by Ngaio Marsh
From her place on the stairs Troy looked at Hilary’s audience. Cuthbert. Mervyn. Nigel. Vincent. Kittiwee. The boy. Standing farther back, a clutch of extra helpers, male and female, brought in for the occasion. Of these last, one could only say that they looked tired and puzzled.
But the impression was very different when she considered the regular staff. Troy was sure she hadn’t concocted this impression and she didn’t think it stemmed from pre-knowledge. If she hadn’t known anything about their past, she believed, she would still have thought that in some indefinable way the staff had closed their ranks and that fear had inspired them to do so. If they had picked up death-masks of their faces and clapped them over their own, they could scarcely have been less communicative. This extravagant notion was given a kind of validity by the fact that – surely – they were all most uncommonly pale? They stared straight in front of themselves as if they were on parade.
‘Well,’ Hilary said, ‘Cuthbert? You’re the chief of staff. Any ideas?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir. We have made, I think I may say, sir, a thorough search of the premises. Very thorough, sir.’
‘Who,’ Mrs Forrester snapped out, ‘saw him last?’
‘Yes. All right. Certainly, Aunt Bed. Good question,’ said Hilary who was clearly flustered.
There was a considerable pause before Cressida said: ‘Well, I’ve said, sweeties, haven’t I? When he eggzitted after his thing I went back as arranged to the cloakroom and he came in from the outside porch and I took off his robe, wig and make-up and he said he’d go and report to Uncle Fred and I went back to the party.’
‘Leaving him there?’ Hilary and Mrs Forrester asked in unison.
‘Like I said, for heaven’s sake. Leaving him there.’
Nobody had paid any attention to Troy. She sat down on the stairs and wondered what her husband would make of the proceedings.
‘All right. Yes. Good. All right,’ said poor Hilary. ‘So far so good. Now then. Darling, you therefore came into the hall, here, didn’t you, on your way to the drawing-room?’
‘I didn’t do an Uncle Tom’s Cabin, darling, and take to the snow.’
‘Of course not. Ha-ha. And – let me see – the people in charge of the children’s supper were here, weren’t they?’ Hilary looked appealingly in their direction. ‘Kitti – er – Cook – and all his helpers?’ he wheedled.
‘That’s right,’ said Cressida. ‘Busy as bees.’ She closed her eyes.
‘And I expect,’ Hilary said, ‘some of you remember Miss Tottenham coming into the hall, don’t you?’
Kittiwee said huffily: ‘Well, sir, I’m sure we were very busy round the supper table at the far end of the hall and, personally speaking, I didn’t take notice to anything but my work. However, sir, I do call the incident to mind because of a remark that was passed.’
‘Oh?’ Hilary glanced at Cressida who didn’t open her eyes.
‘I asked him,’ she said, ‘if his bloody cats were shut up.’
‘Yes, I see.’
Mrs Forrester adjusted her thick-lensed spectacles to look at Cressida.
‘The thing is,’ Hilary hurried on, ‘did any of you happen to notice Moult when he came out of the cloakroom there? After Miss Tottenham. Because he must have come out and he ought to have gone up the right-hand flight of the stairs to the colonel’s room and then returned to help with the children.’
Hilary’s reference to the stairs caused his audience to shift their attention to them and discover Troy. Mrs Forrester exclaimed: ‘Has he –?’ and Troy said quickly: ‘No. Not a sign. The colonel’s quite all right and fast asleep.’
Nobody, it transpired, had seen Moult come out of the cloakroom or go anywhere. Kittiwee again pointed out that the hall was large and dark and they were all very busy. When asked if they hadn’t wondered why Moult didn’t turn up to do his job, they intimated with unmistakable spitefulness that this didn’t surprise them in the least.
‘Why?’ Mrs Forrester barked.
Kittiwee simpered and Cuthbert was silent. One of the women tittered.
Mr Smith removed his cigar from his mouth. ‘Was ’e sozzled?’ he asked of nobody in particular and as there was no response added: ‘What I mean, did ’e take a couple to celebrate ’is triumph?’
‘That’s a point,’ Cressida conceded. She opened her eyes. ‘He was in a tizzy about going on for the part. It was pretty silly, really, because after all – no dialogue. Round the tree, business with arms, and off. Still, he was nervous. And when I fixed his whiskers I must say it was through a pretty thick scotch mist.’
‘There y’are,’ said Mr Smith.
‘Aunt Bed – does Moult sometimes –?’
‘Occasionally,’ said Mrs Forrester.
‘I think he had it on him,’ Cressida said. ‘That’s only my idea, mind. But he sort of patted himself – you know?’
Hilary said: ‘He was already wearing the robe when you went in to make him up, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. He put it on upstairs, he said, for Uncle Fred to see.’
‘Which he didn’t,’ Troy said. ‘He’d gone to sleep.’
‘Moult didn’t say anything about that. Though, mind you,’ Cressida added, ‘I was only with him for a matter of a minute. There was nothing to fixing his beard: a couple of spots of spirit-gum and Bob was your uncle. But I did notice he was all up-tight. He was in no end of a taking-on. Shaking like a leaf he was.’
‘Vincent!’ Hilary suddenly exclaimed and Vincent gave a perceptible start. ‘Why didn’t I think of you! You saw Moult outside when he left the drawing-room, didn’t you? After his performance?’
Vincent, almost indistinguishably, acknowledged that he did.
‘Well – what about it? Did he say anything or – or – look anything – or do anything? Come on, Vincent?’
But no. It appeared that Vincent had not even noticed it was Moult. His manner suggested that he and Moult were not on such terms that the latter would have divulged his secret. He had emerged from his triumph into the icy cold, hunched his shoulders against the wind and bolted from the courtyard into the porch. Vincent saw him enter the little cloakroom.
‘Which gets us nowhere,’ Mrs Forrester said with a kind of stony triumph.
‘I don’t know why there’s all the carry-on, ’Illy,’ said Mr Smith. ‘Alf Moult’s sleeping it off.’
‘Where?’ Mrs Forrester demanded.
‘Where, where, where! Anywhere. You don’t tell me there’s not plenty of lay-bys for a spot of kip where nobody’s thought of looking! ’Ow about the chapel?’
‘My dear Uncle Bert – surely –’
‘Or all them old stables and what-’ave-you at the back. Come orf it!’
‘Have you –?’ Hilary asked his staff.
‘I looked in the chapel,’ Mrs Forrester announced.
‘Has anybody looked – well – outside. The laundries and so on?’
It appeared not. Vincent was dispatched to do this. ‘If ’e’s there,’ Troy heard him mutter, ‘’e’ll ’ave froze.’
‘What about the top storey? The attics?’ Mr Smith asked.
‘No, sir. We’ve looked,’ said Cuthbert, addressing himself exclusively to Hilary. It struck Troy that the staff despised Mr Smith for the same reason that they detested Moult.
A silence followed: mulish on the part of the staff, baffled on the part of the house-party, exhausted on all counts. Hilary finally dismissed the staff. He kept up his grand seigniorial role by thanking his five murderers, congratulating them upon their management of the party and hoping, he said, that their association would continue as happily throughout the coming year. Those of the temporary helpers who lived in the district he excused from further duties.
The house-party then retired to the boudoir, it being, Hilary said, the only habitable room in the house.
Here, after a considerable amount of desultory speculation and argument, everybody but Troy, who found she detested the very sight of alcohol,
had a nightcap. Hilary mixed two rum toddies and Mrs Forrester said she would take them up to her room. ‘If your uncle’s awake,’ she said, ‘he’ll want one. If he isn’t …’
‘You’ll polish them both off yourself, Auntie?’
‘And why not?’ she said. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Alleyn. I am very much obliged to you. Goodnight, Hilary. Goodnight, Smith.’ She looked fixedly at Cressida. ‘Good night,’ she said.
‘What have I done?’ Cressida demanded when Mrs Forrester had gone. ‘Honestly, darling, your relations!’
‘Darling, you know Auntie Bed, none better. One can only laugh.’
‘Heh, heh, heh. Anyone’d think I’d made Moult tight and then hidden him in the boot cupboard.’ Cressida stopped short and raised a finger. ‘A propos,’ she said. ‘Has anybody looked in the cupboards?’
‘Now, my darling child, why on earth should he be in a cupboard? You talk,’ said Hilary, ‘as if he were A Body,’ and then looked extremely perturbed.
‘If you ask my opinion, which you haven’t,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I think you’re all getting yourselves in a muck sweat about nothing. Don’t you lose any sleep over Alf Moult. He knows how to look after ’imself, none better. And since it’s my practice to act as I speak I’ll wish you goodnight. Very nice show, ’Illy, and none the worse for being a bit of a mock-up. Wouldn’t of done for the pipe-and-tabor lot, would it? Bells, Druids, Holy Families and angels! What a combination! Oh dear! Still, the kids appreciated it so we don’t care, do we? Well. Bye bye, all.’
When he had gone Hilary said to Troy: ‘You see what I mean about Uncle Bert? In his way he’s a purist.’
‘Yes, I do see.’
‘I think he’s fantastic,’ said Cressida. ‘You know? There’s something basic. The grass-roots thing. You believe in him. Like he might be out of Genet.’
‘My darling girl, what dreadful nonsense you do talk! Have you so much as read Genet?’
‘Hilly! For heaven’s sake – he’s where O-E begins.’
Hilary said with unusual acerbity: ‘And I’m afraid he’s where I leave off.’
‘Of course I’ve known all along you’ll never get the message.’
Troy thought: This is uncomfortable. They’re going to have a row, and was about to leave them to it when Cressida suddenly laughed and wound her arms round Hilary’s neck. He became very still. She drew his head down and whispered. They both laughed. Their embrace became so explicit that Troy thought on the whole she had better evaporate and proceeded to do so.
At the door she half-turned, wondering if she should throw out a jolly goodnight. Hilary, without releasing Cressida, lifted his face and gave Troy not so much a smile as the feral grimace of Hylaeus. When she had shut the door behind her she thought: that was the sort of thing one should never see.
On her way through the hall she found a great clearance had been made and could hear voices in the drawing-room. Well, she thought, Hilary certainly has it both ways. He gets all the fun of setting-up his party and none of the tedious aftermath. That’s done for him by his murderers.
She reached her room, with its well-tended fire, turned-down bed and impeccably laid-out dressing-gown, pyjamas and slippers. She supposed Nigel had found time to perform these duties, and found this a disagreeable reflection.
She hung her dress in the wardrobe and could just catch the drone of the Forresters’ voices joined, it seemed, in no very urgent conversation. Troy was wide awake and restless. Too much had happened and happened inconclusively over the last few days. The anonymous messages, which, she realized with astonishment, she had almost forgotten. The booby-trap. Cressida’s report of the row in the staff common-room. Uncle Flea’s turns. Moult as Druid. The disappearance of Moult. Should these elements, wondered Troy, who had been re-reading her Forster, connect? What would Rory think? He was fond of quoting Forster. ‘Only connect. Only connect.’ What would he make of all this? And now, in a flash, Troy was perfectly certain that he would think these were serious matters.
As sometimes happens in happy marriages, Troy and her husband when parted, often found that before one of them wrote or cabled or telephoned, the other was visited by an intensified awareness, a kind of expectation. She had this feeling very vividly now and was glad of it. Perhaps in the morning there would be news.
She heard midnight strike and a moment later, Cressida, humming the Bells of St Clement’s, passed the door on her way to her room at the south end of the corridor.
Troy yawned. The bedroom was overheated and at last she was sleepy. She went to her window, slipped through the curtains without drawing them and opened it at the top. The north wind had risen and the rumour of its progress was abroad in the night. Flights of cloud were blown across the heavens. The moon was high now, casting a jetty shadow from the house across the snow. It was not a deserted landscape, for round the corner of the west wing came Vincent and his wheelbarrow and in the barrow the dead body of the Christmas tree denuded of its glory. He plodded on until he was beneath the Forresters’ windows and then turned into the shadow and was swallowed. She heard a swish and tinkle as he tipped his load into the debris of the ruined conservatory.
Shivering and immoderately tired, she went to bed and to sleep.
CHAPTER 5
Alleyn
Troy woke next morning at the sound of Nigel’s discreet attentions to her fire. He had placed her early tea-tray by her bed.
She couldn’t make up her mind, at once, to speak to him but when he opened her window curtains and let in the reflected pallor of snow she wished him good morning.
He paused, blinking his white eyelashes, and returned the greeting.
‘Is it still snowing?’ she asked.
‘Off and on, madam. There was sleet in the night but it changed to snow later.’
‘Has Moult appeared?’
‘I believe not, madam.’
‘How very odd, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, madam. Will that be all, madam?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Thank you, madam.’
But it’s all phoney, Troy thought. He turns it on. He didn’t talk like that when he made rocking-horses and wax effigies. Before he reached the door she said: ‘I think you made a wonderful job of that catafalque.’
He stopped. ‘Ta,’ he said.
‘I don’t know how you managed to get such precision and detail with a medium like snow.’
‘It was froze.’
‘Even so. Have you ever sculpted? In stone?’
‘It was all working from moulds, like. But I always had a fancy to carve.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
He said: ‘Ta,’ again, looked directly at her and went out.
Troy bathed and dressed and took her usual look at the landscape. Everywhere except in areas close to the house, a coverlet of snow. Not a footprint to be seen. Over on the far left the canvas-covered bulldozers and their works were mantled. Every tree was a Christmas tree. Somebody had re-erected the scarecrow or perhaps with a change in the wind it had righted itself. It looked, if anything, more human than before. Quite a number of birds had settled on it.
Troy found Hilary and Mr Smith at breakfast. Hilary lost no time in introducing the Moult theme.
‘No Moult! It really is beyond a joke now,’ he said. ‘Even Uncle Bert agrees, don’t you, Uncle Bert?’
‘I give you in, it’s a rum go,’ he conceded. ‘Under existing circs, it’s rather more than that. It’s upsetting.’
‘What do you mean by “existing circs”?’
‘Ask yourself.’
‘I asked you.’
Mervyn came in with a fresh supply of toast.
‘Pas devant les domestiques,’ quoted Mr Smith.
Mervyn withdrew. ‘Why not before them?’ Hilary asked crossly.
‘Use your loaf, boy.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Uncle Bert.’
‘No? Ah. Fancy.’
‘Oh, blast everything!’ sai
d Hilary. He turned to Troy. ‘He really isn’t on the premises,’ he said. ‘Not in the house or the outbuildings. If he wandered into the grounds somewhere he didn’t go off the drive or swept paths because there aren’t any unaccountable footprints in the snow.’
‘Could he have got into the back of one of the cars and gone to sleep and been driven away unnoticed?’
‘He’d have woken up and declared himself by now, surely?’
‘It’s an idea, though,’ said Mr Smith. ‘What say he got into the boot of the station wagon from The Vale and come-to behind bars? That’d be a turn up for the books, wouldn’t it?’
‘Excessively droll,’ said Hilary sourly. ‘Well!’ he said throwing up his hands, ‘what’s the next step? I don’t know! The Fleas are becoming difficult, I can tell you that much. I looked in on them and found Aunt Bed trying to valet Uncle Flea and getting it all wrong. Aunt Bed’s in a rage because she can’t put her jewellery away.’
‘Why can’t she?’
‘It seems she keeps it in their locked tin box with all their securities under the bed in the dressing-room.’
‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘I saw it.’
‘Well, Moult’s got the key.’
‘They’re potty,’ said Mr Smith definitively. ‘What I mean, potty. What I mean, look at it! Carts her stuff round, and it’s good stuff, mind, some of it’s very nice stuff. Carts it round in a flipping tin box and gives the key to a bloody disappearing act. No, what I mean, I arst you!’
‘All right, Uncle Bert. All right. We all know the Fleas go their own way. That’s beside the point. What we have to decide –’
The door was flung open and Mrs Forrester entered in a temper. She presented a strange front to the breakfast-table. She was attired in her usual morning apparel; a Harris tweed skirt, a blouse and three cardigans, the uppermost being puce in colour. Stuck about this ensemble at eccentric angles were any number of brooches. Round her neck hung the elaborate Victorian necklace which had been the pièce de résistance of her last night’s toilet. She wore many rings and several bracelets. A watch, suspended from a diamond and emerald bow was pinned to her breast. She twinkled and glittered like – the comparison was inevitable – a Christmas tree.
