“Good. Your next move was to tow the sledge round the corner and across the courtyard, where you were met by Moult, whom you took to be Colonel Forrester. Where exactly did you meet him?”

Behind Nigel’s effigy, it appeared. There, Vincent said, he relieved the Druid of his umbrella and handed over the sledge, and there he waited until the Druid returned.

“So you missed the fun?” Alleyn remarked.

“I wouldn’t of bothered anyway,” said Vincent.

“You waited for him to come out and then you took over the sledge and he made off through the porch and the door into the cloakroom? Right.”

“That’s what I told Mr. Bill-Tasman and that’s what I tell everyone else who keeps on about it, don‘ I?”

“Did you give him back the umbrella?”

“No. He scarpered off smartly.”

“Where were you exactly when you saw him go into the cloakroom?”

“Where was I? Where would I be? Out in the bloody snow, that’s where.”

“Behind the effigy?”

“Hey!” said Vincent flaring up. “You trying to be funny? You trying to make a monkey outa me? You said no funny business, that’s what you said.”

“I’m not making the slightest attempt to be funny. I’m simply trying to get the picture.”

“How could I see him if I was be’ind the bloody statcher?”

Blore, in his great voice, said, “Choose your words,” and Kittiwee said, “Language!”

“You could have looked round the corner, I imagine, or even peered over the top,” Alleyn suggested.

Vincent, in a tremulous sulk, finally revealed that he saw Moult go through the cloakroom door as he, Vincent, was about to conceal the sledge round the corner of the east wing.

Alleyn asked when the Christmas tree was demolished and Blore said this was effected by Vincent, Nigel and the boy while the party was at dinner. The children had finished their supper and had been let loose, with their presents, in the library. The ornaments were stripped from the tree, packed into their boxes and removed. The tree itself, on its movable base, was wheeled out through the french windows, and the curtains were drawn to conceal it.

“And there it remained, I suppose. Until when?”

Another long silence.

“Well,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “it’s not there now. It’s round the corner under the east wing. Who put it there? Did you, Vincent?”

He hung fire but finally conceded that he had moved the tree. “When?” Alleyn asked, remembering Troy’s midnight observation from her window. Vincent couldn’t say exactly when. It emerged that after the dining-room had been cleared, the mammoth washing-up disposed of and the rest of the exhaustive chores completed, the staff, with the outside help, had sat down to a late supper. Vincent, upon whose forehead a thread of minute sweat-beads had come into being, said that he’d been ordered by Mr. Bill-Tasman to clear away the tree because, Alleyn gathered, the sight of it, denuded and disreputable, would be too anticlimactic. In all the fuss Vincent had forgotten to do so until he was going to bed.

He had put on his oilskins, fetched a wheelbarrow from the woodshed, collected the tree, and dumped it in the wreckage of the old conservatory.

“Why there?” Alleyn asked.

With an air strangely compounded of truculence and something that might be fear, Vincent asked at large where he was expected to take it in the dead of night.

It would be shifted anyway, he said, when the bulldozers got round to making a clean sweep of all that glass and muck, which they were due to do any day now, for filling in their excavations.

Alleyn said, “I’m sure you know, all of you, don’t you, why you were asked to search the area where the tree lies? It was because it was thought that Moult might have wandered there and collapsed or even, for some reason, leant too far out of an upstairs window and fallen.”

“What an idea!” said Kittiwee and tittered nervously.

Vincent said that half-a-dozen bloody Moults might have fallen in that lot and he wouldn’t have seen them. He had tipped the tree out and slung his hook.

“Tell me,” Alleyn said, looking round the circle, “you must have seen quite a lot of Moult off and on? All of you?”

If they had been so many oysters and he had poked them, they couldn’t have shut up more smartly. They looked anywhere but at him and they said nothing.

“Come—” he began and was interrupted by Nigel, who suddenly proclaimed in a high nasal twang: “He was a sinner before the Lord.”

“Shut up,” said Mervyn savagely.

“He was given to all manner of mockery and abomination.”

“Oh, do stop him, somebody!” Kittiwee implored. He struck out with his legs and the cats, indignant, sprang to the ground. Kittiwee made faces at Alleyn to indicate that Nigel was not in full possession of his wits.

“In what way,” Alleyn asked Nigel, “was Moult an abomination?”

“He was filled with malice,” muttered Nigel, who appeared to be at a slight loss for anathemas. “To the brim,” he added.

“Against whom?”

“Against the righteous,” Nigel said quickly.

“Meaning you,” said Mervyn. “Belt up, will you?”

Blore said, “That’s quite enough, Nigel. You’re exciting yourself and you know what it leads to.” He turned to Alleyn. “I’m sure, sir,” he boomed, “you can see how it is, here. We’ve been overstimulated and we’re a little above ourselves.”

“We’re all abominations before the Lord,” Nigel suddenly announced. “And I’m the worst of the lot.” His lips trembled. “Sin lies bitter in my belly,” he said.

“Stuff it!” Mervyn shouted and then, with profound disgust: “Oh Gawd, now he’s going to cry!”

And cry poor Nigel did, noisily, into a handkerchief held to the lower half of his face like a yashmak. Over this he gazed dolorously at Alleyn through wet, white eyelashes.

“Now, look here,” Alleyn said, “Nigel. Listen to me. No,” he added quickly, anticipating a further demonstration. “Listen. You say you’re a sinner. All right. So you may be. Do you want to cleanse your bosom or your belly or whatever it is, of its burden? Well, come on, man. Do you?”

Without removing the handkerchief, Nigel nodded repeatedly.

“Very well, then. Instead of all this nonsense, how about helping us save another sinner who, for all you know, may be out there dying of exposure?”

Nigel blew his nose and dabbed at his eyes.

“Come on,” Alleyn pressed. “How about it?”

Nigel seemed to take council with himself. He gazed mournfully at Alleyn for some moments and then said: “It’s a judgment.”

“On Moult? Why?”

There was no marked — there was scarcely any discernible— movement among the other four men: it was more as if they jointly held their breath and barely saved themselves from leaning forward.

“He was a wine-bibber,” Nigel shouted. “Wine is a mocker. Strong drink is raging.”

And now there was a distinct reaction: an easing of tension, a shifting of feet, a leaning back in chairs, a clearing of throats.

“Is that the case?” Alleyn asked at large. “What do you say? Blore? Do you agree?”

“Allowing for the extravagant style of expression, sir,” Blore conceded, “I would say it is the case.”

“He tippled?”

“He did, sir, yes. Heavily.”

“Have you any reason to think, any of you, that he had taken more than was good for him yesterday afternoon?” Suddenly they were loquacious. Moult, they said, had undoubtedly been tippling all day. Mervyn volunteered that he had seen Moult sneak out of the dining-room and had subsequently discovered that the whisky decanter on the sideboard which he had only lately filled had been half-emptied. Kittiwee had an unclear story about the total disappearance of a bottle of cooking brandy from the pantry. Vincent unpersuasively recollected that when Moult met him, in druidical array, he had smelt very strongly of alcohol. Blore adopted a patronizing and Olympic attitude. He said that while this abrupt spate of witness to Mr. Moult’s inebriety was substantially correct, he thought it only proper to add that while Mr. Moult habitually took rather more than was good for him, yesterday’s excesses were abnormal.