Ronnie blinked. “Ye-e-ees?”
“He asked for the lav. And Hutch suggested that you should go after him?—”
“To the lav?” Ronnie started to laugh, but he subsided after a few seconds, and began to gnaw on one of his fingernails instead. His eyes were huge and worried above his hand.
“He didn’t go to the lav,” Crispin said gently. “He went to the butler’s pantry so he could listen to what Dom and Gladys were doing in the kitchen. Probably so he could write about it for his rag.”
“I don’t remember that,” Ronnie said.
“You don’t remember going into the butler’s pantry and seeing Freddie Montrose hunched over by the butler door with his ear to the crack?”
Ronnie shook his head. “ I went to the lav.”
“You… what?”
“I went to the lav,” Ronnie repeated with a nod. “I remember now. Nigel said to go after Freddie Montrose, and Freddie went to the lav. So I went to the lav.”
“Freddie did not go to the lav,” Crispin said. “Freddie went to the butler’s pantry.”
“Well, I didn’t know that,” Ronnie retorted, “did I? He asked for directions to the lav. So I went to the lav.”
“That makes perfect sense,” I said soothingly, and he shot me a look. “But he wasn’t there, was he?”
Ronnie shook his head. “The lav was empty. So I used the toilet.” He giggled. “We’d had a lot of champagne, hadn’t we? It was your birthday, wasn’t it, St George?”
Crispin nodded. “It was, old man. I was drinking champagne in your sitting room with my cousins, and you were looking for Freddie Montrose in the lavatory. Do you remember what happened after that?”
“The door to the butler’s pantry was open,” Ronnie said. “And I remembered that Nigel wanted me to find Montrose, so I went across to it, and…”
His face clouded over.
“And what did you see?” Crispin prompted, when Ronnie said no more.
But before Ronnie could answer, the door to the sitting room flew open, and Nigel Hutchison burst through, followed by an out-of-breath Graham Ogilvie.
They were both in the same state that Ronnie had been when he’d opened the door: hair disheveled, shirts unbuttoned, no ties or socks. Ogilvie wasn’t even wearing a shirt, just an undershirt. I eyed it, brows arched, and he flushed.
“Don’t,” Hutchison panted. “Don’t say it, Ronnie.”
“Don’t say what?” Ogilvie wanted to know. “What’s going on?”
“We’re trying to ascertain how much Ronnie remembers from Saturday night,” Crispin told him, and Ogilvie immediately walked to Blanton’s chair and stood beside it, ranging himself aside his… paramour?—with a hand on his arm.
“You don’t have to tell them anything, Ronnie. Just because we’re all supposed to be on the same side now, doesn’t mean you owe them anything.”
He shot us all an unfriendly look.
“I don’t mind, Gram,” Ronnie said, looking puzzled. “I don’t know anything the rest of you don’t, do I?”
Nobody had anything to say to that, it seemed, or at least no one attempted to interject anything.
“I didn’t realize the two of you were here,” Crispin said, looking from Ogilvie to Hutchison and back. “Ronnie didn’t mention it.”
“Certainly I did, St George,” Ronnie said, and giggled. “I asked if you wanted me to call Nigel, don’t you remember? Did you think I meant to ring him up?”
“I suppose I did,” Crispin admitted. “But no matter. We discussed it this morning, the three of us?—”
He included Christopher and me with a look, “—and decided we needed to talk some more about Saturday night.”
