Ngaio Marsh - Tied Up in Tinsel

“What about yourself?” Smith asked.

“I?” she said with her customary spirit. “No doubt I could have killed Moult. I had no conceivable motive for killing him but no doubt I could have done so.”

“Nothing simpler. You go up to the Colonel, who’s on ’is bed and asleep. You hear Alf Moult in the dressing-room. You go froo the barfroom into the dressing-room, pick up the poker and Bob’s your uncle. You shove the corpse out of the winder.” Mr. Smith caught himself up. “You did say Vince and Co. picked it up under the winder, didn’t you, ’Illy?”

“I don’t think I said anything about it. But according to Alleyn, yes, they did.”

“The modus operandi you have outlined, Smith, could have been used by anybody if my theory is correct. You’ve talked a great deal but you’ve proved nothing, I said you’ve —”

“Don’t you bawl me out as if I was your old man,” Mr. Smith roared. “I been watching you, Missus. You been acting very peculiar. You got something up your sleeve you’re not letting on about.”

Hilary, with a wildish look, cried out, “I won’t have this sort of thing!”

“Yes, you will. You can’t help yourself. You want to watch your aunt. I did. When Alleyn was talking about that marvellous tin box. You didn’t like that, Missus, did you?”

Mr. Smith advanced upon Mrs. Forrester. He jabbed at her with a fat forefinger. “Come on,” he said. “What’s it all about? What’s in the ruddy tin box?”

Mrs. Forrester walked out of the room, slamming the door. When she had gone, it opened silently of its own accord.

The key fitted. It turned easily. Now. The hoop was disengaged. The hasp was more difficult, it really needed a lever but there was none to hand. At the cost of a broken fingernail and in spite of a glove it was finally prised up from the staple.

The lid opened to a vertical position but tended to fall forward, so that it was necessary to prop it up with the head. This was irksome.

A cash box: locked. A map-case. Canvas bags, tied at the neck with red tape. Tubular cartons. Manila envelopes, labelled. “Correspondence: B to F.F. F.F. to B.” He had kept all their letters.

“Receipts.” “Correspondence, general.” “Travel, etc.” “Miscellaneous.” A document in a grand envelope. “To our Trusty and Well-beloved —”

It was necessary to keep calm. To keep what Cressida called one’s cool. Not to scrabble wildly in the welter of accumulated papers. To be methodical and workmanlike. Sensible.

A locked box that rattled. The jewels she hadn’t taken out for the party. And at last a leather dispatch-case with an envelope flap: locked.

No panic but something rather like it when somebody walked past the door. The keys had been removed so one couldn’t lock the door.

The impulse to get out at once with the case and deal with it in safety was almost irresistible, but it presented its own problems. If only one knew how to pick a lock! Perhaps they would think that Moult had burst it. It was a sliding mechanism with a metal hinged piece on the leather flap engaging with a lock on the case itself. Perhaps the slide could be knocked down? Or, better, force the hinged piece up? The poker, of course, had gone but there were the tongs with their little thin flat ends.

Yes. Between the metal flap and the lock there was just room. Shove. Shove hard and force it up.

There!

A diary. A large envelope. “My Will.” Not sealed. A rapid look at it. Leave that. Put it back — quick. The thing itself: a reinforced envelope and inside it the document, printed in German, filled in and signed. The statement in Colonel Forrester’s hand. The final words: “declare her to be my daughter,” and the signature: “Alfred Moult.”

Replace the dispatch-case, quick, quick, quick.

Relock the tin box. Back into the wardrobe with it. Now, the envelope. She must hide it under her cardigan and away.

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.”