Tied Up in Tinsel

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 fu

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 fu

“ ‘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 stu

“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 scu

“I’d have thought it a psychological impossibility. He’s walked straight out of Wi