Death in a White Tie ra-7

by Ngaio Marsh

  “If I were you,” said Alleyn, “I don’t think I should. Mrs Halcut-Hackett is very much distressed over last night’s tragedy and I expect she would rather be alone. Are you Miss Birnbaum?”

  “Yes, I am. You’re detectives, aren’t you?”

  “That’s us. My name is Alleyn and this is Mr Fox.”

  “Oh, how d’you do?” said Miss Birnbaum hurriedly. She hesitated and then gave them her hand. She looked doubtfully into Alleyn’s face. He felt the chilly little fingers tighten their grip like those of a frightened child.

  “I expect you’ve found it rather upsetting too, haven’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said dutifully. “It’s dreadful, isn’t it?” She twisted her fingers together. “Lord Robert was very kind, wasn’t he? He was very kind to me.”

  “I hope your toothache’s better,” said Alleyn.

  She looked at her hands and then up into his face.

  “I didn’t have toothache,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No. I just wanted to go home. I hate coming out,” added Miss Birnbaum with extraordinary vigour. “I knew I would and I do.”

  “That’s bad luck. Why do you do it?”

  “Because,” said Miss Birnbaum with devastating frankness, “my mother paid Mrs Hackett, I mean Mrs Halcut-Hackett, five hundred pounds to bring me out.”

  “Hi!” said Alleyn, “aren’t you talking out of school?”

  “You won’t tell anybody I said that, will you? I’ve never breathed a word about it before. Not to a single soul. But you look my kind of person. And I’m absolutely fed up. I’m simply not the social kind. Golly, what a relief to get that off my chest!”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “I want to be an art student. My grandfather was a painter, Joseph Birnbaum. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “I think I have. Didn’t he paint a thing called ‘Jewish Sabbath’?”

  “That’s right. He was a Jew, of course. I’m a Jewess. My mother isn’t, but I am. That’s another thing I’m not supposed to say. I’m only sixteen. Would you have thought I was older?”

  “I think I should.”

  “That,” said Miss Birnbaum, “is because I’m a Jewess. They mature very quickly, you know. Well, I suppose I mustn’t keep you.”

  “I should like to keep you for a minute, if I may.”

  “That’s all right then,” said Miss Birnbaum and sat down. “I suppose Mrs Halcut-Hackett won’t come back, will she?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t mind so much about the General. He’s stupid, of course, but he’s quite kind. But I’m terrified of Mrs Halcut-Hackett. I’m such a failure and she hates it.”

  “Are you sure you’re such a failure?”

  “Oh, yes. Last night only four people asked me to dance. Lord Robert, when I first got there, and a fat man, and the General, and Sir Herbert Carrados.”

  She looked away for a moment and her lips trembled.

  “I tried to pretend I had a soul above social success,” she said, “but I haven’t at all. I minded awfully. If I could paint and get out of it all it wouldn’t matter, but when you’re in a thing it’s beastly to be a failure. So I got toothache. I must say it is queer me saying all this to you.”

  “The General took you home, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. He was very kind. He got Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s maid, whom I hate worse than poison, to give me oil of cloves and Ovaltine. She knew all right.”

  “Did you go to sleep?”

  “No. I tried to think of a way to write to mother so that she would let me give it up. And then everything began to go through and through my head. I tried to think of other things but all the failure-parties kept coming up.”

  “Did you hear the others return?”

  “I heard Mrs Halcut-Hackett come in. It was frightfully late. She goes past my door to her room and she’s got diamante shoe buckles that make a clicking noise with every step. I had heard the clock strike four. Did the General go back to the dance?”

  “He went out again, I think.”

  “Well, then it must have been the General I heard come along the passage at a quarter-past three. Just after. I heard every clock chime from one till six. Then I fell asleep. It was quite light then.”

  “Yes.”

  Alleyn took a turn up and down the room.

  “Have you met Agatha Troy?” he asked.

  “The painter? She was there last night. I wanted awfully for someone to introduce us but I didn’t like to ask. I think she’s the best living English painter, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I believe I do. She teaches, you know.”

  “Does she? Only geniuses, I suppose.”

  “I think only students who have gone a certain distance.”

  “If I were allowed to go a certain distance first, I wonder if she would ever have me.”

  “Do you think you would be good?” asked Alleyn.

  “I’m sure I would be able to draw. I’m not so sure of paint. I see everything in line. I say.”

  “Hallo?”

  “D’you think this will make any difference to the coming-out game? Is she going to be ill? I’ve thought so lots of times lately. She’s so bloody-minded.”

  “Don’t say ‘she’ and don’t say ‘bloody-minded’. The one’s common and you’re too young for the other.”

  Miss Birnbaum grinned delightedly.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s what I think anyway. And she’s not even virtuous. Do you know the Withers person?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s her boy-friend. Don’t pretend to be shocked. I wrote and told mother about it. I hoped it’d shake her a bit. My father wrote and asked me if he was called Maurice and was like a red pig — that’s a frightful insult, you know — because if he was I wasn’t to stay. I like my father. But mother said if he was a friend of Mrs Halcut-Hackett he must be all right. I thought that frightfully funny. It’s about the only thing that is at all funny in the whole business. I don’t think it can be very amusing to be frightened of your boy-friend and your husband, do you?”

  Alleyn rubbed his head and stared at Miss Birnbaum.

  “Look here,” he said, “you’re giving us a good deal of information, you know. There’s Mr Fox with his notebook. What about that?”

  The dark face was lit with an inward smouldering fire. Two sharp lines appeared at the corners of the thick lips.

  “Do you mean she may get into trouble? I hope she does. I hate her. She’s a wicked woman. She’d murder anyone if she wanted them out of the way. She’s felt like murdering me pretty often. She says things to me that twist me up inside, they hurt so. ‘My dear child, how can you expect me to do anything with you if you stare like a fish and never utter?’ ‘My God, what have I done to be saddled with a burden like this?’ ‘My dear child, I suppose you can’t help looking what you are, but at least you might make some effort to sound a little less like Soho.’ And then she imitates my voice. Yesterday she told me there was a good deal to be said for the German point of view, and asked me if I had any relations among the refugees because she heard quite a number of English people were taking them as maids. I hope she is a murderess. I hope you catch her. I hope they hang her by her beastly old neck until she’s dead.”

  The thick soft voice stopped. Miss Birnbaum was trembling very slightly. A thin line of damp appeared above her upper lip.

  Alleyn grimaced, rubbed his nose and said:

  “Do you feel any better for that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vindictive little devil! Can’t you get on top of it all and see it as something intensely disagreeable that won’t last for ever? Have you tried drawing as a counter-irritant?”

  “I’ve done a caricature of Her. When I get away from here I’ll send it to her if she’s not in gaol by that time.”

  “Do you know Sarah Alleyn?”

  “She’s one of the successes. Yes, I know her.”

  “Do
you like her?”

  “She’s not bad. She actually remembers who I am when she sees me.”

  Alleyn decided to abandon his niece for the moment.

  “Well,” he said, “I dare say you’re nearer to escape than you imagine. I’ll be off now. I hope we meet again.”

  “So do I. I suppose you think I’m pretty ghastly.”

  “That’s all right. Make up your mind everybody hates you and you’ll always be happy.”

  Miss Birnbaum grinned.

  “You think you’re clever,” she said, “don’t you? Goodbye.”

  They shook hands in a friendly manner, and she saw them out into the hall. Alleyn had a last glimpse of her standing stocky, dark and truculent against a background of restrained and decorous half-tones and beautiful pseudo-Empire curtains.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Statement by Lucy Lorrimer

  It was nearly six o’clock in the evening when Alleyn and Fox returned to Scotland Yard. They went to Alleyn’s room. Fox got to work on his notes, Alleyn tackled the reports that had come in while they were away. They both lit pipes and between them was established that pleasant feeling of unexpressed intimacy that comes to two people working in silence at the same job.

  Presently Alleyn put down the reports and looked across at his friend. He thought: “How often we have sat like this, Fox and I, working like a couple of obscure clerks in the offices of the Last Judgment concern, filing and correlating the misdeeds of men. Fox is getting quite grizzled and there are elderly purple veins in his cheeks. I shall go home later on, a solitary fellow, to my own hole.” And into his thoughts came the image of a woman who sat in a tall blue chair by his fire, but that was too domestic a picture. Rather, she would sit on the hearthrug. Her hands would be stained with charcoal and they would sweep beautiful lines across a white surface. When he came in she would look up from her drawing and Troy’s eyes would smile or scowl. He jerked the image away and found that Fox was looking at him with his usual air of bland expectancy.

  “Finished?” said Alleyn.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve been trying to sort things out. There’s the report on the silver cleaning. Young Carewe took that on and he seems to have made a fair job of it. Got himself up as a Rat and Mice Destruction Officer and went round all the houses and palled up with the servants. All the Carrados silver was cleaned this morning including Sir Herbert’s cigar-case which isn’t the right shape anyway, because he saw it in the butler’s pantry. Sir Daniel’s man does his silver cleaning on Mondays and Fridays, so it was all cleaned up yesterday. François does Dimitri’s stuff every day or says he does. Young Potter and Withers are looked after by the flat service and only their table silver is kept polished. The Halcut-Hacketts’ cases are cleaned once a week — Fridays — and rubbed up every morning. That’s that. How’s the report from Bailey?”

  “Bailey hasn’t much. There’s nothing in the taxi. He got Withers’s prints from my cigarette-case but, as we expected, the green sitting-room was simply a mess. He has found Withers’s and young Potter’s prints on the pages of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence. The pages that refer to asphyxiation.”

  “By gum, that’s something.”

  “Not such a great deal, Fox. They will tell us that when the newspaper report came out they were interested and turned up Taylor on suffocation; and who is to call them liars? The man who went to Leatherhead had a success. Apparently Withers keeps a married couple there. Our man pitched a yarn that he had been sent by the borough to inspect the electrical wiring in the house, and got in. What’s more he seems to have had a good look round. He found a roulette wheel and had the intelligence to examine it pretty closely. The middle dozen slots had been very slightly opened. I expect the idea is that Master Donald or some other satellite of Withers should back the middle dozen. The wheel seems brand new. There was an older one that showed no signs of irregularity. There were also several packs of cards which had been lightly treated with the favourite pumice-stone. Luckily for us the married couple had a violent row with the gallant Captain and were prepared to talk. I think we’ve got enough to pull him in on a gambling-hell charge. Thompson reports that Withers has stayed in all day. The telephone was disconnected as soon as we left. Donald Potter’s clothes were returned to him by taxi. Nobody has visited Withers. Dimitri comes next. Dimitri went home after he left here, visiting a chemist on the way to get his hand bandaged. He, too, has remained indoors, and has made no telephone calls. Most exemplary behaviour. How the blazes are we going to get any of these victims to charge Dimitri?”

  “You’re asking me!” said Fox.

  “Yes. Not a hope in a hundred. Well now, Fox, I’ve been over this damnable, dreary, involved, addling business of the green sitting-room. It boils down to this. The people who could have overheard Lord Robert’s telephone conversation were Withers, Sir Herbert Carrados, Miss Harris, Mrs Halcut-Hackett and Donald. They were all on or about the top landing and wouldn’t have to lie particularly freely in avoiding any reference to a brief dart in and out of the telephone-room. But, but, but, and a blasted but it is, it is quite possible that while Lord Robert telephoned, someone came upstairs and walked into the telephone-room. Mrs Halcut-Hackett was in the cloakroom; Withers, Donald and Carrados in the other sitting-room, Miss Harris in the lavatory. Dimitri says he was downstairs but who the devil’s to prove it? If the others are speaking the truth, anybody might have come up and gone down again unseen.”

  “The gentleman who burst into the lavatory?”

  “Precisely. He may even have hidden in there till the coast was clear, though I can’t see why. There’s nothing particularly fishy in coming out of a sitting-room.”

  “Ugh,” said Fox.

  “As I see the case now, Fox, it presents one or two highlights. Most of them seem to be concentrated on cigarette-cases. Two cigarette-cases. The murderer’s and Mrs Halcut-Hackett’s.”

  “Yes,” said Fox.

  “After the cigarette-cases comes the lost letter. The letter written by Paddy O’Brien’s friend in Australia. The letter that somebody seems to have stolen eighteen years ago in Buckinghamshire. It’s odd, isn’t it, that Miss Harris’s uncle was sometime rector of Falconbridge, the village where Paddy O’Brien met with his accident? I wonder if either Miss Harris or Lady Carrados realizes there is this vague connection. I think our next move after the inquest is to go down to Barbicon-Bramley where we may disturb the retirement of Miss Harris’s uncle. Then we’ll have to dive into the past history of the hospital in Falconbridge. But what a cold trail! A chance in a thousand.”

  “It’s a bit of a coincidence Miss Harris linking up in this way, isn’t it?” ruminated Fox.

  “Are you building up a picture with Miss Harris as the agent of an infamous old parson who had treasured a compromising letter for eighteen years, and now uses it? Well, I suppose it’s not so impossible. But I don’t regard it as a very great coincidence that Miss Harris has drifted into Lady Carrados’s household. Coincidences become increasingly surprising as they gain in importance. One can imagine someone telling Miss Harris about Paddy O’Brien’s accident and Miss Harris saying the parson at Falconbridge was her uncle. Everybody exclaims tiresomely at the smallness of the world and nobody thinks much more of it. Mix a missing letter up in the story and we instantly incline to regard Miss Harris’s remote connection with Falconbridge as a perfectly astonishing coincidence.”

  “She’d hardly have mentioned it so freely,” admitted Fox, “if she’d had anything to do with the letter.”

  “Exactly. Still, we’ll have to follow it up. And, talking of following things up, Fox, there’s Lady Lorrimer. We’ll have to check Sir Daniel Davidson’s account of himself.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  Fox unhooked his spectacles and put them in their case.

  “On what we’ve got,” he asked, “have you any particular leaning to anyone?”

  “Yes. I’ve left it until we had a moment’s respite to discuss it with y
ou. I wanted to see if you’d arrived independently at the same conclusion yourself.”

  “The cigarette-case and the telephone call.”

  “Yes. Very well, Fox: ‘in a contemplative fashion and a tranquil frame of mind,’ let us discuss the cigarette-cases. Point one.”

  They discussed the cigarette-cases.

  At seven o’clock Fox said:

  “We’re not within sight of making an arrest. Not on that evidence.”

  Alleyn said: “And don’t forget we haven’t found the cloak and hat.”

  Fox said: “It seems to me, Mr Alleyn, we’ll have to ask every blasted soul that hasn’t got an alibi if we can search their house. Clumsy.”

  “Carrados,” began Alleyn, “Halcut-Hackett, Davidson, Miss Harris. Withers and Potter go together. I swear the hat and cloak aren’t in that flat. Same goes for Dimitri.”

  “The garbage-tins,” said Fox gloomily. “I’ve told the chaps about the garbage-tins. They’re so unlikely they’re enough to make you cry. What would anybody do with a cloak and hat, Mr Alleyn, if they wanted to get rid of ’em? We know all the old dodges. You couldn’t burn ’em in any of these London flats. It was low tide, as you’ve pointed out, and they’d have had to be dropped off the bridge which would have been a pretty risky thing to do. D’you reckon they’ll try leaving ’em at a railway office?”

  “We’ll have to watch for it. We’ll have to keep a good man to tail our fancy. I don’t somehow feel it’ll be a left-luggage affair, Brer Fox. They’ve been given a little too much publicity of late years. Limbs and torsos have bobbed up in corded boxes with dreary insistence, not only up and down the LNER and kindred offices, but throughout the pages of detective fiction. I rather fancy the parcels post myself. I’ve sent out the usual request. If they were posted it was probably during the rush hour at one of the big central offices, and how the suffering cats we’re to catch up with that is more than I can tell. Still, we’ll hope for a lucky break, whatever that may be.”

  The desk telephone rang. Alleyn, suddenly and painfully reminded of Lord Robert’s call, answered it.