Tied Up in Tinsel (15 page)

Alleyn listened for a moment and could hear nothing. He made a quick decision. He motioned Wrayburn to stay where he was and himself opened the door and walked straight in.

He did so to the accompaniment of a loud crash.

A man at the window turned to face him: a blond, pale man whom he had seen before, wearing dark trousers and an alpaca jacket.

“Good evening again,” Alleyn said. “I’ve made a mistake. I thought this was my wife’s room.”

“Next door,” the man barely articulated.

“Stupid of me. You must be Nigel, I think.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“I’ve been admiring your work in the courtyard. It really is quite something.”

Nigel’s lips moved. He was saying, inaudibly, “Thank you very much.”

The windowpane behind him streamed with driven rain. His head, face and the front of his jacket were wet.

“You’ve been caught,” Alleyn said lightly.

Nigel said: “It’s come down very sudden. I was — I was closing the window, sir. It’s very awkward, this window.”

“It’ll ruin your snow sculpture, I’m afraid.”

Nigel suddenly said, “It may be a judgment.”

“A judgment? On whom? For what?”

“There’s a lot of sin about,” Nigel said loudly. “One way and another. You never know.”

“Such as?”

“Heathen practices. Disguised as Christian. There’s hints of blasphemy there. Touches of it. If rightly looked at.”

“You mean the Christmas tree?”

“Heathen practices round graven images. Caperings. And see what’s happened to him.”

“What
has
happened to him?” asked Alleyn and wondered if he’d struck some sort of lunatic bonanza.

“He’s
gone
.”

“Where?”

“Ah! Where! That’s what sin does for you. I know. Nobody better. Seeing what I been myself.”

Nigel’s face underwent an extraordinary change. His mouth hung open, his nostrils distended, his white eyelashes fluttered and then, like a microcosm of the deluge outside, he wept most copiously.

“Now, look here —” Alleyn began but Nigel with an unconscionable roar fled from the room and went thudding down the corridor.

Wrayburn appeared in the doorway. “What the hell’s all that in aid of?” he asked. “Which of them was it?”

“That was Nigel, the second houseman, who once made effigies but became a religious maniac and killed a sinful lady. He is said to be cured.”

“Cured!”

“Although I believe Mr. Bill-Tasman has conceded that when Nigel remembers his crime he is inclined to weep. He remembered it just now.”

“I overheard some of his remarks. The chap’s certifiable. Religious maniac.”

“I wonder why he leaned out of the window.”

“He did?”

“I fancy so. He was too wet to match his story about just shutting it. And there’s a very little rain on the carpet. I don’t believe it was open until he opened it.”

“Funny!”

“It is, rather. Let’s have a look about, shall we?”

They found nothing in the bedroom more remarkable than the Forresters’ green-lined tropical umbrella. Nigel had turned down their bed, laid out their Viyella nightclothes, and banked up their fire. The windows were shut.

“Wouldn’t you think,” Mr. Wrayburn observed, “that they’d have heaters in these rooms? Look at the work involved! It must be dynamite.”

“He’s trying to re-create the past.”

“He’s lucky to have a lunatic to help him, then.”

They went through the bathroom with its soap, mackintosh and hair lotion smells. Mr. Wrayburn continued to exclaim upon the appointments at Halberds: “Bathrooms! All over the shop like an eight-star-plus hotel. You wouldn’t credit it.” He was somewhat mollified to discover that in the Colonel’s dressing-room a radiator had been built into the grate. It had been switched on, presumably by Nigel. “Look at that!” said Mr. Wrayburn. “What about his electrical bill! No trouble!”

“And here,” Alleyn pointed out, “are the Welsh fire irons. Minus the poker. Highly polished and, of course, never used. I think the relative positions of the fireplace, the bed, the window and the doors are worth noticing, Jack. If you come in from the bathroom, the window’s on your right, the door into the corridor on your left and the bed, projecting from the outside wall facing you, with the fireplace beyond it in the far wall. If I were to sit on the floor on the far side of the bed and you came through the bathroom door, you wouldn’t see me, would you?”

“No?” said Mr. Wrayburn, expecting an elaboration but getting none. Alleyn had moved to the far side of the bed: a single high-standing Victorian four-poster unadorned with curtains. Its authentic patchwork quilt reached to the floor and showed a sharp bulge at one side. He turned it back and exposed Colonel Forrester’s uniform box black-japanned, white-lettered, and quite noticeably dented and scarred about the padlock area.

“I do hate,” Alleyn said, sitting on his heels, “this going on a job minus my kit. It makes one feel such a damned, piddling amateur. However, Fox will bring it and in the meantime I’ve the Bill-Tasman lens. Look here, Jack. Talk of amateurism! This isn’t the handiwork of any master cracksman, is it?”

Mr. Wrayburn squatted down beside him. “Very clumsy attempt,” he agreed. “What’s he think he’d achieve? Silly.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said, using the lens, “a bit of hanky-panky with the padlock. Something twisted in the hoop.”

“Like a poker?”

“At first glance perhaps. We’ll have to take charge of this. I’ll talk to the Colonel.”

“What about the contents?”

“It’s big enough, in all conscience, to house the crown jewels but I imagine Mrs. Forrester’s got the lion’s share dotted about her frontage. Troy thinks they carry scrip and documents in it. And you did hear, didn’t you, that Moult has charge of the key?”

Wrayburn, with a hint of desperation in his voice, said, “I don’t know! Like the man said: you wouldn’t credit it if you read it in a book. I suppose we pick the lock for them, do we?”

“Or pick it for ourselves if not for them? I’ll inquire of the Colonel. In the meantime they mustn’t get their hands on it.”

Wrayburn pointed to the scarred area. “By Gum! I reckon it’s the poker,” he said.

“Oh for my Bailey and his dab-kit.”

“The idea being,” Wrayburn continued, following out his thought, “that some villain unknown was surprised trying to break open the box with the poker.”

“And killed? With the poker? After a struggle? That seems to be going rather far, don’t you think? And when you say ‘somebody’ —”

“I suppose I mean Moult.”

“Who preferred taking a very inefficient whang at the box to using the key?”

“That’s right — we dismiss that theory, then. It’s ridiculous. How about Moult coming in after he’d done his Christmas tree act and catching the villain at it and getting knocked on the head?”

“And then—?

“Pushed through the window? With the poker after him?”

“In which case,” Alleyn said, “he was transplanted before they searched. Let’s have a look at the window.”

It was the same as all the others: a sash window with a snib locking the upper to the lower frame.

“We’d better not handle anything. The damn’ bore of it is that with this high standard of house management the whole place will have been dusted off. But if you look out of this window, Jack, it’s at the top of the sapling fir where Bill-Tasman picked up the poker. His study is directly beneath us. And if you leant out and looked to your left, it would be at the southeast corner of the east wing. Hold on a jiffy. Look here.”

“What’s up?”

Alleyn was moving about, close to the window. He dodged his head and peered sideways through the glass.

“Turn off the lights, Jack, will you? There’s something out there — yes, near the top of the fir. It’s catching a stray gleam from somewhere. Take a look.”

Mr. Wrayburn shaded his eyes and peered into the night. “I don’t get anything,” he said. “Unless you mean a little sort of shiny wriggle. You can hardly catch it.”

“That’s it. Quite close. In the fir.”

“Might be anything. Bit of string.”

“Or tinsel?”

“That’s right. Blowing about.”

“So what?”

“So nothing, I daresay. A passing fancy. We’ve still got a hell of a lot to find out. About last night’s ongoings — the order of events and details of procedure and so on.”

“Mrs. Alleyn will be helpful, there, I make no doubt.”

“You know,” Alleyn said, austerely, “my views under that heading, don’t you?”

“That was before you took over, though.”

“So it was. And now I’m in the delirious position of having to use departmental tact and make routine inquiries with my wife.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Wrayburn dimly speculated, “she’ll think it funny.”

Alleyn stared at him. “You know,” he said at last, “you’ve got something there. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she did.” He thought for a moment. “And I daresay,” he said, “that in a macabre sort of way she’ll be, as usual, right. Come on. We’d better complete the survey. I’d like one more look at this blasted padlock, though.”

He was on his knees before it and Wrayburn was peering over his shoulder when Colonel Forrester said: “So you
have
found it. Good. Good. Good.”

He had come in by the bathroom door behind their backs. He was a little bit breathless but his eyes were bright and he seemed to be quite excited.

“I didn’t join the ladies,” he explained. “I thought I’d just pop up and see if I could be of any use. There may be points you want to ask about. So here I am and you must pack me off if I’m a nuisance. If one wasn’t so worried it would be awfully interesting to see the real thing. Oh — and by the way — your wife tells me that you’re George Alleyn’s brother. He was in the Brigade in my day, you know. Junior to me, of course: an ensign. In the Kiddies, I remember. Coincidence, isn’t it? Do tell me: what did he do after he went on the reserve? Took to the proconsular service, I seem to remember.”

Alleyn answered this inquiry as shortly as, with civility, he could. The Colonel sat on the bed and beamed at him, still fetching his breath rather short but apparently enjoying himself. Alleyn introduced Mr. Wrayburn, whom the Colonel was clearly delighted to meet. “But I oughtn’t to interrupt you both,” he said. “There you are in the thick of it with your magnifying glass and everything. Do tell me: what do you make of my box?”

“I was going to ask you about that, sir,” Alleyn said. “It’s a clumsy attempt, isn’t it?”

“Clumsy? Well, yes. But one couldn’t be anything else but clumsy with a thing like a poker, could one?”

“You know about the poker?”

“Oh rather! Hilary told us.”

“What, exactly, did he tell you?”

“That he’d found one in the fir tree out there. Now, that was a pretty outlandish sort of place for it to be, wasn’t it?”

“Did he describe it?”

The Colonel looked steadily at Alleyn for some seconds. “Not in detail,” he said, and after a further pause: “But in any case when we found the marks on the box we thought: ‘poker,’ B and I, as soon as we saw them.”

“Why did you think ‘poker,’ sir?”

“I don’t know. We just did. ‘Poker,’ we thought. Or B did, which comes to much the same thing. Poker.”

“Had you noticed that the one belonging to this room had disappeared?”

“Oh dear me, no. Not a bit of it. Not at the time.”

“Colonel Forrester, Troy tells me that you didn’t see Moult after he had put on your Druid’s robe.”

“Oh, but I did,” he said, opening his eyes very wide. “I
saw
him.”

“You did?”

“Well — ‘saw,’ you may call it. I was lying down in our bedroom, you know, dozing, and he came to the bathroom door. He had the robe and the wig on and he held the beard up to show me. I think he said he’d come back before he went down. I think I reminded him about the window and then I did go to sleep, and so I suppose he just looked in and went off without waking me. That’s what Mrs. Alleyn was referring to. I rather
fancy
, although I may be wrong here, but I rather
fancy
I heard him look out.”

“Heard him? Look out?”

“Yes. I told him to look out of the dressing-room window for Vincent with the sledge at the corner. Because when Vincent was there it would be time to go down. That was how we laid it on. Dead on the stroke of half-past seven it was to be, by the stable clock. And so it was.”

“What!” Alleyn exclaimed. “You mean —?”

“I like to run an exercise to a strict timetable and so, I’m glad to say, does Hilary. All our watches and clocks were set to synchronize. And I’ve just recollected: I
did
hear him open the window and I heard the stable clock strike the half-hour immediately afterwards. So, you see, at that very moment Vincent would signal from the corner and Moult would go down to have his beard put on, and — and there you are. That was, you might say, phase one of the exercise, what?”

“Yes, I see. And — forgive me for pressing it, but it is important — he didn’t present himself on his return?”

“No. He didn’t. I’m sure he didn’t,” said the Colonel very doubtfully.

“I mean — could you have still been asleep?”

“Yes!” cried the Colonel as if the Heavens had opened upon supreme enlightenment. “I could! Easily, I could. Of course!”

Alleyn heard Mr. Wrayburn fetch a sigh.

“You see,” the Colonel explained, “I do drop off after my Turns. I think it must be something in the stuff the quack gives me.”

“Yes, I see. Tell me — those fur-lined boots. Would he have put them on up here or in the cloakroom?”

“In the cloakroom. He’d put them all ready down there for me. I wanted to dress up here because of the big looking-glass, but the boots didn’t matter and they’re clumsy things to tramp about the house in.”

“Yes, I see.”

“You do think, don’t you,” asked the Colonel, “that you’ll find him?”

“I expect we will. I hope so.”

“I tell you what, Alleyn,” said the Colonel, and his face became as dolorous as a clown’s. “I’m afraid the poor fellow’s dead.”

“Are you, sir?”

“One shouldn’t say so, of course, at this stage. But — I don’t know — I’m very much afraid my poor old Moult’s dead. He was an awful ass in many ways but we suited each other, he and I. What do you think about it?”