Overture to Death

by Ngaio Marsh

  The rector gulped and added quickly: “But that is beside the point. I drew the curtains, and in my flurry I said something to Miss Campanula about expecting Miss Prentice. It turned out that I couldn’t have said anything worse, because when I tried to tell this unfortunate soul that she was mistaken, she connected my explanation with Miss Prentice’s visit.”

  “Help!” said Alleyn.

  “What did you say? Yes. Yes, indeed. She became quite frantic and I really can not repeat what she said, but she uttered the most dreadful abuse of Miss Prentice and, in a word, she suggested that Miss Prentice had supplanted her, not only in the affairs of the parish, but in my personal regard. I became angry—just angry, as I thought at the time. As her priest I ordered her to stop. I rebuked her and reminded her of the deadly sin of envy. I told her that she must drive out this wickedness from her heart by prayer and fasting. She became much quieter, but as she left she said one sentence that I shall never forget. She turned in the doorway and said, ‘If I killed myself she would suffer for it; but if, as I stand here in this room, I could strike Eleanor Prentice dead, I’d do it!’ And before I could answer her she had gone out and shut the door.”

  “Darling,” said Henry, “I think I’d better tell him.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I believe Eleanor will if I don’t.”

  “How could she? It would be too shaming for her. She’d have to say how she behaved when she saw us.”

  “No, she wouldn’t. She’d just twist it round somehow so that it looked as if she found us in a compromising position and that you were covered with scarlet shame and I was furious and threatened to scrag her.”

  “But, Henry, that would be a deliberate attempt to make him suspect you.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “Well, I would. If you were tried for murder, it’d be a pretty good scandal, and she wouldn’t care for that at all.”

  “No, that’s true enough. Perhaps I may as well keep quiet.”

  “I should say you’d better.”

  “Dinah,” said Henry, “Who do you think—?”

  “I can’t think. It seems incredible that any of us should do it. It just isn’t possible.”

  “Daddy thinks she did it herself. He won’t say why.”

  “What, fixed it up for Eleanor and then at the last minute decided to take the count herself?”

  “I suppose so. It must be something she said to him.”

  “What do you think of Alleyn?” asked Henry abruptly.

  “I like him. Golly, I was rude to him,” said Dinah, hurling another log of wood on the schoolroom fire.

  “Were you, my sweet?”

  “Yes. I implied he was no gent.”

  “Well, that was a lie,” said Henry cheerfully.

  “I know it was. He couldn’t have been nicer about it. How I could! Daddy was livid.”

  “Naturally. Honestly, Dinah!”

  “I know.”

  “I love you all the way to the Great Bear and round the Southern Cross and back again.”

  “Henry,” said Dinah suddenly, “don’t let’s ever be jealous.”

  “All right. Why?”

  “I keep thinking of those two. If they hadn’t been jealous I don’t believe this would have happened.”

  “Good heavens, Dinah, you don’t think Eleanor—”

  “No. But I sort of feel as if the whole thing was saturated in their jealousy. I mean, it was only jealousy that made them so beastly to each other and to us and to that shifty beast, Mrs. Ross.”

  “Why do you call her a shifty beast?”

  “Because I know in my bones she is,” said Dinah.

  “I must say I wish my papa would restrain his middle-aged ardours when he encounters her. His antics are so damn’ silly.”

  “Daddy’s completely diddled by her conversion to his ways. She’s put her name down for the retreat in Advent.”

  “That’s not so bad as my parent’s archness. I could wish she didn’t respond in kind, I must say. Apart from that, I don’t mind the lady.”

  “You’re a man.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Henry, answering the implication.

  “I wouldn’t trust her,” said Dinah, “as far as I could toss a grand piano.”

  “Why bring pianos into it?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t. She’s the sort that’s always called a man’s woman.”

  “It’s rather a stupid sort of phrase,” said Henry.

  “It simply means,” said Dinah, “that she’s nice to men and would let a woman down as soon as look at her!”

  “I should have thought it just meant that she was too attractive to be popular with her own sex.”

  “Darling, that’s simply a masculine cliché,” said Dinah.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There are tons of devastating women who are enormously popular with their own sex.”

  Henry smiled.

  “Do you think she’s attractive?” asked Dinah casually.

  “Yes, very. I dare say she’s rather a little bitch, but she is pleasing. For one thing, her clothes fit her.”

  “Yes, they do,” said Dinah sombrely. “They must cost the earth.”

  Henry kissed her.

  “I’m a low swine,” he muttered. “I was being tiresome. You’re my dear darling and I’m no more fit to love you than a sweep, but I do love you so much.”

  “We must never be jealous,” whispered Dinah.

  “Dinah!” called the rector in the hall below.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the schoolroom.”

  “May I go up, do you think?” asked a deep voice.

  “That’s Alleyn,” said Henry.

  “Come up here, Mr. Alleyn,” called Dinah.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mysterious Lady

  “SIT DOWN, MR. Alleyn,” said Dinah. “The chairs are all rather rickety in this room, I’m afraid. You know Henry, don’t you?”

  “Yes, rather,” said Alleyn. “I’ll have this, if I may.”

  He squatted on a stuffed footstool in front of the fire.

  “I told Henry how rude I’d been,” said Dinah.

  “I was horrified,” said Henry. “She’s very young, poor girl.”

  “You couldn’t by any chance just settle down and spin us some yarns about crime?” suggested Dinah.

  “I’m afraid not. It would be delightful to settle down, but you see we’re not allowed to get familiar when we’re on duty. It looks impertinent. I’ve got a monstrous lot of things to do before to-night.”

  “Do you just collect stray bits of evidence,” asked Henry, “and hope they’ll make sense?”

  “More or less. You scavenge and then you arrange everything and try and see the pattern.”

  “Suppose there’s no pattern?”

  “There must be. It’s a question of clearing away the rubbish.”

  “Any sign of it so far?” asked Dinah.

  “Not a great many signs.”

  “Do you suspect either of us?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, we didn’t do, it,” said Dinah.

  “Good.”

  “Cases of homicide,” said Henry, “must be different from any other kind. Especially cases that occur in these sorts of surroundings. You’re not dealing with the ordinary criminal classes.”

  “True enough,” said Alleyn. “I’m dealing with people like yourselves who will be devastatingly frank up to a certain point—far franker than the practical criminal, who lies to the police from sheer force of habit—but who will probably bring a good deal more savoir faire to the business of withholding essentials. For instance, I know jolly well there’s something more to that meeting you both had with Miss Prentice on Friday afternoon; but it’s no good saying to you, as I would to Posh Jimmy: ‘Come on, now. It’s not you I’m after. Tell me what I want to know and perhaps we’ll forget all about that li
ttle job over at Moorton.’ Unfortunately, I’ve nothing against you.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” said Henry. “Still, you can always go for my Cousin Eleanor.”

  “Yes. That’s what I’ll have to do,” agreed Alleyn.

  “Well, I hope you don’t believe everything she tells you,” said Dinah, “or you will get in a muddle. Where we’re concerned she’s as sour as a quince.”

  “And, anyway, she’s practically certifiable,” added Henry. “It’s a question which was dottiest: Eleanor or Miss C.”

  “Lamentable,” said Alleyn vaguely. “Mr. Jernigham, did you put a box outside one of the hall windows after 2.30 on Friday?”

  “No.”

  “What is this about a box?” asked Dinah.

  “Nothing much. About the piano. When did those aspidistras make their appearance?”

  “They were there on Saturday morning, anyway,” said Dinah. “I meant to have them taken away. They must have masked the stage from the audience. I think the girls put them there after I left on Friday.”

  “In which case Georgie moved them off to rig his pistol.”

  “And the murderer,” Henry pointed out, “must have moved them again.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder when,” said Henry.

  “So do we. Miss Copeland, did you see Miss Campanula on Friday night?”

  “Friday night? Oh, I saw her at the Reading Circle meeting in the dining-room.”

  “Not afterwards?”

  “No. As soon as I got out of the dining-room I came up here. She went into the study to see Daddy. I could just hear her voice scolding away as usual, I should think, poor thing.”

  “The study is beneath this room, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I wanted to have a word with Daddy, but I waited until I heard her and the other person go.”

  Alleyn only paused for a second before he said: “The other person?”

  “There was somebody else in the study with Miss C. I can’t help calling her ‘Miss C.’ We all did.”

  “How do you know there was someone else there?”

  “Well, because they left after Miss C.,” said Dinah impatiently. “It wasn’t Miss Prentice, because she rang up from Pen Cuckoo just about that time. Mary called me to the telephone, so I suppose it must have been Gladys Wright. She’s leader of the Reading Circle. She lives up the lane. She must have gone out by the window in the study, because I heard the lane gate give a squeak. That’s how I knew she’d been here.”

  Alleyn walked over to the window. It looked down on a gravelled path, a lawn, and a smaller earthen path that led to a rickety gate and evidently ran on beyond it through a small plantation to the lane.

  “I suppose you always go that way to the hall?” asked Alleyn.

  “Oh, yes. It’s much shorter than going round the house from the front door.”

  “Yes,” said Alleyn, “it would be.”

  He looked thoughtfully at Dinah and said, “Did you hear this other person’s voice?”

  “Hi!” said Dinah. “What is all this? No, I didn’t. Ask Daddy. He’ll tell you who it was.”

  “Stupid of me,” said Alleyn. “Of course he will.”

  He didn’t ask the rector, but before he left he crunched boldly round the gravel path and walked across the lawn to the gate. It certainly creaked very loudly. It was one of those old-fashioned gates that has a post stile beside it. The path was evidently used very often. There was no hope of finding anything useful on its hard but greasy surface. There had been too much rain since Friday night. “Much too much rain,” sighed Alleyn. But just inside the gate he found two softened but unmistakable depressions. Horseshoe-shaped holes about two inches in diameter that had held water. “Heels,” he thought, “but not a hope of saying whose. Female. Stood there a long time facing the house.” He could see the rector crouched over the study fire. “Oh, well,” he said, and plunged into the little wood. “Nothing at all that’s to the purpose. Nothing.”

  He saw that the hall was only a little way up on the other side from where this path came out on the lane. He returned, circled the rectory, perfectly aware that Dinah and Henry had watched him from the schoolroom window. As he got into the car Henry opened the window and leaned out.

  “I say,” he shouted.

  “Shut up,” said Dinah’s voice behind him. “Don’t, Henry.”

  “What is it?” called Alleyn, squinting up through his driving-window.

  “It’s nothing,” said Dinah. “He’s gone ravers, that’s all. Good-bye.”

  Henry’s head shot out of sight and the window slammed.

  “Now I wonder,” thought Alleyn, “if Master Henry has got the same idea as I have.”

  He drove away.

  At the Jernigham Arms he found Nigel, but no Fox.

  “Where are you going?” Nigel demanded when Alleyn returned to the car.

  “To call on a lady.”

  “Let me come.”

  “Why the devil?”

  “I won’t go in with you if you’d rather not.”

  “Naturally. All right. I can do with some comic relief.”

  “Oh, God, your only jig-maker,” said Nigel and got in. “Now, who’s the lady?” he said. “Speak up, dearie.”

  “Mrs. Ross.”

  “The mysterious stranger.”

  “Why do you call her that?”

  “It’s the part she played in their show. I’ve got a programme.”

  “So it is,” said Alleyn.

  He turned the car up the Vale Road and presently he began to talk. He went over the history of the case from midday on Friday. As far as he could, he traced the movements of the murdered woman and each of her seven companions. He correlated their movements and gave Nigel a time-table he had jotted down in his note-book.

  “I hate these damn’ things,” Nigel grumbled. “They shatter my interest; they remind me of a Bradshaw, and they are therefore completely unintelligible.”

  “It’s a pity about you,” said Alleyn dryly. “Look at the list at the bottom.”

  Nigel looked and read:

  “Piano. Drawing-pin holes. Automatic. Branch. Onion. “Chopsticks.” Key. Letter. Creaky gate. Window. Telephone.”

  “Thank you,” said Nigel. “Now, of course, I see the whole thing in a blinding flash. It’s as clear as the mud in your eye: The onion is particularly obvious, and as for the drawing-pins—It’s ludicrous that I didn’t spot the exquisite reason of the drawing-pins.”

  He returned the paper to Alleyn.

  “Go on,” he continued acidly. “Say ‘You have the facts, Bathgate. You know my methods, Bathgate. What of the little grey cells, Bathgate?’ Sling in a quotation; add: ‘Oh, my dear chap,’ and vanish in a fog of composite fiction.”

  “This is Cloudyfold,” said Alleyn. “Cold, isn’t it? They had twelve degrees of frost on the pub thermometer last night.”

  “Oh, Mr. Mercury, how you did startle me!”

  “That must be Mrs. Ross’s cottage down there.”

  “Can’t I come in as your stenographer?”

  “Very well. I may send you out on an errand into the village.”

  Duck Cottage stands in a bend of the road before it actually reaches Cloudyfold Village. It is a typical Dorset cottage, plain fronted, well proportioned, cold-grey and weather-worn. Mrs. Ross had smartened it up. The window sashes and sills and the front door were painted vermilion, and a vermilion tub with a Noah’s Ark tree stood on each side of the entrance which led straight off the road.

  Alleyn gave a double rap on the shiny brass knocker.

  The door was opened by a maid, all cherry-red and muslin. Mrs. Ross was at home. The maid took Alleyn’s card away with her and returned to usher them in.

  Alleyn had to stoop his head under the low doorway, and the ceilings were not much higher. They walked through a tiny ante-room, down some uneven steps and into Mrs. Ross’s parlour. She was not there. It was a charming parlour looking out on a small form
al garden. There were old prints on the walls, one or two respectable pieces of furniture, a deep carpet, some very comfortable chairs, and a general air of chintz, sparkle and femininity. It was a delicate little room. Alleyn looked at a bookcase filled with modern novels. He noticed one or two works by authors whose sole distinction had been conferred by the censor, and at three popular collections of famous criminal cases. They all had startling wrappers and photographic illustrations. Within their covers one would find the cases of Brown and Kennedy, Bywaters, Seddon, and Stinie Morrison. Their style would be characterized by a certain arch taciturnity. Alleyn grinned to himself and took one of them from the shelf. He let it fall open in his hands and a discourse on dactylography faced him. The groove between the pages was filled with cigarette ash. A photograph of prints developed and enlarged from a letter illustrated the written matter. A woman’s voice sounded. Alleyn returned the book to its place. The door opened and Mrs. Ross came in.

  She was the lady Alleyn had noticed in church. This did not surprise him much, but it made him feel wary. She greeted him with a sensible good-humoured air, shook hands and them gave him a slanting smile.

  “This is Mr. Bathgate,” said Alleyn. He noticed that Nigel’s fingers had flown to his tie.

  She settled them by the fire with the prettiest air in the world, and he saw her glance at the little cupid clock on the mantlepiece.

  “I do think all this is too ghastly,” she said. “That poor wretched old creature! How anybody could!”