“Why did the family leave Halberds?”
“My dear, because they were ruined. They put everything they had into the West Indies and were ruined, very properly I daresay, by the emancipation of slaves. The house was sold off but owing to its situation nobody really fancied it and as the Historic Trust was then in the womb of time, it suffered the ravages of desertion and fell into a sort of premature ruin.”
“You bought it back?”
“Two years ago.”
“And restored it?”
“And am in process of restoring it. Yes.”
“At enormous cost?”
“Indeed. But, I hope you agree, with judgment and style?”
“Certainly. I have,” said Troy Alleyn, “finished for the time being.”
Hilary got up and strolled round the easel to look at his portrait.
“It is, of course, extremely exciting. I’m glad you are still to some extent what I think is called a figurative painter. I wouldn’t care to be reduced to a schizoid arrangement of geometrical propositions however satisfying to the abstracted eye.”
“No?”
“No. The Royal Antiquarian Guild (the Rag as it is called) will no doubt think the portrait extremely avant-garde. Shall we have our drinks? It’s half-past twelve, I see.”
“May I clean up, first?”
“By all means. You may prefer to attend to your own tools but if not, Mervyn, who you may recollect was a sign-writer before he went to gaol, would, I’m sure, be delighted to clean your brushes.”
“Lovely. In that case I shall merely clean myself.”
“Join me here, when you’ve done so.”
Troy removed her smock and went upstairs and along a corridor to her deliciously warm room. She scrubbed her hands in the adjoining bathroom, and brushed her short hair, staring, as she did so, out of the window.
Beyond a piecemeal domain, still in the hands of landscape-gardeners, the moors were erected against a leaden sky. Their margins seemed to flow together under some kind of impersonal design. They bore their scrubby mantling with indifference and were, or so Troy thought, unnervingly detached. Between two dark curves the road to the prison briefly appeared. A light sleet was blown across the landscape.
“Well,” she thought, “it lacks only the Hound of the Baskervilles and I wouldn’t put it past him to set that up if it occurs to him to do so.”
Immediately beneath her window lurched the wreckage of a conservatory that at some time had extended along the outer face of the east wing. Hilary had explained that it was soon to be demolished: at the moment it was an eyesore. The tops of seedling firs poked through shattered glass. Anonymous accumulations had silted up the interior. In one part the roof had completely fallen in. Hilary said that when next she visited Halberds she would look down upon lawns and a vista through cypress trees leading to a fountain with stone dolphins. Troy wondered just how successful these improvements would be in reducing the authority of those ominous hills.
Between the garden-to-be and the moor, on a ploughed slope, a scarecrow, that outlandish, commedia-dell’arte-like survival, swivelled and gesticulated in the December wind.
A man came into view down below, wheeling a barrow and tilting his head against the wind. He wore a sou’wester and an oilskin cape.
Troy thought, “That’s Vincent. That’s the gardener-chauffeur. And what was it about Vincent? Arsenic? Yes. And I suppose this must all be true. Or must it?”
The scarecrow rocked madly on its base and a wisp or two of straw flew away in the sleety wind.
Troy had only been at Halberds for five days but already she accepted its cockeyed grandeur. After her arrival to paint his commissioned portrait, Hilary had thrown out one or two airy hints as to the bizarre nature of his staff. At first she had thought that he was going in for a not very funny kind of leg-pulling but she soon discovered her mistake.
At luncheon they were waited upon by Blore, to whom Hilary had referred as his chief steward, and by Nigel, the second houseman.
Blore was a baldish man of about sixty with a loud voice, big hands and downcast eyes. He performed his duties composedly as, indeed, did his assistant, but there was something watchful and at the same time colourless in their general behaviour. They didn’t shuffle, but one almost expected them to do so. One felt that it was necessary to remark that their manner was not furtive. How far these impressions were to be attributed to hindsight and how far to immediate observation, Troy was unable to determine, but she reflected that after all it was a tricky business adapting oneself to a domestic staff entirely composed of murderers. Blore, a headwaiter at the time, had murdered his wife’s lover, a handsome young busboy. Because of extenuating circumstances the death sentence, Hilary told her, had been commuted into a lifer which exemplary behaviour had reduced to eight years. “He is the most harmless of creatures,” Hilary had said. “The busboy called him a cuckold and spat in his face at a moment when he happened to be carving a wing-rib. He merely lashed out.”
Mervyn, the head houseman, once a signwriter, had, it emerged, been guilty of killing a burglar with a booby-trap. “Really,” Hilary said, “it was going much too far to gaol him. He hadn’t meant to destroy anyone, you know, only to give an intruder pause if one should venture to break in. But he entirely misjudged the potential of an old-fashioned flat-iron balanced on a door top. Mervyn became understandably warped by confinement and behaved so incontinently that he was transferred to the Vale.”
Two other homicides completed the indoor staff. The cook’s name, laughably enough, was Cooke. Among his fellows he was known as Kittiwee, being a lover of cats.
“He actually trained as a chef. He is not,” Hilary had told Troy, “one hundred per cent he-man. He was imprisoned under that heading but while serving his sentence attacked a warder who approached him when he was not in the mood. This disgusting man was known to be a cat-hater and to have practised some form of cruelty. Kittiwee’s onslaught was therefore doubly energetic, and most unfortunately his victim struck his head against the cell wall and was killed. He himself served a painful extension of his sentence.”
Then there was the second houseman, Nigel, who in former years had been employed in the manufacture of horses for merry-go-rounds, and on the creative side of the waxworks industry until he became a religious fanatic and unreliable.
“He belonged to an extreme sect,” Hilary had explained.
“A monastic order of sorts with some curious overtones. What with one thing and another, the life put too heavy a strain upon Nigel. His wits turned and he murdered a person to whom he always refers as ‘a sinful lady.’ He was sent to Broadmoor where, believe it or not, he recovered his senses.”
“I hope he doesn’t think me sinful.”
“No, no, I promise you. You are not at all the type and in any case he is now perfectly rational and composed except for weeping rather extravagantly when he remembers his crime. He has a gift for modelling. If we have a white Christmas I shall ask him to make a snowman for us.”
Finally, Hilary had continued, there was Vincent, the gardener. Later on, when the landscape specialists had completed their operations, there would be a full complement of outside staff. In the meantime there were casual labourers and Vincent.
“And really,” Hilary had said, “it is quite improper to refer to him as a homicide. There was some ridiculous misunderstanding over a fatal accident with an arsenical preparation for the control of fungi. This was followed by a gross misdirection to a more than usually idiotic jury and, after a painful interval, by a successful appeal. Vincent,” he had summed up, “is a much wronged person.”