Black Plumes

by Margery Allingham

  They never caught him. The Piccadilly traffic did that as he made a wild dash through it to reach, so the papers said afterward, the car showrooms on the opposite side of the road. The story at the time was that he was attempting to duck into the doorway unseen by his pursuers and afterward to escape in the car for which he was already negotiating, but that was only a theory. Whatever the truth was, the traffic got him. It swept down the greasy road like an avalanche of red and gold; buses speeding to keep to schedule, little black taxicabs as mobile as flies on a ceiling and very like them, three-ton delivery trucks and a shoal of private cars.

  He was dead two seconds after he left the pavement. The two buses shrieked and swayed and brushed one another in a hail of breaking glass as the hat less figure rebounded from the radiator of the first and pitched beneath the double wheels of the second.

  The avalanche was still for a minute or two and the crowd pressed forward shyly.

  Frances and David went for a walk that night.

  By eleven o'clock 38 Sallet Square was comparatively peaceful. Meyrick and Miss Dorset were still over at the gallery in conference with the head of the accounts department. Nurse King was nodding over a book in Phillida's mom. Norris was in the kitchen nursing his wounded arm and submitting to the ministrations of Molly and Mrs. Sanderson. Gabrielle lay in her monstrous bed beneath the tapestry and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John blessed her with their needlework smiles, while Dorothea muttered mingled prayers for her deliverance and imprecations at the fate which should have had the impudence to decree that she should ever have been in any danger.

  The walk was David's idea and Frances was grateful to him for it before they had been out of the house ten minutes. Walking is a great sedative and the peace and solidity of an old city at night tends to make personal affairs, however terrible, seem small beside such ancient tranquility.

  The sky had cleared and it was mild, with stars over the spires, and in the air a strange damp exhilaration which is peculiar to London.

  They walked along in silence for a long time, heading down the Hay market to Whitehall and the river. It was quiet once they left the theater center, and they walked on wide pavements which they had practically to themselves.

  "Poor old Dolly," " David said suddenly. "You can almost forgive him, you know. He had great provocation. And guts too," he added after a pause. "Terrific guts. The Lucar killing needed something like nerve. He must have taken Phillida upstairs and gone straight along to Gabrielle's empty room, walked through the cupboard, done his work and come calmly out again the same way, ambling downstairs to try the Packard. We forgot how well he knew the house. Phillida must have guessed. Did she?"

  "I think so." Frances spoke soberly. "I think Gabrielle got it out of her that time she sent the nurse away. I think that's how she knew so certainly. You knew too, didn't you?"

  "Yes," he said. "I knew. I knew he'd killed Robert. I knew that night when we were all at the Marble Hall. He accused me. Do you remember? He worked himself up, described the scene, and suddenly gave himself away by referring to Roberts Grey lock flapping in his eyes. I was so startled that I thought he'd seen my face. Robert went Grey in the last six months of his life. He told me so. Besides, I saw it myself. He was bleaching before one's eyes." He shook his head. 'That whistle on the telephone was a damnable torture of Lucar's. Anyway, as soon as 'Dolly' mentioned the Grey hair I knew that he was describing a picture that he'd really seen. I didn't know what to do. I was appallingly sorry for Phillida and scared still generally. It put me on the idea, of course. I began to work out how he could have done it, and it was so abominably easy once one accustomed one's mind to the size of the scheme. I knew he did speak all these border dialects, and it dawned on me that if he had somehow got out of Tibet with something really worth having there was no reason why he shouldn't have lain low for a bit while he disposed of the stuff and turned it into cash. In the course of this he could easily have heard the story of his own heroic death and Robert's marriage and have sneaked back into the country, done his killing and roared back again in time to take part in a grand resurrection ceremony, the details of which he had arranged beforehand. There were no Imperial Airways sailing on the day after the murder, but as soon as I looked into the Dutch Air Line arrangements the whole thing became staggeringly clear. He could do it in six days.

  He paused and shook his head.

  "Lucar's return pulled me together," he said, "and as soon as I saw what was going to happen there I knew I must get busy. I was hours and hours too late, of course."

  "I saw you," she remarked unexpectedly. "I saw you leave the gallery just as the excitement started. Just as Lucar's body was discovered."

  "Did you? That shook the duchess up a bit, didn't it?" He was grinning at her with his old lazy sophistication and she felt comforted. "I'd been down to the framing department. The foreman there has a very fine collection of celebrities pinned up on the wall and I thought he might have a better photograph of Godolphin than the two or three I'd got from the news agency. However, I wasn't lucky and I had to use what I had. It was a simple, rather childish idea. Working on the theory that when Mrs. Sanderson said 'nigger' she might easily mean a high-caste Hindu whose ancestors were discussing theology while her own were still leaping from twig to twig, I simply took out my box of paints and decorated half a dozen press photographs of Dolly with various turbans and fancy moustachings. It was hardly a disguise at all. That's why it was so successful. He was quite right when he said what European can tell the difference between two Indians. The ordinary casual observer simply sees a dark chap in a turban. Well, I was in the thick of my art work when the police came round with the news about Lucar and started asking a lot of suspiciously intimate questions. I was jittering with terror, I'm no hero, you know. I split every bean I had. I think they believed me in the end. Old Jolly Good Job did anyway, when they brought me round to see him in the gallery, or he wouldn't have let me go in to Gabrielle through the cupboard. He was listening through the door, you know. I think she knew he was there. However, he wouldn't hear of me going to the Dutch airport to verify my theories. That's why I had to cut and run for it. He wanted to talk to Mrs. Sanderson first. I told him it was too damned dangerous, with 'Dolly' going berserk in the place, and I think he must have seen that although he didn't admit it."

  "Did they trace your"

  "No, I don't think they even missed me. That was rather degrading. They knew I'd gone into the house and presumably hadn't come out. When they did find I'd gone they broadcast a description, but I phoned Bridie as soon as I landed at the Amsterdam Airport, just to be on the safe side, you know. He sent a couple of men by the morning plane and they did the dirty work, interviewing the Stewards and so on. Bridie wasn't certain of his proofs against Dolly." That's why he was waiting to have a showdown the moment we got back with the deposition. He seems to have kept you all amused in the meanwhile in his own inimitable way. We were all expecting fireworks, but I didn't envisage anything like Gabrielle's sensational performance with the sword stick."

  Frances shivered.

  'That was incredible," she murmured. "As soon as that had happened the whole thing slid into focus. Godolphin never let the stick out of his hand, you see, and as long as one thought he was lame it wasn't extraordinary. He even had it with him that night he invented the burglar."

  "When Lucar came?"

  "Lucar?"

  "Oh lord, yes, that was Lucar. Didn't you know? The police did. Dolly' must have had a phone message from him while we were still at the police station. It was 'Dolly' who left the yard door open for him. That's how he got in.

  He went into the garden room, opened the cupboard door just to make sure—you know how one does—pulled a chair up and was settling down to wait. I imagine he had some sort of idea of putting the screws on 'Dolly' then. However, he mucked his entrance. Norris heard hint and ran Into Dolly' going downstairs. He bunked and 'Dolly' had to stage the burglary scene by kicking over the gong. Luck
y for Lucar. I should say."

  They had come to the end of the street and he pulled her arm through his as they crossed the empty square.

  Where did Godolphin get it?" she said, her mind running on over the tragedy. "I thought they were unheard of nowadays."

  "Sword sticks? No. That's what I thought, but apparently they're not. I put that question to Withers tonight when he called and he says he's been making inquiries tins evening and he finds to his horror that you can buy 'em in every umbrella shop in the city. They cost anything from fifty bob to fifty quid, and the average small branch store still sells about thirty-five a year. It gives one to think, doesn't it? I shall eye every old boy with a Malacca with deep respect in future."

  They reached the bridge and paused to look over the parapet. Big Ben blinked down on them and the colored advertisement signs from upriver stained the water below. They remained there for some time and presently David turned his head.

  "Well?" he said.

  'Well?"

  "It's on our minds, isn't it, ducky?"

  It was pointless to misunderstand him and she laughed.

  "I suppose so."

  "What are you going to do? Invest your Poor Mama's Fortune in the Grand Old Firm and bestow yourself on the Lowly But Not Impoverished Painter, setting forth in April for a New World with the Dawn in its Radiance beckoning you to a Fresh and Glowing Love Life?"

  Frances considered him. He was abominable.

  "You'd have the shock of your existence if I didn't," she said and her eyes were as confidently mocking as his own.

  About the Author

  Margery Allingham, who was born in London in 1904. came from a long line of writers. "I was brought up from babyhood in an atmosphere of ink and paper." she claimed. One ancestor wrote early nineteenth century melodramas, another wrote popular boys' school stories, and her grandfather was the proprietor of a religious newspaper. But it was her father, the author of serials for the popular weeklies, who gave her her earliest training as a writer, She began Studying the craft at the age of seven and had published her first novel by the age of sixteen while still at boarding school. In 1927 she married Philip Young man Carter, and the following year she produced the first of her Albert Champion detective stories. The Crime at Black Dudley. She and her husband lived a life "typical of the English countryside" she reported, with "horses, dogs, our garden and village activities" taking up leisure time. One wonders how much leisure time Margery Allingham, the author of more than thirty-three mystery novels In addition to short stories, serials and book reviews, managed to have.