Naughty In Nice (A Royal Spyness Mystery)

sticking out from under a large oleander bush.
    I grabbed the sleeve of my young policeman, who gave a horrified yelp and rushed over to part the foliage. Underneath the oleander bush, a burly man with tanned skin and grizzled gray hair was lying with a pair of what looked like gardening shears sticking out of his back.

 
    Chapter 27
     
    Villa Marguerite
January 27, 1933
     
    One might have thought that the discovery of yet another dead body in the next-door shrubbery would have put a damper on my mother’s party plans. Not a bit of it.
    “Well, at least you’re off the hook, darling,” she said. “You were in town all day and accompanied every step of the way by one of that silly inspector’s own men.”
    This much, of course, was true.
    “I do see Georgie’s point,” Vera said. “I mean to say, do you think it’s—well—proper to hold a party when people seem to be dropping like flies next door?”
    “All the more reason to cheer ourselves up,” Mummy said. “After all, nobody that we know is doing the killing, so let’s enjoy ourselves and leave the Gropers and their murderers to sort themselves out.”
    As you have probably realized, my mother was one of the world’s truly self-centered women.
    “But what about Lady Groper?” Vera pointed out. “How will she feel if there’s a party going on right next door?”
    “Then send Georgie over to invite her,” Mummy said airily. “She’ll need cheering up too, won’t she? Now, do you think these flowers go well in this niche?” The dead gardener, for indeed it was he I had stumbled upon, was put from her mind and she was back in full party preparation.
    Vera suggested that I pay a courtesy call on Lady Groper. I saw her point—she may not have been fond of her philandering husband but a violent death is a terrible shock to the system. So I had a policeman let me into the Gropers’ estate. The door was opened by Johnson, who was beginning to look rather haggard.
    “Lady Groper’s not here,” he said. “She decided that she didn’t want to spend the night here after all. She said it was too unsettling to be in this house and headed back to the Negresco. I gather she’s coming back to resume cataloging her stuff tomorrow.”
    “I don’t think I’d want to stay here either,” I said.
    “I’m not exactly enjoying it myself.” Johnson made a face. “But I’ve been asked by the police to stay on and keep an eye on the place. And there’s still a policeman stationed outside if I need help.”
    “There was a policeman stationed outside when the gardener was killed,” I said. “Be careful, won’t you?”
    He gave a grin of bravado. “Who’d want to kill me? I’m not worth anything to anybody. As soon as this is over, I’ll be out on my ear.”
    “You don’t think Lady Groper will keep employing you?”
    “She made it clear that she had no intention of doing so. She said she never approved of her husband’s choice of servants. Besides, I bet she’d be a cow to work for.”
    I felt sorry for him. He was a bright young man forced into this kind of work by circumstance, and now he was jobless again. I walked slowly back up the driveway. Truthfully I wasn’t anxious to be roped into more party preparations. I just wasn’t in the mood. I told myself that I should be happy that I would no longer be suspected of the first murder if I couldn’t have committed the second, but I kept seeing that poor man lying there with those shears savagely driven into his back. And I thought back to the wound on Sir Toby’s head. Surely it would have been simple enough to have knocked him out and then dragged him into the pool to drown. These were crimes of great savagery committed by a violent and angry person. As I went about my tasks—blowing up balloons, setting out candles and ashtrays—I wondered why it had become necessary to kill the gardener. I could come up with two reasons—one, that he had been part of the original plot, including the need to incriminate me, and his conscience had gotten the better of him, or two, that he knew who had committed the murder and was attempting, foolishly as it turned out, to extract some hush money from the murderer.
    I had just pondered these things when Inspector Lafite turned up, the last person any of us wanted to see.
    “Lady Georgiana. We meet again. And do I understand correctly that you were the one who discovered this body?” he asked. “I find this most interesting.”
    “Yes,