On impulse I bent down and kissed her forehead. It was moist under my lips. The gesture was a mistake. Whatever it was she wanted from me, it wasn’t affection.
We returned to the sitting-room. Paul asked me if I drank whisky. When I said that I disliked it, he fetched from the drinks cupboard a bottle for himself and a decanter of claret, then took up the pack of cards again and suggested that he should teach me poker. So that was how I spent Christmas night from about ten past eleven until nearly two in the morning, playing endless games of cards, listening to Wagner and Beethoven, hearing the crackle and hiss of burning logs as I kept up the fire, watching my cousin drink steadily until the whisky bottle was empty. In the end I accepted a glass of claret. It seemed both churlish and censorious to let him drink alone. The carriage-clock struck 1:45 before he roused himself and said: “Sorry, Cousin. Rather drunk. Be glad of your shoulder. To bed, to sleep, perchance to dream.”
We made slow progress up the stairs. I opened his door while he stood propped against the wall. The smell of whisky was only faint on his breath. Then with my help he staggered over to the bed, crashed down and was still.
At eight o’clock next morning Mrs. Seddon brought in my tray of early morning tea, switched on the electric fire and went quietly out with an expressionless, “Good morning, Madam.”
Half-awake, I reached over to pour the first cup when there was a hurried knock, the door opened, and Paul entered. He was already dressed and, to my surprise, showed no signs of a hangover. He said: “You haven’t seen Maybrick this morning, have you?”
“I’ve only just woken up.”
“Mrs. Seddon told me his bed hadn’t been slept in. I’ve just checked. He doesn’t appear to be anywhere in the house. And the library door is locked.”
Some of his urgency conveyed itself to me. He held out my dressing-gown and I slipped into it and, after a second’s thought, pushed my feet into my outdoor shoes, not my bedroom slippers. I said: “Where’s the library key?”
“On the inside of the library door. We’ve only the one.”
The hall was dim, even when Paul switched on the light, and the fallen berries from the mistletoe over the library door still gleamed milk-white on the dark wooden floor. I tried the door and, leaning down, looked through the keyhole. Paul was right, the key was in the lock. He said: “We’ll get in through the French windows. We may have to break the glass.”
We went out by a door in the north wing. The air stung my face. The night had been frosty and the thin covering of snow was still crisp except where Paul and I had frolicked the previous day. Outside the library was a small patio about six feet in width leading to a gravel path bordering the lawn. The double set of footprints were plain to see. Someone had entered the library by the French windows and then left by the same route. The footprints were large, a little amorphous, probably made, I thought, by a smooth-soled rubber boot, the first set partly overlaid by the second.
Paul warned: “Don’t disturb the prints. We’ll edge our way close to the wall.”
The door in the French windows was closed but not locked. Paul, his back hard against the window, stretched out a hand to open it, slipped inside and drew aside first the blackout curtain and then the heavy brocade. I followed. The room was dark except for the single green-shaded lamp on the desk. I moved slowly towards it in fascinated disbelief, my heart thudding, hearing behind me a rasp as Paul violently swung back the two sets of curtains. The room was suddenly filled with a clear morning light annihilating the green glow, making horribly visible the thing sprawled over the desk.
He had been killed by a blow of immense force which had crushed the top of his head. Both his arms were stretched out sideways, resting on the desk. His left shoulder sagged as if it, too, had been struck, and the hand was a spiked mess of splintered bones in a pulp of congealed blood. On the desktop the face of his heavy gold wristwatch had been smashed and tiny fragments of glass glittered like diamonds. Some of the coins had rolled onto the carpet and the rest littered the desktop, sent jangling and scattering by the force of the blows. Looking up I checked that the key was indeed in the lock. Paul was peering at the smashed wristwatch.
He said: “Half-past ten. Either he was killed then or we’re meant to believe he was.”
There was a telephone beside the door and I waited, not moving, while he got through to the exchange and called the police. Then he unlocked the door and we went out together. He turned to re-lock—it turned noiselessly as if recently oiled—and pocketed the key. It was then that I noticed that we had squashed some of the fallen mistletoe berries into pulp.
Inspector George Blandy arrived within thirty minutes. He was a solidly built countryman, his straw-coloured hair so thick that it looked like thatch above the square, weather-mottled face. He moved with deliberation, whether from habit or because he was still recovering from an over-indulgent Christmas it was impossible to say.
He was followed soon afterwards by the Chief Constable himself. Paul had told me about him. Sir Rouse Armstrong was an ex–colonial Governor, and one of the last of the old school of Chief Constables, obviously past normal retiring age. Very tall, with the face of a meditative eagle, he greeted my grandmother by her Christian name and followed her upstairs to her private sitting-room with the grave conspiratorial air of a man called in to advise on some urgent and faintly embarrassing family business. I had the feeling that Inspector Blandy was slightly intimidated by his presence and I hadn’t much doubt who would be effectively in charge of this investigation.
I expect you are thinking that this is typical Agatha Christie, and you are right; that’s exactly how it struck me at the time. But one forgets, homicide rate excepted, how similar my mother’s England was to Dame Agatha’s Mayhem Parva. And it seems entirely appropriate that the body should have been discovered in the library, that most fatal room in popular British fiction.
The body couldn’t be moved until the police surgeon arrived. He was at an amateur pantomime in the local town and it took some time to reach him. Dr. Bywaters was a rotund, short, self-important little man, red-haired and red-faced, whose natural irascibility would, I thought, have deteriorated into active ill-humour if the crime had been less portentous than murder and the place less prestigious than the manor.
Paul and I were tactfully excluded from the library while he made his examination. Grandmama had decided to remain upstairs in her sitting-room. The Seddons, fortified by the consciousness of an unassailable alibi, were occupied making and serving sandwiches and endless cups of coffee and tea, and seemed for the first time to be enjoying themselves. Rowland’s Christmas offerings were coming in useful and, to do him justice, I think the knowledge would have amused him. Heavy footsteps tramped backwards and forwards across the hall, cars arrived and departed, telephone calls were made. The police measured, conferred, photographed. The body was eventually taken away shrouded on a stretcher and lifted into a sinister little black van while Paul and I watched from the sitting-room window.
Our fingerprints had been taken, the police explained, to exclude them from any found on the desk. It was an odd sensation to have my fingers gently held and pressed onto what I remember as a kind of inkpad. We were, of course, questioned, separately and together. I can remember sitting opposite Inspector Blandy, his large frame filling one of the armchairs in the sitting-room, his heavy legs planted on the carpet, as conscientiously he went through every detail of Christmas Day. It was only then that I realised that I had spent almost every minute of it in the company of my cousin.