff it out. But then, what other course was left open to him, he mused with an ugly sneer.