‘No, sir. He realizes the oddity of it, as a matter of fact. He says he has an instinct to be precise about time, and that it must have made him do this automatic thing. Incidentally, there can have been no rational occasion to suppose that Tytherton was only, as you put it, nearly dead. The state of his head told only one story. Nevertheless, the order in which Ramsden at once proceeded was undoubtedly the correct one. He picked up the telephone on the writing-table and called the Tythertons’ doctor, who lives no more than a couple of miles away. Then he put through a 999 call to the police. And then he poured Miss Kentwell some brandy.’
‘Very proper attention,’ Colonel Pride said approvingly. ‘Knocked out, was she?’
‘It’s my impression she didn’t fall into any panic, but that she was bewildered and in a slight state of shock. Ramsden then went over to that other telephone – the one beside the fireplace. It’s a house telephone, and he called up the butler on it. Name of Catmull, you will remember, sir. He told Catmull what had happened, and ordered him to get his wife out of bed if necessary, and come to the workroom at once. They were both still up, it seems, and came straight away. Ramsden told Mrs Catmull to stay with Miss Kentwell, and Catmull to be ready to admit the doctor and the police. After that, Ramsden made his way to Mrs Tytherton’s room, and broke the news to her. The doctor was here by twenty-five to twelve, and a couple of my men arrived a few minutes later. I myself turned up just before midnight’ – Henderson smiled faintly – ‘with a safety-razor in my pocket.’
‘Wise precaution.’ Colonel Pride nodded approvingly. ‘Always encourage a smart turn-out, eh?’
‘Undoubtedly.’ Appleby, to whom the question had been addressed, turned to Henderson. ‘When you put the razor in one pocket,’ he asked, ‘I don’t suppose you balanced it with a revolver in the other?’
‘Certainly I didn’t.’ Henderson’s tone was almost reproving. ‘I had no notion of running into a gang of armed robbers, or anything of that kind.’
‘It wasn’t all that unlikely, Inspector – not with affairs like that around.’ Appleby pointed to the Goya. ‘But I was really thinking of something else: a harmless, although perhaps mildly alarming experiment. Just a pot shot at nothing in particular, taken in the quiet of midnight or thereabout in this room. Wouldn’t it make a bit of a rumpus? I’m surprised that, so far, I’ve heard nothing about the sound of a shot.’
‘Well, sir, there is something on the record there, and I’ll be coming to it in a moment.’ Henderson was unperturbed. ‘It’s more perplexing than helpful, to my mind. However, there are three preliminary points to make. The first is that a great house like this is a very solid affair. A pistol-shot won’t necessarily sound like the crack of doom in it, as it would in a small villa. Then, again, there’s the character and calibre of the weapon used. We have no report on that as yet, but at the point-blank range involved the ugly job could have been done with something pretty well like a toy – the sort of miniature weapon ladies whip out of neat little handbags in movies. Not much bite, but even less bark. And the third point is this: almost up to the moment of dispersing and going to bed, the party downstairs seems to have been amusing itself every now and then with intermittent bursts of loud music – pop music, it seems – from an affair like a domestic juke-box.’
‘Good heavens!’ The Chief Constable made an expressive gesture. ‘A thoroughly rackety crowd. Ashamed, my dear John, that I thought of introducing you to them.’
‘On the contrary, Tommy, I can hardly wait to make their acquaintance. But, Inspector, you say there is some record about hearing a possible shot?’
‘Yes, sir. From a Mr Archibald Tytherton. I don’t think I’ve had occasion to mention him.’
‘But I have,’ Colonel Pride said. ‘You remember, John? Nephew of Tytherton’s who comes and goes, and seems not on record as doing much else. What was he doing last night, Henderson? Coming and going, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ And Pride chuckled, much pleased at thus refreshing the company with wit.
‘Well, sir, he certainly went. Rather early, it seems. Even before his uncle went off to write letters, or whatever it was supposed to be. He went to bed. He’s quite frank about it.’
‘Frank?’ There was resigned acceptance of scandal in Pride’s tone. ‘You mean he went shamelessly off to bed with one of the women?’
‘No, sir – or not so far as he has admitted, or I know.’ Henderson had turned warily wooden before this guileless admission of the possibility of disorderly courses on the part of persons of consideration in the county. ‘Mr Archibald Tytherton’s frankness was on the score of inebriety. He had been drinking too much from early in the evening. It was on account of his having had a dispute with his uncle. It had unsettled him.’
‘Just a moment, Inspector.’ Appleby was now prowling almost uneasily around the death-chamber in which this conference was taking place. ‘Did he produce this story of a dispute with Maurice Tytherton off his own bat? No – that’s not quite what I mean. Were its circumstances such that it might have escaped the record altogether if he hadn’t mentioned it himself?’
‘I rather gather not, sir. There had been a witness of at least some part of it. But the young man says he was most attached to his uncle, so that this little flare-up upset him very much.’
‘And sent him to the bottle?’
‘Yes, sir. Or to the decanters, perhaps one ought to say.’
‘My dear Henderson’ – Colonel Pride’s ear for irony was not of the finest – ‘alk is alk, whatever it arrives in. The fellow got tight, and had the grace to take himself off?’
‘Just that. And it seems that, when fairly drunk, he goes off to sleep the moment his head touches the pillow. An enviable physiological predisposition.’
‘No doubt. So he went straight to sleep?’
‘So he says – but with a complete inability to name a likely hour. He seems not to have Mr Ramsden’s habit of taking an informative look at his watch. What he next reports is a nightmare.’
‘An informative nightmare?’ Appleby asked.
‘Well, that’s what he suggests. He was rather proud of producing it. He says he had a dream in which he was playing billiards.’
‘What’s nightmarish about that?’ the Chief Constable inquired. ‘Boring occupation, I’ve always felt. But nothing alarming about it.’
‘The billiard-table kept growing larger and larger, he says. So did the cues. And the balls were eventually like cannonballs, and he had to keep on banging them around for dear life. The noise was like a breaking-up of icebergs.’ Inspector Henderson paused appreciatively. ‘Rather a graphic touch, that.’
‘And then,’ Appleby said, ‘one particularly resounding crack woke him up, and he thought it might have been a revolver-shot? Is that the story?’
‘Not quite. It didn’t, that is, occur to him at the time, but swam up in his memory again when I was questioning him. It’s a way one does remember dreams.’
‘True enough. And it’s popularly supposed that one builds into them at times external stimuli registered in the instant of waking. But if he has no notion of when this supposed happening took place – as I gather is the fact – then it seems unlikely to help us very much. Does he believe himself to have gone to sleep again?’
‘He thinks he dozed off. Catmull got him out of bed just before midnight, but doesn’t know whether he was asleep. Catmull thought proper to arouse the whole household, apart from such servants as there are. Sensible enough. It meant people were more or less on parade when we wanted them.’
‘Ah, yes – servants. Just how does the household run?’
‘Through a good part of the year it appears to be a modified week-end affair. The Catmulls and Ramsden are the only permanent – that’s to say, continuous – residents. There’s a house, or flat, in town, with another Catmull as a fixture in it.’
‘Do you mean a brother of this fellow?’
‘No, sir – just another manservant of the same standing. What else there is, apart from outdoor people, is a few Italian maidservants who shuttle to and fro in the wake of their employers.’
‘Quite an entourage,’ Pride said. ‘Deuced expensive, too. Money there, I suppose. But one wonders. Henderson, is it your immediate impression that Mrs Tytherton would be a woman with extravagant tastes?’
‘Oh, decidedly – by what I think of as ordinary standards, sir. Ordinary wealthy people’s standards, that is. Drives her own Rolls, and nobody else let near it. Nothing too staggering in that, perhaps. But indicative, in a manner of speaking.’
‘I’ve heard things to the same effect, I’m bound to say. Come to think of it, met her at dinner at old Lady Killcanon’s some time ago, absolutely dripping diamonds. Might have been proposing to dominate the grand ball of the season. Not really the thing. Tytherton a bit hard-pressed, I shouldn’t be surprised. If you have a wife like that, it’s unfortunate to have a taste for buying Goyas and what-not as well. However, poor chap won’t be hard-pressed in the grave, eh? Not even literally, so to speak. Slap-up mausoleum just over the hill. Airy and commodious, I believe. No crush of ancestors as yet… By jove! Twelve o’clock.’
8
It was certainly noon. The fact had been signalized at some middle distance by the unassuming chime of a stable clock. And exactly on the last stroke, with something of the effect of an expensive automaton, the door of the late Maurice Tytherton’s workroom flew open, and a newcomer stood framed in it. It was a woman, and although she wasn’t at the moment dripping diamonds Appleby found himself without the slightest doubt as to her identity.
Here was a principal personage of the drama at last – Alice Tytherton, widow of the dead man. She had every right thus to march straight in, yet she had done so with a hint of challenge which for a moment left the three men standing alerted before her. But then men must often have stood before her like that, either aroused or alarmed by an uncommonly handsome woman so manifestly capable of designs of the most predatory sort. If one had to live in a jungle, Appleby told himself, it would probably be sensible to compound with the whole system of savage nature, and take on a mate like this. In civilized conditions she might turn out an awkward buy. That she was as hard as nails seemed to appear in the fact that, thus suddenly bereaved, she was carrying about with her not the slightest indications of grief. But it is not merely the trappings and the suits of woe – Appleby reflected – that are subject to the dictates of fashion, or at least of custom. Banish the widow’s bonnet and the widower’s arm-band, banish the black-edged writing paper and envelopes, and at the same time you are likely to see vanish or attenuate themselves the very lineaments of sorrow. One must make no snap judgement on Alice Tytherton’s emotional state.
‘Colonel Pride, is that a man from a newspaper?’ It was at Appleby that Mrs Tytherton was glancing.
‘Nothing of the kind.’ It clearly cost the Chief Constable an effort not to speak curtly. ‘This is Sir John Appleby, whom you may remember I brought over to pay a call, before knowing of this sad event.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Mrs Tytherton was indifferent. ‘How do you do.’
Appleby expressed himself civilly. He had not perhaps the appearance of a man from a newspaper – or at least not of the kind of man from a newspaper who is sent scurrying after a corpse – but he saw no necessity to be offended.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I am another policeman, although a retired one. And the Colonel has asked me to help him. Otherwise, I need hardly say, it would not–’
‘What an insipid room.’ Thus not very politely cutting Appleby short, Mrs Tytherton looked round her in a kind of slumberous distaste. ‘No wonder I seldom enter it. But at least there are cigarettes.’ She had pointed to a small glass box on the mantelpiece. ‘Please give me one.’
Inspector Henderson obeyed this injunction with a lack of hesitation which told Appleby at once that everything recordable about this room had been recorded. He now took another look at it himself. It was to be supposed that Mrs Tytherton’s sense of the insipid stopped short of the Goya, since the character there represented glanced sideways out of his frame with a fiery intensity of regard that was daunting or inspiriting according as to how one cared to receive it. Nor would it quite apply to the only other ancient thing in the room: a Tuscan marriage cassone in darkened olivewood obscurely painted by a cinquecento hand with some sacred nuptial occasion. The rest of the furniture was simple enough, and no doubt it could be called insipid or even jejune. Appleby wondered whether the late proprietor of these objects had also been that – or at least whether his wife had so regarded him.
‘And there’s brandy. I’ll have some of that.’
This time, Henderson did hesitate – and to Appleby’s sense rather out of delicacy than of professional instinct. On a side-table stood a tray with a decanter, a soda-water syphon, an affair which must have contained ice cubes, and four glasses. Appleby was near enough to see that three of the glasses had been used.
‘All right to go ahead, Henderson?’ The Chief Constable had moved towards the tray. Perhaps he increasingly disapproved of Mrs Tytherton. But his obedience to a lady’s request was automatic.
‘Yes, sir. It looks as if some brandy was drunk by two people shortly before the shooting. And after it, of course, by Miss Kentwell. Nothing you could call fingerprints.’
‘Somebody rubbed them away, would you say?’
‘Possibly so, sir.’ Henderson’s tone indicated disapproval of such a question in Mrs Tytherton’s presence. ‘No reason not to use the remaining glass now.’ He watched the brandy being poured and handed. ‘Can we be of help to you, madam?’ he asked formally.
‘So far, I have been insufficiently informed. I want to know exactly how my husband died. I am surely entitled to any information you have. Do you, or do you not, yet know who killed him?’
‘Inspector Henderson will allow me to reply to that.’ Colonel Pride had spoken with surprising promptness. ‘Unless your husband killed himself, nobody can declare he knows who killed him until a jury has returned a verdict to a judge. The police have to entertain conjectures and suspicions, my dear Mrs Tytherton, but they must not be expected to communicate them even to yourself. Facts are another matter. The Inspector will let you have them at once.’
‘Mr Tytherton died – it must have been instantaneously – from a revolver-shot fired at fairly close range into his right temple. He appears to have been sitting at that writing-table in the window, and to have been taken entirely by surprise. He had simply slumped forward where he sat, and there was no sign of a struggle. His death must have occurred shortly before eleven-twenty.’
‘And he had been having a drink with somebody?’ Mrs Tytherton, her brandy glass at her chin, had taken Henderson’s words steadily. ‘With somebody unknown?’
‘There is that appearance.’
‘And he was found by Ronnie – by Mr Ramsden – and that tiresome woman?’
‘By Mr Ramsden and Miss Kentwell, madam.’
‘If they hadn’t come into this room, nothing would have been discovered until today?’
‘I have no certain answer to that. It certainly appears true that nobody was alarmed and alerted by the shot, and that none of your guests was aware of anything untoward. Your butler tells me that he would not have made any routine late visit to this room. But perhaps’ – Henderson hesitated – ‘you would have expected to see Mr Tytherton yourself? He might have visited you to say good night?’
‘It was not his habit.’
‘Then it does seem probable that, if Mr Ramsden and Miss Kentwell hadn’t looked in, your husband’s death might not have been discovered till this morning.’
‘As it is, you know it happened between his coming upstairs and twenty past
eleven. Even so, anybody in the house might have done it?’
‘I really think we ought not at this point–’ The Chief Constable had intervened, but Mrs Tytherton cut him short.
‘These are still facts. Everybody was scattered, so anybody could have slipped into this room and shot my husband?’
‘Yes, madam. That is broadly the present picture.’ Henderson paused stonily as Mrs Tytherton drained her glass. ‘It may be modified by investigation.’
‘And anybody from outside? For instance, Mark Tytherton?’
‘We have no present information on Mark Tytherton’s movements last night.’ Henderson, rather at a loss, did his best with this defensive formula.
‘Then the sooner you gather some the better. I have come straight from a totally unexpected interview with him. It appears that he has been staying in the neighbourhood without making the fact known to us.’
‘We are aware of the circumstance, madam. Sir John has had a conversation with Mr Mark. With Mr Tytherton, as I ought now to say.’
‘You can say what you please.’ This meaningless rudeness, Appleby thought, showed Mrs Tytherton as rattled. But then why shouldn’t she be? She had lost a husband. She had perhaps acquired, in the person of a step-son, a force to be reckoned with as the new proprietor of Elvedon. ‘And please answer my question,’ Mrs Tytherton went on. ‘Anybody could have come in from outside?’
‘Hardly that. Somebody familiar with the place, or who had studied it, or who possessed or had obtained a key to a side door. Security appears to have been reasonable, although not quite what is to be desired in a house containing so much of value as this one.’
‘Nothing has been stolen?’
‘Nothing that we know of so far. But there may, of course, have been some attempt at robbery, which we have not yet got on the track of. There was, after all, that robbery a couple of years ago. Have you, Madam, any reason to suppose that something of the same sort may have been in question last night?’
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