Death of a Prankster by MC Beaton Read Free Book Online

Mr Trent said he had not long to live and he would leave us a lot of money in his will.’
    ‘Now to the murder,’ said Hamish. ‘Where were you both last night between eleven and midnight?’
    ‘Mostly in the kitchen. We went up to the drawing room about ten-thirty to make sure everyone had drinks and no one needed anything else and then we retired. I think by eleven-thirty we were in bed.’
    ‘Can you confirm this?’ Hamish asked Maria.
    She gave him a wide-eyed, frightened stare and then looked pleadingly at her husband, who said, ‘She confirms it.’
    ‘Tell me about when the body was found.’
    Enrico said that there had been a lot of loud screaming and shouting. He and Maria had been setting the breakfast table. They had run upstairs. Everyone was clustered round the body. Angela Trent said the police should be called immediately and went to do so. It had been assumed at first that the old man had fallen on the dagger during one of his practical jokes. No one but Miss Angela appeared to think it was murder at first.
    ‘Now the main question. Why on earth was the body taken down and laid out? Surely you must know that nothing should have been touched.’
    Maria burst into a noisy flood of Spanish. Hamish caught the name Senora Trent.
    ‘Which Trent was that?’ he asked sharply.
    ‘Mrs Jeffrey,’ said Enrico. ‘She was most upset. She ran to look for her son and then came back and said it was horrible to leave Mr Trent lying there. My wife is very religious. She wanted to lay out the body. I called in one of the gamekeepers, Jim Gaskell – he lives over the stables – and together we took Mr Trent’s body downstairs.’
    ‘Where is his shirt? The blood-stained one you took from the body?’
    ‘Maria washed it. She did not know any better.’
    ‘But you must have known better!’
    ‘I was in shock,’ said Enrico calmly.
    ‘How busy you both were.’ Hamish leaned back in his chair and surveyed them. ‘You have aided and abetted the murderer by moving the body and cleaning Miss Gold’s bedroom.’
    ‘It was Mrs Jeffrey’s suggestion,’ said Enrico. ‘She said there was no need to be slack about our duties and that the rooms needed cleaning as usual. With our master dead, we naturally took our orders from Mr Jeffrey and his wife.’
    ‘Well, don’t touch anything else. Send Mrs Jeffrey in.’
    Anorexic? wondered Hamish, looking at Jan. She was wearing a black dress, short-sleeved, showing arms like sticks. Her face was gaunt and her rather protuberant eyes showed no traces of weeping.
    ‘This is a waste of time,’ she began, sitting sideways on the very edge of a chair and crossing long thin legs. ‘Your superiors will soon be here and I see no reason to go through this ordeal twice.’
    Hamish ignored that.
    ‘Why did you tell the servants to remove Mr Trent’s body?’
    ‘I did not tell them precisely to do that. I simply said that it was dreadful to leave Andrew lying there. I mean, it may not be murder. Have you considered that? He may have been hiding in that wardrobe to scare Titchy and stabbed himself by accident.’
    ‘And the cleaning of the bedroom?’
    ‘Again, I did not specifically tell them to clean that room. I merely said that they should get on with their duties. Servants must be kept up to the mark, you know,’ remarked Jan.
    ‘How many servants do you have, Mrs Trent?’
    ‘I don’t have any, but these are Spaniards and inherently lazy.’
    Hamish often wondered how the myth of the lazy Spaniard had arisen. In fact, he had been taught at school that the farther south you went, the lazier people got, and yet he had never seen any evidence to support that dubious fact.
    In the Highlands and islands, it was another matter. He remembered when there had been another of those drives to bring work to the north and a factory had been opened on one of the Hebridean islands. It had not lasted very long. The workers had downed tools one day and walked out en masse, never to