Midge collected the Deduction Sheets and brought them out to Reggie, then Bramwell gave out the ballot slips. While they were absorbed in their voting, Lettie quietly returned and began serving coffee.
Unobtrusively, the other actors filed into the lounge and seated themselves among the guests. Evelina T. Carterslee nodded congratulations to Midge; all was going well.
Reggie, having donned a business suit and carrying a clipboard crammed with Deduction Sheets and other papers, made his entrance, looking sombre and official. He seated himself beside Roberta at the table that had been set up at one end of the lounge.
Bramwell delivered the ballot slips to Roberta. Midge brought coffee to both of them and retreated to stand against the wall where she could best observe the scene. The expectant hush as Roberta and Reggie studied their respective piles of paper was broken by excited whispers and the clatter of cups from the audience.
At last, Reggie pushed his clipboard aside and nodded to Roberta. She looked down at the two piles of slips in front of her; one was noticeably higher than the other.
‘The decision about the fate of Van Dine Industries was very close.’ Tactfully, she ignored the evidence of the slips before her.
‘However, the vote seems to have gone in favour of one—on a conditional basis. The consensus of opinion is that the new head of Van Dine Industries should be the Honourable Petronella Van Dine—but only if she renounces Algernon Moriarty.’
‘Oh, I say,’ Algie complained. ‘That’s a bit thick. You’re not going to do it, are you, Pet?’
Petronella rose to her feet. There was a long, thoughtful silence.
‘I—I feel I have a duty to—to my heritage,’ she faltered. ‘I’m sorry, Algie—’
‘It’s my heritage, too!’ Ned leaped to his feet, quivering with fury. ‘I’ll fight this decision to the highest court in the land.’
‘Boy, what a sore loser!’ someone commented. ‘He’d have been a lousy boss.’
‘Oh, well—’ Algie rose and began strolling casually towards the door. ‘In that case, I might as well toddle along. There’s nothing here for me—’
‘Don’t let him get away!’ Reggie snapped.
Norman Dain and Stanley Marric caught Algie as he began to run for the exit. They brought him, struggling wildly, to stand before Reggie.
‘Algernon Moriarty,’ Reggie said solemnly, ‘I hereby arrest you for the murders of Sir Cedric Strangeways, Lady Hermione Marsh and Miss Grace Holloway.’
‘It’s a lie!’ Algie shouted. ‘Why should I kill them?’
‘In order to inherit Chortlesby Manor,’ Reggie said.
‘Aha—I guessed it!’ Dix said.
‘No! No! It’s a lie! I didn’t do it! Tell them—’ He appealed to the motionless form hovering in the doorway. ‘Tell them I didn’t do it, Mummy.’
‘I was afraid of this—’ Cook delivered her last line. ‘There was always bad blood in that boy!’ She flipped the apron over her head and disappeared again.
‘Bad blood,’ Reggie said solemnly. ‘But Strangeways blood. There was only one reason Sir Cedric would have sacrificed himself by marrying Cook—to give his father’s child the family name! He never expected to return from the Front and so he thought it didn’t matter.’
‘But Algie’s name is Moriarty,’ Alice said in bewilderment.
‘Quite so.’ Reggie spoke rapidly, gradually speeding up even more, to race through the explanation at breakneck pace. ‘Once Sir Cedric—or Cedric, as he was then—re turned safely, although wounded, from the Front, the succession was no longer in doubt. He—and he alone—would inherit Chortlesby Manor. A different future had to be arranged for his half-brother. It was—is—traditional to buy younger sons a commission in the Army, and this was done as soon as Algie, graduating from a minor Public School, was old enough. For reasons best known to himself, Algie changed his name at that time. He then proceeded to bring disgrace upon his new name.’
‘Curse you, Dain!’ Algie struggled anew with his captors. ‘Let me go!’
‘His family lost track of him under his new name—perhaps they never knew it. No one had seen him since he was sent away to school as a child, he had changed a great deal as he grew up. When he encountered Lady Hermione—with the Honourable Petronella under her wing—in London, he recognized her, although she did not recognize him, and saw his chance. A double chance. Petronella was his key to Chortlesby Manor. And, if he could persuade her to marry him as well, he would have an heiress bride whose fortune could maintain him in the Manor to which he wished to become accustomed.’
Undeterred by groans, Reggie continued his summation.
‘By this time, Cook, his mother, had learned of Sir Cedric’s plan to marry Lettie. If the marriage had taken place and there had subsequently been children of that marriage, Algie’s chances of succeeding would have been dashed. His only hope was to kill his half-brother before the marriage could take place. It had only been delayed in order to allow Lady Hermione time to reconcile herself to the match. But Algie also knew that, if he put forward his claim after Sir Cedric’s death, his half-sister would know immediately that he had been responsible. So he had to kill her, too.’
‘And Miss Holloway knew too much,’ several people chorused. She had established that beautifully.
‘That is correct. Miss Holloway was the sort of person everyone trusts and confides in. She met Sir Cedric when she worked in the office of the solicitor who handled his eventual divorce. They became friends and he invited her to take up residence at the Manor when she had no other place to go when she retired.’
‘Beautiful!’ Dix said. ‘Beautiful!’
‘Take him away!’ Reggie ordered Algie’s captors. They marched Algie out of the lounge.
‘So there we are,’ Roberta said. ‘The solution to Murder At The Manor.’ She led the applause.
One by one, the actors stood up and took their bows. Algie came back into the lounge, Norman and Stanley behind him. They seemed to feel that they were entitled to bows, too.
‘Great!’ Bertha gave a sigh of satisfaction. ‘I was close. I spotted Cook—but I was certain that the child had been a girl. I was even wondering about the Babies Swapped At Birth gimmick. For a while, I suspected that Petronella—’
The happy hubbub of post-mortems filled the lounge. Cedric, Hermione and Grace filed into the room to fresh applause. The audience converged on the actors to congratulate them upon the finer points of their performances.
Lettie slipped away and began collecting the coffee cups and piling them on the trolley. The show might be over, but the ordinary chores of life must go on. ‘That went quite well,’ she said to Midge.
‘Very well.’ Midge took possession of the trolley and began wheeling it towards the door.
‘Oh-oh!’ Lettie said. ‘How did she get away?’
Lauren blocked the doorway, surveying the lounge. ‘What happened?’ she demanded. ‘What have I missed?’
‘Nothing really, dear—’ Forgetting her newly-resurrected state, Miss Holloway came forward to help. ‘I can explain everything to you—’
‘Someone better,’ Lauren said belligerently. ‘We’re sick and tired of missing everything. You keep doing all the important bits when we’re out of the way. It isn’t fair!’
‘What are you doing down here by yourself?’ Midge asked uneasily. ‘Where’s Amaryllis?’
‘Oh, she didn’t want us to come down,’ Lauren answered carelessly. ‘So we locked her in the bathroom.’
‘I suppose I ought to go up and let Mother out,’ Bramwell said, not very enthusiastically.
‘I wouldn’t hurry, if I were you,’ Cedric advised. ‘She’s going to be in a foul mood.’
‘Yes.’ Bramwell shuddered. I’m afraid so.’
‘Have another drink first,’ Dix suggested. They had already had one. ‘Fortify yourself.’
‘It is kind of peaceful without her,’ Bertha said.
‘Look,’ Stan said. ‘She isn’t going to know how long it took for that loopy dame to tell us where she was. We can act as though we just found out. Another half-hour or so isn’t going to make that much difference.’
‘She isn’t shouting or banging on the door, or anything—’ Haila returned from a foray into the upper reaches. ‘Or, if she is, we can’t hear her.’
Amaryllis had brought it on herself, Midge reflected. They had already managed to ignore her plight for over an hour. No one wanted to face the flare of temper when she was finally released. And it was lovely and peaceful without her.
It was Midge’s last coherent thought for quite a while. They were now well into overtime on this tour. According to the original schedule, the coach should have collected the tour right after lunch and taken them to the airport. While it might be to Roberta’s advantage that this had been prevented from happening, it was making a lot more work for everyone at the Manor—especially as they were without outside help.
Eric was in the kitchen chopping onions for Cook, a task he considered more congenial than trying to make conversation with the guests. Lettie, Grace and Hermione had disappeared to make up the rooms while the guests were occupied in the bar with their pre-dinner drinks.
As Midge went back and forth between the kitchen and dining-room setting the tables, she was aware of a burst of hilarity from the lounge. Evelina T. Carterslee, an excellent raconteuse when she chose to be, was regaling her fans with some of her favourite stories.
From the bar, Cedric’s voice could be heard telling a story of his own about one of the earlier tours: ‘Never had so many drinks bought for me in my life. Then I discovered why. Someone had told them I was Charles Paris incognito.’
Everyone seemed to be having a good time. ‘The character I’d like to have met,’ Stanley Marric said, ‘was Arthur Crook. I could really identify with a rough-diamond kind of lawyer like him.’
That wasn’t a bad idea, Midge mused. Perhaps they could do a ‘Dinner With the Detectives’. The actors could bone up on a particular sleuth, get his or her cases down pat, so that they could answer questions and keep in character all evening … Yes, it was definitely something to bear in mind for future weekends—She broke off, remembering that there might not be any future weekends. And this one wasn’t over yet.
‘I should think you’d prefer Perry Mason,’ Cedric said. ‘All those courtroom pyrotechnics—’
‘Naw,’ Stan said. ‘He was too—too American. I’d rather meet these English characters. They’ve got a lot more class.’
Someone cleared a throat, a bit too ostentatiously. Evidently Bramwell was still in their midst. Oh well, it was up to him when he chose to rescue his mother. He must be enjoying the respite as much as any of them. More, since he wasn’t being chivvied into dancing attendance on Lauren.
‘Dinner is going to be late, is it?’ A bit later Roberta popped her head round the corner.
‘The later the better, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’ There would then be less of the evening to struggle through. ‘No one’s in any hurry, are they?’
‘No,’ Roberta admitted. ‘Although some of them have started drifting upstairs to change. I wondered if I ought to make an announcement or something—’
‘Has Bramwell gone up yet?’
‘No, but he can’t delay it much longer. There aren’t many left in the bar now. I think Reggie’s planning to close it down soon.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’ Midge glanced at her watch. ‘Oh dear, it’s later than I thought.’
‘It’s later than Bramwell realizes, too,’ Roberta said. ‘Amaryllis is going to be in such a screaming temper when he lets her out, he’ll be lucky if she doesn’t scalp him.’
‘He’d better stop putting it off,’ Midge said. ‘No one else is going to do it. And if she misses a meal, she’ll be even more furious.’
‘I’ll see if I can’t get him moving,’ Roberta sighed. ‘Maybe I ought to follow him up and bring along a good stiff drink. That might soothe her a bit.’ She went back to the bar.
A familiar yowl sounded at Midge’s feet and Ackroyd hurled himself against her ankles. ‘What are you doing here?” she asked, startled. ‘I left you in the kitchen. You know you’re—’
‘I’m sorry, Midge.’ Dix came into the dining-room. ‘I’m afraid I let him out. I heard him crying and I just opened the kitchen door an inch or so to speak to him and he pushed through and got away from me.’
‘We never allow him in the dining-room.’ Midge frowned at Ackroyd, since Dix was a guest. ‘He knows that.’
‘It’s my fault entirely—’
Ackroyd, aware of Midge’s displeasure, retreated from her hastily and went to sniff at Dix’s shoes. He put out a paw and toyed with one of Dix’s shoelaces.
‘Look at that!’ Dix said. ‘Just like The Third Man. This is a brilliant cat, Midge.’ He stooped and gathered Ackroyd into his arms.
‘He watches the Late Film,’ Midge said drily.
‘All right.’ Dix bowed his head. ‘Perhaps I got carried away. It happens to us cat-lovers, you know. I fully understand why they worshipped them in Ancient Egypt. In fact, I have always felt an affinity for the Egyptians for that very reason. Any people smart enough to venerate the feline species—’
‘That’s it,’ Reggie said briskly, coming into the room. ‘I’ve closed the bar until after dinner.’
‘A very wise move,’ Dix said. ‘Otherwise some people would never move.’
‘They’re moving now—’ Reggie looked around. ‘Need any help in here?’
‘Thanks, but everything’s under control—’
A sudden piercing scream sounded above them.
‘That’s Roberta! What on earth—’ Midge led the dash for the staircase.
‘Oh, what is it now?’ Alice Dain asked fearfully, as they bumped into her at the head of the stairs. ‘I thought the game was over.’
The screams were coming from the Barbour suite.
‘I knew she’d have hysterics as soon as he let her out.’ Evelina appeared in the doorway of her own suite, lipstick still in hand. ‘Pity he couldn’t have left her in there for the rest of the night.’
‘We shouldn’t have let him come up alone,’ Stan said guiltily, as they crowded into the Barbour suite. ‘We knew she was going to raise hell.’
‘Roberta came up with him—’ Midge was still in the lead as they reached the bathroom door. ‘And that’s her screaming.’
Bramwell was slumped against the washbasin, staring incredulously at the sight in the bathtub. Roberta was backed against the far wall, screaming mechanically, pointlessly. It was too late for screams to bring any help.
Amaryllis Barbour lay fully dressed in the tub, her eyes staring up sightlessly through the clear water. A faintly blue tinge to her pallor, a slight parboiling of her skin, told them that she had lain submerged for a very long time.
