Final Curtain by Ngaio Marsh

said Troy. ‘I don’t think she has, honestly. I mean, not in the way you think. There’s a muddle, I’m certain of it.’
    Paul relinquished his hold. Panty sat on the floor, sobbing harshly, a most desolate child.
    â€˜It’s all right,’ said Troy, ‘I’ll explain. You didn’t do it, Panty, and you shall paint if you still want to.’
    â€˜She’s not allowed to come out of school,’ said Paul. ‘Caroline Able will be here in a minute.’
    â€˜Thank God for that,’ said Cedric.
    Miss Able arrived almost immediately, cast a professionally breezy glance at her charge and said it was dinner-time. Panty, with a look at Troy which she was unable to interpret, got to her feet.
    â€˜Look here…’ said Troy.
    â€˜Yes?’ said Miss Able cheerfully.
    â€˜About this looking-glass business. I don’t think that Panty…’
    â€˜Next time she feels like that we’ll think of something much more sensible to do, won’t we, Patricia?’
    â€˜Yes, but I don’t think she did it.’
    â€˜We’re getting very good at just facing up to these funny old things we do when we’re silly, aren’t we, Patricia? It’s best just to find out why and then forget about them.’
    â€˜But…’
    â€˜Dinner!’ cried Miss Able brightly and firmly. She removed the child without any great ado.
    â€˜Dearest Mrs Alleyn,’ said Cedric, waving his hands. ‘Why are you so sure Panty is not the author of the insult on the Old Person’s mirror?’
    â€˜Has she ever called him “Grandfather”?’
    â€˜Well, no,’ said Paul. ‘No, actually she hasn’t.’
    â€˜And what’s more…’ Troy stopped short. Cedric had moved to her painting table. He had taken up a piece of rag and was using it to clean a finger-nail. Only then did Troy realize that the first finger of the right hand he had waved at her had been stained dark crimson under the nail.
    He caught her eye and dropped the rag.
    â€˜Such a Paul Pry!’ he said. ‘Dipping my fingers in your paint.’
    But there had been no dark crimson laid out on her palette.
    â€˜Well,’ said Cedric shrilly, ‘shall we lunch?’

    By the light of her flash-lamp Troy was examining the stair rail in her tower. The paint had not been cleaned away and was now in the condition known as tacky. She could see clearly the mark left by her own hand. Above this, the paint was untouched. It had not been squeezed out and left, but brushed over the surface. At one point only, on the stone wall above the rail, someone had left the faint red print of two fingers. ‘How Rory would laugh at me,’ she thought, peering at them. They were small, but not small enough, she thought, to have been made by a child. Could one of the maids have touched the rail and then the wall? But beyond the mark left by her own grip there were no other prints on the rail. ‘Rory,’ she thought, ‘would take photographs, but how could one ever get anything from these things? They’re all broken up by the rough surface. I couldn’t even make a drawing of them.’ She was about to move away when the light from her torch fell on an object that seemed to be wedged in the gap between a step and the stone wall. Looking more closely she discovered it to be one of her own brushes. She worked it out, and found that the bristles were thick with half-dry Rose Madder.
    She went down to the half-landing. There was the door that she had fancied she heard closing last night when she went to bed. It was not quite shut now and she gave it a tentative shove. It swung inwards, and Troy was confronted with a Victorian bathroom.
    â€˜Well,’ she thought crossly, remembering her long tramp that morning in search of a bath, ‘Fenella might have told me I’d got one of my own.’
    She had dirtied her fingers on the brush and