Vintage Murder

by Ngaio Marsh

  “Yes,” said Alleyn. Suddenly he was aware of a kind of nostalgia, a feeling of intense sympathy and kinship with the stage. “A drab enough story to have aroused it,” he thought “A theme that has been thrashed to death in every back-stage plot from Pagliacci downwards. The show must go on!”

  “Of course,” Mason was saying, “Carolyn may feel differently. I’m not sure about it myself. The public might not like it. Besides suppose it’s—one of us. Everybody would be wondering which of the cast is a bloody murderer. That’s so, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose there would be a certain amount of conjecture.”

  “Not the sort of advertisement the Firm wants,” said Mason moodily. “Undignified.”

  To this magnificent illustration of a meiosis, Alleyn could only reply: “Quite so.”

  Mason muttered on, unhappily: “It’s damn’ difficult and expensive whichever way you look at it. And there’s the funeral. I suppose that will be tomorrow. And the inquest. The papers will be full of us. Publicity! Poor old Alf! He was always a genius on the publicity side. My God, it’s rum, isn’t it? Oh well—see you later. You’re going to give these fellows a hand, aren’t you? Funny, you being a detective. I hear Alf knew all about it. My God, Alleyn, I hope you get him.”

  “I hope we shall. Will you have a drink?”

  “Me? With my stomach it’d be dynamite. Thanks, all the same. See you later.”

  He wandered off, disconsolately.

  Alleyn remained in the hall. In a minute or two Hailey Hambledon came down in the lift and joined him.

  “Carolyn says she would like to go out. I’m to thank you and say she will be down in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll order the car at once. She won’t want to wait down here.”

  “With all these rubbernecks? Heavens, no!”

  Alleyn went into the telephone-box and rang up the garage. The car would be sent round at once. When he came out Hambledon was waiting for him.

  “It’s extraordinarily nice of you, Alleyn, to do this for her.”

  “It is a very great pleasure.”

  “She’s so much upset,” continued Hambledon. He lowered his voice and glanced at the reception clerk who was leaning out of his window and affecting an anxious concern in the activities of the hall porter. The porter was engaged in a close inspection of the carpet within a six-foot radius from Alleyn and Hambledon. He had the air of a person who is looking for a lost jewel of great worth.

  “Porter,” said Alleyn.

  “Sir?”

  “Here is half a crown. Will you be so good as to go out into the street and watch for a car which should arrive for me at any moment? You can continue your treasure hunt when I have gone.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the porter in some confusion, and retired through the revolving doors. Alleyn gazed placidly at the reception clerk who turned away with an abstracted air and picked his teeth.

  “Come over here,” suggested Alleyn to Hambledon. “The occupants of the lounge can gaze their fill but they can’t hear you. You were saying—?”

  “I am sure the shock has been much greater than she realises. As a matter of fact I can’t help feeling she would do better to spend the day in bed.”

  “Thinking?”

  “She’ll do that wherever she is. I’m very worried about her, Alleyn. She’s altogether too bright and brave—it’s not natural. Look here—you won’t talk to her about Alf, will you? Keep right off this tragedy if you can. She’s in no state to discuss it with anybody. Last night those damn’ fellows kept her at it for God knows how long. I know that you, as a Yard man, are anxious to learn what you can, and I hope with all my heart that you get the swine; but—don’t worry Carolyn again just yet. She gets quite hysterical at the mention of it. I know I can depend on you?”

  “Oh,” said Alleyn vaguely, “I’m very dependable. Here is Miss Dacres.”

  Carolyn stepped out of the lift.

  She wore a black dress that he had seen before and a black hat with a brim that came down over her face which, as usual, was beautifully made-up. But underneath the make-up he suspected she was very pale, and there was a darkness about her eyes. Carolyn looked a little older, and Alleyn felt a sudden stab of compassion. “That won’t do,” he thought, and started forward to greet her. He was aware that the old lady with the journalistic yashmak had boldly advanced to the plate-glass partition, and that three of the other occupants of the lounge were making hurriedly for the hall.

  “Good morning,” said Carolyn. “This is very nice of you.”

  “Come out to the car,” said Alleyn. “It is very nice of you.”

  He and Hambledon walked out on either side of her. The porter, who had been deep in conversation with the mechanic from the garage, flew to open the door of the car. A number of people seemed to be hanging about on the footpath.

  “Thank you,” said Alleyn to the mechanic. “I’m driving myself. Come back at about three, will you? Here you are, Miss Dacres.”

  “You’re in a great hurry, both of you,” said Carolyn, as Hambledon slammed the door. Then she saw the little knot of loiterers on the footpath. “I see,” she whispered.

  “Good-bye, my dear,” said Hambledon. “Have a lovely drive.”

  “Good-bye, Hailey.”

  The car shot forward.

  “I suppose the paper is full of it,” said Carolyn.

  “Not absolutely full. They don’t seem to go in for the nauseating front-page stuff in this country.”

  “Wait till the evening papers come out before you’re sure of that.”

  “Even they,” said Alleyn, “will probably show a comparative sense of decency. I thought we might drive up to where those mountains begin. They say it’s a good road and I got the people in the hotel to put some lunch in the car.”

  “You felt sure I would come?” asked Carolyn.

  “Oh, no,” said Alleyn lightly. “I only hoped you would. I’ve been a fair distance along this road already. It’s an uphill grade all the way, though you wouldn’t think it, and when we get to the hills it’s rather exciting.”

  “You needn’t bother to make conversation.”

  “Needn’t I? I rather fancy myself as a conversationalist. It’s part of my job.”

  “In that case,” said Carolyn loudly, “you had better go on. You see, dear Mr. Alleyn, I do realise this is just a rather expensive and delicate approach to an interrogation.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “And I must say I do think it’s quite charming of you to take so much trouble over the setting. Those mountains are grand, aren’t they? So very up-stage and magnificent.”

  “You should have seen them at 6 a.m.”

  “Now you are being a Ruth Draper. They couldn’t have been any lovelier than they are at this moment, even with these depressing little bungalows in the foreground.”

  “Yes, they were. They were so lovely I couldn’t look at them for more than a minute.”

  “‘Mine eyes dazzle’?”

  “Something like that. Why don’t you do some of those old things? The Maid’s Tragedy?”

  ‘Too hopelessly frank and straightforward for the Lord Chamberlain, and not safe enough for the box-office. I did think once of Millament, but Pooh said—” She stopped for a second. “Alfie thought it wouldn’t go.”

  “Pity,” said Alleyn.

  They drove on in silence for a few minutes. The tram-line ended and the town began to thin out into scattered groups of houses.

  “Here’s the last of the suburbs,” said Alleyn. “There are one or two small townships and then we are in the country.”

  “And at what stage,” asked Carolyn, “do we begin the real business of the day? Shall you break down my reserve with precipitous roads, and shake my composure with hairpin bends? And then draw up at the edge of a chasm and snap out a question, before I have time to recover my wits?”

  “But why should I do any of these things? I can’t believe that my few childish inqui
ries will prove at all embarrassing. Why should they?”

  “I thought all detectives made it their business to dig up one’s disreputable past and fling it in one’s face.”

  “Is your past so disreputable?”

  “There you go, you see.”

  Alleyn smiled, and again there was a long silence. Alleyn thought Hambledon had been right when he said that Carolyn was too brave to be true. There was a determined and painful brightness about her, her voice was pitched a tone too high, her conversation sounded brittle, and her silences were intensely uncomfortable. “I’ll have to wait,” thought Alleyn.

  “Actually,” said Carolyn suddenly, “my past is quite presentable. Not at all the sort of thing that most people imagine about the actress gay. It began in a parsonage, went on in a stock drama company, then repertory, then London. I went through the mill, you know. All sorts of queer little touring companies where one had to give a hand with the props, help on the stage, almost bring the curtain down on one’s own lines.”

  “Help on the stage? You don’t mean you had to lug that scenery about?”

  “Yes, I do. I could run up a box-set as well as most people. Flick the toggle-cords over the hooks, drop the back-cloth—everything. Oh, but how lovely that is! How lovely!”

  They had now left all the houses behind them. The road wound upwards through round green hills whose firm margins cut across each other like the curve of a simple design. As Carolyn spoke, they turned a corner, and from behind this sequence of rounded greens rose the mountain, cold and intractable against a brilliant sky. They travelled fast, and the road turned continually, so that the hills and the mountain seemed to march solemnly about in a rhythm too large to be comprehensible. Presently Alleyn and Carolyn came to a narrow bridge and a pleasant little hinterland through which hurried a stream in a wide and stony bed.

  “I thought we might stop here,” said Alleyn.

  “I should like to do that.”

  He drove along a rough track that led down to the river-bed, and stopped in the shadow of thick white flowering manuka shrubs, honey-scented.

  They got out of the car and instead of the stuffiness of leather and petrol they found a smooth freshness of air with a tang of snow in it. Carolyn, an incongruous figure in her smart dress, stood with her face raised.

  “It smells clean.”

  The flat stones were hot in the sun, and a heat-haze wavered above the river-bed. The air was alive with the voice of the stream. They walked over the stones, over springy lichen, and patches of dry grass, to the border of the creek where the grass was greener. Here there were scattered prickly shrubs and sprawling bushes, that farther upstream led into a patch of dark trees.

  “It must have been forested at one time,” said Alleyn. “There are burnt tree stumps all over these hills.”

  And from the trees came the voice of a solitary bird, a slow cadence, deeper than any they had ever heard, ringing, remote and cool, above the sound of water. Carolyn stopped to listen. Suddenly Alleyn realised that she was deeply moved and that her eyes had filled with tears.

  “I’ll go back for the luncheon basket,” he said, “if you’ll find a place for us to sit. Here’s the rug.”

  When he turned back he saw that she had gone farther up the river-bed and was sitting in shade, close to the stream. She sat very still and it was impossible to guess at her mood from her posture. As he walked towards her, he wondered of what she thought. He saw her hands move up and pull off the black London hat. In a moment she turned her head and waved to him. When he reached her side he saw that she had been crying.

  “Well,” said Alleyn, “how do you feel about lunch? They’ve given me a billy to make the authentic brew of tea—I thought you would insist on that, but if you’re not tourist-minded, there’s some sort of white wine. Anyway we’ll make a fire because it smells pleasant. Will you unpack the lunch while I attempt to do my great open spaces stuff with sticks and at least three boxes of matches?”

  She could not answer, and he knew that at last the sprightly, vague, delightfully artificial Carolyn had failed her, and that she was left alone with herself and with him.

  He turned away, but her voice recalled him.

  “You won’t believe it,” she was saying. “Nobody will believe it—but I was so fond of my Alfie-pooh.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Duologue

  ALLEYN DID NOT at once reply. He was thinking that by a sort of fluke he was about to reach a far deeper layer of Carolyn’s personality than was usually revealed. It was as though the top layers of whimsicality and charm and gaiety had become transparent and through them appeared—not perhaps the whole innermost Carolyn but at least a part of her. “And this because she is unhappy and I have jerked her away from her usual background and brought her to a place where the air is very clear and heady, and there is the sound of a mountain stream and the voice of a bird with a note like a little gong.”

  Aloud he said:

  “But I can believe it very easily. I thought you seemed fond of him.”

  He began to break up a branch of dry driftwood.

  “Not romantically in love with him,” continued Carolyn. “My poor fat Alfie! He was not a romantic husband, but he was so kind and understanding. He never minded whether I was amusing or dull. He thought it impossible that I could be dull. I didn’t have to bother about any of that.”

  Alleyn laid his twigs between two flat stones and tucked a screw of paper under them.

  “I know,” he said. “There are people to whom one need not show off. It’s a great comfort sometimes. I’ve got one of that kind.”

  “Your wife! But I didn’t know—”

  Alleyn sat back on his heels and laughed. “No, no. I’m talking about a certain Detective-Inspector Fox. He’s large and slow and innocently straight-forward. He works with me at the Yard. I never have to show off to old Fox, bless him. Now let’s see if it will light. You try, while I fill the billy.”

  He went down to the creek and, standing on a boulder, held the billy against the weight of the stream. The water was icy cold and swift-running, and the sound of it among the stones was so loud that it seemed to flow over his senses. Innumerable labials all sounding together with a deep under-tone that muttered among the boulders. It was pleasant to lift the brimming billy out of the creek and to turn again towards the bank where Carolyn had lit the fire. A thin spiral of smoke rose from it, pungent and aromatic.

  “It’s alight—it’s going!” cried Carolyn, “and doesn’t it smell good?”

  She turned her face up to him. Her eyes were still dimmed with tears, her hair was not quite smooth, her lips parted tremulously. She looked beautiful.

  “It would be so happy,” she said, “if there was nothing but this.”

  Alleyn set the can of water on the stones and built up the fire. They moved away from it and lit cigarettes,

  “I am glad you do not go into ecstasies over nature,” said Alleyn. “I was rather afraid you would.”

  “I expect I should have—yesterday. Dear Mr. Alleyn, will you ask me all your questions now? I would like you to get it over, if you don’t mind.”

  But Alleyn would not ask his questions until they had lunched, saying that he was ravenous. They had white wine with their lunch, and he brewed his billy-tea to take the place of coffee. It was smoky but unexpectedly good. He wondered which of them was dreading most the business that was to come. She helped him to pack up their basket and then suddenly she turned to him:

  “Now, please. The interview.”

  For perhaps the first time in his life, Alleyn found himself unwilling to carry his case a step further. He had set the stage deliberately, hoping to bring about precisely this attitude in Carolyn. Here she was, taken away from her protective background, vulnerable, and not unfriendly and yet—

  He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a little box. He opened it and laid it on the rug between them.

  “My first question is about that. Y
ou can touch it if you like. It has been ‘finger-printed.’”

  Inside the box lay the little green tiki.

  “Oh!—” It was an involuntary exclamation, he would have sworn. For a second she was simply surprised. Then she seemed to go very still. “Why, it’s my tiki—you’ve found it. I’m so glad.” The least fraction of a pause. “Where was it?”

  “Before I tell you where it was, I want to ask you if you remember what you did with it before we sat down at the table.”

  “But I have already told you. I don’t remember. I think I left it on the table.”

  “And if I should tell you that I know you slipped it inside your dress?”

  Another long pause. The fire crackled, and above the voice of the stream sounded the note of the solitary bird.

  “It is possible. I don’t remember.”

  “I found it on the floor of the gallery above the stage.”

  She was ready for that. Her look of astonishment was beautifully done. With her hands she made a gesture eloquent of bewilderment.

  “But I don’t understand. In the grid? How did it get there?”

  “I suggest that it dropped out of your dress.”

  How frightened she was! Cold nightmarish panic was drowning her before his eyes.

  “I don’t know—what—you—mean.”

  “Indeed you do. You can refuse to answer me if you think it wise.” He waited a second. “My next question is this: Did you go up into the grid before the catastrophe?”

  “Before!” The relief was too much for her. The single word, with its damn’ing emphasis, was spoken before she could command herself. When it was too late she said quietly: “No. I did not go up there.”

  “But afterwards? Ah, don’t try!” cried Alleyn. “Don’t try to patch it up. Don’t lie. It will only make matters worse for you and for him.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand! Tell me this. Was that morning in your dressing-room the only time Hambledon asked you if you would marry him, supposing your husband to be dead?”