by Ngaio Marsh
“I don’t know,” Hilary snapped, “anything. I don’t know what’s occurred or why Cressida’s sitting here in her nighty. And I don’t know why you all turn on me. I don’t like these upsets any more than you do. And how the devil, if you’ll forgive me, Aunt Bed, you can have the cheek to expect me to do something about anything when everything’s out of my hands, I do not comprehend.”
Upon this they all four looked indignantly at Alleyn.
“They’re as rum a job lot as I’ve picked up in many a long day’s night,” he thought and addressed himself to them.
“Please stay where you are,” he said. “I shan’t, I hope, keep you long. As you suggest, this incident must be cleared up, and I propose to do it. Miss Tottenham, are you feeling better? Do you want a drink?”
(“Darling! Do you?” urged Hilary.)
Cressida shuddered and shook her head.
“Right,” Alleyn said. “Then please tell me exactly what happened. You woke up, did you, and found a cat on your bed?”
“Its eyes! Two inches away! It was making that awful tumbling noise and doing its ghastly pounding bit. On me! On me! I smelt its fur. Like straw.”
“Yes. What did you do?”
“Do! I screamed.”
“After that?”
After that, it transpired, all hell was let loose. Cressida’s reaction set up an equally frenzied response. Her visitor tore round her room and cursed her. At some stage she turned on her bedside lamp, and revealed the cat glaring out from under the petticoats of her dressing table.
“Black-and-white?” Hilary asked. “Or tabby?”
“What the hell does it matter?”
“No, of course. No. I just wondered.”
“Black-and-white.”
“Smartypants, then,” Hilary muttered.
After the confrontation, it seemed, Cressida, on the verge of hysteria, had got off her bed, sidled to the door, opened it, and then thrown a pillow at Smartypants, who fled from the room. Cressida, greatly shaken, slammed the door, turned back to her bed, and was softly caressed round her ankles and shins.
She looked down and saw the second cat, Slyboots, the tabby, performing the tails-up brushing ceremony by which his species make themselves known.
Cressida had again screamed, this time at the top of her voice. She bolted down the corridor and into the gallery and Alleyn’s reluctant embrace.
Closely wrapped in her eiderdown, inadequately solaced by the distracted Hilary, she nodded her head up and down, her eyes like great damp pansies and her teeth still inclined to chatter.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “Two questions. How do you think the cats got into your room? When you visited Troy, did you leave your door open?”
Cressida had no idea.
“You do leave doors open, rather, my darling,” Hilary said, “don’t you?”
“That queen in the kitchen put them there. Out of spite. I know it.”
“Now, Cressida! Really!”
“Yes, he did! He’s got a thing about me. They all have. They’re jealous. They’re afraid I’m going to make changes. They’re trying to frighten me off.”
“Where,” Alleyn asked before Hilary could launch his protests, “is the second cat, now? Slyboots?”
“He was walking about the corridor,” Troy began and Cressida immediately began a sort of internal fight with her eiderdown cocoon. “It’s all right,” Troy said quickly. “He came into my room and I’ve shut the doors.”
“Do you swear that?”
“Yes, I do.”
“In Heaven’s name!” Mrs. Forrester ejaculated, “Why don’t you take her to bed, Hilary?”
“Really, Aunt B! Well, all right. Well, I will.”
“Give her a pill. She takes pills, of course. They all do. Your uncle mustn’t have any more upsets. I’m going back to him. Unless,” she said to Alleyn, “you want me.”
“No, do go. I hope he’s all right. Was he upset?”
“He woke up and said something about a fire engine. Good-morning, to you all,” snorted Mrs. Forrester and left them.
She had scarcely gone when Hilary himself uttered a stifled scream. He had risen and was leaning over the bannister. He pointed downwards like an accusing deity at a heap of broken porcelain lying near a standard lamp.
“God damn it!” Hilary said, “that’s my K’ang Hsi vase. Who the hell’s broken my K’ang Hsi vase!”
“Your K’ang Hsi vase,” Alleyn said mildly, “missed my head by a couple of inches.”
“What do you mean? Why do you stand there saying things with you arm in your chest like Napoleon Bonaparte?”
“My arm’s in my chest because the vase damn’ nearly broke it. It’s all right,” Alleyn said, catching Troy’s eye. “It didn’t.”
“Very choice piece, that,” Mr. Smith observed. “Famille verte. You bought it from Eichelbaum, didn’t you? Pity.”
“I should bloody well think it is a pity.”
“Insurance O.K.?”
“Naturally. And cold comfort that is, as you well know. The point is, who did it? Who knocked it over.” Hilary positively turned on his beloved. “Did you?” he demanded.
“I did not!” she shouted. “And don’t talk to me like that. It must have been the cat.”
“The cat! How the hell —”
“I must say,” Alleyn intervened, “a cat did come belting downstairs immediately afterwards.”
Hilary opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked at Cressida, who angrily confronted him, clutching her eider-down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “My darling. Forgive me. It was the shock. And it was one of our treasures.”
“I want to go to bed.”
“Yes, yes. Very well. I’ll take you.”
They left, Cressida waddling inside her coverlet.
“Oh dear!” said Mr. Smith. “The little rift what makes the music mute,” and pulled a dolorous face.
“Your room’s next to hers, isn’t it?” Alleyn said. “Did you hear any of this rumpus?”
“There’s her bathrom between. She’s got the class job on the northeast corner. Yes, I heard a bit of a how-d’yer-do but I thought she might be having the old slap-and-tickle with ’Illy. You know.”
“Quite.”
“But when she come screeching down the passage, I thought Hullo-ullo. So I come out. Gawd love us,” said Mr. Smith, “it’s a right balmy turn-out though, and no error. Good-night again.”
When he had gone Alleyn said, “Come out of retirement,” and Troy emerged from the background. “Your arm,” she said. “Rory, I’m not interfering, but your arm?”
With a creditable imitation of the Colonel, Alleyn said: “Don’t fuss me, my dear,” and put his right arm round his wife. “It’s a dirty great bruise, that’s all,” he said.
“Did somebody —?”
“I’ll have to look into the Pussyfoot theory and then, by Heaven, come hell or high water, we’ll go to bed.”
“I’ll leave you to it, shall I?”
“Please, my love. Before you do, though, there’s a question. From your bedroom window, after the party, and at midnight, you looked out and you saw Vincent come round the northeast corner of the house. He was wheeling a barrow and in the barrow was the Christmas tree. He dumped the tree under the Colonel’s dressing-room window. You saw him do it?”
“No. There was an inky-black shadow. I saw him coming, all right, along the path. It’s wide, you know. More like a rough drive. The shadow didn’t cover it. So along he came, clear as clear in the moonlight. Against the snowy background. And then he entered the shadow and I heard him tip the tree out. And then I came away from the window.”
“You didn’t see him leave?”
“No. It was chilly. I didn’t stay.”
“ ‘Clear as clear in the moonlight.’ From that window you can see all those earthworks and ongoings where they’re making a lake and a hillock?”
“Yes. Just out to the left.”
“Did you l
ook, particularly, in that direction?”
“Yes. It was very beautiful. One could have abstracted something from it. The shapes were exciting.”
“Like a track across the snow leading into the distance?”
“Nothing as obvious as that. The whole field of snow — all the foreground — was quite unbroken.”
“Sure?”
“Quite sure. That’s what made it good as a subject.”
“Nothing like a wheel track and footprints anywhere to be seen? For instance?”
“Certainly not. Vincent had trundled round the house by the track and that was already tramped over.”
“Did you look out of your window again in the morning?”
“Yes, darling, I did. And there were no tracks anywhere across the snow. And I may add that after our telephone conversation, I went out of doors. I had a look at Nigel’s sculpture. It had been blurred by weathering, particularly on its windward side. Otherwise it was still in recognizable shape. I walked round the house past the drawing-room windows and had a look at last night’s ‘subject’ from that angle. No tracks anywhere on the snow. The paths round the house and the courtyard and driveway were trampled and muddy. The courtyard had been swept.”
“So nobody, during the night or morning, had gone near the earthworks.”
“Unless from the far side. Even then one would still have seen their tracks on the hillside.”
“And there had been no snowfall after midnight.”
“No. Only the north wind. The sky was still cloudless in the morning.”
“Yes. The Buster only blew up tonight. Thank you, my love. Leave me, now. I shan’t be long.”
“There isn’t—?”
“Well?”
“I suppose there isn’t anything I can do? Only stand and wait like those sickening angels?”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can fetch my small suitcase and go downstairs and collect every last bloody bit of Bill-Tasman’s famille verte. Don’t handle it any more than you can help. Hold the pieces by the edges, put them in the case, and bring them upstairs. I’ll be here. Will you do that?”
“Watch me.”
When she was established at her task he went to the table in the gallery where the vase had stood. He looked down and there, in aerial perspective, was the top of a standard lamp, a pool of light surrounding it, and within the pool, a pattern of porcelain shards, the top of Troy’s head, her shoulders, her knees and her long, thin hands moving delicately about the floor. She was directly underneath him.
A little table, Chinese, elegant but solid, stood against the gallery railing. The ebony pedestal on which the vase had rested was still in position. It had brought the base of the vase up to the level of the balustrade. Alleyn guessed that Hilary wished people in the hall to look up and see his lovely piece of famille verte gently signalling from above. As indeed it had signalled to him, much earlier in this long night. Before, he thought, it had hit him on the arm and then killed itself.
He turned on all the lights in the gallery and used a pocket torch that Wrayburn had lent him. He inspected the table, inch by inch, so meticulously that he was still at it when Troy, having finished her task, switched off the downstairs lamp and joined him.
“I suppose,” she said, “you’re looking for claw-marks.”
“Yes.”
“Found any?”
“Not yet. You go along. I’ve almost finished here. I’ll bring the case.”
And when, finally, just after Troy heard the stable clock strike one, he came to her, she knew it was not advisable to ask him if he had found any traces of Smartypants’s claws on the Chinese table.
Because clearly he had not.
Alleyn obeyed his own instructions to wake at three. He left Troy fast asleep and found his way through their bedroom, darkling, to his dressing-room, where he shaved and dipped his head in cold water. He looked out of his window. The moon was down but there were stars to be seen, raked across by flying cloud. The wind was still high but there was no rain. The Buster was clearing. He dressed painfully, dragging on thick sweaters and stuffing a cloth cap in his pocket.
He found his way by torchlight along the corridor, out to the gallery and downstairs. The hall was a lightless void except for widely separated red eyes where embers still glowed on the twin hearths. He moved from the foot of the stairs to the opening into the east-wing corridor and, turning left, walked along it till he came to the library.
The library, too, was virtually in darkness. The familiar reek of oil and turpentine made Alleyn feel as if he had walked into his wife’s studio. Had the portrait been taken out of seclusion and returned to the library?
He moved away from the door and was startled, as Troy had been before him, by the click of the latch as it reopened itself. He shut it again and gave it a hard shove.
His torchlight dodged about the room. Books, lamps, chair-backs, pictures, ornaments, showed up and vanished. Then he found the workbench and, at last, near it, Troy’s easel.
And now, Hilary started up out of the dark and stared at him.
As he came nearer to the portrait his beam of torchlight intensified and so did the liveliness of the painting. Troy was far from being a “representational” portrait painter. Rather she abstracted the essence of her subjects as if, Alleyn thought, she had worked with the elements of Hilary’s personality for her raw material and laid them out directly on the canvas.
What were those elements? What had she seen?
Well, of course, there was the slightly supercilious air which she had compared to that of a “good-looking camel.” And in addition elegance, fastidiousness, a certain insolence, a certain quirkiness. But, unexpectedly, in the emphasis on a groove running from his nostrils to the corners of his faunish mouth and in the surprising heaviness of the mouth itself, Troy had unveiled a hedonist in Hilary.
The library was the foremost room in the east wing and had three outside walls. Its windows on the left as one entered it, looked on to the great courtyard. Alleyn made his way to them. He knew they were curtained and shuttered.
He opened the curtains, exposed a window and opened that. It crossed his mind that windows played a major role in whatever drama was unfolding at Halberds. Now his torchlight shone on the inside aspect of the shutters. This was the lee side of the east wing, but they rattled slightly and let in blades of cold air. Not strong enough, he thought, to make a great disturbance in the room, but he returned to the easel and gingerly pushed it into a sheltered position.
Then he operated the sliding mechanism in the shutters. The louvres turned and admitted the outside world, its noise and its cold. Alleyn peered through one of the slits. There were no clouds left in the sky. Starlight made a non-darkness of the great courtyard and he could discern, quite close at hand, Nigel’s catafalque, denuded of all but a fragment of its effigy, a thin pock-marked mantle of snow.
He put on his cap, turned up the double collar of his sweater, like a beaver, over his mouth and ears, settled himself on the window-seat, and put out his torch.
“Keeping obbo,” he thought and wondered if Fox and his lot were well on their way. He could have done with a radio link. They might arrive at precisely the wrong moment. Not that, ultimately, it would make any difference.
When did the staff get up at Halberds? Sixish? Was he completely, ludicrously at fault? Waiting, as so often on the job, for a non-event?
After all, his theory, if it could be called a theory, was based on a single tenuous thread of evidence. Guesswork, almost. And he could have proved it right or wrong as soon as it entered his head. But then — no confrontation, no surprise element.
He went over the whole field of information as he had received it piecemeal from Troy, from the guests, from Hilary and from the staff. As far as motive went, a clotted mess of non-sequiturs, he thought. But as far as procedure went: that was another story. And the evidence in hand? A collection of imbecile pranks that might be threats. A disappearance. A man i
n a wig. A hair of the wig and probably the blood of the man on a poker. A scrap of gold in a discarded Christmas tree. A silly attempt upon a padlock. A wedge in a window-sash. A broken vase of great price and his own left arm biceps now thrumming away like fun. Mr. Smith’s junk yard in his horse-and-barrow days could scarcely have offered a more heterogeneous collection, thought Alleyn.
He reversed his position, turned up the collar of his jacket, and continued to peer through the open louvre. Icy blades of air made his eyes stream.
Over years of that soul-destroying non-activity known to the Force as keeping obbo, when the facility for razor-sharp perception must cut through the drag of bodily discomfort and boredom, Alleyn had developed a technique of self-discipline. He hunted through his memory for odd bits from his favourite author that, in however cockeyed a fashion, could be said to refer to his job. As: “O me! what eyes hath Love put in my head / which have no correspondence with true sight.” And: “Mad slanderers by mad ears believed he.” And: “Hence, thou suborn’d informer,” which came in very handy when some unreliable snout let the police-side down.
This frivolous pastime had led indirectly to the memorizing of certain sonnets. Now, when, with his eyes streaming and his arm giving him hell, he had embarked upon “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” he saw, through his peephole, a faint light.
It came jouncing across the courtyard and darted like a moth about the catafalque of Nigel’s fancy.
“Here, after all, we go,” thought Alleyn.
For a split second the light shone directly into his eyes and made him feel ludicrously exposed. It darted away to its original object and then to a slowly oncoming group out of some genre picture that had become blackened almost to oblivion by time. Two figures bent against the wind dragging at an invisible load.
It was a sledge. The torchlight concentrated on the ground beside the catafalque and into this area gloved hands and heavy boots shoved and manoeuvred a large, flat-topped sledge.
Alleyn changed his position on the window-seat. He squatted. He slid up the fastening device on the shutters and held them against the wind almost together but leaving a gap for observation.
