by Ngaio Marsh
“What’s all this? Who’s blowing that whistle?”
“Inspector Wade and Sergeant Cass,” said Alleyn. “They’re in the theatre yard. Has a young man in evening dress passed you during the last few minutes?”
“Yes. Up at the corner. What about him?”
“He’s given us the slip. Which way?”
“Towards the Middleton Hotel. Here, you hold steady, sir. Where are you off to? You wait a bit.”
“Ask Wade,” said Alleyn. He sidestepped neatly and sprinted down the street.
It led him into a main thoroughfare. In the distance he recognized the familiar bulk of the Middleton Hotel. Three minutes later he was talking to the night porter.
“Has Mr. Gordon Palmer returned yet?”
“Yes, sir. He came in a minute ago and went up to his room — No. 51. Anything wrong, sir?” asked the night porter gazing at Alleyn’s filthy shirt-front.
“Nothing in the wide world. I shall follow his example.”
He left the man gaping and ran upstairs. No. 51 was on the second landing. Alleyn tapped at the door. There was no answer, so he walked in and turned up the light.
Gordon Palmer sat on the edge of his bed. He was still dressed. In his hand was a tumbler.
“Drinking in the dark?” asked Alleyn.
Gordon opened his mouth once or twice but failed to speak.
“Really,” said Alleyn, “you are altogether too much of a fool. Do you want to get yourself locked up?”
“You get to hell out of this.”
“I shall certainly go as quickly as I can. You reek of whisky, and you look revolting. Now listen to me. As you’ve heard already, I’m an officer of Scotland Yard. I shall be taking over certain matters in connection with this case. One of my duties will be to write to your father. Precisely what I put in my letter depends on our subsequent conversation. It’s much too late and we’re too busy to talk to you now. So I shall lock you in your room and leave you to think out a reasonable attitude. There’s a fifty-foot drop from your window to the pavement. Good morning.”
Chapter XV
SIX A.M. FIRST ACT CURTAIN
Alleyn longed for his bed. He was dirty and tired, and a dull lugging pain reminded him that he was supposed to be taking things easily after a big operation. He went into his room, washed, and changed quickly into grey flannels and a sweater. Then he went downstairs.
The night porter gazed reproachfully and suspiciously at him.
“Are you going out again, sir?”
“Oh yes, rather. It’s my night to howl.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“You’ll hear all about it,” said Alleyn, “very shortly. There’s something to keep out the cold.”
Back at the theatre he found Wade and Cass closeted with Mr, Geoffrey Weston. There was an enormous tear in Cass’s tunic and a grimy smudge across his face. He sat at the desk taking notes. Evidently his uncomfortable predicament had upset his digestion for he rumbled lamentably and at each uncontrollable gurgitation he assumed an air of huffy grandeur. Wade appeared to be irritable and Weston stolid. The office looked inexpressibly squalid and smelt beastly.
“I thought I’d better come back and report,” said Alleyn. “I’ve locked up your darling little imp for what’s left of the night, Mr. Weston.”
“So he did go back to the pub,” grunted Weston disinterestedly. “I told you he would, you know.”
“That’s right, Mr. Weston,” said Wade.
“I suppose the P.C. I met in the lane told you what I was up to,” said Alleyn.
“Yes, sir, he did, and very surprised he was when he heard who you were. I sent him after you, Mr. Alleyn, and he saw you go into the Middleton so we left you to it. I’ve just been asking Mr. Weston if he could give us an idea why Mr. Palmer slipped up on us.” And Wade glanced uncomfortably at Weston, edged round behind him, and made an eloquent grimace at Alleyn.
Alleyn thought he had never seen any face that expressed as little as Geoffrey Weston’s. It was an example of the dead norm in faces. It was neither good-looking nor plain, it had no distinguishing feature and no marked characteristic. It would be impossible to remember it with any degree of sharpness. It was simply a face.
“And why did he bolt, do you suppose?” asked Alleyn.
“Because he’s a fool,” said Mr. Weston.
“Oh, rather,” agreed Alleyn. “No end of a fool; but even fools have motives. Why did he bolt? What was he afraid of?”
“He’s run away from disagreeable duties,” said Weston, with unexpected emphasis, “ever since he could toddle. He ran away from three schools. He’s got no guts.”
“He displayed a good deal of mistaken effrontery in the wardrobe-room, when he as good as accused Courtney Broadhead of theft.”
“Egged on,” said Weston.
“By Liversidge?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe the story about Broadhead, Mr. Weston?”
“Not interested.”
“Did you speak of it to Mr. Palmer?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In the wardrobe-room, after you’d gone.”
“You must have been very quiet about it.”
“I was.”
“What did you say?” pursued Alleyn, and to himself he murmured: “Oyster, oyster, oyster! Open you shall.”
“Told him he’d be locked up for defamation of character.”
“Splendid. Did it frighten him?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he bolted to avoid further questioning?”
“Yes.”
“It’s all so simple,” said Alleyn pleasantly, “when you understand.”
Weston merely stared at his boots.
“I suppose,” continued Alleyn, “that you had heard all about the arrangements for the champagne business?”
“Knew nothing about it.”
“Mr. Palmer?”
“No.”
“Can you help us about the missing tiki?”
“Afraid I can’t.”
“Ah, well,” said Alleyn, “that’s about all, I fancy. Unless you’ve anything further, Inspector?”
“No, sir, I have not,” said Wade, with a certain amount of emphasis. “We’ll see the young gentleman in the morning.”
“That all?” asked Weston, getting to his feet.
“Yes, thank you, Mr. Weston.”
“I’ll push off. Good night.”
He walked out and they heard his footsteps die away before any of them spoke.
“He’s a fair nark, that chap,” said Wade. “Close! Gosh!”
“Not exactly come-toish,” agreed Alleyn.
“Blooming oyster! Well, that’s the whole boiling of ’em now, sir.”
“Yes,” said Alleyn thankfully.
But they stayed on talking. A kind of perverseness kept them wedded to their discomfort. They grew more and more wakeful and their ideas seemed to grow sharper. Their thoughts cleared. Alleyn spoke for a long time and the other two listened to him eagerly. Quite suddenly he stopped and shivered. The virtue went out of them. They felt dirty, and dog-tired. Wade began to gather up his papers.
“I reckon that finishes us for to-night. We’ll lock up this show and turn it up till to-morrow. There’ll be the inquest next. Cripey, what a life!”
Alleyn had strolled over to the door in the back wall and was peering at a very murky framed drawing that hung beside it. He wiped the glass with his handkerchief.
“Plan of the theatre,” he said. “All fine and handy. I think I’ll just make a rough copy. It won’t take a moment.”
He got a writing-pad from the desk and worked rapidly.
“Here we go,” he murmured. “Stage-door. Footlights. Dressing-room passage here. Prompt-side ladder to the grid, about here. Back-stage one here. There’s a back door there, you see. I noticed it when I was in full cry after Master Gordon. We’ll have a look at it by the light of day. Now the front of the house. Stalls. Circle
. No pass-doors through the proscenium. Here’s this office. Door into box-office. Door to yard. The bicycle shed isn’t in their plan, but it begins just beyond this office. The shed comes forward like that. The yard widens out after you pass the sheds. Packing-cases. Then there’s this affair — a garage, isn’t it? — and the other shed here. And there’s Master Gordon’s getaway.”
“Need we mark that?” asked Wade, yawning horribly.
“I’m sure Cass thinks it worthy of record,” said Alleyn, smiling. “How wide are you, Cass?”
“Twenty-four inches across the shoulders, sir,” said Cass, and was shaken by a stupendous belch. “Pardon,” he added morosely.
“Then the space between the two buildings is certainly less,” murmured Alleyn. “Of course, Master Gordon is a mere stripling. Tell me, Cass, how did it all happen?”
“He was coming along as quiet as you please, sir,” began Cass angrily, and instantly interrupted himself with a perfectly deafening rumble, “—as quiet as you please, when he suddenly lets out a sort of squeak and bolts down that gap like a bloody rabbit. I never stops to think, you see, sir. I tears into it good-oh, and I come at it that determined-like I swept all before me, as you might say, for the first six inches, and then it kind of shut down on me.”
“It did indeed,” said Alleyn.
“By gum, yes, sir, it did so. And I was doubled up like as I was saying to Mr. Wade, sir, and I hadn’t got no purchase.” He belched violently. “Pardon. It’s gone crook on my digestion. Being doubled up.”
“We can hear that for ourselves,” said Wade unsympathetically. “You looked a big simp, Cass. Get your helmet. Gather up that stuff and bring it along to the station. I’ll shut up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Finished your plan, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Yes, thank you,” answered Alleyn.
He came out of the office and walked past the bicycle shed to the stage-door. Here he found Sergeant Packer.
“Hullo, Packer, are you here for the rest of the night?”
Packer came smartly to attention.
“Yessir. At least, I’ll be relieved in half an hour, sir.”
“None too soon, I should imagine. It’s cold.”
“It is too, sir,” agreed Packer. “There’s snow on the back-country.”
“Snow in the back-country!” exclaimed Alleyn, and suddenly he was aware of a new world. The experiences of the night slipped away and became insignificant. He was awake in a sleeping town and not far away there were mountains with snow on them and long tracts of hills with strange soft names.
“Are you a country-bred man?” he asked Packer.
“Yessir. I come from Omarama in the Mackenzie Country. That’s in the South Island, sir. Very high sheep country, beyond Lake Pukaki.”
“I’ve heard of it. You go through a mountain pass, don’t you?”
“That’s right, sir. Burke’s Pass in the north and the Lindis in the south. Still very cold at nights, this time of year, in the Mackenzie, but you get the sun all day.”
“I shall go there,” said Alleyn. Suddenly he felt a great distaste for the position in which he found himself. He had not crossed half a world of ocean to mess about over a squalid and tedious crime. He felt that he had been a fool. He was on a holiday in a new country and he knew that at the back of all his thoughts there lay a kind of delicious excitement which he would not savour until long after he had gone away again.
The office door banged and Wade and Cass stamped out into the yard, beyond the bicycle shed.
“Are you there, Chief Inspector?” called Cass.
“Here! Good night, Packer, or rather good morning, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it’ll be getting light soon. Good morning, sir.”
Alleyn joined the other two, and together they left the theatre and turned into the main thoroughfare.
Their footsteps rang coldly on the asphalt pavement. Somewhere, a long way off, a dog barked. Then, still farther away, a cock crew and was echoed away into nothingness by other cocks. The moon had set but the darkness was thinning and the street lamps already looked wan.
At the second corner Wade and Cass stopped.
“We turn off here,” said Wade. “It’ll be light in half an hour. If I may, sir, I’ll call in at the hotel sometime to-morrow.”
“Do,” said Alleyn cordially.
“It’s been a great pleasure, sir, having you with us.”
“You’ve been damn’ pleasant about it, Inspector. Hope you’re none the worse, Cass.”
Cass saluted. Solemnly and rather ridiculously they both shook hands with Alleyn and tramped off.
The street ran uphill towards the hotel. At the far end there was clean lightness of sky and, as Alleyn watched, it grew still lighter. Between the end of the street and the sky was the head of a faraway mountain. Its flowing margin was sharp against the dawn. Its base was drenched in a colder and more immaculate blue than Alleyn had ever before seen. And as Packer had told him, this mountain was crested white and the little cold wind that touched Alleyn’s face came from those remote slopes. Alleyn paused outside his hotel, still looking up the street to the mountain and wondering at the line traced by its margin against the sky. He thought: “It is like the outline of a lovely body. All beautiful edges are convex. Though the general sweep may be inward, to attain beauty, the line must be formed of outward curves.” Before he had completed this thought, the peak of the mountain, was flooded with thin rose colour, too austere to be theatrical, but so vivid that its beauty was painful. He felt that kind of impatience and disquietude that sudden beauty brings. He could not stand and watch the flood of warmth flow down the flanks of the mountain nor the intolerable transfiguration of the sky. He rang the night bell and was admitted by the porter.
The clocks in the hotel, and the clocks outside in the town, all began to strike six as he got into bed, and when the last clock had struck, the vague rumour of innumerable cockcrows rang in his head. And as he fell asleep he heard the first chatter of waking birds.
Chapter XVI
ENTR’ACTE
Extract from a letter written by Chief Inspector Alleyn to Detective Inspector Fox of the Criminal Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard —
— so you will agree, my dear Fox, it really is a bit of a teaser. I see you wag your head and I know you think what a fool I was not to make my statement and my exit as rapidly as possible. I confess I am surprised at myself and can only suppose that I must like teckery — an amazing discovery. You will have got my cable and I shall have received your answer long before this letter reaches you. Of course, unless Alfred Meyer made a later will, as far as money goes, George Mason has the strongest motive, but on the evidence before us he could never have got up into the flies to put back the weight. I’ve told you the whole story and I have outlined my tentative theory which, as you will see, hinges on this one incontrovertible point. Mason was with me on the stage after the murder, and he went with Te Pokiha to the office. I’ve rung Te Pokiha up and he says he stayed in the office with Mason until he heard the police arrive, and left Mason there when he, Te Pokiha, returned to the stage. To put the thing beyond all argument, it now appears that after the police had come, the doorkeeper went along the yard, saw Mason sitting in the office sipping his whisky, and stayed talking to him until Mason went to the wardrobe-room. By that time the weight was back again. I have laboured this point because I know Wade is going to try and break Mason’s alibi for this period and I am satisfied that he cannot do it. Then there’s this grim little tiki — I wish you could see it — it’s a tiny squint-eyed effigy with a lolling head and curled up rudimentary limbs. The resemblance to the human embryo is obvious. It’s leering at me now from the blotting paper. They tried it for prints and it was smothered with them. Well, it’s reasonable to suppose that whoever put the weight back, dropped the tiki on the floor of the grid platform. Mason is ruled out. We have Hambledon, Carolyn Dacres, Liversidge, Ackroyd and the girl, Va
lerie Gaynes. These four could, I believe, have gone aloft, unnoticed, at both the vital times. At the risk of boring you to tears, my poor Fox, I now append a time-table for the two visits to the grid. I include the entire cast of characters, even our old friend Susan Max. Here it is. You will notice that I have marked the names without alibis. XA or XB stands for no alibi during the first or second vital periods, and XX (Guinness is good for you) for no alibi at either of these times. I’ve also noted the alleged motives.
As regards the attempt on the train (if it was an attempt and not a playful gambol on the part of a homing rugger expert), I regard any attempt to link it up with the theft — an attempt which Wade longs to make — as a likely pitfall. At that time the theft had not been discovered by Miss Gaynes. If Meyer had seen the thief on the job and had tackled him about it, why had he not forced him to return the money before the loss was known? Or, conversely, why had he not made the business public? As he did neither of these things, why should the thief try to murder him? Sergeant Cass intelligently suggests that perhaps the thief knew Meyer had twigged his little game, that Meyer was unaware of this, and that the thief struck before Meyer could take action, missed his pot on the train, and had a more successful go at the theatre. This does not explain Meyer’s delay in tackling the matter in the first instance. The force is now hunting up the train passengers, to try and let a little more light into the affair. I still incline to the view that the theft is a sideline, put in by the gods to make it more difficult. But what god dropped the little green tiki into this puzzle? I have seen some of the Maori deities in the local museum. Wild grimacing abortions, with thrust-out tongues and glinting eyes. They fascinate me. One seems to smell old New Zealand in them — a kind of dark wet smell like the native forest. Before this case came along I hired a car and made a trip into the country north of this town where a tract of native bush is preserved. On the way there are Maori villages — pas they call them — composed for the most part of horrid little modern cottages. The Maoris themselves wear European clothes with occasional native embellishments, among the older people. They have a talent for arranging themselves in pleasant groups and seem to be very light-hearted. The aristocrats among them are magnificent. Te Pokiha is an Oxford man. He is extremely good-looking, courteous, and most dignified. I am to dine with him and he is to tell me something of their folk-law. When, as I have already described, the men handed the little tiki round and Meyer made merry, I felt that he was guilty of the grossest error in taste. Te Pokiha was very cool and well-bred about it. What an idea for a fantastic solution — he killed Meyer because of the insult to the tiki and left the tiki up there as a token of his vengeance. “Cut it out,” as Inspector Wade would say. The local force is very polite to me. I am to meet the superintendent this morning. They might well have been a bit sticky over me and indeed, to begin with, I sensed a sort of defensiveness on Wade’s part. It was a curious mixture of “How about this for a genuine New Zealand (they say ‘New Zillund’) welcome?” and “Treat us fair and we’ll treat you fair, but none of your bloody superiority stuff.” They are extremely nice fellows and good policemen, and I hope I shan’t get on their nerves. One has to keep up a sort of strenuous heartiness, which I find a little fatiguing. The idiom is a bit puzzling but “corker” seems to be the general adjective of approbation. “Crook” means “ill,” “angry,” or “unscrupulous” according to the context; and “a fair nark” or, more emphatically, “a fair cow,” is anything inexpressibly tedious or baffling. The average working man — such as the railway porter and taxi driver (especially the older type) speaks much better English than his English contemporary. One notices the accent in polite circles, but Lor’ bless you, what of it? My poor Fox, I maunder at you. I hope you have enjoyed looking up the affairs of Mason and Meyer’s Incorporated Playhouses, and of Mr. Francis Liversidge. Such fun for you. I am feeling much better, so you need not put on your scolding air over my police activities. It is so amusing to be unofficial and yet in the game. I feel I may give surmise and conjecture free rein. Do write me a line when you’ve time.