“I’m not going to turn you in, Uncle Leo,” Kit cut in, as if he found the suggestion utterly ridiculous.
“Uncle Leo,” Leo echoed, his voice breaking. “You know how to bring a tear to an old villain’s eye.”
“I’ll bring my fist to your eye if you keep putting yourself down,”
Kit warned. “I’m not being sentimental, Uncle Leo. I simply don’t believe that you killed Maurice DuCaral.”
Leo smiled affectionately at his nephew. “You take after your mother, Kit. You want to think the best of people, even when they—”
196 Nancy Atherton
“I’ll have to prove it to you,” Kit interrupted thoughtfully. “And to do that, I’ll need time.” He stood, tossed the dregs of his tea into a convenient puddle, and carried his cup and his stool back to the motor home. When he returned, he stood before Leo and said sternly, “I don’t want you to leave the Anscombe estate until I speak with you again. If we have another storm and you want a hot bath or a hot meal, go to the manor house. I mean it, Uncle Leo. I’ll be very upset with you if you disappear.”
Leo rose from his chair, looking somewhat bemused. “You’re not upset with me for murdering Maurice DuCaral, but you will be upset with me if I take off. Have I got that right?”
“Exactly right.” Kit clapped a hand on Leo’s shoulder, then enveloped him in a bear hug. “Welcome home, Uncle Leo.”
Leo hesitated for a moment before returning the hug, then pushed Kit away, saying gruffly, “Get off home, the both of you. I need my beauty sleep.”
I put my cup next to Leo’s on the flat stone and followed Kit through the gap in the trees. I glanced over my shoulder before the campfire vanished from sight and saw Leo gazing fixedly at Kit, with an inscrutable expression on his face.
“I hope he’s still here when we come back,” I murmured when we reached the muddy track.
“He will be,” Kit said confidently, and patted his pocket. “I stole the keys to his caravan.”
Twenty
“
ou sneak!” I exclaimed, both shocked and tickled by Kit’s Y bold act of thievery.
“I had to do something,” he said, pulling his fl ashlight from his pocket and switching it on. “Leo’s been running scared for nearly forty years. I can’t allow him to run again before I clear his name.”
Kit was so absorbed in his thoughts that he was walking at a relatively moderate speed, for which I was profoundly thankful. It was easier to avoid the track’s boggy spots when the flashlight’s beam wasn’t bouncing around quite so much.
“You meant it, then,” I said, peering up at him. His finely sculpted profile was silhouetted against the starry sky, but it was too dark to read his expression. “You’re really going to prove that Leo didn’t kill Maurice DuCaral.”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “While you were confusing the issue with irrelevant questions about Charlotte’s nonexistent siblings, I was counting up the holes in Leo’s story.”
“I wasn’t confusing the issue,” I protested. “I was trying to figure out who Rendor might be.”
“Let’s set your imaginary monster aside for the moment and concentrate on my very real uncle, shall we?” Kit said brusquely, and went on without waiting for a reply. “We don’t live in the Middle Ages, Lori. Madeline DuCaral couldn’t have simply bunged Maurice’s body into the family mausoleum without notifying the proper authorities—a doctor, the police, a coroner. There would have been an inquest in a shooting death, and the inquest would have been covered by the local newspaper. Yet we didn’t fi nd one word in the Despatch about a fatal shooting accident at Aldercot Hall.”
198 Nancy Atherton
“Not one word,” I agreed meekly. Kit had been so even-tempered all day that his sudden curtness had taken me by surprise. It was like being snapped at by a puppy.
“Apart from that,” he continued, “everything we’ve learned over the past four days contradicts Leo’s story. We have it from Henrietta Harcourt as well as Ruth and Louise Pym that Maurice DuCaral was an invalid for nearly forty years and that Charlotte nursed him until his death three years ago. Which means that he was still alive when Leo left him lying in the bracken, all covered in blood. The worst that Leo could have done was injure Maurice. He certainly didn’t kill him.”
“But, Kit,” I ventured hesitantly, “Maurice didn’t have a pulse when Leo left him. He wasn’t breathing. Unless Lizzie Black has been right all along and Maurice DuCaral was a vampire, so he could have been dead one day and alive the next, I’m not sure how you’re going to get around the part where he doesn’t have a pulse and he’s not breathing.”
“I’ll get around that part when I come to it,” Kit declared, his jaw hardening. “My uncle committed petty misdemeanors in his youth— scrawling graffiti, brawling, boozing—but he wasn’t a hardened criminal. It would have been totally out of character for him to commit murder.”