and every one of us. It was some nasty old tramp after all.”
Nigel sighed, and I don’t suppose he was the only one.
“It’s not that simple,” I said. “For one thing, even if the killer knew I was alive, he wouldn’t necessarily expect me to turn up as abruptly as I did. Carolyn knew I was alive, because I’d told her what I was planning. But I got a look at her face a minute ago, and she looked almost as surprised as the rest of you.”
“Well, you startled me, Bern.”
“I startled everybody,” I said. “That’s fair enough, because I was startled myself when I found out about Gordon Wolpert a few minutes ago. And I’m afraid I’m not done startling you.”
Miss Dinmont said she hoped there wasn’t going to be more in the way of excitement. Dakin Littlefield rolled his eyes and muttered something unintelligible to his bride. Muttering seemed to be the order of the day, until Carolyn called out, “Quiet, everybody! He knows who did it. Don’t you, Bern?”
“Did I? I wanted to hedge, to equivocate, to waffle.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “I know who did it.”
There was a long silence. Then Nigel said, “I say,” and I realized they were all staring at me.
“Sorry,” I said. “It just seemed so decisive, putting it that way. You know what’s been wrong with this whole bloody business from the start? It’s too English.”
“Too English?”
“Too polite, too soft-spoken, too cozy for words. Of course Cissie keeps wanting the murderer to turn out to be a passing tramp. The alternative is to believe one of us did the dirty deed, and we’re all such jolly decent people it’s quite inconceivable. And I’ve been investigating the murders in the same decent earnest English manner, first trying to play Poirot and then turning amateur sleuth, asking dopey questions and looking for motives and probing alibis as if that’s going to tell me anything.”
“And it’s not?”
“No, because this isn’t a cozy little English murder case at all. It’s tough and hardboiled, and it’s not going to be solved by pussyfooting around like Miss Jane Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey. This is Philip Marlowe’s kind of caper.”
“Philip Marlowe?” the colonel said. “Don’t believe I know the name.”
“He was Raymond Chandler’s detective,” I said, “and he knew about mean streets, and that’s what we’ve got here in this house once you peel the veneer away. We may be miles away from any streets, mean or otherwise, but it all amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know, Bern,” Carolyn said. “Look at the murder weapons—a camel and a pillow to start with, and sugar in a gas tank and a dagger with a wavy blade. In Philip Marlowe’s cases they mostly just shot each other, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but—”
“And he’d get hit over the head and fall down a flight of stairs. Nobody’s been shot, and nobody fell down a flight of stairs unless you count the library steps. The way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next person to die gets murdered with tropical fish, and you know what Chandler had to say about that.”
“That’s all peripheral,” I said. “When you get to what really happened, it’s straightforward and it’s brutal. And there’s not a single tropical fish in it.”
“Jonathan Rathburn,” I said. “He came here by himself, took up residence in Young George’s Room, and began behaving like a man with something on his mind. He scribbled away in a notebook and sat around writing letters that nobody ever saw. And he stared at people. Someone mentioned noticing him staring oddly at Leona Savage, but it wasn’t because they were long-lost lovers or twins separated at birth. Rathburn stared probingly at just about everybody, at one time or another.”
“I just assumed he was interested in people,” Cissie Eglantine said.
“There was another guest who was interested in people, too,” I said. “Gordon Wolpert. He was very different from Rathburn, tweedy and mousy where Rathburn was brooding and flamboyant. But he too came here alone, and he was a keen observer of his fellow guests, and he liked a bit of gossip, too.”
“That’s true,” Miss Hardesty recalled. “He had a lot of questions about everybody, and he’d make dry comments.”
“Pleasant enough fellow, though,” the colonel put in. “Seemed a decent chap.”
“But he was a picky eater,” I said. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Quilp?”
“He picked at his food,” Rufus Quilp agreed. “Pushed it around on his plate.”
I looked to Molly Cobbett for confirmation. “He