Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer

Author:Rupert Latimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

XII

Family Party After Christmas

I

This proved altogether too much for Major Smythe. Spare Culley indeed! We were none of us so important that we were indispensable. Needed a little reorganisation, but that was all. Run along, man, for heaven’s sake, before they changed their minds.

Culley accordingly, after only a few faint and formal demurs, ran.

“You see,” Rhoda was presently explaining in Frank’s study, “we both can’t help feeling that my stepfather was deliberately murdered, and we do want to be put out of our agony. Not that gossip can affect us, but there’s my son’s fiancée—her mother, I should say—and my husband’s aunt—Miss Redpath—for her sake—she’s made so many friends here—not that she can’t look after herself, but…” Rhoda tailed off rather helplessly.

“But you know what people are,” Frank finished for her tidily and went on: “Uncle Willie was far too fond of life to take an overdose of cough-mixture. And far too careful. If he had been as absent-minded as that, he would have killed himself a long time ago.”

“But he wasn’t getting any younger,” observed Culley. “The verdict seemed to me quite a reasonable one on the evidence at the inquest.”

“To anyone who didn’t know my stepfather, yes,” admitted Rhoda. “But he’d have been far more likely to throw himself out of the attic window from cantankerousness than poison himself by accident. You don’t believe that, of course; but it’s quite true.”

“If I had wanted to murder him, for instance,” illustrated Frank, “I would simply have told him he would die if he lay out all night on the lawn buried in snow; and he would.”

Culley greeted this remark with due respect; then he asked: “So you want me to try and prove he was murdered, is that it?”

But, if he hoped to create a sensation by asking this, he was disappointed.

“No, no,” Rhoda corrected him patiently.

“We want you to find out the truth,” stated Frank simply. “If it was an accident we’d be most grateful to you if you could prove it. On the other hand, so many people could have poisoned him in so many different ways; and if, later on, one of them turns out to have a strong motive, it would be a relief to know who did—”

“If he was,” put in Rhoda.

“—so that it couldn’t be them, I mean,” finished Frank.

“Ah!” said Culley when he had taken this in. “So that’s what you think! Have you anyone in particular in mind?” After stemming their protests he tried again: “You don’t know anyone, then, in whose associations with the dead man a motive may later transpire?”

Rhoda answered this with: “Practically everyone who came to our party claimed some kind of associations with my stepfather—most of them very remote and a few quite possibly fictitious. Some of them may have had motives for murdering him, but only, I am sure, in the sort of way one does.”

“With so many detective stories written, murdering people has become a kind of intellectual sport nowadays,” said Frank.

“That’s the worst of this case,” Culley sighed.

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