by Ngaio Marsh
Blore tilted his head and stared into the fire. His right hand, thick and darkly hirsute, hung between his knees. Alleyn reflected that it had once wielded a lethal carving knife.
Blore heaved a sigh. “I don’t know,” he boomed in his great voice, “that it will serve any purpose to talk. I don’t know, I’m sure.”
None of his friends seemed inclined to help him in his predicament.
“You don’t by any chance feel,” Alleyn said, “that you rather owe it to Mr. Bill-Tasman to clear things up? After all, he’s done quite a lot for you, hasn’t he?”
Kittiwee suddenly revealed himself as a person of intelligence.
“Mr. Bill-Tasman,” he said, “suited himself. He’d never have persuaded the kind of staff he wanted to come to this dump. Not in the ordinary way. He’s got what he wanted. He’s got value and he knows it. If he likes to talk a lot of crap about rehabilitation, that’s his affair. If we hadn’t given the service, you wouldn’t have heard so much about rehabilitation.”
The shadow of a grin visited all their faces.
“Owe it to him!” Kittiwee said and his moon face, still blotted with tears, dimpled into its widest smile. “You’ll be saying next we ought to show our gratitude. We’re always being told we ought to be grateful. Grateful for what? Fair payment for fair services? After eleven years in stir, Mr. Alleyn, you get funny ideas under that heading.”
Alleyn said: “Yes. Yes, I’ve no doubt you do.” He looked round the group. “The truth is,” he said, “that when you come out of stir it’s into another kind of prison and it’s heavy going for the outsider who tries to break in.”
They looked at him with something like astonishment.
“It’s no good keeping on about this,” he said, “I’ve a job to do and so have you. If you agree with the account I’ve put to you about your part in this affair, it’ll be satisfactory to me and I believe the best thing for you. But I can’t wait any longer for the answer. You must please yourselves.”
A long pause.
Mervyn got to his feet, moved to the fireplace, and savagely kicked a log into the flames.
“We got no choice,” he said. “All right. Like you said.”
“Speak for yourself,” Vincent mumbled but without much conviction.
Blore said, “People don’t think.”
“How do you mean?”
“They don’t know. For us, each of us, it was what you might call an isolated act. Like a single outbreak — an abscess that doesn’t spread. Comes to a head and bursts and that’s it. It’s out of the system. We’re no more likely to go violent than anyone else. Less. We know what it’s like afterwards. We’re oncers. People don’t think.”
“Is that true of Nigel?”
They looked quickly at each other.
“He’s a bit touched,” Blore said. “He gets put out. He doesn’t understand.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“I’ll go with what you’ve put to us, sir,” Blore said, exactly as if he hadn’t heard Alleyn’s question. “I’ll agree it’s substantially the case. Vince found the body and came in and told us and we reached a decision. I daresay it was stupid but the way we looked at it we couldn’t afford for him to be found.”
“Who actually moved the body into the packing case?”
Blore said, “I don’t think we’ll go into details,” and Mervyn and Vincent looked eloquently relieved.
“And Nigel knows nothing about it?”
“That’s right. He’s settled that Mr. Moult was struck down by a sense of sin for mocking us and went off somewhere to repent.”
“I see.” Alleyn glanced at Fox, who put up his notebook and cleared his throat. “I’ll have a short statement written out and will ask you all to sign it if you find it correct.”
“We haven’t said we’ll sign anything,” Blore interjected in a hurry and the others made sounds of agreement.
“Quite so,” Alleyn said. “It’ll be your decision.”
He walked out followed by Fox and the driver.
“Do you reckon,” Fox asked, “there’ll be any attempt to scarper?”
“I don’t think so. They’re not a stupid lot: the stowing of the body was idiotic but they’d panicked.”
Fox said heavily, “This type of chap: you know, the oncer. He always bothers me. There’s something in what they said: you can’t really call him a villain. Not in the accepted sense. He’s funny.” Fox meditated. “That flabby job. The cook. What was it you call him?”
“ ‘Kittiwee.’ ”
“I thought that was what you said.”
“He’s keen on cats. À propos, cats come into my complicated story. I’d better put you in the picture, Br’er Fox. Step into the hall.”
Alleyn finished his recital, to which Mr. Fox had listened with his customary air: raised brows, pursed lips and a hint of catarrhal breathing. He made an occasional note and when Alleyn had finished remarked that the case was “unusual” as if a new sartorial feature had been introduced by a conservative tailor.
All this took a considerable time. When it was over, seven o’clock had struck. Curtains were still drawn across the hall windows, but on looking through Alleyn found that they were guarded on the outside by Fox’s reinforcements and that Bailey and Thompson held powerful lights to the body of Albert Moult while a heavily overcoated person stooped over it.
“The Div. Surgeon,” Alleyn said. “Here’s the key of the cloakroom, Fox. Have a shiner at it while I talk to him. Go easy. We’ll want the full treatment in there.”
The Divisional Surgeon, Dr. Moore, said that Moult had either been stunned or killed outright by a blow on the nape of the neck and that the neck had subsequently been broken, presumably by a fall. When Alleyn fetched the poker and they laid it by the horrid wound, the stained portion was found to coincide and the phenomenon duly photographed. Dr. Moore, a weathered man with a good keen eye, was then taken to see the wig, and in the wet patch Alleyn found a tiny skein of hair that had not been washed perfectly clean. It was agreed that this and the poker should be subjected to the sophisticated attention of the Yard’s pathological experts.
“He’s been thumped all right,” said Dr. Moore. “I suppose you’ll talk to Sir James.” Sir James Curtis was Consultant Pathologist to the Yard. “I wouldn’t think,” Dr. Moore added, “there’d be much point in leaving the body there. It’s been rolled about all over the shop, it seems, since he was thumped. But thumped he was.”
And he drove himself back to Downlow where he practised. The time was now seven-thirty.
Alleyn said, “He’s about right, you know, Fox. I’ll get through to Curtis but I think he’ll say we can move the body. There are some empty rooms in the stables under the clock tower. You chaps can take him round in the car. Lay him out decently, of course. Colonel Forrester will have to identify.”
Alleyn telephoned Sir James Curtis and was given rather grudging permission to remove Moult from Hilary’s doorstep. Sir James liked bodies to be in situ but conceded that as this one had been, as he put it, rattled about like dice in a box, the objection was academic. Alleyn rejoined Fox in the hall. “We can’t leave Bill-Tasman uninformed much longer,” he said, “I suppose. Worse luck. I must say I don’t relish the prospect of coming reactions.”
“If we exclude the servants, and I take it we do, we’ve got a limited field of possibilities, haven’t we, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Six, if you also exclude thirty-odd guests and Troy.”
“A point being,” said Mr. Fox, pursuing after his fashion, his own line of thought, “whether or not it was a case of mistaken identity. Taking into consideration the wig and whiskers.”
“Quite so. In which case the field is reduced to five.”
“Anyone with a scunner on the Colonel, would you say?”
“I’d have thought it a psychological impossibility. He’s walked straight out of Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“Anybody profit by his demise?”
“I�
�ve no idea. I understand his will’s in the tin box.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Together with the crown jewels and various personal documents. We’ll have to see.”
“What beats me,” said Mr. Fox, “on what you’ve told me, is this. The man Moult finishes his act. He comes back to the cloakroom. The young lady takes off his wig and whiskers and leaves him there. She takes them off. Unless,” Fox said carefully, “she’s lying, of course. But suppose she is? Where does that lead you?”
“All right, Br’er Fox, where does it lead you?”
“To a nonsense,” Fox said warmly. “That’s where. To some sort of notion that she went upstairs and got the poker and came back and hit him with it, Gawd knows why, and then dragged him upstairs under the noses of the servants and kids and all and removed the wig and pitched him and the poker out of the window. Or walked upstairs with him alive when we know the servants saw her go through this hall on her own and into the drawing room and anyway there wasn’t time and — Well,” said Fox, “why go on with it? It’s silly.”
“Very.”
“Rule her out, then. So we’re left with? What? This bit of material from his robe, now. If that’s what it was. That was caught up in the tree? So he was wearing the robe when he pitched out of the window. So why isn’t it torn and wet and generally mucked up and who put it back in the cloakroom?”
“Don’t you rather feel that the scrap of material might have been stuck to the poker. Which was in the tree.”
“Damn!” said Fox. “Yes. Damn. All right. Well now. Sometime or another he falls out of the upstairs window, having been hit on the back of his head with the upstairs poker. Wearing the wig?”
“Go on, Br’er Fox.”
“Well — presumably wearing the wig. On evidence, wearing the wig. We don’t know about the whiskers.”
“No.”
“No. So we waive them. Never mind the whiskers. But the wig — the wig turns up in the cloakroom same as the robe, just where they left it, only with all the signs of having been washed where the blow fell and not so efficiently but that there’s a trace of something that might be blood. So what do we get? The corpse falling through the window, replacing the wig, washing it and the robe clean, and going back and lying down again.”
“A droll conceit.”
“All right. And where does it leave us? With Mr. Bill-Tasman, the Colonel and his lady and this Bert Smith. Can we eliminate any of them?”
“I think we can.”
“You tell me how. Now, then.”
“In response to your cordial invitation, Br’er Fox. I shall attempt to do so.”
The men outside, having been given the office, lifted the frozen body of Alfred Moult into their car and drove away to the rear of the great house. The effigy of Hilary Bill-Tasman’s ancestor, reduced to a ghastly storm-pocked wraith, dwindled on the top of the packing case. And Alleyn, watching through the windows, laid out for Fox, piece by piece, his assemblage of events fitting each until a picture was completed.
When he had done, his colleague drew one of his heavy sighs and wiped his great hand across his mouth.
“That’s startling and it’s clever,” he said. “It’s very clever indeed. It’ll be a job to make a dead bird of it, though.”
“Yes.”
“No motive, you see. That’s always awkward. Well — no apparent motive. Unless there’s one locked up somewhere behind the evidence.”
Alleyn felt in his breast pocket, drew out his handkerchief, unfolded it and exposed a key: a commonplace barrel-key such as would fit a commonplace padlock.
“This may help us,” he said, “to break in.”
“I only need one guess,” said Mr. Fox.
Before Alleyn went to tell Hilary of the latest development, he and Fox visited Nigel in the servery, where they found him sitting in an apparent trance with an assembly of early morning tea trays as his background. Troy would have found this a paintable subject, thought Alleyn.
At first, when told that Moult was dead, Nigel looked sideways at Alleyn as if he thought he might be lying. But finally he nodded portentously several times. “Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord,” he said.
“Not in this instance,” Alleyn remarked. “He’s been murdered.”
Nigel put his head on one side and stared at Alleyn through his white eyelashes. Alleyn began to wonder if his wits had quite turned or if, by any chance, he was putting it on.
“How?” Nigel asked.
“He was hit with a poker.”
Nigel sighed heavily: “Like Fox,” Alleyn thought irrelevantly.
“Everywhere you turn,” Nigel generalized, “sinful ongoings! Fornication galore. Such is the vice and depravity of these licentious times.”
“The body,” Alleyn pressed on, “was found in the packing case under your effigy.”
“Well,” Nigel snapped, “if you think I put it there you’re making a very big mistake.” He gazed at Alleyn for some seconds. “Though it’s well known to the Lord God of Hosts,” he added in a rising voice, “that I’m a sinner. A sinner!” he repeated loudly and now he really did look demented. “I smote a shameless lady in the face of the Heavens and they opened and poured down their phials of wrath upon me. Because such had not been their intention. My mistake.” And as usual when recalling his crime, he burst into tears.
Alleyn and Fox withdrew into the hall.
“That chap’s certifiable,” said Fox, looking very put out. “I mean to say, he’s certifiable.”
“I’m told he only cuts up rough occasionally.”
“Does he cart those trays round the bedrooms?”
“At eight-thirty, Troy says.”
“I wouldn’t fancy the tea.”
“Troy says it’s all right. It’s Vincent who’s the arsenic expert, remember, not Nigel.”
“I don’t like it,” Fox said.
“Damn it all, Br’er Fox, nor do I. I don’t like Troy being within a hundred miles of a case, as you very well know. I don’t like — well, never mind all that. Look. Here are the keys of Colonel Forrester’s dressing-room. I want Thompson and Bailey to give it the full treatment. Window-sashes. All surfaces and objects. That’s the wardrobe key. It’s highly probable that there are duplicates of the whole lot but never mind. In the wardrobe, standing on its end, is this damned tin uniform box. Particular attention to that. Tell him to report to me when they’ve finished. I’m going to stir up Bill-Tasman.”
“For God’s sake!” cried Hilary from the top of the stairs. “What now!”
He was leaning over the gallery in his crimson dressing gown. His hair rose in a crest above his startled countenance. He was extremely pale.
“What’s happening in the stable yard?” he demanded. “What are they doing? You’ve found him? Haven’t you? You’ve found him.”
“Yes,” said Alleyn. “I’m on my way to tell you. Will you wait? Join us, Fox, when you’re free.”
Hilary waited, biting his knuckles. “I should have been told,” he began as soon as Alleyn reached him. “I should have been told at once.”
“Can we go somewhere private?”
“Yes, yes, yes. All right. Come to my room. I don’t like all this. One should be told.”
He led the way round the gallery to his bedroom, a magnificent affair in the west wing corresponding, Alleyn supposed, with that occupied by Cressida in the east wing. It overlooked on one side the courtyard, on the other the approach from the main road, and in front, the parklands-to-be. A door stood open into a dressing-room and beyond that into a bathroom. The dominant feature was a fourposter on a dais, sumptuously canopied and counterpaned.
“I’m sorry,” Hilary said, “if I was cross, but really the domestic scene in this house becomes positively quattrocento. I glance through my window,” he gestured to the one that overlooked the courtyard, “and see something quite unspeakable being pushed into a car. I glance through the opposite window and the car is being driven round the hou
se. I go to the far end of the corridor and look into the stable yard and there they are, at it again, extricating their hideous find. No!” Hilary cried. “It’s too much. Admit. It’s too much.”
There was a tap on the door. Hilary answered it and disclosed Mr. Fox. “How do you do,” Hilary said angrily.
Alleyn introduced them and proceeded, painstakingly, to rehearse the circumstances leading to the discovery of Moult. Hilary interrupted the recital with petulant interjections.
“Well, now you’ve found it,” he said when he had allowed Alleyn to finish, “what happens? What is expected of me? My servants will no doubt be in an advanced state of hysteria, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one and all they gave me notice. But command me. What must I do?”
Alleyn said, “I know what a bore it all is for you, but it really can’t be helped. Can it? We’ll trouble you as little as possible and, after all, if you don’t mind a glimpse of the obvious, it’s been an even greater bore for Moult.”
Hilary turned slightly pink. “Now you’re making me feel shabby,” he said. “What an alarming man you are. One doesn’t know where to have you. Well — what shall I do?”
“Colonel Forrester must be told that Moult has been found, that he’s dead, that he’s been murdered, and that we shall ask the Colonel to identify the body?”
“Oh no!” Hilary shouted. “How beastly for him! Poorest Uncle Flea! Well, I can’t tell him. I’ll come with you if you do,” he added. “I mean if you tell him. Oh all right, then, I’ll tell him but I’d like you to come.”
