Troy giggled.

“Of course she’d love it if Uncle Flea did go into action with a horsewhip. I can never understand how it’s managed, can you? It would be so easy to run away and leave the horsewhipper laying about him like a ringmaster without a circus.”

“I don’t think it’s that kind of horsewhip. It’s one of the short jobs like a jockey’s. You have to break it in two when you’ve finished and contemptuously throw the pieces at the victim.”

“You’re wonderfully well informed, aren’t you?”

“It’s only guesswork.”

“All the same, you know, it’s no joke, this business. It’s upset my lovely Cressida. She really is cross. You see, she’s never taken to the staff. She was prepared to put up with them because they do function quite well, don’t you think? But unfortunately she’s heard of the entire entourage of a Greek millionaire who died the other day, all wanting to come to England because of the Colonels. And now she’s convinced it was Nigel who did her message and she’s dead set on making a change.”

“You don’t think it was Nigel?”

“No. I don’t think he’d be such an ass.”

“But if — I’m sorry but you did say he was transferred to Broadmoor.”

“He’s as sane as sane can be. A complete cure. Oh, I know the message to Cressida is rather in his style but I consider that’s merely a blind.”

“Do you!” Troy said thoughtfully.

“Yes, I do. Just as — well — Uncle Flea’s message is rather in Blore’s vein. You remember Blore slashed out at the handsome busboy who had overpersuaded Mrs. Blore. Well, it came out in evidence that Blore made a great to-do about being a cuckold. The word cropped up all over his statements.”

“How does he spell it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“What is your explanation?”

“To begin with I don’t countenance any notion that both Nigel and Blore were inspired, independently, to write poison-pen notes on the same sort of paper (it’s out of the library), in the same sort of capital letters.”

(Or, thought Troy, that Mervyn was moved at the same time to set a booby-trap.)

“—Or, equally,” Hilary went on, “that one of the staff wrote the messages to implicate the other two. They get on extremely well together, all of them.”

“Well, then?”

“What is one left with? Somebody’s doing it. It’s not me and I don’t suppose it’s you.”

“No.”

“No. So we run into a reductio ad absurdum, don’t we? We’re left with a most improbable field. Flea. Bed. Cressida. Uncle Bert.”

“And Moult?”

“Good Heavens,” said Hilary. “Uncle Bert’s fancy! I forgot about Moult. Moult, now. Moult.”

“Mr. Smith seems to think —”

“Yes, I daresay.” Hilary glanced uneasily at Troy and began to walk about the room as if he were uncertain what to say next. “Uncle Bert,” he began at last, “is an oddity. He’s not a simple character. Not at all.”

“No?”

“No. For instance there’s his sardonic-East-End-character act. ‘I’m so artful, you know, I’m a cockney.’ He is a cockney, of course. Vintage barrow-boy. But he’s put himself in inverted commas and comes out of them whenever it suits him. You should hear him at the conference table. He’s as articulate as the next man and, in his way, more civilized than most.”

“Interesting.”

“Yes. He’s got a very individual sense of humour, has Uncle Bert.”

“Tending towards black comedy?”

“He might have invented the term. All the same,” Hilary said, “he’s an astute judge of character and I–I can’t pretend he isn’t, although —”

He left this observation unfinished. “I think I’ll do the tree,” he said. “It settles one’s nerves.”

He opened the lid of the packing-case that had been placed near the tree.

Mr. Smith had left ajar the double doors into the great hall from whence there now came sounds of commotion. Somebody was stumbling rapidly downstairs and making ambiguous noises as he came. A slither was followed by an oath and an irregular progress across the hall. The doors burst wide open and in plunged Mr. Smith: an appalling sight.

He was dressed in pyjamas and a florid dressing gown. One foot was bare, the other slippered. His sparse hair was disordered. His eyes protruded. And from his open mouth issued dollops of foam.

He retched, gesticulated, and contrived to speak.

“Poisoned!” he mouthed. “I been poisoned.”

An iridescent bubble was released from his lips. It floated towards the tree, seemed to hang for a moment like an ornament from one of the boughs.

“Soap,” Hilary said. “It’s soap, Uncle Bert. Calm yourself for Heaven’s sake and wash your mouth out. Go to a downstairs cloakroom, I implore you.”

Mr. Smith incontinently bolted.

“Hadn’t you better see to him?” Troy asked.

“What next, what next! How inexpressibly distasteful. However.”

Hilary went. There followed a considerable interval, after which Troy heard them pass through the hall on their way upstairs. Soon afterwards Hilary returned looking deeply put out.

“In his barley water,” he said. “The strongest possible solution of soap. Carnation. He’s been hideously sick. This settles it.”

“Settles —?”

“It’s some revolting practical joker. No, but it’s too bad! And in the pocket of his pyjama jacket another of these filthy notes. ‘What price Arsnic.’ He might have died of fright.”

“How is he, in fact?”

“Wan but recovering. In a mounting rage.”

“Small blame to him.”

“Somebody shall smart for this,” Hilary threatened.

“I suppose it couldn’t be the new boy in the kitchen?”

“I don’t see it. He doesn’t know their backgrounds. This is somebody who knows about Nigel’s sinful lady and Blore’s being a cuckold and Vincent’s slip over the arsenical weedkiller.”

“And Mervyn’s booby-trap,” Troy said before she could stop herself. Hilary stared at her.

“You’re not going to tell me —? You are!”

“I promised I wouldn’t. I suppose these other jobs sort of let me out but — all right, there was an incident. I’m sure he had nothing to do with it. Don’t corner me.”

Hilary was silent for some time after this. Then he began taking boxes of Christmas tree baubles out of the packing case.

“I’m going to ignore the whole thing,” he said. “I’m going to maintain a masterly inactivity. Somebody wants me to make a big scene and I won’t. I won’t upset my stall. I won’t have my Christmas ruined. Sucks-boo to whoever it may be. It’s only ten to eleven, believe it or not. Come on, let’s do the tree.”

They did the tree. Hilary had planned a golden colour scheme. They hung golden glass baubles, big in the lower branches and tapering to miniscule ones at the top, where they mounted a golden angel. There were festoons of glittering gold tinsel and masses of gilded candles. Golden stars shone in and out of the foliage. It was a most fabulous tree.

“And I’ve even gilded the people in the crib,” he said. “I hope Aunt Bed won’t object. And just you wait till the candles are lit.”

“What about the presents? I suppose there are presents?”

“The children’s will be in golden boxes brought in by Uncle Flea, one for each family. And ours, suitably wrapped, on a side table. Everybody finds their own because Uncle Flea can’t read the labels without his specs. He merely tows in the boxes in a little golden car on runners.”

“From outside? Suppose it’s a rough night?”

“If it’s too bad we’ll have to bring the presents in from the hall.”

“But the Colonel will still come out of the storm?”

“He wouldn’t dream of doing anything else.” With some hesitation Troy suggested that Colonel Forrester didn’t seem very robust and was ill-suited to a passage, however brief, through the rigours of a midwinter storm, clad, she understood, in gold lamé. Hilary said he could wear gloves. Noticing, perhaps, that she was not persuaded, he said Vincent would hold an umbrella over the Colonel and that in any case it wouldn’t do for his wig and crown of mistletoe to get wet although, he added, a sprinkling of snow would be pretty. “But of course it would melt,” he added. “And that could be disastrous.”