Spinsters in Jeopardy

by Ngaio Marsh

  Baradi said that Alleyn’s car had not arrived and with no hint of his former impatience suggested that they show him the library.

  It was on the far side of the courtyard. On entering it he was confronted with Troy’s ‘Boy with a Kite.’ Its vigour and cleanliness struck like a sword-thrust across the airlessness of Mr Oberon’s library. For a second the Boy looked with Ricky’s eyes at Alleyn.

  A sumptuous company of books lined the walls with the emphasis, as was to be expected, upon mysticism, the occult and orientalism. Alleyn recognized a number of works that a bookseller’s catalogue would have described as rare, curious, and collector’s items. Of far greater interest to Alleyn, however, was a large framed drawing that hung in a dark corner of that dark room. It was, he saw, a representation, probably medieval, of the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent and it was part elevation and part plan. After one desirous glance he avoided it. He professed himself fascinated with the books and took them down with ejaculations of interest and delight. Baradi and Glande watched him and listened.

  ‘You are a collector, perhaps, Mr Allen?’ Baradi conjectured.

  ‘Only in a humble way. I’m afraid my job doesn’t provide for the more expensive hobbies.’

  There was a moment’s pause. ‘Indeed?’ Baradi said. ‘One cannot, alas, choose one’s profession. I hope yours is at least congenial.’

  Alleyn thought: ‘He’s fishing. He doesn’t know or he isn’t sure.’ And he said absently as he turned the pages of a superb Book of the Dead, ‘I suppose everyone becomes a little bored with his job at times. What a wonderful thing this is, this book. Tell me, Dr Baradi, as a scientific man –’

  Baradi answered his question. Glande glowered and shuffled impatiently. Alleyn reflected that by this time it was possible that Baradi and Robin Herrington had told Oberon of the Alleyn’s inquiries for Mr Garbel. Did this account for the change in Baradi’s attitude? Alleyn was now unable to bore Dr Baradi.

  ‘It would be interesting,’ Carbury Glande said in his harsh voice, ‘to hear what Mr Alleyn’s profession might be. I am passionately interested in the employment of other people.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Baradi agreed. ‘Do you ever play the game of guessing at the occupation of strangers and then proving yourself right or wrong by getting to know them? Come!’ he cried with a great show of frankness. ‘Let us confess, Carbury, we are filled with unseemly curiosity about Mr Allen. Will he allow us to play our game? Indulge us, my dear Allen. Carbury, what is your guess?’

  Glande muttered. ‘Oh, I plump for one of the colder branches of learning. Philosophy.’

  ‘Do you think so? A don, perhaps? And yet there is something that to me suggests that Mr Allen was born under Mars. A soldier. Or, no. I take that back. A diplomat.’

  ‘How very perceptive of you,’ Alleyn ejaculated, looking at him over the Book of the Dead.

  ‘Then I am right?’

  ‘In part, at least. I started in the Diplomatic,’ said Alleyn truthfully, ‘but left it at the file-and-corridor stage.’

  ‘Really? Then, perhaps, I am allowed another guess. No!’ he cried after a pause. ‘I give up. Carbury, what do you say?’

  ‘I? God knows! Perhaps he left the Diplomatic Service under a cloud and went big game hunting.’

  ‘I begin to think that you are all psychic in this house,’ Alleyn said delightedly. ‘How on earth do you do it?’

  ‘A mighty hunter!’ Baradi ejaculated, clapping his hands softly.

  ‘Not at all mighty. I’m afraid, only pathetically persevering.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Carbury Glande said, drawing his hand across his eyes and suppressing a yawn. ‘You live in South Kensington, I feel sure, in some magnificently dark apartment from the walls of which glower the glass eyes of monstrous beasts. Horns, snouts, tusks. Coarse hair. Lolling tongues made of suitable plastic. Quite wonderful.’

  ‘But Mr Allen is a poet and a hunter of rare books as well as of rare beasts. Perhaps,’ Baradi speculated, ‘it was during your travels that you became interested in the esoteric?’

  Alleyn suppressed a certain weariness of spirit and renewed his raptures. ‘You saw some rum things,’ he said with an air of simple credulity, ‘in native countries.’ He had been told and told on good authority – He rambled on, saying that he greatly desired to learn more about the primitive beliefs of ancient races.

  ‘Does your wife accompany you on safari?’ Glande asked. ‘I should have thought –’he stopped short. Alleyn saw a flash of exasperation in Baradi’s eyes.

  ‘My wife,’ Alleyn said lightly, ‘couldn’t approve less of blood sports. She is a painter.’

  ‘I am released,’ Glande cried, ‘from bondage!’ He pointed to the ‘Boy with a Kite.’ ‘Ecco!’

  ‘No!’ Really, Alleyn thought, Baradi was a considerable actor. Delight and astonishment were admirably suggested.

  ‘Not … ? Not Agatha Troy? But, my dear Mr Allen, this is quite remarkable. Mr Oberon will be enchanted.’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ Carbury Glande said, ‘to tell him.’ He showed his teeth through his moustache. ‘I’m afraid you’re in for a scolding, Alleyn. Troy swore me to secrecy. I may say,’ he added, ‘that I knew in a vague way, that she was a wedded woman but she has kept the Mighty Hunter from us.’ His tongue touched his upper lip. ‘Understandably, perhaps,’ he added.

  Alleyn thought that nothing would give him more pleasure than to seize Dr Baradi and Mr Carbury Glande by the scruffs of their respective necks and crash their heads together.

  He said apologetically: ‘Well, you see, we’re on holiday.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Baradi and the conversation languished.

  ‘I think you told us,’ Baradi said casually, ‘that you have friends in Roqueville and asked if we knew them. I’m afraid that I’ve forgotten the name.’

  ‘Only one. Garbel.’

  Baradi’s smile looked as if it had been left on his face by an oversight. The red hairs of Glande’s beard quivered very slightly as if his jaw was clenched.

  ‘A retired chemist of sorts,’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Ah, yes! Possibly attached to the monstrous establishment which defaces our lovely olive groves. Monstrous,’ Baradi added, ‘aesthetically speaking.’

  ‘Quite abominable!’ said Glande. His voice cracked and he wetted his lips.

  ‘No doubt admirable from a utilitarian point of view. I believe they produce artificial manure in great quantities.’

  ‘The place,’ Glande said, ‘undoubtedly stinks,’ and he laughed unevenly.

  ‘Aesthetically?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Always, aesthetically,’ said Baradi.

  ‘I noticed the factory on our way up. Perhaps we’d better ask there for our friend.’

  There was a dead silence.

  ‘I can’t think what has become of that man of mine,’ Alleyn said lightly.

  Baradi was suddenly effusive. ‘But how inconsiderate we are! You, of course, are longing to rejoin your wife. And who can blame you? No woman has the right to be at once so talented and so beautiful. But your car? No doubt, a puncture or perhaps merely our Mediterranean dolce far niente. You must allow us to send you down. Robin would, I am sure, be enchanted. Or, if he is engaged in meditation, Mr Oberon would be delighted to provide a car. How thoughtless we have been!’

  This, Alleyn realized, was final. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said. ‘But I do apologize for being such a pestilent visitor. I’ve let my ruling passion run away with me and kept you hovering interminably. The car will arrive any moment now, I feel sure, and I particularly want to see the man. If I might just wait here among these superb books I shan’t feel I’m making a nuisance of myself.’

  It was a toss-up whether this would work. They wanted, he supposed, to consult together. After a fractional hesitation, Baradi said something about their arrangements for the afternoon. Perhaps, if Mr Allen would excuse them, they should have a word with Mr Oberon. There was the business of the nurse – Glande, less adro
it, muttered unintelligibly and they went out together.

  Alleyn was in front of the plan two seconds after the door had shut behind them.

  It was embellished with typical medieval ornaments – a coat of arms, a stylized goat and a great deal of scrollwork. The drawing itself was in two main parts, an elevation, treated as if the entire face of the building had been removed and a multiple plan of great intricacy. It would have taken an hour to follow out the plan in detail. With a refinement of concentration that Mr Oberon himself might have envied, Alleyn fastened his attention upon the main outlines of the structural design. The great rooms and principal bedrooms were all, more or less, on the library level. Above this level the château rose irregularly in a system of connected turrets to the battlements. Below it, the main stairway led down by stages through a maze of rooms that grew progressively smaller until, at a level which must have been below that of the railway, they were no bigger than prison cells and had probably served as such for hundreds of years. A vast incoherent maze that had followed, rather than overcome the contour of the mountain: an architectural compromise, Alleyn murmured, and sharpened his attention upon one room and its relation to the rest.

  It was below the library and next to a room that had no outside windows. He marked its position and cast back in his mind to the silhouette of the château as he had seen it, moonlit, in the early hours of that morning. He noticed that it had a window much longer than it was high and he remembered the shape of the window they had seen.

  If it was true that Mr Oberon and his guests were now occupied, as Baradi had represented, with some kind of esoteric keep-fit exercises on the roof-garden, it might be worth taking a risk. He thought of two or three plausible excuses, took a final look at the plan, slipped out of the library and ran lightly down a continuation of the winding stair that, in its upper reaches, led to the roof garden.

  He passed a landing, a closed door and three narrow windows. The stairs corkscrewed down to a wider landing from which a thickly carpeted passage ran off to the right. Opposite the stairway was a door and, a few steps away, another – the door he sought.

  He went up to it and knocked.

  There was no answer. He turned the handle delicately. The door opened inwards until there was a wide enough gap for him to look through. He found himself squinting along a wall hung with silk rugs and garnished about midway along, with a big prayer wheel. At the far end there was an alcove occupied by an extremely exotic-looking divan. He opened the door fully and walked into the room.

  From inside the door his view of Mr Oberon’s room was in part blocked by the back of an enormous looking-glass screwed to the floor at an angle of about 45 degrees to the outside wall. For the moment he didn’t move beyond this barrier, but from where he stood, looked at the left-hand end of the room. It was occupied by a sort of altar hung with a stiffly embroidered cloth and garnished with a number of objects: a pentacle in silver, a triskelion in bronze and a large crystal affair resembling a sunburst. Beside the altar was a door, leading, he decided, into the windowless room he had noted on the plan.

  He moved forward with the intention of walking round the looking-glass into the far part of the room.

  ‘Bring me the prayer-wheel,’ said a voice beyond the glass.

  It fetched Alleyn up with the jolt of a punch over the heart. He looked at the door. If the glass had hidden him on his entrance it would mask his exit. He moved towards the door.

  ‘I am at the Third Portal of the Outer and must not uncover my eyes. Do not speak. Bring me the Prayer Wheel. Put it before me.’

  Alleyn walked forward.

  There, on the other side of the looking-glass facing it and seated on the floor, was Mr Oberon, stark naked, with the palms of his hands pressed to his eyes. Beyond him was a long window masked by a dyed silk blind, almost transparent, with the design of the sun upon it.

  Alleyn took the prayer-wheel from the wall. It was an elaborate affair, heavily carved, with many cylinders. He set it before Oberon.

  He turned and had reached the door when somebody knocked peremptorily on it. Alleyn stepped back as it was flung open. It actually struck his shoulder. He heard someone go swiftly past and into the room.

  Baradi’s voice said: ‘Where are you? Oh. Oh, there you are! See here, I’ve got to talk to you.’

  He must be behind the glass. Alleyn slipped round the door and darted out. As he ran lightly up the stairs he heard Baradi shut the door.

  There was nobody on the top landing. He walked back into the library, having been away from it for five and a half minutes.

  He took out his notebook and made a very rough sketch of Mr Oberon’s room, taking particular pains to mark the position of the prayer-wheel on the wall. Then he set about memorizing as much of its detail as he had been able to take in. He was still at this employment when the latch turned in the door.

  Alleyn pulled out from the nearest shelf a copy of Mr Montague Summers’ major work on witchcraft. He was apparently absorbed in it when a woman came into the library.

  He looked up from the book and knew that as far as preserving his anonymity was concerned, he was irrevocably sunk.

  ‘If it’s not Roderick Alleyn!’ said Annabella Wells.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ricky in Roqueville

  It was some years ago, in a transatlantic steamer, that Alleyn had met Annabella Wells: the focal point of ship-board gossip to which she had seemed to be perfectly indifferent. She had watched him with undisguised concentration for four hours and had then sent her secretary with an invitation for drinks. She herself drank pretty heavily and, he thought, was probably a drug addict. He had found her an embarrassment and was glad when she suddenly dropped him. Since then she had turned up from time to time as an onlooker at criminal trials where he appeared for the police. She was, she told him, passionately interested in criminology.

  In the English theatre her brilliance had been dimmed by her outrageous eccentricities, but in Paris, particularly in the motion picture studios, she was still one of the great ones. She retained a ravaged sort of beauty and an individuality, which would be arresting when the last of her good looks had been rasped away. A formidable woman, and an enchantress still.

  She gave him her hand and the inverted and agonized smile for which she was famous. ‘They said you were a big-game hunter,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait.’

  ‘It was nice of them to give that impression.’

  ‘An accurate one, after all. Are you on the prowl down here? After some master-felon?’

  ‘I’m on holiday with my wife and small boy.’

  ‘Ah, yes! The beautiful woman who paints famous pictures. I am told by Baradi and Glande that she is beautiful. There is no need to look angry, is there?’

  ‘Did I look angry?’

  ‘You looked as if you were trying not to show a certain uxorious irritation.’

  ‘Did I, indeed?’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Baradi is a bit lush. I will allow and admit that he’s a bit lush. Have you seen Oberon?’

  ‘For a few moments.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’

  ‘Isn’t he your host?’

  ‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘you’re not true. Much more fabulous, in your way, than Oberon.’

  ‘I’m interested in what I have been told of his philosophy.’

  ‘So they said. What sort of interest?’

  ‘Personal and academic’

  ‘My interest is personal and unacademic’ She opened her cigarette case. Alleyn glanced at the contents. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘that it would be useless to offer you a Capstan.’

  ‘Will you have one of these? They’re Egyptian. The red won’t come off on your lips.’

  ‘Thank you. They would be wasted on me.’ He lit her cigarette. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if I could persuade you to say nothing about my job.’

  ‘Darling,’ she rejoined (she called everyone ‘darling’), ‘you could persuade me to do anything. My trouble w
as, you wouldn’t try. Why do you look at me like that?’

  ‘I was wondering if any dependence could be placed on a heroin addict. Is it heroin?’

  ‘It is. I get it,’ said Miss Wells, ‘from America.’

  ‘How very tragic’

  ‘Tragic?’

  ‘You weren’t taking heroin when you played Hedda Gabler at the Unicorn in ’42. Could you give a performance like that now?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said vehemently.

  ‘But what a pity you don’t!’

  ‘My last film is the best thing I’ve ever done. Everyone says so.’ She looked at him with hatred. ‘I can still do it,’ she said.

  ‘On your good days, perhaps. The studio is less exacting than the theatre. Will the cameras wait when the gallery would boo? I couldn’t know less about it.’

  She walked up to him and struck him across the face with the back of her hand.

  ‘You have deteriorated,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Are you mad? What are you up to? Why are you here?’

  ‘I brought a woman who may be dying to your Dr Baradi. All I want is to go away as I came in – a complete nonentity.’

  ‘And you think that by insulting me you’ll persuade me to oblige you.’

  ‘I think you’ve already talked to your friends about me and that they’ve sent you here to find out if you were right.’

  ‘You’re a very conceited man. Why should I talk about you?’

  ‘Because,’ Alleyn said, ‘you’re afraid.’

  ‘Of you?’

  ‘Specifically. Of me.’

  ‘You idiot,’ she said. ‘Coming here with a dying spinster and an arty-crafty wife and a dreary little boy! For God’s sake, get out and get on with your holiday.’