The victim, too, had been enticed to Stutleigh. His bait was the prospect of getting his hands on valuable coins and negotiating their sale. But the coins, which I had been told must of necessity be valued and sold, had in fact been purchased only five weeks earlier, almost immediately after my acceptance of my grandmother’s invitation. For a moment I wondered why the receipt hadn’t been destroyed, but the answer came quickly. The receipt was necessary so that the coins, their purpose now served, could be sold and the £3,200 recouped. And if I had been used, so had other people.
Christmas was the one day when the two servants could be certain to be absent all night. The police, too, could be relied upon to play their appointed part.
The Inspector, honest and conscientious but not particularly intelligent, inhibited by respect for an old-established family and by the presence of his Chief Constable. The Chief Constable, past retirement age but kept on because of the war, inexperienced in dealing with murder, a friend of the family and the last person to suspect the local squire of a brutal murder.
A pattern was taking shape, was forming into a picture, a picture with a face. In imagination I walked in the footsteps of a murderer. As is proper in a Christie-type crime, I called him X.
Sometime during Christmas Eve the right-hand drawer of the library desk was cleared, the papers stuffed into the left-hand drawer, the Wellington boots placed ready. The weapon was hidden, perhaps in the drawer with the boots. No, I reasoned, that wasn’t possible; it would need to have been longer than that to reach across the desk. I decided to leave the question of the weapon until later.
And so to the fatal Christmas Day. At a quarter to ten my grandmother goes up to bed, telling Rowland that she will get the coins out of the library safe so that he can examine them before he leaves next day. X can be certain that he will be there at half-past ten, sitting at the desk. He enters quietly, taking the key with him and locking the door quietly behind him. The weapon is in his hands, or hidden somewhere within reach in the room.
X kills his victim, smashes the watch to establish the time, exchanges his shoes for the Wellington boots, unlocks the door to the patio and opens it wide. Then he takes the longest possible run across the library and leaps into the darkness. He would have to be young, healthy and athletic in order to clear the six feet of snow and land on the gravel path; but then he is young, healthy and athletic.
He need have no fear of footprints on the gravel. The snow has been scuffled by our afternoon snowballing. He makes the first set of footsteps to the library door, closes it, then makes the second set, being careful partly to cover the first. No need to worry about fingerprints on the doorknob; his have every right to be there. And then he re-enters the house by a side-door left unbolted, puts on his own shoes and returns the Wellington boots to their place in the front porch. It is while he is crossing the hall that a piece of snow falls from the boots and melts into a puddle on the wooden floor.
How else could that small pool of water have got there? Certainly my cousin had lied in suggesting that it came from the water-carafe. The water-carafe, half-full, had been by my grandmother’s bed with the glass over the rim. Water could not have been spilled from it unless the carrier had stumbled and fallen.
And now, at last, I gave the murderer a name. But if my cousin had killed Rowland, how had it been done in the time? He had left me for no more than three minutes to say goodnight to our grandmother. Could there have been time to fetch the weapon, go to the library, kill Rowland, make the footprints, dispose of the weapon, cleaning from it any blood, and return to me so calmly to tell me that I was needed upstairs?
But suppose Dr. Bywaters was wrong, seduced into an over-hasty diagnosis by the watch. Suppose Paul had altered the watch before smashing it and the murder had taken place later than 10:30. But the medical evidence was surely conclusive; it couldn’t have been as late as half-past one. And even if it were, Paul had been too drunk to deliver that calculated blow.
But had he in fact been drunk? Had that, too, been a ploy? He had enquired whether I liked whisky before bringing in the bottle, and I remembered how faint was the smell of the spirit on his breath. But no; the timing was incontrovertible. It was impossible that Paul could have killed Rowland.
But suppose he’d merely been an accomplice; that someone else had done the actual deed, perhaps a fellow-officer whom he had secretly let into the house and concealed in one of its many rooms, someone who had stolen down at 10:30 and killed Maybrick while I gave Paul his alibi and the surging music of Wagner drowned the sound of the blows. Then, the deed done, he left the room with the weapon, hiding the key among the holly and mistletoe above the door, dislodging the bunch as he did so, so that the berries fell. Paul had then come, taking the key from the ledge, being careful to tread over the fallen berries, locked the library door behind him leaving the key in place, then fabricated the footprints just as I’d earlier imagined.
Paul as the accomplice, not the actual murderer, raised a number of unanswered questions, but it was by no means impossible. An Army accomplice would have had the necessary skill and the nerve. Perhaps, I thought bitterly, they’d seen it as a training exercise. By the time I tried to compose myself to sleep I had come to a decision. Tomorrow I would do more thoroughly what the police had done perfunctorily. I would search for the weapon.
Looking back it seems to me that I felt no particular revulsion at the deed and certainly no compulsion to confide in the police. It wasn’t just that I liked my cousin and had disliked Maybrick. I think the war had something to do with it. Good people were dying all over the world and the fact that one unlikeable one had been killed seemed somehow less important.
I know now that I was wrong. Murder should never be excused or condoned. But I don’t regret what I later did; no human being should die at the end of a rope.
I woke very early before it was light. I possessed myself in patience; there was no use in searching by artificial light and I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. So I waited until Mrs. Seddon had brought up my early morning tea, bathed and dressed, and went down to breakfast just before nine. My cousin wasn’t there. Mrs. Seddon said that he had driven to the village to get the car serviced. This was the opportunity I needed.
My investigation ended in a small lumber room at the top of the house. It was so full that I had to climb over trunks, tin boxes and old chests in order to search. There was a wooden chest containing rather battered cricket bats and balls, dusty, obviously unused since the grandsons last played in village matches. I touched a magnificent but shabby-looking horse, and set it in vigorous creaking motion, got tangled in the piled tin track of a Hornby train set, and cracked my ankle against a large Noah’s Ark.
Under the single window was a long wooden box, which I opened. Dust rose from a sheet of brown paper covering six croquet mallets with balls and hoops. It struck me that a mallet, with its long handle, would have been an appropriate weapon, but these had clearly lain undisturbed for years. I replaced the lid and searched further.
In a corner were two golf-bags, and it was here I found what I was looking for—one of the clubs, the kind with a large wooden head, was different from its fellows. The head was shining-clean.
It was then I heard a footstep and, looking round, saw my cousin. I know that guilt must have been plain on my face but he seemed completely unworried.