Tour de Force by Christianna Brand Page B

great deal,’ said Cockie severely.
    Leo Rodd had a bash. ‘It tells us that – let’s see. She came up from her bathe – no, go back earlier than that. She came in from lunch, she changed into her kimono, possibly with her undies still on, and presumably lay down like the rest of us. Then she put on her bathers, tossing her underclothes, then or before that, into the bathroom to be washed. When she came back from the bathe, she put her wet things on the rail and slipped on her kimono with nothing underneath it. She pulled out the little table from the window a bit and was sitting there when …’
    â€˜What for?’ said Cockie.
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜Why did she sit down at the little table?’
    â€˜Well, I don’t know – to write some letters or something.’
    â€˜But there were no writing things on the table,’ said Helen. ‘Or sewing things. Or manicure things.’
    â€˜M’m. I see,’ said Leo.
    â€˜Perhaps she was reading,’ suggested Louvaine, reasonably.
    â€˜One doesn’t sit at a table to read,’ said Miss Trapp, ‘and her books were on the dressing-table. And anyway, she’d come in to lie down.’ Miss Trapp herself had sent her in to lie down.
    â€˜Perhaps she had lain down. After all, she was in her room for two and a half hours before we found her. Then she got up and sat down at the table.’
    â€˜I say again – what for?’ said Cockie.
    â€˜Perhaps she sat down to talk to the murderer?’
    â€˜Leaving him standing up? There wasn’t anything else in the room to sit on.’
    â€˜That would suggest a servant,’ said Miss Trapp, eagerly; but nobody bothered about Miss Trapp and her servant problem any more.
    â€˜Then what was on the table?’ said Cockie.
    â€˜You’ve told us yourself that there was nothing on it,’ said Leo. But he remembered. ‘Ah! – but you said there was a patch that wasn’t spattered with blood – an oblong patch.’
    â€˜Like ferns in a book,’ said Louvaine. She shied away from that dawning, irritable frown. ‘No, no, I’m not talking nonsense: don’t you remember when one was a child, one used to put leaves and things down on a clean page and spatter ink with a comb? It was heavenly. And then you lifted up the leaf and all the rest of the page was speckled.’
    A slight altercation followed between those who had never heard of it in their lives, and those whose childhood rainy days had been made exquisite with ink and comb. Mr Cockrill continued to draw on his wispy cigarette. He considered it his duty, in the very curious, not to say dangerous, circumstances in which they found themselves, to tell them the facts. If they could not trouble to use the information, that was no affair of his.
    Miss Barker, however, was getting quite well trained. She nervously brought the subject back from the realms to which her simile had consigned it. ‘I only meant that the square patch was like the leaf. In other words, Inspector, there was something on the table when the table was spattered with blood; and it’s been taken away.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Cockrill.
    â€˜Something square: a book or a box.’
    â€˜Something oblong, actually; if a book, possibly an open book.’
    â€˜There were two books in the room?’
    â€˜Neither of them is bloodstained.’
    â€˜Now that I do call exciting,’ said Cecil. ‘A book or a box – and the murderer’s taken it away. Whatever can have been in it?’
    Inspector Cockrill had a very shrewd idea of what might have been in the book or the box and thought Mr Cecil too might be less than sincere in his wide-eyed wonder. But they moved on, away from that particular problem. ‘Well, anyway, Inspector, she was sitting there in her white kimono and the murderer came in through the balcony door …’
    â€˜Why the balcony