Read Online The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn - Free Book Online

dig it up. I went back to the house to fetch my camera and when I returned they had found the body.”
    â€œSo you left these gardeners to guard the deceased and returned to the house to telephone?”
    â€œNo, by that time Mr. Goodman, Sir Reginald’s secretary, had joined us. He asked me to telephone. The gardeners were naturally distressed at finding Grace Moss dead, so he sent them away and stayed himself.”
    Inspector Dunnett pounced. “Grace Moss? You knew the deceased?”
    â€œI didn’t even see the body,” Daisy snapped. “I’ve never been here before and I wouldn’t know her from Adam. Eve, rather.”

    He gave her a wary look as if he suspected she was mocking him. “Then who identified the deceased? Who was Grace Moss?”
    â€œGrace was our parlourmaid,” said Sir Reginald sadly. “A pretty, cheerful child.”
    â€œMr. Goodman, Bligh, and Owen Morgan all knew her. They told me.”
    â€œSo your evidence is nothing but hearsay,” Dunnett reproached her. “In that case, I’ve no need of you at present. My sergeant’ll take a formal statement later, miss. Ah, here’s Dr. Sedgwick and my men.”
    He strode off to meet an approaching group of uniformed police led by a plump civilian with a black bag. Dismissed and ignored, Daisy tramped disconsolately back to the house.
    Sir Reginald and Ben Goodman soon joined her. Sir Reginald enquired after his wife. He breathed a sigh of relief when Moody told him she had gone off in the Daimler to preside over a session of the Mothers’ Meetings county committee.
    â€œThen, if you’ll excuse me, my dear,” he said to Daisy, “I’ll be getting back to the dairy.”
    Mr. Goodman offered to begin the historical tour of the Hall. “We can’t do anything for poor Grace. We might as well have a look at the outside while it’s fine. You can still see the marks of the Roundheads’ cannonballs.”
    So Daisy fetched her notebook and was soon scribbling away in her own idiosyncratic version of Pitman’s shorthand. They reached the stables, now partly converted to garages, just as Sebastian rode in.
    If possible, he looked even more stunning on the back of his roan gelding. The position lent him an air of strength, of masterful vigour, absent from his ordinary demeanour and belied by his subservience to his mother. He smiled down at Daisy and Ben Goodman, and Daisy beamed back.
    â€œLet me tell him,” the secretary said softly to her, and with a shock she remembered Grace Moss.
    â€œAll right. I’ll go and start transcribing my notes. Thanks for all the stuff.”

    He nodded with a faint smile, but his face was troubled as he turned to Sebastian.
    Slightly puzzled, Daisy headed for her room and her portable typewriter. She wondered if Ben was afraid Sebastian would go to pieces when he heard about the corpse. Was he trying to prevent such a revelation of weakness before a stranger? He was no relation of Sebastian’s, but Daisy had cause to appreciate his sympathetic nature.
    Bobbie had defended her brother against Daisy’s implied criticism of his failure to escape his mother, and Lady Valeria guarded him against husband-hunting harpies. He seemed to bring out a protective instinct, which suggested an essential weakness of character. The news of Grace’s demise might well shock him into an unbecoming emotional display.
    No, that was hardly fair, Daisy chided herself. Ben Goodman, who had seen all the horrors of the Great War, had been shaken by the death of the innocent young girl. Sebastian was too young to have fought in the War—only natural for him to be shattered by the murder of a girl he knew.
    And there it was again, the word she’d been avoiding. Murder . Those who died a natural death, those who succumbed to an accident, did not end up under eighteen inches of earth in a flowerbed.
    Grace Moss had been