by Ngaio Marsh
“Now. We know Alf Moult was alive when ’e finished ’is act and waltzed out of the drawing-room winder looking a proper charlie and all. We know ’e was alive when ’e ’ad ’is whiskers taken off. We know ’e was left, alive, in the cloakroom. And that’s all we do know of our own observations. So. The important thing for us is to be able to account for ourselves, all of us, from the time we last see ’im. Right? A-course it’s right.
“Well then. As it appears, we all can answer for the fair sex in the person of Cressy Tottenham. Matter of a minute after Alf finished his act, Cressy come in, having removed his whiskers for ’im, and she certainly hadn’t ’ad time to do ’im in and dispose of ’is body.”
“Look here, Uncle Bert —”
“All right, all right, all right! I said she couldn’t of, didn’t I? So she couldn’t of. This is important. From Cressy’s point of view. Because she seems to of been the last to see ’im alive. Except of course, ’is slayer, and that puts ’er in a special category.”
“It does nothing of the sort,” Hilary said.
“Don’t be silly, Hilary,” said his aunt. “Go on, Smith.”
“Ta. To resume. I was coming to you, Missus. Cressy come in an’ mentioned to you it was Alf and not the Colonel done the Daddy Christmas act and you lit off. Where did you go?”
“To my husband. Naturally.”
“Straight off? Direct?”
“Certainly. To our bedroom.”
“You didn’t look in on the dressing-room?”
“I did not.”
“Can you prove it?”
Mrs. Forrester reddened angrily. “No,” she said.
“That’s unfortunate, innit?”
“Nonsense. Don’t be impertinent.”
“Ah, for Gawd’s sake!”
“Aunt B, he’s trying to help us.”
“When I require help I’ll ask for it.”
“You require it now, you silly old bag,” said Mr. Smith.
“How dare you speak to me like that!”
“Uncle Bert — really.”
“And what about yourself, ’Illy? We’ll be coming to you in a sec. Where was I? Oh, yes. With Cressy in the drawing-room. She tells you two about the job and one after another you leave the room. Where did you go?”
“I? I looked for Moult to thank him. I looked in the cloakroom and the library and I went upstairs to see if he was there. And I visited Uncle Flea and Aunt B was with him and finally I joined you all in the dining-room.”
“There you are,” said Mr. Smith. “So if Alf Moult went upstairs you or your auntie or (supposing ’e ’adn’t ’ad one of ’is turns) your uncle, could of done ’im in.”
“Well — my dear Uncle Bert — ‘could have’! Yes, I suppose so. But so could —” Hilary stopped short.
“So could who? I couldn’t of. Mrs. Alleyn couldn’t of. Cressy couldn’t of. We was all sitting down to our Christmas dinner, good as gold, as anyone will bear us out.”
Mrs. Forrester said, “Are we to take it, Smith, that your attitude is entirely altruistic? If you are persuaded that you are completely free of suspicion, why all this fuss?”
“Innit marvellous?” Mr. Smith apostrophized. “Innit bleeding marvellous? A man sees ’is friends, of what ’e thought was ’is friends, in a nasty situation and tries to give them the office. What does ’e get? You can’t win, can you?”
“I’m sure,” she said, “we’re very much obliged to you, Smith. There’s one aspect of this affair, however, that I think you have overlooked.”
She paused, thrust her hands up the opposite sleeves of her magenta cardigan and rested them on her stomach. “Isn’t it possible,” she said, “that Moult was done away with much later in the evening? Your uncle, Hilary, will not care to admit it but Moult did, from time to time, indulge in drinking bouts. I think it extremely likely this was such an occasion. Cressida considers he had drink concealed about his person. He may well have taken it after his performance, hidden himself away somewhere, possibly in a car, and thus eluded the searchers and emerged later in the evening — to be murdered.”
“You’ve thought it all out very nice and tidy, ’aven’t you?” sneered Mr. Smith.
“And so, you may depend upon it, has Mr. Alleyn,” she retorted.
“The search was very thorough, Aunt Bed.”
“Did they look in the cars?”
Hilary was silent.
“In which case,” Mrs. Forrester said exactly as if he had answered, “I cannot see that you, Smith, or Cressida or indeed you, Hilary, are to be excluded from the list of suspected persons.”
“What about yourself?” Smith asked.
“I?” she said with her customary spirit. “No doubt I could have killed Moult. I had no conceivable motive for killing him but no doubt I could have done so.”
“Nothing simpler. You go up to the Colonel, who’s on ’is bed and asleep. You hear Alf Moult in the dressing-room. You go froo the barfroom into the dressing-room, pick up the poker and Bob’s your uncle. You shove the corpse out of the winder.” Mr. Smith caught himself up. “You did say Vince and Co. picked it up under the winder, didn’t you, ’Illy?”
“I don’t think I said anything about it. But according to Alleyn, yes, they did.”
“The modus operandi you have outlined, Smith, could have been used by anybody if my theory is correct. You’ve talked a great deal but you’ve proved nothing, I said you’ve —”
“Don’t you bawl me out as if I was your old man,” Mr. Smith roared. “I been watching you, Missus. You been acting very peculiar. You got something up your sleeve you’re not letting on about.”
Hilary, with a wildish look, cried out, “I won’t have this sort of thing!”
“Yes, you will. You can’t help yourself. You want to watch your aunt. I did. When Alleyn was talking about that marvellous tin box. You didn’t like that, Missus, did you?”
Mr. Smith advanced upon Mrs. Forrester. He jabbed at her with a fat forefinger. “Come on,” he said. “What’s it all about? What’s in the ruddy tin box?”
Mrs. Forrester walked out of the room, slamming the door. When she had gone, it opened silently of its own accord.
The key fitted. It turned easily. Now. The hoop was disengaged. The hasp was more difficult, it really needed a lever but there was none to hand. At the cost of a broken fingernail and in spite of a glove it was finally prised up from the staple.
The lid opened to a vertical position but tended to fall forward, so that it was necessary to prop it up with the head. This was irksome.
A cash box: locked. A map-case. Canvas bags, tied at the neck with red tape. Tubular cartons. Manila envelopes, labelled. “Correspondence: B to F.F. F.F. to B.” He had kept all their letters.
“Receipts.” “Correspondence, general.” “Travel, etc.” “Miscellaneous.” A document in a grand envelope. “To our Trusty and Well-beloved —”
It was necessary to keep calm. To keep what Cressida called one’s cool. Not to scrabble wildly in the welter of accumulated papers. To be methodical and workmanlike. Sensible.
A locked box that rattled. The jewels she hadn’t taken out for the party. And at last a leather dispatch-case with an envelope flap: locked.
No panic but something rather like it when somebody walked past the door. The keys had been removed so one couldn’t lock the door.
The impulse to get out at once with the case and deal with it in safety was almost irresistible, but it presented its own problems. If only one knew how to pick a lock! Perhaps they would think that Moult had burst it. It was a sliding mechanism with a metal hinged piece on the leather flap engaging with a lock on the case itself. Perhaps the slide could be knocked down? Or, better, force the hinged piece up? The poker, of course, had gone but there were the tongs with their little thin flat ends.
Yes. Between the metal flap and the lock there was just room. Shove. Shove hard and force it up.
There!
A diary. A large envel
ope. “My Will.” Not sealed. A rapid look at it. Leave that. Put it back — quick. The thing itself: a reinforced envelope and inside it the document, printed in German, filled in and signed. The statement in Colonel Forrester’s hand. The final words: “declare her to be my daughter,” and the signature: “Alfred Moult.”
Replace the dispatch-case, quick, quick, quick.
Relock the tin box. Back into the wardrobe with it. Now, the envelope. She must hide it under her cardigan and away.
She stood up, breathless.
The doors opened simultaneously and before she could cry out there were men in the room and Alleyn advancing upon her.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “this is it.”
And for the second time during their short acquaintance Cressida screamed at the top of her voice.
“It’s been a short cut,” Alleyn said. “We left the library door open and let it be known the coast was clear. Fox displayed the key of the padlock, Cressida Tottenham said she was on her way to the study and would give it to the Colonel. We went upstairs, kept out of sight, and walked in on her. It was a gamble and it might never have come off. In which ease we would have been landed with a most exhaustive routine investigation. We are, still, of course, but with the advantage of her first reaction. She was surprised and flabbergasted and she gave herself away in several most significant places.”
“Rory — when did you first —?”
“Oh — that. Almost from the beginning, I think,” said he with a callow smirk. “You see, there everybody was, accepting her story that Moult substituted for the Colonel, which put her ostensibly in the clear and made a squint-eyed nonsense of the evidence: the robe, the wig, the lot. Whereas if she had substituted for the Colonel there was no confusion.
“She hit Moult on the base of his skull with the poker in the dressing-room, probably when he was leaning out of the window looking for his signal from Vincent, who, by the way, saw him and, according to plan, at once hauled his sledge round to the front. At this point the bells started up. A deafening clamour. She removed the wig and the robe, which unzips completely down the back. If he was lolling over the sill, there’d be no trouble. Nor would it be all that difficult to tumble him out.
“The tricky bit, no doubt, was going downstairs but by that time, as she knew when she heard the bells, the whole household, including the staff, were assembled in the library. Even if one of the servants had seen her carrying the robe and all the other gear, they’d have thought nothing of it at the time. She went into the dressing-room, stuffed a couple of cotton-wool pads in her cheeks and put on the wig, the robe, the great golden beard and moustache and the mistletoe crown. And the fur-lined boots. And the Colonel’s woolly gloves which you all thought he’d forgotten. And away she went. She was met by the unsuspecting Vincent. She waltzed round the Christmas tree, returned to the cloakroom and offed with her lendings. In five minutes she was asking you if Moult did his act all right because she couldn’t see very well from the back of the room.”
“Rory — where is she?”
“In her bedroom with a copper at the door. Why?”
“Is she — frightened?”
“When I left her she was furious. She tried to bite me. Luckily I was on my guard so she didn’t repeat her success with the vase.”
Alleyn looked at his wife. “I know, my love,” he said. “Your capacity for pity is on the Dostoevskian scale.” He put his arm round her. “You are such a treat,” he said. “Apart from being a bloody genius. I can’t get over you. After all these years. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Did she work it out beforehand?”
“No. Not the assault. It was an improvisation — a toccata. Now, she’s in for the fugue.”
“But — those tricks — the booby-trap and all?”
“Designed to set Bill-Tasman against his cosy little clutch of homicides. She would have preferred a group of resentful Greeks in flight from the Colonels.”
“Poor old Hilary.”
“Well — yes. But she really is a horrid piece of work. All the same there are extenuating circumstances. In my job one examines them, as you know, at one’s peril.”
“Go on.”
“At one’s peril,” he repeated and then said, “I don’t know at what stage Colonel Forrester felt he was, according to his code, obliged to step in. From the tenor of the documents in that infernal tin box, one gathers that she was Moult’s daughter by a German girl who died in childbirth, that it was Moult who, with great courage, saved the Colonel’s life and got a badly scarred face for his pains. That Moult had means comprising a tidy inheritance from a paternal tobacconist’s shop, his savings, his pay and his wages. That the Colonel, poor dear, felt himself to be under a lifelong debt to Moult. All right. Now Moult, like many of his class, was an unrepentant snob. He wanted his natural daughter upon whom he doted to be ‘brought up a lady.’ He wanted the Colonel to organize this process. He wanted to watch the process, as it were, from well back in the pit, unidentified, completely anonymous. And so it fell out. Until the whirligig of time, according to its practice, brought in its revenges. Hilary Bill-Tasman, having encountered her at his uncle’s and aunt’s house, decided that she was just the chatelaine for Halberds and, incidentally, the desire of his heart. She seemed to fill the bill in every possible respect. ‘Tottenham’ for instance. A damn’ good family.”
“Is it?” said Troy. “Yes. Well. Tottenham. Why Tottenham?”
“I’ll ask the Colonel,” said Alleyn.
“Moult,” said the Colonel, “was a keen follower of the Spurs. He chose it for that reason.”
“We didn’t care for it,” said Mrs. Forrester. “After all there are — Fred tried to suggest Bolton or Wolverhampton but he wouldn’t hear of them. She is Tottenham by deed-poll.”
“How,” Alleyn asked, “did it all come to a crisis?”
The Colonel stared dolefully into space. “You tell him, B,” he said.
“With the engagement. Fred felt — we both felt — that we couldn’t let Hilary marry under false pretence. She had told him all sorts of tarradiddles —”
“Wait a bit,” Alleyn said. “Did she know —?”
They both cried out: no, of course she didn’t. She had only been told that she had no parents, that there were no relatives.
“This was agreed upon with Moult,” said the Colonel. “She grew up from infancy in this belief. Of course, when she visited us he saw her.”
“Gloated,” Mrs. Forrester interpolated. “Took her to the zoo.”
“Peter Pan and all that,” her husband agreed. “ ’Fraid he forgot himself a bit and let her understand all sorts of fairytales — father’s rank and all that.”
But it emerged that on her own account Cressida had built up a magnificent fantasy for herself, and when she discovered that Hilary was steeped up to the teeth in armorial bearings went to all extremes to present herself in a complementary image.
“You see,” the Colonel said unhappily, “Hilary sets such store by that sort of thing. She considered, and one can’t say without cause, that if he learnt that she had been embroidering he would take a grave view. I blame myself, I blame myself entirely, but when she persisted I told her that she should put all that nonsense out of her head and I’m afraid I went further than that.”
“He told her,” said his wife, “without of course implicating Moult, that she came from a sound but not in the least grand sort of background, quite humble in fact, and she — from something he said — she’s quick, you know — she realized that she’d been born out of wedlock. Fred told her it wouldn’t be honourable to marry Hilary letting him think all this nonsense. Fred said that if Hilary loved her the truth wouldn’t stop him.”
“I — warned her —” the Colonel said and stopped.
“That if she didn’t tell him, you would.”
The Colonel opened his eyes as wide as saucers: “Yes. I did. How did you know?” he said.
“I guessed,” Alleyn lied.
<
br /> There was a long silence.
“Oh, yes?” said Mrs. Forrester with a gimlet glance at the wardrobe door.
The Colonel made a helpless gesture with his thin hands. “What is so dreadful,” he said, “what I cannot reconcile myself to believe is that — that the —”
He got up and walked over to the windows, Mrs. Forrester made a portentous grimace at Alleyn.
“—that when she attacked Moult she mistook him for you?” Alleyn suggested.
He nodded.
“Believe me, Colonel,” Alleyn said, going to him. “You need have no misgivings about that. She knew it was Moult. Believe me.”
The Colonel gazed at him. “But — I — of course one is relieved in a way. Of course. One can’t help it? But — Moult? Why my poor Moult? Why her —? No!” he cried out. “No. I don’t want to hear. Don’t tell me.”
But Alleyn told Hilary.
He and Hilary and, at the latter’s entreaty, Troy, sat together in the study. The police, apart from Alleyn’s driver had gone and so had Cressida and so, in a mortuary car, had her father, Alfred Moult.
As if to promote a kind of phony symbolism, the sun had come out and the snow was melting.
Hilary said to Troy. “But you see she’s so very beautiful. That’s what diddled me, I suppose. I mean, all her ongoings and rather tedious conversation, for me was filtered through her loveliness. It reached me as something rather endearing — or, to be honest, didn’t reach me at all.” He fell into a brief reverie. The look that Troy had secured in her painting — the faint smirk — crept into the corners of his mouth. “It’s all quite dreadful,” he said, “and of course, in a way I’m shattered. I promise you — shattered. But — I understand from Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed, she really did tell me the most awful whoppers. I mean — ‘Tottenham’ and so on.”