“And she never laid eyes on him before,” the colonel said after she’d left the room, “and yet Cissy Eglantine saw Rathburn give her a significant glance.”
“Cissy could be mistaken,” Carolyn said, “or Rathburn could have recognized Leona even if Leona didn’t recognize him. Or he could have thought he knew her even if he didn’t.”
“Or she could be lying,” I said.
“Or she could be lying. Anybody could be lying about anything, couldn’t they? You know those party games where one person’s the murderer, and when you interrogate all the players, everybody except the murderer has to tell the truth? Well, that’s what this is like, except it isn’t.” The colonel looked puzzled, and I suppose I did, too. “Because any of them could be lying and it wouldn’t prove anything,” she explained. “Not necessarily. Suppose Jonathan and Leona had a brief fling twenty years ago when they were both counselors at Camp Yahrzeit. That would be reason enough for him to give her a significant glance, and it might also be reason enough for her to insist she’d never met him before, no matter who killed him.”
We tossed that back and forth, and wound up agreeing with her. Anybody could lie, not just the murderer. It didn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it was.
It left me wondering at the point of our efforts. I’d deliberately turned things around during our session with Cissy, switching from a clinical look at alibis and schedules to a more gossipy, anecdotal approach. After she’d left the room I had explained why.
“You described me as an amateur sleuth,” I told Carolyn, “and that’s what all three of us are, amateurs. We all have a little experience that might prove useful, but we’re not cops. A professional approach won’t work for us. But an amateur approach, where people wind up telling us the kind of observations and inferences they wouldn’t dream of sharing with a policeman, well, that might be fruitful.”
And I suppose it had been, in a way. We’d since learned from Quilp that Gordon Wolpert was a picky eater and not to be trusted, and in due course we learned from Wolpert that Earlene Cobbett, the freckled chambermaid so distraught over Orris’s fatal fall, had been noisily ill several mornings in succession. “Now that doesn’t mean the girl is in the family way,” he said, “or that Orris put her there, and even if she is and he did, that doesn’t begin to implicate either of them or anyone else in the events you’re attempting to investigate.” But we’d said we wanted to know what he had observed, and he’d heard her retching three mornings in a row, so he was reporting it.
But what good did it do us to know it? What profit was there in having learned that Miss Dinmont danced in the nude, or that Millicent Savage peeped at keyholes? What difference did it make if Miss Hardesty had had words with the cook, or that Dakin Littlefield had been spotted casting speculative glances at Molly Cobbett?
It was Mrs. Colibri who’d reported Littlefield’s evident interest in the downstairs maid. Lettice in turn had Molly sized up as a saucy tart ready to throw herself at anything in pants. (The most interesting thing about her observation was Carolyn’s reaction to it; she looked down at herself to make sure she wasn’t wearing a skirt.) “My own husband hasn’t noticed the little tramp,” Lettice added, “but we’re on our honeymoon, and that makes a difference. I’m sure the rest of the men have noticed, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have given her a tumble.”
If Dakin had entertained thoughts of luring the downstairs maid upstairs, he was keeping them to himself. According to him, he hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the staff, or to the other guests either. Nor was he much interested in our inquiry, or in staying any longer than he had to at Cuttleford House.
“In the morning,” he said, “we’re out of here.” He tossed his head, a gesture that someone must have told him showed off his wavy hair. “I understand if you walk downstream a ways there’s a place where you can get across the creek without breaking your neck in the process. Then it’s just a matter of finding your way out to the main road. It’s too late to try it now, but as soon as the sun’s up that’s what Lettice and I are going to do.”
“But there’s been murder done,” the colonel told him. “I thought it was agreed that we would all remain here until the police arrive.”
“Maybe that’s what you thought,” Dakin said, “but so what? I didn’t agree to anything, and the rest of you haven’t got any authority over me. Once we get out of here we’ll call the cops and they’ll be out here like a shot, and isn’t that what you people want?”
“Yes, but-”
“I don’t know why the hell I ever came here in the first place,” he went on. “It was Lettice’s idea, and don’t ask me where she got it from. This place is supposed to be so exclusive and special, and all I see is a run-down pile of bricks run by a dizzy dame with a drunk for a husband. Every place you go nowadays you got satellite TV with fifty or a hundred channels, and this dump can’t even put together an old black-and-white portable set with a rabbit-ear antenna. Who in his right mind would come to a place like this?”
“Mrs. Eglantine is perfectly stable,” the colonel said, “and Nigel is hardly an alcoholic simply because he’s developed a palate for malt whisky. And there are special pleasures to be found in the absence of television. As for what sort of person would willingly come here, I may say that I myself am pleased to spend six months a year here.”
“I rest my case,” Dakin said. “This investigation of yours is a lot of crap, and so’s the idea of everybody tripling up in kinky little trios. I’m with my wife, and the two of us’ll be sticking together, and everybody else can just stay the hell away from us. And in the morning we’re gone, and I’ll tell you, I’ll be glad to get out of this nuthouse.”
I could see his point.
“It’s hopeless,” I announced. “I’ve got a notebook full of scribbles, and I’m no closer to naming the murderer than I was when we started. When the police crack this case, they’ll do it by breaking down alibis and asking hard questions and analyzing physical evidence. We can’t do any of that. We’ve got no authority, and when people tell us things anyway we don’t know what to make of it. All we can hope to do is keep everyone else alive until the cops get here, and I don’t know when that will be, and neither does anybody else. Jesus, is it snowing again?”
“I think it’s just blowing around,” Carolyn said.
“Well, I don’t. I think it’s fresh snow, and I think it’s falling, and maybe it’ll go on like that all night. I don’t know what to do.”
“Keep a stiff upper lip,” Blount-Buller advised.
“I’ll certainly try,” I said, “but…”
There was a knock on the door. I went over and opened it, and Raffles came in. He usually scratches, and he’s not very good at that, and I was trying to figure out how he’d managed to knock when I realized that Molly Cobbett was standing there, waiting to be acknowledged before she said anything.
“Yes, Molly,” I said.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, “and yours, ma’am, and yours as well, sir-”
“What is it, Molly?”
“It’s dinner, sir. Not wanting to disturb you, but it’s served, and they’re all in the dining room. Except for those as are in the bar, having a drink before dinner.”
“A drink before dinner,” I said.
“Yes, sir. It sharpens the appetite, Mr. Eglantine says.”
“Well, then,” I said. “We’d all better have one, don’t you think? Everybody knows you can’t trust a picky eater.”
CHAPTER Nineteen
Dinner, it turned out, was the joint effort of Cissy Eglantine and the Cobbett cousins. There’d been some leftover ham in the refrigerator, and they’d combined it with mashed potatoes and boiled cabbage and diced carrots and bacon drippings in what Cissy called an old English recipe. It was evidently something of a staple in the Cobbett clan. “You takes what you has got left,” Earlene explained, “and you cooks it all together like. If your people be really hungry, they will eat it.”