Tied Up in Tinsel (25 page)

The Colonel stared dolefully into space. “You tell him, B,” he said.

“With the engagement. Fred felt — we both felt — that we couldn’t let Hilary marry under false pretence. She had told him all sorts of tarradiddles —”

“Wait a bit,” Alleyn said. “Did she know —?”

They both cried out: no, of course she didn’t. She had only been told that she had no parents, that there were no relatives.

“This was agreed upon with Moult,” said the Colonel. “She grew up from infancy in this belief. Of course, when she visited us he saw her.”

“Gloated,” Mrs. Forrester interpolated. “Took her to the zoo.”

“Peter Pan and all that,” her husband agreed. “ ’Fraid he forgot himself a bit and let her understand all sorts of fairytales — father’s rank and all that.”

But it emerged that on her own account Cressida had built up a magnificent fantasy for herself, and when she discovered that Hilary was steeped up to the teeth in armorial bearings went to all extremes to present herself in a complementary image.

“You see,” the Colonel said unhappily, “Hilary sets such store by that sort of thing. She considered, and one can’t say without cause, that if he learnt that she had been embroidering he would take a grave view. I blame myself, I blame myself entirely, but when she persisted I told her that she should put all that nonsense out of her head and I’m afraid I went further than that.”

“He told her,” said his wife, “without of course implicating Moult, that she came from a sound but not in the least grand sort of background, quite humble in fact, and she — from something he said — she’s quick, you know — she realized that she’d been born out of wedlock. Fred told her it wouldn’t be honourable to marry Hilary letting him think all this nonsense. Fred said that if Hilary loved her the truth wouldn’t stop him.”

“I — warned her —” the Colonel said and stopped.

“That if
she
didn’t tell him,
you
would.”

The Colonel opened his eyes as wide as saucers: “Yes. I did. How did you know?” he said.

“I guessed,” Alleyn lied.

There was a long silence.

“Oh, yes?” said Mrs. Forrester with a gimlet glance at the wardrobe door.

The Colonel made a helpless gesture with his thin hands. “What is so dreadful,” he said, “what I cannot reconcile myself to believe is that — that the —”

He got up and walked over to the windows, Mrs. Forrester made a portentous grimace at Alleyn.

“—that when she attacked Moult she mistook him for you?” Alleyn suggested.

He nodded.

“Believe me, Colonel,” Alleyn said, going to him. “You need have no misgivings about that. She knew it was Moult. Believe me.”

The Colonel gazed at him. “But — I — of course one is relieved in a way. Of course. One can’t help it? But — Moult? Why my poor Moult? Why her —? No!” he cried out. “No. I don’t want to hear. Don’t tell me.”

But Alleyn told Hilary.

He and Hilary and, at the latter’s entreaty, Troy, sat together in the study. The police, apart from Alleyn’s driver had gone and so had Cressida and so, in a mortuary car, had her father, Alfred Moult.

As if to promote a kind of phony symbolism, the sun had come out and the snow was melting.

Hilary said to Troy. “But you see she’s so very beautiful. That’s what diddled me, I suppose. I mean, all her ongoings and rather tedious conversation, for me was filtered through her loveliness. It reached me as something rather endearing — or, to be honest, didn’t reach me at all.” He fell into a brief reverie. The look that Troy had secured in her painting — the faint smirk — crept into the corners of his mouth. “It’s all quite dreadful,” he said, “and of course, in a way I’m shattered. I promise you — shattered. But — I understand from Uncle Flea and Aunt Bed, she really did tell me the most awful whoppers. I mean — ‘Tottenham’ and so on.”

Troy said: “She knew you minded about things like that.”

“Of course I do. I’m the last of the howling snobs. But — Moult?
Moult
! Her papa!”

“She didn’t know,” Alleyn said, “about Moult.”

Hilary pounced: “When did she find out?” he snapped. “Or did she? Has she — has she — confessed?”

“She’s said enough,” Alleyn said sparsely. And as Hilary stared at him: “She knew that documents relating to her parentage were in the uniform case. The Colonel told her so when he said that you should know of her background. When she thought that the Colonel was downstairs in the cloakroom waiting for her and when everybody else had assembled for the tree, she tried to break into the case with the dressing-room poker. Moult, who had been showing himself to the Colonel in his robe and wig, returned to the dressing-room and caught her in the act. Climax. He’d taken a lot to drink, he was excited and he told her. The bells had started up downstairs, he looked out of the window for Vincent, and she hit him with the poker.”

“Unpremeditated, then,” Hilary said quickly. “Not planned? A kind of reflex thing? Yes?”

“You may say so.”

“At least one may be glad of that. And no designs upon poorest Uncle Flea. Thank Heaven for
that
.”

Alleyn said nothing. There would not, he believed, be cause to produce the evidence of the wedge in the Colonel’s window-sash nor of the concealment of his tablets.

“The defence,” he said, “will probably seek to have the charge reduced to one of manslaughter.”

“How long—?”

“Difficult to say. She may get off”

Hilary looked alarmed.

“But not altogether, I fancy,” said Alleyn.

“You might almost say,” Hilary ventured after a pause, “that my poor creatures, Vincent and Co., collaborated.”

“In a way, I suppose you might.”

“Yes,” Hilary said in a hurry, “but it’s one thing to staff one’s house with — er ‘oncers’ — but quite another to—” He stopped short and turned rather pink.

“I think we should be off, Rory,” said Troy.

Hilary was effusive in thanks, ejaculations about his portrait, apologies and expressions of goodwill.

As they drove away in the thin sunshine he stood, manorially, on the steps of the great porch. Mervyn and Blore, having assisted with the luggage, were in the offing. At the last moment Hilary was joined by Mr. Smith and the Forresters. Troy waved to them.

“We might be going away from a jolly weekend party,” she said.

“Do you know,” her husband asked, “what Hilary very nearly said?”

“What?”

“That when she comes out she’ll qualify for a job at Halberds. Not quite the one envisaged. Parlourmaid perhaps. With perks.”

“Rory!”

“I bet you anything you like,” said Alleyn.

The End

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