Killer Dolphin

by Ngaio Marsh

  “He’s a fanatic. He has written to me expostulating about the sale of the items to an American purchaser. He even tried, I am told, to secure an interview. My secretary can show you his letter. It is most extravagant.”

  “I shall be interested to see it.”

  A brief silence followed this exchange. Alleyn thought: “He’s formidable but he’s not as tough as I expected. He’s shaken.”

  “Have you any other questions?” Alleyn asked.

  He wondered if the long, unheralded silence was one of Mr. Conducis’s strategic weapons: whether it was or not, he now employed it and Alleyn, with every appearance of tranquillity, sat it out. The light had changed in the long green room and the sky outside the far windows had darkened. Beneath them, at the exquisite table, Peregrine Jay had first examined the documents and the glove. And against the left-hand wall under a picture—surely a Kandinsky—stood the bureau, an Oeben or Riesener perhaps, from which Mr. Conducis had withdrawn his treasures. Fox, who in a distant chair had performed his little miracle of self-effacement, gave a slight cough.

  Mr. Conducis said without moving, “I would ask for information as to the continued running of the play and the situation of the players.”

  “I understand the season will go on: we’ve taken no action that might prevent it.”

  “You will do so if you arrest a member of the company.”

  “He or she would be replaced by an understudy.”

  “She,” Mr. Conducis said in a voice utterly devoid of inflection. “That, of course, need not be considered.”

  He waited, but Alleyn thought it was his turn to initiate a silence and made no comment.

  “Miss Destiny Meade has spoken to me,” Mr. Conducis said. “She is very much distressed by the whole affair. She tells me you called upon her this afternoon and she finds herself, as a result, quite prostrated. Surely there is no need for her to be pestered like this.”

  For a split second Alleyn wondered what on earth Mr. Conducis would think if he and Fox went into fits of laughter. He said: “Miss Meade was extremely helpful and perfectly frank. I am sorry she found the exercise fatiguing.”

  “I have no more to say,” Mr. Conducis said and stood up. So did Alleyn.

  “I’m afraid that I have,” he said. “I’m on duty, sir, and this is an investigation.”

  “I have nothing to bring to it.”

  “When we are convinced of that we will stop bothering you. I’m sure you’d prefer us to deal with the whole matter here rather than at the Yard. Wouldn’t you?”

  Mr. Conducis went to the drinks tray and poured himself a glass of water. He took a minute gold case from a waistcoat pocket, shook a tablet on his palm, swallowed it and chased it down.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “it was time.”

  Ulcers? wondered Alleyn.

  Mr. Conducis returned and faced him. “By all means,” he said. “I am perfectly ready to help you and only regret that I am unlikely to be able to do so to any effect. I have, from the time I decided to promote The Dolphin undertaking, acted solely through my executives. Apart from an initial meeting and one brief discussion with Mr. Jay I have virtually no personal contacts with members of the management and company.”

  “With the exception, perhaps, of Miss Meade?”

  “Quite so.”

  “And Mr. Grove.”

  “He was already known to me. I except him.”

  “I understand you are related?”

  “A distant connection.”

  “So he said,” Alleyn lightly agreed. “I understand,” he added, “that you were formerly acquainted with Mr. Marcus Knight.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Peregrine Jay recognized his signature on the menu you destroyed in his presence.”

  “Mr. Jay was not himself that morning.”

  “Do you mean, sir, that he made a mistake and Knight was not a guest in the Kalliope?”

  After a long pause Mr. Gonducis said: “He was a guest. He behaved badly. He took offense at an imagined slight. He left the yacht, at my suggestion, at Villefranche.”

  “And so escaped the disaster?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Conducis had seated himself again: this time in an upright chair. He sat rigidly erect, but as if conscious of this, crossed his legs and put his hands in his trouser pockets. Alleyn stood a short distance from him.

  “I am going to ask you,” he said, “to talk about something that may be painful to you. I want you to tell me about the night of the fancy-dress dinner party on board the Kalliope.”

  Alleyn had seen people sit with the particular kind of stillness that now invested Mr. Conducis. They sat like that in the cells underneath the dock while they waited for the jury to come back. In the days of capital punishment, he had been told by a warder that they sat like that while they waited to hear if they were reprieved. He could see a very slight rhythmic movement of the crimson silk handkerchief and he could hear, ever so faintly, the breathing of Mr. Conducis.

  “It was six years ago, wasn’t it?” Alleyn said. “And the dinner party took place on the night of the disaster?”

  Mr. Conducis’s eyes closed in a momentary assent but he did not speak.

  “Was Mrs. Constantin Guzmann one of your guests in the yacht?”

  “Yes,” he said indifferently.

  “You told Mr. Jay, I believe, that you bought the Shakespeare relics six years ago?”

  “That is so.”

  “Had you this treasure on board the yacht?”

  “Why should you think so?”

  “Because Jay found under the glove the menu for a dinner in the Kalliope—he thinks it was headed ‘Villefranche.’ Which you burnt in the fireplace over there.”

  “The menu must have been dropped in the desk. It was an unpleasant reminder of a painful event”

  “So the desk and its contents were in the yacht?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why, sir?”

  Mr. Conduds’s lips moved, were compressed and moved again. “I bought them,” he said, “from—” he gave a grotesque little cough—“ from a person in the yacht.”

  “Who was this person, if you please?”

  “I have forgotten.”

  “Forgotten?”

  “The name.”

  “Was it Knight?”

  “No.”

  “There are maritime records. We shall be able to trace it. Will you go on, please?”

  “He was a member of the ship’s complement. He asked to see me and showed me the desk which he said he wanted to sell. I understand that it had been given him by the proprietress of a lodging-house. I thought the contents were almost certainly worthless but I gave him what he asked for them.”

  “Which was—?”

  “Thirty pounds.”

  “What became of this man?”

  “Drowned,” said a voice from somewhere inside Mr. Conducis.

  “How did it come about that the desk and its contents were saved?”

  “I cannot conjecture by what fantastic process of thought you imagine any of this relates to your inquiry.”

  “I hope to show that it does. I believe it does.”

  “I had the desk on deck. I had shown the contents, as a matter of curiosity, to some of my guests.”

  “Did Mrs. Guzmann see it, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Was she interested?”

  A look which Alleyn afterwards described as being profoundly professional drifted into Mr. Conducis’s face.

  He said, “She is a collector.”

  “Did she make an offer?”

  “She did. I was not inclined to sell.”

  Alleyn was visited by a strange notion.

  “Tell me,” he said, “were you both in fancy dress?”

  Mr. Conducis looked at him with an air of wondering contempt. “Mrs. Guzmann,” he said, “was in costume: Andalusian, I understand. I wore a domino over evening dress.”

/>   “Gloved, either of you?”

  “No!” he said loudly and added: “We had been playing bridge.”

  “Were any of the others gloved?”

  “A ridiculous question. Some may have been.”

  “Were the ship’s company in fancy dress?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “The stewards?”

  “As eighteenth-century flunkeys.”

  “Gloved?”

  “I do not remember.”

  “Why do you dislike pale gloves, Mr. Conducis?”

  “I have no idea,” he said breathlessly, “what you mean.”

  “You told Peregrine Jay that you dislike them.”

  “A personal prejudice. I cannot account for it.”

  “Were there gloved hands that disturbed you on the night of the disaster? Mr. Conducis, are you ill?”

  “I—no. No, I am well. You insist on questioning me about an episode which distressed me, which was painful, tragic, an outrage to one’s sensibilities.”

  “I would avoid it if I could. I’m afraid I must go further. Will you tell me exactly what happened at the moment of disaster: to you, I mean, and to whoever was near you then or later?”

  For a moment Alleyn thought he was going to refuse. He wondered if there would be a sudden outbreak or whether Mr. Conducis would merely walk out of the room and leave them to take what action they chose. He did none of these things. He embarked upon a toneless, rapid recital of facts. Of the fact of fog, the sudden looming of the tanker, the splitting apart of the Kalliope. Of the fact of fire breaking out

  Of oil on the water and of how he found himself looking down on the wooden raft from the swimming pool and of how the deck turned into a precipice and he slid from it and landed on the raft

  “Still with the little desk?”

  Yes. Clutched under his left arm, it seemed, but with no consciousness of this. He had lain across the raft with the desk underneath him. It had bruised him very badly. He gripped a rope loop at the side with his right hand. Mrs. Guzmann had appeared beside the raft and was clinging to one of the loops. Alleyn had a mental picture of an enormous nose, an open mouth, a mantilla plastered over a big head and a floundering mass of wet black lace and white flesh.

  The recital stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

  “That is all. We were picked up by the tanker.”

  “Were there other people on the raft?”

  “I believe so. My memory is not clear. I lost consciousness.”

  “Men? Mrs. Guzmann?”

  “I believe so. I was told so.”

  “Pretty hazardous, I should have thought. It wouldn’t accommodate more than—how many?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Conducis, when you saw Peregrine Jay’s gloved hands clinging to the edge of that hole in the stage at the Dolphin and heard him call out that he would drown if you didn’t save him—were you reminded—”

  Mr. Conducis had risen and now began to move backwards, like an image in slow motion, towards the bureau. Fox rose, too, and shifted in front of it. Mr. Conducis drew his crimson silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it against his mouth, and above it his upper lip glistened. His brows were defined by beaded margins and the dark skin of his face was stretched too tight and had blanched over the bones.

  “Be quiet,” he said. “No. Be quiet.”

  Somebody had come into the house. A distant voice spoke loudly but indistinguishably.

  The door opened and the visitor came in.

  Mr. Conducis screamed: “You’ve told them. You’ve betrayed me. I wish to Christ I’d killed you.”

  Fox took him from behind. Almost at once he stopped struggling.

  Trevor could be, as Alleyn put it, bent at the waist. He had been so bent and was propped up in a sitting position in his private room. A bed-tray on legs was arranged across his stomach, ready for any offerings that might be forthcoming. His condition had markedly improved since Alleyn’s visit of the day before, and he was inclined, though still feebly, to throw his weight about

  The private room was small but there was a hospital screen in one corner of it and behind the screen, secreted there before Trevor was wheeled in, sat Inspector Fox, his large, decent feet concealed by Trevor’s suitcase. Alleyn occupied the bedside chair.

  On receiving assurances from Alleyn that the police were not on his tracks Trevor reported, with more fluency, his previous account of his antics in the deserted auditorium, but he would not or could not carry the recital beyond the point when he was in the circle and heard a distant telephone ring. “I don’t remember another thing,” he said importantly. “I’ve blacked out. I was concussed. The doc says I was very badly concussed. Here! Where did I fall, Super? What’s the story?”

  “You fell into the stalls.”

  “Would you mind!”

  “True.”

  “Into the stalls! Cripes! Why?”

  “That’s what I want to find out.”

  Trevor looked sideways. “Did old Henry Jobbins lay into me?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Or Chas Random?”

  A knowledgeable look: a disfiguring look of veiled gratification, perhaps, appeared like a blemish on Trevor’s pageboy face. He giggled.

  “He was wild with me, Chas was. Listen: Chas had it in for me, Super, really he did. I got that camp’s goat, actually, good and proper.”

  Alleyn listened and absently noted how underlying Cockney seeped up through superimposed drama academy. Behind carefully turned vowel and consonant jibed a Southward urchin. “Goo’ ’un prop-per,” Trevor was really saying, however classy the delivery.

  “Some of the company are coming in to see you,”

  Alleyn said. “They may only stay for a minute or two but they’d like to say hullo.”

  “I’d be pleased,” Trevor graciously admitted. He was extremely complacent.

  Alleyn watched him and talked to him for a little while longer and then, conscious of making a decision that might turn out most lamentably, he said: “Look here, young Trevor, I’m going to ask you to help me in a very tricky and important business. If you don’t like the suggestion you needn’t have anything to do with it. On the other hand—”

  He paused. Trevor gave him a sharp look.

  “Nothing comes to the dumb,” he said. “What seems to be the trouble? Come in and give.”

  Ten minutes later his visitors began to arrive, ushered in by Peregrine Jay. “Just tell them,” Alleyn had said, “that he’d like to see them for a few minutes and arrange the timetable. You can pen them up in the waiting-room at the end of the corridor.”

  They brought presents.

  Winter Meyer came first with a box of crystallized fruit. He put it on the tray and then stood at the foot of the bed wearing his shepherd’s plaid suit and his dark red tie. His hair, beautifully cut, waved above and behind the ears. He leaned his head to one side and looked at Trevor.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “So the great star is receiving. How does it feel to be famous?”

  Trevor was languid and gracious, but before the prescribed five minutes had elapsed he mentioned that his agent would be waiting upon Mr. Meyer with reference to the Management, as he put it, seeing him right

  “We don’t,” Winter Meyer said, eyeing him warily, “need to worry just yet about that one. Do we?”

  “I hope not, Mr. Meyer,” Trevor said. He leaned his head back against the pillows and closed his eyes. “Funny how faint I appear to get,” he murmured. “I hope it won’t be kind of permanent. My doctors seem to take a grave view. Funny thing.”

  Mr. Meyer said, “You played that line just like the end of Act I, but I mustn’t tire you.”

  He tiptoed elaborately away from the bed and, as he passed Alleyn, let droop a heavy white eylid.

  Jeremy Jones had made a group of tiny effigies representing the characters in the play and had mounted them on a minuscule stage. “Ever
so quaint,” Trevor said. “Ta, Mr. Jones. You have been busy. Put it on my tray, would you?”

  Jeremy put his offering on the tray. Trevor gazed into his face as he did so. “You are clever with your fingers,” he said. “Aren’t you, Mr. Jones?”

  Jeremy looked suspiciously at him, turned scarlet and said to Alleyn: “I mustn’t stay too long.”

  “Don’t go,” said Trevor. “Yet.”

  Jeremy lingered, with one eye on Alleyn and awkwardly at a loss for anything to say. Peregrine tapped on the door, looked in, said: “Oh, sorry,” when he saw his friend and retired.

  “I want to see Mr. Jay,” Trevor said. “Here! Call him back.”

  Jeremy fetched Peregrine and seized the opportunity, after a nod from Alleyn, to make his own escape. Peregrine, having already done his duty in that respect, brought no offering.

  “Here!” Trevor said. “What price that kid? My understudy. Is he going on tonight?”

  “Yes. He’s all right,” Peregrine said. “Word perfect and going to give quite a nice show. You needn’t worry.”

  Trevor glowered at him. “What about the billing, Mr. Jay? What about the programmes?”

  “They’ve been slipped. ‘During your indisposition the part will be played—’ You know?”

  “Anything in the press? They haven’t brought me any papers,” the feeble voice grumbled. “What’s my agent doing? My mum says they don’t want me to see the papers. Look, Mr. Jay—”

  Alleyn said: “You’ll see the papers.”

  Peregrine waited until Charles Random arrived. “If you want me,” he then said to Alleyn, “I’ll be in the corridor.”

  Random brought a number of dubious-looking comics. “Knowing your taste in literature,” he said to Trevor. “Not that I approve.”

  Trevor indicated his tray. As Random approached him, he put on a sly look. “Really,” he said, “you shouldn’t have troubled, Mr. Random.”