by Ngaio Marsh
‘Ah, by the way,’ Fox said, as they moved off, ‘that’s the other bit of information. Mr Bathgate rang the Yard and said he’d got hold of someone who writes regularly for this paper Harmony and it seems that Mr Friend is generally supposed to be in the office on the afternoon and evening of the last Sunday in the month, on account of the paper going to press the following week. This gentleman told Mr Bathgate that nobody on the regular staff except the editor ever sees Mr Friend. The story is he deals direct with the proprietors of the paper but popular opinion in Fleet Street reckons he owns the show himself. They reckon the secrecy business is nothing but a build-up.’
‘Silly enough to be incredible,’ Alleyn muttered. ‘But we’re knee-deep in imbecility. I suppose we can take it. All the same, I fancy we’ll turn up a better reason for Mr Friend’s elaborate incognito before this interminable Sunday is out.’
Fox said, with an air of quiet satisfaction: ‘I fancy we shall, sir. Mr Bathgate’s done quite a nice little job for us. It seems he pressed this friend of his a bit further and got him on to the subject of Mr Manx’s special articles for the paper and it came out that Mr Manx is often in their office.’
‘Discussing his special articles. Picking up his galley-sheets or whatever they do.’
‘Better than that, Mr Alleyn. This gentleman told Mr Bathgate that Mr Manx had been noticed coming out of GPF’s room on several occasions, one of them being a Sunday afternoon.’
‘Oh.’
‘Fits, doesn’t it?’
‘Like a glove. Good for Bathgate. We’ll ask him to meet us at the Harmony offices. This being the last Sunday in the month, Br’er Fox, we’ll see what we can see. But first—the Metronome.’
When Carlisle left the Yard, it was with a feeling of astonishment and aimless boredom. So it wasn’t Uncle George’s revolver after all. So there had been an intricate muddle that someone would have to unravel. Alleyn would unravel it and someone else would be arrested and she ought to be alarmed and agitated because of this. Perhaps, in the hinterland of her emotions, alarm and agitation were already established and waited to pounce, but in the meantime she was only drearily miserable and tired. She was pestered by all sorts of minor considerations. The thought of returning to Duke’s Gate and trying to cope with the situation there was intolerable. It wasn’t so much the idea that Uncle George or Aunt Cile or Fée might have murdered Carlos Rivera that Carlisle found appalling: it was the prospect of their several personalities forcing themselves upon her own; their demands upon her attention and courtesy. She had a private misery, a galling unhappiness, and she wanted to be alone with it.
While she walked irresolutely towards the nearest bus stop, she remembered that not far from here, in a cul-de-sac called Costers Row, was Edward Manx’s flat. If she walked to Duke’s Gate she would pass the entry into this blind street. She was persuaded that she did not want to see Edward, that an encounter would, indeed, be unbearable; yet, aimlessly, she began to walk on. Church-going people returning home with an air of circumspection made a pattering sound in the empty streets. Groups of sparrows flustered and pecked. The day was mildly sunny. The Yard man, detailed to keep observation on Carlisle, threaded his way through a trickle of pedestrians and recalled the Sunday dinners of his boyhood. Beef, he thought, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, and afterwards a heavy hour or so in the front room. Carlisle gave him no trouble at all but he was hungry.
He saw her hesitate at the corner of Costers Row and himself halted to light a cigarette. She glanced along the file of housefronts and then, at a more rapid pace, crossed the end of the row and continued on her way. At the same time a dark young man came out of a house six doors down Costers Row and descended the steps in time to catch a glimpse of her. He shouted: ‘Lisle!’ and waved his arm. She hurried on, and once past the corner, out of his sight, broke into a run. ‘Hi Lisle!’ he shouted. ‘Lisle!’ and loped after her. The Yard man watched him go by, turn the corner, and overtake her. She spun round at the touch of his hand on her arm and they stood face to face.
A third man who had come out of some doorway farther up the cul-de-sac walked briskly down the path on the same side as the Yard man. They greeted each other like old friends and shook hands. The Yard man offered cigarettes and lit a match. ‘How’s it going, Bob?’ he said softly. ‘That your bird?’
‘That’s him. Who’s the lady?’
‘Mine,’ said the first, whose back was turned to Carlisle.
‘Not bad,’ his colleague muttered, glancing at her.
‘I’d just as soon it was my dinner, though.’
‘Argument?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Keeping their voices down.’
Their movements were slight and casual: acquaintances pausing for a rather aimless chat.
‘What’s the betting?’ said the first.
‘They’ll separate. I never have the luck.’
‘You’re wrong, though.’
‘Going back to his place?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘I’ll toss you for it.’
‘OK.’ The other pulled his clenched hand out of his pocket. ‘Your squeak,’ he said.
‘Heads.’
‘It’s tails.’
‘I never get the luck.’
‘I’ll ring in then and get something to eat. Relieve you in half an hour, Bob.’
They shook hands again heartily as Carlisle and Edward Manx, walking glumly towards them, turned into Costers Row.
Carlisle had seen Edward Manx out of the corner of her eye as she crossed the end of the cul-de-sac. Unreasoned panic took hold of her. She lengthened her stride, making a show of looking at her watch, and when he called her name, broke into a run. Her heart pounded and her mouth was dry. She had the sensation of a fugitive in a dream. She was the pursued and, since even in her sudden alarm she was confusedly aware of something in herself that frightened her, she was also the pursuer. This nightmarish conviction was intensified by the sound of his feet clattering after her and of his voice, completely familiar but angry, calling her to stop.
Her feet were leaden, he was overtaking her quite easily. Her anticipation of his seizing her from behind was so vivid that when his hand actually closed on her arm it was something of a relief. He jerked her round to face him and she was glad to feel angry.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said breathlessly.
‘That’s my business,’ she panted, and added defiantly: ‘I’m late. I’ll be late for lunch. Aunt Cile will be furious.’
‘Don’t be an ass, Lisle. You ran when you saw me. You heard me call out and you kept on running. What the devil d’you mean by it?’
His heavy eyebrows were drawn together and his lower lip jutted out.
‘Please let me go, Ned,’ she said. ‘I really am late.’
‘That’s utterly childish and you know it. I’m getting to the bottom of this. Come back to the flat. I want to talk to you.’
‘Aunt Cile…’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! I’ll ring Duke’s Gate and say you’re lunching here.’
‘No.’
For a moment he looked furious. He still held her arm and his fingers bit into it, hurting her. Then he said more gently: ‘You can’t expect me to let a thing like this pass: it’s a monstrous state of affairs. I must know what’s gone wrong. Last night, after we got back from the Metronome, I could tell there was something. Please, Lisle. Don’t let’s stand here snarling at each other. Come back to the flat.’
‘I’d rather not. Honestly. I know I’m behaving queerly.’
He had slipped the palm of his hand inside her arm, pressing it against him. His hand was gentler now but she couldn’t escape it. He began to speak persuasively and she remembered how, even when they were children, she had never been able to resist his persuasiveness. ‘You will, Lisle, won’t you? Don’t be queer, I can’t bear all this peculiarity. Come along.’
She looked helplessly at the two men on the oppos
ite corner, thinking vaguely that she had seen one of them before. ‘I wish I knew him,’ she thought, ‘I wish I could stop and speak to him.’
They turned into Costers Row. ‘There’s some food in the flat. It’s quite a nice flat. I want you to see it. We’ll have lunch together, shan’t we? I’m sorry I was churlish, Lisle.’
His key clicked in the lock of the blue door. They were in a small lobby. ‘It’s a basement flat,’ he said, ‘but not at all bad. There’s even a garden. Down those stairs.’
‘You go first,’ she said. She actually wondered if that would give her a chance to bolt and if she would have the nerve to do it. He looked fixedly at her.
‘I don’t believe I trust you,’ he said lightly. ‘On you go.’
He followed close on her heels down the steep stairs and took her arm again as he reached past her and unlocked the second door.
‘Here we are,’ he said, pushing it open. He gave her a little shove forward.
It was a large, low-ceilinged room, white-washed and oak-beamed. French windows opened on a little yard with potted flowers and plane-trees in tubes. The furniture was modern: steel chairs with rubber-foam upholstery, a carefully planned desk, a divan bed with a scarlet cover. A rigorous still-life hung above the fireplace, the only picture in the room. The bookshelves looked as if they had been stocked completely from a Left Book shop. It was a scrupulously tidy room.
‘The oaken beams are strict stockbroker’s Tudor,’ he was saying. ‘Completely functionless, of course, and pretty revolting. Otherwise not so bad, do you think? Sit down while I find a drink.’
She sat on the divan and only half-listened to him. His belated pretence that, after all, this was a pleasant and casual encounter did nothing to reassure her. He was still angry. She took the drink he brought and found her hand was shaking so much she couldn’t carry the glass to her lips. The drink spilled. She bent her head down and took a quick gulp at it, hoping this would steady her. She rubbed furtively with her handkerchief at the splashes on the cover and knew, without looking, that he watched her.
‘Shall we go in, boots and all, or wait till after lunch?’ he said.
‘There’s nothing to talk about. I’m sorry to be such an ass, but after all it was a bit of a night. I suppose murder doesn’t suit me.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘that won’t do. You don’t bolt like a rabbit at the sight of me because somebody killed a piano accordionist.’ And after a long pause he added smoothly, ‘Unless, by any chance, you think I killed him. Do you?’
‘Don’t be a dolt,’ she said, and by some fortuitous mischance, an accident quite beyond her control and unrelated to any recognizable impulse, her answer sounded unconvincing and too violent. It was the last question she had expected from him.
‘Well, at least I’m glad of that,’ he said. He sat on the table near to her. She did not look up at him but straight before her at his left hand, lying easily across his knee. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘what have I done? There is something I’ve done. What is it?’
She thought: ‘I’ll have to tell him something: part of it. Not the real thing itself but the other bit that doesn’t matter so much.’ She began to search for an approach, a line to take, some kind of credible presentation, but she was deadly tired and she astonished herself by saying abruptly and loudly: ‘I’ve found out about GPF.’
His hand moved swiftly out of her range of sight. She looked up expecting to be confronted by his anger or astonishment but he had turned aside, skewing round to put his glass down on the table behind him.
‘Have you?’ he said. ‘That’s awkward, isn’t it?’ He moved quickly away from her and across the room to a wall cupboard which he opened. With his back turned to her he said: ‘Who told you? Did Cousin George?’
‘No,’ she said wearily, surprised. ‘No, I saw the letter.’
‘Which letter?’ he asked, groping in the cupboard.
‘The one to Félicité.’
‘Oh,’ said Manx slowly. ‘That one.’ He turned round. He had a packet of cigarettes in his hand and came towards her holding it out. She shook her head and he lit one himself with steady hands. ‘How did you come to see it?’ he said.
‘It was lost. It—I—oh, what does it matter? The whole thing was perfectly clear. Need we go on?’
‘I still don’t see why this discovery should inspire you to spring like an athlete at the sight of me.’
‘I don’t think I know myself.’
‘What were you doing last night?’ he demanded suddenly. ‘Where did you go after we got back to Duke’s Gate? Why did you turn up again with Alleyn? What were you up to?’
It was impossible to tell him that Félicité had lost the letter. That would lead at once to his discovering that Alleyn had read it: worse than that, it would lead inevitably to the admittance, perhaps the discussion, of his new attitude towards Félicité. ‘He might,’ she thought, ‘tell me, point-blank, that he is in love with Fée and I’m in no shape to jump that hurdle.’
So she said: ‘It doesn’t matter what I was up to. I can’t tell you. In a way it would be a breach of confidence.’
‘Was it something to do with this GPF business?’ Manx said sharply, and after a pause: ‘You haven’t told anybody about this discovery, have you?’
She hadn’t told Alleyn. He had found out for himself. Miserably she shook her head.
He stooped over her. ‘You mustn’t tell anybody, Lisle. That’s important. You realize how important, don’t you?’
Isolated sentences, of an indescribable archness, flashed up in her memory of that abominable page. ‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ she said, looking away from his intent and frowning eyes, and then suddenly burst out: ‘It’s such ghastly stuff, Ned. That magazine. It’s like one of our novelettes gone hay-wire. How you could!’
‘My articles are all right,’ he said, after a pause: ‘So that’s it, is it? You are a purist, aren’t you?’
She clasped her hands together and fixed her gaze on them. ‘I must tell you,’ she said, ‘that if, in some hellish muddled way, entirely beyond my comprehension, this GPF business has anything to do with Rivera’s death—’
‘Well?’
‘I mean, if it’s going to—I mean—’
‘You mean that if Alleyn asks you point-blank about it, you’ll tell him?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I see.’
Carlisle’s head ached. She had been unable to face her breakfast and the drink he had given her had taken effect. Their confused antagonism, the sense of being trapped in this alien room, her personal misery: all these circumstances were joined in a haze of uncertainty. The whole scene had become unreal and unendurable. When he put his hands on her shoulders and said loudly: ‘There’s more to it than this. Come on, what is it?’ she seemed to hear him from a great distance. His hands were bearing down hard. ‘I will know,’ he was saying.
At the far end of the room a telephone bell began to ring. She watched him go to it and take the receiver off. His voice changed its quality and became the easy friendly voice she had known for so long.
‘Hallo? Hallo, Fée darling. I’m terribly sorry, I should have rung up. They kept Lisle for hours grilling her at the Yard. Yes: I ran into her and she asked me to telephone and say she was so late she’d try for a meal somewhere at hand, so I asked her to have one with me. Please tell Cousin Cecile it’s entirely my fault and not hers: I promised to ring for her.’ He looked at Carlisle over the telephone. ‘She’s perfectly all right,’ he said. ‘I’m looking after her.’
If any painter, a surrealist for choice, attempted to set the figure of a working detective officer against an appropriate and composite background, he would turn his attention to rooms overlaid with films of dust, to objects suspended in unaccustomed dinginess, to ash-trays and tablecloths, unemptied waste bins, tables littered with powder, dirty glasses, disordered chairs, stale food, and garments that retained an unfresh smell of disuse.
Whe
n Alleyn and Fox entered the Metronome at 12.30 on this Sunday morning, it smelt of Saturday night. The restaurant, serveries and kitchens had been cleaned, but the vestibule and offices were untouched and upon them the aftermath of festivity lay like a thin pall of dust. Three men in shirt sleeves greeted Alleyn with that tinge of gloomy satisfaction which marks an unsuccessful search.
‘No luck?’ Alleyn said.
‘No luck yet, sir.’
‘There’s the passage that runs through from the foyer and behind the offices to the back premises,’ said Fox. ‘That’s the way the deceased must have gone to make his entrance from the far end of the restaurant.’
‘We’ve been along there, Mr Fox.’
‘Plumbing?’
‘Not yet, Mr Alleyn.’
‘I’d try that next.’ Alleyn pointed through the two open doors of Caesar Bonn’s office into the inner room. ‘Begin there,’ he said.
He went alone into the restaurant. The table he and Troy had sat at was the second on the right. The chairs were turned up on its surface. He replaced one of them and seated himself. ‘For twenty years,’ he thought, ‘I have trained my memory and trained it rigorously. This is the first time I have been my own witness in a case of this sort. Am I any good or am I rotten?’
Sitting alone there, he recreated his scene, beginning with small things: the white cloth, the objects on the table, Troy’s long hand close to his own and just within his orbit of vision. He waited until these details were firm in his memory and then reached out a little farther. At the next table, her back towards him, sat Félicité de Suze in her red dress. She turned a white carnation in her fingers and looked sidelong at the man beside her. He was between Alleyn and the lamp on their table. His profile was rimmed with light. His head was turned towards the band dais. On his right, more clearly visible, more brilliantly lit, was Carlisle Wayne. In order to watch the performance she had swung round with her back half-turned to the table. Her hair curved back from her temples. There was a look of compassion and bewilderment in her face. Beyond Carlisle, with her back to the wall, a heavy shape almost obscured by the others, sat Lady Pastern. As they moved he could see in turn her stony coiffure, her important shoulders, the rigid silhouette of her bust; but never her face.