talking about Cressida,’ Mrs Forrester bawled at her husband.
‘I know you are. I heard.’
After this they sipped their drinks, Mrs Forrester making rather a noise with hers and blowing on it to cool it down.
‘The arrangements for Christmas Day,’ Hilary began after a pause, ‘are, I think, an improvement on last year. I’ve thought of a new entrance for you, Uncle Flea.’
‘Have you, though? Have you? Have you?’
‘From outside. Through the french windows behind the tree.’
‘Outside!’ Mrs Forrester barked. ‘Do I understand you, Hilary? Do you plan to put your uncle out on the terrace on a midwinter night – in a snowstorm. I said a snowstorm?’
‘It’ll only be for a moment, Aunt Bed.’
‘You have not forgotten, I suppose, that your uncle suffers from a circulatory complaint.’
‘I’ll be all right, B.’
‘I don’t like it, I said –’
‘But I assure you! And the undergarment is quilted.’
‘Pshaw! I said –’
‘No, but do listen!’
‘Don’t fuss, B. My boots are fur-lined. Go on, old boy. You were saying –?’
‘I’ve got a lovely tape-recording of sleighbells and snorting reindeer. Don’t interrupt, anybody. I’ve done my research and I’m convinced that there’s an overlap here between the Teutonic and the Druidical and if there’s not,’ Hilary said rapidly, ‘there ought to be. So. We’ll hear you shout “Whoa”, Uncle Flea, outside, to the reindeer, and then you’ll come in.’
‘I don’t shout very loud nowadays, old boy,’ he said worriedly. ‘Not the Pirbright note any more, I’m afraid.’
‘I thought of that. I’ve had the “whoa” added to the bells and snorts. Cuthbert did it. He has a stentorian voice.’
‘Good. Good.’
‘There will be thirty-one children and about a dozen parents. And the usual assortment of county and farmers. Outside hands and, of course, the staff.’
‘Warders?’ asked Mrs Forrester. ‘From That Place?’
‘Yes. From the married quarters. Two. Wives and families.’
‘Marchbanks?’
‘If he can get away. They have their own commitments. The chaplain cooks up something pretty joyless. Christmas,’ said Hilary acidly, ‘under maximum security. I imagine one can hardly hear the carols for the alarm bells.’
‘I suppose,’ said his aunt after a good suck at her toddy, ‘you all know what you’re about. I’m sure I don’t. I smell danger.’
‘That’s a dark saying, Auntie,’ remarked Hilary.
Cuthbert came in and announced dinner. It was true that he had a very loud voice.
Before they went to bed they listened to the regional weather report. It said that snow was expected to fall through the night and into Christmas Eve but that it was unlikely to continue until Christmas Day itself. A warm front was approaching over the Atlantic Ocean.
‘I always think,’ Hilary remarked, ‘of a warm front as belonging to a décolleté Regency lady thrusting her opulent prow, as it were, into some consequential rout or ball and warming it up no end. The ball, I mean.’
‘No doubt,’ his aunt tartly rejoined, ‘Cressida will fulfil that questionable role at the coming function.’
‘Well, you know, darling, I rather think she may,’ said Hilary and kissed his aunt goodnight.
When Troy hung her red dress in her wardrobe that night she discovered that the recess in which it had been built must be flanked by a similar recess in the Forrester’s room so that the ancient wall that separated them had been in this section, removed and a thin partition separated their respective hanging cupboards.
Mrs Forrester, at this very moment, was evidently disposing of her own garments. Troy could hear the scrape of coathangers on the rail. She jumped violently when her own name was shouted, almost as it seemed, into her ear.
‘Troy! Odd sort of Christian name.’
Distantly, Colonel Forrester could be heard to say: ‘… no … understand … famous …’ His head, Troy thought was momentarily engulfed in some garment. Mrs Forrester sounded extremely cross.
‘You know what I think about it,’ she shouted and rattled the coathangers, ‘I said you know …’
Troy, reprehensibly, was riveted in her wardrobe.
‘… don’t trust …’ continued the voice. ‘Never have. You know that.’ A pause and a final shout: ‘… sooner it was left straight out to the murderers. Now!’ A final angry clash of coathangers and a bang of wardrobe doors.
Troy went to bed in a daze but whether this condition was engendered by the Lucullan dinner Hilary and Kittiwee had provided or by the juxtaposition of unusual circumstances in which she found herself, she was quite unable to determine.
She had thought she was sleepy when she got into bed but now she lay awake, listening to small noises made by the fire in her grate as it settled into glowing oblivion and to faint sighs and occasional buffets of the night wind outside. Well, Troy thought, this is a rum go and no mistake.
After a period of disjointed but sharp reflections she began to fancy she heard voices somewhere out in the dark. ‘I must be dozing, after all,’ Troy thought. A gust of wind rumbled in the chimney followed by a silence into which there intruded the wraith of a voice, belonging nowhere and diminished as if the sound had been turned off in a television dialogue and only the ghost of itself remained.
Now, positively, it was out there below her window: a man’s voice – two voices – engaged in indistinguishable talk.
Troy got out of bed and by the glow from her dying fire, went to her window and parted the curtains.
It was not as dark as she had expected. She looked out at a subject that might have inspired Jane Eyre to add another item to her portfolio. A rift had been blown in the clouds and the moon in its last quarter shone on a prospect of black shadows thrown across cadaverous passages of snow. In the background rose the moors and in the foreground, the shambles of broken glass beneath her window. Beyond this jogged two torchlights, the first of which cast a yellow circle on a white ground. The second bobbed about the side of a large wooden crate with the legend: ‘Musical instrument. Handle with Extreme Care’ stencilled across it. It seemed to be mounted on some kind of vehicle, a sledge, perhaps, since it made no noise.
The two men wore hooded oilskins that glinted as they moved. The leader gesticulated and pointed and then turned and leant into the wind. Troy saw that he had some kind of tow-rope over his shoulder. The second man placed his muffled hands against the rear end of the crate and braced himself. He tilted his head sideways and glanced up. For a moment she caught sight of his face. It was Nigel.
Although Troy had only had one look at Vincent, the non-poisoner-chauffeur-gardener, and that look from the top of a hill, she felt sure that the leader was he.
‘Hup!’ cried the disembodied voice and the ridiculous outfit moved off round the west wing in the direction of the main courtyard of Halberds.