Free Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh Page A

Uncle Flea said it was ridiculous?”
    “I don’t believe you.”
    “You may as well, I promise you.”
    Troy giggled.
    “Of course she’d love it if Uncle Flea did go into action with a horsewhip. I can never understand how it’s managed, can you? It would be so easy to run away and leave the horsewhipper laying about him like a ringmaster without a circus.”
    “I don’t think it’s that kind of horsewhip. It’s one of the short jobs like a jockey’s. You have to break it in two when you’ve finished and contemptuously throw the pieces at the victim.”
    “You’re wonderfully well informed, aren’t you?”
    “It’s only guesswork.”
    “All the same, you know, it’s no joke, this business. It’s upset my lovely Cressida.
She
really is cross. You see, she’s never taken to the staff. She was prepared to put up with them because they do function quite well, don’t you think? But unfortunately she’s heard of the entire entourage of a Greek millionaire who died the other day, all wanting to come to England because of the Colonels. And now she’s convinced it was Nigel who did her message and she’s dead set on making a change.”
    “You don’t think it was Nigel?”
    “No. I don’t think he’d be such an ass.”
    “But if — I’m sorry but you did say he was transferred to Broadmoor.”
    “He’s as sane as sane can be. A complete cure. Oh, I know the message to Cressida is rather in his style but I consider that’s merely a blind.”
    “
Do
you!” Troy said thoughtfully.
    “Yes, I do. Just as — well — Uncle Flea’s message is rather in Blore’s vein. You remember Blore slashed out at the handsome busboy who had overpersuaded Mrs. Blore. Well, it came out in evidence that Blore made a great to-do about being a cuckold. The word cropped up all over his statements.”
    “How does he spell it?”
    “I’ve no idea.”
    “What is your explanation?”
    “To begin with I don’t countenance any notion that both Nigel and Blore were inspired, independently, to write poison-pen notes on the same sort of paper (it’s out of the library), in the same sort of capital letters.”
    (Or, thought Troy, that Mervyn was moved at the same time to set a booby-trap.)
    “—Or, equally,” Hilary went on, “that one of the staff wrote the messages to implicate the other two. They get on extremely well together, all of them.”
    “Well, then?”
    “What is one left with? Somebody’s doing it. It’s not me and I don’t suppose it’s you.”
    “No.”
    “No. So we run into a
reductio ad absurdum
, don’t we? We’re left with a most improbable field. Flea. Bed. Cressida. Uncle Bert.”
    “And Moult?”
    “Good Heavens,” said Hilary. “Uncle Bert’s fancy! I forgot about Moult. Moult, now.
Moult
.”
    “Mr. Smith seems to think —”
    “Yes, I daresay.” Hilary glanced uneasily at Troy and began to walk about the room as if he were uncertain what to say next. “Uncle Bert,” he began at last, “is an oddity. He’s not a simple character. Not at all.”
    “No?”
    “No. For instance there’s his sardonic-East-End-character act. ‘I’m so artful, you know, I’m a cockney.’ He
is
a cockney, of course. Vintage barrow-boy. But he’s put himself in inverted commas and comes out of them whenever it suits him. You should hear him at the conference table. He’s as articulate as the next man and, in his way, more civilized than most.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Yes. He’s got a very individual sense of humour, has Uncle Bert.”
    “Tending towards black comedy?”
    “He might have invented the term. All the same,” Hilary said, “he’s an astute judge of character and I–I can’t pretend he isn’t, although —”
    He left this observation unfinished. “I think I’ll do the tree,” he said. “It settles one’s nerves.”
    He opened the lid of the packing-case that had been placed near the tree.
    Mr. Smith had left ajar the double doors into the great hall from whence