“Are you lot coming quietly?” he asked. “You’ll be mad if you don’t.”
They made affirmative noises.
“Good. You,” Alleyn said to the driver of the police car, “come with us. You,” to Bailey and Thompson, “get on with it. I’ll call up the Div. Surgeon. When you’ve all finished wait for instructions. Where’s your second car, Fox?”
“Puncture. They’ll be here.”
“When they come,” Alleyn said to Bailey, “stick them along the entrances. We don’t want people barging out of the house before you’ve cleared up here. It’s getting on for six. Come on, Fox. Come on, you lot.”
Alleyn led the way through the library window, down the corridor, across the hall, through the green baize door, and into the servants’ common-room. Here they surprised the Boy in the act of lighting the fire. Alleyn sent him with his compliments to Mr. Blore, whom he would be pleased to see. “Is Nigel up?” he asked. The Boy, all eyes, nodded. Nigel, it appeared, was getting out early-morning tea trays in the servery.
“Tell him we’re using this room and don’t want to be disturbed for the moment. Got that? All right. Chuck some coal on the fire and then off you cut, there’s a good chap.”
When the boy had gone Alleyn rang up Wrayburn on the staff telephone, told him of the discovery, and asked him to lay on the Divisional Surgeon as soon as possible. He then returned to the common-room, where he nodded to the Yard car-driver, who took up a position in front of the door.
Mervyn, Kittiwee and Vincent stood in a wet, dismal and shivering group in the middle of the room. Kittiwee mopped his great dimpled face and every now and then, like a baby, caught his breath in a belated sob.
“Now then,” Alleyn said. “I suppose you three know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve tried to obstruct the police in the execution of their duty, which is an extremely serious offence.”
They broke into a concerted gabble.
“Pipe down,” he said. “Stop telling me you didn’t do him. Nobody’s said anything to the contrary. So far. You could be charged as accessories after the fact, if you know what that means.”
Mervyn, with some show of dignity, said: “Naturally.”
“All right. In the meantime I’m going to tell you what I think is the answer to your cockeyed behaviour. Get in front of the fire, for pity’s sake. I don’t want to talk to a set of castanets.”
They moved to the hearthrug. Pools formed round their boots, and presently they began to smell and steam. They were a strongly contrasted group: Kittiwee with his fat, as it were, gone soggy; Vincent, ferret-like with the weathered hide of his calling; and Mervyn, dark about the jaws, black-browed and white-faced. They looked at nobody. They waited.
Alleyn eased his throbbing arm a little further into his chest and sat on the edge of the table. Mr. Fox cleared his throat, retired into a sort of self-made obscurity, and produced a notebook.
“If I’ve got this all wrong,” Alleyn said, “the best thing you can do is to put me right, whatever the result. And I mean that. Really. You won’t believe me, but really. Best for yourselves on all counts. Now. Go back to the Christmas tree. The party. The end of the evening. At about midnight, you,” he looked at Vincent, “wheeled the dismantled tree in a barrow to the glasshouse wreckage under the east wing. You tipped it off under Colonel Forrester’s dressing-room window near a sapling fir. Right?”
Vincent’s lips moved inaudibly.
“You made a discovery. Moult’s body, lying at the foot of the tree. I can only guess at your first reaction. I don’t know how closely you examined it, but I think you saw enough to convince you he’d been murdered. You panicked in a big way. Then and there, or later, after you’d consulted your mates —”
There was an involuntary shuffling movement, instantly repressed.
“I see,” Alleyn said. “All right. You came indoors and told Blore and these two what you’d found. Right?”
Vincent ran his tongue round his lips and spoke.
“What say I did? I’m not giving the O.K. to nothing. I’m not concurring, mind. But what say I did? That’d be c’rrect procedure, wouldn’t it? Report what I seen? Wouldn’t it?”
“Certainly. It’s the subsequent ongoings that are not so hot.”
“A chap reports what he seen to the authorities. Over to them.”
“Wouldn’t you call Mr. Bill-Tasman the authority in this case?”
“A chap puts it through the right channels. If. If. See? I’m not saying —”
“I think we’ve all taken the point about what you’re not saying. Let’s press on, shall we, and arrive at what you do say. Let’s suppose you did come indoors and report your find to Mr. Blore. And to these two. But not to Nigel, he being a bit tricky in his reactions. Let’s suppose you four came to a joint decision. Here was the body of a man you all heartily disliked and whom you had jointly threatened and abused that very morning. It looked as if he’d been done to death. This you felt to be an acute embarrassment. For several reasons. Because of your records. And because of singular incidents occurring over the last few days: booby-traps, anonymous messages, soap in the barley water, and so on. And all in your several styles.”
“We never —” Mervyn began.
“I don’t for a moment suggest you did. I do suggest you all believed Moult had perpetrated these unlovely tricks in order to discredit you, and you thought that this circumstance, too, when it came to light, would incriminate you. So I suggest you panicked and decided to get rid of the corpse.”
At this juncture Blore came in. He wore a lush dressing gown over silk pyjamas. So would he have looked, Alleyn thought, if nocturnally disturbed in his restaurant period before the advent of the amorous busboy.
“I understand,” he said to Alleyn, “sir, that you wished to see me.”
“I did and do,” Alleyn rejoined. “For your information, Blore, Alfred Moult’s body has been found in the packing case, supporting Nigel’s version of the Bill-Tasman effigy. These men were about to remove the whole shooting box on a sledge. The idea, I think, was to transfer it to an appropriate sphere of activity where, with the unwitting aid of bulldozers, it would help to form an artificial hillock overlooking an artificial lake. End result, an artifact known, appropriately, as a folly. I’ve been trying to persuade them that their best course — and yours, by the way — is to give me a factual account of the whole affair.”
Blore looked fixedly at the men, who did not look at him.
“So: first,” Alleyn said, “did Vincent come to you and report his finding of the body on Christmas night? Or, rather, at about ten past midnight, yesterday morning?”
Blore dragged at his jaw and was silent.
Vincent suddenly blurted out. “We never said a thing, Mr. Blore. Not a thing.”
“You did, too, Vince,” Kittiwee burst out. “You opened your great silly trap. Didn’t he, Merv?”
“I never. I said ‘if.’ ”
“If what?” Blore asked.
“I said supposing. Supposing what he says was right it’d be the c’rrect and proper procedure. To report to you. Which I done. I mean —”
“Shut up,” Mervyn and Kittiwee said in unison.
“My contention,” Alleyn said to Blore, “is that you decided, among you, to transfer the body to the packing case there and then. You couldn’t take it straight to the dumping ground because in doing so you would leave your tracks over a field of unbroken snow for all to see in the morning and also because any effort you made to cover it at the earthworks would be extremely difficult in the dark and would stand out like a sore thumb by the light of day.