6 Grounds for Murder Read Free Page B

while renovating the hotel had left formidable debts that would take years to pay back. The Pennyfoot needed a full house now and again during the off-season to survive.
    Colonel Fortescue, seated on the rocking chair by the blazing fire, greeted Cecily with his usual hearty exuberance. A regular guest at the hotel, he considered himself a shade or two more privileged than the rest of the guests and often took advantage of the fact.
    Cecily put up with his somewhat disturbing behavior for two reasons. In the first place, his custom was sorely needed. In the second place, the colonel suffered from a highly nervous condition brought upon by his close proximity to gunfire. Amongst other things, the experience had left him with a pronounced stutter, and what some people described as an addled brain.
    Having been the wife of a military man, Cecily could sympathize with the man’s condition, though at times even she was sorely tried by the colonel’s strange antics.
    “Spiffing!” Colonel Fortescue exclaimed, when Cecily announced that she was there to join the guests for afternoon tea. “Just what a chappie needs to brighten up this gray dismal day, what? What?”
    The other guests in the room politely mumbled in agreement.
    “It is indeed a horrible day out there,” Lady Bellevillechirped. “Why, the wind was so fierce my poor little birds could hardly balance on my shoulders.”
    Colonel Fortescue looked startled. “Birds?”
    The elderly widow nodded her head. “Yes, my canaries.” She lifted a finger to her lips. “Hush! They don’t like people talking about them. They think they are invisible, you see.”
    “Oh, quite, quite,” the colonel murmured, obviously at a loss for a suitable answer.
    Cecily could hardly blame him. Lady Belleville was well known for her eccentricities, including her conviction that her “birds” accompanied her everywhere, seated either on her shoulder or her wrist. The fact that, as yet, no one had ever seen or heard these particular birds appeared to faze her not at all.
    “Yes,” Lady Belleville said, “that dreadful wind would have taken my hat into the ocean with it, had I not had it pinned securely to my head.”
    “By George, that must be dashed painful,” the colonel said, furiously blinking his eyelids.
    Lady Belleville lifted a pair of diamond-encrusted lorgnettes and looked down her nose through them. “You have something in your eye, my good man?”
    “What?” The colonel looked confused for a moment, then shook his head. “Oh, no, madam. Can’t stop the blighters from flapping up and down. Damned nuisance. Can’t keep a dashed monocle in place for five seconds.”
    He twirled one end of his white mustache with his fingers. “Got shot at during the Boer War, you know. Frightful scrimmage that was, what? What? I remember when—”
    “Colonel,” Cecily said before the man could launch into one of his horrific tales of the fighting in Africa. “Tell me, what do you make of this dreadful murder on the Downs?”
    Belatedly she wished she had introduced another subject.The murder had been uppermost in her mind, and the first thing she had pounced on when searching for a diversion.
    “Why, absolutely ghastly, of course, old bean,” the colonel said with relish. “Imagine, chopping off her head like that. Must have been a saber, of course. Sharp as the devil, those blades are. One slice and”—he made a squelching noise in his throat and thrust his hand sideways—“right through the neck as clean as a whistle.”
    “I say, must you be quite so explicit?” The little man seated next to him looked thoroughly uncomfortable. Cyril Plunkett was a salesman from London and had informed Cecily that he had chosen the Pennyfoot instead of one of the bigger hotels in Wellercombe because he detested the noise and bustle of the town.
    He had discovered the charm of the hotel, he’d told her, when he’d solicited a fairly large order for his cleaning supplies from Mrs.