“We are only just in time, my dear Dalgliesh,” he said when they arrived. “The engines of destruction are assembled. That ball on a chain looks like the eyeball of God, ready to strike. Let us make our number with the attendant artisans. You will have no wish to trespass, will you?”
The work of demolition had not yet begun but the inside of the house had been stripped and plundered, the great rooms echoed to their footsteps like gaunt and deserted barracks after the final retreat. They moved from room to room, Glatt mourning the forgotten glories of an age he had been born too late to enjoy; Dalgliesh with his mind on the somewhat more immediate and practical concerns.
The design of the house was simple and formalised. The first floor, on which were most of the main bedrooms, had a long corridor running the whole length of the facade. The master bedroom was at the southern end with two large windows giving a distant view of Winchester Cathedral tower. A communicating door led to a small dressing room.
The main corridor had a row of four identical large windows. The brass curtain rods and wooden rings had been removed (they were collector’s items now) but the ornate carved pelmets were still in place. Here must have hung pairs of heavy curtains giving cover to anyone who wished to slip out of view. And Dalgliesh noted with interest that one of the windows was exactly opposite the door of the main bedroom. By the time they had left Colebrook Croft and Glatt had dropped him at Winchester Station, Dalgliesh was beginning to formulate a theory.
His next move was to trace Marguerite Goddard if she were still alive. It took him nearly a week of weary searching, a frustrating trail along the South Coast from hotel to hotel. Almost everywhere his enquiries were met with defensive hostility. It was the usual story of a very old lady who had become more demanding, arrogant and eccentric as her health and fortune waned; an unwelcome embarrassment to manager and fellow guests alike. The hotels were all modest, a few almost sordid. What, he wondered, had become of the legendary Goddard fortune?
From the last landlady he learned that Miss Goddard had become ill, really very sick indeed, and had been removed six months previously to the local district general hospital. And it was there that he found her.
The ward sister was surprisingly young, a petite, dark-haired girl with a tired face and challenging eyes.
“Miss Goddard is very ill. We’ve put her in one of the side wards. Are you a relative? If so, you’re the first one who has bothered to call and you’re lucky to be in time. When she is delirious she seems to expect a Captain Brize-Lacey to call. You’re not he, are you?”
“Captain Brize-Lacey will not be calling. No, I’m not a relative. She doesn’t even know me. But I would like to visit her if she’s well enough and is willing to see me. Could you please give her this note.”
He couldn’t force himself on a defenceless and dying woman. She still had the right to say no. He was afraid she would refuse him. And if she did, he might never learn the truth. He wrote four words on the back page of his diary, signed them, tore out the page, folded it and handed it to the sister.
She was back very shortly.
“She’ll see you. She’s weak, of course, and very old but she’s perfectly lucid now. Only please don’t tire her.”
“I’ll try not to stay too long.”
The girl laughed:
“Don’t worry. She’ll throw you out soon enough if she gets bored. The chaplain and the Red Cross librarian have a terrible time with her. Third floor on the left. There’s a stool to sit on under the bed. We will ring the bell at the end of visiting time.”
She bustled off, leaving him to find his own way. The corridor was very quiet. At the far end, he could glimpse through the open door of the main ward the regimented rows of beds, each with its pale blue coverlet, the bright glow of flowers on some of the tables, and the laden visitors making their way in pairs to each bedside. There was a faint buzz of welcome, a hum of conversation. But no one was visiting the side wards. Here, in the silence of the sterile corridor, Dalgliesh could smell death.
The woman, propped high against the pillows in the third room on the left, no longer looked human. She lay rigidly, her long arms disposed like sticks on the coverlet. This was a skeleton clothed with a thin membrane of flesh beneath whose yellow transparency the tendons and veins were as plainly visible as an anatomist’s model. She was nearly bald and the high-domed skull under its spare down of hair was as brittle and vulnerable as a child’s. Only the eyes still held life, burning in their deep sockets with an animal vitality. But when she spoke her voice was distinctive and unwavering, evoking as her appearance never could the memory of imperious youth.
She took up his note and read aloud four words:
“It was the child. You are right, of course. The four-year-old Hubert Boxdale killed his grandfather. You signed this note Adam Dalgliesh. There was no Dalgliesh connected with the case.”
“I am a detective of the Metropolitan Police. But I’m not here in any official capacity. I have known about this case for a number of years from a dear friend. I have a natural curiosity to learn the truth. And I have formed a theory.”
“And now, like that poseur Aubrey Glatt, you want to write a book?”
“No. I shall tell no one. You have my promise.”
Her voice was ironic.
“Thank you. I am a dying woman, Mr. Dalgliesh. I tell you that, not to invite your sympathy which it would be an impertinence for you to offer and which I neither want nor require, but to explain why it no longer matters to me what you say or do. But I, too, have a natural curiosity. Your note, cleverly, was intended to provoke it. I should like to know how you discovered the truth.”
Dalgliesh drew the visitor’s stool from under the bed and sat down beside her. She did not look at him. The skeleton hands still holding his note did not move.
“Everyone in Colebrook Croft who could have killed Augustus Boxdale was accounted for, except the one person whom nobody considered, the small boy. He was an intelligent, articulate child. He was almost certainly left to his own devices. His nurse did not accompany the family to Colebrook Croft and the servants who were there over Christmas had extra work and also the care of the delicate twin girls. The boy probably spent much time with his grandfather and the new bride. She, too, was lonely and disregarded. He could have trotted around with her as she went about her various activities. He could have watched her making her arsenical face wash and, when he asked, as a child will, what it was for, could have been told ‘to make me young and beautiful.’ He loved his grandfather but he must have known that the old man was neither young nor beautiful. Suppose he woke up on that Boxing Day night overfed and excited after the Christmas festivities? Suppose he went to Allegra Boxdale’s room in search of comfort and companionship and saw there the basin of gruel and the arsenical mixture together on the washstand? Suppose he decided that here was something he could do for his grandfather?”
The voice from the bed said quietly:
“And suppose someone stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched him.”
“So you were behind the window curtains on the landing looking through the open door?”
“Of course. He knelt on the chair, two chubby hands clasping the bowl of poison, pouring it with infinite care into his grandfather’s gruel. I watched while he replaced the linen cloth over the basin, got down from the chair, replaced it with careful art against the wall and trotted out into the corridor and back to the nursery. About three seconds later, Allegra came out of the bathroom and I watched while she carried the gruel into my grandfather. A second later I went into the main bedroom. The bowl of poison had been a little heavy for Hubert’s small hands to manage and I saw that a small pool had been spilt on the polished top of the washstand. I mopped it up with my handkerchief. Then I poured some of the water from the jug into the poison bowl to bring up the level. It only took a couple of seconds and I was ready to join Allegra and my grandfather in the bedroom and sit with him while he ate his gruel.