“Well, sir, I’m just sort of trying to see.”
“That’s right,” said Alleyn quietly. “You know your brain is really rather like a camera. It takes a photograph of everything you see, only very often you never develop the photgraph. Try to develop the photograph your brain took of the hall.”
Nanny said: “The boy’s getting flushed.”
“I’m not,” said Mike, without opening his eyes. “ Honestly, Nanny. Well, in my photograph the light is sort of coming through the window in front of me. Into my eyes. So everything has got its shadow coining my way. There’s a thing of flowers on the round table and a bowler. I think it was Uncle G.’s bowler. And I saw Henry’s gloves. And a scarf and some race glasses and one of those hats people wear in hot places. Wait a bit, sir. There’s something else. It’s sort of on the edge of the picture. Not quite developed, like you said.”
“Yes?”
“I’ll get it in a jiffy, all right. It’s a shining kind of thing. Not ’zackly big but long and bright.”
Nanny uttered a brusque exclamation and made an anxious gesture with her hands as though she fended something away from herself and from Mike.
“Wait a bit,” Mike repeated impatiently. “Don’t tell me. Long and thin and bright.”
He opened his eyes and stared triumphantly at Alleyn. “I’ve got it,” he said. “It was on the edge of the table. One of those long pointed things they keep in the sideboard drawer. A skewer. That’s what it was, sir. A skewer.”