Off with His Head

by Ngaio Marsh

  There was a long silence. The fire crackled; in a distant part of the pub somebody turned up the volume of a wireless set and turned it down again.

  ‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘there’s the story, and very neatly reported if I may say so, Carey. Let’s have a look at the place.’

  II

  The courtyard at Mardian Castle looked dismal in the thaw. The swept-up snow, running away into dirty water, was much trampled, the courtyard itself was greasy and the Mardian Dolmen a lump of wet rock standing on two other lumps. Stone and mud glistened alike in sunlight that merely lent a kind of pallor to the day and an additional emphasis to the north wind. The latter whistled through the slits in the old walls with all the venom of the arrows they had originally been designed to accommodate. Eight burnt-out torches on stakes stood in a semi-circle roughly following that of the wall but set some twelve feet inside it. In the middle of this scene stood a police sergeant with his mackintosh collar turned up and his shoulders hunched. He was presented by Carey—‘Sergeant Obby.’

  Taking in the scene, Alleyn turned from the semi-circle of old wall to the hideous façade of the Victorian house. He found himself being stared at by a squarish, wooden old lady behind a ground-floor window. A second lady, sandy and middle-aged, stood behind her.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘The Dame,’ said Carey. ‘And Miss Mardian.’

  ‘I suppose I ought to make a polite noise.’

  ‘She’s not,’ Carey muttered, ‘in a wonderful good mood today.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘And Miss Mardian’s—well—er—well, she’s not right smart, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘Like Ernie?’

  ‘No, sir. Not exactly. It may be,’ Carey ventured, ‘on account of in-breeding which is what’s been going on hot and strong in the Mardian family for a great time. Not that there’s anything like that about the Dame, mind. She’s ninety-four and a proper masterpiece.’

  ‘I’d better try my luck. Here goes.’

  He walked past the window, separated from the basilisk glare by two feet of air and a panel of glass. As he mounted the steps between dead braziers half full of wet ash, the door was opened by Dulcie.

  Alleyn said: ‘Miss Mardian? I wonder if I may have two words with Dame Alice Mardian?’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ Dulcie said. ‘I don’t honestly know if you can. I expect I ought to remember who you are, oughtn’t I, but with so many new people in the county these days it’s a bit muddly. Ordinarily I’m sure Aunt Akky would love to see you. She adores visitors. But this morning she’s awfully upset and says she won’t talk to anybody but policemen.’

  ‘I am a policeman.’

  ‘Really? How very peculiar. You are sure,’ Dulcie added, ‘that you are not just pretending to be one in order to find out about the Mardian Morris and all that?’

  ‘Quite sure. Here’s my card.’

  ‘Goodness! Well, I’ll ask Aunt Akky.’

  As she forgot to shut the door Alleyn heard the conversation. ‘It’s a man who says he’s a policeman, Aunt Akky, and here’s his card. He’s a gent.’

  ‘I won’t stomach these filthy ’breviations.’

  ‘Sorry, Aunt Akky.’

  ‘’Any case you’re talkin’ rot. Show him in.’

  So Alleyn was admitted and found her staring at his card.

  ‘Morning to yer,’ said Dame Alice. ‘Sit down.’

  He did so.

  ‘This is a pretty kettle-of-fish,’ she said. ‘Ain’t it?’

  ‘Awful.’

  ‘What are you, may I ask? ’Tective?’

  It wouldn’t have surprised him much if she’d asked if he were a Bow Street Runner.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A plain-clothes detective from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Superintendent?’ she read, squinting at the card.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Ha! Are you goin’ to be quick about this? Catch the feller?’

  ‘I expect we shall.’

  ‘What’d yer want to see me for?’

  ‘To apologize for making a nuisance of myself, to say I hope you’ll put up with us and to ask you, at the most, six questions.’

  She looked at him steadily over the top of her glasses.

  ‘Blaze away,’ she said at last.

  ‘You sat on the steps there, last night, during the performance?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘What step exactly?’

  ‘Top. Why?’

  ‘The top. So you had a pretty good view. Dame Alice, could William Andersen, after the mock-killing, have left the courtyard without being seen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not under cover of the last dance of the Five Sons?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not if he crawled out?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘As he lay there could he have been struck without your noticing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could his body have been brought in and put behind the stone without the manœuvre attracting your attention?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looked at Dulcie, who hovered uncertainly near the door. ‘You were with Dame Alice, Miss Mardian. Do you agree with what she says?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Dulcie said a little vaguely, and added—‘rather!’ with a misplaced show of enthusiasm.

  ‘Was anyone else with you?’

  ‘Sam,’ Dulcie said in a hurry.

  ‘Fat lot of good that is, Dulcie. She means the Rector, Sam Stayne, who’s my great-nephew-in-law. Bit of a milksop.’

  ‘Right. Thank you so much. We’ll bother you as little as possible. It was kind of you to see me.’

  Alleyn got up and made her a little bow. She held out her hand. ‘Hope you find,’ she said as he took it.

  Dulcie, astonished, showed him out.

  There were three chairs in the hall that looked as if they didn’t belong there. They had rugs safety-pinned over them. Alleyn asked Dulcie if these were the chairs they had sat on and, learning that they were, got her startled permission to take one of them out again.

  He put it on the top step, sat in it and surveyed the courtyard. He was conscious that Dame Alice, at the drawing-room window, surveyed him.

  From here, he could see over the top of the dolmen to within about two feet of its base and between its standing legs. An upturned box stood on the horizontal stone and three others, which he could just see, on the ground beyond and behind it. The distance from the dolmen to the rear archway in the old semi-circular wall—the archway that had served as an entrance and exit for the performers—was perhaps twenty-five feet. The other openings into the courtyard were provided at the extremities of the old wall by two further archways that joined it to the house. Each of these was about twenty feet distant from the dolmen.

  There was, on the air, a tang of dead fire and through the central archway at the back Alleyn could see a patch of seared earth, damp now, but bearing the scar of heat.

  Fox, who with Carey, Thompson, Bailey and the policeman, was looking at the dolmen, glanced up at his chief.

  ‘You have to come early,’ he remarked, ‘to get the good seats.’

  Alleyn grinned, replaced his chair in the hall and picked up a crumpled piece of damp paper. It was one of last night’s programmes. He read it through with interest, put it in his pocket and went down into the courtyard.

  ‘It rained in the night, didn’t it, Carey?’

  ‘Mortal hard. Started soon after the fatality. I covered up the stone and place where he lay, but that was the best we could do.’

  ‘And with a team of Morris men, if that’s what you call them, galumphing like baby elephants over the terrain there wouldn’t be much hope anyway. Let’s have a look, shall we, Obby?’

  The sergeant removed the inverted box from the top of the dolmen. Alleyn examined the surface of the stone.

  ‘Visi
ble prints where Ernie stood on it,’ he said. ‘Rubber soles. It had a thin coat of rime, I should think, at the time. Hallo! What’s this, Carey?’

  He pointed a long finger at a small darkness in the grain of the stone. ‘Notice it? What is it?’

  Before Carey could answer there was a vigorous tapping on the drawing-room window. Alleyn turned in time to see it being opened by Dulcie evidently under orders from her great-aunt, who, from within, leant forward in her chair, shouted: ‘If you want to know what that is, it’s blood,’ and leant back again.

  ‘How do you know?’ Alleyn shouted in return. He had decided that his only hope with Dame Alice was to meet her on her own ground. ‘What blood?’

  ‘Goose’s. One of mine. Head cut off yesterday afternoon and left on the stone.’

  ‘Good lord!’

  ‘You may well say so. Guess who did it.’

  ‘Ernie?’ Alleyn asked involuntarily.

  ‘How d’yer know?’

  ‘I guessed. Dame Alice, where’s the body?’

  ‘In the pot.’

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Shut the window, Dulcie.’

  Before Dulcie had succeeded in doing so, they heard Dame Alice say: ‘Ask that man to dinner. He’s got brains.’

  ‘You’ve made a hit, Mr Alleyn,’ said Fox.

  Carey said: ‘My oath!’

  ‘Did you know about this decapitated bird?’

  ‘First I heard of it. It’ll be one of that gang up on the hill there.’

  ‘Near the bulls?’ Fox asked sombrely.

  ‘That’s right. You want to watch them geese, Mr Fox,’ the sergeant said, ‘they so savage as lions and tricksy as snakes. I’ve been minded myself, off and on this morning, to slaughter one and all.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘if it was Ernie. Get a shot of the whole dolmen, will you, Thompson, and some details of the top surface.’

  Sergeant Thompson moved in with his camera and Alleyn walked round to the far side of the dolmen.

  ‘What,’ he asked, ‘are these black stains all over the place? Tar?’

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ Obby said, ‘off of old “Crack’s” skirts.’

  Carey explained. ‘Good lord!’ Alleyn said mildly and turned to the area behind the dolmen.

  The upturned boxes that they had used to cover the ground here were bigger. Alleyn and Fox lifted them carefully and stood away from the exposed area. It was a shallow depression into which had collected a certain amount of the fine gravel that had originally been spread over the courtyard. The depression lay at right angles to the dolmen. It was six feet long and shelved up to the level of the surrounding area. At the farthest end of the dolmen there was a dark viscous patch, about four inches in diameter, overlying a little drift of gravel. A further patch, larger, lay about a foot from it, nearer the dolmen and still in the hollow.

  ‘You know, Carey,’ Alleyn said under his breath and out of the sergeant’s hearing, ‘he should never have been moved: never.’

  Carey, scarlet-faced, said loudly: ‘I know’s well as the next man, sir, the remains didn’t ought to have been shifted. But shifted they were before us chaps could raise a finger to stop it. Parson comes in and says, “it’s not decent as it is,” and, with ’is own hands, Mr Ralph assisting, takes off mask and lays out the pieces tidy-like while Obby, here, and I were still ordering back the crowd.’

  ‘You were here too, Sergeant?’

  ‘Oh, ya-as, Mr Alleyn. All through.’

  ‘And seeing, in a manner of speaking, the damage was done and rain setting in, we put the remains into his own car, which is an old station wagon. Simmy-Dick and Mr Stayne gave us a hand. We took them back to the forge. They’re in his lean-to coach-house, Mr Alleyn, locked up proper with a police seal on the door and the only other constable in five mile on duty beside it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘All right. Now, tell me, Carey, you did actually see how it was before the parson tidied things up, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did, then, and not likely to forget it.’

  ‘Good. How was it?’

  Carey drew the back of his hand across his mouth and looked hard at the shallow depression. ‘I reckon,’ he said, ‘those two patches show pretty clear. One’s blood from head and t’other’s blood from trunk.’

  Fox was squatting above them with a rule in his hands. ‘Twentythree inches apart,’ he said.

  ‘How was the body lying?’ Alleyn asked. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Kind of cramped up and on its left side, sir. Huddled. Knees to chin.’

  ‘And the head?’

  ‘That was what was so ghasshley,’ Carey burst out. ‘T’other way round.’

  ‘Do you mean the crown of the head and not the neck was towards the trunk?’

  ‘Just so, Mr Alleyn. Still tied up in that there bag thing with the face on it.’

  ‘I reckoned,’ Sergeant Obby ventured, ‘that it must of been kind of disarranged in the course of the proceedings.’

  ‘By the dancers?’

  ‘I reckoned so, sir. Must have been.’

  ‘In the final dance, after the mock beheading, did the Five Sons go behind the stone?’

  There was silence. The superintendent and the sergeant eyed each other.

  ‘I don’t believe they did, you know, Sarge,’ Carey said.

  ‘Put it that way, no more don’t I, then.’

  ‘But the other two. The man-woman and the Hobby Horse?’

  ‘They were every which-way,’ Carey said.

  Alleyn muttered: ‘If they’d come round here they could hardly fail to see what was lying there. What colour were his clothes?’

  ‘Whitish, mostly. And they reckon they did see them.’

  ‘There you are,’ Fox said.

  ‘Well, Thompson, get on with it. Cover the area again. When he’s finished we’ll take specimens of the stains, Fox. In the meantime, what’s outside the wall there?’

  Carey took him through the rear archway. ‘They waited out here before the performance started,’ he said.

  It was a bleak enough spot, now: an open field that ran up to a ragged spinney and the crest of the hill. On the higher slopes the snow still lay pretty thick but down near the wall it had melted and, to one side of the archway, there was the great scar left by the bonfire. It ran out from the circular trace of the fire itself in a blackened streak about fourteen feet long.

  ‘And here?’ Alleyn said, pointing his stick at a partially burnt out drum, lying on its side in the fire-scar. ‘We have the tar barrel?’

  ‘That’s so, Mr Aleyn. For “Crack”.’

  ‘Looks as if it caught fire.’

  ‘Reckon it might have got overturned when all the skylarking was going on between Mr Ralph and Ernie. They ran through here. There was a mighty great blaze sprung up about them. The fire might have spread to it.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the idea be to keep the fire as an extra attraction, though?’

  ‘Maybe they lit it early for warmth? One of them may have got excited-like and poured tar on it.’

  ‘Ernie, for instance,’ Alleyn said patiently, and Carey replied that it was very likely.

  ‘And this?’ Alleyn went on. ‘Look at this, Carey.’

  Round the burnt-out scar left by the bonfire lay a fringe of green brushwood that had escaped complete destruction. A little inside it, discoloured and deadened by the heat, its wooden handle a mere blackened stump, was a steel blade about eighteen inches long.

  ‘That’s a slasher,’ Alleyn said.

  III

  ‘That’s Copse Forge,’ Carey said. ‘Stood there a matter of four hundred year and the smith’s been an Andersen for as long as can be reckoned.’

  ‘Not so profitable,’ Fox suggested, ‘nowadays, would it be?’

  ‘Nothing like. Although he gets all the shoeing for the Mardian and adjacent hunts and any other smith’s job for miles around. Chris has got a mech
anic’s ticket and does a bit with cars. A big oil company’s offered to back them if they convert to a service station. I believe Simmy-Dick Begg’s very anxious to run it. The boys like the idea but the Guiser wouldn’t have it at any price. There’s a main road to be put through too.’

  ‘Do they all work here?’ Alleyn asked. ‘Surely not?’

  ‘No, no. Dan, the eldest, and the twins, Andy and Nat, are on their own. Farming. Chris and Ernie work at the forge. Hallo, that’s Dr Otterly’s car. I axed him to be here and the five boys beside. Mr Ralph and Simmy-Dick Begg are coming up to the pub at two. If that suits, of course.’

  Alleyn said it did. As they drew up, Dr Otterly got out of his car and waited for them. His tweed hat was pulled down over his nose and his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his covert-coat.

  He didn’t wait to be introduced but came up and looked in at the window of their car.

  ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Glad you’ve managed to get here. Morning, Carey. Expect you are, too.’

  ‘We’re damn’ pleased to see you,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘It’s not every day you get police officers and a medical man to give what almost amounts to eye-witness’s evidence of a capital crime.’

  ‘There’s great virtue in that “almost”, however,’ Dr Otterly said, and added: ‘I suppose you want to have a look at him.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Want me to come?’

  ‘I think so. Don’t you, Carey?’

  They went through the smithy. There was no fire that morning and no heat in the place. It smelt of cold iron and stale horse-sweat. Carey led the way out by a back door into a yard. Here stood a small ramshackle cottage, and, alongside it, the lean-to coach-house.

  ‘He lived in the cottage, did he?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Chris and Ern keep there. The old chap slept in a little room off the smithy. They all ate in the cottage, however.’

  ‘They’re in there now,’ Dr Otterly said, ‘waiting.’

  ‘Good,’ Alleyn said. ‘They won’t have to wait much longer. Will you open up, Carey?’