Artists in Crime

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘Ask them to wait. I’ll see them in a minute.’

  ‘Have you finished with me?’ asked Troy, standing up.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Miss Troy,’ said Alleyn formally. ‘If you wouldn’t mind giving us the names and addresses of the people you met in London, I should be very grateful. You see, we are obliged to check all statements of this sort.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ answered Troy coldly.

  She gave the names and addresses of her host and hostess, of the people she met in the club, and of the man who took her to lunch—John Bellasca, 44 Little Belgrave Street.

  ‘The club porter may be useful,’ she said, ‘his name’s Jackson. He may have noticed my goings out and comings in. I remember that I asked him the time, and got him to call taxis. The sort of things people do when they wish to establish alibis, I understand.’

  ‘They occasionally do them at normal times, I believe,’ said Alleyn. ‘Thank you, Miss Troy. I won’t bother you any more for the moment. Do you mind joining the others until we have finished this business.’

  ‘Not at all,’ answered Troy with extreme grandeur. ‘Please use this room as much as you like. Good evening, good evening.’

  ‘Good evening, miss,’ said Fox.

  Troy made an impressive exit.

  CHAPTER 8

  Sidelights on Garcia

  ‘The lady seems a bit upset,’ said Fox mildly, when Troy had gone.

  ‘I irritate the lady,’ answered Alleyn.

  ‘You do, sir? I always think you’ve got a very pleasant way with female witnesses. Sort of informal and at the same time very polite.’

  ‘Thank you, Fox,’ said Alleyn wryly.

  ‘Learn anything useful, sir?’

  ‘She says the drape was in the second position on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Stretched out straight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ said Fox, ‘if she’s telling the truth, it looks as though the knife was fixed up between the time this Mr Malmsley walked out on Friday afternoon and the time Miss Troy looked in on Saturday. That’s if Malmsley was telling the truth when he said the drape was crumpled and flat on Friday afternoon. It all points one way, chief, doesn’t it.’

  ‘It does, Brer Fox, it does.’

  ‘The Yard’s getting straight on to chasing up this Mr Garcia. I’ve rung all the stations round this district and asked them to make inquiries. I got a pretty fair description of him from the cook, and Bailey found a couple of photographs of the whole crowd in the studio. Here’s one of them.’

  He thrust a massive hand inside his pocket and produced a halfplate group of Troy and her class. It had been taken in the garden.

  ‘There’s the model, Fox. Look!’

  Fox gravely put on his spectacles and contemplated the photograph.

  ‘Yes, that’s the girl,’ he said. ‘She looks merry, doesn’t she, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alleyn slowly. ‘Very merry.’

  ‘That’ll be this Garcia, then.’ Fox continued. He pointed a stubby finger at a figure on the outside of the group. Alleyn took out a lens and held it over the photograph. Up leaped a thin, unshaven face, with an untidy lock of dark hair falling across the forehead. The eyes were set rather close and the brows met above the thin nose. The lips were unexpectedly full. Garcia had scowled straight into the camera. Alleyn gave Fox the lens.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fox, after a look through it, ‘we’ll have enlargements done at once. Bailey’s got the other. He says it will enlarge very nicely.’

  ‘He looks a pretty good specimen of a wild man,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘If Malmsley and Miss Troy are telling the truth,’ said Fox, who had a way of making sure of his remarks, ‘he’s a murderer. Of course, the motive’s not much of an affair as far as we’ve got.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Brer Fox. It looks as though the girl was badgering him to marry her. It’s possible the P.M. may offer the usual explanation for that sort of thing.’

  ‘In the family way?’ Fox took off his spectacles and stared blandly at his chief. ‘Yes. That’s so. What did you make of that statement of Mr Malmsley’s about Garcia being ill in the garden after he saw the defaced likeness? That seems a queer sort of thing to me. It wasn’t as if he’d done the photo.’

  ‘The painting, Fox,’ corrected Alleyn. ‘One doesn’t call inspired works of art photographs, you know. Yes, that was rather a rum touch, wasn’t it? You heard Miss Seacliff’s theory. Garcia is infatuated with her and was all upheaved by the sight of her defeated loveliness.’

  ‘Far-fetched,’ said Fox.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you. But it might be an explanation of his murdering Sonia Gluck when he realized she had done it. He might have thought to himself: “This looks like a more than usually hellish fury from the woman scorned—what am I in for?” and decided to get rid of her. There’s a second possibility which will seem even more far-fetched to you, I expect. To me it seems conceivable that Garcia’s aesthetic nerves were lacerated by the outrage on a lovely piece of painting. Miss Troy says the portrait of Valmai Seacliff was the best thing she has ever done.’ Alleyn’s voice deepened and was not quite steady. ‘That means it was a really great work. I think, Fox, that if I had seen that painted head and known it for a superlatively beautiful thing, and then seen it again with that beastly defacement—I believe I might have sicked my immortal soul up into the nearest flower-bed. I also believe that I would have felt remarkably like murder.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ said Fox stolidly. ‘But you wouldn’t have done murder, though, however much you felt like it.’

  ‘I’d have felt damn like it,’ muttered Alleyn. He walked restlessly about the room. ‘The secret of Garcia’s reaction,’ he said, ‘lies behind this.’ He wagged the photograph at Fox. ‘Behind that very odd-look-ing head. I wish we knew more about Garcia. We’ll have to go hunting for his history, Brer Fox. Records of violence and so on. I wonder if there are any. Suppose he turns up quite innocently to do his “Comedy and Tragedy” in his London warehouse?’

  ‘That’ll look as if either Malmsley or Miss Troy was a liar, sir, won’t it? I must say I wouldn’t put Mr Malmsley down as a very dependable sort of gentleman. A bit cheeky in an arty sort of fashion.’

  Alleyn smiled.

  ‘Fox, what a neat description of him! Admirable! No, unless Malmsley is lying, the knife was hammered through and the drape stretched out after they had all gone on Friday. And if Miss Troy found it stretched out on Saturday afternoon, then the thing was done before then.’

  ‘If,’ said Fox. And after a moment’s silence Alleyn replied:

  ‘“If”—of course.’

  ‘You might say Miss Troy had the strongest motive, sir, as far as the portrait is concerned.’

  There was a longer pause.

  ‘Do you think it at all likely that she is a murderess?’ said Alleyn from the fireplace. ‘A very deliberate murderess, Fox. The outrage to the portrait was committed a week before the murder.’

  ‘I must say I don’t think so, sir. Very unlikely indeed, I’d say. This Garcia seems the likeliest proposition on the face of it. What did you make of Miss Phillida Lee’s statement, now? The conversation she overheard. Looks as though Garcia and the deceased were making an assignation for Friday night, doesn’t it? Suppose she came back to the studio on Friday night in order that they should resume intimacy?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘He seems to have actually threatened her, if the young lady can be depended upon.’

  ‘Miss Seacliff didn’t contradict the account, and you must remember that extraordinary little party, Phillida Lee, confided the fruits of her nosy-parkering to Miss Seacliff long before the tragedy. I think we may take it that Garcia and Sonia Gluck had a pretty good dustup on the lines indicated by the gushing Lee. You took notes in the dining-room, of course. Turn up her report of the quarrel, will you?’

  Fox produced a very smug-looking notebook, put on his spectacles,
and turned up a page.

  ‘Garcia—’ he read slowly from his shorthand notes. ‘“All right. On Friday night then.” Sonia Gluck: “Yes, if it’s possible.” Then later Gluck said: “I won’t stand for any funny business with her, you know.” Garcia said: “Who?” and Gluck answered: “The Seacliff bitch, of course.” Sonia Gluck said Garcia ought to marry her. He did not reply. She threatened to go to Miss Troy with the whole story if he let her down. He said; “If you don’t shut up and leave me to get on with my work, I’ll bloody well stop your mouth for keeps.” That’s the conversation, sir.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll have to get hold of something about Friday night. Damn it all, the studio is built into the wall, and the window opens on the lane. Surely to Heaven someone must have passed by that evening and heard voices if Garcia had the girl in the place with him.’

  ‘And how did he get his stuff away on Friday night or Saturday morning? They’ve tried all the carriers for miles around.’

  ‘I know, Brer Fox, I know. Well, on we go. We’ve got to get all these people’s time-tables from Friday noon till Sunday evening. What about Bailey? I’d better see him first, I suppose.’

  Bailey came in with his usual air of mulish displeasure and reported that they had finished in the studio. They had gone over everything for prints, had photographed the scratched window-sill, measured and photographed the car’s prints and footprints in the lane, and taken casts of them. They had found the key of the studio hanging on a nail outside the door. It was smothered in prints. Under the pillow was an empty whisky bottle. On the window-sill one set of prints occurred many times, and seemed to be superimposed on most of the others. He had found traces of clay with these prints, and with those on the bottle.

  ‘Those will be Garcia’s,’ said Alleyn. ‘He worked in the window.’

  In the junk-room Bailey had found a mass of jars, brushes, bottles of turpentine and oil, costumes, lengths of materials, a spear, an old cutlass, and several shallow dishes that smelt of nitric acid. There was also what Bailey described as ‘a sort of mangle affair with a whale of a heavy chunk of metal and a couple of rollers.’

  ‘An etching press,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘There’s a couple of stains on the floor of the junkroom,’ continued Bailey. ‘Look like nitric-acid stains. They’re new. I can’t find any nitric acid anywhere, though. I’ve looked in all the bottles and jars.’

  ‘Um!’ said Alleyn, and made a note of it.

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ said Bailey. He opened a bag he had brought in with him, and out of it he took a small box which he handed to Alleyn.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Alleyn. ‘This is the bonne-bouche, is it?’

  He opened the little box and held it under the lamp. Inside was a flattened greenish-grey pellet.

  ‘Clay,’ said Alleyn. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In the folds of that silk stuff that was rigged on the platform,’ said Bailey, staring morosely at his boots.

  ‘I see,’ said Alleyn softly. ‘Look here, Fox.’

  Fox joined him. They could both see quite clearly that the flattened surface of the pellet was delicately scrolled by minute holes and swirling lines.

  ‘A nice print,’ said Fox, ‘only half there, but very sharp what there is.’

  ‘If the prints on the sill are Garcia’s,’ said Bailey, ‘that’s Garcia’s too.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Alleyn at last, ‘that’s what you call a fat little treasuretrove, Bailey.’

  ‘I reckon it must have dropped off his overall when he was stretching that stuff above the point of the knife, sir. That’s what I reckon.’

  ‘Yes. It’s possible.’

  ‘He must have used gloves for the job. There are one or two smudges about the show that look like glove-marks, and I think one of them’s got a trace of the clay. We’ve photographed the whole outfit.’

  ‘You’ve done rather well, Bailey.’

  ‘Anything more, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid there is. I want you to find the deceased’s room and go over it. I don’t think we should let that wait any longer. One of the maids will show you where it is. Come and get me if anything startling crops up.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘And when that’s done, you can push off if you want to. You’ve left a man on guard, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, sir. One of these local chaps. Getting a great kick out of it.’

  ‘Guileless fellow. Away you go, Bailey. I’ll see you later on.’

  ‘OK, sir.’

  ‘Nitric acid?’ ruminated Fox, when Bailey had gone.

  ‘I think it’s the acid they used for etching. I must ask Miss Troy about it.’

  ‘Looks as if all we’ve got to do is to find Garcia, don’t it, sir?’

  ‘It do, Fox. But for the love of Mike don’t let’s be too sure of ourselves.’

  ‘That bit of clay, you know, sir—how could it have got there by rights? He’d no business up on the model’s throne now, had he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And according to Malmsley’s story, the drape must have been fixed when the rest of them had gone up to London.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll have to trace ‘em in London just the same. Have to get on to these others now. Go and take a dip in the dining-room, Fox, and see what the fairies will send us in the way of a witness.’

  Fox went off sedately and returned with Katti Bostock. She came in looking very four-square and sensible. Her short and stocky person was clad in corduroy trousers, a red shirt and a brown jacket. Her straight black hair hung round her ears in a Cromwellian cut with a determined bang across her wide forehead. She was made up in a rather slap-dash sort of manner. Her face was principally remarkable for its exceedingly heavy eyebrows.

  Alleyn pushed forward a chair and she slumped herself down on it. Fox went quietly to the desk and prepared to make a shorthand report. Alleyn sat opposite Katti.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you again, Miss Bostock,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a good deal of tidying up to do, as you may imagine. First of all, is nitric acid used in the studio for anything?’

  ‘Etching,’ said Katti. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ve found stains in the junk-room that looked like it. Where is it kept?’

  ‘In a bottle on the top shelf. It’s marked with a red cross.’

  ‘We couldn’t find it.’

  ‘It was filled up on Friday, and put on the top shelf. Must be there.’

  ‘I see. Right. Now I just want to check everybody’s movements from lunch-time on Friday. In your case it will be a simple matter. I believe you spent most of your time in London with Miss Troy?’ He opened his notebook and put it on the arm of his chair.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see you both went to your club, changed and dined with Sir Arthur and Lady Jaynes at Eaton Square. From there you went to the private view of the Phoenix Group Show, and supped at the Hungaria. That right?’

  ‘Yes. Quite correct.’

  ‘You stayed at the club. What time did you get back from the Hungaria on Friday night?’

  ‘Saturday morning,’ corrected Katti. ‘I left with the Jayneses at about twelve-thirty. They drove me to the club. Troy stayed on with John Bellasca and was swept out with the dust whenever they close.’

  ‘You met again at breakfast?’

  ‘Yes. We separated during the morning and met again at the show. I lunched with some people I ran into there—Graham Barnes and his wife— he’s the watercolour bloke. Then Troy and I met at the club and came home. She lunched with John Bellasca.’

  ‘Yes. That’s all very straightforward. I’ll have to ask Sir Arthur Jaynes or someone to confirm it. The usual game, you know.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Katti. ‘You want to find out whether either of us had time to sneak back here and set a death-trap for that little fool Sonia, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s the sort of idea,’ agreed Alleyn with a smile. ‘I know Sir Arthur slightly. Would
you like me to say you’ve lost a pearl necklace and want to trace it, or—’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Tell him the facts of the business. Do I look like pearls? And John will fix up Troy’s alibi for her. He’ll probably come down at ninety miles an hour to say he did it himself if you’re not careful.’ Katti chuckled and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I see,’ said Alleyn. And into his thoughts came the picture of Troy as she had sat before the fire with her cropped head between her long hands. There had been no ring on those hands.

  ‘When you got back to the club after you left the Hungaria, did anyone see you?’

  ‘The night porter let me in. I don’t remember anyone else.’

  ‘Was your room near Miss Troy’s?’

  ‘Next door.’

  ‘Did you hear her return?’

  ‘No. She says she tapped on the door, but I must have been asleep. The maid came in at seven with my tea, but I’d have had time to go out, get Troy’s car and drive down here and back, between twelve-thirty and seven, you know.’

  ‘True,’ said Alleyn. ‘Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well—we’ll have to do our best with night porters, garage attendants, and petrol consumption.’

  ‘Wish you luck,’ said Katti.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Bostock. You got back here for lunch, I understand. How did you spend the afternoon?’

  ‘Dishing up bilge for The Palette. I was in here.’

  ‘Did you at any time go to the studio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Miss Troy with you on Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘She was in and out. Let’s see. She spent a good time turning out that desk over there and burning old papers. Then she tidied her sketching-kit. We had tea in here. After tea we went out to look at a place across the fields where Troy thought of doing a sketch. We dined out with some people at Bossicote—the Haworths—and got home about eleven.’

  ‘Thank you. Sunday?’

  ‘I was at my article for The Palette all day. Troy painted in the morning and came in here in the afternoon. The others were all back for dinner.’

  ‘Did you hear the model say anything about her own movements during the weekend?’