False Scent

by Ngaio Marsh

  Alleyn said: ‘Before going any further, Mr Marchant, I think I should make it quite clear that any questions I may put to you will be raised with the sole object of clearing innocent persons of suspicion and of helping towards the solution of an undoubted case of homicide. Mary Bellamy has been murdered; I believe by someone who is now in this house. You will understand that matters of personal consideration or professional reticence can’t be allowed to obstruct an investigation of this sort. Any attempt to withhold information may have disastrous results. On the other hand, information that turns out to be irrelevant, as yours, of course, may, will be entirely wiped out. Is that understood?’

  Gantry said: ‘In my opinion, Monty, we should take legal advice.’

  Marchant looked thoughtfully at him.

  ‘You are at liberty to do so,’ Alleyn said. ‘You are also at liberty to refuse to answer any or all questions until the arrival of your solicitor. Suppose you hear the questions and then decide.’

  Marchant examined his hands, lifted his gaze to Alleyn’s face and said: ‘What are they?’

  There was a restless movement among the others.

  ‘First. What exactly was Mrs Templeton’s, or perhaps in this connection I should say Miss Bellamy’s, position in the firm of Marchant & Company?’

  Marchant raised his eyebrows. ‘A leading and distinguished artist who played exclusively for our management.’

  ‘Any business connection other than that?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said at once. ‘She had a controlling interest.’

  ‘Monty!’ Bertie cried out.

  ‘Dear boy, an examination of our shareholders list would give it.’

  ‘Has she held this position for some time?’

  ‘Since 1956. Before that it was vested in her husband, but he transferred his holdings to her in that year.’

  ‘I had no idea he had financial interests in the theatre world.’

  ‘These were his only ones, I believe. After the war we were in considerable difficulties. Like many other managements we were threatened with a complete collapse. You may say that he saved us.’

  ‘In taking this action was he influenced by his wife’s connection with The Management?’

  ‘She brought the thing to his notice, but fundamentally I should say he believed in the prospect of our recovery and expansion. In the event he proved to be fully justified.’

  Why did he transfer his share to her, do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I can conjecture. His health is precarious. He’s – he was – a devoted husband. He may have been thinking of death duties.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  Marchant said: ‘It’s so warm in here,’ and unbuttoned his overcoat. Fox helped him out of it. He sat down, very elegantly and crossed his legs. The others watched him anxiously.

  The door opened and Dr Harkness came in. He nodded at Alleyn and said: ‘Better, but he’s had as much as he can take.’

  ‘Anyone with him?’

  ‘The old nurse. He’ll settle down now. No more visits, mind.’

  ‘Right.’

  Dr Harkness sat heavily on the sofa and Alleyn turned again to Marchant.

  ‘Holding, as you say, a controlling interest,’ he said, ‘she must have been a power to reckon with, as far as other employees of The Management were concerned.’

  The lids drooped a little over Marchant’s very pale eyes. ‘I really don’t think I follow you,’ he said.

  ‘She was, everyone agrees, a temperamental woman. For instance, this afternoon, we are told, she cut up very rough indeed. In the conservatory.’

  The heightened tension of his audience could scarcely have been more apparent, if they’d all begun to twang like bowstrings, but none of them spoke.

  ‘She would throw a temperament,’ Marchant said coolly, ‘if she felt the occasion for it.’

  ‘And she felt the occasion in this instance?’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Suppose, for the sake of argument, she had pressed for the severance of some long-standing connection with your management? Would she have carried her point?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow that either.’

  ‘I’ll put it brutally. If she’d demanded that you sign no more contracts with, say, Mr Gantry or Mr Saracen or Miss Cavendish, would you have had to toe the line?’

  ‘I would have talked softly and expected her to calm down.’

  ‘But if she’d stuck to it?’ Alleyn waited for a moment and then took his risk. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘She did issue an ultimatum this afternoon.’

  Saracen scrambled to his feet. ‘There!’ he shouted. ‘What did I tell you! Somebody’s blown the beastly gaff and now we’re to suffer for it. I said we should talk first, ourselves, and be frank and forthcoming and see how right I was!’

  Gantry said: ‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, Bertie.’

  ‘What do we get for holding our tongues?’ He pointed to Warrender. ‘We get an outsider giving the whole thing away with both hands. I bet you, Timmy. I bet you anything you like.’

  ‘Utter balderdash!’ Warrender exclaimed. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, Saracen.’

  ‘Oh, pooh! You’ve told the Inspector or Commander or Great Panjandrum or whatever he is. You’ve told him.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Gantry said, ‘you’ve told him yourself. You fool, Bertie.’

  Pinky Cavendish, in what seemed to be an agony of exasperation, cried out: ‘Oh, why, for God’s sake, can’t we all admit we’re no good at this sort of hedging! I can! Freely and without prejudice to the rest of you, if that’s what you’re all afraid of. And what’s more, I’m going to. Look here, Mr Alleyn, this is what happened to me in the conservatory. Mary accused me of conspiring against her and told Monty it was either her or me as far as The Management was concerned. Just that. And if it really came to the point I can assure you it’d be her and not me. You know, Monty, and we all know, that with her name and star-ranking, Mary was worth a damn’ sight more than me at the box office and in the firm. All right! This very morning you’d handed me my first real opportunity with The Management. She was well able, if she felt like it, to cook my goose. But I’m no more capable of murdering her than I am of taking her place with her own particular public. And when you hear an actress admit that kind of thing,’ Pinky added, turning to Alleyn, ‘you can bet your bottom dollar she’s talking turkey.’

  Alleyn said: ‘Produce this sort of integrity on the stage, Miss Cavendish, and nobody will be able to cook your goose for you.’ He looked round at Pinky’s deeply perturbed audience. ‘Has anybody got anything to add to this?’ he asked.

  After a pause, Richard said: ‘Only that I’d like to endorse what Pinky said and to add that, as you and everybody else know, I was just as deeply involved as she. More so.’

  ‘Dicky, darling!’ Pinky said warmly. ‘No! Where you are now! Offer a comedy on the open market and watch the managements bay like ravenous wolves.’

  ‘Without Mary!’ Marchant asked of nobody in particular.

  ‘It’s quite true,’ Richard said, ‘that I wrote specifically for Mary.’

  ‘Not always. And no reason,’ Gantry intervened, ‘why you shouldn’t write now for somebody else.’ Once again he bestowed his most disarming smile on Anelida.

  ‘Why not indeed!’ Pinky cried warmly and laid her hand on Anelida’s.

  ‘Ah!’ Richard said, putting his arm about her. ‘That’s another story. Isn’t it, darling?’

  Wave after wave of unconsidered gratitude flowed through Anelida. ‘These are my people,’ she thought. ‘I’m in with them for the rest of my life.’

  ‘The fact remains, however,’ Gantry was saying to Alleyn, ‘that Bertie, Pinky and Richard all stood to lose by Mary’s death. A point you might care to remember.’

  ‘Oh, lawks! ‘Bertie ejaculated. ‘Aren’t we all suddenly generous and noble-minded! Everybody loves everybody! Safety in numbers, or so they say. Or do
they?’

  ‘In this instance,’ Alleyn said, ‘they well might.’ He turned to Marchant. ‘Would you agree that, with the exception of her husband, yourself and Colonel Warrender, Miss Bellamy issued some kind of ultimatum against each member of the group in the conservatory?’

  ‘Would I?’ Marchant said easily. ‘Well, yes. I think I would.’

  ‘To the effect that it was either they or she and you could take your choice?’

  ‘More or less,’ he murmured, looking at his fingernails.

  Gantry rose to his enormous height and stood over Marchant.

  ‘It would be becoming in you, Monty,’ he said dangerously, ‘if you acknowledged that as far as I enter into the picture the question of occupational anxiety does not arise. I choose my managements: they do not choose me.’

  Marchant glanced at him. ‘Nobody questions your prestige, I imagine, Timmy. I certainly don’t.’

  ‘Or mine, I hope,’ said Bertie, rallying. ‘The offers I’ve turned down for The Management! Well, I mean to say! Face it, Monty, dear, if Mary had bullied you into breaking off with Dicky and Timmy and Pinky and me, you’d have been in a very pretty pickle yourself.’

  ‘I am not,’ Marchant said, ‘a propitious subject for bullying.’

  ‘No,’ Bertie agreed. ‘Evidently.’ And there followed a deadly little pause. ‘I’d be obliged to everybody,’ he added rather breathlessly, ‘if they wouldn’t set about reading horrors of any sort into what was an utterly unmeaningful little observation.’

  ‘In common,’ Warrender remarked, ‘with the rest of your conversation.’

  ‘Oh, but what a catty big colonel we’ve got!’ Bertie said.

  Marchant opened his cigarette case. ‘It seems,’ he observed, ‘incumbent on me to point out that, unlike the rest of you, I am ignorant of the circumstances. After Mary’s death, I left this house at the request of’ – he put a cigarette between his lips and turned his head slightly to look at Fox –’yes – at the request of this gentleman, who merely informed me that there had been a fatal accident. Throughout the entire time that Mary was absent until Florence made her announcement, I was in full view of about forty guests and those of you who had not left the drawing-room. I imagine I do not qualify for the star role.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘Or am I wrong?’ he asked Alleyn.

  ‘As it turns out, Monty,’ Gantry intervened, ‘you’re dead wrong. It appears that the whole thing was laid on before Mary went to her room.’

  Marchant waited for a moment, and then said: ‘You astonish me.’

  ‘Fancy!’ Bertie exclaimed and added in an exasperated voice: ‘I do wish, oh, how I do wish, dearest Monty, that you would stop being a parody of your smooth little self and get down to tin-tacks (why tin-tacks, one wonders?) and admit that, like all the rest of us, you qualify for the homicide stakes.’

  ‘And what,’ Alleyn asked, ‘have you got to say to that, Mr Marchant?’

  An uneven flush mounted over Marchant’s cheekbones. ‘Simply,’ he said, ‘that I think everybody has, most understandably, become overwrought by this tragedy and that, as a consequence, a great deal of nonsense is being bandied about on all hands. And, as an afterthought, that I agree with Timon Gantry. I prefer to take no further part in this discussion until I have consulted my solicitor.’

  ‘By all means,’ Alleyn said. ‘Will you ring him up? The telephone is over there in the corner.’

  Marchant leant a little farther back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid that’s quite out of the question,’ he said. ‘He lives in Buckinghamshire. I can’t possibly call him up at this time of night.’

  ‘In that case you will give me your own address, if you please, and I shan’t detain you any longer.’

  ‘My address is in the telephone book and I can assure you that you are not detaining me now nor are you likely to do so in the future.’ He half-closed his eyes. ‘I resent,’ he said, ‘the tone of this interview, but I prefer to keep observation – if that is the accepted police jargon – upon its sequel. I’ll leave when it suits me to do so.’

  ‘You can’t,’ Colonel Warrender suddenly announced in a parade-ground voice, ‘take that tone with the police, sir.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ Marchant murmured. ‘I promise you, my dear Colonel, I can take whatever tone I bloody well choose with whoever I bloody well like.’

  Into the dead silence that followed this announcement, there intruded a distant but reminiscent commotion. A door slammed and somebody came running up the hall.

  ‘My God, what now!’ Bertie Saracen cried out. With the exception of Marchant and Dr Harkness they were all on their feet when Florence, grotesque in tin curling pins, burst into the room.

  In an appalling parody of her fatal entrance she stood there, mouthing at them.

  Alleyn strode over to her and took her by the wrist. ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Speak up.’

  And Florence, as if in moments of catastrophe she was in command of only one phrase, gabbled: ‘The doctor! Quick! For Christ’s sake! Is the doctor in the house!’

  CHAPTER 8

  Pattern Completed

  Charles Templeton lay face down, as if he had fallen forward with his head towards the foot of the bed that had been made up for him in the study. One arm hung to the floor, the other was outstretched beyond the end of the bed. The back of his neck was empurpled under its margin of thin white hair. His pyjama jacket was dragged up, revealing an expanse of torso; old, white and flaccid. When Alleyn raised him and held him in a sitting position, his head lolled sideways, his mouth and eyes opened and a flutter of sound wavered in his throat. Dr Harkness leant over him, pinching up the skin of his forearm to admit the needle. Fox hovered nearby. Florence, her knuckles clenched between her teeth, stood just inside the door. Charles seemed to be unaware of these four onlookers; his gaze wandered past them, fixed itself in terror on the fifth; the short person who stood, pressed back against the wall in shadow at the end of the room.

  The sound in his throat was shaped with great difficulty into one word. ‘No!’ it whispered. ‘No! No!’

  Dr Harkness withdrew the needle.

  ‘What is it?’ Alleyn said. ‘What do you want to tell us?’

  The eyes did not blink or change their direction, but after a second or two they lost focus, glazed, and remained fixed. The jaw dropped, the body quivered and sank.

  Dr Harkness leant over it for some time and then drew back.

  ‘Gone,’ he said

  Alleyn laid his burden down and covered it.

  In a voice that they had not heard from him before, Dr Harkness said: ‘He was all right ten minutes ago. Settled. Quiet. Something’s gone wrong here and I’ve got to hear what it was.’ He turned on Florence. ‘Well?’

  Florence, with an air that was half-combative, half-frightened, moved forward, keeping her eyes on Alleyn.

  ‘Yes,’ Alleyn said, answering her look, ‘we must hear from you. You raised the alarm. What happened?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know!’ she said at once. ‘I did the right thing, didn’t I? I called the doctor. Now!’

  ‘You’ll do the right thing again, if you please, by telling me what happened before you called him.’

  She darted a glance at the small motionless figure in shadow at the end of the room and wetted her lips.

  ‘Come on, now,’ Fox said. ‘Speak up.’

  Standing where she was, a serio-comic figure under her panoply of tin hair curlers, she did tell her story.

  After Dr Harkness had given his orders, she and – again that sidelong glance – she and Mrs Plumtree had made up the bed in the study. Dr Harkness had helped Mr Templeton undress and had seen him into bed and they had all waited until he was settled down, comfortably. Dr Harkness had left after giving orders that he was to be called if wanted. Florence had then gone to the pantry to fill a second hot-water bottle. This had taken some time as she had been obliged to boil a kettle. When she returned to the hall she had heard voices raised in the study. I
t seemed that she had paused outside the door. Alleyn had a picture of her, a hot-water bottle under her arm, listening avidly. She had heard Mrs Plumtree’s voice, but had been unable to distinguish any words. Then, she said, she had heard Mr Templeton ejaculate: ‘No!’ three times, just as he did before he died, only much louder; as if, Florence said, he was frightened. After that there had been a clatter and Mrs Plumtree had suddenly become audible. She had shouted, Florence reported, at the top of her voice: ‘I’ll put a stop to it,’ Mr Templeton had given a loud cry and Florence had burst into the room.

  ‘All right,’ Alleyn said. ‘And what did you find?’

  A scene, it appeared, of melodrama. Mrs Plumtree with the poker grasped and upraised, Mr Templeton sprawled along the bed, facing her.

  ‘And when they seen me,’ Florence said, ‘she dropped the poker in the hearth and he gasped, “Florrie, don’t let ’er” and then he took a turn for the worse and I see he was very bad. So I said, “Don’t you touch ’im. Don’t you dare,” and I fetched the doctor like you saw. And God’s my witness,’ Florence concluded, ‘if she isn’t the cause of his death! As good as if she’d struck him down, ill and all as he was, and which she’d of done if I hadn’t come in when I did and which she’d do to me now if it wasn’t for you gentlemen.’

  She stopped breathless. There was a considerable pause. ‘Well!’ she demanded. ‘Don’t you believe it? All right, then. Ask her. Go on. Ask her!’

  ‘Everything in its turn,’ Alleyn said. ‘That will do from you for the moment. Stay where you are.’ He turned to the short motionless figure in the shadows. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘You can’t avoid it, you know. Come along.’

  She moved out into the light. Her small nose and the areas over her cheekbones were still patched with red, but otherwise her face was a dreadful colour. She said, automatically, it seemed: ‘You’re a wicked girl, Floy.’