Death of a Gay Dog

by Anne Morice

  The word they chose was ‘flatten’, which wasn’t bad, although not good enough to get past Toby, who had caught on long before the denouement. In the first scene, Guy was a Jewish estate-agent, with a bowler hat and a thick lisp. Robin and Anabel, the latter with all teeth humanely liberated for this festive occasion, played a nervous married couple, looking for a house and being repeatedly urged to take a flat instead; and, somewhere around this point, a memory began hammering itself out in my head.

  In the next act Guy was a cockney bookmaker, shouting the odds in a check cap, and Robin and Anabel were a nervous married couple, who could not decide which horse to back. One way and another, the word ten got in about forty times.

  In the final scene, Robin had become a nervous doctor, but Anabel broke out of the matrimonial rut and played a flighty nurse, with a handkerchief wrapped round her head. Guy also had a handkerchief round his head, to represent a bandage, and played a garrulous Pakistani, who had been knocked down by a lorry.

  Watching them both, I was struck by a curious phenomenon and, simultaneously by my second revelation of the evening.

  In recognition of her birthday, it fell to Anabel’s honour to speak the whole word, which she managed to do, after much giggling and writhing, by saying: ‘Now, now, you must lie flat; oh, sorry, I mean flatten out.’ Whereupon, metaphorically speaking, the curtain came down.

  ‘Did you notice what I noticed?’ I muttered, joining Toby by the window, and turning my back on the room:

  ‘Funny resemblance, you mean?’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? Looking at them now, one is staggered at having missed it. Of course, their tops are different. She’s got a bulgy forehead, like her mother; but, when all you can see are those matching displays of teeth, it’s unmistakable.’

  ‘Does it give him a motive, according to your book?’

  I considered the question in silence, until he repeated it.

  ‘Honestly, Toby, it’s a fair teaser. I had another idea about it, earlier on. Now I can’t decide which of them to follow up.’

  ‘Come on, chaps, no slacking!” Guy called out, behind us. ‘No one gets fed till he’s done his piece, you know.’

  ‘You’ll have to shelve them both,’ Toby said, as we drifted towards the door. ‘I have a nasty feeling that we’re on.’

  He was all for us using ‘into’ as the word, since it was practically impossible to guess, but Nancy said it would not be fair, and I backed her up. We eventually settled for ‘monkey’, which was rather a cheat, because we used the k twice over.

  I shall skip the details of our first playlet, because they had no bearing on events; and, to be truthful, they now elude me completely. I presume that I did not acquit myself particularly well, for I went through the performance mechanically, three-quarters of my mind concentrating fiercely on matters right outside the game. The big surprise, which penetrated even this absorption, was provided by Nancy. She revealed a remarkable poise, plus genuine acting talent, and it was obvious that she held five-sixths of her audience in rapt attention. The exception was Robin, who stared stonily at a point somewhere over my left shoulder, occasionally casting his eyes up to the ceiling, as though in direct communication with a celestial informant.

  This unsuspected skill of Nancy’s caused me to wonder how much acting went into her everyday life and, during the first interval, I asked her whether she had ever been on the stage.

  She was pulling a dusty black evening dress over her head, as I spoke, having been cast as a lady violinist, about to rehearse with Toby, the mad conductor. Her face emerged from its folds looking flushed and annoyed, and with chignon slightly askew.

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice, my dear. I did a few seasons in rep. before I married, but I was never in your class. By the way, Toby, which piece are we supposed to be doing?’

  They settled for a Mozart concerto, and I entered left, seated myself on the kitchen chair and thumped out a few chords on the table, which had now become a Bechstein.

  I had my back to the door throughout this scene, but when we were half-way through I heard a sound behind me. Sneaking a backward look, I saw that Roger had joined us. He was perched on one end of the dining-table and he winked at me and put a finger to his lips, when I turned round.

  Nancy and Toby went into their final slanging-match, at the end of which she burst into a storm of realistic sobs. There was loud applause and Roger walked down stage and over the footlights, shouting ‘Bravo!’ and smiting Nancy a mighty blow between the shoulder blades, as he passed.

  It was in the final scene that I received my third inspiration. I was supposed to be a schoolboy being escorted round Hampton Court by his irate grand-parents, when the bolt descended from the blue, and I abruptly switched nationalities and departed from the prepared script by shrilling out:

  ‘Gee whiz, Granpaw, guess what? I just found this key. Think it could be the key to the maze, Granpaw?’

  The other two looked understandably nonplussed, since we had already done the key bit in the previous scene, and some of their bafflement transmitted itself to the audience. I saw Guy and Anabel, side by side like two peas in a pod, gaping at me with identical toothy expressions, and Robin transferred his attention from the ceiling to bestow an icy stare in my direction, possibly on account of the hideously over-done American accent. Undaunted, I ad libbed away like a mad thing.

  ‘Gosh, isn’t that great, Granpaw and Granmaw? And lookee here,’ I piped, holding out an empty hand. ‘Look what else I found! Isn’t it real cute?’

  Old Granpaw had caught on by this time and he said that it most certainly was, and I was a smart kid. He then raised his eyebrows and, when I shook my head, gave Nancy the prearranged cue. She informed me flatly that I was a tiresome young monkey, who would be sent straight upstairs to its bedroom, and the play fizzled out into silence.

  Robin and Guy made a dutiful pretence of being unable to guess the word, until elucidation burst upon Anabel; whereupon Guy jumped up and commanded everyone to partake of a nosh-up.

  Xenia doled out dollops of chicken and salad and Guy topped up the glasses, which Maria brought round on a tray. This was an embarrassment, on every count, because I had no hands left and the wine tasted of warm stewed plums. Seeing my fix, Robin picked up my glass and placed it behind the curtain, on the window sill.

  ‘Cheer up!’ I whispered, handing a plate to Aunt Moo. ‘Who knows? There may be some lovely hot soup for us when we get home?’

  I got a very beady look in return for this, and she advised me to look at my step, as curiosity had been known to kill the goose. It was all I needed.

  When everyone had been attended to and all but me were unhappily balancing a plate in one hand and a glass in the other, we stood to attention while Guy led off a glee-club version of ‘Happy Birthday’. Timing it simultaneously, Robin and I waited for the ‘dear Aa-na . . . bel’ bit, then lunged forward from opposite sides of the room and knocked the glass from Toby’s hand.

  The wine spilled out over the carpet, he was spattered from head to foot with Russian salad, and he looked most aggrieved:

  ‘Not so hasty, please!’ he grumbled. ‘You surely didn’t imagine I was going to drink it?’

  Nineteen

  ‘I made numerous mistakes,’ I said, ‘which I freely acknowledge.’

  ‘Splendid!’ Toby said. ‘And this would be the moment.’

  ‘Four in all,’ I went on, doing some calculations. ‘I shall begin with the last.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Robin said.

  ‘Because that one wasn’t entirely my fault, you see. I confess I was to blame in not keeping you informed of my progress, but that was because I thought you would stamp on me. If you had only dropped a hint that you weren’t satisfied with the verdict, we could have worked as a team and probably got the answer twice as quickly.’

  ‘I am thankful you didn’t, though,’ Toby said. ‘Your acting separately practically knocked me insensible and ruined a perfectly good suit. O
ne trembles to think what you might have accomplished as a team.’

  ‘And my dissatisfaction, as Tessa calls it, was too nebulous to be worth passing on, with everything pointing the other way. I suppose you could say that your summing-up of Christabel’s character and the conflict between that and what she was supposed to have done made a stronger impression on me than it was wise to let on, in view of the mountain of evidence against you.’

  ‘How can you say that? It was seeing the way you carried on during those ghastly charades which gave me the boost I needed.’

  ‘Carried on?’

  ‘Don’t deny it, Robin. You weren’t even pretending to enter into the spirit, either with those feeble performances of yours, or when you were supposed to be guessing. And that’s so unlike you. The only time you go distrait is when you’re not sure of the form. So what was there for you to be uncertain about at that stage, I asked myself; and the answer came pretty promptly.’

  ‘Oh, good! And I hope you will promptly pass it on to me.’

  I concluded, from his sour expression, that the Algerian wine was giving him trouble.

  ‘No, it suddenly struck me that the reason why he had consented to go to that awful party, and pass up our date with the Coles and everything, was because it gave him a last chance to study all those people in one gathering and maybe pick up something he missed. Isn’t that so, Robin?’

  ‘There may be a grain of truth in it. I was afraid the sacrifice would be wasted, though, when it looked as though our man wasn’t going to turn up.’

  ‘I know; and being so late was a bad blunder on his part. Even if the plan hadn’t miscarried completely, he would only have succeeded in poisoning the wrong person.’

  ‘Though I doubt if we’d have pinned it on him, since the motive was non-existent. On the other hand; I suppose it would have been that much harder for him to make a third attempt.’

  ‘Third?’ Toby repeated.

  ‘Oh, this was the second crack he’d had at poor old Tessa. The first was when he tried to break her skull, in Christabel’s barn. He might have got away with it, too, if Christabel hadn’t seen him first and shouted a warning, which caused Tessa to turn her head just enough to deflect his aim.’

  ‘When did you work that one out?’ I asked.

  ‘During an interview I had with Mr Harper Barrington, after his arrest,’ Robin said smoothly. ‘I am sorry you were not invited to be present, but Cole is a stickler for the correct procedures.’

  ‘Oh, very funny! Did Roger shoot Prince, as well?’

  ‘Yes. The Robinsons were supposed to be taking care of him, because Roger was always threatening to have him put down, unless he was kept under control, but he escaped and followed his old, unloving master. There was no shaking him off apparently, and Roger was afraid he would ruin his plan. He’d been out shooting in the Haverford woods and he spied Tessa walking along the bridle path. So he stayed out of sight and kept an eye on her. Then he saw the constable ride off and that gave him a heaven-sent chance. Unfortunately for him, he was at such pains to keep behind the barn and out of sight that he missed Christabel’s arrival in the taxi. His plan was to creep round and enter by the stable door, but Prince was rather undisciplined, as you know, and gave every sign of rushing ahead and barking. So Roger called him off, retreated a few hundred yards into the paddock and shot him through the head. After which, he came back to finish the job on Tessa; but he had reckoned without Christabel, of course. It’s hard to see how he could have found still another opportunity, so, if you had drunk the poisoned wine, Toby, you would have died in a good cause.’

  ‘Thank you. I shall try to remember that, although there was never the faintest risk. I had no intention of drinking the horrid stuff.’

  ‘I couldn’t rely on that, and I was almost certain it was in your glass. Anyone arriving at the party when Roger did would automatically assume that Tessa had been given the T initial. All the same, I had to get her glass away from her first, just in case I’d miscalculated.’

  ‘I am so grateful to you for putting me first, Robin, but I had come to roughly the same conclusions.’

  ‘And, so far, it seems to be all self-congratulation,’ Toby complained. ‘It is rather disappointing. I thought we were going to hear about some of Tessa’s mistakes.’

  ‘And so you shall. The principal one was my assumption that Christabel wanted to see me to confess about Mott’s pictures not being by him at all. It was idiotic of me, because there was really no need for it. I already knew, and she had guessed that I knew, so what was left to say?’

  ‘But why did she want to see you, then?’

  ‘For exactly the reason the murderer worked out. She knew that an attempt had been made on my life and she wanted to warn me. I expect she was too doped at first, to know what was what, and later she went out of action with a heart attack. I take it that was genuine, by the way?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ Roger assured me, ‘and it must have seemed like a terrific break for Roger, don’t you think? With a little bit of luck, she’d have died a natural death and saved him a heap of trouble.’

  ‘In some ways, I wish she had, poor old thing; but when she recovered she must have had a lucid period and remembered what had happened. She probably even recognised my attacker.’

  ‘That’s more doubtful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if she could identify him why should she then have allowed him to walk into her room at the hospital, without raising the alarm?’

  ‘Yes, that puzzled me at first. I worked out all sorts of theories about his putting on a white coat and disguising himself as a porter, but now I believe he used a much simpler device. The point is –’

  ‘The point, in my opinion,’ Toby interrupted, ‘is that it made no difference whether she recognised him in the barn or not. I am certain she knew all along who had killed Sir Brands Hatch.’

  I nodded: ‘Me, too. I think Roger sat them together at the film show, believing her to be scatty and half-blind, and therefore the safest person, from his point of view. If you remember, Nancy began by taking that place for herself, but Roger made her change over. What he didn’t know was that Christabel was wearing her reading-glasses that evening. She’d left home in a hurry and picked up the wrong pair. So it was the screen which was out of her vision, not the things which were going on within inches of her nose. It put her in a first-class position to see the murderer at work, and it also meant that she was never at any moment diverted by the sight of Nancy prancing around on the poop deck.’

  ‘Then, if it’s true and she really did see everything,’ Robin said sadly, ‘I am afraid she got her just desserts. Accessory to murder is a serious crime.’

  ‘Oh yes, but there’s nothing to be done about it now; and Christabel always made her own rules. It’s my belief that she knew Roger had killed the old man, but it suited her book to have him out of the way, and she probably wished she’d had the guts to do it herself. That being so, I expect she told Roger she wouldn’t give him away, so long as he didn’t get up to any more tricks.’

  ‘Then it was highly immoral of her, and remarkably naive, if you’ll allow me to say so.’

  ‘I do allow you to say so, Robin, darling, because it’s true. She was naive, and immoral, too, by general standards. Also, she never learnt that other people didn’t necessarily play the game by her rules. But she stuck to them herself, and it was jolly bad luck for Roger that she happened to be present when I got my clump on the head.’

  ‘And what had you done to make him so keen to murder you?’ Toby asked me.

  ‘He must have been afraid I had found him out, or was on the brink of doing so. It’s funny about Roger. I always thought of him as rather an ass, but in some respects he was a jump ahead. He saw that I had bumped up against his motive, even before I saw it myself. I was fooled by that boisterous Battle of Britain manner, but one ought to remember that people don’t make vast piles on the Stock Exchange simply by twirling their mo
ustaches.’

  ‘But what made him believe that you were about to unmask him?’

  ‘Well, he was wary of me right from the start, I dare say, because I told him I was doing some Teach Yourself Company Law and so on. Quite untrue, as it happened, but I am apt to get carried away, and he fell for it. When I started shrieking about his cute little bar, the next morning, he must have thought I was really creeping up on him, although that was quite inadvertent, too.’

  ‘Why did that ring the alarm bells?’ Toby asked. ‘I realise the word had some dreaded significance for him; hence your lapse into gibberish in the charade game, but I still haven’t gathered what the significance was.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ Robin said. ‘That act of yours was an unnecessary trimming, you know. I had already seen him drop something into one of the glasses, even though I wasn’t sure which.’

  ‘Yes, but I had my back to him when he first came in. My intention was to jostle him into making some stupid move by showing clearly that I was on to him. How could I know that he’d already made the stupid move? You see, Toby, he was up to his neck in some shady deal with a certain Mr Flatmore in the States, who had been kicked out of a company called Consolidated United Trust Enterprises when one of his smart take-overs fell flat on its face. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I? You know how these high-powered people love making funny words out of sets of initials? Presumably, this Flatmore and Roger had been cooking up a similar deal in this country and, when the crash came, Roger was landed with about two million worthless shares. I expect he could have slithered out of it, given time, but that was probably the one thing which Sir Maddox wouldn’t give him.’

  ‘So you think Sir Mad had uncovered this shady plot?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, Roger was so anxious to curry favour in that quarter that it wouldn’t surprise me if he had tipped Maddox off to buy a few shares, too; letting him in on the ground floor and all that jazz. Even that might have been sorted out, with Maddox safely larking round Russia for another five or six weeks, but his pictures were stolen and he came zooming back to London. I don’t suppose he was in any mood to turn the other cheek when he discovered that Roger had landed him in a dud financial deal. Probably, threats of exposure were being flung around in all directions. Even if Roger had escaped prosecution for fraud, he’d have been pretty well ruined, and we all know how little that would have appealed to him.’