“I know. Our chaps went into that pretty thoroughly and elicited the fact that, as each member was responsible for paying for the hire of his own costume, there was an unresolved argument between Collis and Carson—the two who took the parts of Ford and Page—as to whose job it was to send for the missing sword. Neither would give way, so no second sword was worn at the dress rehearsal, but the real sword turned up on the night, borrowed, of course, from Colonel Batty-Faudrey’s collection at Squire’s Acre Hall.”
“Who borrowed it?”
“Ah, that’s where we come to a blank wall. Nobody at the Hall has any idea. Colonel and Mrs Batty-Faudrey had gone out to dinner—a private invitation from the Mayor, apparently—the servant who answered the door could give only the vaguest description of the visitor—“he wore a raincoat and a trilby and spoke educated”—and Giles Faudrey, told of the request to borrow a sword, “had said to bung him up to the long gallery, and then you can go to bed. Tell him to help himself. I’ll toddle up there as soon as I’ve finished my chapter”. We’ve tackled Giles, of course, but he says that he forgot all about the fellow until he heard the front door being shut, and so never saw him at all. Evidence obtained from Mrs Batty-Faudrey in support of this is that whenever Giles has an interesting book he becomes so much absorbed that he probably wouldn’t notice if the room was on fire. His powers of concentration were out of the ordinary. This statement was slightly qualified by Colonel Batty-Faudrey, who added that Giles was a lazy lie-about who ought to be in the Army, where they’d occupy his time for him and teach him a few manners into the bargain. Giles, it appears, has no consideration for anybody. Comes and goes as he pleases, and at all hours of the day and night, is a supercilious puppy, leaves his car outside the front door because he’s too bone-lazy to put it away now there’s no manservant to do it for him, and, to be brief, is, generally speaking, the Colonel’s pet pain in the neck.”
“Where was Giles when the sword was borrowed?” asked Dame Beatrice. “In which room, I mean.”
“In the library. It’s a ground-floor room. The long gallery, as you probably know, is on the first floor.”
“At what time, approximately, did the sword-borrower arrive?”
“Soon after half-past ten. He came in a car, but the servant can’t speak to the make or the number. That’s natural enough, of course.”
“And at just after half-past ten, Colonel and Mrs Batty-Faudrey had not returned from their dinner-party? I wonder when the visitor left?”
“Giles puts it at about a quarter to eleven, but can’t be sure. The servant didn’t hear the car drive away. Colonel and Mrs Batty-Faudrey didn’t get back until half-past eleven because the Mayor had run a series of cine-films after dinner, and as one of them showed the Mayoress and the Mayoral children on holiday in Spain, including a visit to Gibraltar, where the Colonel had once been stationed, the session had been protracted.”
“So, except for the servant, who is unable to give any useful description of the visitor, nobody saw him at all? Nevertheless, a visitor came, and at a time which indicates that the dress rehearsal was over.”
“I know. Oh, there’s no doubt about its having been one of the actors. Nobody else would have bothered whether a sword was missing from the play or not.”
“I suppose the visitor, left to himself, didn’t borrow two swords while he was about it?”
“We put that theory to Giles Faudrey, but both he and the Colonel dismissed it. All the same, the medical evidence showed that the wound must have been caused by an instrument having the same measurements, so to speak, as the first few inches of the borrowed sword, and our inference still is that a precisely similar sword was used, so our men had a very good look at the rest of the Batty-Faudrey armoury. It contains three other precisely similar swords, all of their hilts well finger-printed by Giles and the Colonel, who keep them clean—one of the very few jobs which Giles deigns to undertake.”
“When were they last cleaned, I wonder?”
“According to the Colonel, his wife and Giles, on the morning of the pageant. Mrs Batty-Faudrey insisted on their being given a special bit of spit and polish because she was having all the notables to tea in the long gallery that afternoon. She was rather peevish, it seems, about anything having been lent, because it spoilt the symmetry.”
“It looks bad for the Colonel and young Mr Faudrey, does it not?”
“We can’t go as far as that, you know. It’s true that neither of them has an alibi for the time of the murder. Both were out for the evening and so was Mrs Batty-Faudrey. She went to spend the evening with her sister who lives in Maidenhead, but, although the Colonel drove her there, leaving Squire’s Acre at just after six, he merely dumped her, drove on into North Oxford and looked up some friends of his own. He hasn’t any alibi, because he did not get to North Oxford until well after the murder had been committed. His story of having trouble with the car on Henley Fair-Mile may sound a little thin, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true. Besides, he doesn’t seem to have had the shadow of a motive for plotting Luton’s death. I don’t suppose he even knew the chap.”
“Oh, yes, he did,” said Laura, who, except for one remark, had been a silent listener to the conversation. She rehearsed the incident of the girl on the Colonel’s knee at the Squire’s Acre masque, and referred also to the donkey which had turned a dignified display of dressage into a comic turn.
“And Luton was thought to be responsible for both,” she added. “He seems to have been known for a practical joker of a harmless sort of type. Once, in one of the drama club’s efforts, he let off a gun in the wings instead of bursting a paper bag.”
“They’re not the kind of things you kill a man for doing,” said Gavin. “You’d have to be potty to take them to heart to that extent, and, whatever the Colonel is, he certainly isn’t insane.”
“What about young Mr Faudrey?” asked Dame Beatrice. “Is it known how he spent the evening?”
“Oh, Giles says he dined on some cold stuff he found in the pantry, read a book for a bit, became bored and so went out in his car, picked up a girl and took her out for a night drive and a late supper. He didn’t pick her up until nearly nine o’clock, though, so he has no alibi for the time of the murder, but there, again, like his uncle, he had no motive for it, either.”
“He’s the one for my money, all the same,” said Laura. “A nasty, mean little bit of work if ever I saw one. Look at the way he thought he could pull his rank with old Kitty, and ride beside the float with that frightful girl on it! Look at the way he showed off on the schoolboys’ trampoline in front of the whole of Brayne! Look at the way he flaunted that same beastly girl in front of his aunt and uncle and the Mayor and Mayoress! Kitty told me all about that. It was disgusting behaviour. He’s a rotten little cad. Moreover, although he pretended to treat the donkey episode as a joke, he was just as livid about it as his aunt and uncle were.”
“All this doesn’t add up to murder,” said Gavin patiently. “In fact, what it does add up to is that it is far more likely somebody would have murdered him, rather than the other way about.”
“I suppose the police have returned the borrowed sword to the Colonel by this time?” said Dame Beatrice.
“Oh, yes. They had no option, once it was established that that particular sword could not possibly have been the weapon. There’s one interesting point about that, though. There were traces of blood on some of the rags that constituted the dirty linen in the clothes-basket. The rags, it seems almost certain, had been used to wipe the blood off a knife-blade of some sort.”