‘You don’t think...?’
‘I’m certainly starting to. And that’s why we’re going to go and see Veronica and Wilfred.’
‘Crikey,’ I said.
‘I just want to just stir them up a bit and see what happens.’
‘And if you’re right, they’ll find my body in a ditch, shot through the head by a gun concealed in my hat.’
‘And I’ll be lying beside you, killed by withering sarcasm and a lack of proper respect.’
We had arrived at the caravan. Very few of the circus folk lived in caravans, most of them preferring the same sort of spacious tent that Colonel Dawlish occupied. But Mr and Mrs Carney were clearly caravan dwellers. And what a caravan. It was of the Romany type, covered in the most intricately carved, gold-painted designs. Even in the grey drizzle it was a magnificent vehicle but I imagined that in the sunlight it would glitter and gleam like a jewel.
Lady Hardcastle climbed the steps and tapped on the door with the handle of her umbrella.
Wilfred opened the door a crack and looked out suspiciously. When he saw it was us, he opened the door fully and motioned for us to come inside quickly. The caravan was surprisingly roomy on the inside and just as lavishly decorated as on the outside. I could see why they preferred to live there; it was a proper home.
Wilfred turned awkwardly and put something back behind the door as we entered. I thought I caught a glimpse of a cudgel in an elephant’s foot umbrella stand as he took another look outside and quickly shut the door. I was on my guard immediately.
I wasn’t much reassured when I saw that they were in the middle of packing to leave.
‘Are you off?’ asked Lady Hardcastle.
‘Yes, my love,’ said Veronica. ‘We can’t stay around here, not with all this going on. Three dead and Pru disappeared. Who knows who might be next?’
‘Prudence is dead.’
Veronica let out a little scream, an oddly girlish sound from such a large lady. ‘Oh no! How? No, don’t tell me. No, I have to know. Was it as horrible as the others?’
‘It wasn’t obvious but I’d guess she was strangled,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘But it’s the way the scene was dressed that caught everyone’s attention. She’d been quite brutally folded up – ligaments snapped and bones broken, I shouldn’t wonder – to force her into a tiny space in a steamer trunk.’
Veronica whitened and sat heavily on a stool. ‘Oh my goodness!’ she said. ‘Contorted. Where’s Addie?’
‘You tell me,’ said Lady Hardcastle, coldly.
Veronica just sat there, mouth agape.
‘Have a care, Lady Hardcastle,’ said Wilfred, menacingly. ‘You might be a Lady, and you might be a friend of Colonel Dawlish, but you can’t come into our home and accuse us of murdering our friends.’
Lady Hardcastle turned to him. ‘And yet your wife knows exactly who the next victim is expected to be.’
Wilfred laughed bitterly. ‘It doesn’t take a murderer or a Cambridge graduate to work it out, my lady,’ he said. ‘Pru was contorted. The next victim will be the contortionist. We’re circus freaks, not idiots. And because we’re not idiots, we’re getting out before you find Addie with her legs chopped off to make her into a dwarf or stuffed to make her fat.’
Lady Hardcastle was clearly stumped. She had become certain of their involvement but that certainty was evaporating quickly now that she had actually confronted them. I had not been so convinced of their guilt, and I was even less sure now in the face of their seemingly genuine distress at being accused.
‘May I sit?’ she said, almost meekly.
Wilfred indicated a chair beside a small fold-away table.
‘My apologies to you both,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘I jumped to a conclusion. Perhaps more than one.’
‘More than one, dear?’ said Veronica, dabbing her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.
‘The victims so far,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘We’ve heard them described as “the inner circle’s inner circle”.’
‘That would be about right,’ said Wilfred. ‘They were very tight, that lot.’
‘It seemed logical to me that they’d been bullying you. We heard that you kept to yourselves. I thought it was for protection, to get away from them.’
Wilfred laughed. ‘Not us. It’s true that we keep to ourselves, but we like it that way. We enjoy the company of our friends, but we enjoy our own company just as much, don’t we, Ron?’
‘We do, Wilf, we do.’
They looked fondly at each other and I wondered if I’d ever seen a couple so much in love. It was an oddly touching moment in the midst of all the chaos and death.
‘But they never bothered us,’ said Wilfred.
‘No, love, it was never us,’ agreed Veronica.
‘But they were picking on someone?’ I asked.
‘They were always picking on someone, dear,’ she said. ‘You know what gangs are like. Teasing the stable boys for getting things wrong, teasing the trumpeter when he fell off his chair...’
‘You’ve got to admit that was rather funny,’ said Wilfred.
‘It was,’ she conceded.
‘But was there anyone specific,’ asked Lady Hardcastle. ‘Had they gone too far, made someone angry?’
‘Well,’ said Veronica, tentatively.
‘What is it, my love?’ asked Wilfred.
‘The poems,’ she said.
‘Poems?’ said Lady Hardcastle.
‘The poems Jonas wrote for Sabine,’ said Veronica.
‘What about them?’ I asked. I remembered someone saying something about poetry while we were asking around the day before.
‘You must have noticed,’ said Veronica, ‘that poor old Jonas is absolutely smitten with Sabine. Really head-over-heels. He absolutely idolizes her. “Worships” might be a better way of saying it.’
‘There is a certain obvious attraction there,’ said Lady Hardcastle. ‘He was certainly gazing at her rather longingly at dinner on Sunday night.’
‘Longingly, love? Obsessively more like. He’s been like it for months. Just took it into his head one day that she was the only girl for him and set about trying to woo her. But of course, she’s the snootiest sort you’re ever likely to meet. Heartbreakingly beautiful, and oh, you should see what she can make those horses do – well, of course you did, didn’t you, you were at the show last night – but so difficult to get close to. She treated everyone like something the cat had sicked up.
‘So of course, she just spurns his advances, tells him there’s no way someone like her could ever love a “mere clown”, and takes no more notice of him. But that just made him more determined. The gang, the... the... murdered ones,’ she whispered the word “murdered”, ‘they took the rise out of him something shocking. Thought it was hilarious, they did. But he didn’t seem to take any notice, he just tried to think of new ways to impress her.