Ian’s tone was acidic when he said, “Well, the university wasn’t going to have it, were they? And no decent restaurant or pub anywhere in Oxford will let those drunken vandals cross the threshold. I’m afraid it was this or nothing.”
Right. Nobody would know better than the police what this bunch of posh hooligans got up to.
“And you and Pamela worked closely together?”
I held back my snort, but it wasn’t easy. “I didn’t really see a lot of Pamela. She was sort of coming and going. Sometimes she seemed to be helping me downstairs because we had eight people, and sometimes she was upstairs. Frankly, she seemed to be doing whatever she felt like.”
“Not a very efficient waitress then?”
“She said she had waitressing experience, but I don’t think that was true.”
He simply nodded, but that disturbing twinkle was back in his eyes. Like he was laughing at me. I decided to ignore it. I talked him through the champagne and appetizer course, through the scallops to the soup. “That’s when the older members adjourned upstairs.”
“And the eight younger ones stayed here in the dining room?”
“Yes. That was about eight-thirty. They shifted places.” I glanced around the table, recalling where everyone was. “So Alex started sitting where I am now. Alex took the place where his father had been. I suppose this is the head of the table.” I gestured all the way across to the foot of the table. “Charles Smythe-Richards sat there. Let’s see.” I made the picture in my mind. Imagined I was Alex. “From Alex’s viewpoint, then, to my left was Winston, and to my right was Randolph. Though everybody called the two of them Winnie and Dolph. In the middle was Prince Vikram, and on the other side was Gabriel Parkinson. And then on Charles’ right was Miles Thompson. You’ll remember Miles; he was one of the actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ian had been involved in that production in an official capacity. Since Miles had been a murder suspect at the time, Ian remembered him very well and nodded. “Across the table from him was Jeremy Pantages.”
“Did they just sit wherever they wanted? Or was there a seating plan?”
Oh, that was a good question. I tried to remember. “It felt like they were sitting in an order that they’d done a million times. You know the way you do, when you go into a classroom, say, even if the seating isn’t assigned, once you’ve settled in a spot, you tend to keep going back to the same one?”
They both nodded.
“It seemed to me like that was starting to happen, and then Alex said, ‘No, Dolph, you sit here. And Winnie, you sit on my other side.’ I think that Jeremy was going to sit beside him and stopped and then backed away and sat beside Charles. And then everyone just sort of sat down.”
“So, apart from Alex being quite specific about where Winston and Randolph sat, everybody else sat wherever they wanted to.”
“That’s the way it looked to me.”
“Good. Go on.”
“We served the beef Wellington then. With the older Gargoyles gone, the younger ones got a lot more relaxed. The wine, by the way, was some fabulous burgundy. According to William, it was a fortune. It came out of Hugo’s cellar.”
Ian only nodded again. Once more I suspected this was not news to him.
I wanted to make some snarky comment about how much booze they’d been drinking, but it wasn’t my place. Ian and the sergeant could do the math as easily as I could. “Jeremy Pantages wasn’t there. Alex said he’d gone out for a smoke.” I didn’t want to steal Mrs. Briggs’s thunder, but I said, “Mrs. Briggs saw Jeremy Pantages outside smoking, and with him was Pamela.”
“She’s sure it was Pamela?”
“Pretty sure. She’d seen Pamela before.”
And he could ask Mrs. Briggs for that story, which no doubt she’d be only too happy to tell him. The story of the tramp naked in Alex’s bed when Alex wasn’t even home.
The sergeant was scribbling notes. Ian said, “So, you served the beef.”
“Yes. And they told me to stay out of the room unless they rang the bell.” I contemplated telling him about Charles putting his hand up my skirt but decided it wasn’t relevant. Besides, I’d dealt with him in my own way.
“And did they ring for you?”
I nodded. “Around nine-thirty, they wanted more wine.”
“And Pamela went to get it?” Ian asked me, leaning forward slightly, so I knew this was an important point.
“Yes. Alex told us to ask Hugo for the key to the cellar.”
It was hard to remember exactly what had happened and who’d been where, I found, even just in that short period of time. It seemed like there had been so much going on. I put my hand to my head and closed my eyes. “Let me think. I believe that Pamela left then. And I started clearing plates away even though they hadn’t finished their dinner, and then that seemed to be the signal for Winston to get up and say he needed to go to the bathroom. I think Jeremy went too.”
If I was having trouble keeping all this straight, I couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for Ian. But he had heard this story many times by now.
His gaze sharpened on mine. “Did you see Pamela again?”
Had I? I tried to remember. Then shook my head slowly. “She must have come back from the cellar and disappeared again, though, because there were two fresh bottles of the fancy burgundy on the table when I came in to give them dessert.”
Ian glanced at his sergeant and then back at me. “In fact, Pamela didn’t bring the wine, so Alex sent Miles and Charles to fetch two more bottles.”
This was news to me. “They did?”
“So they say. Did you see or hear that?”
“No. As I said, I thought Pam must have come and gone
