The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

The Mistletoe Murder

One of the minor hazards of being a bestselling crime novelist is the ubiquitous question, “And have you ever been personally involved with a real-life murder investigation?”; a question occasionally asked with a look and tone which suggest that the Murder Squad of the Metropolitan Police might with advantage dig up my back garden.

I invariably reply no, partly from reticence, partly because the truth would take too long to tell and my part in it, even after fifty-two years, is difficult to justify. But now, at seventy, the last survivor of that extraordinary Christmas of 1940, the story can surely safely be told, if only for my own satisfaction. I’ll call it “The Mistletoe Murder.” Mistletoe plays only a small part in the mystery but I’ve always liked alliteration in my titles. I have changed the names. There is now no one living to be hurt in feelings or reputation, but I don’t see why the dead should be denied a similar indulgence.

I was eighteen when it happened, a young war-widow; my husband was killed two weeks after our marriage, one of the first RAF pilots to be shot down in single combat. I had joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, partly because I had convinced myself it would have pleased him, but primarily out of the need to assuage grief by a new life, new responsibilities.

It didn’t work. Bereavement is like a serious illness. One dies or one survives, and the medicine is time, not a change of scene. I went through my preliminary training in a mood of grim determination to see it through, but when my grandmother’s invitation came, just six weeks before Christmas, I accepted with relief. It solved a problem for me. I was an only child and my father, a doctor, had volunteered as a middle-aged recruit to the Royal Army Medical Corps; my mother had taken herself off to America. A number of school friends, some also in the Forces, wrote inviting me for Christmas, but I couldn’t face even the subdued festivities of wartime and feared that I should be a skeleton at their family feast.

I was curious, too, about my mother’s childhood home. She had never got on with her mother and after her marriage the rift was complete. I had met my grandmother only once in childhood and remembered her as formidable, sharp-tongued, and not particularly sympathetic to the young. But I was no longer young, except in years, and what her letter tactfully hinted at—a warm house with plenty of wood fires, home cooking and good wine, peace and quiet—was just what I craved.

There would be no other guests, but my cousin Paul hoped to be on leave for Christmas. I was curious to meet him. He was my only surviving cousin, the younger son of my mother’s brother and about six years older than I. We had never met, partly because of the family feud, partly because his mother was French and much of his youth spent in that country. His elder brother had died when I was at school. I had a vague childhood memory of some disreputable secret, whispered about but never explained.

My grandmother in her letter assured me that, apart from the three of us, there would only be the butler, Seddon, and his wife. She had taken the trouble to find out the time of a country bus which would leave Victoria at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve and take me as far as the nearest town, where Paul would meet me.

The horror of the murder, the concentration on every hour of that traumatic Boxing Day, has diminished my memory of the journey and arrival. I recall Christmas Eve in a series of images, like a gritty black-and-white film, disjointed, a little surreal.

The bus, blacked out, crawling, lights dimmed, through the unlit waste of the countryside under a reeling moon; the tall figure of my cousin coming forward out of the darkness to greet me at the terminus; sitting beside him, rug-wrapped, in his sports car as we drove through darkened villages through a sudden swirl of snow. But one image is clear and magical, my first sight of Stutleigh Manor. It loomed up out of the darkness, a stark shape against a grey sky pierced with a few high stars. And then the moon moved from behind a cloud and the house was revealed; beauty, symmetry and mystery bathed in white light.

Five minutes later I followed the small circle of light from Paul’s torch through the porch with its country paraphernalia of walking-sticks, brogues, rubber boots and umbrellas, under the blackout curtain and into the warmth and brightness of the square hall. I remember the huge log fire in the hearth, the family portraits, the air of shabby comfort, and the mixed bunches of holly and mistletoe above the pictures and doors, which were the only Christmas decoration. My grandmama came slowly down the wide wooden stairs to greet me, smaller than I had remembered, delicately boned and slightly shorter even than my five feet three inches. But her handshake was surprisingly firm and, looking into the sharp, intelligent eyes, at the set of the obstinate mouth, so like my mother’s, I knew that she was still formidable.

I was glad I had come, glad to meet for the first time my only cousin, but my grandmother had in one respect misled me. There was to be a second guest, a distant relation of the family, who had driven from London earlier and arrived before me.

I met Rowland Maybrick for the first time when we gathered for drinks before dinner in a sitting-room to the left of the main hall. I disliked him on sight and was grateful to my grandmother for not having suggested that he should drive me from London. The crass insensitivity of his greeting—“You didn’t tell me, Paul, that I was to meet a pretty young widow”—reinforced my initial prejudice against what, with the intolerance of youth, I thought of as a type.

He was in the uniform of a Flight Lieutenant but without wings—Wingless Wonders, we used to call them—darkly handsome, full-mouthed under the thin moustache, his eyes amused and speculative, a man who fancied his chances. I had met his type before and hadn’t expected to encounter it at the manor.

I learned that in civilian life he was an antiques dealer. Paul, perhaps sensing my disappointment at finding that I wasn’t the only guest, explained that the family needed to sell some valuable coins. Rowland, who specialised in coinage, was to sort and price them with a view to finding a purchaser. And he wasn’t only interested in coins. His gaze ranged over furniture, pictures, porcelain and bronze; his long fingers touched and caressed as if he were mentally pricing them for sale. I suspected that, given half a chance, he would have pawed me and assessed my second-hand value.

My grandmother’s butler and cook, indispensable small-part characters in any country-house murder, were respectful and competent but deficient in seasonal goodwill. My grandmother, if she gave the matter any thought, would probably have described them as faithful and devoted retainers, but I had my doubts. Even in 1940 things were changing. Mrs. Seddon seemed to be both overworked and bored, a depressing combination, while her husband barely contained the lugubrious resentment of a man calculating how much more he could have earned as a war-worker at the nearest RAF base.

I liked my room; the four-poster with its faded curtains, the comfortable low chair beside the fire, the elegant little writing-desk, the prints and watercolours, fly-blown in their original frames. Before getting into bed I put out the bedside light and drew aside the blackout curtain. High stars and moonlight, a dangerous sky. But this was Christmas Eve. Surely they wouldn’t fly tonight. And I thought of women all over Europe drawing aside their curtains and looking up in hope and fear at the menacing moon.

I woke early next morning, missing the jangle of Christmas bells, bells which in 1940 would have heralded invasion. Next day the police were to take me through every minute of that Christmas, and every detail remains clearly in my memory more than fifty years later. After breakfast we exchanged presents. My grandmother had obviously raided her jewel chest for her gift to me of a charming enamel and gold brooch, and I suspect that Paul’s offering, a Victorian ring, a garnet surrounded with seed pearls, came from the same source. I had come prepared. I parted with two of my personal treasures in the cause of family reconciliation, a first edition of A Shropshire Lad for Paul and an early edition of Diary of a Nobody for my grandmother. They were well received. Rowland’s contribution to the Christmas rations was three bottles of gin, packets of tea, coffee and sugar, and a pound of butter, probably filched from RAF stores. Just before midday the depleted local church choir arrived, sang half a dozen unaccompanied carols embarrassingly out of tune, were grudgingly rewarded by Mrs. Seddon with mulled wine and mince pies and, with evident relief, slipped out again through the blackout curtains to their Christmas dinners.

After a traditional meal served at one o’clock, Paul asked me to go for a walk. I wasn’t sure why he wanted my company. He was almost silent as we tramped doggedly over the frozen furrows of desolate fields and through birdless copses as joylessly as if on a route march. The snow had stopped falling but a thin crust lay crisp and white under a gun-metal sky. As the light faded, we returned home and saw the back of the blacked-out manor, a grey L-shape against the whiteness. Suddenly, with an unexpected change of mood, Paul began scooping up the snow. No one receiving the icy slap of a snowball in the face can resist retaliation, and we spent twenty minutes or so like schoolchildren, laughing and hurling snow at each other and at the house, until the snow on the lawn and gravel path had been churned into slush.

The evening was spent in desultory talk in the sitting-room, dozing and reading. The supper was light, soup and herb omelettes—a welcome contrast to the heaviness of the goose and Christmas pudding—served very early, as was the custom, so that the Seddons could get away to spend the night with friends in the village. After dinner we moved again to the ground-floor sitting-room. Rowland put on the gramophone, then suddenly seized my hands and said, “Let’s dance.” The gramophone was the kind that automatically played a series of records and as one popular disc dropped after another—“Jeepers Creepers,” “Beer Barrel Polka,” “Tiger Rag,” “Deep Purple”—we waltzed, tangoed, fox-trotted, quick-stepped round the sitting-room and out into the hall. Rowland was a superb dancer.

I hadn’t danced since Alastair’s death but now, caught up in the exuberance of movement and rhythm, I forgot my antagonism and concentrated on following his increasingly complicated lead.

The spell was broken when, breaking into a waltz across the hall and tightening his grasp, he said: “Our young hero seems a little subdued. Perhaps he’s having second thoughts about this job he’s volunteered for.”

“What job?”

“Can’t you guess? French mother, Sorbonne-educated, speaks French like a native, knows the country. He’s a natural.”

I didn’t reply. I wondered how he knew, if he had a right to know. He went on:

“There comes a moment when these gallant chaps realise that it isn’t play-acting anymore. From now on it’s for real. Enemy territory beneath you, not dear old Blighty; real Germans, real bullets, real torture-chambers and real pain.”

I thought: And real death, and slipped out of his arms, hearing, as I re-entered the sitting-room, his low laugh at my back.

Shortly before ten o’clock my grandmother went up to bed, telling Rowland that she would get the coins out of the study safe and leave them with him. He was due to drive back to London the next day; it would be helpful if he could examine them tonight. He sprang up at once and they left the room together. Her final words to Paul were: “There’s an Edgar Wallace play on the Home Service which I may listen to. It ends at eleven. Come to say goodnight then, if you will, Paul. Don’t leave it any later.”

As soon as they’d left, Paul said: “Let’s have the music of the enemy,” and replaced the dance records with Wagner. As I read, he got out a pack of cards from the small desk and played a game of patience, scowling at the cards with furious concentration while the Wagner, much too loud, beat against my ears. When the carriage-clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven, heard in a lull in the music, he swept the cards together and said: “Time to say goodnight to Grandmama. Is there anything you want?”

“No,” I said, a little surprised. “Nothing.”

What I did want was the music a little less loud and when he left the room I turned it down. He was back very quickly. When the police questioned me next day, I told them that I estimated that he was away for about three minutes. It certainly couldn’t have been longer. He said calmly: “Grandmama wants to see you.”

We left the sitting-room together and crossed the hall. It was then that my senses, preternaturally acute, noticed two facts. One I told the police; the other I didn’t. Six mistletoe berries had dropped from the mixed bunch of mistletoe and holly fixed to the lintel above the library door and lay like scattered pearls on the polished floor. And at the foot of the stairs there was a small puddle of water. Seeing my glance, Paul took out his handkerchief and mopped it up. He said: “I should be able to take a drink up to Grandmama without spilling it.”

She was propped up in bed under the canopy of the four-poster, looking diminished, no longer formidable, but a tired, very old woman. I saw with pleasure that she had been reading the book I’d given her. It lay open on the round bedside table beside the table-lamp, her wireless, the elegant little clock, the small half-full carafe of water with a glass resting over its rim, and a porcelain model of a hand rising from a frilled cuff on which she had placed her rings.

She held out her hand to me; the fingers were limp, the hand cold and listless, the grasp very different from the firm handshake with which she had first greeted me. She said: “Just to say goodnight, my dear, and thank you for coming. In wartime, family feuds are an indulgence we can no longer afford.”

On impulse I bent down and kissed her forehead. It was moist under my lips. The gesture was a mistake. Whatever it was she wanted from me, it wasn’t affection.

We returned to the sitting-room. Paul asked me if I drank whisky. When I said that I disliked it, he fetched from the drinks cupboard a bottle for himself and a decanter of claret, then took up the pack of cards again and suggested that he should teach me poker. So that was how I spent Christmas night from about ten past eleven until nearly two in the morning, playing endless games of cards, listening to Wagner and Beethoven, hearing the crackle and hiss of burning logs as I kept up the fire, watching my cousin drink steadily until the whisky bottle was empty. In the end I accepted a glass of claret. It seemed both churlish and censorious to let him drink alone. The carriage-clock struck 1:45 before he roused himself and said: “Sorry, Cousin. Rather drunk. Be glad of your shoulder. To bed, to sleep, perchance to dream.”

We made slow progress up the stairs. I opened his door while he stood propped against the wall. The smell of whisky was only faint on his breath. Then with my help he staggered over to the bed, crashed down and was still.

At eight o’clock next morning Mrs. Seddon brought in my tray of early morning tea, switched on the electric fire and went quietly out with an expressionless, “Good morning, Madam.”

Half-awake, I reached over to pour the first cup when there was a hurried knock, the door opened, and Paul entered. He was already dressed and, to my surprise, showed no signs of a hangover. He said: “You haven’t seen Maybrick this morning, have you?”

“I’ve only just woken up.”

“Mrs. Seddon told me his bed hadn’t been slept in. I’ve just checked. He doesn’t appear to be anywhere in the house. And the library door is locked.”

Some of his urgency conveyed itself to me. He held out my dressing-gown and I slipped into it and, after a second’s thought, pushed my feet into my outdoor shoes, not my bedroom slippers. I said: “Where’s the library key?”

“On the inside of the library door. We’ve only the one.”

The hall was dim, even when Paul switched on the light, and the fallen berries from the mistletoe over the library door still gleamed milk-white on the dark wooden floor. I tried the door and, leaning down, looked through the keyhole. Paul was right, the key was in the lock. He said: “We’ll get in through the French windows. We may have to break the glass.”

We went out by a door in the north wing. The air stung my face. The night had been frosty and the thin covering of snow was still crisp except where Paul and I had frolicked the previous day. Outside the library was a small patio about six feet in width leading to a gravel path bordering the lawn. The double set of footprints were plain to see. Someone had entered the library by the French windows and then left by the same route. The footprints were large, a little amorphous, probably made, I thought, by a smooth-soled rubber boot, the first set partly overlaid by the second.

Paul warned: “Don’t disturb the prints. We’ll edge our way close to the wall.”

The door in the French windows was closed but not locked. Paul, his back hard against the window, stretched out a hand to open it, slipped inside and drew aside first the blackout curtain and then the heavy brocade. I followed. The room was dark except for the single green-shaded lamp on the desk. I moved slowly towards it in fascinated disbelief, my heart thudding, hearing behind me a rasp as Paul violently swung back the two sets of curtains. The room was suddenly filled with a clear morning light annihilating the green glow, making horribly visible the thing sprawled over the desk.

He had been killed by a blow of immense force which had crushed the top of his head. Both his arms were stretched out sideways, resting on the desk. His left shoulder sagged as if it, too, had been struck, and the hand was a spiked mess of splintered bones in a pulp of congealed blood. On the desktop the face of his heavy gold wristwatch had been smashed and tiny fragments of glass glittered like diamonds. Some of the coins had rolled onto the carpet and the rest littered the desktop, sent jangling and scattering by the force of the blows. Looking up I checked that the key was indeed in the lock. Paul was peering at the smashed wristwatch.

He said: “Half-past ten. Either he was killed then or we’re meant to believe he was.”

There was a telephone beside the door and I waited, not moving, while he got through to the exchange and called the police. Then he unlocked the door and we went out together. He turned to re-lock—it turned noiselessly as if recently oiled—and pocketed the key. It was then that I noticed that we had squashed some of the fallen mistletoe berries into pulp.

Inspector George Blandy arrived within thirty minutes. He was a solidly built countryman, his straw-coloured hair so thick that it looked like thatch above the square, weather-mottled face. He moved with deliberation, whether from habit or because he was still recovering from an over-indulgent Christmas it was impossible to say.

He was followed soon afterwards by the Chief Constable himself. Paul had told me about him. Sir Rouse Armstrong was an ex–colonial Governor, and one of the last of the old school of Chief Constables, obviously past normal retiring age. Very tall, with the face of a meditative eagle, he greeted my grandmother by her Christian name and followed her upstairs to her private sitting-room with the grave conspiratorial air of a man called in to advise on some urgent and faintly embarrassing family business. I had the feeling that Inspector Blandy was slightly intimidated by his presence and I hadn’t much doubt who would be effectively in charge of this investigation.

I expect you are thinking that this is typical Agatha Christie, and you are right; that’s exactly how it struck me at the time. But one forgets, homicide rate excepted, how similar my mother’s England was to Dame Agatha’s Mayhem Parva. And it seems entirely appropriate that the body should have been discovered in the library, that most fatal room in popular British fiction.

The body couldn’t be moved until the police surgeon arrived. He was at an amateur pantomime in the local town and it took some time to reach him. Dr. Bywaters was a rotund, short, self-important little man, red-haired and red-faced, whose natural irascibility would, I thought, have deteriorated into active ill-humour if the crime had been less portentous than murder and the place less prestigious than the manor.

Paul and I were tactfully excluded from the library while he made his examination. Grandmama had decided to remain upstairs in her sitting-room. The Seddons, fortified by the consciousness of an unassailable alibi, were occupied making and serving sandwiches and endless cups of coffee and tea, and seemed for the first time to be enjoying themselves. Rowland’s Christmas offerings were coming in useful and, to do him justice, I think the knowledge would have amused him. Heavy footsteps tramped backwards and forwards across the hall, cars arrived and departed, telephone calls were made. The police measured, conferred, photographed. The body was eventually taken away shrouded on a stretcher and lifted into a sinister little black van while Paul and I watched from the sitting-room window.

Our fingerprints had been taken, the police explained, to exclude them from any found on the desk. It was an odd sensation to have my fingers gently held and pressed onto what I remember as a kind of inkpad. We were, of course, questioned, separately and together. I can remember sitting opposite Inspector Blandy, his large frame filling one of the armchairs in the sitting-room, his heavy legs planted on the carpet, as conscientiously he went through every detail of Christmas Day. It was only then that I realised that I had spent almost every minute of it in the company of my cousin.

At 7:30 the police were still in the house. Paul invited the Chief Constable to dinner, but he declined, less, I thought, because of any reluctance to break bread with possible suspects than from a need to return to his grandchildren.

Before leaving he paid a prolonged visit to my grandmother in her room, then returned to the sitting-room to report on the results of the day’s activities. I wondered whether he would have been as forthcoming if the victim had been a farm labourer and the place the local pub.

He delivered his account with the staccato self-satisfaction of a man confident that he’d done a good day’s work.

“I’m not calling in the Yard. I did eight years ago when we had our last murder. Big mistake. All they did was upset the locals. The facts are plain enough. He was killed by a single blow delivered with great force from across the desk and while he was rising from the chair. Weapon, a heavy blunt instrument. The skull was crushed but there was little bleeding—well, you saw for yourselves. I’d say he was a tall murderer; Maybrick was over six foot two. He came through the French windows and went out the same way.

“We can’t get much from the footprints, too indistinct, but they’re plain enough, the second set overlaying the first. Could have been a casual thief, perhaps a deserter, we’ve had one or two incidents lately. The blow could have been delivered with a rifle butt. It would be about right for reach and weight. The library door to the garden may have been left open. Your grandmother told her butler Seddon she’d see to the locking up but asked Maybrick to check on the library before he went to bed.

“In the blackout the murderer wouldn’t have known the library was occupied. Probably tried the door, went in, caught a gleam of the money and killed almost on impulse.”

Paul asked: “Then why not steal the coins?”

“Saw that they weren’t legal tender. Difficult to get rid of. Or he might have panicked or thought he heard a noise.”

Paul asked: “And the locked door into the hall?”

“Murderer saw the key and turned it to prevent the body being discovered before he had a chance to get well away.”

He paused, and his face assumed a look of cunning which sat oddly on the aquiline, somewhat supercilious features. He said: “An alternative theory is that Maybrick locked himself in. Expected a secret visitor and didn’t want to be disturbed. One question I have to ask you, my boy. Rather delicate. How well did you know Maybrick?”

Paul said: “Only slightly. He’s a second cousin.”

“You trusted him? Forgive my asking.”

“We had no reason to distrust him. My grandmother wouldn’t have asked him to sell the coins for her if she’d had any doubts. He is family. Distant, but still family.”

“Of course. Family.” He paused, then went on: “It did occur to me that this could have been a staged attack which went over the top. He could have arranged with an accomplice to steal the coins. We’re asking the Yard to look at his London connections.”

I was tempted to say that a faked attack which left the pretend victim with a pulped brain had gone spectacularly over the top, but I remained silent. The Chief Constable could hardly order me out of the sitting-room—after all, I had been present at the discovery of the body—but I sensed his disapproval at my obvious interest. A young woman of proper feeling would have followed my grandmother’s example and taken to her room.

Paul said: “Isn’t there something odd about that smashed watch? The fatal blow to the head looked so deliberate. But then he strikes again and smashes the hand. Could that have been to establish the exact time of death? If so, why? Or could he have altered the watch before smashing it? Could Maybrick have been killed later?”

The Chief Constable was indulgent to this fancy: “A bit far-fetched, my boy. I think we’ve established the time of death pretty accurately. Bywaters puts it at between ten and eleven, judging by the degree of rigor. And we can’t be sure in what order the killer struck.

“He could have hit the hand and shoulder first, and then the head. Or he could have gone for the head, then hit out wildly in panic. Pity you didn’t hear anything, though.”

Paul said: “We had the gramophone on pretty loudly and the doors and walls are very solid. And I’m afraid that by 11:30 I wasn’t in a state to notice much.”

As Sir Rouse rose to go, Paul asked: “I’ll be glad to have the use of the library if you’ve finished with it, or do you want to seal the door?”

“No, my boy, that’s not necessary. We’ve done all we need to do. No prints, of course, but then we didn’t expect to find them. They’ll be on the weapon, no doubt, unless he wore gloves. But he’s taken the weapon away with him.” The house seemed very quiet after the police had left. My grandmother, still in her room, had dinner on a tray and Paul and I, perhaps unwilling to face that empty chair in the dining room, made do with soup and sandwiches in the sitting-room. I was restless, physically exhausted; I was also a little frightened.

It would have helped if I could have spoken about the murder, but Paul said wearily: “Let’s give it a rest. We’ve had enough of death for one day.”

So we sat in silence. From 7:40 we listened to Radio Vaudeville on the Home Service—Billy Cotton and His Band, the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Adrian Boult. After the nine o’clock news and the 9:20 war commentary, Paul murmured that he’d better check with Seddon that he’d locked up.

It was then that, partly on impulse, I made my way across the hall to the library. I turned the door-handle gently as if I feared to see Rowland still sitting at the desk, sorting through the coins with avaricious fingers. The blackout was drawn, the room smelled of old books, not blood. The desk, its top clear, was an ordinary unfrightening piece of furniture, the chair neatly in place.

I stood at the door convinced that this room held a clue to the mystery. Then, from curiosity, I moved over to the desk and pulled out the drawers. On either side was a deep drawer with two shallower ones above it. The left was so crammed with papers and files that I had difficulty in opening it. The right-hand deep drawer was clear. I opened the smaller drawer above it. It contained a collection of bills and receipts. Rifling among them I found a receipt for £3,200 from a London coin dealer listing the purchase and dated five weeks previously.

There was nothing else of interest. I closed the drawer and began pacing and measuring the distance from the desk to the French windows. It was then that the door opened almost soundlessly and I saw my cousin.

Coming up quietly beside me, he said lightly: “What are you doing? Trying to exorcise the horror?”

I replied: “Something like that.”

For a moment we stood in silence. Then he took my hand in his, drawing it through his arm. He said:

“I’m sorry, cousin, it’s been a beastly day for you. And all we wanted was to give you a peaceful Christmas.” I didn’t reply. I was aware of his nearness, the warmth of his body, his strength. As we moved together to the door I thought, but did not say: “Was that really what you wanted, to give me a peaceful Christmas? Was that all?”

I had found it difficult to sleep since my husband had been killed, and now I lay rigid under the canopy of the four-poster re-living the extraordinary day, piecing together the anomalies, the small incidents, the clues, to form a satisfying pattern, trying to impose order on disorder. I think that is what I’ve been wanting to do all my life. It was that night at Stutleigh which decided my whole career.

Rowland had been killed at half-past ten by a single blow delivered across the width of a three-foot-six desk. But at half-past ten my cousin had been with me, had indeed been hardly out of my sight all day. I had provided an indisputable alibi. But wasn’t that precisely why I had been invited, cajoled to the house by the promise of peace, quiet, good food and wine, exactly what a young widow, recently recruited into the Forces, would yearn for?

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.

He asked: “Can I help you?”

“No,” I said. “No. I was just looking for something.”

“And have you found it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I have.” He came into the room and shut the door, leaned across it and said casually: “Did you like Rowland Maybrick?”

“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t like him. But not liking him isn’t a reason for killing him.”

He said easily: “No, it isn’t, is it? But there’s something I think you should know about him. He was responsible for the death of my elder brother.”

“You mean he murdered him?”

“Nothing as straightforward as that. He blackmailed him. Charles was a homosexual. Maybrick got to know and made him pay. Charles killed himself because he couldn’t face a life of deceit, of being in Maybrick’s power, of losing this place. He preferred the dignity of death.”

Looking back on it I have to remind myself how different public attitudes were in the forties. Now it would seem extraordinary that anyone would kill himself for such a motive. Then I knew with desolate certainty that what he said was true.

I asked: “Does my grandmother know about the homosexuality?”

“Oh yes. There isn’t much that her generation don’t know, or guess. Grandmama adored Charles.”

“I see. Thank you for telling me.” After a moment I said: “I suppose if you’d gone on your first mission knowing Rowland Maybrick was alive and well, you’d have felt there was unfinished business.”

He said: “How clever you are, Cousin. And how well you put things. That’s exactly what I should have felt, that I’d left unfinished business.” Then he added: “So what were you doing here?”

I took out my handkerchief and looked him in the face, the face so disconcertingly like my own.

I said: “I was just dusting the tops of the golf-clubs.”

I left the house two days later. We never spoke of it again. The investigation continued its fruitless course. I could have asked my cousin how he had done it, but I didn’t. For years I thought I should never really know.

My cousin died in France, not, thank God, under Gestapo interrogation, but shot in an ambush. I wondered whether his Army accomplice had survived the war or had died with him. My grandmother lived on alone in the house, not dying until she was ninety-one, when she left the property to a charity for indigent gentlewomen, either to maintain as a home or to sell. It was the last charity I would have expected her to choose. The charity sold.

My grandmother’s one bequest to me was the books in the library. Most of these I, too, sold, but I went down to the house to look them over and decide which volumes I wished to keep. Among them I found a photograph album wedged between two rather dull tomes of nineteenth-century sermons. I sat at the same desk where Rowland had been murdered and turned the pages, smiling at the sepia photographs of high-bosomed ladies with their clinched waists and immense flowered hats.

And then, suddenly, turning its stiff pages, I saw my grandmother as a young woman. She was wearing what seemed a ridiculous little cap like a jockey’s and holding a golf-club as confidently as if it were a parasol. Beside the photograph was her name in careful script and underneath was written: “Ladies County Golf Champion 1898.”