‘So that’s that,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. She gazed about her as she had the day before, at the chair opposite, at the picture on the mantelpiece, and she spoke with great calmness, into the silence of the room. ‘That’s the end of it, then. That’s that.’
‘That’s that?’ echoed Cadwallader, later. ‘She said, “That’s that”?’ Buttercup and I had joined him and Daisy in the library whereupon he had poured me a monstrously huge drink and demanded to be told all.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t the way it sounds now,’ I said. ‘Was it, darling?’
Buttercup only blinked.
‘It was as though she were saying, I had a husband yesterday and today he’s gone and there’s no reason for it and no one to blame and that’s that. Actually, I rather thought it was her son and her husband, you know. She did glance towards the son’s picture as she said it. She had them both and she lost them both and there’s the end of it and she’s on her own now. It was terribly sad and it makes perfect sense.’
‘It does?’ said Cad with a sly look at Daisy which I could not begin to interpret. He waited, Daisy waited, Buttercup stared into space and sipped her cocktail.
‘And yet,’ I said, almost reluctantly. I was tired, drained from all the giving of sympathy, not to mention the bonny babies. ‘And yet… there was something.’
‘Mrs Dudgeon said something?’ asked Daisy.
‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘She looked… Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably nothing. Once before in my experience someone at a comparable moment behaved not as I thought she would and in that case it turned out that all was far from well. So I suppose I’m just looking for trouble and, therefore, as my nanny warned me, finding it. Ignore me.’
‘So this feeling you had,’ said Cadwallader, ‘it was just a funny look from the widow, was it? Nothing else?’ I stared at him and at Daisy too, puzzled, with a growing feeling that something was going on here I could not quite catch on to.
‘What are you two up to?’ I said. Cad gave back a limpid gaze, but Daisy fidgeted and would not meet my eyes. She has a dreadful habit, started goodness knows where and when, of sticking her cocktail stick, once the olive has gone, into the setting of her engagement ring, then snapping it off and sticking in the next bit, and so on and so on until her beautiful cluster of five diamonds looks like a dried porcupine. I have seen her go through an evening like this, little ragged bits of cocktail stick poking out from her finger, and I assume that her maid removes them at bedtime. Grant, I am sure, would smack my legs and put my ring in the bank if I did the like.
‘One of these days, one of those stones will ping right out, darling,’ I said. ‘And if it goes in the fire, I shall laugh.’
Daisy raised her eyebrows in that haughty way of hers (I am immune to it) and said: ‘Don’t take it out on me, Dan. Just give in.’
‘Give in to what?’ I said.
‘I knew it,’ said Cad. ‘Although you wouldn’t listen. I knew it this morning. Robert Dudgeon knew it last night. And what you’ve said convinces me that Mrs Dudgeon knows it too. Now, if an autopsy had come up with something solid I was prepared to believe I was wrong but…’
‘Not this again,’ I said, almost, almost laughing. ‘Robert Dudgeon died of heart failure owing to alcoholic poisoning. How can you doubt it? How can you doubt Inspector Cruickshank?’
‘I don’t,’ said Cadwallader. ‘I’m sure Dudgeon did die of heart failure, everyone does, in the end. And no one can doubt the alcohol. I’d even be willing to put quite a bet on poison.’
‘A poison which the post-mortem failed to detect?’ I said. ‘Not an untraceable poison, Cadwallader, really! One can be drummed out of the Sherlock Holmes Society for the mere mention.’ He ignored me.
‘What did you think of the inspector, Dandy?’ he said.
‘What did I think of what aspect of the inspector?’ I said.
‘Not to mention the doctor,’ he went on.
‘The police surgeon?’ I said. I had not thought much of the police surgeon, truth be told, but before I could properly bring him to mind and wonder why exactly, Cadwallader was speaking again.
‘Did Robert Dudgeon look drunk to you last evening?’ he said.
I shook my head. All of a sudden my scalp prickled.
‘Well, then,’ said Daisy.
Both she and Cad were looking hard at me, waiting. The ludicrous thought struck me that they thought I had had something to do with it all. Why, otherwise, were they staring like that? What did they want?
‘Well then what?’ I demanded.
‘Will you take the job?’
‘What?’
‘Daisy here has filled me in as to your terms.’
‘My…?’
‘And I’ve told him, without a word of a lie, darling, that you’re absolutely splendid, even if you do tend to store your light under the nearest bushel for safekeeping.’
‘Oh, I see!’ said Buttercup at last. ‘Daisy did tell me about you branching out into diamond theft and murder, Dan, but I forgot.’
‘I’m not sure I’d put it quite that way,’ I said. ‘Not on my card, at least.’
‘You have cards?’ said Buttercup, impressed.
‘I don’t,’ I admitted.
‘But you do have the knack,’ said Cad.
I shrugged modestly.
‘And you have the time, Dan,’ said Daisy.
I could hardly deny that.
‘All right,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll do it.’ And I thought to myself, why not? Perhaps last time was not a fluke. Perhaps I do have the knack. And I may not have a pipe, nor a deerstalker, nor a magnifying lens, nor an apparent walking cane that is really a sword and a compass, but I do have a Watson. At least I did last time and I was sure I would not have made any headway without him. Now, the question was how to get him off the grouse moor on the twelfth of August. I should have to give him the whole of my fee.
Chapter Five
Alec’s face, upon first seeing the castle, was a sight not to be missed so I made sure to be standing alongside Cad and Buttercup outside the great iron-studded door as his motor car negotiated the grassy ramp. He looked up, up, up, counting arrow slits on the Hall floor, the library floor, and the first bedroom floor, then took a step back and shaded his eyes with one hand to look at the last two floors above. His head-shake as he turned his gaze back to Cad must have been meant to loosen the crick in his neck, but Cad took it as awe.
‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ Cad said, absolutely artless.
‘Wonderful isn’t the word,’ said Alec.
I managed to turn my snort into a cough, but Cad was busy anyway, introducing himself and Buttercup and trying to explain to Alec’s valet about the other house and the system of connecting telephones.
Buttercup could not be prevented from launching into her tour.
‘We ’ll finish up in the library, darlings, so wait for us there,’ she said, before bearing Alec away into the kitchens. I saw that she was set to turn into one of those hostesses who process house guests rather than entertaining them, but there are worse kinds of hostess than that since, when one has been simmered, seasoned, minced and tinned by them, one is then left pleasantly alone. Besides, the castle and Buttercup’s guileless raptures over it were genuinely diverting and at least here it was rooms and fittings not dreary gardens or, worse, the drains, walls and ditches over which my own husband enthuses so mystifyingly. Hugh is always rather bewildered at his guests’ blanket refusals to be shown a new kind of cattle grid or an ingenious self-filling water-trough in a far field.