Death on the Agenda

by Patricia Moyes

  And he had Emmy. If it was true that their relationship would henceforward be different, it was true in the best possible sense. Their interdependence had never been more clearly demonstrated, and it had been spiced with the possibility, which would now always be with them, that each was capable of finding adventure elsewhere.

  Henry walked slowly up the steps of the hotel in the sunshine. As he entered the foyer, the porter hurried over. “Mr. Tibbett,” he said. “I have another message for you, that is, for Mr. Wilberforce Smith. His friend has had to leave the country unexpectedly, but he has left a forwarding address in Tangiers. I have it here, if you...”

  “Put it in the ashcan,” said Henry. “I’m going to bed.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT WAS A LONG TIME BEFORE Henry could be persuaded to talk about the Geneva case to anybody. Mary Benson’s letter of confession to the police had been meticulous and fully explicit, and the dossier was closed. Emmy respected Henry’s request, and asked no questions. It was some months later, when Alfredo and Gerda were visiting London, that Henry at last consented to explain exactly what had happened, and how he had arrived at the truth. In fact, he embarked almost eagerly on his exposition. The wound had healed, on the surface at least, and he was anxious to experiment, to make sure that the scar tissue was healthy and would stand up to harsh treatment.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” he said. They were sitting in the Tibbetts’ London flat on a foggy November evening, drinking coffee round the fire. It seemed a world away from the opulence of the Villa Trounex, the polyglot splendor of the Palais des Nations, and the dancing blue of the lake. “The crux of the matter was that, as far as I or anyone else could see, only Annette or myself could have murdered Trapp, unless there was a conspiracy between two people to do it. For a time I considered the conspiracy idea, but at the time of the murder, the groupings were all wrong. I mean, I had established a connection between Helène Brochet and Zwemmer, but Helène was with Lenoir in the rest room and Zwemmer was with Alfredo in the conference room. Mary was with me. In any case, Annette, who was alone in the cloakroom, maintained that she could see the office door in the mirror all the time.

  “Now, I knew very well that I hadn’t murdered John, which gave me an advantage over Colliet, who thought I had. So when evidence began to pile up against Annette, I was greatly tempted to believe her guilty. There remained, however, two facts which did not tally. One was her obvious, terrible grief when she found that John was dead. I didn’t believe anyone could have faked that. The other was that she could not have taken the dagger. Both Paul and Natasha Hampton maintained that it was there long after she had left, and in fact the library was only empty for such a short time after our conducted tour that it would have been the greatest coincidence if nobody had seen her. I was prepared to believe that she might have been persuaded to take the note to John, but I was convinced she had not done the actual killing. I came back to my conspiracy idea. Was there, then, a connection between Annette and any of the men? I soon realized there was—Juan Moranta. He was in love with Annette.”

  “They’re married now,” Gerda put in.

  “I know,” said Henry. “Annette wrote and told us. Well, Juan loathed Trapp because of the way he had treated Annette, and if he had been concerned in the security leak as well, he might have been capable of murder. He could certainly have stolen the dagger during the party, but he did not arrive at the Palais next morning until John was already dead. He could, of course, have given the dagger to Annette sometime during the night. This meant, again, though, that she would have been the actual killer. I did toy with that idea, but it just didn’t ring true, and I was more than ever convinced of her innocence when she failed to tell the police certain damning facts about me after her arrest.

  “So I was faced with a nightmare situation, a murder apparently impossible on any hypothesis other than my own guilt. Once or twice I began to wonder if I had had a brainstorm and killed the man myself. It was only when I sat down and made out detailed timetables”—he grinned at Spezzi—“that a glaringly obvious fact leapt out at me. Trapp was a good typist. We all heard for ourselves that the typing was going on, steadily and without interruption, from at least a quarter past nine until nearly quarter to ten. Half an hour of solid typing at high speed—and what was there to show for it? A half-page letter unfinished in the machine. It was not a question of his having made several drafts, for the wastepaper baskets were empty. There was not another scrap of typing anywhere in the office. I don’t know much about typing speeds myself, but I remembered that Marcelle had produced copies of the revised agenda, running to a whole foolscap page, in a matter of a few minutes. This opened up an entirely new line of thought.”

  Henry paused, and swallowed some coffee. The painful part of his monologue was getting close, and he dreaded it. He went on. “It was then that I remembered what it was that I had seen in the office with John’s body, something that was missing when we moved up to the identical office on the floor above. It was Mary Benson’s portable tape recorder. At once the idea began to take shape. A tape recording of the sound of typing, playing back through the closed door of an office where a dead man is sitting at the desk, thereby giving the impression that he is still alive.

  “As soon as I accepted this theory, there could be no doubt as to who was guilty. Mary Benson arrived soon after John did, and followed him into the office. She, and only she, had ample opportunity to kill him before anyone else arrived. She had time to put a faked note into the typewriter and set the tape recorder going. It was she who kept everyone else out of the office, on the pretext that John did not want to be disturbed. For a while I was puzzled, because I had gathered from what Annette said that she had spoken to John personally in the office that morning; but then I remembered that, talking to Emmy about her quarrel with him the previous evening, she had said, ‘I never thought I wouldn’t see him alive again.’ Clearly, when she told us that John said he didn’t want to be disturbed, she was quoting Mary. A very natural thing to do.

  “There were two other points to check. Could Mary have been the girl who took the message to John’s apartment, and could she have slipped his answering note into my pocket? To answer the second point first: we all left her alone to cope with Annette after the murder. She was calm and efficient and organized us, and we all trooped off like well-trained sheep to the rest room. Mary actually said to me that she was going to give Annette a sedative—and the First Aid Box, which contains aspirins, was in the men’s cloakroom. As for the first point, she gave herself away, talking to me.”

  Henry looked down. He hated having to speak of the picnic by the lake. He said with a great effort, “She had overheard me telling Helène Brochet about the girl with the message, but I didn’t mention anything about the girl having insisted on a reply in writing. Yet she remarked on this to me. It was only afterward that I realized she could not possibly have known about it unless she had delivered the message herself.” He paused, and sighed. “It was very ingenious,” he said. “That is how John Trapp was killed.”

  “And what happened to the tape recorder?” Emmy asked.

  “That must have taken some nerve,” said Henry. “It was a perfectly ordinary piece of office equipment, and she simply left it there for the police to examine if they wanted to. Of course, they didn’t bother. It was then taken up to our new suite with everything else, and she collected it, took it home as usual, and wiped the typewriter sounds off the tape. The recorder wasn’t subject to the ordinary security regulations, because ostensibly it hadn’t been used, since our committee had not started work. There was one thing I should have spotted. Mary told me she was never separated from her equipment, yet on the morning of the murder, the tape recorder was in the office, where she never worked.”

  “There are still a thousand things I do not understand,” said Gerda. “How did she get the dagger, for instance?”

  “The really vital part of this murder,” said Henry, “w
as not who did it or how, but why. That was obscure for a long time.

  “Bear in mind two facts. Trapp had no appointment with me; he only thought he had. Trapp did not write the note we found in the typewriter. The money which the police found in his flat belonged to Natasha Hampton. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that John Trapp knew anything at all about the security leak, but his murderer did. Now, Bill Parkington may talk too much, but he’s blazingly sincere, and he’d never shoot his mouth off to anyone he didn’t completely trust. However, after he got that cable about the security leak, and before the party, he went back to the Palais to do some checking up. Mary Benson was there, too, working late—she told me so. Bearing in mind that they were friendly—he’d had drinks with her outside office hours—it shouldn’t have been too difficult for her to glean the truth from him, just as Alfredo did next morning.

  “All well and good so far; but why, in heaven’s name, should Mary then decide to kill the inoffensive John Trapp, of all people? And how did she get the dagger?

  “Well, I started worrying that one out. The dagger connects her up immediately with the Villa Trounex, but she was not at the party nor, as far as I knew, had she ever been to the house. She did, however, admit to a slight acquaintance with Paul Hampton through her riding. Well, had somebody stolen the dagger and taken it to her? Somebody who knew about the security leak? At that time, that meant only Bill or myself, and Bill had already left the Villa Trounex when Natasha came down through the library and noticed that the dagger was still there. Right at the beginning, I made a joking remark to Emmy about one of the girls having burgled the Villa later that night. That was obviously a ridiculous idea, yet it had a grain of truth. I decided that either Mary had visited the house after everyone had left—an unlikely hypothesis, for the servants would surely have seen or heard her—or else somebody from the house went to visit her, taking the dagger along. Natasha is out of the picture, since she went home with John and stayed there. I was left with the choice of Paul Hampton or Gamboni. Now, the house is full of servants, and the chauffeur sleeps over the garage. Nobody could have taken a car out in the middle of the night without being heard. In fact, I rang the chauffeur and checked with him, and he was positive that no car had come or gone during the night. The next car that left the Villa was on perfectly legitimate business, taking Paul Hampton to the airport at six in the morning; and the chauffeur told me that they had, in fact, made a stop on the way through the town, not far from Mary’s apartment. That clinched the matter. Paul Hampton and Mary Benson were in league. He had taken her the dagger and she had killed John Trapp. The whole thing was tied up with the security leakage. I felt I was really getting somewhere, but the question still wasn’t answered—why kill poor, innocent Trapp?

  “First I concentrated on trying to visualize the setup. I knew that Mary had had contact with Hampton through show jumping, and I guessed for myself what Mary told the police in her confession. Running his dope-smuggling business under the guise of respectable property deals here in Geneva, Hampton needed a contact in the Narcotics Section of the Palais. He met Mary, and started her off by exchanging the relatively harmless bits of information she gave him for a pony and equipment of her own. You must realize that horses were the passion of her life. Once started, he kept her at it with a nice mixture of blackmail and rewards, leading her deeper and deeper into the mire. Not,” Henry added, with a burst of painful honesty, “that she probably needed much persuasion. She was as tough as they come, physically and mentally, and remained so almost to the end.

  “Well, there’s the situation on the night of the party. By then, Mary has heard or gathered from Bill Parkington that the leakage of information is known. As soon as she leaves the Palais she must obviously contact Hampton and warn him, and how else should she do it except by telephoning him on his private line? As soon as I thought of that, everything else fell into place. The call that interrupted our tour of the house, which Paul pretended was from New York, must actually have been from Mary; and it was that call which signed John’s death warrant. In fact, it was I, in all innocence, who caused his death.”

  “What on earth do you mean, Henry?” Emmy demanded. For Henry had never told her that particular part of the story. He did so now.

  “When John came out of Natasha’s room and ran into Paul and myself,” he went on, “he was embarrassed—not to see Paul, who understood the situation perfectly, but to see me. For my benefit, he made up a ridiculously lame excuse; that he had been trying to telephone from Natasha’s room, but that the line was engaged. Then, from pure impudence, he added, with a secret smile at Paul, that nevertheless his time had not been wasted. What he didn’t know was that the private phones in Paul’s and Natasha’s rooms were on the same line, as I realized next day when I was there; and that Paul had, in fact, just been having a highly compromising conversation with Mary, which, had it been overheard, could have blown Hampton’s racket sky high. Hampton knew that John envied and disliked him, and immediately read into his words a threat of exposure. Paul Hampton was a ruthless and very efficient person. He decided then and there to eliminate John Trapp.

  “I must say, his mind worked fast and well. The killing must be carried out well away from the Villa Trounex. Mary must do it, but she must have a watertight alibi. He himself will be far from Geneva at the time. The question of a weapon presents a difficulty, for Mary has nothing suitable at hand; but by using the dagger which Juan and I have handled, Paul will also throw a scapegoat to the police. Meanwhile, Trapp must be prevented from talking to anyone else between then and the following morning. And what better method than to send Natasha home with him, thereby killing two birds with one stone, because it also gets her out of the house. You can see how beautifully it was all calculated.

  “When all the guests had gone, Paul Hampton took the dagger up to his room and packed it in his suitcase. He then telephoned Mary on the private line, and told her that he would call on her early next morning. Soon after six, on his way to the airport, he visited her and gave her his orders. She was to make a tape recording of typing, and type the fake note, whose wording he dictated to her. She was to deliver the message, purporting to come from me, at John’s apartment, and get a written reply which could be planted as evidence against me. This would ensure that John would arrive at the Palais well before anyone else. I was picked as the victim for no personal reason, but simply because I had handled the dagger, and because—as Mary must have pointed out to Paul—I had a date with her before the conference, so that I would be under her eye at the crucial time. I would like to think that Mary had qualms about killing John, but...” He paused. “In any case, she had no choice.”

  Emmy shivered. “I hadn’t realized it was quite so cold-blooded,” she said.

  “That was typical of Paul Hampton.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the crucial time’?” Alfredo asked.

  “As soon as Mary had killed Trapp,” said Henry, “she set the tape recorder going. She had recorded exactly a half hour of the sound of typing. So long as the tape was running, Trapp would be assumed to be alive, and it was vital that nobody should go into the office; it was equally vital that I should go in as soon as it stopped. No wonder the girl was nervous. She looked at her watch several times while I was with her, and she must have had a nasty moment when I looked like going into the office just before the typing stopped. She headed me off with a piece of uncalled-for flattery, and then practically pushed me in there the instant the tape ran out.

  “Well, that’s all there is to it. I was extraordinarily stupid in some ways. I suppose it came from being chief suspect myself, instead of playing the lordly police officer.” Henry looked at Gerda and smiled. “I hope I’ll be a rather more pleasant policeman from now on.”

  “The worst part of all,” said Emmy, “was the Novaris. I suppose Hampton arranged that, too.”

  “Without a doubt, though it will never be proved. Hampton had thought of everything. He had arranged
for the Novaris to be offered a considerable sum of money to trump up the story of an accident in the family and go back to Italy that day. All seemed well, and it must have been a shock to Mary when she overheard me telling Helène that I had seen Madame Novari before she left, and that she would recognize the girl with the message. Mary contacted Paul and warned him; she says so in her confession. Even she, however, was shocked by the prompt action he took. He had agents everywhere, of course, and could organize an accident like that quite easily.”

  “And Gamboni, who was he?” Alfredo asked.

  “An adventurer,” said Henry. “A sort of free-lance mercenary secret agent whom Zwemmer was employing to spy on Hampton. He knew very little about what was actually going on, but Zwemmer had offered him a considerable amount for certain documents out of the library. That was why he was so angry to find me in the library the evening after the murder. It was also why, happily, he informed Zwemmer of my arrival at the Villa at three in the morning.”

  “And this idea of trying to send us to South America?”

  “That was a desperate move, when Hampton knew he was up against it. He was worried when he saw me going off in the car with Mary, and he lunched with you to get all the information he could from you.”

  Emmy blushed. “I’m afraid I told him quite a lot, now I look back on it,” she said. “I was only thinking of Annette, and he was so kind and sympathetic. I told him you knew about the girl with the message, and that you’d seen Mahoumi.”

  “That didn’t matter,” said Henry. His heart was beating unpleasantly fast. “Paul didn’t even know Mahoumi. He was just a crooked little man employed by Natasha for her intrigue. However, he knew Paul’s reputation, and when Trapp was killed, jumped to the conclusion that Paul had arranged his murder out of jealousy; and he was in a panic that he might receive the same treatment for his part in the affair. When Natasha got in touch with him and demanded that he rifle John’s flat for the money and the will, he saw his chance of decamping with the cash, out of harm’s way.”