STILL DECEMBER 4

A lot has happened today but we seem to be getting somewhere at last.

Zou Zou and I are brilliant! I think I might actually like her.

We stared at each other, digesting this news. It was Darcy who voiced the conclusion we had all come to. “But if he was terminally ill, why might this doctor—if indeed he was the murderer—bother to kill him?”

“Perhaps he had decided to change his will and one of his relatives in the States decided to kill him before he could do so,” Zou Zou suggested.

“That’s one thing we haven’t done,” I said. “Asked the local postman if any letters had come from America recently. It’s my experience of village postmen that they are terribly nosy and he might well remember where the letters came from.”

“Good idea,” Darcy said. “We should follow up on that. Of course, we have no way of knowing what telephone calls he received.”

“The exchange would know,” I said. “I wonder if the local police followed up on that, or if we’d be allowed to do so.”

“Now that they know Roach was traveling on a false passport I think they will have to start a proper investigation,” Darcy said. “We can make suggestions as to the directions that investigation should take.”

“Tactfully, of course,” Zou Zou said and we smiled.

“I still think the most important figure in this is Mickey, the manservant,” I said. “The whole case against Lord Kilhenny hinges on his testimony. He claimed nobody else visited the castle. But now we know that a doctor visited recently. He claimed he overheard the argument that afternoon and then a scuffle that evening. But what if there was no scuffle? What if he is actually the murderer? What if he made sure Lord Kilhenny’s fingerprints were on the club?”

“But what possible motive could he have?” Lord Kilhenny asked. “He has just lost a well-paid job. Jobs are not easy to find these days.”

“If he really was a manservant,” I said. “What if he really had some other connection to Mr. Roach and came over here to murder him?”

“What kind of connection?” Darcy’s father asked. “He was a low-class kind of chap. Roach wasn’t exactly top-drawer himself but he had money.”

“Precisely,” I said. “What if Mickey felt that the fortune Roach inherited should have gone to him?”

“The only fly in that ointment is, why did he wait so long?” Darcy said. “How many years was Roach here, Father? Four, was it?”

“Almost,” Lord Kilhenny said.

“So you want to murder someone but you wait four years?”