The Divisional Surgeon, Dr. Moore, said that Moult had either been stunned or killed outright by a blow on the nape of the neck and that the neck had subsequently been broken, presumably by a fall. When Alleyn fetched the poker and they laid it by the horrid wound, the stained portion was found to coincide and the phenomenon duly photographed. Dr. Moore, a weathered man with a good keen eye, was then taken to see the wig, and in the wet patch Alleyn found a tiny skein of hair that had not been washed perfectly clean. It was agreed that this and the poker should be subjected to the sophisticated attention of the Yard’s pathological experts.
“He’s been thumped all right,” said Dr. Moore. “I suppose you’ll talk to Sir James.” Sir James Curtis was Consultant Pathologist to the Yard. “I wouldn’t think,” Dr. Moore added, “there’d be much point in leaving the body there. It’s been rolled about all over the shop, it seems, since he was thumped. But thumped he was.”
And he drove himself back to Downlow where he practised. The time was now seven-thirty.
Alleyn said, “He’s about right, you know, Fox. I’ll get through to Curtis but I think he’ll say we can move the body. There are some empty rooms in the stables under the clock tower. You chaps can take him round in the car. Lay him out decently, of course. Colonel Forrester will have to identify.”
Alleyn telephoned Sir James Curtis and was given rather grudging permission to remove Moult from Hilary’s doorstep. Sir James liked bodies to be in situ but conceded that as this one had been, as he put it, rattled about like dice in a box, the objection was academic. Alleyn rejoined Fox in the hall. “We can’t leave Bill-Tasman uninformed much longer,” he said, “I suppose. Worse luck. I must say I don’t relish the prospect of coming reactions.”
“If we exclude the servants, and I take it we do, we’ve got a limited field of possibilities, haven’t we, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Six, if you also exclude thirty-odd guests and Troy.”
“A point being,” said Mr. Fox, pursuing after his fashion, his own line of thought, “whether or not it was a case of mistaken identity. Taking into consideration the wig and whiskers.”
“Quite so. In which case the field is reduced to five.”
“Anyone with a scunner on the Colonel, would you say?”
“I’d have thought it a psychological impossibility. He’s walked straight out of Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“Anybody profit by his demise?”
“I’ve no idea. I understand his will’s in the tin box.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Together with the crown jewels and various personal documents. We’ll have to see.”
“What beats me,” said Mr. Fox, “on what you’ve told me, is this. The man Moult finishes his act. He comes back to the cloakroom. The young lady takes off his wig and whiskers and leaves him there. She takes them off. Unless,” Fox said carefully, “she’s lying, of course. But suppose she is? Where does that lead you?”
“All right, Br’er Fox, where does it lead you?”
“To a nonsense,” Fox said warmly. “That’s where. To some sort of notion that she went upstairs and got the poker and came back and hit him with it, Gawd knows why, and then dragged him upstairs under the noses of the servants and kids and all and removed the wig and pitched him and the poker out of the window. Or walked upstairs with him alive when we know the servants saw her go through this hall on her own and into the drawing room and anyway there wasn’t time and — Well,” said Fox, “why go on with it? It’s silly.”
“Very.”
“Rule her out, then. So we’re left with? What? This bit of material from his robe, now. If that’s what it was. That was caught up in the tree? So he was wearing the robe when he pitched out of the window. So why isn’t it torn and wet and generally mucked up and who put it back in the cloakroom?”
“Don’t you rather feel that the scrap of material might have been stuck to the poker. Which was in the tree.”
“Damn!” said Fox. “Yes. Damn. All right. Well now. Sometime or another he falls out of the upstairs window, having been hit on the back of his head with the upstairs poker. Wearing the wig?”
“Go on, Br’er Fox.”
“Well — presumably wearing the wig. On evidence, wearing the wig. We don’t know about the whiskers.”
“No.”
“No. So we waive them. Never mind the whiskers. But the wig — the wig turns up in the cloakroom same as the robe, just where they left it, only with all the signs of having been washed where the blow fell and not so efficiently but that there’s a trace of something that might be blood. So what do we get? The corpse falling through the window, replacing the wig, washing it and the robe clean, and going back and lying down again.”
“A droll conceit.”
“All right. And where does it leave us? With Mr. Bill-Tasman, the Colonel and his lady and this Bert Smith. Can we eliminate any of them?”
“I think we can.”
“You tell me how. Now, then.”
“In response to your cordial invitation, Br’er Fox. I shall attempt to do so.”
The men outside, having been given the office, lifted the frozen body of Alfred Moult into their car and drove away to the rear of the great house. The effigy of Hilary Bill-Tasman’s ancestor, reduced to a ghastly storm-pocked wraith, dwindled on the top of the packing case. And Alleyn, watching through the windows, laid out for Fox, piece by piece, his assemblage of events fitting each until a picture was completed.
When he had done, his colleague drew one of his heavy sighs and wiped his great hand across his mouth.
“That’s startling and it’s clever,” he said. “It’s very clever indeed. It’ll be a job to make a dead bird of it, though.”
“Yes.”
“No motive, you see. That’s always awkward. Well — no apparent motive. Unless there’s one locked up somewhere behind the evidence.”
Alleyn felt in his breast pocket, drew out his handkerchief, unfolded it and exposed a key: a commonplace barrel-key such as would fit a commonplace padlock.
“This may help us,” he said, “to break in.”
“I only need one guess,” said Mr. Fox.
Before Alleyn went to tell Hilary of the latest development, he and Fox visited Nigel in the servery, where they found him sitting in an apparent trance with an assembly of early morning tea trays as his background. Troy would have found this a paintable subject, thought Alleyn.
At first, when told that Moult was dead, Nigel looked sideways at Alleyn as if he thought he might be lying. But finally he nodded portentously several times. “Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord,” he said.
“Not in this instance,” Alleyn remarked. “He’s been murdered.”
Nigel put his head on one side and stared at Alleyn through his white eyelashes. Alleyn began to wonder if his wits had quite turned or if, by any chance, he was putting it on.
“How?” Nigel asked.
“He was hit with a poker.”
Nigel sighed heavily: “Like Fox,” Alleyn thought irrelevantly.
“Everywhere you turn,” Nigel generalized, “sinful ongoings! Fornication galore. Such is the vice and depravity of these licentious times.”
“The body,” Alleyn pressed on, “was found in the packing case under your effigy.”
“Well,” Nigel snapped, “if you think I put it there you’re making a very big mistake.” He gazed at Alleyn for some seconds. “Though it’s well known to the Lord God of Hosts,” he added in a rising voice, “that I’m a sinner. A sinner!” he repeated loudly and now he really did look demented. “I smote a shameless lady in the face of the Heavens and they opened and poured down their phials of wrath upon me. Because such had not been their intention. My mistake.” And as usual when recalling his crime, he burst into tears.