At this point Tim covered his chalk-white countenance with his hands and lowered his head. Avery put an arm around his shoulders. As he did so, his mind became crowded with bathetic images. He saw himself visiting Tim in prison every week, even if that meant for years. He would bake a cake with a file inside. Or smuggle in a rope beneath his poncho. At the thought of prison food, Avery felt his tummy start to chum. How would Tim survive?
“If you remember, Kitty”—Avery forced his attention back to what Tom was saying—“I asked you if you had noticed any change recently in your husband’s routine, and you said he had gone to work the Saturday morning before he died. I don’t know, Rosa, if you recall … ?”
“Never.” The first Mrs. Carmichael shook her head. “He was quite firm on that. Said he had enough of facts and figures during the week.”
“He had gone to the office, Kitty told me, to ‘call something in.’ A strange phrase, surely. One you’d be more likely to hear from the lips of a gambler than an accountant. Or a debt collector. Because that’s what the phrase means. You ‘call in’ a debt. And I believe this is what Esslyn was about to do. What was owed and for how long we don’t know. But he had apparently decided that it had gone on long enough.”
“But, Tom,” interrupted Joyce, her voice harsh and nervous, “you said he was killed because he knew something.”
“And also”—Nicholas took advantage of the breach— “owing someone money isn’t much fun, but it’s not the end of the world. Certainly not worth killing for. I mean, the worst that can happen is you get taken to court.”
“Oh, there was much more than that at stake. To discover precisely what, we have to go back to the point I reached earlier and ask again what happened several months ago—six, to be exact—to give Esslyn the confidence to start throwing his weight about?”
Barnaby paused then, and the silence lay ripe with suspicion and stabbed by startled looks. At first dense, it slowly became more lightsome, gathering point and clarity. Barnaby was never sure who first fingered the Everards. Certainly it was not him. But, as if telepathically, first one head, then another, pointed in their direction. Nicholas spoke.
“He got himself a pair of toadies.”
“I see nothing wrong—” rushed in Clive Everard. “Neither do I,” said Donald.
“—in becoming friendly with—”
“—in devotedly admiring—”
“—even venerating—”
“—someone of Esslyn’s undoubted talents—”
“—and remarkable skills.”
“You bloody hypocrites.” Barnaby’s voice was so quiet that for a moment people glanced around, uncertain from where that damning indictment had arisen. Troy knew, and his adrenaline shot up. Barnaby walked to the edge of the row in which the brothers were sitting and said still softly, “You malicious, wicked, meddling, evil-minded bastards.”
Pasty-faced, their nostrils pinched in tight with alarm, the Everards shrank closer together. Kitty gazed at them with dawning horror, Cully, unaware that she was gripping Nicholas’s arm very tight, half rose from her seat. Avery’s expression of misery was suddenly touched with a glow of hope. Joyce felt she would choke on the suspense, and Harold was nodding. His head wagged back and forth as if it were loose on his shoulders, like the head on those gross Chinese Buddhas found sometimes in antique shops.
“You’ve no call to speak to us like that,” cried one of the Everards, recovering fast.
“Since when has it been against the law to admire an actor?”
>“Admire.” Barnaby almost spat out the word, and the volume of his voice increased tenfold. He pushed his angry face close to theirs. “You didn’t admire him. You led him around like a bear with a ring through its nose. And he, poor bugger, never having had a friend in his life, thought no doubt that this was what friendship was. Court toadies? Quite the reverse. Whatever that might be.”
“Eminences grises?” suggested Boris.
“And directly responsible for his death.’’
At this, Donald Everard flew out of his seat. “You heard that!” he screamed, flapping his arms at the rest of the gathering. “That’s slander!”
“We shall sue!” shrieked his brother. “You can’t go around saying we killed Esslyn and get away with it.”
“We’ve got witnesses!”
“All these people!”
“I didn’t say you had killed him,” said Barnaby, stepping back from these hysterics with an expression of deep distaste. “I said I believed you were responsible for his death.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Not quite. As you’ll realize if you’ll stop flinging yourselves about and settle down to think about it.” When they had reluctantly, with many an injured cluck and toss of a gel-stiffened crest, reseated themselves, Barnaby carried on. “So we now have a puppet, a hollow man with someone pulling his strings. And what do they do, oh so subtly, so slyly, these puppeteers? At first they encourage intransigence. I can just hear it … ‘You’re not going to take that, are you? You’re the leading man … don’t you realize how powerful you are? They couldn’t do anything without you.’ But after a few weeks that rather modest mischief starts to pall. They’ve gone about as far as they can go with that one. So they look around for something more interesting, and I suspect it was about this time that Esslyn shared with them the information that was to instigate their grand design and lead directly to his death.
“In fact, it was something my sergeant said in the office today that pointed me in the right direction.” His sergeant, suddenly in the spotlight, attempted to look intelligent, modest, and invaluable. He also managed a surreptitious wink at Kitty, who promptly winked back. “He’s given to making feeble, atrociously unfunny jokes,” continued Barnaby (Troy immediately looked less intelligent), “the latest being a play on the word ‘putsch,’ but, as these things sometimes do, it reminded me of something very similar from a recent interview. I don’t know if you remember, Kitty… ?”
Suddenly addressed, Kitty, who was still ogling Troy, blushed and said, “Sorry?”
“You told me that Esslyn spoke to you of the dramatic effect he intended to make on the first night.”
“That’s right, he did.”
“And because he was admiring himself in his costume, you assumed that he referred to his own transformation.” “No—you said that, Tom. When you explained that funny French bit.” Barnaby almost repeated the phrase, making it a question, and Kitty said, “That’s right.”
“Are you sure?”
Kitty looked around. Something was amiss. People were staring at her. She suddenly felt cold. What had she done that they should stare so?
“Yes, Tom, quite sure. Why?”
“Because what I just said was not the same phrase.” So near though, and it had taken him two days to get it. “What I said—what Esslyn said—was ‘coup d’etat.’ A seizing of power.”
“Oh, God—” The fragment of sound from Deidre was almost inaudible, but David immediately handed the dog to his father and took her hand.
“Twice a phrase was misheard or misinterpreted. And in both instances the correct readings would have provided vital clues.”
“What was the other, Tom?” asked Boris, the only member of the group who seemed relaxed enough to speak.
“Esslyn tried to tell us with his dying breath of the plan that had undone him. Only one word, and that word was thought to be ‘bungled.’ But I performed a simple experiment earlier today, and I’m now quite sure the word in fact was ‘Uncle.’ And that if time had been granted him the next word would have been ‘Vanya.’ Isn’t that right, Harold?” Harold’s head continued to nod like a Chinese Buddha.