Page 27 of Murder in Moonlight
“Why don’t you begin, Mrs. Goldrich?” Grey said, with a glint of amusement in his eyes.
“Very well. I went upstairs when we all did, just before eleven o’clock, and went to my room. Once there, my mind would not settle to sleep, so I went in search of a book.”
“What time was this, Mrs. Goldrich?” Grey asked with apparent interest.
“Not long after midnight. I definitely heard the clock in the drawing room chime the hour before I left my room. I went straight to the library—where I saw Mr. Grey.”
“I can confirm that,” he said solemnly to the company. “She left again when she saw me there. Did you see anyone else moving about the house, Mrs. Goldrich?”
“No, I did not.”
“And how long were you in the library?” Randolph asked. There was a certain sulkiness in his face because she had accounted for not being in her room. But he would hardly want to say in front of his sisters that he had been there.
“Just a few minutes. The curtains were not drawn, and Mr. Grey thought he saw movement outside. He went off to investigate.”
“And why were you in the library, Mr. Grey?” Mrs. Bolton asked.
“For the same purpose as Mrs. Goldrich. I must have been there for about five minutes before she came in. She did not linger. I decided to investigate what I had seen from the window and left the house via the French window in the drawing room.”
It was Constance’s turn for an admiring glance. He had preserved them both without telling any direct lies.
And yet he could still have committed the crime before she entered the library. She could be complicit by her silence as to what he had been doing there. She acknowledged it again. There was a hardness about him. She did not put killing past him, but killing in such a way? A knife in the back? And why on earth would he do such a thing? He wanted information from Winsom about his missing brother—which was a whole different mystery. Could Winsom have told him something that had inspired ungovernable fury?
Going to the kitchen for a weapon first?
Hardly a moment of rage, and she doubted he was subject to those anyway. He was far too self-controlled. And in any case, the knife had vanished before Grey got here. That surely proved his innocence.
She thought.
“And you, Mr. Grey?” she asked. “Did you see anyone else apart from me in the house or garden, between the time you left your bedchamber and when you roused the household after discovering Mr. Winsom?”
“No, I did not. Only the shadowy figure outside, whom I could not identify.”
“And which may not even have been real,” Ivor Davidson drawled. “Tree branches move. Cats, foxes, swooping owls—all cast shadows that can fool us.”
“You are right, of course,” Grey said, inclining his head. “And yourself, Mr. Davidson? Did you go straight to sleep?”
“I did not. I wrote some letters first. It must have been just before midnight that I prepared for bed, for I had just closed my eyes when, like Mrs. Goldrich, I heard the clock chime downstairs.”
“Did you hear or see anyone else in that time?” Grey asked.
“I heard quiet footsteps in the passage,” Davidson said, a hint of malicious amusement in his eyes as they found Randolph, who blushed furiously. Davidson knew exactly whose footsteps he had heard and where they had gone. “They retreated again almost at once. That was all I heard before the household was aroused.”
Constance inclined her head and turned to Alice Bolton next to him.
“Mrs. Goldrich,” Thomas Bolton said suddenly, “how do you propose to remember all of this in detail?”
“Oh, I remember everything, sir,” Constance said amiably. “Whether written or spoken. I find it both a gift and a curse.”
“I find the whole thing an impertinence,” Mrs. Bolton snapped.
“It is,” Constance agreed at once. “But I think we will all find it less impertinent than answering the police.”
*
“Disingenuous,” Grey saidto her later. “The police will ask exactly the same questions, whatever detailed notes you give them. Unless they are entirely incompetent or far too easily intimidated.”
“I’m sure you are right,” Constance admitted.
