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Mervyn, Kittiwee and Vincent stood in a wet, dismal and shivering group in the middle of the room. Kittiwee mopped his great dimpled face and every now and then, like a baby, caught his breath in a belated sob.
“Now then,” Alleyn said. “I suppose you three know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve tried to obstruct the police in the execution of their duty, which is an extremely serious offence.”
They broke into a concerted gabble.
“Pipe down,” he said. “Stop telling me you didn’t do him. Nobody’s said anything to the contrary. So far. You could be charged as accessories after the fact, if you know what that means.”
Mervyn, with some show of dignity, said: “Naturally.”
“All right. In the meantime I’m going to tell you what I think is the answer to your cockeyed behaviour. Get in front of the fire, for pity’s sake. I don’t want to talk to a set of castanets.”
They moved to the hearthrug. Pools formed round their boots, and presently they began to smell and steam. They were a strongly contrasted group: Kittiwee with his fat, as it were, gone soggy; Vincent, ferret-like with the weathered hide of his calling; and Mervyn, dark about the jaws, black-browed and white-faced. They looked at nobody. They waited.
Alleyn eased his throbbing arm a little further into his chest and sat on the edge of the table. Mr. Fox cleared his throat, retired into a sort of self-made obscurity, and produced a notebook.
“If I’ve got this all wrong,” Alleyn said, “the best thing you can do is to put me right, whatever the result. And I mean that. Really. You won’t believe me, but really. Best for yourselves on all counts. Now. Go back to the Christmas tree. The party. The end of the evening. At about midnight, you,” he looked at Vincent, “wheeled the dismantled tree in a barrow to the glasshouse wreckage under the east wing. You tipped it off under Colonel Forrester’s dressing-room window near a sapling fir. Right?”
Vincent’s lips moved inaudibly.
“You made a discovery. Moult’s body, lying at the foot of the tree. I can only guess at your first reaction. I don’t know how closely you examined it, but I think you saw enough to convince you he’d been murdered. You panicked in a big way. Then and there, or later, after you’d consulted your mates —”
There was an involuntary shuffling movement, instantly repressed.
“I see,” Alleyn said. “All right. You came indoors and told Blore and these two what you’d found. Right?”
Vincent ran his tongue round his lips and spoke.
“What say I did? I’m not giving the O.K. to nothing. I’m not concurring, mind. But what say I did? That’d be c’rrect procedure, wouldn’t it? Report what I seen? Wouldn’t it?”
“Certainly. It’s the subsequent ongoings that are not so hot.”
“A chap reports what he seen to the authorities. Over to them.”
“Wouldn’t you call Mr. Bill-Tasman the authority in this case?”
“A chap puts it through the right cha
“I think we’ve all taken the point about what you’re not saying. Let’s press on, shall we, and arrive at what you do say. Let’s suppose you did come indoors and report your find to Mr. Blore. And to these two. But not to Nigel, he being a bit tricky in his reactions. Let’s suppose you four came to a joint decision. Here was the body of a man you all heartily disliked and whom you had jointly threatened and abused that very morning. It looked as if he’d been done to death. This you felt to be an acute embarrassment. For several reasons. Because of your records. And because of singular incidents occurring over the last few days: booby-traps, anonymous messages, soap in the barley water, and so on. And all in your several styles.”
“We never —” Mervyn began.
“I don’t for a moment suggest you did. I do suggest you all believed Moult had perpetrated these unlovely tricks in order to discredit you, and you thought that this circumstance, too, when it came to light, would incriminate you. So I suggest you panicked and decided to get rid of the corpse.”
At this juncture Blore came in. He wore a lush dressing gown over silk pyjamas. So would he have looked, Alleyn thought, if nocturnally disturbed in his restaurant period before the advent of the amorous busboy.
“I understand,” he said to Alleyn, “sir, that you wished to see me.”
“I did and do,” Alleyn rejoined. “For your information, Blore, Alfred Moult’s body has been found in the packing case, supporting Nigel’s version of the Bill-Tasman effigy. These men were about to remove the whole shooting box on a sledge. The idea, I think, was to transfer it to an appropriate sphere of activity where, with the unwitting aid of bulldozers, it would help to form an artificial hillock overlooking an artificial lake. End result, an artifact known, appropriately, as a folly. I’ve been trying to persuade them that their best course — and yours, by the way — is to give me a factual account of the whole affair.”
Blore looked fixedly at the men, who did not look at him.
“So: first,” Alleyn said, “did Vincent come to you and report his finding of the body on Christmas night? Or, rather, at about ten past midnight, yesterday morning?”
Blore dragged at his jaw and was silent.
Vincent suddenly blurted out. “We never said a thing, Mr. Blore. Not a thing.”
“You did, too, Vince,” Kittiwee burst out. “You opened your great silly trap. Didn’t he, Merv?”
“I never. I said ‘if.’ ”
“If what?” Blore asked.
“I said supposing. Supposing what he says was right it’d be the c’rrect and proper procedure. To report to you. Which I done. I mean —”
“Shut up,” Mervyn and Kittiwee said in unison.
“My contention,” Alleyn said to Blore, “is that you decided, among you, to transfer the body to the packing case there and then. You couldn’t take it straight to the dumping ground because in doing so you would leave your tracks over a field of unbroken snow for all to see in the morning and also because any effort you made to cover it at the earthworks would be extremely difficult in the dark and would stand out like a sore thumb by the light of day.
“So one of you was taken with the very bright notion of transferring it to the packing case, which was destined for the earthworks anyway. I suppose Vincent wheeled it round in his barrow and one or more of you gave him a hand to remove the built-up box steps, to open the side of the case, stow away the body, and replace and re-cover the steps. It was noticed next morning that the northern aspect appeared to have been damaged by wind and rain but there had been a further fall of snow which did something to restore them.”
Alleyn waited for a moment. Kittiwee heaved a deep sigh. His associates shuffled their feet.
“I really think we’d all better sit down,” Alleyn said. “Don’t you?”
They sat in the same order as in yesterday’s assembly. Mr. Fox, after his habit, remained unobtrusively in the background, and the driver kept his station in front of the door.
“I wonder,” Alleyn said, “why you decided to shift the case at five o’clock this morning? Had you lost your collective nerve? Had its presence out there become a bit more than some of you could take? Couldn’t you quite face the prospect of dragging it away in the full light of morning and leaving it to the bulldozers to cover? What were you going to do with it? Has the storm produced some morass in the earthworks or the lake site into which it could be depended upon to sink out of sight?”
They shifted their feet and darted sidelong glances at him and at each other. “I see. That’s it. Come,” Alleyn said quietly, “don’t you think you’d better face up to the situation? It looks like a fair cop, doesn’t it? There you were and there’s the body. You may not believe me when I tell you I don’t think any of you killed him, but I certainly don’t intend, at this point, to charge any of you with doing so. You’ve conspired to defeat the ends of justice, though, and whether you’ll have to face that one is another matter. Our immediate concern is to find the killer. If you’re helpful rather than obstructive and behave sensibly we’ll take it into consideration. I’m not offering you a bribe,” Alleyn said. “I’m trying to put the situation in perspective. If you all want a word together in private you may have it, but you’ll be silly if you use the opportunity to cook up a dish of cod’s wallop. What do you say? Blore?”