Murdersdale 3

Martha looked at Jedidiah a shot while, contemplating her next line of action. To deny? To admit? To throw a tantrum and walk out? All the options had their fair share of risks, but she decided she was not ready or willing to admit, yet. She would call his bluff. Even though the papers he had were a tad consequential - no thanks to those two who disobeyed her instructions – there was still a slight chance that the detective had no evidence.

A chance she was willing to take.

“Those were not written by me. You got it wrong,” she said calmly, looking him dead in the eye.

Jedidiah smiled, knowing he had cornered her now. “I don’t usually get this things wring, and today is no exception.”

Jedidiah started, “This letter reads:

Be at the Bell house by 2’o clock. We have something important to discuss. Destroy this after reading.

Eleanor Cynster.”

Tossing the book towards her, he opened to the page where she had written her name, and address. “Compare your writing here to the writing on the letter supposedly from Lady Cynster to Marcel, the farmer. As you can see, the handwriting is the same. Moreover, Lady Cynster was losing her vision, if I heard correctly, and would not have been able to write a letter. That duty would have fallen on the one person who was educated in that house – you in this case.”

Martha squirmed in her seat and gulped, but still remained silent.

“Well then, over to the letter that was supposedly written from Marcel to Lady Cynster, asking her to be at the bell house. It was written in a different ink, with quite different writing. I’m impressed; you must have used your left hand to write this, huh? A good attempt at throwing me off track. Obviously, you expected Lady Cynster to either throw it away or keep it somewhere you’d know so you can dispose of it, and not carry it along with her to the bell house, hmm?”

He noticed as Martha gasped, realizing that her lie had been seen through. The anger on her face when she saw that both of them had not obeyed her instructions to destroy the letter.

Martha sighed, remembering how, after reading the letter Marcel ‘sent’, Lady Cynster asked for it. She felt a little uneasy, but did not think much of it. Now she knew that she had made a huge mistake. And her earlier lie did not help her case now.

“So you wrote two letters bearing the exact same content and delivered to both parties, making it look to them like the other wanted a meeting. And then before the meeting could take place, you killed your employer,” Jedidiah said, standing up. “That makes absolutely no sense to me, Martha. But now that you have been cornered, you’ll tell me what happened that fateful night that culminated in your gruesome butchering of your…”

“For the love of God, I DID NOTHING!” Martha said, screaming the last part.

Jedidiah was shocked by the outburst, but managed to keep his emotions in check. “Then why the letters, the lies, the pretences? Only someone with something to hide does that, Martha. Now come on, cooperate with me and your sentence will be quite lenient, honest to…”

“Fine!” she screamed.

Jedidiah’s eyebrows perked at the thought of a confession.

“I asked them both to come, but I didn’t kill them. I only wanted to know what Lady Cynster was secretly doing with Marcel. They used to have meetings sometimes in the cellar, and in hushed tones I couldn’t hear. I decided to fix the meeting so that if they met and discussed, even though there would have been some confusion, maybe I’d have gotten some information.”

“Information that is none of your concern? That doesn’t make you a trustworthy person, now does it, Martha?”

“Trustworthy or not, it is what it is. It’s a small, relatively quiet town we live in. Any bit of suspicious activity is bound to wake the curiosity of young girls like me,” she said defensively.

“Who would love to gossip all about it, I presume?”

She frowned.

But then I had a brainwave. “That means you would have been at the scene when…”

Jedidiah noticed the sudden change in her. She shuddered and began to shake her head as though in an unspeakable agony. “Martha, you know who…”

“By God, I don’t know them,,, I do not. But I was there. I heard… Oh I saw. I saw them, their bodies, they… Scarecrow Thomas and…”

“Scarecrow Thomas, you said?”

“There were three men who followed her there. She’d have known, but she’s also hard of hearing. They followed her and attacked her, asking her for the Eye of the Sky or something like that…”

Jedidiah wrote down all these details in his pad at top speed. “You said they attacked her?”

“Yes, with a long knife, But she seemed to know one of them, because she called him by his name. Thomas Littleton. Scarecrow Thomas, she added. That was when they attacked her.”

“Probably because their identities had been uncovered. It’s more of a panic action, if you ask me,” Jedidiah said, rubbing her hands. Ashe seemed to calm down.

“They ran off after that. She was dead by the time Marcel reached there, and he knelt and cried a little before he also took off.”

Jedidiah realised he had to call Marcel back in soon for questioning on a few things.

What was the nature of his relationship with Lady Cynster?

What was the Eye of the Moon, and how did a small-time burglar and his gang know enough about it as to confront Lady Cynster in such a brazen manner?

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@Hanzell, @Leo_kitti I'm back from my extra long holiday lol.