by Ngaio Marsh
An Arrest and a Night Journey
OUTSIDE ON THE FROZEN BALCONY two men struggled together bitterly and silently. The uncertain lamp light, broken by the billowing curtains, wavered across them. Nigel had a swift glimpse of Tokareff’s face, spectacled, strangely passive. He flung himself at the Russian, tackling him low, and was himself bowled over, striking his face against the icy, frost-smelling stones. A moment later he saw Alleyn stagger backwards, and as he himself scrambled up he was aware of a figure that melted away out into the dark.
“After him!” Alleyn grunted. A shrill whistle split the night air.
Nigel was running across the lawn, vaguely conscious of the rush of cold air on his eyes and lips. “The wood!” he thought, “he mustn’t reach the wood.” He could hear the dull rhythm of the Russian’s feet on the soft turf. With a stringent effort he quickened his pace, sprinted and then dived, bringing the unseen fugitive down with him.
“This is better,” thought Nigel, wrenching a wrist and arm across a writhing back, “I’ve got him.”
“Got him?” echoed Alleyn’s voice out of the darkness, and in a moment the detective knelt beside him, and a bull’s-eye lantern heralded the approach at the double of Bunce, P.C.
Tokareff uttered a short gasping sound, a sort of groan.
“Now then,” said Alleyn, “let’s have my torch.” A pencil of light shot out. Tokareff lay on his back with Alleyn sitting across him. “Get back to your post, Bunce, as quick as you came,” the detective ordered sharply. “Is Green still there?”
“Yessir,” breathed Bunce; “we heard your whistle.”
“Miss North, Mr. Bathgate, and I will come through in the Bentley in ten minutes. Have the gates open and don’t stop us. Keep a cat’s own watch for anything else. Now skedaddle!”
“Yessir,” blew Bunce in the dark, and the bull’s-eye retired.
“Now then, Doctor Tokareff. There’s a perfectly good revolver cuddled into your ribs here, and I think you will come quietly.”
“Proklyatie! proklyatei!” stuttered a furious voice. Something clicked sharply.
“Yes, I dare say. Come now, get up.”
The three stood facing each other in the darkness to which their eyes had grown accustomed.
“I don’t think he carries any deadly weapons,” said Alleyn; “but have a look, will you, Bathgate. Doctor Tokareff, you must consider yourself under arrest. Nothing in his hip pocket, or anywhere? Sure? Right. Now, this way quickly. Damn, too late! Here’s the hue and cry. Oh well, no matter.”
The sound of voices drifted across from the house. Two figures were silhouetted against the dishevelled warmth of the study windows.
“Alleyn! Bathgate!” called Sir Hubert.
“Here we are!” answered Alleyn. “Nothing’s the matter.”
“Nozzing ze matter!” bellowed the suddenly articulate Russian. “I greatly beg a difference. I am under an arrest. I am innocent of this murder! Sir Hubert! Mr. Ooilde!”
“Come on,” said Alleyn, and he and Nigel propelled their captive back towards the house.
Handesley and Wilde met them in the pool of light outside the windows.
“Just a little Russian touch,” explained Alleyn. “Manacles at midnight. A home away from home for the doctor.”
“Doctor Tokareff,” said Sir Hubert, “this is a terrible business.”
“Tokareff!” murmured Wilde to Nigel. “Tokareff, after all!” And Nigel wondered if there had crept into his voice a note of exquisite relief or only one of profound astonishment. The Russian was protesting vehemently, his manacled hands clasped in front of his face. Nigel felt an insane desire to giggle.
“Sir Hubert,” Alleyn continued, exactly as if the Russian was not speaking, “please do you and Mr. Wilde return indoors. You may explain briefly to the others what has happened.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We shall be away for some time. I shall get Miss Angela to drive us to the local police station. Doctor Tokareff—”
“I am innocent! Ask of the peasant Vassily, the butler! He knows—on the night of the crime—I must tell you.”
“I have to warn you,” interrupted Alleyn, and Nigel saw him glance inimicably at Wilde, “that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you. Later on, if you choose, you can make a statement. Now, Sir Hubert, and you too, Mr. Wilde, please go in. I shall communicate with you later.” The others turned silently towards the house.
“Lawyers!” roared Tokareff after them. “Lawyers! judges! magistrates! How you call them? I must have them of the best.”
“So you shall. Bless the boy. Come on,” said Alleyn, as the others disappeared, “come on, Bathgate, round the house to the garage, and Doctor Tokareff, I really must insist—no more Deaths of Boris.”
He led them without hesitation to the back drive, where in a softly palpitating Bentley they found Angela.
“Good girl,” said Alleyn softly. “Doctor Tokareff will come with us, as you see. In you get, Doctor. Bathgate, you sit in front. To the local quad, please, Miss.”
“Streuth!” whispered Angela, as the Bentley ate up the drive.
“Streuth indeed!” agreed Nigel. “Tokareff is under arrest.”
“For the murder?”
“For what else?”
“But—he sang the Death of Boris all the time.”
“Seems he couldn’t have.”
“Well, here we are,” commented Angela after an indecently brief interval. She slowed down and put on her brakes.
“Will you wait for us?” Alleyn asked her. “Come on, Doctor Tokareff.”
A police sergeant showed them into a brilliantly lit whitewashed room. A tall blue-uniformed officer greeted them.
“Inspector Fisher—Mr. Bathgate,” said Alleyn by way of introduction. “This is Doctor Tokareff. I wish to charge him with—”
Tokareff, who had been perfectly silent for some time, broke in. “I am innocent of murder!”
“Who said you weren’t?” rejoined Alleyn wearily. “The charge is one of sedition and conspiracy, if that’s the correct phrase. I always get them wrong, don’t I, Fisher? This man is charged with complicity in connection with the operations of an association of Russians having its headquarters at 101 Little Racquet Street, Soho. He is charged with having caused to be published and circulated certain pamphlets containing treasonable utterances and incitements to sedition and—oh, damn it, anyway, that’s the charge.”
“Righto,” said Inspector Fisher, crossing to a desk and putting on his spectacles. “Let’s have it.”
A brief colloquy between the two policemen followed, interspersed by the scratching of the Inspector’s pen. The sergeant came in and said cheerfully: “Now then, Doctor, we’ll just move next door.”
“I wish to write, to make an announcement,” said Doctor Tokareff suddenly.
“You shall have every opportunity,” soothed Alleyn. “What a tig you are in, to be sure!”
“It is the knife,” said Tokareff profoundly. “The betrayal of the knife that has been to me my own betrayal. The Pole, Krasinski, who gave it to Mr. Rankin was the author of all these misfortunates.”
“Krasinski is dead,” said Alleyn, “and letters of yours were in his pockets. Who killed him?”
“How should I know? In the brotherhood no one knows. Krasinski was mad. I wish to write to my country’s ambassador.”
“You may do so. He’ll be delighted. We’ll leave you now, Fisher. I’ll ring through at about one o’clock. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” mumbled Nigel uncomfortably, and followed the detective out to the car.
Angela did nothing to darken her reputation as a furious driver on that night trip to London. Alleyn refused to talk after having given an address off Coventry Street as their destination, and slept deeply on the back seat. Nigel stared at a young, eager profile and thought his own thoughts.
“Do you think Mr. Alleyn believes Doctor Tokareff did it?” she said.
“And on Sunday someone murdered Charles Rankin at Frantock,” concluded Angela under her breath. “Do you think Tokareff could have darted out of his bedroom, rushed to the head of the stairs, thrown the knife, run back and gone on gaily with the Death of Boris?”
“Hardly. And who put out the lights?” objected Nigel.
“And what does Mr. Alleyn mean by saying Charles himself sounded the gong?” Angela ended hopelessly.
“I can’t imagine, but I’m glad he’s asleep. Angela, if I were to kiss the fur on your collar, would you mind very much?”
“We are now doing sixty, and we are going up to sixty-five. Is this a time for dalliance?”
“It may be my death,” said Nigel, “but I’ll risk it.”
“That wasn’t the fur on my collar.”
“Darling!”
“What’s the time?” said Alleyn suddenly from the back seat.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes,” called Angela, and was true to her words.
At the top of one of those curious little cul-de-sacs off Coventry Street, where the Bentley looked the size of a caravan, Alleyn fitted a latch-key into a green door.
“You will find that you know my servant,” he said over his shoulder.
And, sure enough, there in the little hall waiting for them was an elderly apologetic figure, anxiously bent forward.
“Vassily!” cried Angela.
“Miss Angela, my little Miss Dushitchka!” The old Russian was covering her hands with kisses.
“Oh, Vassily!” said Angela gently, “what have you to do with this? Why did you run away?”
“I was in terror. In such terrible fright. Picture, little Miss, what would they think? I said to myself the police will find out all. They will question Alexis Andrevitch, Doctor Tokareff, and he will tell them perhaps that I also was of the brotherhood long, long ago in my own country. He will repeat what I have said, that Mr. Rankin should not have the holy little knife that had been blessed to the bratsvo, the brothership. The English police, they know everything, and perhaps they already have known how I have had letters from the brothership in London. It will be useless for me to say that I am no longer, how you say, mixed up with this society. I am already suspect. So before the police come, I run away and am arrested here in London, and to Scotland Yard I have made my statement and to Inspector Alleyn when he comes up to see me on Sunday, and they release me and I stay here. It is splendid!”
“He behaved like an old donkey,” said Alleyn. “Did you get my message, Vassily?”
“Yes, certainly, and already dinner is waiting and cocktails.”
“Then let Miss Angela powder her nose in the guest suite, while Mr. Bathgate and I remove the turf from our ears in the lonely west wing.”
Alleyn was still about this business when Nigel, emerging from a diminutive dressing-room, found Angela already in the Inspector’s extremely comfortable study.
“Tell me,” she said in an engaging whisper, “do Chief Inspector Detectives usually invite the relatives and friends of the victim to dine in their flat, and do they invariably engage disappearing butlers as their own servants as soon as they are freed from arrest?”
“Perhaps it is The Thing Done in the Yard,” answer Nigel; “though, I must say, he doesn’t conform to my mental pictures of a sleuth-hound. I had an idea they lived privately amidst inlaid linoleums, aspidistras, and enlarged photographs of constabulary groups.”
“Taking a strong cuppa at six-thirty in their shirt sleeves. Well, pooh to us for a couple of snobs, anyway.”
“All the same,” said Nigel, “I do think he’s a bit unorthodox. He must be a gent with private means who sleuths for sleuthing’s sake.”
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Alleyn in the doorway. “Have one of Vassily’s ‘cork-tails,’ and then let us dine.”
Vassily, important and beaming, rolled back sliding doors, and the Inspector ushered them into the dining-room. The dinner was a very pleasant little ceremony. When Vassily had brought in coffee, set a decanter in front of the Inspector, and taken himself off, Alleyn looked at his watch.
“We can talk for fifteen minutes,” he said, “and then I want you to do a job of work for me. Perhaps I should say I can talk for fifteen minutes, because I should like, if it wouldn’t bore you, to go over the history of this case. It is of enormous help, I find, to talk to someone who is not a C.I.D. man. You needn’t look so inordinately perky, Bathgate. I don’t expect you to solve the mystery; I merely want you to tell me how clever I am, whether you think so or not.”
“Oke,” said Nigel tractably.
Alleyn gave him a friendly grin, lit a cigarette, and with a faintly didactic air began his résumé.
“I shall return to the official manner,” he said. “I find it impresses you. Rankin was stabbed in the back at five minutes to eight. That was the time by your watch when the gong sounded, and your watch synchronized with Mary’s, who told Wilde it was ten to as he went upstairs. She saw him go up. You spoke to him when he went into the bathroom and during the time that followed; that leaves four minutes when Rankin was alone until the murder took place—less, because Mary didn’t go away immediately. He was stabbed from behind either by somebody over six feet, or by somebody standing on a raised area. In falling he struck the gong with his head.”
“Oh!” gasped Angela and Nigel together.
“Yes, indeed. You were slow there. Baby-class stuff at the Yard, I do assure you. There was a very slight abrasion on the head, and I am pretty sure that was how it was caused. You all described the sound as a single, slightly muffled, booming note. ‘Skulls and brass in musical conjunction,’ said I to myself. The moving of the body was definitely naughty—I was very cross about it—but that is how I reconstruct it. Rankin was bending over pouring out his drink, poor chap, the shaker was beside him on the floor and the glass overturned. Miss Grant noticed that. The murderer—I shan’t bother to add ‘or murderess’ every time—then switched off the lights, wearing a glove or having something wrapped round the hand. He then ran away. Where to? For reasons that I shan’t bore you with, I think he went upstairs.
“Now; at that precise moment where was everybody? The servants are all accounted for, even that old goat Vassily, who was alone in the boot-room. You, Bathgate, were in your room. A housemaid saw you there when the gong sounded, and I have other excellent reasons for believing your evidence. Sir Hubert says he was in his dressing-room. You saw him there, Miss Angela, when you fetched the aspirin, and you had only just got back to Miss Grant’s room when the alarm sounded. Sir Hubert is a very active man for his age, but he could not have got downstairs in that time, be he never so nippy. You might possibly have managed it, but in your case, Miss Angela, there is a complete absence of motive and I have washed you out as a possibility. No cause célèbre for you this time.”
“Too kind,” muttered Nigel.
“Besides, Florence saw you in the passage. ‘Saved by the Servants’ is the sub-title as far as you two are concerned. Miss Grant went upstairs, bathed, went to Rankin’s room, returned, found Florence in her room. Miss Grant in her account, deliberately gave a miss to her visit to Rankin’s room, but unless she had bribed Florence to tell a tarradiddle for her, their meeting, although it does not save her from coming definitely under suspicion, gives her a very short time in which to get downstairs, take the dagger from the wall, drive it home, and return. She studied medicine at the university, clever girl, and intended to become a doctor. Please don’
t interrupt, either of you.
“Tokareff sang in his bedroom, and Florence tells me she heard him. So did Sir Hubert. They are under the impression he was rendering the bellows of Boris unceasingly until the gong sounded. Such impressions are not very truthworthy. He may well have stopped for four minutes without their having any recollection of it.
“Mrs. Wilde, whose room is at the head of the stairs, was nearest to the victim. You say you heard her talking after the lights went out. There are certain other features that go far towards scratching her off the list of possibles, but she has subsequently done one or two things that show she was desperately anxious to conceal certain aspects of her friendship for Rankin.”
“Surely,” ventured Angela gently, “that is very understandable.”
“I think so too, but all the same, they must be cleared up. That is why you are going to help me tonight. Wilde we have dealt with exhaustively. We are all sick of Wilde. He has tried to give himself up for the murder, but his movements have been described from the time he left Rankin and went upstairs under the gaze of the housemaid until the gong sounded. Bathgate talked to him all the time, and Florence heard them. The bath gave an excellent finger-print, and so on, and so on. He also left some prints on the bannister, just to make it more difficult.
“Lastly, there is the melodramatic Russian element. Your uncle has written several excellent essays on Russian characteristics and customs. In my opinion, the truest thing he ever wrote about Russians was that no Englishman could understand them. The idea of a villainous secret brotherhood belongs to Merejkowski and contributors to Chums. The idea of Russians stabbing people in England because someone has given away a sacred dagger is so highly coloured that a decent policeman blushes to advance it. Yet Krasinski the Pole was murdered for this reason, Rankin was the man to whom the knife was given, and two members of the association were in the house when it happened. One is already under arrest for sedition, but—blast his eyes!—he sang while the murder was going on.”
“That,” said Angela mildly, “establishes a beautiful alibi, doesn’t it?”
“A bit too beautiful, you think,” observed Alleyn appreciatively. “Sagacious woman, you have stolen my stock bit of thunder. Yet sing he did, and—unless as I have said, he did pause without anyone noticing the sudden lull, or unless he’s a ventriloquist and threw the Death of Boris upstairs and along the back corridor—it’s a teaser to get rid of. Well, here we are again. Let me say finally that there were no finger-prints on the dagger or on the strap from which it was taken, only Bathgate’s prints on the electric switch and a muck-up of everybody’s on the bannister. Talking of the bannister, Miss Angela, do you ever slide down it?”