He chuckled ruefully. “That is difficult, when I have thought of nothing else for six months.”
“You have to let it go, Michael. It does no good to keep fretting over it like this.”
“But I am so close! There is but one piece of the puzzle missing, if I could only see it.”
“I see it more like a maze,” she said. “However long we spend wandering about, we can never find the centre, and if we could, it would be just as difficult to find our way out again. Probably we should have turned left instead of right at the first branch and then— Michael, are you listening?”
“Oh…of course!”
“Michael?”
“The belt was broken,” he murmured. “Laudanum… the saddle… and the painters… Of course! Thepainters! It must be so!”
He stood as if in a trance, eyes far away, mouth slightly open.
“Michael?” Mrs Edgerton said, puzzled. “Michael, what is it? Oh! You know! You know who killed the chaplain.”
The captain turned astonished eyes on his wife. “Yes, I know. Actually, I have knownwhoit was for a while now, but the rest… It is like one of those images one sees… it is a vase, you think, but there are supposed to be faces there. You cannot see it no matter how hard you try and then suddenly… there it is. The answer. It all makes sense now. Oh, but I have been so unbelievably stupid. Why did I not think—? But at last I know, and not onlywhokilled Mr Nicholson, butwhy. That is what has puzzled me all this time, which has kept me gnawing away at it like a dog with a bone, but now Iknow, and it is so clear… so blindingly obvious.”
His voice was loud enough to drown out the other conversations rumbling round the room, and everyone drifted nearer.
“Well, you had better tell us at once,” the earl said gruffly. “Is it someone here this very minute? We have Sir Hubert with us to effect an arrest. Come, man, do not keep us in suspense.”
“No, I will not,” the captain said distractedly, “but I must check my notes first… and the plan! The plan of the castle that Mrs Walter was so good as to label for me.” He dashed away, was halfway up the stairs before turning and racing down again.“My lord, would you be so good as to gather everyone into… the library would be best. I shall be back in five minutes.”
And then he dashed off again.
***
They were all there, the ladies and some of the gentlemen on chairs set in a loose semi-circle by Pettigrew, who was still helping to arrange them, while Luce and Sandy passed around glasses of what looked like brandy. Some of the younger gentlemen stood at the back, and Lady Farramont prowled back and forth, a glass in her hand.
Michael ran a quick tally in his head, and decided that everyone was there. No one had sneaked away. They all turned expectantly towards him, as Neate and Sandy moved unobtrusively into place in front of the two doors.
“My lords, ladies and gentlemen,” Michael began. “Thank you all for helping to recreate the murder for me, and for being so patient with my bumblings. It has taken me an unconscionable time to understand this murder, but perhaps there are good reasons for that. The murderer was clever, for one thing, and threw me quite off his trail. And then I was looking at it all wrong. I could see very clearlyhowthe murder was done, but the point that evaded me all along waswhyanyone should want to murder Mr Arthur Nicholson, a chaplain, a well-liked man, in general, and a man who, whatever his faults, appeared to have no enemies.”
He turned to Lady Alice with a bow, even though she could not see it.
“Lady Alice, you will forgive me, I am sure, if I say that your husband was no saint. He set out, almost from the earliest moments of his arrival here, to amass a great fortune. We may never know why he felt impelled to do so. Perhaps it wasenvy of those around him, so wealthy and so careless of that wealth. Or perhaps he thought that his lack of ordination would one day be discovered and he would have to leave in a hurry. Perhaps a man cut adrift from his own family and not fully rooted in his new one simply needed the security of money. We cannot say. But whatever his motives, he embezzled great sums from the late earl’s estate, he won suspiciously often at cards, he sold his wife’s jewellery and substituted paste copies, he solicited charitable contributions from acquaintances and he ran a brothel in Pickering, channelling the profits through legitimate businesses to hide them.”
He paused, gazing round the room, seeing the surprise on some faces. The full extent of Nicholson’s perfidy had been known to few people.
“But none of this,” he continued, “provided sufficient motive to kill him. The late earl made no complaint about his losses, and probably knew nothing of them. Lady Alice had no idea about her jewellery. No one questioned where all those charitable donations went. His connection to the brothel was not generally known. Even his unacknowledged illegitimate son was not at all resentful. No one, it seemed, hated Mr Nicholson enough to kill him. And only one person benefited from his death, his daughter, who inherited that vast accumulated fortune.”
“I did not kill him!” she cried.
Michael bowed. “No, indeed you did not, my lady. You shared a room with your cousin, so you could only have left your room at night if you had drugged her into a deep sleep — laudanum, perhaps, which is so easy to obtain. So very easy… Yet when the murder was discovered, you both went to the scene, very much awake. So no, you did not kill your father. But again, it left me with no one who had a reason to murder Mr Nicholson, and was in a position to do so.”
Again he paused. Part of him relished the drama of the situation, but he knew he was about to distress the earl and his family greatly. How much easier this would have been if the murderer had been nothing but a random stranger!
But the truth, however unpalatable, must be faced.
“And I was exactly right about that. No one hated him enough to kill him. No one wanted him dead. He was not supposed to die that night.”
“Whatever do you mean, Edgerton?” the earl said tersely. “Just get to the point, will you?”
“Of course, my lord. The point is this — Mr Nicholson was not supposed to die because he was not the murderer’s target. He died by accident. The murderer took the axe from the urn on the stairs, and then he made a fatal mistake. He went up thewrong stairs, entered the wrong room and killed Nicholson.”
“How could anyone—?” someone began, but then stopped. Already eyes were beginning to turn in one direction.
