The Murder of Busy Lizzie

tell you this, but I, too, have been on the island.’

‘You?’

‘Yes. As you will remember, I left to take a holiday of my own choice, leaving you all to see yourselves off to Great Skua.’

‘You said you were going to stay with Cousin Marie and Miss Potter. I hoped you were looking forward to it.’

‘You should know me better than to have believed that I wanted to go there. I did go, in order to save money, and a thin time I had of it in Marie’s smelly, poky, disease-ridden little hovel!’

‘Oh, come, my dear! I have never been to it, but Cousin Marie always refers to it as a picturesque country cottage. But if you intended to go to Great Skua, why on earth did you not wait and go with us? It would have been delightful to have made a complete family holiday of it.’

‘I never had the smallest intention of going there with you. I went on my own account to throw myself on Eliza’s mercy.’

‘On Lizzie’s mercy? Whatever can you mean?’

‘Boobie has boobed again,’ said Sebastian in an undertone to his sister which was also intended for his mother’s ears.

‘Yes,’ said Clothilde, defiantly, ‘I have boobed, if you call it that! Marius, you should never have involved me in a joint bank account.’

‘You mean you have overdrawn it again, my dear?’

‘That is exactly what I mean. I have converted to my own use money which was intended for both of us. Oh, and the children, of course.’

‘Does it mean Maggie can’t go back to school or I to college?’ asked Sebastian. ‘Not to worry, darling. We can go into industry or down the mines and earn fabulous sums and have trade union cards and go on strike and help run the country by force majeure.’

Clothilde burst into tears. Sebastian put his arm round her. Marius distressfully pulled his lip and Margaret said anxiously,

‘Oh, Father, can’t you do something? Haven’t you got some shares to sell or can’t you get a bank loan? Or perhaps we could sell this house and get something smaller. You mustn’t let poor Boobs upset herself over something as silly as money.’

‘There is no problem. Your mother has never understood money, my dear. The joint account was never more than a goodwill gesture on my part. Of course I have resources elsewhere, and of course there is no need for my dear wife to upset herself.’

‘There you are, Boobie,’ said her son, squeezing her up against him. ‘We’re not on the breadline yet.’ He looked perplexedly at his father. ‘You’re not holding her acknowledged dottiness against her, are you?’ he asked.

‘Dear me, no,’ said Marius. ‘It is not the first time she has overdrawn that account. It is not that which is worrying me.’

Sebastian searched his father’s face and enlightenment came.

‘Good Lord!’ he said, as his mother broke away from his encircling arm and rushed upstairs. ‘Boobie has quite monumentally boobed this time. You mean she might have been on the island when Aunt Eliza died…’

‘And at whose death I come in for all the money my parents left in trust for Eliza,’ said Marius.

‘That was a queer sort of affair,’ said Laura to her employer. ‘Why should anybody want to strangle a harmless little Ph.D. like Mr Lovelaine? And what are we going to do about it, if anything? I don’t care to think of our guests being set upon on our very doorstep.’

‘We are going to talk to Miss Crimp.’

‘That little creep? What can she tell us?’

‘That we shall have to find out, but first let us review the situation, as you would say, and plot the lie of the land.’

‘Assemble the known facts and see what we can deduce from them?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Right. You shout, and I will make interpolations if necessary.’

‘Very well.’

‘Not losing track of the great thought that the death of Mrs Chayleigh may tie up in some way with our own little job here.’

‘Quite. Well, now, to begin with we have Mr Lovelaine arriving, with his children, to pay a visit to a sister whom he had not seen for very many years.’

‘Yes. Why, I wonder, did he come?’

‘It seems that she invited him. However, when he introduced himself at the hotel, he found that no booking had been made in his name, that his sister was absent and that Miss Crimp, in charge of reception, knew nothing whatever about him.’

‘All the same, she took him in, and also the two youngsters.’

‘That, to my mind, was somewhat surprising, considering that she was expecting an overflow of guests a week later.’

‘These bird-fanciers? Yes, and a mixed bag they are! I’ve met some of them, and if they’re genuine ornithologists I’m the king of Siam.’

‘Interesting,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘But, for the moment, we are concerning ourselves with the Lovelaine family, I thought.’

‘Sorry! Over to you, then, although I’m bound to insist that, if they’re watching birds, it’s time some reputable citizens were watching them. Some of them — the majority, I expect — may be genuine enough, but they’re being used as cover, I suspect, for a minority of evil persons who may be just the people we’ve been sent here to look out for.’

‘I do not doubt it. Well, all in good time we will inform upon them in the proper quarters.’

‘When we’ve got proof, you mean. Ah, well, back to the Lovelaines then, and let’s get their affairs cleared out of the way. You were remarking that it was strange that Miss Crimp—’

‘Took them in, although, according to the hotel system of bookings, there is no record of any correspondence between Marius Lovelaine and Mrs Chayleigh and I find that strange. I would think nothing of it in the ordinary course of events, for I understand that the hotel is rarely full…’

‘But with these bird-watchers looming, and needing all the available accommodation—yes, quite so, indeed. You know what it looks like to me?’

‘I can imagine what it looks like to you. You think that Miss Crimp knew perfectly well that the Lovelaines were expected and that she deliberately mislaid the correspondence.’

‘Why should she do such a thing?’

‘I do not think she did. I think it far more likely that if there was such a correspondence — and we have only Marius Lovelaine’s word for that — it was Eliza Chayleigh who suppressed it.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘The absence of any entries in the hotel books. It is easy enough to throw away letters, but to remove an entry from a ledger or a day-book is a vastly different matter. The chances are that anybody doing such a thing would not only dispose of the one entry which it was requisite and necessary to conceal, but other entries which had been entered on the same page. I suggest, therefore, that the Lovelaines’ booking was not entered, and that Miss Crimp knew nothing about it for the simple reason that Eliza Chayleigh had never shown her any of the letters to and from Marius Lovelaine.’

‘But why hadn’t she? What could be the reason? She couldn’t have foreseen that she’d be dead before the Lovelaines turned up at the hotel, and that they’d have to explain themselves to the reception clerk.’

‘Quite. Therefore I say that our next intrusion into the affair must take the form of a conversation with Miss Crimp.’

‘She’ll probably lie.’

‘That remains to be seen. If she does, and we become aware of the fact, it will mean that she has something