by Ngaio Marsh
“Did you notice the name on the flyleaf? ‘M. V. Rossi’?”
“Rossi? Rossi!” he repeated, and stared at Alleyn. “But that was the name she did mention. On the rare occasions when she used a name. I recollect that she once said she wished my name did not resemble it. I thought this very farfetched but she seemed to be quite serious about it. She generally referred simply to the ‘nemico’ — meaning the enemy.”
“Perhaps, after all, it was not her book.”
“It was certainly not mine,” he said flatly.
“At some time — originally, I suppose — it has been the property of the ‘enemy.’ One wouldn’t have expected her to have acquired it.”
“You certainly would not,” Mr. Reece said emphatically. “Up there, was it? What sort of company was it keeping?”
Alleyn took down four of the neighboring books. One, a biography called La Voce, was written in Italian and seemed from cover to cover to be an unmodified rave about the Sommita. It was photographically illustrated, beginning with a portrait of a fat-legged infant, much befrilled, beringleted and beribboned, glowering on the lap, according to the caption, of “La Zia Giulia,” and ending with La Sommita receiving a standing ovation at a royal performance of Faust.
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Reece. “The biography. I always intended to read it. It went into three editions. What are the others?”
One in English, one in Italian — both novels with a strong romantic interest. They were gifts to the Sommita, lavishly inscribed by admirers.
“Is the autobiography there?” asked Mr. Reece. “That meant a helluva lot to me. Yes sir. A helluva lot.” This piece of information was dealt out by Mr. Reece in his customary manner: baldly as if he were citing a quotation from Wall Street. For the first time he sounded definitely American.
“I’m sure it did,” Alleyn said.
“I never got round to reading it right through,” Mr. Reece confessed and then seemed to brighten up a little. “After all,” he pointed out, “she didn’t write it herself. But it was the thought that counted.”
“Quite. This seems, doesn’t it, to be a corner reserved for her own books?”
“I believe I remember, now I come to think of it, her saying something about wanting someplace for her own books. She didn’t appreciate the way they looked in her bedroom. Out of place.”
“Do you think she would have put them up there herself?”
Mr. Reece took off his spectacles and looked at Alleyn as if he had taken leave of his senses. “Bella?” he said. “Up there? On the steps?”
“Well, no. Silly of me. I’m sorry.”
“She would probably have told Maria to do it.”
“Ah, apropos! I don’t know,” Alleyn said, “whether Mr. Hazelmere had told you?” He looked at the Inspector, who slightly shook his head. “Perhaps we should—?”
“That’s so, sir,” said Hazelmere. “We certainly should.” He addressed himself to Mr. Reece. “I understand, sir, that Miss Maria Bennini has expressed the wish to perform the last duties and Mr. Alleyn pointed out that until the premises had been thoroughly investigated, the stattus” (so Mr. Hazelmere pronounced it) “quow must be maintained. That is now the case. So, if it’s acceptable to yourself, we will inform Miss Bennini and in due course—”
“Yes, yes. Tell her,” Mr. Reece said. His voice was actually unsteady. He looked at Alleyn almost as if appealing to him. “And what then?” he asked.
Alleyn explained about the arrangements for the removal of the body. “It will probably be at dusk or even after dark when they arrive at the lakeside,” he said. “The launch will be waiting.”
“I wish to be informed.”
Alleyn and Hazelmere said together: “Certainly, sir.”
“I will—” he hunted for the phrase. “I will see her off. It is the least I can do. If I had not brought her to this house—” He turned aside, and looked at the books without seeing them. Alleyn put them back on their shelf. “I’m not conversant with police procedure in New Zealand,” Mr. Reece said. “I understand it follows the British rather than the American practice. It may be quite out of order, at this juncture, to ask whether you expect to make an arrest in the foreseeable future.”
Hazelmere again glanced at Alleyn, who remained silent. “Well, sir,” Hazelmere said, “it’s not our practice to open up wide, like, until we are very, very sure of ourselves. I think I’m in order if I say that we hope quite soon to be in a position to take positive action.”
“Is that your view, too, Chief Superintendent?”
“Yes,” Alleyn said. “That’s my view.”
“I am very glad to hear it. You wish to see Maria, do you not? Shall I send for her?”
“If it’s not putting you out, sir, we’d be much obliged,” said Inspector Hazelmere, who seemed to suffer from a compulsion to keep the interview at an impossibly high-toned level.
Mr. Reece used the telephone. “Find Maria,” he said, “and ask her to come to the library. Yes, at once. Very well, then, find her. Ask Mrs. Bacon to deal with it.”
He replaced the receiver. “Staff coordination has gone to pieces,” he said. “I asked for service and am told the person in question is sulking in her room.”
A long silence followed. Mr. Reece made no effort to break it. He went to the window and looked out at the Lake. Hazelmere inspected his notes, made two alterations, and under a pretense of consulting Alleyn about them, said in a slurred undertone: “Awkward if she won’t.”
“Hellishly,” Alleyn agreed.
Voices were raised in the hall, Hanley’s sounding agitated, Mrs. Bacon’s masterful. A door banged. Another voice shouted something that might have been an insult and followed it up with a raucous laugh. Marco, Alleyn thought. Hanley, all eyes and teeth, made an abrupt entrance.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir,” he said. “There’s been a little difficulty. Just coming.”
Mr. Reece glanced at him with contempt. He gave a nervous titter and withdrew only to reappear and stand, door in hand, to admit Maria in the grip of Mrs. Bacon.
“I’m extremely sorry, Mr. Reece,” said Mrs. Bacon in a high voice. “Maria has been difficult.”
She released her hold as if she expected her catch would bolt and when she did not, left the arena. Hanley followed her, shutting the door but not before an indignant contralto was heard in the hall: “No, this is too much. I can take no more of this,” said Miss Dancy.
“You handle this one, eh?” Hazelmere murmured to Alleyn.
But Mr. Reece was already in charge.
He said: “Come here.” Maria walked up to him at once and waited with her arms folded, looking at the floor.
“You are making scenes, Maria,” said Mr. Reece, “and that is foolish of you: you must behave yourself. Your request is to be granted; see to it that you carry out your duty decently and with respect.”
Maria intimated rapidly and in Italian that she would be a model of decorum, or words to that effect, and that she was now satisfied and grateful and might the good God bless Signor Reece.
“Very well,” said Mr. Reece. “Listen to the Chief Superintendent and do as he tells you.”
He nodded to Alleyn and walked out of the room.
Alleyn told Maria that she was to provide herself with whatever she needed and wait in the staff sitting room. She would not be disturbed.
“You found her. You have seen what it is like,” he said. “You are sure you want to do this?”
Maria crossed herself and said vehemently that she was sure.
“Very well. Do as I have said.”
There was a tap on the door and Sergeant Franks came in.
Hazelmere said: “You’ll look after Miss Bennini, Franks, won’t you? Anything she may require.”
“Sir,” said Sergeant Franks.
Maria looked as if she thought she could do without Sergeant Franks and intimated that she wished to be alone with her mistress.
“If that’s what you want,”
said Hazelmere.
“To pray. There should be a priest.”
“All that will be attended to,” Hazelmere assured her. “Later on.”
“When?”
“At the interment,” he said flatly.
She glared at him and marched out of the room.
“All right,” Hazelmere said to Franks. “Later on. Keep with it. You know what you’ve got to do.”
“Sir,” said Sergeant Franks and followed her.
“Up we go,” said Alleyn.
He and Hazelmere moved into the hall and finding it empty, ran upstairs to the Sommita’s bedroom.
iii
It was stuffy in the wardrobe now they had locked themselves in. The smell was compounded of metallic cloth, sequins, fur, powder, scent, and of the body when it was still alive and wore the clothes and left itself on them. It was as if the Sommita had locked herself in with her apparel.
“Cripes, it’s close in here,” said Inspector Hazelmere.
“Put your mouth to the hole,” Alleyn suggested.
“That’s an idea, too,” Hazelmere said and began noisily to suck air through his peephole. Alleyn followed his own advice. Thus they obliterated the two pencils of light that had given some shape to the darkness as their eyes became adjusted to it.
“Makes you think of those funny things jokers on the telly get up to,” Hazelmere said. “You know. Crime serials.” And after a pause. “They’re taking their time, aren’t they?”
Alleyn grunted. He applied his eye to his peephole. Again, suddenly confronting him, was the black satin shape on the bed: so very explicit, so eloquent of the body inside. The shrouded limb, still rigid as a yardarm, pointing under its funeral sheet — at him.
He thought: But shouldn’t the rigidity be going off now? And tried to remember the rules about cadaveric spasm as opposed to rigor mortis.
“I told Franks to give us the office,” said Hazelmere. “You know. Unlock the door and open it a crack and say something loud.”
“Good.”
“What say we open these doors, then? Just for a second or two? Sort of fan them to change the air? I suffer from hay fever,” Hazelmere confessed.
“All right. But we’d better be quick about it, hadn’t we? Ready?”
Their keys clicked.
“Right.”
They opened the doors wide and flung them to and fro, exchanging the wardrobe air for the colder and more ominously suspect air of the room. Something fell on Alleyn’s left foot.
“Bloody hell!” said Hazelmere. “I’ve dropped the bloody key.”
“Don’t move. They’re coming. Here! Let me.”
Alleyn collected it from the floor, pushed it in the keyhole, and shut and locked both doors. He could feel Hazelmere’s bulk heaving slightly against his own arm.
They looked through their spy holes. Alleyn’s was below the level of his eyes and he had to bend his knees. The bedroom door was beyond their range of sight but evidently it was open. There was the sound of something being set down, possibly on the carpet. Detective Sergeant Franks said: “There you are, then, lady. I’ll leave you to it. If you want anything knock on the door. Same thing when you’ve finished. Knock.”
And Maria: “Give me the key. I let myself out.”
“Sorry, lady. That’s not my orders. Don’t worry. I won’t run away. Just knock when you’re ready. See you.”
The bedroom door shut firmly. They could hear the key turn in the lock.
Alleyn could still see, framed by his spy hole, the body and beyond it a section of the dressing table.
As if by the action of a shutter in a camera they were blotted out. Maria was not two feet away and Alleyn looked into her eyes. He thought for a sickening moment that she had seen the hole in the sunflower but she was gone only to reappear by the dressing table — stooping — wrenching open a drawer — a bottom drawer.
Hazelmere gave him a nudge. Alleyn remembered that he commanded a slightly different and better view than his own of the bottom left-hand end of the dressing table.
But now Maria stood up and her hands were locked round a gold meshed bag. They opened it and inverted it and shook it out on the dressing table and her right hand fastened on the key that fell from it.
Hazelmere shifted but Alleyn, without moving his eye from the spy hole, reached out and touched him.
Maria now stood over the shrouded body and looked at it, one would have said, speculatively.
With an abrupt movement, more feline than human, she knelt and groped under the shroud — she scuffled deep under the body, which jolted horridly.
The black shroud slithered down the raised arm and by force of its own displaced weight slid to the floor.
And the arm dropped.
It fell across her neck. She screamed like a trapped ferret and with a grotesque and frantic movement, rolled away and scrambled to her feet.
“Now,” Alleyn said.
He and Hazelmere unlocked their doors and walked out into the room.
Hazelmere said: “Maria Bennini, I arrest you on a charge—”
Chapter nine
Departure
i
The scene might have been devised by a film director who had placed his camera on the landing and pointed it downward to take in the stairs and the hall beneath where he had placed his actors, all with upturned faces. For sound he had used only the out-of-shot Maria’s screams, fading them as she was taken by the two detective sergeants to an unoccupied bedroom. This would be followed by total silence and immobility and then, Alleyn thought, the camera would probably pan from face to upturned face: from Mr. Reece halfway up the stairs, pallid and looking, if anything, scandalized, breathing hard, and to Ben Ruby, immensely perturbed and two steps lower down, to Signor Lattienzo with his eyeglass stick in a white mask. Ned Hanley, on the lowest step, held on to the banister as if in an earthquake. Below him Miss Dancy at ground level, appropriately distraught and wringing every ounce of star quality out of it. Farther away, Sylvia Parry clung to Rupert Bartholomew. And finally, in isolation Marco stood with his arms folded and wearing a faint, unpleasant smile.
Removed from all these stood Mrs. Bacon in command of her staff, who were clustered behind her. Near the door onto the porch, Les and Bert kept themselves to themselves in close proximity to the pregnant nude, whose smirk would no doubt be held in shot for a second or two, providing an enigmatic note. Finally, perhaps, the camera would dwell upon the remaining stiletto and the empty bracket where its opposite number had hung.
Alleyn supposed this company had been made aware of what was going on by Hanley and perhaps Mrs. Bacon and that the guests had been at their buffet luncheon and the staff assembled for theirs in their own region and that Maria’s screams had brought them out like a fire alarm.
Mr. Reece, as ever, was authoritative. He advanced up the stairs and Inspector Hazelmere met him at the top. He, too, in his professional manner was impressive and Alleyn thought: He’s going to handle this.
“Are we to know,” Mr. Reece asked, at large, “what has happened?”
“I was coming to see you, sir,” said Inspector Hazelmere. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment”—he addressed the company at large—“I’ll ask everybody at the back, there, if you please, to return to whatever you were doing before you were disturbed. For your information, we have been obliged to take Miss Maria Bennini into custody”—he hesitated for a moment—“you may say protective custody,” he added. “The situation is well in hand and we’ll be glad to make that clear to you as soon as possible. Thank you. Mrs. — er—”
“Bacon,” Alleyn murmured.
“Mrs. Bacon — if you would be kind enough—”
Mrs. Bacon was kind enough and the set was, as it were, cleared of supernumeraries.
For what, Alleyn thought, might well be the last time, Mr. Reece issued a colorless invitation to the study and was at some pains to include Alleyn. He also said that he was sure there would be no objection to Mad
ame’s singing maestro, for whom she had a great affection, Signor Lattienzo, and their old friend and associate, Mr. Ben Ruby, being present.
“They have both been with me throughout this dreadful ordeal,” Mr. Reece said drearily and added that he also wished his secretary to be present and take notes.
The Inspector controlled any surprise he may have felt at this request. His glance, which was of the sharp and bright variety, rested for a moment on Hanley before he said there was no objection. In fact, he said, it had been his intention to ask for a general discussion. Alleyn thought that if there had been a slight juggling for the position of authority, the Inspector had politely come out on top. They all proceeded solemnly to the study and the soft leather chairs in front of the unlit fireplace. It was here, Alleyn reflected, that this case had taken on one of its more eccentric characteristics.
Inspector Hazelmere did not sit down. He took up his stance upon that widely accepted throne of authority, the hearthrug. He said:
“With your permission, sir, I am going to request Chief Superintendent Alleyn to set out the events leading up to this crime. By a very strange but fortunate coincidence he was here and I was not. Mr. Alleyn.”
He stepped aside and made a very slight gesture, handing over the hearthrug, as it were, to Alleyn, who accordingly took his place on it. Mr. Reece seated himself at his desk, which was an ultramodern affair, streamlined and enormous. It accommodated two people, facing each other across it. Mr. Reece signaled to Hanley, who hurried into the second and less opulent seat and produced his notebook. Alleyn got the impression that Mr. Reece highly approved of these formalities. As usual he seemed to compose himself to hear the minutes of the last meeting. He took a leather container of keys from his pocket, looked as if he were surprised to see it, and swiveled around in his chair with it dangling from his fingers.
Alleyn said: “This is a very unusual way to follow up an arrest on such a serious charge, but I think that, taking all the circumstances, which are themselves extraordinary, into consideration, it is a sensible decision. Inspector Hazelmere and I hope that in hearing this account of the case and the difficulties it presents you will help us by correcting anything I may say if you know it to be in the smallest degree mistaken. Also we do beg you, if you can add any information that will clear up a point, disprove or confirm it, you will stop me and let us all hear what it is. That is really the whole purpose of the exercise. We ask for your help.”