Why hadn’t I stopped him? How could I let the man kill himself like this? Oh, in a sense he’d been doing so for years, digging his grave with his knife and fork, but…

“Ha!” He straightened up in his seat, gave a little yelp of laughter, and looked positively delighted by the expressions on our faces. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my, oh my. Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn’t resist. You will forgive me my little joke, won’t you?” He plunged the fork into the bowl of stew. “It’s wonderfully flavorful, I assure you,” he said, “and it couldn’t possibly harm anyone. May I urge you all to fill bowls for yourselves and join me?”

“We can’t be sure it’s safe,” Miss Hardesty said. “There are slow-acting poisons, aren’t there?”

“If Cook was poisoned,” said Quilp, “the poison seems to have worked at the speed of light. But I’m sure you’re right. The stew contains a slow-acting poison, and I’m doomed. In fifty years’ time I’ll be stone dead.” He rolled his eyes. “With that timetable, young Millicent might want to hold off. The rest of you can afford to take your chances.”

Mrs. Colibri said she thought she’d wait, not fifty years but, oh, fifteen minutes or so, just to be on the safe side. Several others murmured their agreement. Quilp told us to suit ourselves, but by then he’d very likely have had a second helping, and perhaps even a third. “And if Molly or Earlene could bring me a plate of that salad,” he said, “and some of the seven-grain bread, I think there must be some left. And some butter, of course. And beer, I think, would provide a better accompaniment than wine. Is there some of that nice brown ale, Nigel?”

CHAPTER Eighteen

“Jonathan Rathburn,” Nigel Eglantine said, and put the tips of his long fingers together. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about him at all. He rang up early in the week to ask if he could come up for a short stay. You both arrived yesterday, didn’t you? Mr. Rathburn preceded you by a day. It was Wednesday when he turned up, early in the afternoon.”

“How did he get here?”

“I don’t know that he said. If he drove, his car would be parked on the other side of the bridge. But we can’t get there to look for it, and we wouldn’t know it if we saw it, would we?”

“We wouldn’t even see it,” I said, “under all that snow.”

It was snowing again, though not as heavily as before. Carolyn and I were in the Great Library, along with Nigel and Colonel Blount-Buller. That room was pretty much as we’d left it, down to the copy of The Big Sleep still perched on the topmost shelf. There was, however, one significant change. Jonathan Rathburn was no longer crumpled at the foot of the library steps. The steps remained, and his blood still discolored the carpet, but Rathburn was gone.

He hadn’t risen from the dead, nor had he been mysteriously spirited away. The decision to move the body had been a collective one, taken up with not much argument in the aftermath of a satisfying if initially unnerving lunch of lamb stew and salad and seven-grain bread, all washed down with Newcastle brown ale or California zinfandel or Deer Park spring water, as one preferred. Someone, I’m not sure who, made the point that we now had two rooms off-limits and out of bounds because there were bodies in them. While it was no more than a nuisance to be unable to go into the library, we would be hard-pressed to make do without the kitchen.

Furthermore, it was noted, our initial decision to give up the library to the late Mr. Rathburn had been founded on the belief that the police would be appearing shortly. With the phone disabled and the bridge down, and with more snow falling, there was no way to guess when the police would actually show up. In the meantime, neither corpse was improving with age.

“Rathburn’s gone off,” the colonel reported, “and the cook can’t be far behind. It’s unfortunate about young Orris, but there’s no denying he’s a good deal more conveniently placed than the other two.”

Now, halfway through the afternoon, Rathburn and Cook were conveniently situated as well-outside, though not at the bottom of the gully. They reposed side by side in lawn chairs immediately to the rear of Cuttleford House, each covered with a bedsheet that was being covered in its turn by a fresh fall of snow.

We’d taken crime-scene photographs before we moved the bodies, making use of a Polaroid camera the Savages had brought. Greg had snapped half a dozen shots of each of them from a variety of angles. He had more film in his room, he assured us, but thought he ought to save some. For the next victim, I suppose.

Someone proposed outlining the bodies before moving them, either with chalk or strips of tape, but both were in short supply. Nor could anyone quite say what point there was in outlining the corpses. We’d all seen them do it on TV and figured you were supposed to.

Once the library was clear, we opened a window to air it out, then assembled there and divided into groups of three. It was the colonel’s suggestion that he make up a trio with Carolyn and me, and that the three of us initiate an investigation, interviewing each of the others in turn and holding our interviews in the library, at the very scene of the first murder. “I do have a lifetime of military experience,” he said, “and sat on my share of courts-martial over the years. And Rhodenbarr here has had investigative experience.”

What sort, someone wondered. Millicent, bless her heart, piped up again that I was a burglar. “Maybe the police investigated him,” she said. “And he assisted them in their inquiries.”

“Cut the crap,” Carolyn told her. “If you want to know what Bernie is, he’s what you could call an amateur sleuth. With a house like this, I’m surprised you haven’t got an amateur sleuth on staff year-round.” Someone wanted to know just what an amateur sleuth was, and what they did. “Sometimes they’re busybodies,” Carolyn explained. “But other times they’re ordinary people like Bernie, just minding their own business, and getting mixed up in murder investigations through no fault of their own. That’s what keeps happening to Bernie. He can’t go away for a quiet weekend in the country without stumbling over dead bodies.”

“And then he solves the crime?”

“I’ve had some good luck in the past,” I admitted.

“Is it a hobby?” someone wanted to know. I felt like saying that staying out of jail was a hobby, and solving other people’s crimes had occasionally served as a means toward that end. But I just lowered my head and tried to look modest.

And now our investigation was under way. We’d begun with Nigel, and had learned that he didn’t know much about Rathburn, except that Nigel had thought he’d said over the phone that he was calling from New York, but that he’d written “ Boston, Mass. ” in the guest register. “Of course he could have called from New York even if he lived in Boston,” Nigel added.

“Or he could have lied over the phone,” Carolyn said, “and remembered it wrong when it was time to sign in. For all we know he’s from Ames, Iowa.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a guest from Iowa,” Nigel said. “That’s not the same as Omaha, is it?”

The colonel asked him where he’d been at the time of the first murder, and Nigel said he didn’t know when the murder took place, but he rather thought he must have been asleep at the time. “In our own private quarters,” he said, “which isn’t one of the named rooms, I’m afraid. Cissy and I have a suite on the other side of the kitchen.”

“On the ground floor?”

“Yes.”

“And do you know when you retired for the night?”

He frowned. “It’s difficult to be precise,” he said. “Last night you’ll recall we had a sort of informal trial of the Glen Drumnadrochit.” I said I remembered it well. “I remember it well enough,” he said, “but I find that when I drink a good deal over a period of several hours, the tail end of the evening tends to be the slightest bit difficult to recall. The details blur, as it were.”