Grave Mistake ra-30

by Ngaio Marsh

  “That’s right. Not for want of looking. But obviously he had it on him.”

  “Miss Foster, I wouldn’t ask you this if it wasn’t important and I hope you won’t mind very much that I do ask. Will you let me see those letters?”

  Prunella looked at her own hands. They were clenched tightly on her handkerchief and she hurriedly relaxed them. The handkerchief lay in a small damply crumpled heap in her lap. Alleyn saw where a fingernail had bitten into it.

  “I simply can’t imagine why,” she said. “I mean, it’s fantastic. Love letters, pure and simple, written almost forty years ago and concerning nothing and nobody but the writer. And Mummy, of course.”

  “I know. It seems preposterous, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how ‘professional’ and detached I shall be about it. Rather like a doctor. Please let me see them.”

  She glanced at the distant Fox, still absorbed in the contents of the curio table. “I don’t want to make a fuss about nothing,” she said. “I’ll get them.”

  “Are they still in the not-so-secret, secret drawer of the converted sofa-table?”

  “Yes.”

  “I should like to see it.”

  They had both risen.

  “Secret drawers,” said Alleyn lightly, “are my specialty. At the Yard they call me Peeping Tom Alleyn.” Prunella compressed her lips. “Fox,” Alleyn said loudly, “may I tear you away?”

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Alleyn,” Fox said, removing his spectacles but staying where he was. “I beg your pardon, Miss Foster. My attention was caught by this — should I call it specimen table? My aunt, Miss Elsie Smith, has just such another in her shop in Brighton.”

  “Really?” said Prunella and stared at him.

  Alleyn strolled down to the other end of the room and bent over the table. It contained a heterogeneous collection of medals, a vinaigrette, two miniatures, several little boxes in silver or cloisonné and one musical box, all set out on a blue velvet base.

  “I’m always drawn to these assemblies,” Alleyn said. “They are family history in hieroglyphics. I see you’ve rearranged them lately.”

  “No, I haven’t. Why?” asked Prunella, suddenly alerted. She joined them. It was indeed clear from indentations in the velvet that a rearrangement had taken place. “Damn!” she said. “At it again! No, it’s too much.”

  “At it?” Alleyn ventured. “Again? Who?”

  “Claude Carter. I suppose you know he’s staying here. He — does so fiddle and pry.”

  “What does he pry into?”

  “All over the place. He’s always like that. The old plans of this house and garden. Drawers in tables. He turns over other people’s letters when they come. I wouldn’t put him past reading them. I’m not living here at the moment so I daresay he’s having field days. I don’t know why I’m talking about it.”

  “Is he in the house at this moment?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only just come in, myself. Never mind. Forget it. Do you want to see the letters?”

  She walked out of the room, Alleyn opening the door for her. He followed her into the hall and up the staircase.

  “How happy Mr. Markos will be,” he remarked, “climbing up the golden stairs. They are almost golden, aren’t they? Where the sun catches them?”

  “I haven’t noticed.”

  “Oh, but you should. You mustn’t allow ownership to dull the edge of appetite. One should always know how lucky one is.”

  Prunella turned on the upper landing and stared at him.

  “Is it your habit,” she asked, “to go on like this? When you’re on duty?”

  “Only if I dare hope for a sympathetic reception. What happens now? Turn right, proceed in a westerly direction and effect an entrance?”

  Since this was in fact what had to be done, Prunella said nothing and led the way into her mother’s bedroom.

  A sumptuous room. There was a canopied bed and a silken counterpane with a lacy nightgown case topped up by an enormous artificial rose. A largesse of white bearskin rugs. But for all its luxury the room had a depleted air as if the heart had gone out of it. One of the wardrobe doors was open and disclosed complete emptiness.

  Prunella said rapidly: “I sent everything, all the clothes, away to the nearest professional theatre. They can sell the things they don’t use: fur hats and coats and things.”

  There were no photographs or feminine toys of any kind on the tables and chimney-piece, and Sybil’s sofa-cum-dressing-table, with its cupid-encircled looking-glass, had been bereft of all the pots, bottles and jars that Alleyn supposed had adorned it.

  Prunella said, following his look. “I got rid of everything. Everything.” She was defiant.

  “I expect it was the best thing to do.”

  “We’re going to change the room. Completely. My father-in-law-to-be’s fantastic about houses — an expert. He’ll advise us.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Alleyn politely.

  She almost shouted at him: “I suppose you think I’m hard and modern and over-reacting to everything. Well, so I may be. But I’ll thank you to remember that Will. How she tried to bribe me, because that’s what it was, into marrying a monster, because that’s what he is, and punish me if I didn’t. I never thought she had it in her to be so mean and despicable and I’m not going to bloody cry again and I don’t in the least know why I’m talking to you like this. The letters are in the dressing-table and I bet you can’t find the hidden bit.”

  She turned her back on Alleyn and blew her nose.

  He went to the table, opened the central drawer, slid his finger round inside the frame and found a neat little knob that released a false wall at the back. It opened and there in the “secret” recess was the classic bundle of letters tied with the inevitable faded ribbon.

  There was also an open envelope with some half-dozen sepia snapshots inside.

  “I think,” he said, “the best way will be for me to look at once through the letters and if they are irrelevant return them to you. Perhaps there’s somewhere downstairs where Fox and I could make ourselves scarce and get it settled.”

  Without saying anything further Prunella led the way downstairs to the “boudoir” he had visited on his earlier call. They paused at the drawing-room to collect Mr. Fox, who was discovered in contemplation of a portrait in pastel of Sybil as a young girl.

  “If,” said Prunella, “you don’t take the letters away perhaps you’d be kind enough to leave them in the desk.”

  “Yes, of course,” Alleyn rejoined with equal formality. “We mustn’t use up any more of your time. Thank you so much for being helpful.”

  He made her a little bow and was about to turn away when she suddenly thrust out her hand.

  “Sorry I was idiotic. No bones broken?” Prunella asked.

  “Not even a green fracture.”

  “Goodbye, then.”

  They shook hands.

  “That child,” said Alleyn when they were alone, “turned on four entirely separate moods, if that’s what they should be called, in scarcely more than as many minutes. Not counting the drawing-room comedy which was not a comedy. You and your Aunt Elsie!”

  “Perhaps the young lady’s put about by recent experience,” Fox hazarded.

  “It’s the obvious conclusion, I suppose.”

  In the boudoir Alleyn divided the letters — there were eight — between them. Fox put on his spectacles and read with the catarrhal breathing that always afflicted him when engaged in that exercise.

  Prunella had been right They were indeed love letters, “pure and simple” within the literal meaning of the phrase, and most touching. The young husband had been deeply in love and able to say so.

  As his regiment moved from the Western Desert to Italy, the reader became accustomed to the nicknames of fellow officers and regimental jokes. The Corp, who was indeed Captain Carter’s servant, featured more often as time went on. Some of the letters were illustrated with lively little drawings. There was one of the e
normous Corp being harassed by bees in Tuscany. They were represented as swarming inside his kilt and he was depicted with a violent squint and his mouth wide open. A balloon issued from it with a legend that said: “It’s no sae much the ticklin’, it’s the imperrtinence, ye ken.”

  The last letter was as Prunella had described it. The final sentences read: “So my darling love, I shan’t see you this time. If I don’t stop I’ll miss the bloody train. About the stamp — sorry, no time left Your totally besotted husband, Maurice.”

  Alleyn assembled the letters, tied the ribbon and put the little packet in the desk. He emptied out the snapshots: a desolate, faded company well on its slow way to oblivion. Maurice Carter appeared in all of them and in all of them looked like a near relation of Rupert Brooke. In one, he held by the hand a very small nondescript child: Claude, no doubt. In another, he and a ravishingly pretty young Sybil appeared together. A third was yet another replica of the regimental group still in her desk drawer. The fourth and last showed Maurice kilted and a captain now, with his enormous “Corp” stood-to-attention in the background.

  Alleyn took it to the window, brought out his pocket lens and examined it. Fox folded his arms and watched him,

  Presently he looked up and nodded.

  “We’ll borrow these four,” he said. “I’ll leave a receipt.”

  He wrote it out, left it in the desk and put the snap-shots in his pocket. “Come on,” he said.

  They met nobody on their way out. Prunella’s car was gone. Fox followed Alleyn past the long windows of a library and the lower west flank of the house. They turned right and came at last to the stables.

  “As likely as not, he’ll still be growing mushrooms,” Alleyn said.

  And so he was. Stripped to the waist, bronzed, golden-bearded and looking like a much younger man. Bruce was hard at work in the converted lean-to. When he saw Alleyn he grounded his shovel and arched his earthy hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

  “Ou aye,” he said, “so it’s you again, Chief Superintendent. What can I do for you, the noo?”

  “You can tell us, if you will, Corporal Gardener, the name of your regiment, and of its captain,” said Alleyn.

  ii

  “I canna credit it,” Bruce muttered and gazed out of his nonaligned blue eyes at Alleyn. “It doesna seem within the bounds of possibility. It’s dealt me a wee shock. I’ll say that for it.”

  “You hadn’t an inkling?”

  “Don’t be sae daft, man,” Bruce said crossly. “Sir, I should say. How would I have an inkling, will you tell me that? I doubt if her first husband was ever mentioned in my hearing and why would he be?”

  “There was this stepson,” Fox said to nobody in particular. “Name of Carter.”

  “Be damned to that,” Bruce shouted. “Carrrter! Carrrter! Why would he not be Carrrter? Would I be sae daft as to say: my Captain, dead nigh on forty years, was a man o’ the name of Carrrter so you must be his son and he the bonniest lad you’d ever set eyes on and you, not’ to dra’ it mild, a puir, sickly, ill-put-taegither apology for a man? Here, sir, can I have another keek at them photies?”

  Alleyn gave them to him.

  “Ah,” he said, “I mind it fine, the day that group was taken. I’d forgotten all about it but I mind it fine the noo.”

  “But didn’t you notice the replica of this one in her bedroom at the hotel?”

  Bruce stared at him. His expression became prudish. He half-closed his eyes and pursed his enormous mouth. He said, in a scandalized voice: “Sir, I never set fut in her bedroom. It would have not been the thing at a’. Not at a’.”

  “Indeed?”

  “She received me in her wee private parlour upstairs or in the garden.”

  “I see. I beg your pardon.”

  “As for these ither ones: I never saw them before.”

  He gazed at them in silence for some moments. “My God,” he said quietly, “look at the bairn, just. That’ll be the bairn by the first wife. My God, it’ll be this Claude! Who’d’ve thought it. And here’s anither wi’ me in the background. It’s a strange coincidence, this, it is indeed.”

  “You never came to Quintern or heard him speak of it?”

  “If I did, the name didna stick in my mind. I never came here. What for would I? When we had leave and we only had but one before he was kilt, he let me gang awa’ home. Aye, he was a considerate officer. Christ!”

  “What’s the matter?” Alleyn asked. Bruce had dealt his knees a devastating smack with his ginger-haired earthy hands.

  “When I think of it,” he said. “When I mind how me and her would have our bit crack of an evening when I came in for my dram. Making plans for the planting season and a’ that. When I remember how she’d talk sae free and friendly and there, all unbeknownst, was my captain’s wife that he’d let on to me was the sonsiest lass in the land. He had her picture in his wallet and liked fine to look at it. I took a wee keek mysel’ one morning when I was brushing his tunic. She was bonny, aye she was that. Fair as a flooer. She seems to have changed and why wouldn’t she over the passage of the years? Ou aye,” he said heavily. “She changed.”

  “We all do,” said Alleyn. “You’ve changed, yourself. I didn’t recognize you at first, in the photographs.”

  “That’d be the beard,” he said seriously and looked over his lightly sweating torso with the naïve self-approval of the physically fit male. “I’m no’ so bad in other respects,” he said.

  “You got to know Captain Carter quite well, I suppose?”

  “Not to say well, just. And yet you could put it like that. What’s that speil to the effect that no man’s a hero to his valet? He can be so to his soldier-servant and the Captain came near enough to it with me.”

  “Did you get in touch with his wife after he was killed? Perhaps write to her?”

  “Na, na. I wadna tak’ the liberty. And foreby I was back wi’ the regiment that same night and awa’ to the front. We didna get the news until after we landed.”

  “When did you return to England?”

  “After the war. I was taken at Cassino and spent the rest of the duration in a prison camp.”

  “And Mrs. Carter never got in touch? I mean: Captain Carter wrote quite a lot about you in his letters. He always referred to you as The Corp. I would have thought she would have liked to get in touch.”

  “Did he? Did he mention me, now?” said Bruce eagerly. “To think o’ that.”

  “Look here, Gardener, you realize by this time, don’t you, that we are considering the possibility of foul play in this business?”

  Bruce arranged the photographs carefully like playing cards, in his left fist and contemplated them as if they were all aces.

  “I’m aware of that,” he said absently. “It’s a horrid conclusion but I’m aware of it. To think he made mention of me in his correspondence. Well, now!”

  “Are you prepared to help us if you can? Do,” begged Alleyn, “stop looking at those damn’ photographs. Here — give them to me and attend to what I say.”

  Bruce with every sign of reluctance yielded up the photographs.

  “I hear you,” he said. “Ou aye. I am prepared.”

  “Good. Now. First question. Did Captain Carter ever mention to you or in your hearing, a valuable stamp in his possession?”

  “He did not. Wait!” said Bruce dramatically. “Aye. I mind it now. It was before he went on his last leave. He said it was in his bank in the City but he was no’ just easy in his mind on account of the blitz and intended to uplift it.”

  “Did he say what he meant to do with it?”

  “Na, na. Not a wurrred to that effect.”

  “Sure?”

  “Aye, I’m sure,” said Bruce, indifferently.

  “Oh, well,” Alleyn said after a pause and looked at Fox.

  “You can’t win all the time,” said Fox.

  Bruce shook himself like a wet dog. “I’ll not deny this has been a shock to me,” he said. �
�It’s given me an unco awkward feeling. As if,” he added opening his eyes very wide and producing a flight of fancy that seemed to surprise him, “as if time, in a manner of speaking, had got itself mixed. That’s a gey weird notion, to be sure.”

  “Tell me, Gardener. Are you a Scot by birth?”

  “Me? Na, na, I’m naething of the sort, sir. Naething of the sort. But I’ve worked since I was a laddie, in Scotland and under Scots instruction. I enlisted in Scotland. I served in a Scots regiment and I daresay you’ve noticed I’ve picked up a trick or two of the speech.”

  “Yes,” said Alleyn. “I had noticed.

  “Aye,” said Bruce complacently. “I daresay I’d pass for one in a crowd and proud to do it.” As if to put a signature to his affirmation he gave Alleyn a look that he would have undoubtedly described as “canny.”

  “I ken well enough,” he said, “that I must feature on your short list if it’s with homicide that you’re concerning yourself, Superintendent. For the simple reason the deceased left me twenty-five thousand pounds, et cetera. That’s correct, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Alleyn said. “That’s correct.”

  “I didna reckon to be contradicted and I can only hope it won’t be long before you eliminate me from the file. In the meantime I can do what any guiltless man can do under the circumstances: tell the truth and hope I’m believed. For I have told you the truth, Chief Superintendent. I have indeed.”

  “By and large, Bruce,” said Alleyn, “I believe you have.”

  “There’s no ‘by’ and there’s no ‘large’ in it,” he said seriously, “and I don’t doubt you’ll come to acknowledge the fact.”

  “I hope to,” Alleyn said cheerfully. “With that end in view tell me what you think of Dr. Schramm? You’ve met him, haven’t you?”

  Bruce stared at him. He turned red and looked wary. “I canna see what my opinion of the doctor would have to do wi’ the matter in hand,” he said.

  “You prefer not to give it?”

  “I didna say so. I make no secret of what I think of the doctor. I think he’s not to be trusted.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Leave it at that. Call it instinct. I canna thole the man and that’s the long and the short of it.”