‘Good Lord!’ Finn said, fifteen minutes later. He had strolled into the stable-yard of Ashmore Chase and come upon the group of men round the well. ‘Surely nobody is taking that ploy seriously?’ He watched the head and shoulders of a constable disappear into darkness. ‘Is that sort of champagne really worth it?’
‘You may find it’s a pretty odd sort of champagne.’ Bobby Appleby had swung round. ‘Where on earth have you been? And where is Virginia?’
‘I borrowed your car. The key was in the ignition. I hope you don’t mind?’
‘I’ve put up with worse than that from you, I suppose.’ Bobby sounded resigned. ‘But what did you want the car for, anyway?’
‘I ran Virginia to that AA telephone on the main road. She wanted to make a call.’
‘You had been talking to Miss Ashmore?’ It was Appleby who had turned round now. With a brisk inclination of the head, he drew the two young men aside. ‘You followed her into the park as soon as you left us?’
‘Well, yes. I’d got a glimpse of her, you know, and she seemed rather attractive.’ Finn offered this explanation with an appearance of entire artlessness. ‘And, of course, I thought it might be a time for a chap to rally round. Her family not showing up in too good a light, and so forth.’
‘And did she respond to being rallied round?’
‘Not too well at first, sir. But I chatted her up.’
‘Did you, indeed? May I ask what you judged to be a suitable topic of conversation?’
‘Well, just all this.’ Finn made a gesture. ‘It would have been silly – it would have been quite artificial, wouldn’t it? – to talk about anything else. So I had a go – from a sympathetic viewpoint. Told her the latest, and so on.’
‘Just what do you mean by the latest?’
‘Well, sir, things like your saying that the fire was the key.’
‘Was it at that point that Miss Ashmore said she wanted to make a telephone call?’
‘I don’t quite remember.’ Finn produced his artless look again. Then he caught sight of Appleby’s expression, and it vanished.
‘Finn, I think you knew very well what you were doing?’
Finn hesitated only for a second.
‘Yes, sir. I think she knew where she could contact her brother on the telephone – or leave a message for him.’
‘It’s your belief that the truth – or an outline of it – had just flashed on her? That she can have known nothing whatever about it until that very moment?’
‘That’s how it felt. Anything really grim and dark about her brother, I mean. In fact, I’m certain of it. She had tumbled to something that I hadn’t tumbled to, and it was a terrific shock. She did say something queer – something about Giles having been interested in fires. Anyway, I knew what she was doing.’
‘And you knew what you were doing? You thought it was right?’
‘She had made an appeal to me.’ Finn looked straight at Appleby. ‘Not explicitly – is that the word? She might just have been wanting to telephone her mama about being home to lunch. But I knew. I knew that she wanted to give her brother a chance. Shall I be put in quod, do you think? There just wasn’t anything else I could do.’
‘Your incarceration is improbable – or the girl’s, for that matter.’ Appleby looked at Finn soberly. ‘You accepted a heavy responsibility, all the same.’
‘Yes, I see that. If it’s as I think it is, I believe I know what Giles will do.’
‘It’s our duty–’
Appleby was interrupted by a shout behind him. They all turned round. The constable, gloriously muddy, had been hauled out of the well. He was clutching a bulky object in his arms.
‘The champagne,’ Bobby said quietly, ‘transformed into something rich and strange.’
‘The champagne?’ Finn echoed in bewilderment. ‘That isn’t–’
‘My dear Finn, there never was any champagne. Look!’ Appleby had pointed. The constable’s burden had been set down in the yard, and a certain amount of mud and weed cleared away from it. It stood revealed as a large electric fire: the kind that masquerades as a heap of flaming logs.
‘When Bobby first peered through the window,’ Appleby said to Judith that night, ‘he saw the electric flex – which is something an honest-to-God fire doesn’t have. But it was simply the visual image that registered, followed by no rational inference at all – and apparently no impress upon his memory. However, he recovered it as soon as I shoved him at the window again – and when something like the truth was beginning to dawn on my own mind.’
‘The rather dim-seeming Giles Ashmore is not without resource.’
‘Decidedly not. He smuggled the fire into the Chase beneath a dozen bottles of claret. But that was simply to elude the observation of his two companions. Once in Martyn Ashmore’s presence, he simply produced it boldly. Ashmore must have been put in good humour by the absurdity of the miserable claret, and he was no doubt in high feather over having out-smarted his nephew with Miss Bunker. So he accepted the contraption graciously, and allowed Giles to fix it up at once. A “very original present”, he called it in Bobby’s hearing later. There was nothing else of the kind in the house, apart from a wretched little electric radiator in the hall. Incidentally, I don’t suppose he often lit a fire at this time of year. But the fireplace had the abundant remains of one, left neglected since goodness knows when. The rest of the story pretty well tells itself.’
‘I’m not sure that it tells itself to me.’
‘Giles got Bobby into the hall, simply to glimpse that great big fire through a door. He had the good luck to manage that further glimpse through the window. But Ibell, I think, he was reckoning on; and when Bobby and Finn scattered in alarm he simply slipped back into the house, killed his uncle, arranged his head and shoulders in the cold ashes, and took the electric contraption out and pitched it down the well. All he had to do then was to keep up an alibi over a period of so many hours – you may say while that non-existent wood fire was dying down and going out. Hence the whole business of having Bobby see him off to London – non-stop.’
‘Do you think that Giles knew about his uncle and Robina?’
‘I should judge it extremely probable, and it would add a good deal of extra drive to his plan. Sex and cupidity all mixed up.’
‘What about his father?’
‘I’m sure that his father didn’t know what he was about – any more than his sister did. Rupert, as we know, had been pursuing his own nasty game. But he was a cipher last night. Perhaps the bad news he read in The Times really set his teeth on edge. It seems his visit to his dentist was genuine enough.’
‘Ambrose?’
‘Giles had neglected to do anything about the catch on the front door. So Ambrose walked straight into the house in a tearing rage, and came on his brother as dead as a door-nail. He lost his head, and I’m not surprised. This morning, of course, he realized that Finn was a deadly danger to him. One is rather sorry for Ambrose.’
‘I’m not sure that I can find anybody to be sorry for.’ Judith paused. ‘Except, perhaps, the girl.’
‘That’s just as well. Bobby will positively require you to be sorry for her.’
‘John – no!’
‘A passing attraction. I shouldn’t worry… I’ll get that.’
The telephone had rung in another room. Answering it, Appleby was away for some time. When he returned, it was to pour out two glasses of brandy, and hand one of them silently to his wife. He went over to the fire and stirred it – a log fire. Then he turned back into the room.
‘That was Tommy Pride,’ he said. ‘Giles Ashmore shot himself in a London hotel late this afternoon. He’s dead.’