Gregor sighed. “John, this house has what? Forty rooms? Fifty? Every one I’ve been in has had a fireplace, including the bedrooms and the kitchen. Every one of them has a poker stand full of pokers. There have to be hundreds of pokers in this place. I wouldn’t know how to begin to find out if one of them were missing. And if whoever did this was smart enough to wash what he used immediately—”
“Washing won’t do it,” Jackman said sharply. “There are tests. It’s almost impossible to get blood off a surface entirely.”
“Fine, John. Which surface? Do you want to test a couple of hundred pokers for bloodstains?”
“If I have to.”
“Then do it,” Gregor said. “In the long run, you may even have to. But think about this situation, John. Just think about it. Doesn’t anything seem odd to you?”
Jackman had been backing away from the body ever since he’d made the remark about the poker. Now he backed all the way out of the room, taking Gregor with him. The uniforms and lab men were crowding the hall. Jackman nodded to the tall man in the too-large overcoat, and they surged inside, ready to do all the technical things they were paid to do.
Jackman looked over the hall, pausing briefly on the runner carpet, the paintings, the ceiling. Gregor didn’t blame him. This was a back hall, a secondary part of the house, and it would have cost three or four times Jackman’s salary to buy the things that furnished it. Then there were the Christmas decorations. Jack-man seemed especially taken with those. Red velvet ribbons and little silver bells. In this house, at this time, they had the effect of a casket dressed up as a birthday cake.
There was a bench under one of the paintings on the far wall. Jackman sat down on it and stretched his legs.
“Gregor,” he said, “everything about this situation is weird. I was talking it over with my wife last night, and she put her finger on it exactly. It’s like something out of a Hercule Poirot novel. Do you read Hercule Poirot novels?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I probably ought to. The Inquirer called me an ‘Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.’”
“You’re too fat,” Jackman said, “and you don’t have face hair. Seriously. A murderer who wants me to know he’s committed a murder. Suicide notes that appear and disappear and reappear. And now this—”
“A candlestick smeared with blood to make it look like it was used to batter a face?”
“Right,” Jackman said. “Count on it, that candlestick is going to belong to somebody. The note in Bobby’s wastebasket. The candlestick—”
“Do you remember, the day Emma Hannaford died, we had a discussion about candlesticks?” Gregor said. “In the upstairs hall?”
“Where a pair of them was missing,” Jackman said. “Yeah. I suppose you’re trying to tell me that’s one of them.”
“Well, it’s antique Georgian. It’s old and it’s heavy. The pair upstairs are the only candlesticks I know of that are missing. And there’s this, too. If you search Christopher Hannaford’s room, you’ll probably find the other one.”
Jackman stared at him. “Christopher Hannaford? What would Christopher Hannaford be doing with twelve-thousand-dollar candlesticks?”
There was another bench, next to the writing room door, opposite the one Jackman was sitting on. Gregor’s feet hurt and his legs were heavy. He sat down and put his hands on his knees.
“This is just conjecture,” he said, “but I think I’m right, and you can check on it. I think that sometime on the day Emma Hannaford was killed, or before, Christopher took that pair of candlesticks and tried to pawn them.”
“I thought you said nobody in his right mind would pawn them. Christopher Hannaford may be a long-haired weirdo, but he isn’t that kind of nuts.”
“I said no one who knew anything about silver would try to pawn them,” Gregor said. “That includes most of the servants. The butler would have instructed anyone who worked here in what was valuable and what was not, to make sure they didn’t damage anything important. It includes most of the family, too. Cordelia Day would have taught her daughters about those things. Upper-class mothers do. Bobby would have known because Bobby makes it a point to know about things. That leaves Teddy and Chris.”
“Why not pick on Teddy?” Jackman grinned. “I’d like to pick on Teddy. Man makes my teeth grind.”
“Teddy was in the house all day the day Emma Hannaford died, for one thing,” Gregor said, “or around the house, anyway. I know, I know. The candlesticks might have been stolen earlier. But look at the two of them. Teddy Hannaford seems to be scrambling a little, and he’s definitely worried about something. Christopher Hannaford is in desperate need of money.”