by Ngaio Marsh
“T’uh!” said the Ancreds softly.
“Are we to be told,” Pauline asked, “how long she proposes to—?”
“I should imagine,” said Desdemona, “no longer than it takes for the Will to become effective.”
“Well, but I mean to say,” Cedric began, and they all turned their heads towards him. “If it’s not too inappropriate and premature, one wonders rather, or doesn’t one, if darling Sonia is in quite the same position unmarried as she would have been as the Old — as dearest Grandpapa’s widow? Or not?”
An attentive stillness fell upon the table. It was broken by Thomas: “Yes — well, of course,” he said, looking blandly about him, “won’t that depend on how the Will is made out? Whether her share is left to ‘Sonia Orrincourt,’ you know, or to ‘my wife, Sonia,’ and all that.”
Pauline and Desdemona stared for a moment at Thomas. Cedric smoothed his hair with two unsteady fingers. Fenella and Paul looked stolidly at their plates. Millamant, with a muffled attempt at easiness, said: “There’s no need to jump that fence, surely, till we meet it.” Pauline and Desdemona exchanged glances. Millamant had used the sacred “we”.
“I think it’s pretty ghastly,” said Fenella abruptly, “to begin talking about Grandfather’s Will when he’s up there — lying there—” She broke off, biting her lip. Troy saw Paul reach for her hand. Jenetta Ancred, who had been silent throughout luncheon, gave her daughter a smile, half-deprecating, half-anxious. “How she dislikes it,” Troy thought, “when Fenella behaves like an Ancred.”
“Darling Fen,” Cedric murmured, “you, of course, can afford to be grand and virtuous over the Will. I mean, you are so definitely out of that party, aren’t you?”
“That’s a pretty offensive remark, Cedric,” said Paul.
“Has everyone finished?” asked Pauline in a hurry. “If so, Mrs. Alleyn, shall we—?”
Troy excused herself from the post-prandial gathering in the drawing-room.
As she entered the hall a car drew up outside. Barker, who seemed to have been expecting it, was already in the outer porch. He admitted three pale men, dressed in London clothes of a particularly black character. They wore wide black ties. Two of them carried black cases. The third, glancing at Troy, spoke in a muted and inaudible voice.
“This way, if you please,” said Barker, ushering them into a small waiting-room across the hall. “I will inform Sir Cedric.”
After the newcomers had been shut away and Barker had gone on his errand, Troy stood digesting the official recognition of Cedric’s ascendancy. Her glance strayed to a table where, as she had observed, the senior of the three men, with a practised modesty, suggestive almost of sleight of hand, had dropped or slid a card. He had, indeed, given it a little push with his forefinger, so that it lay, partly concealed, under a book which Troy herself had brought from the library to solace her afternoon. The card was engraved in a type slightly heavier and more black than that of a normal visiting card:
“MORTIMER, SON & LOAME
Undertakers—”
Troy lifted her book, exposing the hidden corner of the card, “—and Embalmers,” she read.
CHAPTER IX
Alleyn
i
By an alteration in the rhythm of the ship’s progress, suggestive almost of a physiological change, her passengers became aware of the end of their long voyage. Her pulse died. It was replaced by sounds of blind waves washing along her sides; of gulls, of voices, of chains, and, beyond these, of movement along the wharves and in the city beyond them.
At early dawn the Port of London looked as wan and expectant as an invalid already preparing for a return to vigour. Thin mist still hung about sheds and warehouses. Muffled lights were strung like a dim necklace along the waterfront. Frost glinted on roofs and bollards and ropes. Alleyn had gripped the rail for so long that its cold had bitten through his gloves into the palms of his hands. Groups of people stood about the wharves, outward signs of a life from which the passengers were, for a rapidly diminishing period, still remote. These groups, befogged by their own breath, were composed for the main part of men.
There were three women, and one wore a scarlet cap. Inspector Fox had come out in the pilot’s boat. Alleyn had not hoped for this, and had been touched and delighted to meet him; but now it was impossible to talk to Fox.
“Mrs. Alleyn,” said Fox, behind him, “is wearing a red cap. If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Alleyn, I ought to have a word with a chap — The car’s just behind the Customs shed. I’ll meet you there.”
When Alleyn turned to thank him, he was already walking away, squarely overcoated, tidy, looking just like his job.
Now only a dark channel, a ditch, a gutter lay between the ship and the wharf. Bells rang sharply. Men moved forward to the bollards and stared up at the ship. One raised his hand and shouted a greeting in a clear voice. Ropes were flung out, and a moment later the final stoppage was felt dully throughout the ship.
That was Troy down there. She walked forward. Her hands were jammed down in the pockets of her overcoat. She looked along the deck, scowling a little, her gaze moving towards him. In these last seconds, while he waited for her to discover him, Alleyn knew that, like himself, she was nervous. He lifted his hand. They looked at each other, and a smile of extraordinary intimacy broke across her face.
ii
“Three years seven months and twenty-four days,” said Alleyn that afternoon. “It’s a hell of a time to be without your wife.” He looked at Troy sitting on the hearth-rug hugging her knees. “Or rather,” he added, “to be away from you, Troy. From you, who, so astonishingly happens to be my wife. I’ve been getting myself into such a hullabaloo about it.”
“Wondering,” Troy asked, “if we’d run short of conversation and feel shy?”
“You too, then?”
“It does happen, they say. It might easily happen.”
“I even considered the advisability of quoting Othello on his arrival at Cyprus. How would you have reacted, my darling, if I had laid hold upon you under letter A in the Customs shed and begun: ‘Oh, my fair warrior!’ ”
“I should probably have made a snappy come-back with something from Macbeth.”
“Why Macbeth?”
“To explain that would be to use up all the conversation I’d saved up on my own account. Rory—”
“My love?”
“I’ve been having a very queer time with Macbeth.”
She was looking doubtfully at him from under her ruffled forelock. “You may not care to hear about it,” she mumbled. “It’s a long story.”
“It won’t be too long,” Alleyn said, “if it’s you who tells it.”
Watching her, he thought: “That’s made her shy again. We are to re-learn each other.” Alleyn’s habit of mind was accurate and exhaustive. He had recognized and examined in himself thoughts that another man might have preferred to ignore. During the long voyage home, he had many times asked himself if, when they met again, he and Troy might not find the years had dropped between them a transparent barrier through which they would stare without love, at each other. The possibility occurred to him, strangely enough, at moments when he most desired and missed her. When she had moved forward on the quay, without at first seeing him, his physical reaction had been so sharp that it had blotted out his thoughts. It was only when she gave him the look of intimacy, which so far had not been repeated, that he knew, without question, he was to love her again.
Now, when she was before him in the room whose very familiarity was a little strange, his delight was of a virgin kind that anticipates a trial of its temper. Were Troy’s thoughts at this moment comparable with his own? Could he be as certain of her as he was of himself? She had entered into an entirely different mode of life during his absence. He knew nothing of her new associates beyond the rather sparse phrases she had allowed them in her letters. Now, evidently, he was to hear a little more.
“Come over here,” he said, “and tell me.”
She moved into her old place, leaning against his chair, and he looked down at her with a more tranquil mind, yet with such intense pleasure that the beginning of her story escaped him. But he had been ruthlessly trained to listen to statements and the habit asserted itself. The saga of Ancreton was unfolded.
Troy’s account was at first tentative, but his interest stimulated her. She began to enjoy herself, and presently hunted out her sketch-book with the drawings she had made in her tower-room. Alleyn chuckled over the small lively figures with their enormous heads. “Like the old-fashioned Happy Families cards,” he said, and she agreed that there was something Victorian and fantastic about the originals. After the eccentricities of the Ancreds themselves, the practical jokes turned out to be a dominant theme in her story. Alleyn heard of this with growing concern. “Here,” he interrupted, “did this blasted kid ruin your thing in the end or didn’t she?”
“No, no! But it wasn’t the blasted kid at all. Listen.”
He did, with a chuckle for her deductive methods. “She might conceivably, you know, write ‘grandfarther’ at one moment and ‘grandfather’ the next, but it’s a point of course.”
“It was her manner more than anything. I’m quite positive she didn’t do it. I know she’s got a record for practical jokes — but wait till I get to the end. Don’t fluster the witness.”
“Why not?” said Alleyn, stooping his head.
“To continue,” said Troy after a moment or two, and this time he let her go on to the end. It was an odd story. He wondered if she realized quite how odd it was.
“I don’t know whether I’ve conveyed the general dottiness of that monstrous house,” she said. “I mean, the queer little things that turned up. Like the book on embalming amongst the objets d’art and the missing rat bane.”
“Why do you put them together?”
“I dunno. I suppose because there’s arsenic in both of them.”
“You are not by any chance, my angel, attempting to land me with a suspected poisoning case on my return to your arms?”
“Well,” said Troy after a pause, “you would think that one up, wouldn’t you?” She screwed round and looked at him. “And he’s been embalmed, you know. By the Messrs. Mortimer and Loame. I met them in the hall with their black bags. The only catch in it is the impossibility of regarding any of the Ancreds in the light of a slow poisoner. But it would fit.”
“A little too neatly, I fancy.” With a trace of reluctance he added: “What were some of the other queer little things that happened?”
“I’d like to know what Cedric and the Orrincourt were giggling about on the sofa, and whether the Orrincourt was coughing or laughing in the governess-cart. I’d even like to know what it was she bought in the chemist’s shop. And I’d like to know more about Millamant. One never knew what Millamant was thinking, except that she doted perpetually on her ghastly Cedric. It would have been in her Cedric’s interest, of course, to sicken Sir Henry of poor old Panty, who, by the way, has a complete alibi for the flying cow. Her alibi’s a dangerous drug. For ringworm.”
“Has this odious child been taking thallium?”
“Do you know about thallium?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“It establishes her alibi for the flying cow,” said Troy. “I’d better explain.”
“Yes,” Alleyn agreed when she had finished, “that lets her out for the flying cow.”
“She didn’t do any of them,” said Troy firmly. “I wish now that Paul and Fenella and I had gone on with our experiment.”
“What was that to be?”
“It involved your collaboration,” said Troy, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes.
“Like hell it did!”
“Yes. We wrapped up the paint-brush that had been used for the flying cow and we were going to ask all of them to let us take their finger-prints for you to compare with it. Would you have minded?”
“My darling heart, I’d compare them with the Grand Cham of Tartary’s if it would give you any fun.”
“But we never got them. Death, as you and Mr. Fox would say, intervened. Sir Henry’s death. By the way, the person who painted my banister left finger-prints on the stone wall above it. Perhaps after a decent interval I could hint for an invitation to Ancreton and you could come down with your insufflator and black ink. But honestly, it is a queer story, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he agreed, rubbing his nose. “It’s queer enough. We heard about Ancred’s death on the ship’s wireless. Little did I imagine you were in at it.”
“I liked him,” said Troy after a pause. “He was a terrific old exhibitionist, and he made one feel dreadfully shy at times, but I did like him. And he was grand to paint.”
“The portrait went well?”
“I think so.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Well, so you shall one of these days. He said he was leaving it to the Nation. What does the Nation do under those circumstances? Hang it in a dark corner of the Tate, do you imagine? Some paper or another, I suspect Nigel Bathgate’s, is going to photograph it. We might get a print.”
But Alleyn was not to wait long for the photograph. It appeared that evening in Nigel’s paper over a notice of Sir Henry’s funeral. He had been buried in the family vault at Ancreton with as much ceremony as the times allowed.
“He hoped,” said Troy, “that the Nation would wish otherwise.”
“The Abbey?”
“I’m afraid so. Poor Sir Henry, I wish it had. Ah, well,” said Troy, dropping the newspaper, “that’s the end of the Ancreds as far as I’m concerned.”
“You never know,” Alleyn said vaguely. Then, suddenly impatient of the Ancreds and of anything that prolonged beyond this moment the first tentative phase of their reunion, he stretched out his hands towards Troy.
This story is concerned with Alleyn and Troy’s reunion only in so far as it affected his attitude towards her account of the Ancreds. If he had heard it at any other time it is possible that, however unwillingly, he might have dwelt longer on its peculiarities. As it was, he welcomed it as a kind of interlude between their first meeting and its consummation, and then dismissed it from his conscious thoughts.
They had three days together, broken only by a somewhat prolonged interview between Alleyn and his chief at the Special Branch. He was to resume, for the time being at least, his normal job at the Yard. On the Thursday morning when Troy returned to her job, he walked part of the way with her, watched her turn off, and with an odd feeling of anxiety, himself set out for the familiar room and the old associates.
It was pleasant, after all, to cross that barren back hall, smelling of linoleum and coal, to revisit an undistinguished office where the superintendent of C.I., against a background of crossed swords, commemorative photographs and a horseshoe, greeted him with unmistakable satisfaction. It was oddly pleasant to sit again at his old desk in the chief inspectors’ room and contemplate the formidable task of taking up the threads of routine.
He had looked forward to a preliminary gossip with Fox, but Fox had gone out on a job somewhere in the country and would not be back before the evening. In the meantime here was an old acquaintance of Alleyn’s, one Squinty Donovan, who, having survived two courts-martial, six months’ confinement in Broadmoor, and a near-miss from a flying bomb, had left unmistakable signs of his ingenuity upon a lock-up antique shop in Beachamp Place, Chelsea. Alleyn set in motion the elaborate police machinery by which Squinty might be hunted home to a receiver. He then turned again to his file.
There was nothing exciting; a series of routine jobs. This pleased him. There had been enough of excursions and alarums, the Lord knew, in his three years’ hunting for the Special Branch. He had wanted his return to C.I. to be uneventful.
Presently Nigel Bathgate rang up, “I say,” he said, “has Troy seen about the Will?”
“Whose Will?”
“Old Ancred’s. She’s told you about the
Ancreds, of course.”
“Of course.”
“It’s in this morning’s Times. Have a look at it. It’ll rock them considerably.”
“What’s he done?” Alleyn asked. But for some reason he was unwilling to hear more about the Ancreds.
He heard Nigel chuckling. “Well, out with it,” he said. “What’s he done?”
“Handed them the works.”
“In what way?”
“Left the whole caboosh to the Orrincourt.”
iii
Nigel’s statement was an over-simplification of the facts, as Alleyn discovered when, still with that sense of reluctance, he looked up the Will. Sir Henry had cut Cedric down to the bare bones of the entail, and had left a legacy of one thousand pounds to Millamant, to each of his children and to Dr. Withers. The residue he had willed to Sonia Orrincourt.
“But — what about the dinner speech and the other Will?” Troy cried when he showed her the evening paper. “Was that just a complete have, do you suppose? If so, Mr. Rattisbon must have known. Or — Rory,” she said, “I believe it was the flying cow that did it! I believe he was so utterly fed up with his family he marched upstairs, sent for Mr. Rattisbon and made a new Will there and then.”
“But didn’t he think the enfant terrible had done the flying cow? Why take it out of the whole family?”
“Thomas or somebody may have gone up and told him about Panty’s alibi. He wouldn’t know who to suspect, and would end up by damning the whole crew.”
“Not Miss Orrincourt, however.”
“She’d see to that,” said Troy with conviction.
She was, he saw, immensely taken up with this news, and at intervals during the evening returned to the Ancreds and their fresh dilemma. “What will Cedric do, can you imagine? Probably the entail is hopelessly below the cost of keeping up Katzenjammer Castle. That’s what he called it, you know. Perhaps he’ll give it to the Nation. Then they could hang my portrait in its allotted place, chequered all over with coloured lights and everybody would be satisfied. How the Orrincourt will gloat.”