Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

The policeman looked as if he disagreed, but he nodded anyway.

Fifteen minutes later, all the guest-intruders were gone, and Speedwell House was once again locked up so that the outside world couldn’t get in.

Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey sat in the drawing room for hour upon hour. Bascom wept and Sorrel stared numbly into space. They didn’t seem to notice that their two less troublesome daughters were still alive and in need of attention.

Ignored by their parents, Lisette and Allisande found it remarkably easy to sneak away. “Let’s go to the library,” Lisette whispered.

“But . . . it hasn’t been cleaned yet,” said Allisande. “David Butcher’s body might not still be there, but there will be loads of blood. It’ll be horrid.”

“I know,” said Lisette. “I need to look at it, though. Things are horrid at the moment. There’s no way around that.”

“I still don’t see why I have to sit in a room full of blood,” said Allisande sulkily.

Lisette felt it was important that she and Allisande should talk in the library. She had something momentous to say to her only living sister. She needed to confront her, and make her admit the truth. It stood to reason that the best place to do all this was in the library, where they would be forced to face the horror that had taken over their lives—where the herringbone parquet floor would be wet and red with the blood of an innocent music teacher. It would be symbolically right, thought Lisette, for them to have this vital conversation in the library, in the presence of this haunting visual spectacle, but she couldn’t explain this to Allisande because you ruin a symbol if you explain it.

In the end, she enticed her sister into the room by saying, “I’ve got an exciting secret, and I won’t tell you it unless you come in here with me.”

There was not quite as much blood in the library as Lisette had expected. She had pictured almost enough to swim in, as if the library were a pool but with no deep end, just shallow all over the room. Like those children’s pools that you sometimes see next to the main pool at hotels. Instead, there were drops and smears and a couple of large-ish patches, but nothing up to knee height as Lisette had imagined. Mostly the library looked the same as it always had. “Why isn’t there more blood?” she asked.

Allisande (who had, remember, always been allowed to watch whatever she wanted on TV, while Lisette was busy doing only worthwhile, mind-improving activities that Bascom chose for her) said, “It’s because Perrine killed him ages before Mum slashed at him with a knife. I saw a TV movie where that happened: someone was stabbed to death, or looked as if they had been, and the police worked out that they hadn’t, and that they must have been already dead for ages, because of the lack of blood around the body. Apparently if you stab someone who’s already dead, nowhere near as much seeps out.”

“Allisande,” Lisette said gravely. “Who do you think murdered Perrine?”

Allisande snorted to show that she didn’t think much of the question. “I’ve no idea!” she said. “I suppose the obvious answer is Mrs. Dodd, who is angry enough to turn into a raving homicidal maniac . . . but it can’t be her.”

“Why not?”

“Too obvious.”

“This is real life, not a story!” Lisette exploded impatiently. “You’re trying to be flippant, as if someone’s made all this up for titillation, because you know the truth ! You know it as well as I do, and you won’t admit it!”

“I do not!” Allisande protested. Her face had turned red.

“Yes, you do. We know more than anyone else, don’t we, you and I? One by one, the guests went to get their breakfast from Mum and Dad in the kitchen, but we didn’t. Dad brought our plates in to us in the drawing room, remember, while Mum was busy in the kitchen?”

“Oh—yes, you’re right,” said Allisande grudgingly. “But I don’t see why that means—”

“You do see,” Lisette spoke over her. “Stop lying! I know it’s difficult to face the truth, and nothing in your life experience has trained you to persevere when something is difficult—”

“I hate difficult!” Allisande flounced off to the other side of the room, making sure not to step in David Butcher’s blood as she went. “Let’s not have this conversation, Lissy. Please? Let’s go to the gazebo and make lists of names we’re going to call our future children. I quite like Ptolemy for a boy and Arbella for a girl—what do you think? Not Ara bella—that has ‘arab’ in it, which sounds like ‘scarab,’ and isn’t that a beetle?—but Ar bella. Do you like it?”

“We have to talk about this, Sandie,” said Lisette. “You and I were sitting, the whole time, in chairs in the drawing room that faced the window. We were still there when everyone else came in and settled down for the big group meeting, and we know that Perrine can’t have been murdered after that point because there was no one available to murder her—all the suspects were in the drawing room.”

“Oh shut up, shut up!” moaned Allisande.

“Whoever took Perrine out of the house, with all the pieces of her bed in tow, they must have gone out through the front door and along the drive. There’s no other way. The back door was never unlocked, and it’s only reachable if you go down the other flight of stairs, the one on the side of the house where Perrine’s bedroom isn’t .”

“That’s not true,” said Allisande. “Someone could have come down the stairs near the drawing room, straight from Perrine’s bedroom, and then gone around to the back door instead of going to the front door. If they stole the key to the back door—”

“But they couldn’t have done!” said Lisette in an impassioned voice. “The only key to the back door is kept in the drawing room in the glass-fronted cabinet, and we were in the drawing room the whole time! We’d have seen if any of the guests had gone to the cabinet and taken the key. No one went anywhere near it!”

“Intruders,” muttered Allisande.

“What?”

“You called them guests. I call them intruders.”

Lisette’s heart sank.

“One of them murdered our sister,” said Allisande.

“Sandie, you have to tell the truth—to me and to yourself! From where we were sitting, we would have seen if anyone went out of the front door. Who did we see? Who did you see?”

“Two policemen, taking David Butcher’s body out on a sort of stretcher thing.” Suddenly, Allisande’s eyes lit up. “What if it wasn’t only his body? What if Perrine was in there too? You know how the legend of evil Perrine has spread across the whole of the local area, and even as far as Paignton and Torquay—what if the police decided to take care of a murderer in a forbidden way, without any trial or anything?”

“I thought of that,” said Lisette. “But it’s impossible. David Butcher’s body was in a bag, wasn’t it? A zipped-up bag, exactly the shape of a person— one person, an adult male. Perrine wouldn’t have fitted in the bag, no way—and even if she had, what about the big wooden headboard of her bed, and all the other bed pieces. None of the policemen were carrying any bits of bed at all.”

“They might have hidden them under their coats,” suggested Allisande, who was starting to seem nervous.

“You know that’s impossible,” said Lisette. “And you know something else too. Why won’t you admit it?”

Allisande looked trapped. She put her fingers in her ears and started to sing: “Seven locks upon the red gate, seven gates about the red town. In the town there lives a butcher and his name is Handsome John Brown . . .”