Free What Happened at Hazelwood? by Michael Innes

down the corridor calling upon Owdon to follow her.
    For a moment George’s large laughter filled the room. But it was not the laughter with which he would normally have greeted an incident so much to his taste. And again I tried to get the hang of how these men were feeling. ‘Who threw the bottle?’ I asked.
    What happened at Hazelwood? My question, as it happened, was really the first attempt at solving that. Or at least it exposed a preliminary mystery. For they didn’t want to answer. Some queer panic or uncertainty was upon them and they were all for concealing whatever they could. But they were quite ineffective. They could, after all, simply have turned Grace (who was very much the chafing-dish again) and myself out of the room; and George ought to have been quite fit for this with no ceremony. But instead they looked at one another like third-form boys caught smoking in a barn. Bevis, although one could see that he had been in the thick of the quarrel, was endeavouring to look dignified and composed; this gave him the air of the unpleasant sort of child who, at such a discovery, edges himself towards the side of law and order.
    Willoughby was a little more genuinely detached. My eye followed his straying to the Caravaggio Venus in her almost trompe d’œil quality over the fireplace. He was far, I knew, from seeing her as what Grace called an allurement to vice. For art is a mysterious but increasingly real other world to Willoughby, and perpetually entices him from the banal environment in which he quite willingly spends most of his time. He looked at the goddess now as one might look at some transcendental backstairs or fire-escape. Then he turned back and scowled rather conscientiously at each of us in turn.
    Hippias moved with exaggerated unsteadiness across the room. ‘Mush better go to bed,’ he stuttered. ‘Lil’ dispute over cards.’
    ‘Cards?’ I said. There was no sign of cards in George’s study, nor ever had been since I could remember.
    ‘Horses,’ corrected Hippias readily. ‘Lil’ alter – altercation about name of animal won the Derby in ’06.’
    ‘He means in ’07,’ said George – and as he spoke gave me a look which made me at once afraid and furious. For I could see how George’s mind was working. The mystery, whatever it was, had got him in a tight spot. And (as I had suspected might happen) he was going to take it out of someone else. ‘Among gentlemen such matters are always settled with a bottle. Get back to your own brand of tattle, my dear, and leave us to ours. But just see that Mervyn’s all right first. And tell Owdon to bring more glasses.’
    It is funny just what one won’t stand. There had been times when, if George had taken a hunting-crop to me, I should have regarded it as one of the legitimate consequences of a marriage made in a bad moment. But this about the glasses was definitive.
    ‘Owdon,’ I snapped, ‘has had his last orders from me. And I from you.’
    I could see George hesitate, and again I knew that he had much more on his mind than I could get at. ‘You are mistaken,’ he said.
    The significance of this – if significance it had – was obscured by Grace, who gave a sudden and indignant yelp of surprise. ‘George’s portrait!’ she exclaimed. ‘How utterly disgraceful!’
    We all looked at it. Alone of all the oils in the room, this picture was for some reason glazed. And here, it seemed, was where the whiskey-bottle had found its mark. The glass was shattered, and in the lower centre of the canvas itself there was a gaping rent. Grace as she looked at this turned pale with fury; an obscure assault upon her brother plainly went very deep. Since (as I have explained) that pink hunting-coat toned George’s portrait right in with the allurements to vice her attitude was really very unreasonable. But now she started on one of those tirades of hers which it would be useless to reproduce. And this annoyed Willoughby.
    ‘Shut up,’