Bearing up with fetching fortitude, Madge Rolfe, who always looked as though the major anxiety of her life was how long she might have to wait for some lovelorn lounge lizard to light her next cigarette, offered him no more than a wan smile in return for his kiss.
As he strode out of the room followed by Don, everybody wished them godspeed. Then, clapping his hands in quite the Oriental manner, mustering as much grim joviality as could be regarded as decent under the circumstances, the Colonel asked, ‘Would anybody care to join me in a spot of breakfast?’
Chapter Two
It was a few minutes short of nine o’clock that same morning when a motor-car was heard pulling up in the forecourt outside the french window and a swift peek between the drawing-room’s heavy velveteen curtains confirmed it to be Dr Rolfe’s. It transpired (as the house-party was to hear it described to them) that the outward journey in particular had been a nightmarish experience. By the Doctor’s account, his Rover had lurched perilously out of one deep snowdrift into another and poor Don seems to have spent more of the trip pushing the car than being driven in it. They had, though, finally made it to Trubshawe’s cottage. Luckily, he was already up, nursing a mug of hot chocolate by the fire – perhaps also nursing a lonely memory or two – while Tobermory, his ancient Labrador, dozed at his slippered feet.
The Chief-Inspector first had to get over his natural surprise at finding a pair of strangers on his doorstep not merely on an icy December morn but on Boxing Day to boot. Having digested that, he was to be surprised all over again when informed of the reason for their call. Once a policeman, however, always a policeman: he accepted without hesitation to return with them to ffolkes Manor. In fact, the Colonel may have been right when he predicted that Trubshawe would actually welcome an injection of excitement in what must have become a somewhat anti-climactic existence after four decades of sterling service at the Yard. Don reported having observed an exhilarated glint in his eyes as well as a coiled and almost cat-like alacrity in his gestures when he and Rolfe gave him a brief rundown of the morning’s bizarre events.
Inside the gloomy hallway the three of them proceeded to divest themselves of their overcoats, scarves and gloves. Then, as the Chief-Inspector briskly dusted the snow from his walrus moustache, Tobermory, who couldn’t be left behind on his own, since at this stage nobody knew for certain just how long it might be before his master got home again, treated his bulgy old frame to an unexpectedly vigorous shake before trotting into the drawing-room and, giving its occupants an incurious once-over, collapsed in front of the fireplace and promptly closed his rheumy eyes.
The company, it has to be said, had become more than a little fretful in the intervening couple of hours. Selina ffolkes had taken to her bed, or at least to her bedroom, minutes after the Doctor’s departure and, with the exception of Chitty, whose idea it had been to fetch the Chief-Inspector and whom it would have been churlish to deprive of the spectacle of his arrival, the servants – the cook, the two housemaids, the kitchen-maid and the gardener-cum-chauffeur-cum-handyman – had all been sent back down to the kitchen, since the only contribution the three maids especially had had to make to the crisis was a nervous twittering that looked unlikely to let up in the short term.
As for the ffolkeses’ house-guests, not knowing whether they ought to go up to their rooms or wait on in the drawing-room, they had all chosen – all but Selina, that is – to stay put.
Maybe ‘chosen’ isn’t the correct word. Though nobody, not even the Colonel, presumed to give an order as such, there was an unspoken feeling among the whole party that, mortifying as it was to have to sit about in their dressing-gowns, hair unkempt and make-up unapplied, it might be wiser if they all remained within reassuring sight of each other until this Trubshawe person turned up, assuming he ever did. Naturally, they all implicitly trusted their fellow guests and hosts, all of them old, dear, close friends. Still, you could almost hear them thinking, if Evie is right …
Time passing as slowly as it invariably does, though, when you’re eager for it to fly, Madge Rolfe had proposed a rubber of bridge to while away what, for all anyone knew, could be several hours before her husband’s return. And since Mary ffolkes had long since given up playing with her own choleric spouse, it was Madge herself who ended up partnering the Colonel, and Evadne Mount the Vicar.
But it had been a spineless sort of game, with a dispiriting absence of the squabbling they all secretly enjoyed. It was clear they felt it would have been both tactless and tasteless to indulge themselves in one of their ripsnorting, corset-cracking rows. So that, when the search-party turned up at last with the Chief-Inspector in tow, it was with unanimous and undisguised relief that they all downed their cards.
Flanked by Don and Rolfe, the burly ex-Scotland Yard policeman stepped into the spacious drawing-room, whose light and warmth, following directly on from the gloom of the narrow hallway, caused him momentarily to blink.
The Colonel walked a few paces forward to greet him.
‘Ah, Trubshawe, so they got you here in one piece? Look, I’m really sorry, old chap, to have to drag you away from hearth and home on Boxing Day – and what a stinker of a Boxing Day it is, eh, what? But we’ve been at our wits’ end – we just didn’t know what …’
The Chief-Inspector took a grip of the Colonel’s hand and gave it such a forceful shake the latter couldn’t prevent himself from flinching. Then he scrutinised the half-dozen guests seated around the fireside – their tired, obscurely frightened eyes lent a semblance of animation by its glow – without letting his own shrewd eyes alight for more than a couple of seconds on any one of them.
‘You needn’t apologise,’ he said, absent-mindedly tweaking one of his bushy eyebrows. ‘I quite see how you had to turn wherever you could for help. Sounds like a dreadful business.’
‘It is, it is. But do come right in, right up to the fire. Warm your hands.’
‘Thanks. I will,’ he answered, marching over to the fireside with a series of generic nods to the attendant womenfolk.
‘Ladies,’ he said lightly, all but dipping his fingertips into the flames.
Then, turning back to the Colonel, he added, ‘I think, though, I ought to be taken at once to the scene of the crime.’
‘You wouldn’t prefer to be introduced first?’
‘Well – no.’
He addressed the others.
‘I don’t wish to appear rude, ladies – gentlemen,’ he nodded again, this time to both genders, ‘but, in view of the extreme gravity of the case, first things first. The body, I think.’
‘Yes, naturally you’ll want to see the body,’ said the Colonel. ‘Yes, yes, if you’ll just come with me. But, you know, it does feel a bit odd you haven’t yet met –’
‘The body first,’ the Chief-Inspector insisted.
‘As you say, then. It – I mean the body – it’s still in the attic. We haven’t touched anything, you’ll see. We left it – we left him – exactly as we found him. If you’d just like to follow me.’
‘Thank you. And perhaps you, Mr Duckworth, would join us? Since you were with the Colonel when he broke into the attic.’
‘Oh yeah, sure thing,’ averred Don. ‘In the car I told you everything I know, but, sure, anything you say.’
‘It might be helpful if Farrar also came with us,’ the Colonel interjected. ‘Take notes. What say you, Chief-Inspector? He’s my secretary and general manager. Good chap to have around.’
‘I don’t have a problem with that. Though I tend to make my own notes’ – he tapped his forehead – ‘inside my head, don’t you know. But yes, why not.’