by Ngaio Marsh
It was as if the clock that was Dimitri was opened, and the feverish little pulse of the brain revealed. Should he say yes; should he say no?
‘I am trying to remember. I think I do remember that his lordship was present.’
‘You are quite correct, Mr Dimitri. He was not far away from you.’
‘I pay little attention to externals when I listen to beautiful music.’
‘Did you return her bag to Mrs Halcut-Hackett?’
Dimitri gave a sharp cry. Fox’s pencil skidded across the page of his notebook. Dimitri drew his left hand out of his pocket and stared at his fingers. Three drops of blood fell from them to his striped trouser leg.
‘Blood on your hand, Mr Dimitri,’ said Alleyn.
Dimitri said: ‘I have broken my glass.’
‘Is the cut deep? Fox, my bag is in the cupboard there. I think there is some lint and strapping in it.’
‘No,’ said Dimitri, ‘it is nothing.’ He wrapped his fine silk handkerchief round his fingers and nursed them in his right hand. He was white to the lips.
‘The sight of blood,’ he said, ‘affects me unpleasantly.’
‘I insist that you allow me to bandage your hand,’ said Alleyn. Dimitri did not answer. Fox produced iodine, lint and strapping. Alleyn unwrapped the hand. Two of the fingers were cut and bled freely. Dimitri shut his eyes while Alleyn dressed them. The hand was icy cold and clammy.
‘There,’ said Alleyn. ‘And your handkerchief to hide the blood-stains which upset you so much. You are quite pale, Mr Dimitri. Would you like some brandy?’
‘No. No, thank you.’
‘You are recovered?’
‘I do not feel well. I must ask you to excuse me.’
‘Certainly. When you have answered my last question. Did you ever return Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s bag?’
‘I do not understand you. We spoke of Lady Carrados’s bag.’
‘We speak now of Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s bag which you took from the sofa at the Sirmione Concert. Do you deny that you took it?’
‘I refuse to prolong this interview. I shall answer no more questions without the advice of my solicitor. That is final.’
He rose to his feet. So did Alleyn and Fox.
‘Very well,’ said Alleyn. ‘I shall have to see you again, Mr Dimitri; and again, and I daresay again. Fox, will you show Mr Dimitri down?’
When the door had closed Alleyn spoke into his telephone.
‘My man is leaving. He’ll probably take a taxi. Who’s tailing him?’
‘Anderson relieving Carewe, sir.’
‘Ask him to report when he gets a chance, but not to take too big a chance. It’s important.’
‘Right, Mr Alleyn.’
Alleyn waited for Fox’s return. Fox came in grinning. ‘He’s shaken up a fair treat to see, Mr Alleyn. Doesn’t know if he’s Mayfair, Soho, or Wandsworth.’
‘We’ve a long way to go before he’s Wandsworth. How are we ever going to persuade women like Mrs Halcut-Hackett to charge their blackmailers? Not in a lifetime, unless—’
‘Unless what?’
‘Unless the alternative is even more terrifying. Fox, do you think it within the bounds of possibility that Dimitri ordered his trifle of caviare and champagne at Sir Herbert’s expense, that François departed and Dimitri, hurriedly acquiring a silk hat and overcoat, darted out by the back door just in time to catch Lord Robert in the mist, ask him preposterously for a lift and drive away? Can you swallow this camel of unlikelihood and if so, can you open your ponderous and massy jaws still farther and engulf the idea of Dimitri performing his murder and subsequent masquerade, returning to Marsdon House, and settling down to his supper without anybody noticing anything out of the ordinary?’
‘When you put it that way, sir, it does sound funny. But we don’t know it’s impossible.’
‘No, we don’t. He’s about the right height. I’ve a strong feeling, Fox, that Dimitri is not working this blackmail game on his own. We’re not allowed strong feelings, so ignore it. If there is another scoundrel in the game they’ll try to get into touch. We’ll have to do something about that. What’s the time? One o’clock, I’m due at Sir Daniel’s at two and I’ll have to see the AC before then. Coming?’
‘I’ll do a bit of work on the file first. We ought to hear from the fellow at Leatherhead any time now. You go to lunch, Mr Alleyn. When did you last eat anything?’
‘I don’t know. Look here—’
‘Did you have any breakfast?’ asked Fox, putting on his spectacles and opening the file.
‘Good Lord, Fox, I’m not a hothouse lily.’
‘This isn’t a usual case, sir, for you. It’s a personal matter, say what you like, and you’ll do no good if you try and work it on your nerves.’
Fox glanced at Alleyn over the top of his spectacles, wetted his thumb, and turned a page.
‘Oh God,’ said Alleyn, ‘once the wheels begin to turn, it’s easier to forget the other side. If only I didn’t see him so often. He looked like a child, Fox. Just like a child.’
‘Yes,’ said Fox. ‘It’s a nasty case, personal feelings aside. If you see the Assistant Commissioner now, Mr Alleyn, I’ll be ready to join you for a bite of lunch before we go to Sir Daniel Davidson’s.’
‘All right, blast you. Meet me downstairs in a quarter of an hour.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Fox. ‘I’ll be pleased.’
About twenty minutes later he presided over Alleyn’s lunch, with all the tranquil superiority of a nannie. They arrived at St. Luke’s Chambers, Harley Street, at two o’clock precisely. They sat in a waiting-room lavishly strewn with new periodicals. Fox solemnly read Punch, while Alleyn, with every appearance of the politest attention, looked at a brochure appealing for clothes and money for the Central Chinese Medical Mission. In a minute or two a secretary told them that Sir Daniel would see them and showed them into his consulting-room.
‘The gentlemen from Scotland Yard, Sir Daniel. Mr Alleyn and Mr Fox.’
Davidson, who had apparently been staring out of the window, came forward and shook hands.
‘It’s very good of you to come to me,’ he said. ‘I said on the telephone that I was quite ready to report at Scotland Yard whenever it suited you. Do sit down.’
They sat down. Alleyn glanced round the room and what he saw pleased him. It was a charming room with apple-green walls, an Adam fireplace and silver-starred curtains. Above the mantelpiece hung a sunny landscape by a famous painter. A silk praying-mat that would not have disgraced a collector’s walls did workaday service before the fireplace. Sir Daniel’s desk was an adapted spinet, his inkwell recalled the days when sanded paper was inscribed with high-sounding phrases in quill-scratched calligraphy. As he sat at his desk Sir Daniel saw before him in Chinese ceramic, a little rose-red horse. A beautiful and expensive room, crying in devious tones of the gratitude of wealthy patients. The most exalted, if not the richest, of these stared with blank magnificence from a silver frame.
Sir Daniel himself, neat, exquisite in London clothes and a slightly flamboyant tie, with something a little exotic about his fine dark head, looked as though he could have no other setting than this. He seated himself at his desk, joined his hands and contemplated Alleyn with frank curiosity.
‘Surely you are Roderick Alleyn?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I have read your book.’
‘Are you interested in criminology?’ asked Alleyn with a smile.
‘Enormously! I hardly dare to tell you this because you must so often fall a victim to the enthusiasm of fools. I, too! “Oh, Sir Daniel, it must be too marvellous to be able to look into the minds of people as you do.” Their minds! My God! Their stomachs are enough. But I often think quite seriously that I should have liked to follow medical jurisprudence.’
‘We have lost a great figure then,’ said Alleyn.
‘That’s very graceful. But it’s untrue, I’m afraid. I am too impatient and altogether too much
of a partisan. As in this case. Lord Robert was a friend of mine. It would be impossible for me to look at this case with an equal eye.’
‘If you mean,’ said Alleyn, ‘that you do not feel kindly disposed towards his murderer, no more do we. Do we, Fox?’
‘No, sir, that we do not,’ said Fox.
Davidson’s brilliant eyes rested for a moment on Fox. With a single glance he seemed to draw him into the warm circle of his confidence and regard. ‘All the same,’ thought Alleyn, ‘he’s uneasy. He doesn’t quite know where to begin.’ And he said:
‘You very kindly rang up to say you might be able to help us.’
‘Yes,’ said Davidson, ‘yes, I did.’ He lifted a very beautiful jade paperweight and put it down. ‘I don’t know how to begin.’ He darted a shrewd and somehow impish glance at Alleyn. ‘I find myself in the unenviable position of being one of the last people to see Lord Robert.’
Fox took out his notebook. Davidson looked distastefully at it.
‘When did you see him?’ Alleyn asked.
‘In the hall. Just before I left.’
‘You left, I understand, after Mrs Halcut-Hackett, Captain Withers and Mr Donald Potter, who went away severally about three-thirty.’
Davidson’s jaw dropped. He flung up his beautiful hands.
‘Believe it or not,’ he said, ‘I had a definite struggle with my conscience before I made up my mind to admit it.’
‘Why was that?’ asked Alleyn.
Again that sideways impish glance.
‘I didn’t want to come forward at all. Not a bit. It’s very bad for us parasites to appear in murder trials. In the long run, it is very bad indeed. By the way, I suppose it is a case of homicide. No doubt about it? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘Of course you can ask. There seems to be no doubt at all. He was smothered.’
‘Smothered!’ Davidson leant forward, his hands clasped on the desk. Alleyn read in his face the subtle change that comes upon all men when they embark on their own subject. ‘Good God!’ he said, ‘he wasn’t a Desdemona! Why didn’t he make a rumpus? Is he marked?’
‘There are no marks of violence.’
‘None? Who did the autopsy?’
‘Curtis. He’s our expert.’
‘Curtis, Curtis?—yes, of course. How does he account for the absence of violence? Heart? His heart was in a poor condition.’
‘How do you know that, Sir Daniel?’
‘My dear fellow, I examined him most thoroughly three weeks ago.’
‘Did you!’ exclaimed Alleyn. ‘That’s very interesting. What did you find?’
‘I found a very unpleasant condition. Evidence of fatty degeneration. I ordered him to avoid cigars like the plague, to deny himself his port and to rest for two hours every day. I am firmly persuaded that he paid no attention whatsoever. Nevertheless, my dear Mr Alleyn, it was not a condition under which I would expect an unprovoked heart attack. A struggle certainly might induce it and you tell me there is no evidence of a struggle.’
‘He was knocked out.’
‘Knocked out! Why didn’t you say so before? Because I gave you no opportunity, of course. I see. And quietly asphyxiated? How very horrible and how ingenious.’
‘Would the condition of the heart make it quicker?’
‘I should say so, undoubtedly.’
Davidson suddenly ran his fingers through his picturesque hair.
‘I am more distressed by this abominable, this unspeakable crime than I would have thought possible. Mr Alleyn, I had the deepest regard for Lord Robert. It would be impossible to exaggerate my regard for him. He seemed a comic figure, an aristocratic droll with an unusual amount of charm. He was much more than that. He had a keen brain. In conversation, he understood everything that one left unsaid, his mind was both subtle and firm. I am a man of the people. I adore all my smart friends and I understand—Cristo Mio, do I not understand!—my smart patients! But I am not, deep in my heart, at ease with them. With Lord Robert I was at ease. I showed off and was not ashamed afterwards that I had done so.’
‘You pay him a great compliment when you confess as much,’ said Alleyn.
‘Do I not? Listen. If it had been anyone else, do you know what I should have done? I should have kept quiet and I should have said to myself il ne faut pas réveiller le chat qui dort, and hoped nobody would remember that I stood in the hall this morning at Marsdon House and watched Lord Robert at the foot of the stairs. But as it is I have screwed myself up to making the superb gesture of coming to you with information you have already received. Gros-Jean en remontre à son cure!’
‘Not altogether,’ said Alleyn. ‘It is not entirely une vieille histoire. You may yet glow with conscious virtue. I am longing for a precise account of those last minutes in the hall. We have the order of the going but not the nature of it. If you don’t mind giving us a microscopically exact version?’
‘Ah!’ Davidson frowned. ‘You must give me a moment to arrange my facts. A microscopically exact version! Wait now.’ He closed his eyes and his right hand explored the surface of the carved jade paperweight. The deliberate movement of the fingers arrested Alleyn’s attention. The piece of jade might have been warm and living, so sensitively did the fingertips caress it. Alleyn thought: ‘He loves his beautiful possessions.’ He determined to learn more of this poseur who called himself a man of the people and spattered his conversation with French and Italian tags, who was at once so frankly theatrical and so theatrically frank.
Davidson opened his eyes. The effect was quite startling. They were such remarkable eyes. The light grey iris, unusually large, was ringed with black, the pupil a sharp black accent. ‘I bet he uses that trick on his patients to some effect,’ thought Alleyn, and then realized that Davidson was smiling. ‘Blast him, he’s read my thoughts.’ And he found himself returning the smile as if he and Davidson shared an amusing secret.
‘Take this down, Fox,’ said Alleyn.
‘Very good, sir,’ said Fox.
‘As you have noticed,’ Davidson began, ‘I have a taste for the theatrical. Let me present this little scene to you as if we watched it take place behind the footlights. I have shaken hands with my host and hostess where the double flight of stairs meet in a gallery outside the ballroom. I come down the left-hand flight of stairs, thinking of my advancing years and longing for my bed. In the hall are scattered groups of people; coated, cloaked, ready for departure. Already the great house seems exhausted and a little raffish. One feels the presence of drooping flowers, one seems to smell the dregs of champagne. It is indeed time to be gone. Among the departing guests I notice an old lady whom I wish to avoid. She’s rich, one of my best patients, but her chief complaint is a condition of chronic, complicated and acute verbal diarrhoea. I have ministered to this complaint already this evening and as I have no wish to be offered a lift in her car I dart into the men’s cloakroom. I spend some minutes there, marking time. It is a little awkward as the only other men in the cloakroom are obviously engaged in an extremely private conversation.’
‘Who are they?’ asked Alleyn.
‘A certain Captain Withers who is newly come upon the town and that pleasant youth, Donald Potter. They both pause and stare at me. I make a great business of getting my coat and hat. I chat with the cloakroom attendant after I have tipped him. I speak to Donald Potter, but am so poorly received that in sheer decency I am forced to leave. Lucy Lorrimer—tiens, there I go!’
‘It’s all right,’ said Alleyn, ‘I know all about Lucy Lorrimer.’
‘What a woman! She is still screaming out there. I pull up my scarf and lurk in the doorway, waiting for her to go. Having nothing else to do I watch the other people in the hall. The grand seigneur of the stomach stands at the foot of the stairs.’
‘Who?’
‘The man who presides over all these affairs. What is his name?’
‘Dimitri?’
‘Yes, Dimitri. He stands there like an imitation host. A group of young pe
ople go out. Then an older woman, alone, comes down the stairs and slips through the doors into the misty street. It was very strange, all that mist.’
‘Was this older woman Mrs Halcut-Hackett?’
‘Yes. That is who it was,’ said Davidson a little too casually.
‘Is Mrs Halcut-Hackett a patient of yours, Sir Daniel?’
‘It so happens that she is.’
‘Why did she leave alone? What about her husband and—hasn’t she got a débutante attached to her?’
‘The protégée, who is unfortunately une jeune fille un peu farouche, fell prey to toothache earlier in the evening and was removed by the General. I heard Lord Robert offer to escort Mrs Halcut-Hackett home.’
‘Why did he not do so?’
‘Perhaps because they missed each other.’
‘Come now, Sir Daniel, that’s not your real opinion.’
‘Of course it’s not, but I don’t gossip about my patients.’
‘I needn’t assure you that we shall be very discreet. Remember what you said about your attitude towards this case.’
‘I do remember. Very well. Only please, if you can avoid my name in subsequent interviews, I shall be more than grateful. I’ll go on with my recital. Mrs Halcut-Hackett, embedded in ermine, gives a swift look round the hall and slips out through the doors into the night. My attention is arrested by something in her manner, and while I stare after her somebody jostles me so violently that I actually stumble forward and only just save myself from falling. It is Captain Withers, who has come out of the cloakroom behind me. I turn to receive his apologies and find him with his mouth set and his unpleasant eyes—I mistrust people with white lashes—goggling at the stairhead. He does not even realize his own incivility, his attention is fixed on Lord Robert Gospell, who has begun to descend the stairs. This Captain Withers’s expression is so singular that I, too, forget our encounter. I hear him draw in his breath. There is a second’s pause and then he, too, thrusts his way through a party of chattering youngsters and goes out.’
‘Do you think Withers was following Mrs Halcut-Hackett?’
‘I have no reason to think so, but I do think so.’
‘Next?’