“I shouldn’t think so. They’ve probably both got an eye on young David. They wouldn’t go into any sort of huddle with one another.”
“They’ve both got an eye on Tom,” said Deborah.
“I accept your judgment. That leaves us with Barbara Bourton, who would seem to gain financially from her husband’s death. Money is a strong incentive to commit a crime.”
“But she was never in any position to change over the daggers, Aunt dear. She had no props to pick up, had no access to the daggers before the show opened and would have been spotted at once if she’d been seen—as she would have been—fiddling about on one of the trestle tables,” said Jonathan.
“Edmund seems a bit sniffly this morning,” said Laura. “He may have picked up one of these summer colds.”
“Cook says stuff a cold and starve a fever,” said Rosamund.
“She is full of these old saws. An old saw,” added Laura quickly, “is a saying handed down from generation to generation and probably quite as sensible as anything the doctors tell you.”
“Will Edmund have the doctor?”
“I don’t know until I’ve taken his temperature.”
“I think Cook and Carrie always have colds.”
“Oh? What makes you think so?”
“They are always eating. Mummy says they eat twice as much as the rest of us put together.”
“Compensatory, perhaps. That means it may be their way of expressing dissatisfaction with something else in their lives.”
“Mr Rinkley was eating some nasty things out of a jar. They had kind of orange-coloured bits on them.”
“When was this?”
“At the play. Auntie Deb had dressed Edmund and me and Ganymede and Lucien in our fairy clothes, so while she went into the bedroom to get herself and Uncle Jon ready, I thought I would go into the hall and see whether Signora had got Peasblossom ready, because that was going to be my part until I was given a much better one. I thought I would tell her she might get a bouquet if she did nicely the third time.”
“You think of everything.”
“Yes, you have to, with Edmund, because he is so naughty. Are boys always naughtier than girls?”
“I think they have to be. The onus is on them in so many ways, biologically and otherwise.”
“What’s an onus?”
“According to the dictionary, it’s a duty, a responsibility.”
“Is this year a leap year?”
“Why?”
“Cook says if every year was a leap year there would be a lot more happy marriages and not so many divorces.”
“She may have got something there.”
“Why?”
“Because in leap year women do the proposing.”
“I am going to marry Peter when I grow up. Peter said to Mr Rinkley was he really going to eat that muck just before the show and Mr Rinkley said the orange-looking things had a lot of eye-deen in them. Mummy put eyedeen on a nasty deep cut Daddy made on his hand with a chisel and Daddy danced about and swore.”
“Iodine. Yes, I daresay he did. Did Mr Rinkley eat the whole of the contents of the jar?”
“Oh, yes, with a long pickle-fork Cook lent him. I watched him, but he didn’t see me. He ate the whole jar.”
“No wonder he made himself sick.”
“Ganymede showed me how to make myself sick with two fingers down my throat, but it looked horrid, so I didn’t try it.”
“Did Ganymede try it?”
“Oh, yes, he had to when he showed me, but Auntie Deb didn’t know, because it was right at the end of the garden, so nobody saw Ganymede being sick. He said if you were poisoned it was a good thing to know. Ganymede is going to be a doctor when he grows up, like his mummy and daddy.”
“So, for what it’s worth, if anything,” said Laura to Dame Beatrice over the telephone that evening, “it looks as though Rinkley provided the mussels himself and ate them at an unusual time. Edmund? Oh, he’s all right, lively as a cricket tonight. No, no temperature. Not to worry. Rosamund has been prancing about in a white frock, on to which I sewed a red cross, and I made her a nurse’s cap out of one of Gavin’s handkerchiefs. Yes, he’s been here and is most interested in the murder. No, he doesn’t call it that, but he says it might be as well to get you to look into it and he has got in touch with the Chief Constable down there and suggested that they get you involved.”
“I am involved already. A number of Mr Yorke’s actors—perhaps I should say actresses, since all but one are women—have asked for interviews. The rumours and the newspaper reports are making Mr Bourton’s death into a local
“Shall you see them?”
