Ngaio Marsh - Tied Up in Tinsel

“No. There was an inky-black shadow. I saw him coming, all right, along the path. It’s wide, you know. More like a rough drive. The shadow didn’t cover it. So along he came, clear as clear in the moonlight. Against the snowy background. And then he entered the shadow and I heard him tip the tree out. And then I came away from the window.”

“You didn’t see him leave?”

“No. It was chilly. I didn’t stay.”

“ ‘Clear as clear in the moonlight.’ From that window you can see all those earthworks and ongoings where they’re making a lake and a hillock?”

“Yes. Just out to the left.”

“Did you look, particularly, in that direction?”

“Yes. It was very beautiful. One could have abstracted something from it. The shapes were exciting.”

“Like a track across the snow leading into the distance?”

“Nothing as obvious as that. The whole field of snow — all the foreground — was quite unbroken.”

“Sure?”

“Quite sure. That’s what made it good as a subject.”

“Nothing like a wheel track and footprints anywhere to be seen? For instance?”

“Certainly not. Vincent had trundled round the house by the track and that was already tramped over.”

“Did you look out of your window again in the morning?”

“Yes, darling, I did. And there were no tracks anywhere across the snow. And I may add that after our telephone conversation, I went out of doors. I had a look at Nigel’s sculpture. It had been blurred by weathering, particularly on its windward side. Otherwise it was still in recognizable shape. I walked round the house past the drawing-room windows and had a look at last night’s ‘subject’ from that angle. No tracks anywhere on the snow. The paths round the house and the courtyard and driveway were trampled and muddy. The courtyard had been swept.”

“So nobody, during the night or morning, had gone near the earthworks.”

“Unless from the far side. Even then one would still have seen their tracks on the hillside.”

“And there had been no snowfall after midnight.”

“No. Only the north wind. The sky was still cloudless in the morning.”

“Yes. The Buster only blew up tonight. Thank you, my love. Leave me, now. I shan’t be long.”

“There isn’t—?”

“Well?”

“I suppose there isn’t anything I can do? Only stand and wait like those sickening angels?”

“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can fetch my small suitcase and go downstairs and collect every last bloody bit of Bill-Tasman’s famille verte . Don’t handle it any more than you can help. Hold the pieces by the edges, put them in the case, and bring them upstairs. I’ll be here. Will you do that?”

“Watch me.”

When she was established at her task he went to the table in the gallery where the vase had stood. He looked down and there, in aerial perspective, was the top of a standard lamp, a pool of light surrounding it, and within the pool, a pattern of porcelain shards, the top of Troy’s head, her shoulders, her knees and her long, thin hands moving delicately about the floor. She was directly underneath him.

A little table, Chinese, elegant but solid, stood against the gallery railing. The ebony pedestal on which the vase had rested was still in position. It had brought the base of the vase up to the level of the balustrade. Alleyn guessed that Hilary wished people in the hall to look up and see his lovely piece of famille verte gently signalling from above. As indeed it had signalled to him, much earlier in this long night. Before, he thought, it had hit him on the arm and then killed itself.

He turned on all the lights in the gallery and used a pocket torch that Wrayburn had lent him. He inspected the table, inch by inch, so meticulously that he was still at it when Troy, having finished her task, switched off the downstairs lamp and joined him.

“I suppose,” she said, “you’re looking for claw-marks.”

“Yes.”

“Found any?”

“Not yet. You go along. I’ve almost finished here. I’ll bring the case.”

And when, finally, just after Troy heard the stable clock strike one, he came to her, she knew it was not advisable to ask him if he had found any traces of Smartypants’s claws on the Chinese table.

Because clearly he had not.

Alleyn obeyed his own instructions to wake at three. He left Troy fast asleep and found his way through their bedroom, darkling, to his dressing-room, where he shaved and dipped his head in cold water. He looked out of his window. The moon was down but there were stars to be seen, raked across by flying cloud. The wind was still high but there was no rain. The Buster was clearing. He dressed painfully, dragging on thick sweaters and stuffing a cloth cap in his pocket.

He found his way by torchlight along the corridor, out to the gallery and downstairs. The hall was a lightless void except for widely separated red eyes where embers still glowed on the twin hearths. He moved from the foot of the stairs to the opening into the east-wing corridor and, turning left, walked along it till he came to the library.

The library, too, was virtually in darkness. The familiar reek of oil and turpentine made Alleyn feel as if he had walked into his wife’s studio. Had the portrait been taken out of seclusion and returned to the library?

He moved away from the door and was startled, as Troy had been before him, by the click of the latch as it reopened itself. He shut it again and gave it a hard shove.

His torchlight dodged about the room. Books, lamps, chair-backs, pictures, ornaments, showed up and vanished. Then he found the workbench and, at last, near it, Troy’s easel.

And now, Hilary started up out of the dark and stared at him.

As he came nearer to the portrait his beam of torchlight intensified and so did the liveliness of the painting. Troy was far from being a “representational” portrait painter. Rather she abstracted the essence of her subjects as if, Alleyn thought, she had worked with the elements of Hilary’s personality for her raw material and laid them out directly on the canvas.

What were those elements? What had she seen?

Well, of course, there was the slightly supercilious air which she had compared to that of a “good-looking camel.” And in addition elegance, fastidiousness, a certain insolence, a certain quirkiness. But, unexpectedly, in the emphasis on a groove running from his nostrils to the corners of his faunish mouth and in the surprising heaviness of the mouth itself, Troy had unveiled a hedonist in Hilary.

The library was the foremost room in the east wing and had three outside walls. Its windows on the left as one entered it, looked on to the great courtyard. Alleyn made his way to them. He knew they were curtained and shuttered.

He opened the curtains, exposed a window and opened that. It crossed his mind that windows played a major role in whatever drama was unfolding at Halberds. Now his torchlight shone on the inside aspect of the shutters. This was the lee side of the east wing, but they rattled slightly and let in blades of cold air. Not strong enough, he thought, to make a great disturbance in the room, but he returned to the easel and gingerly pushed it into a sheltered position.

Then he operated the sliding mechanism in the shutters. The louvres turned and admitted the outside world, its noise and its cold. Alleyn peered through one of the slits. There were no clouds left in the sky. Starlight made a non-darkness of the great courtyard and he could discern, quite close at hand, Nigel’s catafalque, denuded of all but a fragment of its effigy, a thin pock-marked mantle of snow.

He put on his cap, turned up the double collar of his sweater, like a beaver, over his mouth and ears, settled himself on the window-seat, and put out his torch.