Ngaio Marsh - Tied Up in Tinsel

“My darling girl, what dreadful nonsense you do talk! Have you so much as read Genêt?”

“Hilly! For Heaven’s sake — he’s where O-E begins .”

Hilary said with unusual acerbity, “And I’m afraid he’s where I leave off.”

“Of course I’ve known all along you’ll never get the message.”

Troy thought, “This is uncomfortable. They’re going to have a row,” and was about to leave them to it when Cressida suddenly laughed and wound her arms round Hilary’s neck. He became very still. She drew his head down and whispered. They both laughed. Their embrace became so explicit that Troy thought on the whole she had better evaporate and proceeded to do so.

At the door she half turned, wondering if she should throw out a jolly good-night. Hilary, without releasirig Cressida, lifted his face and gave Troy not so much a smile as the feral grimace of an antique Hylaeus. When she had shut the door behind her she thought: that was the sort of thing one should never see.

On her way through the hall she found a great clearance had been made and could hear voices in the drawing-room. Well, she thought, Hilary certainly has it both ways. He gets all the fun of setting up his party and none of the tedious aftermath. That’s done for him by his murderers.

She reached her room, with its well-tended fire, turned-down bed and impeccably laid-out dressing gown, pyjamas and slippers. She supposed Nigel had found time to perform these duties, and found this a disagreeable reflection.

She hung her dress in the wardrobe and could just catch the drone of the Forresters’ voices joined, it seemed, in no very urgent conversation. Troy was wide awake and restless. Too much had happened and happened inconclusively over the last few days. The anonymous messages, which, with astonishment, she realized she had almost forgotten. The booby-trap, Cressida’s report of the row in the staff common-room. Uncle Flea’s turns. Moult as Druid. The disappearance of Moult. Should these elements, wondered Troy, who had been rereading her Forster, connect? What would Rory think? He was fond of quoting Forster. “Only connect. Only connect.” What would he make of all this? And now, in a flash, Troy was perfectly certain that he would think these were serious matters.

As sometimes happens in happy marriages, Troy and her husband, when parted, often found that before one of them wrote or cabled or telephoned, the other was visited by an intensified awareness, a kind of expectation. She had this feeling very vividly now and was glad of it. Perhaps in the morning there would be news.

She heard midnight strike and a moment later Cressida, humming the “Bells of St. Clement’s,” passed the door on her way to her room at the south end of the corridor.

Troy yawned. The bedroom was overheated and at last she was sleepy. She went to her window, slipped through the curtains without drawing them, and opened it at the top. The north wind had risen and the rumour of its progress was abroad in the night. Flights of cloud were blown across the heavens. The moon was high now, casting a jetty shadow from the house across the snow. It was not a deserted landscape, for round the corner of the east wing came Vincent and his wheelbarrow and in the barrow the dead body of the Christmas tree denuded of its glory. He plodded on until he was beneath the Forresters’ windows and then turned into the shadow and was swallowed. She heard a swish and tinkle as he tipped his load into the debris of the ruined conservatory.

Shivering and immoderately tired, she went to bed and to sleep.

Troy woke next morning at the sound of Nigel’s discreet attentions to her fire. He had placed her early tea tray by her bed.

She couldn’t make up her mind, at once, to speak to him, but when he opened her window curtains and let in the reflected pallor of snow she wished him good morning.

He paused, blinking his white eyelashes, and returned the greeting.

“Is it still snowing?” she asked.

“Off and on, madam. There was sleet in the night but it changed to snow, later.”

“Has Moult appeared?”

“I believe not, madam.”

“How very odd, isn’t it?”

“Yes, madam. Will that be all, madam?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Thank you, madam.”

But it’s all phony, Troy thought. He turns it on. He didn’t talk like that when he made rocking-horses and wax effigies. Before he reached the door she said, “I think you made a wonderful job of that catafalque.”

He stopped. “Ta,” he said.

“I don’t know how you managed to get such precision and detail with a medium like snow.”

“It was froze.”

“Even so. Have you ever sculpted? In stone?”

“It was all working from moulds like. But I always had a fancy to carve.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He said, “Ta,” again. He looked directly at her and went out.

Troy bathed and dressed and took her usual look at the landscape. Everywhere except in areas close to the house, a coverlet of snow. Not a footprint to be seen. Over on the far left the canvas-covered bulldozers and their works were mantled. Every tree was a Christmas tree. Somebody had re-erected the scarecrow, or perhaps with a change in the wind it had righted itself. It looked, if anything, more human than before. Quite a number of birds had settled on it.

Troy found Hilary and Mr. Smith at breakfast. Hilary lost no time in introducing the Moult theme.

“No Moult! It really is beyond a joke, now,” he said. “Even Uncle Bert agrees, don’t you, Uncle Bert?”

“I give you in, it’s a rum go,” he conceded. “Under existing circs, it’s rather more than that. It’s upsetting.”

“What do you mean by ‘existing circs’?”

“Ask yourself.”

“I asked you.”

Mervyn came in with a fresh supply of toast.

“ Pas devant les domestiques ,” quoted Mr. Smith.

Mervyn withdrew. “Why not before them?” Hilary asked crossly.

“Use your loaf, boy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Uncle Bert.”

“No? Ah: Fancy.”

“Oh, blast everything!” said Hilary. He turned to Troy. “He really isn’t on the premises,” he said. “Not in the house or the outbuildings. If he wandered into the grounds somewhere, he didn’t go off the drive or swept paths because there aren’t any unaccountable footprints in the snow.”

“Could he have got into the back of one of the cars and gone to sleep and been driven away unnoticed?”

“He’d have woken up and declared himself by now, surely?”

“It’s an idea, though,” said Mr. Smith. “What say he got into the boot of the station wagon from the Vale and come to behind bars? That’d be a turn-up for the books, wouldn’t it?”

“Excessively droll,” said Hilary sourly. “Well!” he said, throwing up his hands, “what’s the next step? I don’t know! The Fleas are becoming difficult, I can tell you that much. I looked in on them and found Aunt Bed trying to valet Uncle Flea and getting it all wrong. Aunt Bed’s in a rage because she can’t put her jewelry away.”

“Why can’t she?”

“It seems she keeps it in their locked tin box with all their securities under the bed in the dressing-room.”

“I know,” said Troy. “I saw it.”

“Well, Moult’s got the key.”

“They’re potty,” said Mr. Smith definitively. “What I mean, potty. What I mean, look at it! Carts her stuff round, and it’s good stuff, mind, some of it’s very nice stuff. Carts it round in a flipping tin box and gives the key to a bloody disappearing act. No, what I mean, I arstyou!”

“All right, Uncle Bert. All right. We all know the Fleas go their own way. That’s beside the point. What we have to decide —”