But Flavia was proceeding by instinct, and would almost certainly have disregarded an expert's advice even had she remembered it. Rather than the calm approach, she ran up the little driveway and round the back of the house as fast as her legs would carry her.
Instead of cautious reconnaissance, she charged at the back door with all her force, crashing into it with her shoulder at such speed that it sprang open.
And instead of patient situation assessment and target location, she slid to the floor on her knees, swung the gun up in both hands and pointed it at the figure standing over the inert form by the living room door.
'Get off him,' she screamed at the top of her voice.
And pulled the trigger.
'All I can say,' Argyll said heavily when he recovered from the fright, 'is thank God for safety catches. Although killing me by nearly scaring me to death is almost as effective.'
When Flavia put in her appearance he'd been feeling quite pleased with himself. But the sudden apparition and the gun - particularly the gun, as it was rather long and pointed at him - made his self-congratulatory mood ebb a little. He hurled himself to one side, and cracked his elbow on a side table as he did so. Just at that point where the funny bone is particularly vulnerable. Brought tears to the eyes.
He lay there gasping and clutching his elbow and Flavia, thoroughly winded from her sprint, her shoulder hurting damnably from the way she'd crashed through the door, and speechless from terror over so nearly blowing Argyll's head off, collapsed on the sofa and panted. That was the other thing they'd taught her on the course, she remembered. Take the safety catch off. Just as well she hadn't paid much attention.
'So what happened?' she asked eventually.
He thought for a moment, trying to choose between the paths of honesty and dissimulation. In the circumstances, he thought that a little light editing might be permissible. So he left out the bit about being on the verge of bolting after them because he was too frightened to be on his own.
'I was in the kitchen and heard someone outside the door. So I hid behind it; I thought it was probably you, but wasn't sure. Anyway, in he came. Saw me, pulled out a gun.'
'And?'
'So I kicked him. When in doubt, you know. Probably wouldn't have done much good except for the plaster cast. It must have been like being hit by a train. Down he went, but began crawling after the gun. So I hopped after him and brought him a sharp crack over the head with my crutch.
'I was a bit worried that he might come round while I was looking for something to tie him up with, and I didn't feel like leaving him alone. So I was just standing, wondering what to do when you came in and nearly killed me.'
'Sorry.'
'That's OK. It's the thought that counts.'
'A small detail,' she went on.
'What?'
She pointed at the recumbent form. 'Who is it?'
'Oh, him. I'm sorry.' He pulled the figure over so she could see his face. 'I forgot, you've never met. Flavia; meet Jack Moresby.'
Chapter Fifteen
By the time all the other invitees had drifted along, the atmosphere in Streeter's living room was almost jolly. Well, not quite. Anne Moresby, causing a local stir by arriving in her absurd limousine, was no more charming than usual. Samuel Thanet had bags under his eyes the size of full suitcases, James Langton had the look of someone prepared for a fight and even David Barclay looked concerned about the on-going situation.
Morelli had turned up only a few minutes after Flavia burst in, doing his best to give support. Quite admirable, really; he had taken the syringeful of painkiller, and injected the whole lot into his gum. All on his own. The very idea gave Argyll the quivers. It's bad enough when a dentist does it. Then he'd grabbed his regulation-issue shotgun and come after Flavia. His run along the street was observed by a back-up car, and they had followed him. Another back-up summoned reinforcements, and that turned the street outside into something resembling a battlefield. Grim-faced men in camouflage talking into radios and marching around with machine-guns; the works. That of, course, alerted the vultures, and within half an hour the press had arrived in full force as well. You could see local residents didn't approve. The neighbourhood watch committee was going to have something pretty severe to say about this at the annual meeting.
They were all a bit late, as well. By that time all the excitement was over. But as Morelli said, it would look great on the news, and he had a promotion to worry about.
Not that he was very talkative; in his haste and enthusiasm he had rather overdone the painkiller, and the lower part of his head felt like a large block of ice. But his tooth had stopped hurting. However, it did curtail his conversational powers.
So, when explanations were demanded, all he could do was mumble incomprehensibly and ultimately indicate through sign language that Flavia would have to do the talking. He thought it better to preserve his strength for the reporters outside.
'It's all quite simple, really, once you think about it,' she said. Personally, she would have preferred to have gone back to the hotel and thought it out at leisure. It was, after all, not very long since her careful exposition of what had happened had been revealed as a bit wrong. She was thinking furiously to find out why.
'It was two separate cases, operating in parallel. Once you see that, it becomes easy. The problem was that we tended to assume that the two parts - the bust and the murder – were connected.
'Let's start with the murder of Moresby. As you know, we've just arrested his son; we laid a trap by spreading a story about a fictitious tape. Unfortunately, he didn't fall for it; but he knew that Jonathan Argyll would be here. He followed us, saw Morelli and I leave to get painkillers, and spotted his opportunity to get Jonathan alone. He needed to kill Argyll, but fortunately he was equally keen on staying alive himself.
'Why kill Argyll? Simple. After he left the party at the museum, Jonathan went to eat, then began walking back to his hotel. He must have left the restaurant about forty minutes after the murder, and was crossing a road about ten minutes later. His head was in the clouds as usual, and he was nearly run over.
'As he lives in Rome and constantly dices with death in this fashion anyway, he didn't pay much attention to it. A minor incident, but he mentioned it to Jack Moresby, to whom he had taken a liking at the party. Typical, he said, to be run over by a truck. A purple one, to boot.
'Moresby, I discover, drives a purple truck, and his alibi for the murder was that he went home and stayed there. And it was clearly damaging if anyone could say they saw him in the area of the museum fifty minutes or so afterwards. What was he doing there? He was sitting on a time bomb. The least comment might forge a connection and that might start people thinking. A small risk, but any at all was too big. So he loosened the brake cable while Argyll was eating at a restaurant in Venice. I always had trouble imagining Anne Moresby under a car with a spanner in her hands. It's not her style, somehow. Anyway, the result was one broken leg, and he was lucky it wasn't his neck.'
Argyll glared indignantly at Moresby. Moresby shrugged.
'Prove it,' he said simply.
'Back to the point. How did son kill father, and why? We assumed he had nothing to gain from his father's death. But he would have had something to gain, if his stepmother was convicted of the murder.
'Criminals cannot benefit from their crimes. If Barclay and Anne Moresby were convicted of conspiracy to murder in order to get their hands on the old man's money, then she could not inherit. The money would go to the next of kin, which was Jack Moresby. The will didn't say he was not to get anything, it just left him out. As it was clear his father would never change his mind, it was the only possible way he could ever become the heir.
'The murder of Arthur Moresby had clearly been decided on, and some of it planned, in advance. The day comes more rapidly than Jack anticipates because he discovers that his father is about to set up the trust for the Big Museum. He comes to the party at the museum - the sort of function that ordinarily he would not be seen dead at - to find out what is going on. He discovers, through Argyll and others, that his father plans to finalise the arrangements very soon - Moresby junior needs to act that same night, or wave goodbye to several billion dollars.
'So straight away he starts laying the groundwork. To Argyll, for example, he drops the information about his stepmother having an affair with Barclay, and says his father knows about it . . .'
