Swing, Brother, Swing

by Ngaio Marsh

  The face appeared quite suddenly against the plate glass, obscuring the reflected lamp and distorted by pressure. One door squeaked faintly as it opened.

  She stood for a moment, holding her head-scarf half across her face. Then she moved forward swiftly and was down on her knees before an armchair. Her fingernails scrabbled on its tapestry. So intent was she upon her search that she did not hear him cross the thick carpet behind her, but when he drew the envelope from his pocket it made a slight crackle. Still kneeling, she swung round, saw him and cried out sharply.

  ‘Is this what you are hunting for, Miss Wayne?’ Alleyn asked.

  He crossed over to the wall and switched up the lights. Without moving, Carlisle watched him. When he returned he still held the envelope. She put her hand to her burning face and said unsteadily: ‘You think I’m up to no good, I suppose. I suppose you want an explanation.’

  ‘I should be glad of an answer to my question. Is this what you want?’

  He held the envelope up, but did not give it to her. She looked at it doubtfully. ‘I don’t know—I don’t think—’

  ‘The envelope is mine. I’ll tell you what it contains. A letter that had been thrust down between the seat and the arm of the chair you have been exploring.’

  ‘Yes,’ Carlisle said. ‘Yes. That’s it. May I have it, please?’

  ‘Do sit down,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘We’d better clear this up, don’t you think?’

  He waited while she rose. After a moment’s hesitation, she sat in the chair.

  ‘You won’t believe me, of course,’ she said, ‘but that letter—I suppose you have read it, haven’t you—has nothing whatever to do with this awful business tonight. Nothing in the wide world. It’s entirely personal and rather important.’

  ‘Have you even read it?’ he asked. ‘Can you repeat the contents? I should like you to do that, if you will.’

  ‘But—not absolutely correctly—I mean—’

  ‘Approximately.’

  ‘It—it’s got an important message. It concerns someone—I can’t tell you in so many words—’

  ‘And yet it’s so important that you return here at three o’clock in the morning to try and find it.’ He paused, but Carlisle said nothing. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘didn’t Miss de Suze come and collect her own correspondence?’

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she said. ‘This is difficult.’

  ‘Well, for pity’s sake keep up your reputation and be honest about it.’

  ‘I am being honest, damn you!’ said Carlisle with spirit. ‘The letter’s a private affair and—and—extremely confidential. Félicité doesn’t want anyone to see it. I don’t know exactly what’s in it.’

  ‘She funked coming back herself?’

  ‘She’s a bit shattered. Everyone is.’

  ‘I’d like you to see what the letter’s about,’ said Alleyn after a pause. She began to protest. Very patiently he repeated his usual argument. When someone had been killed the nicer points of behaviour had to be disregarded. He had to prove to his own satisfaction that the letter was immaterial, and then he would forget it. ‘You remember,’ he said, ‘this letter dropped out of her bag. Did you notice how she snatched it away from me? I see you did. Did you notice what she did after I said you would all be searched? She shoved her hand down between the seat and arm of that chair. Then she went off to be searched and I sat in the chair. When she came back she spent a miserable half-hour fishing for the letter and trying to look as if she wasn’t. All right.’

  He drew the letter from the envelope and spread it out before her. ‘It’s been fingerprinted,’ he said, ‘but without any marked success. Too much rubbing against good solid chair-cover. Will you read it or—’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Carlisle said angrily.

  The letter was typed on a sheet of plain notepaper. There was no address and no date.

  ‘MY DEAR:’ Carlisle read, ‘Your loveliness is my undoing. Because of it I break my deepest promise to myself and to others. We are closer than you have ever dreamed. I wear a white flower in my coat tonight. It is yours. But as you value our future happiness, make not the slightest sign—even to me. Destroy this note, my love, but keep my love. GPF’

  Carlisle raised her head, met Alleyn’s gaze and avoided it quickly. ‘A white flower,’ she whispered. ‘GPF? GPF? I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Mr Edward Manx had a white carnation in his coat, I think.’

  ‘I won’t discuss this letter with you,’ she said strongly. ‘I should never have read it. I won’t discuss it. Let me take it back to her. It’s nothing to do with this other thing. Nothing. Give it to me.’

  Alleyn said, ‘You must know I can’t do that. Think for a moment. There was some attachment, a strong attachment of one kind or another, between Rivera and your cousin—your step-cousin. After Rivera is murdered, she is at elaborate pains to conceal this letter, loses it, and is so anxious to retrieve it that she persuades you to return here in an attempt to recover it. How can I disregard such a sequence of events?’

  ‘But you don’t know Fée! She’s always in and out of tight corners over her young men. It’s nothing. You don’t understand.’

  ‘Well,’ he said looking good-humouredly at her, ‘help me to understand. I’ll drive you home. You can tell me on the way. Fox.’

  Fox came out of the office. Carlisle listened to Alleyn giving him instructions. The other men appeared from the cloakroom, held a brief indistinguishable conversation with Fox and went out through the main entrance. Alleyn and Fox collected their belongings and put on their coats. Carlisle stood up. Alleyn returned the letter to its envelope and put it in his pocket. She felt tears stinging under her eyelids. She tried to speak and produced only an indeterminate sound.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, glancing at her.

  ‘It can’t be true,’ she stammered. ‘I won’t believe it. I won’t.’

  ‘What? That Edward Manx wrote this letter?’

  ‘He couldn’t. He couldn’t write like that to her.’

  ‘No?’ Alleyn said casually. ‘You think not? But she’s quite good-looking, isn’t she? Quite attractive, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s not that at all. It’s the letter itself. He couldn’t write like that. It’s so bogus.’

  ‘Have you ever noticed love-letters that are read out in court and published in the papers? Don’t they sound pretty bogus? Yet some of them have been written by extremely intelligent people. Shall we go?’

  It was cold out in the street. A motionless pallor stood behind the rigid silhouette of roofs. ‘Dawn’s left hand,’ Alleyn said to nobody in particular and shivered. Carlisle’s taxi had gone but a large police car waited. A second man sat beside the driver. Fox opened the door and Carlisle got in. The two men followed. ‘We’ll call at the Yard,’ Alleyn said.

  She felt boxed-up in the corner of the seat and was conscious of the impersonal pressure of Alleyn’s arm and shoulder. Mr Fox, on the farther side, was a bulky man. She turned and saw Alleyn’s head silhouetted against the bluish window. An odd notion came into her head. ‘If Fée happens to calm down and take a good look at him,’ she thought, ‘it’ll be all up with GPF and the memory of Carlos and everybody.’ And with that her heart gave a leaden thump or two. ‘Oh, Ned,’ she thought, ‘how you could!’ She tried to face the full implication of the letter but almost at once shied away from it. ‘I’m miserable,’ she thought, ‘I’m unhappier than I’ve been for years and years.’

  ‘What,’ Alleyn’s voice said close beside her, ‘I wonder, is the precise interpretation of the initials: GPF? They seem to ring some bell in my atrocious memory but I haven’t got there yet. Why do you imagine “GPF?”’ She didn’t answer and after a moment he went on. ‘Wait a bit, though. Didn’t you say something about a magazine you were reading before you visited Lord Pastern in his study? Harmony? Was that it?’ He turned his head to look at her and she nodded. ‘And the editor of the tell-it-all-to-auntie page calls himself Guide, Phi
losopher and Friend? How does he sign his recipes for radiant living?’

  Carlisle mumbled: ‘Like that.’

  ‘And you had wondered if Miss de Suze had written to him,’ Alleyn said tranquilly. ‘Yes. Now, does this get us anywhere, do you imagine?’

  She made a non-committal sound. Unhappy recollections forced themselves upon her. Recollections of Félicité’s story about a correspondence with someone she had never met who had written her a ‘marvellous’ letter. Of Rivera reading her answer to this letter and making a scene about it. Of Ned Manx’s article in Harmony. Of Félicité’s behaviour after they all met to go to the Metronome. Of her taking the flower from Ned’s coat. And of his stooping his head to listen to her as they danced together.

  ‘Was Mr Manx,’ Alleyn’s voice asked, close beside her, ‘wearing his white carnation when he arrived for dinner?’

  ‘No,’ she said, too loudly. ‘No. Not till afterwards. There were white carnations on the table at dinner.’

  ‘Perhaps it was one of them.’

  ‘Then,’ she said quickly, ‘it doesn’t fit. The letter must have been written before he ever saw the carnation. It doesn’t fit. She said the letter came by district messenger. Ned wouldn’t have known.’

  ‘By district messenger, did she? We’ll have to check that. Perhaps we’ll find the envelope. Would you say,’ Alleyn continued, ‘that he seemed to be very much attached to her?’

  (Edward had said: ‘About Fée. Something very odd has occurred. I can’t explain but I’d like to think you understand.’)

  ‘Strongly attracted, would you think?’ Alleyn said.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘Do they see much of each other?’

  ‘I don’t know. He—he stayed at Duke’s Gate while he was flat hunting.’

  ‘Perhaps an attachment developed then. What do you think?’

  She shook her head. Alleyn waited. Carlisle now found his unstressed persistence intolerable. She felt her moorings go and was adrift in the darkness. A wretchedness of spirit that she was unable to control or understand took possession of her. ‘I won’t talk about it,’ she stammered. ‘It’s none of my business. I can’t go on like this. Let me go, please. Please let me go.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ll take you home.’

  When they arrived at Duke’s Gate, dawn was so far established that the houses with their blind windows and locked doors were clearly distinguishable in a wan half-light.

  The familiar street, emerging from night, had an air of emaciation and secrecy, Carlisle thought, and she was vaguely relieved when milk bottles jingled up a side alley, breaking across the blank emptiness. ‘Have you got a key?’ Alleyn said. He and Fox and the man from the front seat waited, while she groped in her bag. As she opened the door a second car drew up and four men got out. The men from the front seat joined them. She thought: ‘This makes us all seem very important. This is an important case. A case of murder.’

  In the old days she had come back from parties once or twice with Ned Manx at this hour. The indefinable house-smell made itself felt as they entered. She turned on a lamp and it was light in the silent hall. She saw herself reflected in the inner glass doors, her face stained with tears. Alleyn came in first. Standing there, in evening dress, with his hat in his hand, he might have been seeing her home, about to wish her goodbye. The other men followed quickly. ‘What happens now?’ she wondered. ‘Will he let me go now? What are they going to do?’

  Alleyn had drawn a paper from his pocket. ‘This is a search warrant,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hunt Lord Pastern out of his bed. It will do, I think, if—’

  He broke off, moved quickly to the shadowed staircase and up half a dozen steps. Fox and the other men stood quiet inside the doors. A little French clock in the stairwell ticked flurriedly. Upstairs on the first floor a door was flung open. A faint reflected light shone on Alleyn’s face. A voice, unmistakably Lord Pastern’s, said loudly: ‘I don’t give a damn how upset you are. You can have kittens if you like but you don’t go to bed till I’ve got my timetable worked out. Sit down.’

  With a faint grin Alleyn moved upstairs and Carlisle, after a moment’s hesitation, followed him.

  They were all in the drawing-room. Lady Pastern, still in evening dress and now very grey about the eyes and mouth, sat in a chair near the door. Félicité, who had changed into a housecoat and reduced her make-up, looked frail and lovely. Edward had evidently been sitting near her and had risen on Alleyn’s entrance. Lord Pastern, with his coat off and his sleeves turned up, sat at a table in the middle of the room. Sheets of paper lay before him and he had a pencil between his teeth. A little removed from this group, her hands folded in the lap of her woollen dressing-gown and her grey hair neatly braided down her back, sat Miss Henderson. A plainclothes officer stood inside the door. Carlisle knew all about him. He was the man who had escorted them home: hours ago, it seemed, in another age. She had given him the slip when she returned to the Metronome and now wondered, for the first time, how dim a view the police would take of this manoeuvre. The man looked awkwardly at Alleyn, who seemed about to speak to him as Carlisle entered, but stood aside to let her pass. Edward came quickly towards her. ‘Where have you been?’ he said angrily. ‘What’s the matter? I—’ He looked into her face. ‘Lisle,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  Lord Pastern glanced up. ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Where the devil did you get to, Lisle? I want you. Sit down.’

  ‘It’s like a scene from a play,’ she thought. ‘All of them sitting about exhausted, in a grand drawing-room. The third act of a thriller.’ She caught the eye of the plain-clothes officer who was looking at her with distaste.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I just walked out by the back door.’

  ‘I realize that, Miss,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t be in two places at once, can we?’ Carlisle added brightly. She was trying to avoid Félicité. Félicité was looking at her anxiously, obviously, with inquiring eyebrows.

  Lord Pastern said briskly: ‘Glad you’ve come, Alleyn, though I must say you’ve taken your time about it. I’ve been doin’ your job for you. Sit down.’

  Lady Pastern’s voice, sepulchral with fatigue, said: ‘May I suggest, George, that as in all probability this gentleman is about to arrest you, your choice of phrase is inappropriate.’

  ‘That’s a damn’ tiresome sort of thing to say, C,’ her husband rejoined. ‘Gets you nowhere. What you want,’ he continued, darting his pencil at Alleyn, ‘is a time-table. You want to know what we were all doin’ with ourselves before we went to the Metronome. System. All right. I’ve worked it out for you.’ He slapped the paper before him. ‘It’s incomplete without Breezy’s evidence, of course, but we can get that tomorrow. Lisle, there are one or two things I want from you. Come here.’

  Carlisle stood behind him and looked at Alleyn. His face was politely attentive, his eyes were on Lord Pastern’s notes. In her turn and in response to an impatient tattoo of the pencil, she too looked at them.

  She saw a sort of table, drawn up with ruled lines. Across the top, one each at the head of nine columns, she read their names: her own, Lady Pastern’s, Félicité’s, Edward’s, Lord Pastern’s, Bellairs’, Rivera’s, Miss Henderson’s, and Spence’s. Down the left hand side, Lord Pastern had written a series of times, beginning at 8.45 and ending at 10.30. These were ruled off horizontally and in the spaces thus formed, under each name, were notes as to the owner’s whereabouts. Thus, at ‘9.15 approx,’ it appeared that she and Lady Pastern had been in the drawing-room, Miss Henderson on her way upstairs, Félicité in the study, Rivera in the hall, Lord Pastern and Breezy Bellairs in the ballroom, and Spence in the servants’ quarters.

  ‘The times,’ Lord Pastern explained importantly, ‘are mostly only approximate. We know some of them for certain but not all. Thing is: it shows you the groupin’. Who was with who and who was alone. Method. Here y’are, Lisle. Go over
it carefully and check your entries.’

  He flung himself back in his chair and ruffled his hair. He reeked of complacency. Carlisle took up the pencil and found that her hand trembled. Exhaustion had suddenly overwhelmed her. She was nauseated and fuddled with fatigue. Lord Pastern’s time-table swam before her. She heard her voice saying, ‘I think you’ve got it right,’ and felt a hand under her arm. It was Alleyn’s. ‘Sit down,’ he said from an enormous distance. She was sitting down and Ned, close beside her, was making some sort of angry protest. She leant forward, propping her head on her hands. Presently it cleared and she listened, with an extraordinary sense of detachment, to what Alleyn was now saying.

  ‘…very helpful, thank you. And now, I’m sure, you’ll all be glad to get to bed. We shall be here during what’s left of the night: hardly anything, I’m afraid, but we shan’t disturb you.’

  They were on their feet. Carlisle, feeling very sick, wondered what would happen if she got to hers. She looked at the others through her fingers and thought that there was something a little wrong, a little misshapen, about all of them. Her aunt, for instance. Why had she not seen before that Lady Pastern’s body was too long and her head too big? It was so. And surely Félicité was fantastically narrow. Her skeleton must be all wrong: a tiny pelvis with the hip-bones jutting out from it like rocks. Carlisle’s eyes behind their sheltering fingers turned to Lord Pastern, and she thought how monstrous it was that his forehead should overhang the rest of his face: a blind over a shop-window; that his monkey’s cheeks should bunch themselves up when he was angry. Even Hendy: Hendy’s throat was like some bird’s and now that her hair was braided one saw that it was thin on top. Her scalp showed. They were caricatures, really, all of them. Subtly off-pitch: instruments very slightly out of tune. And Ned? He was behind her, but if she turned to look at him, what, in the perceptiveness born of nervous exhaustion, would she see? Were not his eyes black and small? Didn’t his mouth, when it smiled, twist and show canine teeth a little too long? But she would not look at Ned.