The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories

The Boxdale Inheritance

“You see, my dear Adam,” explained the Canon gently, as he walked with Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh under the vicarage elms, “useful as the legacy would be to us, I wouldn’t feel happy in accepting it if Great Aunt Allie came by her money in the first place by wrongful means.”

What the Canon meant was that he and his wife wouldn’t be happy to inherit Great Aunt Allie’s fifty thousand pounds if, sixty-seven years earlier, she had poisoned her elderly husband with arsenic in order to get it. As Great Aunt Allie had been accused and acquitted of just that charge in a 1902 trial which, for her Hampshire neighbours, had rivalled the Coronation as a public spectacle, the Canon’s scruples were not altogether irrelevant. Admittedly, thought Dalgliesh, most people faced with the prospect of fifty thousand pounds would be happy to subscribe to the commonly held convention that, once an English Court has pronounced its verdict, the final truth of the matter had been established once and for all. There may possibly be a higher judicature in the next world but hardly in this. And so Hubert Boxdale would normally be happy to believe. But, faced with the prospect of an unexpected fortune, his scrupulous conscience was troubled. The gentle but obstinate voice went on:

“Apart from the moral principle of accepting tainted money, it wouldn’t bring us happiness. I often think of that poor woman, driven restlessly round Europe in her search for peace, of that lonely life and unhappy death.”

Dalgliesh recalled that Great Aunt Allie had moved in a predictable pattern with her retinue of servants, current lover and general hangers-on from one luxury Riviera hotel to the next, with stays in Paris or Rome as the mood suited her. He was not sure that this orderly programme of comfort and entertainment could be described as being restlessly driven round Europe or that the old lady had been primarily in search of peace. She had died, he recalled, by falling overboard from a millionaire’s yacht during a rather wild party given by him to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday. It was perhaps not an edifying death by the Canon’s standards but Dalgliesh doubted whether she had, in fact, been unhappy at the time. Great Aunt Allie (it was impossible to think of her by any other name), if she had been capable of coherent thought, would probably have pronounced it a very good way to go.

But this was hardly a point of view he could put forward comfortably to his present companion.

Canon Hubert Boxdale was Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh’s godfather. Dalgliesh’s father had been his Oxford contemporary and lifelong friend. He had been an admirable godfather: affectionate, uncensorious, genuinely concerned. In Dalgliesh’s childhood, he had always been mindful of birthdays and imaginative about a small boy’s preoccupations and desires.

Dalgliesh was very fond of him and privately thought him one of the few really good men he had known. It was only surprising that the Canon had managed to live to seventy-one in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival, let alone success. But his goodness had in some sense protected him. Faced with such manifest innocence, even those who exploited him, and they were not a few, extended some of the protection and compassion they might show to the slightly subnormal.

“Poor old darling,” his daily woman would say, pocketing pay for six hours when she had worked five and helping herself to a couple of eggs from his refrigerator. “He’s really not fit to be let out alone.” It had surprised the then young and slightly priggish Detective Constable Dalgliesh to realise that the Canon knew perfectly well about the hours and the eggs, but thought that Mrs. Copthorne, with five children and an indolent husband, needed both more than he did. He also knew that if he started paying for five hours she would promptly work only four and extract another two eggs, and that this small and only dishonesty was somehow necessary to her self-esteem. He was good. But he was not a fool.

He and his wife were, of course, poor. But they were not unhappy; indeed it was a word impossible to associate with the Canon. The death of his two sons in the 1939 war had saddened but not destroyed him. But he had anxieties. His wife was suffering from disseminated sclerosis and was finding it increasingly hard to manage. There were comforts and appliances which she would need. He was now, belatedly, about to retire and his pension would be small. A legacy of fifty thousand pounds would enable them both to live in comfort for the rest of their lives and would also, Dalgliesh had no doubt, give them the pleasure of doing more for their various lame dogs. Really, he thought, the Canon was an almost embarrassingly deserving candidate for a modest fortune. Why couldn’t the dear, silly old noodle take the cash and stop worrying? He said cunningly: “Great Aunt Allie was found Not Guilty, you know, by an English jury. And it all happened nearly seventy years ago. Couldn’t you bring yourself to accept their verdict?”

But the Canon’s scrupulous mind was totally impervious to such sly innuendos. Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert’s conscience—that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, Uncle Hubert never pretended that it hadn’t sounded or that he hadn’t heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.

“Oh, I did, while she was alive. We never met after my grandfather’s death, you know. I didn’t wish to force myself on her. After all, she was a wealthy woman. My grandfather made a new will on his marriage and left her all he possessed. Our ways of life were very different. But I usually wrote briefly at Christmas and she sent a card in reply. I wanted to keep some contact in case, one day, she might want someone to turn to, and would remember that I am a priest.”

And why should she want that, thought Dalgliesh. To clear her conscience? Was that what the dear old boy had in mind? So he must have had some doubts from the beginning. But of course he had; Dalgliesh knew something of the story, and the general feeling of the family and friends was that Great Aunt Allie had been extremely lucky to escape the gallows.

His own father’s view, expressed with reticence, reluctance and compassion, had not in essentials differed from that given by a local reporter at the time: “How on earth did she expect to get away with it? Damned lucky to escape topping if you ask me.”

“The news of the legacy came as a complete surprise?” Dalgliesh asked the Canon.

“Indeed, yes. I saw her just once at that first and only Christmas, six weeks after her marriage when my grandfather died. We always talk of her as Great Aunt Allie but in fact, as you know, she married my grandfather. But it seemed impossible to think of her as a step-grandmother.

“There was the usual family gathering at Colebrook Croft at the time I was there with my parents and my twin sisters. I was barely four and the twins were just eight months old. I can remember nothing of my grandfather or of his wife. After the murder—if one has to use that dreadful word—my mother returned home with us children, leaving my father to cope with the police, the solicitors and the newsmen. It was a terrible time for him. I don’t think I was even told that my grandfather was dead until about a year later. My old nurse, Nellie, who had been given Christmas as a holiday to visit her own family, told me that, soon after my return home. I asked her if grandfather was now young and beautiful for always. She, poor woman, took it as a sign of infant prognostication and piety. Poor Nellie was sadly superstitious and sentimental, I’m afraid. But I knew nothing of Grandfather’s death at the time and certainly can recall nothing of that Christmas visit or of my new step-grandmother. Mercifully, I was little more than a baby when the murder was done.”

“She was a music-hall artist, wasn’t she?” asked Dalgliesh.

“Yes, and a very talented one. My grandfather met her when she was working with a partner in a hall in Cannes. He had gone to the South of France, with his man-servant, for his health. I understood that she extracted a gold watch from his chain and, when he claimed it, told him that he was English, had recently suffered from a stomach ailment, had two sons and a daughter, and was about to have a wonderful surprise. It was all correct except that his only daughter had died in childbirth leaving him a granddaughter, Marguerite Goddard.”

“That was all easily guessable from Boxdale’s voice and appearance,” said Dalgliesh. “I can only suppose the surprise was the marriage?”

“It was certainly a surprise, and a most unpleasant one for the family. It is easy to deplore the snobbishness and the conventions of another age and, indeed, there was much in Edwardian England to deplore, but it was not a propitious marriage. I think of the difference in background, education and way of life, the lack of common interests. And there was the disparity of age. Grandfather had married a girl just three months younger than his own granddaughter. I cannot wonder that the family were concerned, that they felt that the union could not, in the end, contribute to the contentment or happiness of either party.”

And that was putting it charitably, thought Dalgliesh. The marriage certainly hadn’t contributed to their happiness. From the point of view of the family, it had been a disaster. He recalled hearing of an incident when the local vicar and his wife, a couple who had actually dined at Colebrook Croft on the night of the murder, first called on the bride. Apparently old Augustus Boxdale had introduced her, saying: “Meet the prettiest little variety artiste in the business. Took a gold watch and notecase off me without any trouble. Would have had the elastic out of my pants if I hadn’t watched out. Anyway, she stole my heart, didn’t you, sweetheart?”

All this was accompanied by a hearty slap on the rump and a squeal of delight from the lady who had promptly demonstrated her skill by extracting the Reverend Arthur Venable’s bunch of keys from his left ear.

Dalgliesh thought it tactful not to remind the Canon of this story.

“What do you wish me to do, Sir?” he enquired.

“It’s asking a great deal, I know, when you’re so busy. But if I had your assurance that you believed in Aunt Allie’s innocence, I should feel happy about accepting the bequest. I wondered if it would be possible for you to see the records of the trial. Perhaps it would give you a clue. You’re so clever at this sort of thing.”

He spoke without flattery but with an innocent wonder at the strange vocations of men. Dalgliesh was, indeed, very clever at this sort of thing. A dozen or so men at present occupying security wings in HM prisons could testify to Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh’s cleverness, as, indeed, could a handful of others walking free whose defending counsel had been in their own way as clever as Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh. But to re-examine a case over sixty years old seemed to require clairvoyance rather than cleverness. The trial judge and both learned counsels had been dead for over fifty years. Two world wars had taken their toll. Four reigns had passed. It was highly probable that, of those who had slept under the roof of Colebrook Croft on that fateful Boxing Day night of 1901, only the Canon still survived. But the old man was troubled and had sought his help, and Dalgliesh, with a day or two’s leave due to him, had the time to give it.

“I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

The transcript of a trial which had taken place sixty-seven years ago took time and trouble to obtain even for a Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police. It provided little comfort for the Canon. Mr. Justice Bellows had summed up with that avuncular simplicity with which he was wont to address juries, regarding them as a panel of well-intentioned but cretinous children. And the facts could have been comprehended by any child. Part of the summing up set them out with lucidity:

“And so, gentlemen of the jury, we come to the night of December twenty-sixth. Mr. Augustus Boxdale, who had perhaps indulged a little unwisely on Christmas Day, had retired to bed in his dressing room after luncheon, suffering from a recurrence of the slight indigestive trouble which had afflicted him for most of his life. You will have heard that he had taken luncheon with the members of his family and ate nothing which they, too, did not eat. You may feel you can acquit luncheon of anything worse than over-richness.

“Dinner was served at eight p.m. promptly, as was the custom at Colebrook Croft. There were present at that meal Mrs. Augustus Boxdale, the deceased’s bride; his elder son, Captain Maurice Boxdale, with his wife; his younger son, the Reverend Henry Boxdale, with his wife; his granddaughter Miss Marguerite Goddard; and two neighbours, the Reverend and Mrs. Arthur Venables.

“You have heard how the accused took only the first course at dinner, which was ragout of beef, and then, at about eight-twenty, left the dining room to sit with her husband. Shortly after nine o’clock she rang for the parlour maid, Mary Huddy, and ordered a basin of gruel to be brought up to Mr. Boxdale. You have heard that the deceased was fond of gruel, and indeed as prepared by Mrs. Muncie, the cook, it sounds a most nourishing dish for an elderly gentleman of weak digestion.

“You have heard Mrs. Muncie describe how she prepared the gruel according to Mrs. Beaton’s admirable recipe and in the presence of Mary Huddy in case, as she said, ‘The master should take a fancy to it when I’m not at hand and you have to make it.’ After the gruel had been prepared, Mrs. Muncie tasted it with a spoon and Mary Huddy carried it upstairs to the main bedroom together with a jug of water to thin the gruel if it were too strong. As she reached the door, Mrs. Boxdale came out, her hands full of stockings and underclothes. She has told you that she was on her way to the bathroom to wash them through. She asked the girl to put the basin of gruel on the washstand by the window and Mary Huddy did so in her presence. Miss Huddy has told us that at the time she noticed the bowl of flypapers soaking in water and she knew that this solution was one used by Mrs. Boxdale as a cosmetic wash. Indeed, all the women who spent that evening in the house, with the exception of Mrs. Venables, have told you that they knew that it was Mrs. Boxdale’s practice to prepare this solution of flypapers.

“Mary Huddy and the accused left the bedroom together and you have heard the evidence of Mrs. Muncie that Miss Huddy returned to the kitchen after an absence of only a few minutes. Shortly after nine o’clock, the ladies left the dining room and entered the drawing room to take coffee. At nine-fifteen p.m., Miss Goddard excused herself to the company and said that she would go to see if her grandfather needed anything. The time is established precisely because the clock struck the quarter-hour as she left and Mrs. Venables commented on the sweetness of its chime. You have also heard Mrs. Venables’ evidence and the evidence of Mrs. Maurice Boxdale and Mrs. Henry Boxdale that none of the ladies left the drawing room during the evening, and Mr. Venables has testified that the three gentlemen remained together until Miss Goddard appeared about three-quarters of an hour after to inform them that her grandfather had become very ill and to request that the doctor be sent for immediately.

“Miss Goddard has told you that, when she entered her grandfather’s room, he was just finishing his gruel and was grumbling about its taste. She got the impression that this was merely a protest at being deprived of his dinner rather than that he genuinely considered there was something wrong with the gruel. At any rate, he finished most of it and appeared to enjoy it despite his grumbles.

“You have heard Miss Goddard describe how, after her grandfather had had as much as he wanted of the gruel, she took the bowl next door and left it on the washstand. She then returned to her grandfather’s bedroom and Mr. Boxdale, his wife and his granddaughter played three-handed whist for about three-quarters of an hour.

“At ten o’clock Mr. Augustus Boxdale complained of feeling very ill. He suffered from griping pains in the stomach, from sickness and from looseness of the bowels. As soon as the symptoms began Miss Goddard went downstairs to let her uncles know that her grandfather was worse and to ask that Doctor Eversley should be sent for urgently. Doctor Eversley has given you his evidence. He arrived at Colebrook Croft at ten-thirty p.m., when he found his patient very distressed and weak. He treated the symptoms and gave what relief he could but Mr. Augustus Boxdale died shortly before midnight.

“Gentlemen of the jury, you have heard Marguerite Goddard describe how, as her grandfather’s paroxysms increased in intensity, she remembered the gruel and wondered whether it could have disagreed with him in some way. She mentioned this possibility to her elder uncle, Captain Maurice Boxdale. Captain Boxdale has told you how he handed the bowl with its residue of gruel to Doctor Eversley with the request that the doctor should lock it in a cupboard in the library, seal the lock and keep the key. You have heard how the contents of the bowl were later analysed and with what results.”

An extraordinary precaution for the gallant captain to have taken, thought Dalgliesh, and a most perspicacious young woman. Was it by chance or by design that the bowl hadn’t been taken down to be washed up as soon as the old man had finished with it? Why was it, he wondered, that Marguerite Goddard hadn’t rung for the parlour maid and requested her to remove it? Miss Goddard appeared the only other suspect. He wished he knew more about her.

But, except for those main protagonists, the characters in the drama did not emerge very clearly from the trial report. Why, indeed, should they? The British accusatorial system of trial is designed to answer one question: is the accused guilty beyond reasonable doubt of the crime charged? Exploration of the nuances of personality, speculation and gossip have no place in the witness box. The two Boxdale brothers came out as very dull fellows indeed. They and their estimable, respectable, sloping-bosomed wives had sat at dinner in full view of each other from eight until after nine o’clock (a substantial meal, that dinner) and had said so in the witness box, more or less in identical words. The ladies’ bosoms might have been heaving with far from estimable emotions of dislike, envy, embarrassment or resentment of the interloper. If so, they didn’t tell the court.

But the two brothers and their wives were clearly innocent, even if a detective of that time could have conceived of the guilt of a gentlefolk so well respected, so eminently respectable. Even their impeccable alibis had a nice touch of social and sexual distinction. The Reverend Arthur Venables had vouched for the gentlemen, his good wife for the ladies. Besides, what motive had they? They could no longer gain financially by the old man’s death. If anything, it was in their interests to keep him alive in the hope that disillusion with his marriage or a return to sanity might occur to cause him to change his will. So far Dalgliesh had learned nothing that could cause him to give the Canon the assurance for which he hoped.

It was then that he remembered Aubrey Glatt. Glatt was a wealthy amateur criminologist who had made a study of all the notable Victorian and Edwardian poison cases. He was not interested in anything earlier or later, being as obsessively wedded to his period as any serious historian, which indeed he had some claim to call himself. He lived in a Georgian house in Winchester—his affection for the Victorian and Edwardian age did not extend to its architecture—and was only three miles from Colebrook Croft. A visit to the London Library disclosed that he hadn’t written a book on the case but it was improbable that he had totally neglected a crime close at hand and so in period. Dalgliesh had occasionally helped him with the technical details of police procedure. Glatt, in response to a telephone call, was happy to return the favour with the offer of afternoon tea and information.

Tea was served in his elegant drawing room by a parlour maid wearing a frilly cap with streamers. Dalgliesh wondered what wage Glatt paid her to persuade her to wear it. She looked as if she could have played a role in any of his favourite Victorian dreams and Dalgliesh had an uncomfortable thought that arsenic might be dispensed with the cucumber sandwiches. Glatt nibbled away and was expansive.

“It’s interesting that you should have taken this sudden and, if I may say so, somewhat inexplicable interest in the Boxdale murder; I got out my notebook on the case only yesterday. Colebrook Croft is being demolished to make way for a new housing estate and I thought I would visit it for the last time. The family, of course, haven’t lived there since the 1914–18 war. Architecturally, it’s completely undistinguished but one grieves to see it go. We might drive over after tea if you are agreeable.

“I never wrote my book on the case, you know. I planned a work entitled The Colebrook Croft Mystery, or Who Killed Augustus Boxdale? But the answer was all too obvious.”

“No real mystery?” suggested Dalgliesh.

“Who else could it have been but Allegra Boxdale? She was born Allegra Porter, you know. Do you think her mother could have been thinking of Byron? I imagine not. There’s a picture of her on page two of the notebook by the way, taken by a photographer in Cannes on her wedding day. I call it beauty and the beast.”

The old photograph had scarcely faded and Great Aunt Allie half-smiled at Dalgliesh across nearly seventy years. Her broad face with its wide mouth and rather snub nose was framed by two wings of dark hair swept high and topped, in the fashion of the day, by an enormous flowered hat. The features were too coarse for real beauty but the eyes were magnificent, deep set and well spaced, and the chin round and determined. Beside this vital young Amazon poor Augustus Boxdale, clutching his bride as if for support, was but a very frail and undersized beast. Their pose was unfortunate. She almost looked as if she were about to fling him over her shoulder.

Glatt shrugged. “The face of a murderess? I’ve known less likely ones. Her counsel suggested, of course, that the old man had poisoned his own gruel during the short time she left it on the washstand to cool while she visited the bathroom. But why should he? All the evidence suggests that he was in a state of post-nuptial euphoria, poor senile old booby. Our Augustus was in no hurry to leave this world, particularly by such an agonising means. Besides, I doubt whether he even knew the gruel was there. He was in bed next door in his dressing room, remember.”

Dalgliesh asked: “What about Marguerite Goddard? There’s no evidence about the exact time when she entered the bedroom.”

“I thought you’d get onto that. She could have arrived while her step-grandmother was in the bathroom, poisoned the gruel, hidden herself either in the main bedroom or elsewhere until it had been taken into Augustus, then joined her grandfather and his bride as if she had just come upstairs. It’s possible, I admit. But it is unlikely. She was less inconvenienced than any of the family by her grandfather’s second marriage. Her mother was Augustus Boxdale’s eldest child who married, very young, a wealthy patent medicine manufacturer. She died in childbirth and the husband only survived her by a year. Marguerite Goddard was an heiress. She was also most advantageously engaged to Captain the Honorable John Brize-Lacey. Marguerite Goddard, young, beautiful, in possession of the Goddard fortune, not to mention the Goddard emeralds and the eldest son of a Lord, was hardly a serious suspect. In my view defence counsel, that was Roland Gort Lloyd, remember, was wise to leave her strictly alone.”

“A memorable defence, I believe.”

“Magnificent. There’s no doubt Allegra Boxdale owed her life to Gort Lloyd. I know that concluding speech by heart:

“ ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I beseech you in the sacred name of Justice to consider what you are asked to do. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to decide the fate of this young woman. She stands before you now, young, vibrant, glowing with health, the years stretching before her with their promise and their hopes. It is in your power to cut off all this as you might top a nettle with one swish of your cane. To condemn her to the slow torture of those last waiting weeks; to that last dreadful walk; to heap calumny on her name; to desecrate those few happy weeks of marriage with the man who loved her so greatly; and to cast her into the final darkness of an ignominious grave.’

“Pause for dramatic effect. Then the crescendo in that magnificent voice. ‘And on what evidence, gentlemen? I ask you.’ Another pause. Then the thunder. ‘On what evidence?’ ”

“A powerful defence,” said Dalgliesh. “But I wonder how it would go down with a modern judge and jury.”

“Well, it went down very effectively with that 1902 jury. Of course, the abolition of capital punishment has rather cramped the more histrionic style. I’m not sure that the reference to topping nettles was in the best of taste. But the jury got the message. They decided that, on the whole, they preferred not to have the responsibility of sending the accused to the gallows. They were out six hours reaching their verdict and it was greeted with some applause. If any of those worthy citizens had been asked to wager five pounds of their own good money on her innocence, I suspect that it would have been a different matter. Allegra Boxdale had helped him, of course. The Criminal Evidence Act, passed three years earlier, enabled him to put her in the witness box. She wasn’t an actress of a kind for nothing. Somehow, she managed to persuade the jury that she had genuinely loved the old man.”

“Perhaps she had,” suggested Dalgliesh. “I don’t suppose there had been much kindness in her life. And he was kind.”

“No doubt, no doubt. But love!” Glatt was impatient. “My dear Dalgliesh! He was a singularly ugly old man of sixty-nine. She was an attractive girl of twenty-one!”

Dalgliesh doubted whether love, that iconoclastic passion, was susceptible to this kind of simple arithmetic but he didn’t argue. Glatt went on: “The prosecution couldn’t suggest any other romantic attachment. The police got in touch with her previous partner, of course. He was discovered to be a bald, undersized little man, sharp as a weasel, with a buxom wife and five children. He had moved down the coast after the partnership broke up and was now working with a new girl. He said regretfully that she was coming along nicely, thank you gentlemen, but would never be a patch on Allie and that, if Allie got her neck out of the noose and ever wanted a job, she knew where to come. It was obvious, even to the most suspicious policeman, that his interest was professional. As he said: ‘What was a grain or two of arsenic between friends?’

“The Boxdales had no luck after the trial. Captain Maurice Boxdale was killed in 1916, leaving no children, and the Reverend Edward lost his wife and their twin daughters in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He survived until 1932. The boy, Hubert, may still be alive, but I doubt it. That family always were a sickly lot.

“My greatest achievement, incidentally, was in tracing Marguerite Goddard. I hadn’t realised that she was still alive. She never married Brize-Lacey or, indeed, anyone else. He distinguished himself in the 1914–18 war, came successfully through, and eventually married an eminently suitable young woman, the sister of a brother officer. He inherited the title in 1925 and died in 1953. But Marguerite Goddard may be alive now for all I know. She may even be living in the same modest Bournemouth hotel where I found her. Not that my efforts in tracing her were rewarded. She absolutely refused to see me. That’s the note that she sent out to me, by the way. Just there.”

It was meticulously pasted into the notebook in its chronological order and carefully annotated. Aubrey Glatt was a natural researcher; Dalgliesh couldn’t help wondering whether this passion for accuracy might not have been more rewarding spent other than in the careful documentation of murder.

The note was written in an elegant upright hand, the strokes black and very thin but clear and unwavering.

Aubrey Glatt said: “After that extremely disobliging note, I felt there was really no point in going on with the book.”

Glatt’s passion for Edwardian England evidently extended to a wider field than its murders, and they drove to Colebrook Croft high above the green Hampshire lanes in an elegant 1910 Daimler. Aubrey wore a thin tweed coat and deer-stalker hat and looked, Dalgliesh thought, rather like Sherlock Holmes, with himself as attendant Watson.

“We are only just in time, my dear Dalgliesh,” he said when they arrived. “The engines of destruction are assembled. That ball on a chain looks like the eyeball of God, ready to strike. Let us make our number with the attendant artisans. You will have no wish to trespass, will you?”

The work of demolition had not yet begun but the inside of the house had been stripped and plundered, the great rooms echoed to their footsteps like gaunt and deserted barracks after the final retreat. They moved from room to room, Glatt mourning the forgotten glories of an age he had been born too late to enjoy; Dalgliesh with his mind on the somewhat more immediate and practical concerns.

The design of the house was simple and formalised. The first floor, on which were most of the main bedrooms, had a long corridor running the whole length of the facade. The master bedroom was at the southern end with two large windows giving a distant view of Winchester Cathedral tower. A communicating door led to a small dressing room.

The main corridor had a row of four identical large windows. The brass curtain rods and wooden rings had been removed (they were collector’s items now) but the ornate carved pelmets were still in place. Here must have hung pairs of heavy curtains giving cover to anyone who wished to slip out of view. And Dalgliesh noted with interest that one of the windows was exactly opposite the door of the main bedroom. By the time they had left Colebrook Croft and Glatt had dropped him at Winchester Station, Dalgliesh was beginning to formulate a theory.

His next move was to trace Marguerite Goddard if she were still alive. It took him nearly a week of weary searching, a frustrating trail along the South Coast from hotel to hotel. Almost everywhere his enquiries were met with defensive hostility. It was the usual story of a very old lady who had become more demanding, arrogant and eccentric as her health and fortune waned; an unwelcome embarrassment to manager and fellow guests alike. The hotels were all modest, a few almost sordid. What, he wondered, had become of the legendary Goddard fortune?

From the last landlady he learned that Miss Goddard had become ill, really very sick indeed, and had been removed six months previously to the local district general hospital. And it was there that he found her.

The ward sister was surprisingly young, a petite, dark-haired girl with a tired face and challenging eyes.

“Miss Goddard is very ill. We’ve put her in one of the side wards. Are you a relative? If so, you’re the first one who has bothered to call and you’re lucky to be in time. When she is delirious she seems to expect a Captain Brize-Lacey to call. You’re not he, are you?”

“Captain Brize-Lacey will not be calling. No, I’m not a relative. She doesn’t even know me. But I would like to visit her if she’s well enough and is willing to see me. Could you please give her this note.”

He couldn’t force himself on a defenceless and dying woman. She still had the right to say no. He was afraid she would refuse him. And if she did, he might never learn the truth. He wrote four words on the back page of his diary, signed them, tore out the page, folded it and handed it to the sister.

She was back very shortly.

“She’ll see you. She’s weak, of course, and very old but she’s perfectly lucid now. Only please don’t tire her.”

“I’ll try not to stay too long.”

The girl laughed:

“Don’t worry. She’ll throw you out soon enough if she gets bored. The chaplain and the Red Cross librarian have a terrible time with her. Third floor on the left. There’s a stool to sit on under the bed. We will ring the bell at the end of visiting time.”

She bustled off, leaving him to find his own way. The corridor was very quiet. At the far end, he could glimpse through the open door of the main ward the regimented rows of beds, each with its pale blue coverlet, the bright glow of flowers on some of the tables, and the laden visitors making their way in pairs to each bedside. There was a faint buzz of welcome, a hum of conversation. But no one was visiting the side wards. Here, in the silence of the sterile corridor, Dalgliesh could smell death.

The woman, propped high against the pillows in the third room on the left, no longer looked human. She lay rigidly, her long arms disposed like sticks on the coverlet. This was a skeleton clothed with a thin membrane of flesh beneath whose yellow transparency the tendons and veins were as plainly visible as an anatomist’s model. She was nearly bald and the high-domed skull under its spare down of hair was as brittle and vulnerable as a child’s. Only the eyes still held life, burning in their deep sockets with an animal vitality. But when she spoke her voice was distinctive and unwavering, evoking as her appearance never could the memory of imperious youth.

She took up his note and read aloud four words:

“It was the child. You are right, of course. The four-year-old Hubert Boxdale killed his grandfather. You signed this note Adam Dalgliesh. There was no Dalgliesh connected with the case.”

“I am a detective of the Metropolitan Police. But I’m not here in any official capacity. I have known about this case for a number of years from a dear friend. I have a natural curiosity to learn the truth. And I have formed a theory.”

“And now, like that poseur Aubrey Glatt, you want to write a book?”

“No. I shall tell no one. You have my promise.”

Her voice was ironic.

“Thank you. I am a dying woman, Mr. Dalgliesh. I tell you that, not to invite your sympathy which it would be an impertinence for you to offer and which I neither want nor require, but to explain why it no longer matters to me what you say or do. But I, too, have a natural curiosity. Your note, cleverly, was intended to provoke it. I should like to know how you discovered the truth.”

Dalgliesh drew the visitor’s stool from under the bed and sat down beside her. She did not look at him. The skeleton hands still holding his note did not move.

“Everyone in Colebrook Croft who could have killed Augustus Boxdale was accounted for, except the one person whom nobody considered, the small boy. He was an intelligent, articulate child. He was almost certainly left to his own devices. His nurse did not accompany the family to Colebrook Croft and the servants who were there over Christmas had extra work and also the care of the delicate twin girls. The boy probably spent much time with his grandfather and the new bride. She, too, was lonely and disregarded. He could have trotted around with her as she went about her various activities. He could have watched her making her arsenical face wash and, when he asked, as a child will, what it was for, could have been told ‘to make me young and beautiful.’ He loved his grandfather but he must have known that the old man was neither young nor beautiful. Suppose he woke up on that Boxing Day night overfed and excited after the Christmas festivities? Suppose he went to Allegra Boxdale’s room in search of comfort and companionship and saw there the basin of gruel and the arsenical mixture together on the washstand? Suppose he decided that here was something he could do for his grandfather?”

The voice from the bed said quietly:

“And suppose someone stood unnoticed in the doorway and watched him.”

“So you were behind the window curtains on the landing looking through the open door?”

“Of course. He knelt on the chair, two chubby hands clasping the bowl of poison, pouring it with infinite care into his grandfather’s gruel. I watched while he replaced the linen cloth over the basin, got down from the chair, replaced it with careful art against the wall and trotted out into the corridor and back to the nursery. About three seconds later, Allegra came out of the bathroom and I watched while she carried the gruel into my grandfather. A second later I went into the main bedroom. The bowl of poison had been a little heavy for Hubert’s small hands to manage and I saw that a small pool had been spilt on the polished top of the washstand. I mopped it up with my handkerchief. Then I poured some of the water from the jug into the poison bowl to bring up the level. It only took a couple of seconds and I was ready to join Allegra and my grandfather in the bedroom and sit with him while he ate his gruel.

“I watched him die without pity and without remorse. I think I hated them both equally. The grandfather who had adored, petted and indulged me all through my childhood and deteriorated into this disgusting old lecher, unable to keep his hands off this woman even when I was in the room. He had rejected me and his family, jeopardised my engagement, made our name a laughingstock in the county, and all for a woman that my grandmother wouldn’t have employed as a kitchen maid. I wanted them both dead. And they were both going to die. But it would be by other hands than mine. I could deceive myself that it wasn’t my doing.”

Dalgliesh asked: “When did she find out?”

“She knew that evening. When my grandfather’s agony began she went outside for the jug of water. She wanted a cool cloth for his head. It was then that she noticed that the level of water in the jug had fallen and that a small pool of liquid on the washstand had been mopped up. I should have realised that she would have seen that pool. She had been trained to register every detail. She thought at the time that Mary Huddy had spilt some of the water when she set down the tray and the gruel. But who but I could have mopped it up? And why?”

“And when did she face you with the truth?”

“Not until after the trial. Allegra had magnificent courage. She knew what was at stake. But she also knew what she stood to gain. She gambled with her life for a fortune.”

And then Dalgliesh understood what had happened to the Goddard inheritance.

“So she made you pay?”

“Of course. Every penny. The Goddard fortune, the Goddard emeralds. She lived in luxury for sixty-seven years on my money. She ate and dressed on my money. When she moved with her lovers from hotel to hotel it was on my money. She paid them with my money. And if she has left anything, which I doubt, it is my money. My grandfather left very little. He had been senile and had let money run through his fingers like sand.”

“And your engagement?”

“It was broken, you could say by mutual consent. A marriage, Mr. Dalgliesh, is like any other legal contract. It is most successful when both parties are convinced they have a bargain. Captain Brize-Lacey was sufficiently discouraged by the scandal of a murder in the family. He was a proud and highly conventional man. But that alone might have been accepted with the Goddard fortune and the Goddard emeralds to deodorise the bad smell. But the marriage couldn’t have succeeded if he had discovered that he had married socially beneath him, into a family with a major scandal and no compensating fortune.”

Dalgliesh said: “Once you had begun to pay you had no choice but to go on. I see that. But why did you pay? She could hardly have told her story. It would have meant involving the child.”

“Oh no! That wasn’t her plan at all. She never meant to involve the child. She was a sentimental woman and she was fond of Hubert. No, she intended to accuse me of murder outright. Then, if I decided to tell the truth, how would it help me? After all, I wiped up the spilled liquid, I topped up the bowl. She had nothing to lose remember, neither life nor reputation. They couldn’t try her twice. That’s why she waited until after the trial. It made her secure for ever.

“But what of me? In the circles in which I moved at that time reputation was everything. She needed only to breathe the story in the ears of a few servants and I was finished. The truth can be remarkably tenacious. But it wasn’t only reputation. I paid in the shadow of the gallows.”

Dalgliesh asked, “But could she ever prove it?”

Suddenly she looked at him and gave an eerie screech of laughter. It tore at her throat until he thought the taut tendons would snap violently.

“Of course she could! You fool! Don’t you understand? She took my handkerchief, the one I used to mop up the arsenic mixture. That was her profession, remember. Some time during that evening, perhaps when we were all crowding around the bed, two soft plump fingers insinuated themselves between the satin of my evening dress and my flesh and extracted that stained and damning piece of linen.”

She stretched out feebly towards the bedside locker. Dalgliesh saw what she wanted and pulled open the drawer. There on the top was a small square of very fine linen with a border of hand-stitched lace. He took it up. In the corner was her monogram delicately embroidered. And half of the handkerchief was still stiff and stained with brown.

She said: “She left instructions with her solicitors that this was to be returned to me after her death. She always knew where I was. But now she’s dead. And I shall soon follow. You may have the handkerchief, Mr. Dalgliesh. It can be of no further use to either of us now.”

Dalgliesh put it in his pocket without speaking. As soon as possible he would see that it was burnt. But there was something else he had to say. “Is there anything you would wish me to do? Is there anyone you want told, or to tell? Would you care to see a priest?”

Again there was that uncanny screech of laughter but softer now:

“There’s nothing I can say to a priest. I only regret what I did because it wasn’t successful. That is hardly the proper frame of mind for a good confession. But I bear her no ill will. One should be a good loser. But I’ve paid, Mr. Dalgliesh. For sixty-seven years I’ve paid. And in this world, young man, the rich only pay once.”

She lay back as if suddenly exhausted. There was a silence for a moment. Then she said with sudden vigour:

“I believe your visit has done me good. I would be obliged if you’d return each afternoon for the next three days. I shan’t trouble you after that.”

Dalgliesh extended his leave with some difficulty and stayed at a local inn. He saw her each afternoon. They never spoke again of the murder. And when he came punctually at 2:00 p.m. on the fourth day it was to be told that Miss Goddard had died peacefully in the night with apparently no trouble to anyone. She was, as she had said, a good loser.

A week later, Dalgliesh reported to the Canon.

“I was able to see a man who has made a detailed study of the case. I have read the transcript of the trial and visited Colebrook Croft. And I have seen one other person, closely connected with the case but who is now dead. I know you will want me to respect confidence and to say no more than I need.”

The Canon murmured his quiet assurance. Dalgliesh went on quickly:

“As a result I can give you my word that the verdict was a just verdict and that not one penny of your grandfather’s fortune is coming to you through anyone’s wrongdoing.”

He turned his face away and gazed out of the window. There was a long silence. The old man was probably giving thanks in his own way. Then Dalgliesh was aware of his godfather speaking. Something was being said about gratitude, about the time he had given up to the investigation.

“Please don’t misunderstand me, Adam. But when the formalities have been completed I should like to donate something to a charity named by you, one close to your heart.”

Dalgliesh smiled. His contributions to charity were impersonal; a quarterly obligation discharged by banker’s order. The Canon obviously regarded charities as so many old clothes; all were friends but some fitted better and were consequently more affectionately regarded than others.

But inspiration came:

“It’s good of you to think of it, Sir. I rather liked what I learned about Great Aunt Allie. It would be pleasant to give something in her name. Isn’t there a society for the assistance of retired and indigent variety artists, conjurers and so on?”

The Canon, predictably, knew that there was and could name it.

Dalgliesh said: “Then I think, Canon, that Great Aunt Allie would have agreed that a donation in her name would be entirely appropriate.”