He looked hopefully down the table, but he’d left it too late. We’d all had a long hard day, and we were all of us extremely hungry. In fact, most of us had started the soup before he’d finished his first sentence. Nothing stimulates the appetite like an unexpected proximity to death. So we all tucked in. The food was excellent, and everyone gave it their full attention. But even the best food couldn’t stop these people from talking for long; not when they all had so much they wanted to say. After a little surreptitious prompting from Khan, Melanie started the ball rolling.
‘Walter!’
‘Yes, dear?’ he said immediately. ‘Have I forgotten something?’
‘I demand to know why you felt the need to bring an armed bodyguard into our house, masquerading as a butler!’
Walter looked at Khan, who just shrugged. Walter patted Melanie’s hand comfortingly. ‘Just being cautious, my dear. Alex drew my attention to some rather worrying hate mail, aimed at me and the company, so I decided we would all be a lot safer with a professional security expert on hand. I think you’ll all agree; Jeeves has proved a first-class butler …’
‘The Colonel is still dead,’ I said, and Walter had no reply to that. I looked at Khan. ‘So; Alex. As head of the company these days, you must have known about Jeeves all along?’
‘No,’ said Khan. ‘I didn’t. Walter didn’t see fit to inform me.’
He glared at Walter, who met his gaze unflinchingly. ‘I don’t have to tell you everything, Alex. I am still capable of making my own decisions.’
‘Is that why my James is dead?’ Diana said loudly. ‘Was he killed because of these threats to you and your damned company? Are you responsible for our son’s death?’
Walter looked at her, helplessly, and then looked at me. I nodded, took the envelope out of my pocket, removed the letter, and read out the contents to the whole company. And then I passed the letter down the table, so everyone could look at it for themselves. To see I wasn’t exaggerating. So I could look at them, looking at the Colonel’s last words. Because I felt the need to stir things up a little. They were all clearly intrigued by the letter’s contents, but they also seemed equally surprised and equally baffled. The letter went up the table and down the other side, and ended up with Roger, who didn’t want to give it up until he’d had his say. Penny cut him off with a hard look and kept on glaring at him until he reluctantly handed the letter back to me. I put it away again.
‘I think the time for secrets is past,’ said Khan, not looking at anyone in particular. ‘We need to know, we have a right to know, just what the hell is going on here. And exactly what it is you and the Colonel do, Mister Jones, that has brought this … horror, here.’
‘Damn right!’ said Roger.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to sound like I was. ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to nuke the house from orbit, just to be sure. You could say, I was the Colonel’s Jeeves. I solved problems for him. Protecting those who needed protecting from bad things, and putting the hard word on people who deserved it. Except, unlike Jeeves, I don’t carry a gun. Never have. Don’t believe in them. Now, I hate to rain on everyone’s parade, but I can’t let you hide behind a false sense of security any longer.’
I explained to them why the Colonel simply couldn’t have been killed where Penny and I found him. That the lack of blood made it clear it was a body dump. And that the murderer was almost certainly sitting right there at the table, hiding in plain sight, hoping to go unnoticed till the storm passed and they could make their escape.
‘Only, that isn’t going to happen,’ I said. ‘Because I will find the killer first.’
‘And put the hard word on him?’ said Penny.
‘He killed my Colonel,’ I said. And something in my voice made everyone at the table shiver, just for a moment.
‘Why didn’t you tell us all this before?’ said Khan.
‘Because you weren’t ready to hear it,’ I said.
People were looking back and forth around the table, staring into familiar faces, looking for something out of place. They all seemed to accept my logic, even if none of them were happy about it. Here and there, hands moved a little closer to the knives by their plates, as though feeling the need for something like a weapon. Everyone was eyeing up everyone else and wondering if they could take them. Or outrun them.
‘So,’ I said, and everyone’s eyes snapped back to me. I did my best to smile reassuringly. ‘It’s time to establish who has an alibi. See if we can rule anyone out. Where were you all, when the Colonel was murdered?’
‘But … we don’t know when James was killed, do we?’ said Melanie.
I looked at Walter. ‘You said the Colonel arrived here very late, last night. Can you remember what time it was when he finally retired to his room?’
‘Half-past two in the a.m.,’ said Walter, very firmly. ‘I remember, because James pointed out how long we’d been talking, and we both laughed. We would have gone on, but we were both tired out. If I’d known it was the last time I would ever talk with him … Anyway, I escorted him upstairs. I’d put him back in his old room; the Tiger Lily.’
‘We only have your word for it that that’s the right time,’ said Roger, bullishly.
‘Really, Roger!’ said Penny. ‘You can’t call Daddy a liar to his face! I won’t have it!’
‘Assume, for the moment, that Walter’s memory is correct,’ I said. ‘That means the Colonel had to be murdered some time after two thirty a.m., and before four thirty p.m., when Penny and I found the body. Which is a hell of a gap, complicated by the frozen state of the body. He had to have been there for some time before we found him, to have frozen so solidly. Everyone; think hard. Do any of you remember anyone here going missing, during that period? As in, unaccounted for? Not being where you would expect them to be?’
I looked up and down the table, where everyone was busy looking at everyone else. They would all have liked to accuse someone, either to pay off some old score, or just to make themselves feel better … but none of them felt justified in pointing the finger, just yet.
‘I was with Walter,’ Melanie said finally.
‘And I was with Sylvia,’ said Diana.
‘I’ve spent most of the day talking business with Walter, or Roger,’ said Khan.
‘And Roger’s been hanging around me pretty much non-stop,’ said Penny.
She didn’t sound particularly happy about that. Roger started to bristle, remembered where he was, and subsided again.
‘We have to be realistic,’ Walter said heavily. ‘Any one of us could have slipped away, for perfectly justifiable reasons … Disappeared for a while, without anyone noticing or thinking twice about it. How could we know what was going to be significant and what wasn’t? It’s a big house, and we’ve all been coming and going. None of us has an alibi that’s worth a damn.’
‘We’ve locked the killer inside the house with us,’ said Khan. And no one had anything else to say, after that.
I wished the Colonel was there. He was always so much better at this sort of thing than I ever was.
For want of anything better to do, we all started eating again. Course after course. Partly to keep us occupied; mainly because no one wanted to go anywhere. There might be a killer in the room, but there was still safety in numbers. We ate everything on the trolley, including the plum duff and custard, which was actually quite tasty, and drank a lot of tea and coffee. We talked of various things, in brittle artificial tones, looking for hidden meanings in everyone’s words. Circling around the subject no one wanted to discuss, but which we couldn’t stop thinking about. I was still thinking hard and getting nowhere, when Melanie suddenly stood up.
‘Walter needs his rest,’ she said firmly. ‘Look at him; nodding off in his chair. He needs to lie down properly, or he won’t be able to get up at all tomorrow.’
‘I’m too tired to argue with you,’ said Walter. He allowed Melanie to help him to his feet, leaning heavily on her for support. And then he stopped and looked at me. ‘You did say … you thought we should all stick together.’