Wyatt smiled. ‘I’m afraid one of the family was beheaded for the murder,’ he said; ‘and the chronicles have it that the dagger betrayed him, but I fancy that there was a good deal of juggling in affairs of justice in those days.’
‘Yes, but where does the ritual come in?’ said Albert Campion, in his absurd falsetto drawl. ‘It sounds most intriguing. I knew a fellow once who, when he went to bed, made a point of taking off everything else first before he removed his topper. He called that a ritual.’
‘It sounds more like a conjuring trick,’ said Abbershaw.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ agreed the irrepressible Albert. ‘But I don’t suppose your family ritual was anything like that, was it, Petrie? Something more lurid, I expect.’
‘It was, a little, but nearly as absurd,’ said Wyatt, laughing. ‘Apparently it became a custom after that for the whole ceremony of the dagger to be repeated once a year – a sort of family rite as far as I can ascertain. That was only in the beginning, of course. In later years it degenerated into a sort of mixed hide-and-seek and relay race, played all over the house. I believe it was done at Christmas as late as my grandfather’s time. The procedure was very simple. All the lights in the house were put out, and the head of the family, a Petrie by name and blood, handed the dagger to the first person he met in the darkness. Acceptance was of course compulsory, and that person had to hunt out someone else to pass the dagger on to, and the game continued in that fashion – each person striving to get rid of the dagger as soon as it was handed to him – for twenty minutes. Then the head of the house rang the dinner gong in the hall, the servants relit the lights, and the person discovered with the dagger lost the game and paid a forfeit which varied, I believe, from kisses to silver coins all round.’
He stopped abruptly.
‘That’s all there is,’ he said, swinging the dagger in his fingers.
‘What a perfectly wonderful story!’
Anne Edgeware turned to the others as she spoke. ‘Isn’t it?’ she continued. ‘It just sort of fits in with this house!’
‘Let’s play it.’ It was the bright young man with the teeth again, and he beamed round fatuously at the company as he spoke. ‘For sixpences if you like,’ he ventured as an added inducement, as no one enthused immediately.