Prologue
On the June afternoon that Jennie Archer died, Dick Tracy did nothing more strenuous than sag in a hammock, nurse a tumbler of gin and tonic, and lift his gaze from his paunch to admire the turrets of his colossal house.
Lockleigh Castle crowned a green rise above the Thames. Its ramparts had guarded princes and monarchs since the reign of Henry the Sixth. Henry the Eighth had snored here. The great Elizabeth had supped in its Great Hall. Cromwell's army had savaged the exterior walls but its ruins had been handsomely repaired.
Dick Tracy, whose full name was Richard Tracy Touchett, was a New York entrepreneur who had shelled out substantial cash when Sotheby's Realty put the property on the market. He had purchased Lockleigh as his retirement home for one compelling reason. Lockleigh had once housed his most illustrious ancestor.
Respected genealogists had traced Mr. Touchett's ancestry back to Sir Humphrey Tucket, the Elizabethan pirate explorer, and all historical records confirmed that Sir Humphrey had indeed resided at Lockleigh. The Queen had ordered him detained there under house arrest so that he could be slowly poisoned to death.
British antiquarians passed along a local legend as well. Elizabeth's ghost wandered the premises. It comforted Dick Tracy to know that when death arrived he would give up the ghost where Queen Elizabeth's still wailed, and check out where Sir Humphrey had already paid.
Under certain circumstances a gin and tonic in the perfect middle of an English afternoon stops the clock for an hour. But when Dick Tracy tilted his tumbler and found only a wedge of lime, he saw eternity creeping his way. A dry eternity.
His hammock hung too many inches from his motorized bar. He had grown too stout to touch his swollen ankles. His son was too far away to call. His wife was too close for comfort and that distance was mercilessly decreasing.
He sucked the lime. Spat it out. Balanced the tumbler on his abdomen.
Sighed.
And heard the shot.
Starlings flashed from the trees.
His eyes snapped wide.
The startled birds settled back into the branches.
He looked at his bar, forlorn, until a commotion at a distance captured his attention.
Over near the rose garden someone was running. He made out the figure of his son's athletic friend, Lord Warburton, jogging closer at a steady, rolling gait.
"Over here, under the trees," Dick Tracy called out superfluously, since the young man was bounding straight for his hammock. "Can't reach the damn bar from here, young fella. You catch your breath, Bertie, and pour us a couple of drinks."
The jogger was breathing easily.
Lord Warburton was a well built fellow in his thirties with a remarkably English face, a face so emphatically modest that it seemed to say, Look here, I may very well be exceptional. I am well-born, sensitive, open minded, handsome, possibly brilliant, and yet I am quite without pretension. Because inequality offends me, damn it all, fully as much as it does you.
Though what Lord Warburton actually did say was, "You'd best have a look at your bloody swimming pool."
Dick Tracy chuckled.
"The wife's idea, that pool. Can't swim myself, not any more. Something wrong with it, Bertie, you get her to take care of it."
"I'm afraid, sir, you don't grasp the situation. There's been an accident."
"My wife?" Dick Tracy asked, between doubt and hope.
"Mrs. Touchett is quite well, though far from calm. She's found a body at the bottom of the pool and the blood - "
"My son? No!"
"Ralph's ringing up the authorities. The body, I'm sorry to say, appears to be that of your American visitor. Your sister, I believe."
Jennie?"
Dick Tracy teetered in his hammock. The glass fell from his belly and a whine took Lord Warburton by surprise.
It was not Dick Tracy who had whined, not on your life.
It was a gargantuan Irish wolfhound, seven feet tall if you were brave enough to hold its forelegs over your head. You might have been, since the dog was docile. Stretched beneath the hammock, the hound had yawned.
Chapter One
They shipped Jennie back to California via air freight.
A limousine picked her up at the San Francisco airport and took her to a mortician near her home in Stinson Beach north of the city. All funeral and cemetery expenses had been prepaid.
Jennie's daughter learned about her mother's death first in a cablegram. Then came a letter from her aunt, expressing condolences on behalf of the Touchett family. None of Jennie's relatives flew over from England to attend her funeral. But they were thoughtful enough to send her back in a gilded casket.
Her daughter opened the documents that accompanied the body and read them with horror. With rage. With disbelief. She knew of five previous attempts Jennie had made to take her own life. What she found intolerable to believe was that her ineffectual mother had succeeded.
The documentation included a British death certificate, a county coroner's statement, and a local constabulary report, affirming that the deceased Jennifer Archer had drowned to death. Mention was also made of a self inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. The bullet had narrowly missed the heart, exiting the torso so neatly that the wound, though serious, would not have proved fatal.
In the pool near the body lay the gun and the spent cartridge.
The inquest concluded that the deceased Jennifer Archer, not trusting her aim to do the job, had stationed herself at the edge of a diving board.
The verdict was suicide.
And Jennie's daughter was furious.
Not for a minute did she believe the inquest's conclusion.
From what her mother had told her, she had ample reason to doubt it.
Jenne Archer's daughter made a vow. She would get to the bottom of her mother’s alleged suicide. She would go to Lockleigh Castle. She’d sell her mother's furniture, even the house, to raise the money for the trip.
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