“When were you planning on telling her, Littlefield?”
“When we got to Aruba.” He turned to her. “I wanted to make it easy for you to act natural on the plane. As soon as we got there, I was planning to tell you everything.”
“But you didn’t go to Aruba,” I said. “You let her talk you into coming here.”
“Yeah,” he said, “and don’t ask me why. There’s people knocking each other off left and right, and I’m the one who winds up getting accused of murder.”
“You didn’t want to come here when I first mentioned it,” Lettice remembered, “and then you decided you liked the idea.”
“I saw how much it meant to you.”
“It didn’t mean that much to me. I thought it would be a lark, that’s all. And I said since we already had reservations in Aruba maybe we should go, and you said-”
“Jesus,” he said, “I just wanted to make you happy.”
“You thought you could hide out better here than you could in Aruba,” I cut in. “Especially if you didn’t bother to cancel the reservations. By the time the authorities figured out that you never boarded the plane, you’d have had a chance to cover your tracks pretty thoroughly. You’d stay here a few days until the trail got cold, and then you’d head on out. It wasn’t a bad idea, but you picked the wrong place to come to.”
“We all did,” he said with feeling. “Why anyone would want to stay at this pesthole is beyond me.”
There was a cry from Cissie Eglantine, hardly the sort of utterance one had come to expect from Earlene, but expressive all the same.
“I liked the place just fine myself,” I said, “until people started dropping like flies. But the minute you got here, everything went haywire.”
“Why?” the colonel wondered. “I’m not surprised this chap’s a thief. I thought him a bad hat and supposed he lived off women. He has that air about him.”
“Thanks a lot,” Littlefield said.
“But what was the connection between him and the other two, Rathburn and Wolpert? Why should his arrival put the match to the powder keg?”
“They must have all three been in on it,” Miss Dinmont said. “Conspiring together, thick as thieves.”
“That’s crap,” Littlefield said. “I never met either of those birds before in my life.”
The colonel cleared his throat. “And we’re to take your word for that, eh, sir?”
“I’ll take his word,” I said. “Whatever his plans might have been for after he left Cuttleford House, Littlefield came here planning nothing more than a quiet honeymoon weekend. But he walked right into the kind of coincidence that’s evidently damn near inescapable in English country houses.”
I glanced at Lettice. “Coming here was Mrs. Littlefield’s idea. She’d heard that there had been a late cancellation. She called, and she learned that there had indeed been a party who’d called to cancel, and she got the room.”
“So?”
“But I hadn’t canceled,” I said.
“You?”
“There was a point where I thought I would have to cancel,” I said, “but things worked out after all. I mentioned something to somebody, and word got to Mrs. Littlefield through the grapevine. You know how things get around.”
I hurried on, before it occurred to them to wonder how a bit of news could find its way from my lips to Lettice’s ears. “Here’s the point-someone else did call up to cancel, just in time for the Littlefields to get his room.”
“Cousin Beatrice’s Room,” Cissie said. “And a gentleman did call. I don’t know why I can’t remember his name.”
“Pettisham.”
“That’s it,” she said. “I remember he had an accent, and I thought that was odd, because the name is very English, isn’t it? Or at least it sounds English, although I don’t know that I’ve ever actually known anyone named Pettisham. Petty, certainly, and Pettibone, but not Pettisham.”
“Pettibone’s definitely an English name, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I would say so,” Nigel told me. “An old name, too. I’d guess there was a Pettibone came over with the Conqueror.”
“That would figure,” I said, “because the name’s an anglicization of the French. It combines two French words, petit and bon.”
“Small and good,” Mrs. Colibri translated. “Do you suppose the implication is that good things come in small packages?”
I glanced at Carolyn, who beamed at the very notion. “Pettisham’s been anglicized, too,” I said, “although I don’t know that there were any Pettishams among William’s troops at Hastings.”
“It would be possible to find out,” the colonel offered.
I told him I didn’t think we had to go back that far. “My guess is that it’s a much more recent name,” I said, “and that the two words it combines are petit and champ.”
“Small champion,” Carolyn said.
“Small plot of land,” Mrs. Colibri corrected. “Or, you know, like a field or meadow.”
“Sounds like the name of a smallholder or yeoman,” the colonel said. “And thus not terribly likely to have been one of the Conqueror’s Norman knights.”
“That’s some coincidence,” Littlefield said. “Not only did we call for a reservation, but the guy who canceled didn’t cross the Channel with the bastard king of England. What do you figure the odds would be on something like that?”
“The coincidence,” I said, “is that you both had the same last name.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Pettisham,” I said. “Petit champ. Small plot of land. Little field.”
“Jesus,” he said.
“The first time I met Gordon Wolpert, he got to talking about malt whisky. There were a lot of distilleries, he told me, although he’d always supposed it was a small field. That was the phrase he picked, though it didn’t fit the conversation that well, and he bore down on it, too, to stress it. Then he went on and used the phrase ‘a petty sham,’ and looked disappointed when I failed to react to it. When Pettisham called and canceled his booking, Mrs. Eglantine got the chart of room assignments and crossed out his name. A few hours later she wrote ‘Littlefield’ in the same space.”
“Who was Pettisham?” Millicent wanted to know.
“Cissie says he sounded foreign,” I said, “and he was certainly mixed up in some sort of foreign intrigue. I don’t know whether he was actually an agent of a foreign power, and I couldn’t say whether he was buying or selling, and whether the transaction involved secrets or valuables. The two men who could tell us are both dead.”
“Rathburn and Wolpert,” Carolyn said.
“That’s right. They were both waiting for him to turn up. Rathburn was keeping an eye on everybody and I guess Wolpert was keeping an eye on Rathburn. And then Dakin Littlefield arrived, with a glamorous companion and an arrogant manner and a guilty secret, and they both took action. Wolpert wasn’t sure how he was going to handle things, but he knew he didn’t want anyone getting away before he made his move. So he cut the ropes and dumped the bridge in the gully.”
“And Rathburn?”
“Made an approach to Littlefield. He was always scribbling away, so my guess would be he wrote out a note and passed it to you in the hallway.”
“He slipped it under the bedroom door,” Lettice said.
“I never saw any note,” her husband said.
“Don’t you remember? There was a folded sheet of yellow paper under our door when we went to the room. You picked it up and read it, and when I asked you what it was you said it was nothing.”
“Oh, that. Well, it was nothing. I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. Looking back, I guess this guy did have me mixed up with somebody else. I just thought he was a crank, or he stuck his little love note under the wrong door. So I crumpled it up and forgot about it.”