“You’re misremembering, Ronnie,” Hutchison said, still attempting to be calm and reasonable in the face of Blanton’s rising hysteria. “It happened the way I said. You followed him into the butler’s pantry and?—”
“Did not! Did not! You did! You’re the one!”
Blanton wasn’t a particularly prepossessing sight, in his bare feet and unbuttoned shirt, with his furious, tear-streaked face. But there was something both heartbreakingly real and sobering about the way he kept insisting on his innocence. There was nothing dignified or decorous about it, but he came across as desperately sincere.
The problem, of course, was that Hutchison might be right, and Blanton might not be remembering the events correctly.
Ogilvie seemed to believe him, however, because he, too, turned on Hutchison. “You said he did it! You said we needed to ensure that Gladys couldn’t tell anyone what she’d seen, or Ronnie would go to prison!”
“And so he would,” Hutchison said, “if you hadn’t killed her.”
At this, Blanton gave another shrill scream. “You killed Gladys! You killed Gladys! Why would you do such a thing, Gram?”
“He said—” Graham Ogilvie began, and Blanton turned back to Nigel Hutchison.
“You bastard, Nigel! You bastard!”
He launched himself at Hutchison, who barely got his hands up in time.
“Come on,” Christopher murmured in my ear. “This is going to turn into another murder in a moment. We’d better get out of here before it’s one of us.”
I nodded. It certainly had that look, didn’t it?
“Get Crispin,” Christopher said.
That was easier said than done, especially since Crispin appeared to be thinking of joining the fray, but I reached forward and nipped his sleeve. He shot a glance over his shoulder at me. When I inched back, pulled by Christopher, Crispin followed.
By now, Ogilvie had joined the fight, and was trying to pull Blanton off Hutchison, but this only resulted in Hutchison punching Blanton when Ogilvie got him to the right distance, and then Ogilvie waded in and attacked Hutchison, too. Meanwhile, I and the two Astleys managed to scurry to the door and out into the hallway without being called back.
“Someone’s knocking,” Christopher said breathlessly as we emerged into the hallway. “They’re so loud I couldn’t?—”
“Probably the neighbors complaining about the noise.” Crispin headed towards the front door, his steps long and his face grim.
“Shouldn’t we do something?” I asked Christopher, with a look over my shoulder into the drawing room, where they were all three now throwing punches at one another and rolling around in the middle of the floor, bumping into chair legs and tables.
He glanced at me. “If you want to get involved in that, you’re a better man than me. I’d rather not risk my skin for any of them.”
“But they’ll kill each other.”
“They might prefer that to the gallows,” Christopher said, which certainly might be true.
And then it was out of my hands anyway, because Crispin had opened the door, and Tom and Finchley and Chief Inspector Pendennis boiled through, followed by a couple of constables in uniform.
EPILOGUE
“So Hutchison did it,”Christopher said later that day.
We were having tea at Sutherland House, and Tom had stopped by for a cucumber sandwich and to give us the lowdown on what was going on at Scotland Yard.
After he and the others had burst through the door of Ronnie Blanton’s flat this morning, it hadn’t taken them long to subdue the combatants. Ronnie was still shrieking accusations and declaiming his own innocence as he was hauled out the door, while Graham Ogilvie shouted obscenities at Nigel Hutchison when he wasn’t pleading with Blanton. Hutchison was quiet, as he had been all along, and didn’t say a word to anyone, but the look he directed our way on his way through the passage and out the door, didn’t bode well. If Nigel Hutchison wasn’t indicted for murder, we’d all have to take refuge in the country, I thought.
Tom nodded. “Once everyone had had their say, it was pretty obvious what had happened.”
“But if Ronnie hadn’t remembered going into the lavatory because he thought Freddie Montrose was there, he might have gotten away with it,” I said.
Tom glanced at me. “Hutchison gotten away with it, you mean? Yes, he was quite clever about it. He found Montrose in the butler’s pantry, listening in on the conversation between Dominic Rivers and Gladys Long. And he grabbed the marble rolling pin from the counter and brought it down on Montrose’s head. The butler door—it swings, you know?—”
Of course it did. That was what made it a butler door.
