by Ngaio Marsh
‘Never mind about that,’ Alleyn said. ‘Are you going to tell me what happened?’
She looked steadily up into his face. Her mouth was shut like a trap, but her eyes were terrified.
‘Look here, Ninn,’ Dr Harkness began very loudly. Alleyn raised a finger and he stopped short.
‘Has Florence,’ Alleyn asked, ‘spoken the truth? I mean as to facts. As to what she saw and heard when she came back to this room?’
She nodded, very slighdy.
‘You had the poker in your hand. You dropped it when she came in. Mr Templeton said, “Florrie, don’t let her.” That’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And before she came in you had said, very loudly, to Mr Templeton, “I’ll put a stop to it?” Did you say this?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you going to put a stop to?’
Silence.
‘Was it something Mr Templeton had said he would do?’
She shook her head.
For a lunatic second or two Alleyn was reminded of a panel game on television. He saw the Plumtree face in close-up; tight-lipped, inimical, giving nothing away, winning the round.
He looked at Fox. ‘Would you take Florence into the hall? You too, Dr Harkness, if you will?’
‘I’m not going,’ Florence said. ‘You can’t make me.’
‘Oh, yes, I can,’ Alleyn rejoined tranquilly, ‘but you’d be very foolish to put it to the test. Out you go, my girl.’
Fox approached her. ‘You keep your hands off me!’ she said.
‘Now, now!’ Fox rumbled cosily. He opened the door. For a moment she looked as if she would show fight and then, with a lift of her chin, she went out. Fox followed her.
Dr Harkness said: ‘There are things to be done. I mean …’ He gestured at the covered form on the bed.
‘I know. I don’t expect to be long. Wait for me in the hall, will you, Harkness?’
The door shut behind them.
For perhaps ten seconds Alleyn and that small, determined and miserable little woman looked at each other.
Then he said: ‘It’s got to come out, you know. You’ve been trying to save him, haven’t you?’
Her hands moved convulsively, and she looked in terror at the bed.
‘No, no,’ Alleyn said. ‘Not there. I’m not talking about him. You didn’t care about him. You were trying to shield the boy, weren’t you? You did what you did for Richard Dakers.’
She broke into a passion of weeping and from then until the end of the case he had no more trouble with Ninn.
II
When it was over he sent her up to her room.
‘Well,’ he said to Fox, ‘now for the final and far from delectable scene. We should, of course, have prevented all this but I’m damned if I see how. We couldn’t arrest on what we’d got. Unless they find some trace of Slaypest in the scent spray my reading of the case will never be anything but an unsupported theory.’
‘They ought to be coming through with the result before long.’
‘You might ring up and see where they’ve got to.’
Fox dialled a number. There was a tap at the door and Philpott looked in. He stared at the covered body on the bed.
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘A death. Mr Templeton.’
‘By violence, sir?’
‘Not by physical violence. Heart disease. What is it, Philpott?’
‘It’s that lot in there, sir. They’re getting very restive, especially Mr Dakers and the colonel. Wondering what was wrong with’ – he looked again at the bed –’ with him, sir.’
‘Yes. Will you ask Mr Dakers and Colonel Warrender to go into the small sitting-room next door. I’ll be there in a moment. Oh, and Philpott, I think you might ask Miss Lee to come too. And you may tell the others they will have very little longer to wait.’
‘Sir,’ said Philpott and withdrew.
Fox was talking into the telephone. ‘Yes. Yes. I’ll tell him. He’ll be very much obliged. Thank you.’
He hung up. ‘They were just going to ring. They’ve found an identifiable trace inside the bulb of the scent spray.’
‘Have they, indeed? That provides the complete answer.’
‘So you were right, Mr Alleyn.’
‘And what satisfaction,’ Alleyn said wryly, ‘is to be had out of that?’
He went to the bed and turned back the sheet. The eyes, unseeing, still stared past him. The imprint of a fear already non-existent, still disfigured the face. Alleyn looked down at it for a second or two. ‘What unhappiness!’ he said and closed the eyes.
‘He had a lot to try him,’ Fox observed with his customary simplicity.
‘He had indeed, poor chap.’
‘So did they all, if it comes to that. She must have been a very vexing sort of lady. There’ll have to be a PM, Mr Alleyn.’
‘Yes, of course. All right. I’ll see these people next door.’
He recovered the face and went out.
Dr Harkness and Florence were in the hall, watched over by a Yard reinforcement. Alleyn said: ‘I think you’d better come in with me, if you will, Harkness.’ And to Florence: ‘You’ll stay where you are for the moment, if you please.’
Harkness followed him into the boudoir.
It had been created by Bertie Saracen in an opulent mood and contrasted strangely with the exquisite austerity of the study. ‘Almost indecently you, darling!’ Bertie had told Miss Bellamy and, almost indecently, it was so.
Its present occupants – Richard, Anelida and Warrender – were standing awkwardly in the middle of this room, overlooked by an enormous and immensely vivacious portrait in pastel of Mary Bellamy. Charles, photographed some twenty years ago, gazed mildly from the centre of an occasional table. To Alleyn there was something atrociously ironic in this circumstance.
Richard demanded at once: ‘What is it? What’s happened? Is Charles – ?’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘It’s bad news. He collapsed a few minutes ago.’
‘But …? You don’t mean …?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Richard said: ‘Anelida! It’s Charles. He means Charles has died. Doesn’t he?’
‘Why,’ she said fiercely, ‘must these things happen to you. Why!’
Dr Harkness went up to him. ‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said, ‘I tried but it was no good. It might have happened any time during the last five years, you know.’
Richard stared blankly at him. ‘My God! ‘he cried out. ‘You can’t talk like that!’
‘Steady, old chap. You’ll realize, when you think it over. Any time.’
‘I don’t believe you. It’s because of everything else. It’s because of Mary and …’ Richard turned on Alleyn. ‘You’d no right to subject him to all this. It’s killed him. You’d no right. If it hadn’t been for you it needn’t have happened.’
Alleyn said very compassionately: ‘That may be true. He was in great distress. It may even be that for him this was the best solution.’
‘How dare you say that! ‘Richard exclaimed and then: ‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you think he’d pretty well got to the end of his tether? He’d lost the thing he most valued in life, hadn’t he?’
‘I – I want to see him.’
Alleyn remembered Charles’s face. ‘Then you shall,’ he promised, ‘presently.’
‘Yes,’ Harkness agreed quickly. ‘Presently.’
‘For the moment,’ Alleyn said, turning to Anelida, ‘I suggest that you take him up to his old room and give him a drink. Will you do that?’
‘Yes,’ Anelida said. ‘That’s the thing.’ She put her hand in Richard’s. ‘Coming?’
He looked down at her. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what on earth I should do without you, Anelida.’
‘Come on,’ she said, and they went out together.
Alleyn nodded to Harkness and he too went out.
An affected little French clock above the fireplace cleared its thro
at, broke into a perfect frenzy of silvery chimes and then struck midnight. Inspector Fox came into the room and shut the door.
Alleyn looked at Maurice Warrender.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘there must be an end to equivocation. I must have the truth.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Warrender and could scarcely have sounded less convincing.
‘I wonder why people always say that when they know precisely what one does mean. However, I’d better tell you. A few minutes ago, immediately after Charles Templeton died, I talked to the nanny, Mrs Plumtree, who had been alone with him at the moment of his collapse. I told her that I believed she had uttered threats, that she had acted in this way because she thought Templeton was withholding information which would clear your son from suspicion of murder and that under the stress of this scene, Templeton suffered the heart attack from which he died. I told her your son was in no danger of arrest and she then admitted the whole story. I now tell you, too, that your son is in no danger. If you have withheld information for fear of incriminating him you may understand that you have acted mistakenly.’
Warrender seemed to be on the point of speaking but instead turned abruptly away and stood very still.
‘You refused to tell me of the threats Mrs Templeton uttered in the conservatory and I got them, after great difficulty it’s true, from the other people who were there. When I asked you if you had quarrelled with Charles Templeton you denied it. I believe that, in fact, you had quarrelled with him and that it happened while you were together in the study before I saw you for the first time. For the whole of that interview you scarcely so much as looked at each other. He was obviously distressed by your presence and you were violently opposed to rejoining him there. I must ask you again: had you quarrelled?’
Warrender muttered: ‘If you call it a quarrel.’
‘Was it about Richard Dakers?’ Alleyn waited. ‘I think it was,’ he said, ‘but of course that’s mere speculation and open, if you like, to contradiction.’
Warrender squared his shoulders. ‘What’s all this leading up to?’ he demanded. ‘An arrest?’
‘Surely you’ve heard of the usual warning. Come, sir, you did have a scene with Charles Templeton and I believe it was about Richard Dakers. Did you tell Templeton you were the father?’
‘I did not,’ he said quickly.
‘Did he know you were the father?’
‘Not … We agreed from the outset that it was better that he shouldn’t know. That nobody should know. Better on all counts.’
‘You haven’t really answered my question, have you? Shall I put it this way? Did Templeton learn for the first time, this afternoon, that Dakers is your son?’
‘Why should you suppose anything of the sort?’
‘Your normal relationship appears to have been happy, yet at this time, when one would have expected you all to come together in your common trouble, he showed a vehement disinclination to see Dakers – or you.’
Warrender made an unexpected gesture. He flung out his hands and lifted his shoulders. ‘Very well,’ he said.
‘And you didn’t tell him.’ Alleyn walked up to him and looked him full in the face. ‘She told him,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she? Without consulting you, without any consideration for you or the boy. Because she was in one of those tantrums that have become less and less controllable. She made you spray that unspeakable scent over her in his presence, I suppose to irritate him. You went out and left them together. And she broke the silence of thirty years and told him.’
‘You can’t possibly know.’
‘When she left the room a minute or two later she shouted at the top of her voice: “Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.” Florence had gone. You had gone. She was speaking to her husband. Did she tell you?’
‘Tell me! What the hell …’
‘Did she tell you what she’d said to Templeton?’
Warrender turned away to the fireplace, leant his arm on the shelf and hid his face.
‘All right!’ he stammered. ‘All right! What does it matter, now. All right.’
‘Was it during the party?’
He made some kind of sound, apparently in assent.
‘Before or after the row in the conservatory?’
‘After.’ He didn’t raise his head and his voice sounded as if it didn’t belong to him. ‘I tried to stop her attacking the girl.’
‘And that turned her against you? Yes, I see.’
‘I was following them, the girl and her uncle, and she whispered it. “Charles knows about Dicky.” It was quite dreadful to see her look like that. I – I simply walked out – I …’ He raised his head and looked at Alleyn. ‘It was indescribable.’
‘And your great fear after that was that she would tell the boy?’
He said nothing.
‘As, of course, she did. Her demon was let loose. She took him up to her room and told him. They were, I dare say, the last words she spoke.’
Warrender said: ‘You assume – you say these things – you …’ And was unable to go on. His eyes were wet and bloodshot and his face grey. He looked quite old. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me,’ he said.
Alleyn thought he knew.
‘It’s not much cop,’ he said, ‘when a life’s preoccupation turns out to have been misplaced. It seems to me that a man in such a position would rather see the woman dead than watch her turning into a monster.’
‘Why do you say these things to me? Why!’
‘Isn’t it so?’
With a strange parody of his habitual mannerism he raised a shaking hand to his tie and pulled at it.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very clever, I suppose.’
‘Not very, I’m afraid.’
Warrender looked up at the beaming portrait of Mary Bellamy. ‘There’s nothing left,’ he said. ‘Nothing. What do you want me to do?’
‘I must speak to Dakers and then to those people in there. I think I must ask you to join us.’
‘Very well,’ Warrender said.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Thank you. If I may.’
Alleyn looked at Fox who went out and returned with a tumbler and the decanter that Alleyn had seen on the table between Warrender and Charles at his first encounter with them.
‘Whisky,’ Fox said. ‘If that’s agreeable. Shall I pour it out, sir?’
Warrender took it neat and in one gulp. ‘I’m very much obliged to you,’ he said, and straightened his back. The ghost of a smile distorted his mouth. ‘One more,’ he said, ‘and I shall be ready for anything, isn’t it?’
Alleyn said: ‘I am going to have a word with Dakers before I see the others.’
‘Are you going to – to tell him?’
‘I think it best to do so, yes.’
‘Yes. I see. Yes.’
‘When you are ready, Fox,’ Alleyn said, and went out.
‘He’ll make it as easy as possible, sir,’ Fox said comfortably. ‘You may be sure of that.’
‘Easy!’ said Warrender and made a sound that might have been a laugh. ‘Easy!’
III
The persons sitting in the drawing-room were assembled there for the last time. In a few weeks Mary Bellamy’s house would be transformed into the West End offices of a new venture in television, and a sedan chair, for heaven knows what reason, would adorn the hall. Bertie Saracen’s decor, taken over in toto, would be the background for the frenzied bandying about of new gimmicks and Charles Templeton’s study a waiting-room for disengaged actors.
At the moment it had an air of stability. Most of its occupants, having exhausted each in his or her own kind their capacity for anxiety, anger or compassion, had settled down into apathy. They exchanged desultory remarks, smoked continuously and occasionally helped themselves, rather self-consciously to the drinks that Gracefield had provided. PC Philpott remained alert in his corner.
It was Dr Harkness who, without elaboration, announced Charles Templeton’s death and that indeed shook them into a state of flabbergasted astonishment. When Richard came in, deathly pale, with Anelida, they all had to pull themselves together before they found anything at all to say to him. They did, indeed, attempt appropriate remarks, but it was clear to Anelida that their store of consolatory offerings was spent. However heartfelt their sympathy, they were obliged to fall back on their technique in order to express it. Pinky Cavendish broke into this unreal state of affairs by suddenly giving Richard a kiss and saying warmly: ‘It’s no good, darling. There really is just literally nothing we can say or do, but we wish with all our hearts that there was and Anelida must be your comfort. There!’
‘Pinky,’ Richard said unevenly, ‘you really are no end of a darling. I’m afraid I can’t – I can’t, … I’m sorry. I’m just not reacting much to anything.’
‘Exactly,’ Marchant said. ‘How well one understands. The proper thing, of course, would be for one to leave you to yourself, which unfortunately this Yard individual at the moment won’t allow.’
‘He did send to say it wouldn’t be long now,’ Bertie pointed out nervously.
‘Do you suppose,’ Pinky asked, ‘that means he’s going to arrest somebody?’
‘Who can tell! Do you know what?’ Bertie continued very rapidly and in an unnatural voice. ‘I don’t mind betting every man Jack of us is madly wondering what all the others think about him. Or her. I know I am. I keep saying to myself, “Can any of them think I darted upstairs instead of into the loo, and did it!” I suppose it’s no use asking you all for a frank opinion, is it? It would be taking an advantage.’
‘I don’t think it of you,’ Pinky said at once. ‘I promise you, darling.’
‘Pinky! Nor I of you. Never for a moment. And I don’t believe it of Anelida or Richard. Do you?’
‘Never for a moment,’ she said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Well,’ Bertie continued, inspired by Pinky’s confidence, ‘I should like to know if any of you does suppose it might be me.’ Nobody answered. ‘I can’t help feeling immensely gratified,’ Bertie said. ‘Thank you. Now. Shall I tell you which of you I think could – just – under frightful provocation – do something violent all of a sudden?’