Tied Up in Tinsel

“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 si

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 house. 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.”