There was a long pause. The others exchanged puzzled glances, then settled their eyes on Desmond. He kept his gaze stolidly fixed on St. Just.
"Tell me something, Desmond," said St. Just. "Satisfy my curiosity, let's say. Have you ever set foot inside the priest's hole?"
"What? No. No, never. What priest's hole?" he asked, in a voice loud and hoarse. He might have been shouting against a sudden influx of noise.
St. Just smiled in satisfaction. It was all he could have hoped for.
"Then why did forensics find strands of short dark hair in there? You're the only one we've got who would have any earthly reason to hang about the priest's hole that night. The rest of them had rooms.
"We can easily test hair for DNA, too, you know," he added.
The room fell into a hushed silence, the muted ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece the only sound. But St. Just thought he could almost hear the two minds that most concerned him communing telepathically across the room.
"Let me tell you how this happened," said St. Just. "You, Desmond, killed your wife, Kimberlee. It had to be done before she got around to filing divorce papers. My conversations with both her agent and her publisher elicited a portrait of Kimberlee as a steely woman of business-the type of person who could annihilate you in a divorce action. So the question, of course, is why she would want a divorce. Did she find out you'd been unfaithful? Or did she just want out herself? I gather she did have rather a short attention span for relationships. Either way, you couldn't have her suing you for divorce, quietly or otherwise. You'd become accustomed to the lifestyle her money provided… far more money than you'd ever made in your lifetime."
He looked at the man, closely watching his eyes, eyes that glanced nervously about the room, as if deliberately avoiding… a certain person. "You didn't arrive after the murder. You've been here all along. You hid in the priest's hole, and you returned there after you killed Kimberlee.
"But you left the castle the next morning, after Kimberlee's body was found. You changed clothes somewhere at a safe distance from the castle, and then you returned much later in your business suit to talk with the police, wearing your distraught-husband face."
"But," said Portia. "There were people crawling all over the place by then, and police guarding the only entrance. There's no way he could just walk out."
"Ah, you've come to the heart of the matter, Portia. I'll get to that in a minute," St. Just replied. "No, there was no way, Desmond, you could walk in or out as you pleased. You'd need help from an accomplice. An accomplice here in the castle.
"Let's trace it back, shall we? The drawbridge went up just before dinner and stayed up until Donna released Rachel Twalley and some of the other guests. She closed it behind them. The drawbridge opens only from the inside, and it makes a tremendous racket. We'd all have heard someone letting you in. You had to have come in before dinner, when it stood open.
"But here's a curious, related thing. We checked all the hotel's files going back years, and only one name appeared. And it wasn't yours, Desmond. Now, no one could just wander in and start looking about for the priest's hole. A stranger asking the staff about it would be sure to be remembered. No. It took someone who had been here, someone who knew the layout, someone to make sure the entrance to the priest's hole hadn't been sealed or obstructed at some point.
"It also needed someone to help you escape the next day, someone to act as lookout, someone to give you the all-clear signal.
"And that someone was… your lover, Annabelle Pace."
At this, the silence was broken by a collective gasp of disbelief.
"I told you," said Magretta.
"You did no such thing," said St. Just.
"You're mad," Annabelle said stoutly. "I'll not stay to listen to this."
At a nod from Moor, Sergeant Kittle lightly stepped over to block the door.
"I think you will. So, we have Desmond hiding in the priest's hole, and maybe taking a little nap there after the murder. Murdering one's wife is so fatiguing, is it not, Desmond? But… why not just plan to kill her and leave? Why? Because the drawbridge would be heard. You might also be seen fleeing across the grounds.
"At first I thought the original plan was that you would wait, hiding, until everyone was asleep and then slip out, risking the noise. Maybe stay in a hotel in Edinburgh that night under an assumed name. But now I don't think so. I think the plan all along was to sabotage the drawbridge-literally, throw a spanner in the works-so the castle would be sealed all night, providing you an airtight alibi, so to speak. There would be no way a 'stranger' could enter unheard. The storm and power outage allowed you to skip that little sabotage step. That part, I am sure, was to have been Annabelle's role. She was free to walk about, after all; you were not.
"You-you only had to sit tight in your hidey hole until the time was ripe. You were Annabelle's alibi. She didn't make a move that night without being seen by someone. She couldn't have done the killing, and she did not. By the way, where's your mobile, Desmond?"
"I left it at home by mistake, I was that upset," he said. His face was flushed. A thin, bright sheen of perspiration had appeared on his forehead.
"No," said St. Just. "Not a mistake. Your own alibi was that mobile message you supposedly sent to Kimberlee's phone from London.
"Only you didn't really send that message, did you? At least, not directly. You knew the police could tell from where the call was made. So you left your mobile at home in London. The simple thing would have been to bribe an accomplice to send the message from London for you, but that was a risk in itself. I think you-clever, technical genius you-programmed the mobile for a delayed send of a friendly message you'd written to Kimberlee. And then you headed for Scotland. Her mobile shows the message was sent at ten the night she died. Almost the exact minute you were killing her-the time you had planned in advance to kill her.
"You invent software for investors, Desmond-you told me writing these programs is how you made your packet. You must have taken this as a small challenge, to adapt the delayed-order-placement feature you'd invented to a mobile phone message. We'll be taking a close look at that mobile, you can be certain."
A smile began to play about the edges of Desmond's mouth. St. Just added, "We'll be taking a closer look, even if you designed a program to remove almost all traces of itself, and then cause the device to restart, eliminating the last little bit. But certain controls would have to be defeated first, and that in and of itself would leave a trace."
The smile disappeared.
"But back to Annabelle's role in this. She was here in the first instance to show you the hiding place."
"You'll have to do much better than this," said Annabelle.
"I shall. You had another role, which was to get Kimberlee to the bottle dungeon. You were seen in the hallway outside the ladies' room, talking with her. You passed her a message, didn't you, purportedly from Jay Fforde, that there had been a change of plans and she was to meet him earlier than planned, and in a different place than planned. I doubt Kimberlee would question this, your being enlisted as go-between. That was part of her nature, wasn't it? The love of intrigue. Remember, her first book was a romance novel. Her second was all about the mating rituals of the sexes. It was the perfect ploy to get her where you wanted her."
Annabelle looked at him contemptuously.
"And this passes for evidence these days, does it? So I was here at the castle, over two years ago, during the Edinburgh festival, as you can easily find out by going through the castle records. So what?"
He had to hand it to her; she wasn't just going to give it up. She, he suspected, had masterminded the whole scheme. Desmond didn't have the starch. St. Just paused, a knight looking for the chink in the armor. There was always one.
"Yes, I think the credit for this elaborate charade must go to Annabelle," he said aloud.
"Do tell."
"What was it?" he went on relentlessly. "A plot for a new book, one that you decided to apply to real life? Or did you from the beginning address your demonic creativity to the little problem of how to get rid of Kimberlee Kalder? Either way, it worked-or nearly did."
"Nonsense."
"It is most assuredly not nonsense. You, as you say, were here during the Edinburgh festival. And you are the only one in this room who has ever been a guest here."
"I repeat: You call this evidence? What about the staff?"
"Ah, yes, speaking of the staff: The bartender, having been shown a certain photo, remembers you well as the lady who showed such a keen interest in the priest's hole. Combined with a few other inconsistencies, yes, I think we can put a seal on this nicely."
"Inconsistencies… such as?"
"Such as this."
He reached into the box behind him and pulled out several books. He held out one, its back cover facing his audience. He turned slowly, so they could all get a good look.
"Your author photo." He held up another book, then another, all with different photos of Annabelle through the years, but all of them glamour shots of a woman unrecognizable as the frumpy, haggard-looking Annabelle that sat before them. The woman in the photo was coiffed and buffed and highlighted to within an inch of her life, and even allowing for the photographer's art and skillfully applied makeup, her beauty could not be denied. Her blonde hair fell in graceful waves to her shoulders; in one particularly ravishing photo she wore a low-cut dress of red satin. At her neck and throat were diamonds. She was a stunner.
"This is why you got rid of all the copies of your book you could lay your hands on at the conference booksellers, isn't it? Your disguise was to play the frump, the woman of no sex appeal whatsoever. Especially once you saw me browsing the bookstore at the conference that day, you realized you had to buy up all the copies of your book and destroy them or throw them away. They couldn't be found in your room by the police, could they? Because your deadly game with Desmond was already, if you will forgive the expression, afoot. You could not have the police noticing your disguise.
"What did you do with the books?" he demanded.
"What books?" she snapped. "This is madness, I tell you."
"The first day of the conference I saw you carrying a bag that had to have had a dozen books in it. The bookseller will have a record of that purchase, of course. But we only found three books in your room, all by other authors. What did you do with your own books? Will we also find them in the moat-or did you just find a handy trash bin somewhere?"
"I really don't know what you're talking about."
"You're the only author-the only one-who isn't traveling with at least a few copies of her own books. Dozens, in some cases. Why is that, I asked myself? Humility? A lack of vanity? Not ruddy likely. That's an unheard-of modesty for an author. But there are practical reasons as well: All of you keep your own books about you in case the bookseller runs out of copies, in case a fan asks to see the cover-whatever authorial reasons. Then I remembered: All of the authors had a big, smiling photo-in some cases, a scowling photo-of themselves on the backs of their books.
"It was the photo you didn't want us to see, wasn't it?"
"Disguise." She fairly spat at him, fixing him with arrow-slit eyes, a brief flare of temper beneath the ice. "Don't be absurd. I've just not been well."
"That is makeup on your face," he replied, "but you've painted yourself almost gray. You've painted yourself old, haven't you? No woman wears makeup so that she can look worse -unless she's playing a part, like an actress in a play. I would've said you wore no makeup at all, but there were in fact the usual little pots and bottles in your room. And baby powder-possibly used to dull your hair. That's an old actor's trick. Something you learned as a photographer's assistant, perhaps? There were also tissues in your bathroom waste bin with lotion and traces of makeup on them. I thought nothing of it-all the women's waste bins were like that." The women exchanged looks at realizing how thoroughly their privacy had been invaded. "With the exception of Mrs. Elksworthy," he went on, "who really does wear no makeup."
"Allergic," Joan barked, traces of her usual staunch self returning. "I could have told you that. No need to snoop around my room."
"And the clothes-all wrong, all cheap and ill-fitting, nothing you would normally wear, nothing like what we see in these photos. Yet all the clothes looked brand new, bought especially for the occasion-the occasion being this farce you were about to play. Also, you have pierced ears, but I've yet to see you wear a single piece of jewelry. I was reminded of this when someone said something about Mrs. Elksworthy's jewelry, but I couldn't put my finger on the memory then."
"I did tell you Annabelle looked changed somehow-" began Mrs. Elksworthy.
"Yes, I missed the significance. You didn't even recognize her at first. I started looking closer and asked myself again what woman would work that hard at looking fat, bloated, and ill-especially a woman speaking before a conference audience. Especially a woman who had been involved with B. A. King-a man who would never waste a minute on a woman like the Annabelle we see before us. I could not for the life of me see how someone like B. A. King-a man of all flash and no substance-would ever have taken up with someone like Annabelle, and vice versa. It was a complete mismatch. He would go for youth or sparkle, every time. Another inconsistency."
She gazed at him from hooded, predatory, eyes. He was reminded of the falcons in the aviary.
"This is all pretty insulting, and yet I fail to see how my personal dress and makeup choices have anything to do with this. I've been unwell, I tell you. Maybe I've gained a few pounds. The stress of deadlines can do that. So what?"
"Do you know what I think? For one thing, I think a woman must be very sure of her man to allow him to see her looking like that. Not to mention, letting your fans wonder what train ran over you. There had to be a reason for the sudden lack of author vanity. And the reason was this: You couldn't be seen as an object of desire-a girlfriend, a mistress. There was too much money riding on it. Kimberlee's money. No. It was best the police believe you'd never had color in your cheeks, that your hair was always drab and stringy, that you dressed like a bag lady.
"That is why you didn't join the other ladies in the spa, even though it would have been a natural indulgence, a way to pass the time. You didn't want to be spit-polished. Your disguise was the frumpy hair and clothing.
"I also started to notice, Annabelle, that you had quite a good brain, and could generally be counted on for the sharp observation. But your sharpness, your apparent savvy, your confident way of speaking-that didn't match your appearance, either.
"Now, which one of you two killed poor Florie, is what I want to know?" He had a sense just then of energy flowing between the pair-but mainly of energy flowing from Annabelle to Desmond, bolstering him up. "She had to have been killed because of something she saw, something she knew. Then I remembered those four men standing around, 'repairing' the drawbridge. Florie saw them, too, and made a comment about how typical that was. Three men supervising while one worked, something to that effect."
He turned to Donna.
"How many men on your repair staff were called out that night?"
"There are only three, as I told you when you asked just now. We called them all."
" Not four?" St. Just eyes glanced across the assembled group, collecting their attention.
"No. I saw them myself when they first arrived."
"So somewhere along the way, they added a fourth man. That man was you, Desmond. Florie must have seen you later in the castle and recognized you as one of the 'repairmen.' But you were supposed to be the victim's husband, the one who'd rushed up, weeping all the way, from London. So what were you doing there, dressed in baggy jeans, pretending to be a workman? No one else thought anything of it-the workmen you chatted with took you for one of the friendly guests. You just walked out of the castle-anyone watching would have thought you were going to get something from the lorry. And you kept walking. Later that day, you came back, this time playing the widower."
"I congratulate you, Annabelle. It was a good plan, and it nearly worked."
Still, she stared at him insolently. Time to go for the weakest link, he thought. He turned to Sergeant Kittle, and nodded.
The policeman turned and opened the library door. A dog-a black and cream German Shepherd-came tumbling in, attached to his handler by a leash. Kittle's friends Robert and Rob Roy had arrived.
"Everyone remain seated," commanded St. Just.
The dog made an exploratory circle around the room, sniffing as he went.
He came to Desmond, and lay down. Desmond recoiled, as if the dog were going to take a bite of him.
"You're all witnesses to that. He's following the scent he found in the priest's hole."
The dog stood at Robert's command and resumed his circle around the room.
The next place Rob Roy lay down was at Annabelle's feet.