The apple-cheeked boy was watching television, the five members of the regular staff sat round the fire, their chairs close together. As Alleyn came in they got to their feet with the air of men who have been caught offside. Blore moved towards him and then stood still.
Alleyn said, “I thought it would be easier if we talked this business over here where we won’t be interrupted. May we sit down?”
Blore, with a quick look at the others, pulled back the central chair. Alleyn thanked him and took it. The men shuffled their feet. A slightly distorted voice at the other end of the room shouted, “What you guys waitin’ for? Less go.”
“Turn that off,” Blore commanded in his great voice, “and come over here.”
The rosy boy switched off the television set and slouched, blushing, towards them.
“Sit down, all of you,” Alleyn said. “I won’t keep you long.”
They sat down and he got a square look at them. At Blore: once a headwaiter, who had knifed his wife’s lover in the hanging days and narrowly escaped the rope, swarthy, fattish, baldish and with an air of consequence about him. At Mervyn, the ex-signwriter, booby-trap expert, a dark, pale man who stooped and looked sidelong. At Cooke, nicknamed Kittiwee, whose mouth wore the shadow of a smirk, who loved cats and had bashed a warder to death. At Slyboots and Smartypants, who lay along his ample thighs, fast asleep. At Nigel, pallid as uncooked pastry, almost an albino, possibly a lapsed religious maniac, who had done a sinful lady. Finally at Vincent, now seen by Alleyn for the first time at Halberds and instantly recognized since he himself had arrested him when, as gardener to an offensive old lady, he had shut her up in a greenhouse heavy with arsenical spray. His appeal, based on the argument that she had been concealed by a date palm and that he was unaware of her presence, was successful and he was released. At the time Alleyn had been rather glad of it. Vincent was a bit ferrety in the face and gnarled as to the hands.
They none of them looked at Alleyn.
“The first thing I have to say,” he said, “is this. You know that I know who you are and that you’ve all been inside and what the convictions were. You,” he said to Vincent, “may say you’re in a different position from the others, having been put in the clear, but where this business is concerned and at this stage of the inquiry, you’re all in the clear. By this I mean that your past records, as far as I can see at the moment, are of no interest and they’ll go on being uninteresting unless anything crops up to make me think otherwise. A man has disappeared. We don’t know why, how, when or where and we’ve got to find him. To use the stock phrase, alive or dead. If I say I hope one or more or all of you can help us, I don’t mean, repeat don’t mean, that one or more or all of you is or are suspected of having had anything to do with his disappearance. I mean what I say: I’m here to see if you can think of anything at all, however trivial, that will give us a lead, however slight. In this respect you’re on an equal footing with every other member of the household. Is that understood?”
The silence was long enough to make him wonder if there was to be no response. At last Blore said, “It’s understood, sir, I suppose, by all of us.”
“But not necessarily believed? Is that it?”
This time the silence was unbroken. “Well,” he said, “I can’t blame you. It’s a natural reaction. I can only hope you will come to accept the proposition.”
He turned to the boy, who stood apart looking guarded. “You’re a local chap, aren’t you?” Alleyn said.
He extracted with some difficulty that the boy, whose name was Thomas Appleby, was a farmer’s son engaged for the festive season. He had never spoken to Moult, had with the other servants come into the drawing-room for the Christmas tree, had had no idea who the Druid was, had received his present, and had returned to his kitchen and outhouse duties as soon as the ceremony ended and had nothing whatever to offer in the way of information. Alleyn said he could go off to bed, an invitation he seemed to accept with some reluctance.
When he had gone Alleyn told the men what he had learnt about their movements at the time of the Christmas tree: that they too had seen the Druid, failed to recognize him, received their gifts, and returned to their duties. “I understand,” he said, “that you, Cooke, with the extra women helpers, completed the arrangements for the children’s supper and that you saw Miss Tottenham return to the drawing-room but didn’t see anything of Moult. Is that right?”
“Yes, it is,” said Kittiwee, setting his dimples. “And I was concerned with, my own business, if I may put it that way, sir, and couldn’t be expected to be anything else.”
“Quite so. And you,” Alleyn said to Vincent, “did exactly what it had been arranged you should do in respect of the tree. At half-past seven you stationed yourself round the corner of the east wing. Right?”
Vincent nodded.
“Tell me, while you were there did anyone throw open a window in the east frontage and look out? Do you remember?”
“ ‘Course I remember,” said Vincent, who had an indeterminate accent and a bronchial voice. “He did. To see if I was there like he said he would. At seven-thirty.”
“The Colonel? Or Moult?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I? I took him for the Colonel because I expected him to be the Colonel, see?”
“Was he wearing his beard?”
“I never took no notice. He was black-like against the light.”
“Did he wave or signal in any way?”
“I waved according, giving him the office to come down. According. Now they was all in the drawing-room. And he wove back, see, and I went round to the front. According.”
“Good. Your next move was to tow the sledge round the corner and across the courtyard, where you were met by Moult, whom you took to be Colonel Forrester. Where exactly did you meet him?”
Behind Nigel’s effigy, it appeared. There, Vincent said, he relieved the Druid of his umbrella and handed over the sledge, and there he waited until the Druid returned.
“So you missed the fun?” Alleyn remarked.
“I wouldn’t of bothered anyway,” said Vincent.
“You waited for him to come out and then you took over the sledge and he made off through the porch and the door into the cloakroom? Right.”
“That’s what I told Mr. Bill-Tasman and that’s what I tell everyone else who keeps on about it, don‘ I?”
“Did you give him back the umbrella?”
“No. He scarpered off smartly.”
“Where were you exactly when you saw him go into the cloakroom?”
“Where was I? Where would I be? Out in the bloody snow, that’s where.”
“Behind the effigy?”
“Hey!” said Vincent flaring up. “You trying to be funny? You trying to make a monkey outa me? You said no funny business, that’s what you said.”
“I’m not making the slightest attempt to be funny. I’m simply trying to get the picture.”
“How could I see him if I was be’ind the bloody statcher?”
Blore, in his great voice, said, “Choose your words,” and Kittiwee said, “Language!”
“You could have looked round the corner, I imagine, or even peered over the top,” Alleyn suggested.
Vincent, in a tremulous sulk, finally revealed that he saw Moult go through the cloakroom door as he, Vincent, was about to conceal the sledge round the corner of the east wing.