“And that man wasn’t Brian Hannan?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never met Mr. Hannan. I suppose it could have been, but it didn’t look like the man I saw in the photographs. He seemed to be taller and slimmer. I thought at the time that it was Mr. Terrence Hannan.”
“It most certainly was not me,” Terrence said angrily. “I can tell you exactly where I was all that evening. I was playing with my small nephews, which I’m sure they will be only too happy to confirm, and then I went to my room to change for dinner. We met for sherry in the music room and waited for Uncle Brian to arrive so we could go in to dinner. We all became rather annoyed and hungry when he did not show up. Finally we decided to go in to eat. After dinner I sat smoking with the other men. Archie tried to get us interested in playing whist, but we were all rather tired from the journey. I read the paper for a while then went to bed.”
He cast me a glance letting me know that he was hurt by my accusation.
“Do we actually know what time frame we are looking at?” Father Patrick asked quietly. “Can a doctor tell the approximate time of death?”
“Only approximate,” Chief Prescott said. “It’s still an inexact science.”
“So we couldn’t, for example, be looking at some time late at night or early the next morning?”
Chief Prescott shook his head. “Definitely before midnight the doctor says, most likely before nine o’clock. Of course with the body lying half in water, it makes such estimations more difficult.”
There was the crunch of feet on gravel as one of the constables came toward us. “I’ve found it, sir,” he said. “I believe I’ve found the prussic acid you were looking for.”
“Good man,” Prescott said. “Where was it?”
“In the shed next to the stables,” the constable said. “A little packet of it in a jar on a high shelf.”
“You didn’t touch it, did you? We’ll want to test for fingerprints.”
“I had to lift it down, sir, but I used my handkerchief, knowing what you’d told us.”
“Can anybody throw light on why there would be prussic acid in the shed?” Prescott asked.
Nobody answered. Prescott shrugged. “Let’s go and see, shall we?”
He set off across the forecourt. Some of us got up to follow him. The servants hovered behind, not sure what they were supposed to do. The constable flung the shed door open, like a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat and Prescott went inside.
“I put it back in its original position for you to see, sir. Up there. That jar on the top shelf. That’s the one,” the constable said proudly.
“I see. Clearly visible, isn’t it?” He poked around, looking from side to side like a dog looking to pick up a scent. A workbench ran around the walls and under it were shelves and cupboards. There were also shelves above containing plant pots, jars of seeds, tools, and hung on hooks against the wall was fishing tackle. I remembered that young Sam claimed to have gone fishing that morning, when he spotted the body. Had that been a clever way of explaining possible fingerprints in the shed? I turned to look at the boy, who was standing at the back of the group, close to his grandmother. He couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen—raised in the Lower East Side and then taken to work by his great uncle as a messenger boy. Surely such a youth would not possess the knowledge or sophistication to think about alibis and fingerprints. If he were going to kill his great uncle, he’d have bashed him over the head, or pushed him off the cliff. And yet … He was the one who led us to the body, something murderers are known to do.
Chief Prescott worked his way around the shelves and cupboards, opening each one cautiously, using his handkerchief. When he reached the far recesses of the shed we heard him say, “So that’s where it was.”
He came back out to us. “I’ve just found where Mr. Hannan kept his stash of alcohol. There’s a bottle of whiskey and one of gin, plus a bottle of tonic water. And there’s a space where I suspect the tray and decanter had stood.”
“Ah, so that’s where he kept it,” Joseph said. “We thought as much. That means presumably that the gardeners were in on his secret. He probably paid them to keep quiet.”
“We’ll have to ask them when they arrive,” Prescott said.
“So it’s possible that one of the glasses had the poison put in it right here in this shed,” Archie Van Horn said slowly, as if still thinking this through.
“Probably not, sir. Doing that would risk that Mr. Hannan would take a drink and die too far from the cliff. No, I surmise that the poison was administered at the last possible moment.” He closed the shed door behind him. “I want this place sealed off,” Prescott said. “And I want one of you to get Sergeant Rawlins out here. He knows about fingerprint testing. Is there a telephone on the premises?”