Someone said something about Greta Garbo.
“I don’t mean that I want to be alone,” Mrs. Colibri said icily. “But I’d as soon not share my bed with anyone, thank you very much, and I’m afraid I’m old-fashioned enough to prefer privacy in the bath. Add in the virtual certainty that one of us would be paired with the murderer, and you begin to see the dimensions of the problem.”
“Threesomes,” I said.
“I beg your pardon!”
“Not at night,” I said hastily. “During waking hours. If we divide into groups of three, that means two people will be buddied up with the murderer.”
“Safety in numbers,” the colonel murmured.
“Just that,” I said. “If A and B are buddies, and A’s the killer, he can wait for a quiet moment and knock off B. But if C’s part of the party, then he can’t.”
“What about bedtime?” Miss Hardesty wondered.
“That’s more complicated,” I admitted. “Millicent, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go back to sleeping in your parents’ room. Sleeping arrangements for the rest of us will need a little more thought. I think, though, that Mrs. Colibri’s concerns about bathroom privacy are satisfied by this approach.”
“If I don’t want one person in the bath with me,” Mrs. Colibri said, “what on earth makes you think I’d be happier with two?”
“Because they’d be waiting outside,” I said, “keeping an eye on the door, and on each other. I’m sure there will be lots of details that need work, but I’m equally certain we can work them all out. We’re well motivated, and that’s a help.”
“That’s good sense,” the colonel said. “Carry on, Rhodenbarr.”
“Well,” I said, and put my glass down, wanting a clear head. “I guess the first thing to do is make sure we’re all here. I can’t think of anyone who’s missing, but I don’t have a list of all of us.” I patted my pockets. “Or anything to make a list with, either.”
“One moment,” Nigel said. He ducked out of the room and came back minutes later with a clipboard holding a yellow legal pad. The top sheet was blank, but a skilled investigator could have rubbed the side of a pencil point very gently over its surface to raise an impression of what had been written on the sheet above. Why anyone would want to do so, however, was quite beyond me.
“Thanks,” I said, and clicked the cap of my ballpoint pen a couple of times, and tested it with a quick squiggle in the margin. “This will do perfectly. But I should have stopped you.” He looked at me. “You went off by yourself,” I explained. “And that’s something none of us ought to do. Until we’ve got ourselves organized, can we agree that no one will leave the immediate area without a companion?”
“Two companions,” Lettice said. “Threesomes, remember?”
Threesomes indeed. Somehow the word had a special flavor coming from Mrs. Littlefield’s lips, and it threw me offstride for a moment. “Two companions,” I agreed. “Although one companion might be enough on a brief errand of the sort Nigel just ran. Just so no one goes off on his own.” Or her own? Or their own? The hell with it.
“Now,” I said, clicking my pen again. “Let’s start with the staff. Nigel Eglantine. Cissy Eglantine. Present and accounted for.” I wrote down both their names.
“And the two serving wenches,” Dakin Littlefield said.
“The upstairs maid,” I corrected, “Earlene Cobbett, and the downstairs maid, Molly Cobbett. Both here, I see.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” I said, and jotted down their names. “And Orris, of course, who is accounted for but not present. How do you spell his name?”
Cissy Eglantine spelled it. “Like the root,” she said.
“And his last name?”
“Cobbett,” Cissy said, and Earlene Cobbett let out a desperate sob. She seemed utterly undone by Orris’s death, and I’d wondered what they’d been to each other. The news that they shared a surname failed to clear up the nature of their relationship. Were they brother and sister? Husband and wife? All of the above?
My confusion must have shown, for Nigel Eglantine moved to clear it up. “There are a lot of Cobbetts in the region,” he said. “Molly and Earlene are cousins, and they’re both Cobbetts. And Orris was a cousin of both of them. Have I got that right, Molly?”
“Orris was cousin to Earlene, sir,” she said. “And cousin and uncle both to me, cousin on my father’s side and uncle on my mother’s.”
“My God,” Dakin Littlefield said. “They must all have webbed feet.”
“Or royal blood,” Nigel said. “The Cobbetts show about the same degree of inbreeding as the crowned heads of Europe.”
Orris, I’d written down, and now I wrote Cobbett after it. I looked at the name for a moment and then put a checkmark alongside it. I didn’t much like the way that looked, but decided that crossing it out would be even worse.
“Is that all?” I asked Nigel. “I know there are sometimes people behind the scenes whom one never sees, but who keep things running smoothly. Is there anyone else on staff I’ve left out?”
“I’m afraid that’s the lot,” he said. “We all work hard, you see, and put in long hours, so it doesn’t require very many of us.”
“Of course there’s Cook,” Cissy put in.
“Oh, yes,” Nigel said. “Quite right. Mustn’t forget Cook.”
I scanned the room. She’d been among us earlier, a comfortingly stout woman of a certain age who’d taken a glass of sherry and refilled it twice that I’d noticed.
“I don’t see her,” I said.
“I expect she’s gone to the kitchen.”
“But everyone’s supposed to stay right here.”
“I expect she slipped out before we decided that,” Nigel said, “or else she didn’t consider that rule as applying to herself.”
“Cooks are a law unto themselves,” the colonel agreed.
“She’d be preparing lunch now,” Cissy said. “I know it must seem as though we just got up from breakfast, but it’s been longer than that, actually, and she has lunch to prepare. I’d hate to call her away from the kitchen.”
Miss Dinmont wanted to know if she was alone in the kitchen. Because, she pointed out, we’d just agreed that no one was to be alone.
“It’s a bit different for Cook,” Nigel said. “She doesn’t much care for company in the kitchen.”
“And I’m sure she’ll be safe in there,” Cissy said. “Since we’re all out here, aren’t we?”
That brought another brief silence, reminding us that the “we” in that sentence presumably included the murderer. You’d think we’d have gotten used to the idea, but it kept taking us by surprise and bringing us up short.
“I’ll just put her on the list then,” I said. “I don’t believe I caught her name.”
Nigel and Cissy exchanged glances. “We just call her ‘Cook,’” Cissy said.
“She must have a name.”
“Of course,” she said, “but I can’t think what it is. Molly? Earlene?”
“Just ‘Cook,’ mum.”
“‘Cook’ is all, mum.”
“She has a name,” Nigel said. “I could look it up, but…”
“Not now,” I said, and wrote Cook on my list, then looked up. “I don’t suppose her name would be Cobbett,” I said. “Or would it?”
Nigel shook his head, and Molly assured me that Cook was no Cobbett, nor any kind of kin to Cobbetts.
“Just a wild guess,” I said. “And that’s all for the owners and staff of Cuttleford House? Now for the guests.”
Bernard Rhodenbarr.
Carolyn Kaiser.
Gregory Savage.
Leona Savage.
Millicent Savage.
Anne Hardesty.
Gloria Dinmont.
“I wonder,” Miss Dinmont said. “I don’t suppose I should say this, but…” She paused significantly and looked around. When no one urged her to go ahead and say it, she shot a peeved glance at her companion.