Spinsters in Jeopardy

by Ngaio Marsh

  Alleyn was saying: ‘… so you will remain at first in the car. After a time I may fetch or send for you. If I do you will come into the offices and tell a fairy story. It will be to this effect …’

  Raoul listened impassively, his eyes on the distant road. When Alleyn had done, Raoul made a squaring movement with his shoulders, blew out his cheeks into a mock-truculent grimace and intimated that he was ready for anything.

  ‘Now, darling,’ Alleyn said, ‘do you think you can come in with me and keep all thought of our inside information out of your mind? You know only this: Ricky has been kidnapped and Raoul has seen him being driven into the factory. I’m going to have a shot at the general manager who is called Callard. We don’t know much about him. He’s a Parisian who worked in the States for a firm that was probably implicated in the racket and he speaks English. Any of the others we may run into may also speak English. We’ll assume, whatever we find, that they understand it. So don’t say anything to me that they shouldn’t hear. On the other hand, you can with advantage keep up an agitated chorus. I shall speak bad French. We don’t know what may develop so we’ll have to keep our heads and ride the skids as we meet them. How do you feel about it?’

  ‘Should I be a brave little woman biting on the bullet or should I go in, boots and all, and rave?’

  ‘Rave if you feel like it, my treasure. They’ll probably expect it.’

  ‘I daresay a spartan mother would seem more British in their eyes or is that a contradiction in terms? O, Rory!’ Troy said in a low voice. ‘It’s so grotesque. Here we are half-crazy with anxiety and we have to put on a sort of anxiety-act. It’s – it’s a cruel thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Alleyn said. ‘It is cruel but it’ll be all right. I promise. You’ll be as right as a bank whatever you do. Hallo, there’s Dupont.’

  A car had appeared on the main road from Roqueville.

  ‘M. le Commissaire,’ said Roul and flicked his headlamps on and off. The police car, tiny in the distance, winked briefly in response.

  ‘We’re off,’ said Alleyn.

  IV

  The entrance hall of the factory was impressive. The décor was carried out in obscured glass, chromium and plastic and was beautifully lit. In the centre was a sculptured figure, modern in treatment, suggestive of some beneficent though pin-headed being, who drew strength from the earth itself. Two flights of curved stairs led airily to remote galleries. There was an imposing office on the left. Double doors at the centre back and a series of single doors in the right wall all bore legends in chromium letters. The front wall was plate-glass and commanded a fine view of the valley and the sea.

  Beyond a curved counter in the outer office a girl sat over a ledger. When she saw Alleyn and Troy she rose and stationed herself behind a chromium notice on the counter:

  ‘Renseignements.’

  ‘Monsieur?’ asked the girl. ‘Madame?’

  Alleyn, without checking his stride, said: ‘Don’t disarrange yourself, Mademoiselle,’ and made for the central doors.

  The girl raised her voice: ‘One moment, Monsieur, whom does Monsieur wish to see?’

  ‘M. Callard, le Controller.’

  The girl pushed a bell on her desk. Before Alleyn could reach the double doors they opened and a commissionaire came through. Alleyn turned to the desk.

  ‘Monsieur has an appointment?’ asked the girl.

  ‘No,’ Alleyn said, ‘but it is a matter of extreme urgency. I must see M. Callard, Mademoiselle.’

  The girl was afraid that M. Callard saw nobody without an appointment. Troy observed that her husband was making his usual impression on the girl, who touched her hair, settled her shoulders and gave him a look.

  Troy said in a high voice: ‘Darling, what’s she saying? Has she seen him?’

  The girl just glanced at Troy and then opened her eyes at Alleyn. ‘Perhaps I can be of assistance to Monsieur?’ she suggested.

  Alleyn leant over the counter and haltingly asked her if by any chance she had seen a little boy in brown shorts and a yellow shirt. The question seemed to astonish her. She made an incredulous sound and repeated it to the commissionaire who merely hitched up his shoulders. They had not seen any little boys, she said. Little boys were not permitted on the premises.

  Alleyn stumbled about with his French and asked the girl if she spoke English. She said that unfortunately she did not.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ Alleyn said to Troy, ‘doesn’t speak English. I think she says M. Callard won’t see us. And she says she doesn’t know anything about Ricky.’

  Troy said: ‘But we know he’s here. We must see the manager. Tell her we must.’

  This time the girl didn’t so much as glance at Troy. With a petunia-tipped finger and thumb she removed a particle of mascara from her lashes and discreetly rearranged her figure for Alleyn to admire. She said it was too bad that she couldn’t do anything for him. She thought he had better understand this and said that at any other time she might do a lot. She reacted with a facial expression which corresponded, Troy thought, with the ‘haughty little moue’ so much admired by Edwardian novelists.

  He said: ‘Mademoiselle, will you have the kindness of an angel? Will you take a little message to M. Callard?’ She hesitated and he added in English: ‘And do you know that there is a large and I believe poisonous spider on your neck?’

  She flashed a smile: ‘Monsieur makes a grivoiserie at my expense. He says naughty things in English, I believe, “to pull a carrot at me.” ‘

  ‘Doesn’t speak English,’ Alleyn said to Troy without moving his eyes from the girl. He took out his pocketbook, wrote a brief message and slid it across the counter with a 500 franc note underneath. He playfully lifted the girl’s hand and closed it over both.

  ‘Well, I must say!’ said Troy, and she thought how strange it was that she could be civilized and amused and perhaps a little annoyed at this incident.

  With an air that contrived to suggest that Alleyn as well as being a shameless flirt was also a gentleman, the girl moved back from the counter, glanced through the plate-glass windows of the main office where a number of typists and two clerks looked on with undisguised curiosity, seemed to change her mind, and came out by way of a gate at the top of the counter and walked with short steps to the double doors. The commissionaire opened them for her. They looked impassively at each other. She passed through and he followed her.

  Alleyn said: ‘She’s taking my note to the boss. It ought to surprise him. By all the rules he should have been rung up and told we’re on the road to St Céleste.’

  ‘Will he see us?’

  ‘I don’t see how he can refuse.’

  While they waited, Troy looked at the spidery stairs, the blind doors and the distant galleries. ‘If he should appear!’ she thought. ‘If there could be another flash of yellow and brown.’ She began to imagine how it would be when they found Ricky. Would his face be white with smudges under the eyes? Would he cry in the stifled inarticulate fashion that always gripped her heart in a stricture? Would he shout and run to her? Or, by a merciful chance, would he behave like the other boy and want to stay with his terrible new friends? She thought: ‘It’s unlucky to anticipate. He may not be here at all. If we don’t find him before tonight I think I shall crack up.’

  She knew Alleyn’s mind followed hers as closely as one mind can follow another and she knew that as far as one human being can find solace in another she found solace in him, but she suffered, nevertheless, a great loneliness of spirit. She turned to him and saw compassion and anger in his eyes.

  ‘If anything could make me want more to get these gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it would be this. We’ll get them, Troy.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I expect you will.’

  ‘Ricky’s here. I know it in my bones. I promise you.’

  The girl came back through the double doors. She was very formal.

  ‘Monsieur Callard will see Monsieur and Madame,’ she said. Th
e commissionaire waited on the far side, holding one door open. As Alleyn stood aside for Troy to go through, the girl moved nearer to him. Her back was turned to the commissionaire. Her eyes made a sign of assent.

  He murmured: ‘And I may understand – what, Mademoiselle?’

  ‘What Monsieur pleases,’ she said and minced back to the desk.

  Alleyn caught Troy up and took her arm in his hand. The commissionaire was several paces ahead. ‘Either that girl’s given me the tip that Ricky’s here,’ Alleyn muttered, ‘or she’s the smartest job off the skids in the Maritime Alps.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just gave the go-ahead signal.’

  ‘Good lord! Or did it mean Ricky?’

  ‘It’d better mean Ricky,’ Alleyn said grimly.

  They were in an inner hall, heavily carpeted and furnished with modern wall-tables and chairs. They passed two doors and were led to a third in the end wall. The commissionaire opened it and went in. They heard a murmur of voices. He returned and asked them to enter.

  A woman with blue hair and magnificent poise rose from a typewriter. ‘Bon jour, Monsieur et Madame,’ she said. ‘Entrez s’il vous plaît.’ She opened another door. ‘Monsieur et Madame Allen,’ she announced.

  ‘Come right in!’ invited a voice in hearty American. ‘C’m on! Come right in.’

  V

  M. Callard was a fat man with black eyebrows and bluish chops. He was not a particularly evil-looking man: rather one would have said that there was something meretricious about him. His mouth looked as if it had been disciplined by meaningless smiles and his eyes seemed to assume rather than possess an air of concentration. He was handsomely dressed and smelt of expensive cigars. His English was fluent and falsely Americanized with occasional phrases and inflections that made it clear he wasn’t speaking his native tongue.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, pulling himself up from his chair and extending his hand. The other held Alleyn’s note. ‘Very pleased to meet you, Mr – I just can’t quite get the signature.’

  ‘Alleyn.’

  ‘Mr Allen.’

  ‘This is my wife.’

  ‘Mrs Allen,’ said M. Callard bowing. ‘Now, let’s sit down, isn’t it, and get acquainted. What’s all this I hear about Junior?’

  Alleyn said: ‘I wouldn’t have bothered you if we hadn’t by chance heard that our small boy who went missing early this afternoon, had, Heavens knows how, turned up at your works. In your office they didn’t seem to know anything about him and our French doesn’t go very far. It’s a great help that your English is so good. Isn’t it darling?’ he said to Troy.

  ‘Indeed, yes. M. Callard, I can’t tell you how anxious we are. He just disappeared from our hotel. He’s only six and it’s so dreadful –’

  To her horror Troy heard her voice tremble. She was silent.

  ‘Now, that’s just too bad,’ M. Callard said. ‘And what makes you think he’s turned up in this part of the world?’

  ‘By an extraordinary chance,’ Alleyn said, ‘the man we’ve engaged to drive us took his car up this road earlier this afternoon and he saw Ricky in another car with a man and woman. They turned in at the entrance to your works. We don’t pretend to understand all this, but you can imagine how relieved we are to know he’s all right.’

  M. Callard sat with a half smile on his mouth, looking at Alleyn’s left ear. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t pretend to understand it either. Nobody’s told me anything. But we’ll soon find out.’

  He bore down with a pale thumb on his desk bell. The blue-haired secretary came in and he spoke to her in French.

  ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘that Monsieur and Madame have been given information by their chauffeur that their little boy who has disappeared was seen in an auto somewhere on our premises. Please make full inquiries, Mademoiselle in all departments.’

  ‘At once, Monsieur le Directeur,’ said the secretary and went out.

  M. Callard offered Troy a cigarette and Alleyn a cigar both of which were refused. He seemed mysteriously to expand. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘you folks are not aware there’s a gang of kidnappers at work along this territory. Child-kidnappers.’

  Alleyn at once broke into a not too coherent and angry dissertation on child-kidnappers and the inefficiency of the police. M. Callard listened with an air of indulgence. He had taken a cigar and he rolled it continuously between his thumb and fingers, which were flattish and backed with an unusual amount of hair. This movement was curiously disturbing. But he listened with perfect courtesy to Alleyn and every now and then made sympathetic noises. There was, however, a certain quality in his stillness which Alleyn recognized. M. Callard was listening to him with only part of his attention. With far closer concentration he listened for something outside the room: and for this, Alleyn thought, he listened so far in vain.

  The secretary came back alone.

  She told M. Callard that in no department of the works nor among the gardens outside had anyone seen a small boy. Troy only understood the tenor of this speech. Alleyn, who had perfectly understood the whole of it, asked to have it translated. M. Callard obliged, the secretary withdrew and the temper of the interview hardened. Alleyn got up and moved to the desk. His hand rested on top of a sound system apparatus. Troy found herself looking at the row of switches and the loud-speaker and at the good hand above them.

  Alleyn said he was not satisfied with the secretary’s report. M. Callard said he was sorry, but evidently there had been some mistake. Alleyn said he was certain there was no mistake. Troy, taking her cue from him, let something of her anxiety and anger escape. M. Callard received her outburst with odious compassion and said it was quite understandable that she was not just one hundred per cent reasonable. He rose but before his thumb could reach the bell-push Alleyn said that he must ask him to listen to the account given by their chauffeur.

  ‘I’m sure that when you hear the man you will understand why we are so insistent,’ Alleyn said. And before Callard could do anything to stop him he went out, leaving Troy to hold, as it were, the gate open for his return.

  Callard made a fat, wholly Latin gesture, and flopped back into his chair. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘this good man of yours is just a little difficult. Certainly I’ll listen to your chauffeur who is, no doubt, one of the local peasants. I know how they are around here. They say what they figure you want them to say and they don’t worry about facts: it’s not conscious lying, it’s just that they come that way. They’re just naturally obliging. Now, your husband’s French isn’t so hot and my guess is, he’s got this guy a little bit wrong. We’ll soon find out if I’m correct. Pardon me if I make a call. This is a busy time with us and right now I’m snowed under.’

  Having done his best to make Troy thoroughly uncomfortable he put through a call on his telephone, speaking such rapid French that she scarcely understood a word of what he said. He had just hung up the receiver when something clicked. This sound was followed by a sense of movement and space beyond the office. M. Callard glanced at the switchboard on his desk and said: ‘Ah?’ A disembodied voice spoke in mid-air.

  ‘Monsieur le Directeur? Le service de transport avise qu’il est incapable d’expédier la marchandise.’

  ‘Qu’est ce qu’il se passe?’

  ‘Rue barrée!’

  ‘Bien. Prenez garde. Remettez la marchandise à sa place.’

  ‘Bien, Monsieur,’ said the voice. The box clicked and the outside world was shut off.

  ‘My, oh my,’ sighed M. Callard, ‘the troubles I have!’ He opened a ledger on his desk and ran his flattened forefinger down the page.

  Troy thought distractedly that perhaps he was right about Raoul and then, catching herself up, remembered that Raoul had in fact never seen the car drive in at the factory gates with Ricky and a man and woman in it, that they were bluffing and that perhaps all Alleyn’s and Dupont’s theories were awry. Perhaps this inhuman building had never contained her little son. Pe
rhaps it was idle to torture herself by thinking of him: near at hand yet hopelessly withheld.

  M. Callard looked at a platinum mounted wristwatch and then at Troy, and sighed again. ‘He’s trying to shame me out of this office,’ she thought and she said boldly: ‘Please don’t let me interrupt your work.’ He glanced at her with a smile from which he seemed to make no effort to exclude the venom.

  ‘My work requires the closest concentration, Madame,’ said M. Callard.

  ‘Sickening for you,’ said Troy.

  Alleyn came back with Raoul at his heels. Through the door Troy caught a glimpse of the blue-haired secretary, half-risen from her desk, expostulation frozen on her face. Raoul shut the door.

  ‘This is Milano, M. Callard,’ Alleyn said. ‘He will tell you what he saw. If I have misunderstood him you will be able to correct me. He doesn’t speak English.’

  Raoul stood before the desk and looked about him with the same air of interest and ease that had irritated Dr Baradi. His gaze fell for a moment on the sound system apparatus and then moved to M. Callard’s face.

  ‘Well, my friend,’ said M. Callard in rapid French. ‘What’s the tarradiddle Monsieur thinks you’ve told him?’

  ‘I think Monsieur understood what I told him,’ Raoul said cheerfully and even more rapidly. ‘I spoke slowly and what I said, with all respect, was no tarradiddle. With Monsieur’s permission I will repeat it. Early this afternoon, I do not know the exact time, I drove my young lady along the road to the factory. I parked my car and we climbed a little way up the hillside opposite the gates. From here we observed a car come up from the main road. In it were a man and a woman and the small son of Madame and Monsieur who is called Riki. This little Monsieur Riki was removed from the car and taken into the factory. That is all, Monsieur le Directeur.’