Murder at Shillingworth Magna

Author: Sherry Thornburg

Author's Email: Thornburgs77, at gmail

Feedback: Yes, please

Permission to Archive: Privately only, with notice to me as to where it is.

Category: Suspense

Rating/Warning: K

Main Characters: Phileas and Rebecca Fogg and Jules Verne

Disclaimer: SAJV and original characters copywrite Tailsman/Promark/etc., no infringement is intended.

Chapter 1

"What a Bloody mess!"

A Lieutenant from Scotland Yard said this as he walked into view of his newest assignment. He had been called to a Derbyshire estate to look over the double murder of a man and his sister early on a Sunday morning. The dead were country gentry, the children of a once renowned diplomat who had died serving the crown. The family had lived here in this Derbyshire valley, probably for centuries. A servant and a veterinary coming into the house to report on a new foal had found the bodies. They had neither seen nor heard anything amiss.

Lieutenant Granger Chatsworth was a veteran investigator who had been there and seen almost everything in over twenty years of service. He was a middle-aged man with a balding head, still half covered with sandy blonde hair. His mustache drooped over drooping jowls, hiding a thin serious mouth compressed against the sight of the first body he would examine. His clear blue eyes had hardened from many such sights, but nevertheless, this crime scene set in the luxury of a fine old manor house was about as bad as they came.

The initial reports telephoned to him before sunrise from the local constable had assumed the crime to have been a robbery gone wrong. "The young lord of the manor had been found dead in his study, and the lady, his sister, lay dead in another part of the house. Her death doesn't not look intended. She may have been pushed, taking a bad blow to the head." Chatsworth sighed. Dead was dead no matter how it had come about.

"Her brother is a different story." Constable Owen said, with an audible swallow. "You'll see where you get here. He may have tried to fight off the robbers and got more of a fight than expected. Beaten bloody, before having his throat slit."

That part told the Lieutenant the object of the break-in had defiantly not been robbery. Thieves stealing the silver didn't spend that much time on the owner. No, that had been murder.

Looking down at the body now, Lieutenant Chatsworth confirmed his fears. The face was a mess. He couldn't tell if the poor man had been good looking or not. The nose was broken, and the lips swollen and bloody. The cheeks were purple and red, framed with sweat and blood dampened jet-black hair.

"He was twenty-four," a voice said behind him.

Chatsworth turned to the local officer who had spoken. They nodded to each other. He was leading a photographer documenting the area.

Twenty-four… a boy out of university. Chatsworth looked at the boy. Paternal sympathy rose in him. "Too young to have done anything to deserve this sort of end."

Chatsworth forced those thoughts aside to give the scene his professional assessment. The young man's coat was off, but his vest and dress shirt were still on, showing by their disarray how the victim had struggled against his attackers. Looking closer, the investigator saw the slits in the vest where he had been stabbed numerous times. Shallow wounds made by a short knife. Blood aplenty stained the waistcoat and puddled on the floor around him. Those stabs were meant to cause pain, not kill the boy. The slit across the throat did that. It was long and deep, draining the boy's life all over the fine carpet. Somebody wanted this boy dead, all right. …wanted it done ugly. No, no robber would have done this.

Chatsworth called for the local officer to show him the other victim. They moved back toward the front of the house to the parlor. Those doors had been closed when he entered the house. Moving to the far end of the room he knelt to examine this body. The victim was curled up in a kneeling position by the hearth. There were trickles of dried blood on the fine mantel piece above her and more trickling down her temple, resting against the wall. There were mild bruises on the woman's upper arms just under the short sleeves of her smart looking travel suit, the only marks on her besides the head trauma.

Another of the local constables came into the room as Chatsworth finished that assessment. He was young, fresh-faced, and probably inexperienced if he was the one who had made the first report. Chatsworth didn't hold it against him. This sort of thing just didn't happen in the country.

Constable Owen introduced himself and quickly handed over his final written report. "It's all in here, sir; and you're bloody welcome to it. I've no stomach for this sort of thing."

Chatsworth took the report and scanned it looking for anything he hadn't seen for himself. It appeared well done. He flipped over to the summations on the victim's movements before death. The man's movements were well documented. The woman's was not. Directing questions to the Constable, Chatsworth said, "The gentleman spends most of his time here in the country?"

"Yes, sir." Owen said. "Both the deceased moved to the country from London after their father's death. I saw them in the village just last month, well and happy as you please. I've heard rumors about the lady's recent engagement. Their relatives in London will have to be contacted soon. I chose to wait until you had looked this over to make any calls."

"You were right to wait," Chatsworth said. "Here, the veterinary says the lady came home late this evening. Did she drive herself home? Where had she been?"

"The lady routinely comes home on weekends from Oxford," Owen said. "This weekend, she came home a day late. The Aston Martin in the drive is hers. The veterinary only knew that the young lord was expecting his sister's arrival and had come back to the house to wait for her. The mare in foal was hers."

Chatsworth looked over the carpet tracks, and the way the body was lying. Someone had forced her into this room. Afterward, she had either been pushed or had lost her balance in a struggle, falling against the mantle. One blow to the side of her pretty dark-haired head and it had been all over. She would have been dead before she hit the floor. For a moment the investigator judged that a blessing. The vicious murderers who killed her brother would have been equally savage with her later.

Chatsworth gave the room one more scan and went back to the study with the constable. Before they could get to the door, three men walked into the room. They showed him identification and asked for a briefing. To say the least, Chatsworth was surprised British Secret Service investigators had come nosing around his crime scene. His voice took a hard edge. "Aren't you out of your territory, here? The local police called us to investigate. Scotland Yard needs no help in handling murders."

"The deceased man was one of ours," the lead man said. He was a typical recruit of the Secret Service: a man, medium height, weight, with looks of middling age wearing a medium gray suit. The only thing that stood out about him was a pair of serious dark eyes. The other two were silent sentinels of the same stamp at his back. "Loren Fogg and his family have a history with the service. We will be investigating to determine whether this was service related. From what we have seen so far…" The man's eyes caught sight of the body on the floor by the fireplace mid-sentence. He mentally identified the woman and looked back to the Lieutenant, askance.

Chatsworth said, "She wasn't worked over like the other. Her death looks to have been incidental."

The investigator moved around Chatsworth to kneel beside the young woman's body. He very gently lifted her chin from her chest to look at her face. It was a pretty face with a light trace of tear stains on the cheeks. He whispered. "Four Foggs in two months."

He low tone wasn't meant to be overheard, but Chatsworth heard it anyway. Oh, lovely. Cloak and dagger come to the country. It is just what I don't need with the country folk seeing spies and Germans behind every bush since Dunkirk. The news added fuel to his irritation at seeing crown agents. His family had its own history in the service. A history to be proud of, but one Granger personally didn't choose to follow. Cloak and dagger was a game he had no use or respect for. "Were both these young people agents?"

"Loren Fogg resigned due to injuries a year ago," the agent said. "Lacinda was not, though Lord knows, it had been all around her. These two were twins. I've known them since they were children." The agent stood, throwing off personal concerns. "We will keep in touch, Lieutenant." With that, the three men moved on to the study to see the other body.

While the four investigators talked, two other men had come onto the crime scene to look over the carnage. They had gained access with Scotland Yard identification badges and moved about the rooms carefully, looking over everything. They held what looked to be small radios in their hands, but not like anyone would see at this end of the twenty first century. The Scotland Yard and Secret Service investigators left the room. One man whispered, "Have you got it all?"

"All done," his partner said.

They slipped out the front door to their car with little notice. The man taking the driver's seat consulted the monitor of his recorder, which was in his right hand comparing it against a read out on a different device in his left. "The home office was right, this never happened. Those two should have lived well into their eighties. Somebody is tampering."

"Let's report it," his partner said. "That will make three out of time deaths in two months, all in the same family?"

The driver gave a nod, put away his instruments and put the key into the ignition of the shiny black sedan. The car started with the usual rumble of a petrol engine. Once around the corner in a wood-lined section of the road, the car and its occupants blended into the darkness as though they had never existed.