“I suppose so,” Agatha said. I found she was looking at me. “Would you care to see the rose garden, Lady Georgiana? The Finlays are famous for it. Dickie tends those roses like his babies, don’t you, Dickie?”

  “I must admit I get great pleasure from it,” he said. “Would you like me to show you around?”

  “I thought Lady Georgiana and I might take a little stroll together, if that’s all right with you,” Agatha Christie said.

  I caught Darcy’s eye. “You stay here,” my gaze said.

  “I think we’ll let the ladies have their chat,” he said.

  Agatha and I went out through the French doors, across a terrace, and through an archway of pale yellow roses to the garden beyond. It was indeed a heavenly place.

  “I noticed that you are also a keen observer, Lady Georgiana,” she said at last. “I wondered what your thoughts were on this now you’ve had time to consider it?”

  “I admit I’m in the dark,” I said. “If the killer had wanted to strike a particular person, then the handing around of tarts would be far too risky.”

  “So who would be your suspects?”

  “I’m still inclined to go for Sir Mordred’s children, I suppose. They do have a large inheritance coming to them. And there is no love lost in that family. And I had mentioned to you that Edwin sort of hinted to me that he’d thought his father killed his mother.”

  She nodded. “Yes, that does seem a good motive. And he had the means.”

  “He was sent to see if everything was ready for the dinner. He would have checked the serving room, wouldn’t he?”

  “He would indeed. But then wouldn’t he have made sure that the lethal berry went to his father?”

  “I know. That’s the problem. There was no way of making sure anyone got the right pudding.”

  “But again we know that two lots of elderberries would not have finished anyone off. Just given them a nasty stomachache. It was the deadly nightshade. But it would surely have needed more than one berry. Quite a few to kill someone, in my experience. And how would you make sure the right person got that? We’ve presumed it was Sir Mordred. But the question might be, who wanted to kill Mr. Halliday?”

  I toyed with this theory. “I’ve just spoken with Tubby Halliday’s widow and it seems he was well-liked—an ordinary country farmer. Except…”

  “Except?” She stared at me expectantly.

  “Except he did know Sir Mordred, years and years ago. He was the only one at the banquet with a personal connection, wasn’t he?”

  I saw Agatha’s face as a thought occurred to her. “Not the only one. Didn’t the orphanage woman already know him?”

  “They’d only corresponded,” I said. “She didn’t know him in person.”

  “The only two people with the most tenuous connections and yet they are dead.” She paused. “The problem is that Sir Mordred was also poisoned.” Those intelligent eyes held mine.

  “We still come back to how anybody could have made sure that the right tart went to the right person,” I said. “Surely there was no way…”

  Agatha Christie stopped suddenly, staring at a spectacular yellow rose. “How do we know that Mr. Halliday was fed a deadly nightshade berry or two? There wouldn’t have been much of it left in his digestive system by the time they did an autopsy.”

  “I suppose it was the atropine in his blood,” I said.

  She looked excited now. “Precisely. And that atropine need not have come from a plant. You can get it at the chemists. It is in eye drops as well as other things.”

  “So you are saying that the atropine need not have been in a tart at all?”

  She nodded, gripping my arm excitedly. “What was there on the table that would have been served to a particular person?”

  I thought back to the dinner. “The crab mousse was already put out when we arrived, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded again. “Crab mousse. A little hard to doctor. But what else?”

  I spun to face her. “The wineglasses,” I said excitedly. “The mead was already in them when we came to the table!”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. A few drops of atropine in the mead would not be noticed because the mead was so horribly sweet.”

  “Golly,” I said.

  “So there you are. That’s how it was done.” She clapped her hands in delight. “You want to kill a particular person, so you put the atropine in the mead. That could have been done well ahead of time, before the guests arrived. But then, as a red herring, you dot a few elderberries around randomly. Sir Mordred went in to inspect that all was in order before dinner, didn’t he?”

  “But my assistant cook was already in the serving room.”

  “And I’m sure she’d have been terrified of Sir Mordred. He’d only have had to say something like ‘careful those wineglasses aren’t too near the edge’ and she’d have her back turned while he planted a few elderberries into the tarts. He knows several people will become ill. One will die.”

  “In this case two will die,” I said. “Unless Miss Ormorod’s death was more a result of old age.”

  “Two will die,” she repeated. “And I find it interesting that those two were the only ones, apart from his family, with a definite connection to Sir Mordred.”

  “But Sir Mordred also became ill.”

  “Another red herring,” she said. “He gave himself an elderberry or two to make himself sick. Or he just claimed to have been taken ill. Who would have checked on him?”

  I stared at her for a moment, digesting this. “Are you saying that Sir Mordred was not the victim but the mastermind behind this?”

  “It seems the most likely answer to me,” she replied.

  I stared at her in complete admiration.

  “Golly,” I said again before I reminded myself that I had promised to stop using such girlish exclamations. I considered the implication of this. “So you think that Sir Mordred knew that Halliday and Miss Ormorod were coming to the banquet and decided to finish them off? But why? He hadn’t met Tubby Halliday since their school days. I don’t think he had ever met Miss Ormorod before.”

  “They must both have known something that could damage his reputation badly enough that he’d kill for it,” Agatha Christie said.

  “Tubby Halliday’s wife said they were thick as thieves at school, but Sir Mordred denied that, saying he couldn’t stand the man.”

  “Ah.” Agatha Christie gave me a knowing smile. “That itself is telling, isn’t it? What if they were good friends at school, I mean really close friends, as in an intimate relationship?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that sort of thing would worry Sir Mordred. It’s not uncommon in the world of the arts, is it? Look at Noël Coward. Everyone knows about him. Everyone adores him.”

  “That’s true,” she agreed. “Then it was something else. Something about him that Mr. Halliday knew that could ruin him. Something he did at school, maybe?”

  “Lots of people do silly things at school, don’t they?”

  We walked on, the scent of roses all around us. I was conscious of the stillness of the day, the humming of bees, and was struck by the contrast—the idyllic peace of an English countryside and yet two people had been killed in this same beautiful and peaceful setting.

  “Well, what about Miss Ormorod?” Agatha asked.

  “I don’t think he’d met her before. She represented some charity, and I gather she expected the proceeds of the event to go to her charity. But the woman she was staying with said that he planned to send the money directly to some orphanage in South Africa. Miss Ormorod was suspicious.”

  “She felt everything wasn’t quite aboveboard?”

  “I gather so. She said the man was a charlatan.”

  “And was keeping the money for himself, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But would that make you want to kill somebody? To hush them up?” Agatha shook her head. “I don’t think so. Look how many politicians are happy to pocket money they shouldn’t keep.”

  “And it doesn’t make sense. Sir Mordred is a rich man. He makes a lot of money from his books and he married a rich wife. He’s also rather stingy, I suspect.”

  “Stingy?”

  I nodded. “He keeps a minimum of servants. He used his son’s friends as servers. And the house—well, the house didn’t look quite up to snuff, did it? Not lovingly cared for.”

  “That’s what happens when a man lives alone, I suppose,” she said. She gave a little sigh. “Well, Georgiana”—she broke off, giving an embarrassed grin—“I may call you by your first name, mayn’t I, seeing that we are in this together?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you must call me Agatha. As I was saying, we seem to have given ourselves quite a challenge. We have come up with a man who had the means to carry out the deed, but we haven’t come up with a real motive. Neither of these people could have done him real harm, could they?”

  “Should we mention our theory to the police, do you think?”

  “I can’t see what good it could do at this stage,” she said. “Those glasses containing the mead would have been washed long ago. There would be no proof. But you notice how cleverly Sir Mordred excluded himself as a suspect. There were no berries on his deadly nightshade. A clever man, although he does write the most horrible books, and he cheats too—he has used supernatural means on several occasions to solve a crime.”

  I tried not to smile. Literary rivalry.

  Chapter 33

  July 28

  Back at Eynsleigh and then…

  I am excited that we might be getting somewhere. Was Agatha right? Was this all carefully planned? I remembered how Sir Mordred had suddenly come up with the idea of hiring my chef. Was that after he learned that Pierre not only spoke little English but was also an avowed communist? The perfect person to be the scapegoat. What we had to do was to find out why these two apparently harmless people represented a threat to a successful novelist.

  “So did you and Mrs. Mallowan have a good chin-wag?” Darcy asked as we drove home. “Did you solve the crime between you?” he asked in a joking manner.

  “Actually yes, I think so,” I said. “It’s just that we can’t come up with a good motive.”

  Then I related how we had worked it out. He looked rather impressed.

  “Good God,” he said. “It does all make sense. He mentioned he had a laboratory, didn’t he? He could easily have brewed a concoction of deadly nightshade when there were berries on it. And then put random elderberries onto the tarts to throw us off the scent. But the question is why?”

  “You know people in London,” I said. “You could ask around about Sir Mordred. See if he is likely to have any deep, dark secrets he wouldn’t want made public.”

  “I could do that,” he said. “And you, I think, should rest, not keep running around at this stage. You’ll need all your energy in a week or so.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “My back has been aching all day. But I’d dearly love to go to that inspector and tell him we’ve solved his case. He was so smug and condescending, wasn’t he?”

  “He was, a little,” Darcy agreed. “Let’s hope the solicitor has managed to extricate Pierre. I don’t think I’m ready to go back to Queenie’s cooking.”

  We arrived home to find a message that the solicitor had managed to gain Pierre’s release but that he was not to leave our house until the case was solved. We sent Phipps to retrieve him from the police station.

  “All this running around is not good for you, Georgiana,” Fig said as I entered the sitting room. “You need to put your feet up. Save your strength for all that pushing and straining you’re going to have to do. Now, I went up and checked on your nursery this morning and I’ve made a list of things you don’t have and are going to need. And I’ve also had some thoughts on a suitable nanny. I remember that my mother said that the youngest of the Fraser-Huntingdon sons had gone off to school. That might mean that their nanny is now available. And you know the Fraser-Huntingdons, don’t you? Such a proud military family. Generation after generation of generals. The boys all go to Gordonstoun. You know, that outdoor school where they have cross-country runs at six in the morning and cold showers?”

  I shuddered, imagining my darling baby being ducked into cold water to harden him up and spanked if he cried.

  “Thanks, Fig, but I’m not even sure I want a nanny,” I said. “I’ll have a nursemaid who is good with children and I want to look after the baby myself.”

  “Yourself?” That perpetually haughty look became even haughtier. “As in change nappies? Get up in the night to feed the little monster? You can’t mean that, Georgiana.”

  “Oh, I think so,” I said. “At least I want to give it a try.”

  “But what about when you want to travel? You’ll surely go over to Ireland to see Darcy’s father. And you always seem to be popping across to the Continent.”

  “Then we’ll take the baby with us.”

  She stared at me as if I’d said that I was going to be taking along a circus, complete with lions and fire-eaters. “Take it with you? Are you mad? Babies demand attention. It will spit up over your nice dress and cry at the wrong moment. No, Georgiana, absolutely no. Babies are a horrid inconvenience. One has to have them, to carry on the line, but the less you see of them, the better.”

  “I think I’ll go and take that nap you recommended,” I said and beat a hasty retreat. In truth I had been feeling rather washed out and my back was now most uncomfortable. I felt better after a rest, ate some cold ham and salad for lunch, then greeted Pierre warmly when he arrived home. He took my hands and thanked me profusely for believing in him and helping him. Off he went to the kitchen, promising to make us the best meal we had ever eaten.

  After lunch I took a deck chair into the garden and would have passed a relaxing afternoon if Fig had not drawn up a chair beside me and given me a lecture on child raising. In her case I could see the wisdom of a nanny. She had raised two delightful children who were nothing like their mother.

  “And the moment they are seven,” Fig was saying, “you pack them off to boarding school. Podge is coming up soon. I told Binky we should consider Hyland House for him.”

  “Because it’s close to home?” I asked. “That’s nice. You can go and visit him a lot.”

  “No. Because it’s a feeder school for Gordonstoun. Tough. Outdoorsy.”

  One thing she was not going to do was to subject my nephew to that sort of regime. I sat up. “Absolutely no, Fig. He is a sensitive little boy. It would be quite wrong for him.”

  “It’s precisely because he’s sensitive, Georgiana. He needs to toughen up. Be a man. It’s a hard world and he’ll be a duke someday.”

  “I don’t think dukes are any longer required to lead the charge into battle, Fig,” I replied. “He might want to be a poet or a farmer like Binky.”

  “Oh, Binky is absolutely useless. You know that. If it weren’t for the income from the tenants we’d starve.”

  At that moment the dogs came bounding up to us, ahead of Sir Hubert and the explorer, and I was mercifully saved.

  Darcy spent the afternoon making telephone calls to London. We ended the day with a fabulous dinner of shrimp soufflé, followed by what Queenie had called the cocky-van, and then a floating island of meringue and spun sugar, finished with a slab of ripe Stilton and peaches. I went to bed feeling quite content, Fig and Sir Mordred banished to the back of my mind for the moment, only to be awoken in the darkness by the strangest sensation. I must have groaned because Darcy woke up.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I feel terrible,” I said. “I have the most awful stomach cramps and I feel sick.” Then I realized what I had just said. “Do you think we have got it wrong? It was Pierre after all and now he’s trying to poison us?”

  Darcy sat up. “I’m calling the doctor right away.” He switched on the bedside lamp and reached for his dressing gown.

  “Maybe that’s a bit hasty,” I said. “I’m not feeling quite as bad at the moment. And the food was very rich.”

  “I’m not taking any chances,” Darcy said. “Remember we also drank tea at Mrs. Halliday’s. Until we know definitely who killed Mr. Halliday we can’t be too careful, especially with you in such a delicate condition.”

  He left me and I heard his slippers on the stairs then his voice floating up from the foyer. Then another wave of stomach cramps shook me and I was glad the doctor was coming. Darcy reappeared. “He wasn’t too pleased to be called out at four o’clock in the morning, but he’s on his way,” he said. “Is there anything I can get you?”

  I shook my head. He sat beside me and held my hand. “My God, if anything happens to you, Georgie…”

  The warmth of his hand in mine was comforting and I relaxed a little. Everything was going to be all right, I told myself. But then there was another round of intense cramping. Darcy went downstairs to watch for the doctor. I lay there, feeling miserable, until I heard a motorcar pull up, hushed voices below, and then feet on the stairs.

  “So, young lady, you think you’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with you?” he said. “Any vomiting? Diarrhea?”

  “Not yet. I do feel sick.”

  “Let’s take a look at you.” He pulled back the bedclothes, started to examine me, then glared at me. “You don’t have a stomach upset, my dear. You’re in labor.”

  “That can’t be right,” Darcy said. “The baby’s not due for another week at least.”

  “First babies can be unpredictable,” the doctor said, “and the timing is not always that accurate. Were your periods always regular?”

  “Not exactly,” I said.