‘Oh yes,’ said Georgina Nash, bending down to pick up a pigeon’s wing from the immaculate grass. ‘Really, why the gardeners can’t be bothered to bend down and pick up this rubbish I don’t know. It was the same with the fountain. Three times before Emily’s big day I asked them to mend it. They never did. It’s too bad. Sorry, Lord Powerscourt, I’ve diverted myself. Where was I? Ah yes, timetable, that’s what we were talking about. Willoughby and I reckoned half an hour should be enough for a couple of glasses of champagne and for people to loosen up a little. It seemed to be about right.’
‘Did you have a seating plan for the Long Gallery?’ asked Powerscourt.
‘How very curious that you too should ask about seating plans, Lord Powerscourt. That young policeman, Inspector Cooper I think he was called, he looked about fifteen years old, he was obsessed with seating plans. Anyway, we did have one. We had a couple of discreet blackboards set up out here with the plans pinned to them and more on the way to the Gallery itself.’
Powerscourt resolved to leave the question of the fifteen-year-old Detective Inspector till later. He felt Georgina Nash could be sidetracked very easily from the question in hand.
She was leading them back to the gravel drive in front of the house and the main entrance. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Nash, before we go into the house, was there anything unusual going on while the guests were drinking their champagne on the lawn? Any strangers moving about, that sort of thing?’
Georgina Nash stopped in front of a great timber door that opened into the interior of Brympton Hall. ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. ‘Up till this point and a little longer, there was absolutely nothing unusual about Emily’s wedding. Nothing. The horrors came later.’
She led them into the Great Hall, once the heart of the house, now dominated by an enormous double staircase leading to the first floor. A series of eighteenth-century Norfolk gentlemen, famed perhaps in their own county rather more than in the country at large, lined the walls. Carved wooden figures adorned the stairs, a soldier with musket and powder flasks, a gentleman in hose, a bearded soldier with slashed breeches and a two-handed sword, a kilted Highlander and a Cossack.
‘It’s absolutely splendid,’ said Powerscourt, inspecting one of the Norfolk grandees in a scarlet coat.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Georgina Nash. ‘If you actually live here, of course, you get used to it and you begin to wonder after a while how so much dust manages to settle on and around this staircase.
‘Now then, back to business, Lord Powerscourt. We had two more seating plans on display on either side of the stairs so people could have a check before they reached the Long Gallery.’
She led the way up to the first floor. ‘It’s all quite simple from here on,’ she said. ‘Once they were up here we took them through this little spot we call the anteroom and into the Long Gallery itself.’ Powerscourt was enchanted by the room, over a hundred and fifty feet long, great windows looking out over the grass, a rich and elaborate ceiling. It must, he thought, be one of the finest Long Galleries in the kingdom.
‘Mrs Nash,’ he said, ‘I have had an account from the lawyers of what happened here that day. All I would ask is that you tell me everything you can remember about the time immediately before and immediately after the murder.’
‘And then I could go? I could meet you down in the gardens perhaps? That would be very kind, Lord Powerscourt.’ She paused and stared down the room. ‘All the tables were laid out up here, of course. They looked lovely. Every place had a name on the table in front of it. I was trying to mix them up, the Colvilles and the Nashes and their friends.’ She stopped again and fiddled with her hair. ‘I remember feeling irritated that the people weren’t moving away from this entrance here and up to the far end of the Long Gallery. There was a great crush in this area until one of the footmen began ushering people up the room. I think the sun went in briefly. I remember thinking how improbably blonde Augusta Nash’s hair was and how improbably handsome her brother Percy was. He’d just become a lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment and he was wearing his scarlet jacket and black trousers. Who am I, Lord Powerscourt,’ Georgina Nash managed a bright smile, ‘to fall for a soldier at my age! After that, it all becomes rather a blur, I’m afraid. Willoughby telling me what had happened, the terrible silence while people played with their food. They felt, I think, that it would be rude to eat it, in those circumstances, and that it would be rude not to eat it. So, most of them fiddled about with this rather splendid fare. Nobody wanted to talk much, they were all too shocked, and every now and then somebody would launch a conversational boat out on to the pond, as it were, only for it to be engulfed in the surrounding quiet. Then the policemen came and we all had to wait until they had questioned everybody before we could leave. Willoughby is saying he’ll never set foot in the Long Gallery again. He’s even talking of selling the Hall.’
Powerscourt felt that Georgina Nash would be better away from this place with its awful memories. ‘You have been most kind, Mrs Nash, and most helpful. If you’d like to take a turn about the garden I’ll join you very shortly. By the way, you wouldn’t by any chance have one of those seating plans left, would you? It might be helpful.’
She smiled. ‘I put one aside for you, Lord Powerscourt. I shall have it with me when we meet in the garden.’
Powerscourt strolled slowly up the room. He noticed that you could see very clearly what was happening in the garden, and wondered if the same was true the other way round. He stared regretfully at the splendid ceiling, knowing that under normal circumstances he would have spent far longer examining it. One thing in particular interested him. Was the route he had just taken via the Grand Staircase the only way in? At the far end of the Long Gallery, the opposite end to the Great Hall and the double staircase, was a door which opened out on to a set of steps that led down into the garden. An enterprising murderer might have come in this way and hidden himself away until he could be lost in the crowds. And as he followed what must have been the last journey of Randolph Colville through the Peter the Great room and into the state bedroom on the corner of the Hall, he found another set of stairs leading out on to the gardens on the other side of the house from the fountain. Here was another way in or out for any wedding guest who happened to be a murderer.
Two things had worried Powerscourt about this case from the start. He found that his brain seemed to come up with new answers when he least expected it. The first related to the silence of Cosmo Colville. The second, and the one that assailed him now, had to do with the gun. The prosecution, Charles Augustus Pugh had been adamant on this point, were sure that they could prove that it was Randolph Colville’s own gun. Powerscourt’s initial reaction was that they might be putting two and two and two together and making six. Pugh himself was moderately hopeful that he could open some doubts in the jury’s mind in cross-examination, but he couldn’t be sure. Suppose, Powerscourt’s brain suggested to him, as he stood on the bottom steps of the staircase leading from the state bedroom with a couple of pigeons waddling across the grass in front of him, suppose it really was Randolph’s gun. Why had he brought it? Did he intend to murder somebody at the wedding? Was he bringing it in self-defence? Defence of whose self, of his own, or of some member of his family’s?
He made some detailed drawings in a small black notebook and headed round the house for a final chat with Mrs Colville. She handed him a seating plan, with the writing carried out in one of the most beautiful hands Powerscourt had ever seen.
‘It’s Ursula, Emily’s sister, who does the handwriting, she’s very artistic. Willougby thinks she could be famous one day.’ Mrs Nash looked much more comfortable in her garden than she had in her house. ‘I tell you one thing that might be helpful, Lord Powerscourt,’ she said. ‘I think that young policeman had a seating plan, or maybe it should be a standing plan, for where everybody was when the gun went off. He and his men took very careful statements from everybody here about exactly where they were at the time.’