Swing, Brother, Swing

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that you and Rivera had parted as friends?’

  Félicité shook her head vaguely and raised her eyebrows. ‘Even that makes it sound too important,’ she said. ‘It all just came peacefully unstuck.’

  ‘And there was no quarrel, for instance, when you and he were in the study between a quarter and half-past nine? Or later, between Mr Manx and Mr Rivera?’

  There was a long pause. Félicité bent forward and jerked at the strap of her shoe. ‘What in the world,’ she said indistinctly, ‘put these quaint little notions into your head?’

  ‘Are they completely false?’

  ‘I know,’ she said loudly and cheerfully. She looked up into his face. ‘You’ve been gossiping with the servants.’ She appealed to Fox. ‘Hasn’t he?’ she demanded playfully.

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say, Miss de Suze,’ said Fox blandly.

  ‘How could you!’ she accused Alleyn. ‘Which of them was it? Was it Hortense? My poor Mr Alleyn, you don’t know Hortense. She’s the world’s most accomplished liar! She just can’t help herself, poor thing. It’s pathological.’

  ‘So there was no quarrel?’ Alleyn said. ‘Between any of you?’

  ‘My dear, haven’t I told you?’

  ‘Then why,’ he asked, ‘did Mr Manx punch Mr Rivera over the ear?’

  Félicité’s eyes and mouth opened. Then she hunched her shoulders and caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth. He could have sworn she was astonished and in a moment it was evident that she was gratified.

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘Honestly? Ned did? Well, I must say I call that a handsome tribute. When did it happen? Before we went down to the Met? After dinner? When?’

  Alleyn looked steadily at her: ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that perhaps you could tell me that.’

  ‘I? But I promise you…’

  ‘Had he got a trickle of blood on his ear when you talked to him in the study? On the occasion, you know, when you say there was no quarrel?’

  ‘Let me think,’ said Félicité, and rested her head on her crossed arms. But the movement was not swift enough. He had seen the blank look of panic in her eyes. ‘No.’ Her voice muffled by her arms said slowly, ‘No, I’m sure…’

  There was some change of light above, where the stairs ran up to the first landing. He looked up. Carlisle Wayne stood there in the shadow. Her figure and posture still retained the effect of movement, as if while she came downstairs, she had suddenly been held in suspension as the action of a motion picture may be suspended to give emphasis to a specific moment. Over Félicité’s bent head, Alleyn with a slight movement of his hand arrested Carlisle’s descent. Félicité had begun to speak again.

  ‘After all,’ she was saying, ‘one is a bit uplifted. It’s not every day in the week that people give other people cauliflower ears for love of one’s bright eyes.’ She raised her face and looked at him. ‘How naughty of Ned, but how sweet of him. Darling Ned!’

  ‘No, really!’ said Carlisle strongly, ‘this is too much!’

  Félicité, with a stifled cry, was on her feet.

  Alleyn said: ‘Hallo, Miss Wayne. Good-morning to you. Have you any theory about why Mr Manx gave Rivera a clip over the ear? He did give him a clip, you know. Why?’

  ‘If you must know,’ Carlisle said in a high voice, ‘it was because Rivera kissed me when we met on the landing.’

  ‘Good lord!’ Alleyn ejaculated, ‘why didn’t you say so before? Kissed you, did he? Did you like it?’

  ‘Don’t be a bloody fool!’ Carlisle shouted and bolted upstairs.

  ‘I must say,’ Félicité said, ‘I call that rather poor of darling Lisle.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse us,’ Alleyn said. He and Fox left her staring thoughtfully at her fingernails.

  ‘A shave,’ Alleyn said in the car, ‘a bath and with luck two hours’ sleep. I’ll take it out at home. We’ll send the stuff on to the experts. What about you, Fox? Troy will be delighted to fix you up.’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir, but I wouldn’t think of troubling Mrs Alleyn. There’s a little place—’

  ‘I’ll be damned to your little place. I’ve had enough insurbordination from you, my lad. To hell with you. You’re coming to us.’

  Fox accepted this singular invitation in the spirit in which it was made. He took out his spectacles, Alleyn’s note-book and Lord Pastern’s time-table. Alleyn dragged his palm across his jaw, shuddered, yawned and closed his eyes. ‘A hideous curse on this case,’ he murmured, and appeared to sleep. Fox began to whisper to himself. The car slipped down Cliveden Place, into Grosvenor Place, into Hyde Park Corner. ‘T, t, t,’ Fox whispered over the time-table.

  ‘You sound,’ Alleyn said without opening his eyes, ‘like Dr Johnson on his way to Streatham. Can you crack your joints, Foxkin?’

  ‘I see what you mean about this ruddy time-table.’

  ‘What did I mean? Split me and sink me if I know what I meant.’

  ‘Well, sir, our customer, whoever he or she may be, and you know my view on the point, had to be in the ballroom to pick up the bit of umbrella shaft, in the drawing-room to collect the stiletto and alone in the study to fix the stiletto to the bit of umbrella shaft with plastic wood.’

  ‘You’ll be coming round the mountain when you come.’

  ‘It is a bit of a mountain and that’s a fact. According to what the young lady, Miss Wayne, I mean, told you, sir, this perishing parasol was all right before dinner when she was in the ballroom and handled it, and according to her, his lordship was in the study drawing the bullets out of the cartridges. If that’s correct he didn’t get a chance to play the fool with the parasol before dinner. What’s more it fits in with his lordship’s own statement, which Bellairs can speak to, if he ever wakes up, that he took the parasol to bits on the piano after dinner. For fun.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘All right. Now where does this get us? If the time-table’s correct, his lordship was never alone in the study after that.’

  ‘And the only time he was alone at all, moreover, he was up and down the house, bellowing like a bull for his sombrero.’

  ‘Doesn’t that look like establishing an alibi?’ Fox demanded.

  ‘It looks a bit like the original alibi itself, Br’er Fox.’

  ‘He might have carried the tube of plastic wood round in his pocket.’

  ‘So he might. Together with the bit of parasol and the stiletto, pausing in mid-bellow to fix the job.’

  ‘Gah! How about him just taking the stuff in his pocket to the Metronome and fixing everything there?’

  ‘Oh, lord! When? How?’

  ‘Lavatory?’ Fox suggested hopefully.

  ‘And when did he put the weapon in the gun? Skelton looked down the barrel just before they started playing, don’t forget.’

  The car stopped at traffic lights in Piccadilly. Fox contemplated the Green Park with disapproval. Alleyn still kept his eyes shut. Big Ben struck seven.

  ‘By gum!’ Fox said, bringing his palm down on his knee, ‘by gum, how about this? How about his lordship in his damn-your-eyes fashion fitting the weapon into the gun while he sat there behind his drums? In front of everybody, while one of the other turns was on? It’s amazing what you can do when you brazen it out. What’s that yarn they’re always quoting, sir? I’ve got it. The Purloined Letter! Proving that if you make a thing obvious enough nobody notices it?’

  Alleyn opened one eye. ‘The Purloined Letter,’ he said. He opened the other eye. ‘Fox, my cabbage, my rare edition, my objet d’art, my own special bit of bijouterie, be damned if I don’t think you’ve caught an idea. Come on. Let’s further think of this.’

  They talked intensively until the car pulled up, in a cul-de-sac off Coventry Street, before Alleyn’s flat.

  Early sunlight streamed into the little entrance hall. Beneath a Benozzo Gozzoli, a company of dahlias, paper-white in a blue bowl, cast translucent shadows on a white parchment wall. Alleyn looked about him con
tentedly.

  ‘Troy’s under orders not to get up till eight,’ he said. ‘You take first whack at the bath, Fox, while I have a word with her. Use my razor. Wait a bit.’ He disappeared and returned with towels. ‘There’ll be something to eat at half-past nine,’ he said. ‘The visitor’s room’s all yours, Fox. Sleep well.’

  ‘Very kind, I’m sure,’ said Fox. ‘May I send my compliments to Mrs Alleyn, sir?’

  ‘She’ll be delighted to receive them. See you later.’

  Troy was awake in her white room, sitting up with her head aureoled in short locks of hair. ‘Like a faun,’ Alleyn said, ‘or a bronze dahlia. Are you well this morning?’

  ‘Bouncing, thanks. And you?’

  ‘As you see. Unhousled, unannealed and un-everything that’s civilized.’

  ‘A poor state of affairs,’ said Troy. ‘You look like the gentleman in that twenty-foot canvas in the Luxembourg. Boiled shirt in dents and gazing out over Paris through lush curtains. I think it’s called. “The Hopeless Dawn”! His floozy is still asleep in an elephantine bed, you remember.’

  ‘I don’t remember. Talking of floozies, oughtn’t you to be asleep yourself?’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ Troy complained, ‘I haven’t been bitten by the tsetse-fly. It’s getting on for nine hours since I went to bed, damn it.’

  ‘OK OK.’

  ‘What’s happened, Rory?’

  ‘One of the kind we don’t fancy.’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  ‘You’ll hear about it anyway, so I may as well tell you. It’s that florid number we saw playing the piano accordion, the one with the teeth and hair.’

  ‘You don’t mean—’

  ‘Somebody pinked him with a sort of dagger made out of a bit of a parasol and needlework stiletto.’

  ‘Gatcha!’

  He explained at some length.

  ‘Well but…’ Troy stared at her husband. ‘When have you got to be at the Yard?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘All right. You’ve got two hours and time for breakfast. Good morning, darling.’

  ‘Fox is in the bathroom. I know I’m not fit for a lady’s bedchamber.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘If you didn’t, nobody.’ He put his arm across her and stooped his head. ‘Troy,’ he said, ‘may I ask Fox this morning?’

  ‘If you want to, my dearest.’

  ‘I think I might. How much, at a rough guess, would you say I loved you?’

  ‘Words fail me,’ said Troy, imitating the late Harry Tate.

  ‘And me.’

  ‘There’s Mr Fox coming out of the bathroom. Away with you.’

  ‘I suppose so. Good-morning, Mrs Quiverful.’

  On his way to the bathroom Alleyn looked in upon Fox. He found him lying on the visitor’s room bed, without his jacket but incredibly neat; his hair damp, his jaw gleaming, his shirt stretched tight over this thick pectoral muscles. His eyes were closed but he opened them as Alleyn looked in.

  ‘I’ll call you at half-past nine,’ Alleyn said. ‘Did you know you were going to be a godfather, Br’er Fox?’ And as Fox’s eyes widened he shut the door and went whistling to the bathroom.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Yard

  AT TEN-THIRTY IN THE Chief-Inspector’s room at New Scotland Yard, routine procedure following a case of homicide was efficiently established.

  Alleyn sat at his desk taking reports from Detective-Sergeants Gibson, Watson, Scott and Sallis. Mr Fox, with that air of good humour crossed with severity, which was his habitual reaction to reports following observation, listened critically to his juniors, each of whom held his official notebook. Six men going soberly about their day’s work. Earlier that morning, in other parts of London, Captain Entwhistle, an expert on ballistics, had fitted a dart made from a piece of parasol into a revolver and had fired it into a bag of sand; Mr Carrick, a Government analyst, had submitted a small cork to various tests for certain oils; and Sir Grandy Morton, the famous pathologist, assisted by Curtis, had opened Carlos Rivera’s thorax, and, with the greatest delicacy, removed his heart.

  ‘All right,’ Alleyn said. ‘Get yourselves chairs and smoke if you want to. This is liable to be a session.’

  When they were settled, he pointed the stem of his pipe at a heavy-jawed, straw-coloured, detective-sergeant with a habitually startled expression. ‘You searched the deceased’s rooms, didn’t you, Gibson? Let’s take you first.’

  Gibson thumbed his note-book open, contemplated it in apparent astonishment and embarked on a high-pitched recital.

  ‘The deceased man. Carlos Rivera,’ he said, ‘lived at 102 Bedford Mansions, Austerly Square, SWI. Service Flat, Rental £500 a year.’

  ‘Why don’t we all play piano accordions?’ Fox asked of nobody in particular.

  ‘At 3 a.m. on the morning of June 1st,’ Gibson continued in a shrillish voice, ‘having obtained a search warrant, I effected entrance to above premises by means of a key on a ring removed from the body of the deceased. The flat consists of an entrance lobby, six-by-eight feet, a sitting room twelve-by-fourteen, and a bedroom nine-by-eleven feet. Furnishings:—Sitting room: Carpet, purple, thick. Curtains, full length, purple satin.’

  ‘Stay me with flagons!’ Alleyn muttered. ‘Purple.’

  ‘You might call it morve, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘Well, go on.’

  ‘Couch, upholstered green velvet, three armchairs, ditto, dining-table, six dining-chairs, open fireplace. Walls painted fawn. Cushions: Seven. Green and purple satin.’ He glanced at Alleyn. ‘I beg pardon, Mr Alleyn? Anything wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Go on.’

  ‘Bookcase. Fourteen books. Foreign. Recognized four as on police lists. Pictures: four.’

  ‘What were they like?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Never you mind, you dirty old man,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Two were nood studies, Mr Fox, what you might call heavy pin-ups. The others were a bit more so. Cigarette boxes: four. Cigarettes, commercial product. Have taken one from each box. Wall safe. Combination lock but found note of number in deceased’s pocket book. Contents:—’

  ‘Half a minute,’ Alleyn said. ‘Have all the flats got these safes?’

  ‘I ascertained from inquiries, sir, that deceased had his installed.’

  ‘Right. Go on.’

  ‘Contents. I removed a number of papers, two ledgers or account books and a locked cash box containing three hundred pounds in notes of low denomination, and thirteen shillings in silver.’ Here Gibson paused of his own accord.

  ‘There now!’ said Fox. ‘Now we may be on to something.’

  ‘I left a note of the contents of the safe in the safe and I locked the safe,’ said Gibson, on a note of uncertainty, induced perhaps by misgivings about his prose style. ‘Shall I produce the contents now, sir, or go on to the bedroom?’

  ‘I doubt if I can take the bedroom,’ Alleyn said. ‘But go on.’

  ‘It was done up in black, sir. Black satin.’

  ‘Do you put all this in your notes?’ Fox demanded suddenly. ‘All this about colours and satin?’

  ‘They tell us to be thorough, Mr Fox.’

  ‘There’s a medium to all things,’ Fox pronounced sombrely. ‘I beg pardon, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘Not at all, Br’er Fox. The bedroom, Gibson.’

  But there wasn’t anything much to the purpose in Gibson’s meticulous account of Rivera’s bedroom unless the revelation that he wore black satin pyjamas with embroidered initials could be called, as Alleyn suggested, damning and conclusive evidence as to character. Gibson produced the spoil of the wall-safe and they examined it. Alleyn took the ledgers and Fox the bundle of correspondence. For some time there was silence, broken only by the whisper of papers.

  Presently, however, Fox brought his palm down on his knees and Alleyn, without looking up, said: ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Peculiar,’ Fox grunted. ‘Listen to this, sir.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘�
��How tender,”’ Mr Fox began, ‘“is the first burgeoning of love! How delicate the tiny bud, how easily cut with frost! Touch it with gentle fingers, dear lad, lest its fragrance be lost to you forever.”’

  ‘Cor!’ whispered Detective-Sergeant Scott.

  ‘“You say,”’ Mr Fox continued, ‘“that she is changeable. So is a day in spring. Be patient. Wait for the wee petals to unfold. If you would care for a very special, etc.”’ Fox removed his spectacles and contemplated his superior.

  ‘What do you mean by your “etc.,” Fox? Why don’t you go on?’

  ‘That’s what it says. Etc. Then it stops. Look.’

  He flattened a piece of creased blue letter paper out on the desk before Alleyn. It was covered with typing, closely spaced. The Duke’s Gate address was stamped on the top.

  Alleyn said: ‘What’s that you’re holding back?’

  Fox laid his second exhibit before him. It was a press-cutting and printed on paper of the kind used in the more exotic magazines. Alleyn read aloud: ‘“Dear GPF, I am engaged to a young lady who at times is very affectionate and then again goes cold on me. It’s not halitosis because I asked her and she said it wasn’t and wished I wouldn’t harp on about it. I am twenty-two, five-foot eleven in my socks and well built. I drag down £550 per annum. I am an A grade motor mechanic and I have prospects of a rise. She reckons she loves me and yet she acts like this. What should be my attitude? Spark-plug.”’

  ‘I should advise a damn’ good hiding,’ Alleyn said. ‘Poor old Spark-plug.’

  ‘Go on, sir. Read the answer.’

  Alleyn continued: ‘“Dear Spark-plug. Yours is not as unusual a problem as perhaps you, in your distress of mind, incline to believe. How tender is the first burgeoning—” Yes, here we go again. Yes. All right. Fox. You’ve found apparently, a bit of the rough draft and the finished article. The draft, typed on Duke’s Gate letter-paper, looks as if it had been crumpled up in somebody’s pocket, doesn’t it? Half a minute.’