She stood up, breathless.
The doors opened simultaneously and before she could cry out there were men in the room and Alleyn advancing upon her.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “this is it.”
And for the second time during their short acquaintance Cressida screamed at the top of her voice.
“It’s been a short cut,” Alleyn said. “We left the library door open and let it be known the coast was clear. Fox displayed the key of the padlock, Cressida Tottenham said she was on her way to the study and would give it to the Colonel. We went upstairs, kept out of sight, and walked in on her. It was a gamble and it might never have come off. In which ease we would have been landed with a most exhaustive routine investigation. We are, still, of course, but with the advantage of her first reaction. She was surprised and flabbergasted and she gave herself away in several most significant places.”
“Rory — when did you first —?”
“Oh — that. Almost from the beginning, I think,” said he with a callow smirk. “You see, there everybody was, accepting her story that Moult substituted for the Colonel, which put her ostensibly in the clear and made a squint-eyed nonsense of the evidence: the robe, the wig, the lot. Whereas if she had substituted for the Colonel there was no confusion.
“She hit Moult on the base of his skull with the poker in the dressing-room, probably when he was leaning out of the window looking for his signal from Vincent, who, by the way, saw him and, according to plan, at once hauled his sledge round to the front. At this point the bells started up. A deafening clamour. She removed the wig and the robe, which unzips completely down the back. If he was lolling over the sill, there’d be no trouble. Nor would it be all that difficult to tumble him out.
“The tricky bit, no doubt, was going downstairs but by that time, as she knew when she heard the bells, the whole household, including the staff, were assembled in the library. Even if one of the servants had seen her carrying the robe and all the other gear, they’d have thought nothing of it at the time. She went into the dressing-room, stuffed a couple of cotton-wool pads in her cheeks and put on the wig, the robe, the great golden beard and moustache and the mistletoe crown. And the fur-lined boots. And the Colonel’s woolly gloves which you all thought he’d forgotten. And away she went. She was met by the unsuspecting Vincent. She waltzed round the Christmas tree, returned to the cloakroom and offed with her lendings. In five minutes she was asking you if Moult did his act all right because she couldn’t see very well from the back of the room.”
“Rory — where is she?”
“In her bedroom with a copper at the door. Why?”
“Is she — frightened?”
“When I left her she was furious. She tried to bite me. Luckily I was on my guard so she didn’t repeat her success with the vase.”
Alleyn looked at his wife. “I know, my love,” he said. “Your capacity for pity is on the Dostoevskian scale.” He put his arm round her. “You are such a treat,” he said. “Apart from being a bloody genius. I can’t get over you. After all these years. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Did she work it out beforehand?”
“No. Not the assault. It was an improvisation — a toccata. Now, she’s in for the fugue.”
“But — those tricks — the booby-trap and all?”
“Designed to set Bill-Tasman against his cosy little clutch of homicides. She would have preferred a group of resentful Greeks in flight from the Colonels.”
“Poor old Hilary.”
“Well — yes. But she really is a horrid piece of work. All the same there are extenuating circumstances. In my job one examines them, as you know, at one’s peril.”
“Go on.”
“At one’s peril,” he repeated and then said, “I don’t know at what stage Colonel Forrester felt he was, according to his code, obliged to step in. From the tenor of the documents in that infernal tin box, one gathers that she was Moult’s daughter by a German girl who died in childbirth, that it was Moult who, with great courage, saved the Colonel’s life and got a badly scarred face for his pains. That Moult had means comprising a tidy inheritance from a paternal tobacconist’s shop, his savings, his pay and his wages. That the Colonel, poor dear, felt himself to be under a lifelong debt to Moult. All right. Now Moult, like many of his class, was an unrepentant snob. He wanted his natural daughter upon whom he doted to be ‘brought up a lady.’ He wanted the Colonel to organize this process. He wanted to watch the process, as it were, from well back in the pit, unidentified, completely anonymous. And so it fell out. Until the whirligig of time, according to its practice, brought in its revenges. Hilary Bill-Tasman, having encountered her at his uncle’s and aunt’s house, decided that she was just the chatelaine for Halberds and, incidentally, the desire of his heart. She seemed to fill the bill in every possible respect. ‘Tottenham’ for instance. A damn’ good family.”
“Is it?” said Troy. “Yes. Well. Tottenham. Why Tottenham?”
“I’ll ask the Colonel,” said Alleyn.
“Moult,” said the Colonel, “was a keen follower of the Spurs. He chose it for that reason.”
“We didn’t care for it,” said Mrs. Forrester. “After all there are — Fred tried to suggest Bolton or Wolverhampton but he wouldn’t hear of them. She is Tottenham by deed-poll.”
“How,” Alleyn asked, “did it all come to a crisis?”
The Colonel stared dolefully into space. “You tell him, B,” he said.
“With the engagement. Fred felt — we both felt — that we couldn’t let Hilary marry under false pretence. She had told him all sorts of tarradiddles —”
“Wait a bit,” Alleyn said. “Did she know —?”
They both cried out: no, of course she didn’t. She had only been told that she had no parents, that there were no relatives.
“This was agreed upon with Moult,” said the Colonel. “She grew up from infancy in this belief. Of course, when she visited us he saw her.”
“Gloated,” Mrs. Forrester interpolated. “Took her to the zoo.”
“Peter Pan and all that,” her husband agreed. “ ’Fraid he forgot himself a bit and let her understand all sorts of fairytales — father’s rank and all that.”
But it emerged that on her own account Cressida had built up a magnificent fantasy for herself, and when she discovered that Hilary was steeped up to the teeth in armorial bearings went to all extremes to present herself in a complementary image.
“You see,” the Colonel said unhappily, “Hilary sets such store by that sort of thing. She considered, and one can’t say without cause, that if he learnt that she had been embroidering he would take a grave view. I blame myself, I blame myself entirely, but when she persisted I told her that she should put all that nonsense out of her head and I’m afraid I went further than that.”
“He told her,” said his wife, “without of course implicating Moult, that she came from a sound but not in the least grand sort of background, quite humble in fact, and she — from something he said — she’s quick, you know — she realized that she’d been born out of wedlock. Fred told her it wouldn’t be honourable to marry Hilary letting him think all this nonsense. Fred said that if Hilary loved her the truth wouldn’t stop him.”
“I — warned her —” the Colonel said and stopped.
“That if she didn’t tell him, you would.”
The Colonel opened his eyes as wide as saucers: “Yes. I did. How did you know?” he said.
“I guessed,” Alleyn lied.
There was a long silence.