Murder in The Smokehouse: (Auguste Didier Mystery 7) by Amy Myers Page A

this matter’s been cleared up.’
    ‘Then we’d best start by finding out who he is – and quickly,’ Cobbold said practically. He turned to the clothes again. ‘Good quality gloves – assuming they’re his. Tailcoat, label inside pocket, badly stained with blood that’s soaked through. Maker, somebody in Paris. Looks like Noire or Poire.’
    ‘I have not heard of him,’ Auguste observed, coming into his own. ‘Yet it is good quality, if worn.’ He looked at a shiny patch on one elbow and sniffed gently. ‘Not new. Someone has tried to renovate this with ammonia – seewhere the cloth is slightly brown?’
    ‘Black tie and waistcoat. Both badly stained. No label on them but the tie is good-quality silk, wouldn’t you say?’
    Cobbold permitted himself a grin. ‘This is Yorkshire, Inspector Rose. Nowt but good wool here.’
    ‘High-collared piqué dress shirt. Again, good quality. Label – Amelia Pegg, New York. No laundry mark. Far travelled, our bloke,’ Rose commented. ‘What else?’
    ‘White wool combinations. Nothing unusual there for a man of his age. No corsets,’ Cobbold continued. ‘Silk braces, suspenders, socks and old-fashioned black boots. No maker’s name – it’s worn off. That seems out of keeping.’
    ‘No front braces in the trousers either,’ said Auguste thoughtfully. ‘Our man buys good clothes and keeps them regardless of fashion.’
    ‘Only recently back from abroad perhaps,’ Rose suggested.
    ‘Back?’ repeated Auguste, his recent conversation about Robert Mariot and Uncle Oscar coming to mind. ‘But we do not know he started from Yorkshire. He could have been a foreigner.’
    Cobbold looked taken aback, as if a nameless corpse to identify in Yorkshire was bad enough. Opening up the horizons to encompass other countries was far worse.
    ‘Gun’s British,’ Rose pointed out, looking at the offending article. ‘That’s a Webley, ain’t it?’
    ‘Taken from the gun room, so Lord Tabor tells me,’ Cobbold replied.
    ‘And where is that?’
    ‘Inside the house, near the garden entrance door.’
    ‘That probably rules out suicide, then. Been touched by human hand, has it?’ asked Rose casually.
    ‘Only the hand that pulled the trigger,’ Cobboldanswered, ‘and maybe someone on the scene before I got here.’ A pause. ‘It’s this new fingerprint business you’re thinking of?’
    Auguste froze in horror, not at the implication as regards himself, but instantly the thought came to him: had Tatiana touched it?
    Rose nodded. ‘Central Fingerprint Branch. Might as well give them some practice. I’ll get a man up with the equipment.’
    ‘I sent for some earlier this year, Chief Inspector.’
    Rose gave him a friendly nod. ‘Good. Let’s check it, together with anything else we can turn up from this smokehouse.’
    ‘What I don’t understand, sir,’ Cobbold spoke directly to Rose, ‘is what the King’s representative is doing here?’
    Auguste stiffened. Him?
    ‘Monsieur Didier?’ Rose asked in glee. ‘He’s a cook, aren’t you, Auguste?’
    ‘I have had the honour to assist Inspector Rose in a humble capacity,’ Auguste glared at Egbert, ‘on several of his cases. One or two of those have concerned the King, of whom my wife is a relation. A cousin three times removed.’
    ‘Now you’re concerned with who removed the owner of this lot.’ Rose bundled up the clothes again.
    Egbert Rose looked out unimpressed at the fells and limestone crags on the way to Tabor Hall. He was, Auguste knew, a town man. Egbert liked people, buildings, alleyways, all the million and one secrets of mankind, not bubbling becks, saxifrage and fern-covered hillsides and bored-looking sheep. Rose’s ‘nose’, famous in the Yard for its intuition, didn’t work so quickly in the country – it merely felt cold. But the smokehouse forced even him into interest as he took inits pinnacles and towers rising into the grey late-afternoon sky. He insisted on visiting it