Death at the Bar

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ whispered Decima.

  She was looking at Cubitt as though she saw him for the first time. He said, ‘What the devil are you badgering her for?’

  ‘Just,’ said Alleyn, ‘out of sheer wanton brutality.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Decima. ‘He didn’t badger, really. He’s only doing his loathsome job.’

  Her eyes were brilliant with tears, her lips not quite closed, and still she looked with a sort of amazement into Cubitt’s face.

  ‘Oh, Norman!’ she said, ‘I’ve been so inconsistent and fluttery and feminine. Me!’

  ‘You!’ said Cubitt.

  ‘In a moment,’ thought Alleyn, ‘he’ll kiss her.’ And he said, ‘Thank you so much, Miss Moore. I’m extremely sorry to have distressed you. I hope we shan’t have to bother you again.’

  ‘Look here, Alleyn,’ said Cubitt, ‘if you do want to see Miss Moore again I insist on being present, and that’s flat.’

  Before Alleyn could answer this remarkable stipulation Decima said, ‘But, my dear man, I’m afraid you can’t insist on that. You’re not my husband, you know.’

  ‘That can be attended to,’ said Cubitt. ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Fox,’ said Alleyn, ‘what are you staring at? Come back to Ottercombe.’

  III

  ‘Well, Mr Alleyn,’ said Fox when they were out of earshot, ‘we see some funny things in our line of business, don’t we? What a peculiar moment now, for him to pick on for a proposal. Do you suppose he’s been courting her for a fair while, or did he spring it on her sudden?’

  ‘Suddenish, I fancy, Fox. Her eyes were wet and that, I suppose, went to his head. I must say she’s a very lovely creature. Didn’t you think so?’

  ‘A very striking young lady,’ agreed Fox. ‘but I thought the super said she was keeping company with young Pomeroy?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘She’s a bit on the classy side for him, you’d think.’

  ‘You would, Fox.’

  ‘Well, now, I wonder what she’ll do. Throw him over and take Mr Cubitt? She looked to me to be rather inclined that way.’

  ‘I wish she’d told the truth about Watchman,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Think there’d been something between them, sir? Relations? Intimacy?’

  ‘Oh Lord, I rather think so. It’s not a very pleasant thought.’

  ‘Bit of a femme fatale,’ said Fox carefully. ‘But there you are. They laugh at what we used to call respectability, don’t they? Modern women—’

  Alleyn interrupted him.

  ‘I know, Fox, I know. She is very sane and intellectual and modern, but I don’t mind betting there’s a strong dram of rustic propriety that pops up when she leasts expects it. I think she’s ashamed of the Watchman episode, whatever it was, and furious with herself for being ashamed. What’s more, I don’t believe she knew until Friday that Legge was an old lag. All guesswork. Let’s forget it. We’ll have an early lunch and call on Dr Shaw. I want to ask him about the wound in the finger. Come on.’

  They returned by way of the furze bush, collecting the casts and Alleyn’s case. As they disliked making entrances with mysterious bundles, they locked their gear in the car and went round to the front of the Feathers. But here they walked into a trap. Sitting beside Abel Pomeroy on the bench outside the front door was an extremely thin and tall man with a long face, a drooping moustache, and foolish eyes. He stared very fixedly at Fox, who recognized him as Mr George Nark and looked the other way.

  ‘Find your road all right, gentlemen?’ asked Abel.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Pomeroy,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘It’s a tidy stretch, sir. You’ll be proper warmed up.’

  ‘We’re not only warm but dry,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘Ripe for a pint, I dessay, sir?’

  ‘A glorious thought,’ said Alleyn.

  Mr Nark cleared his throat. Abel threw a glance of the most intense dislike at him and led the way into the private bar.

  ‘‘Morning,’ said Mr Nark, before Fox could get through the door.

  ‘‘Morning, Mr Nark,’ said Fox.

  ‘Don’t know but what I wouldn’t fancy a pint myself,’ said Mr Nark firmly, and followed them into the Private.

  Abel drew Alleyn’s and Fox’s drinks.

  ‘‘Alf-’n-’alf, Abel,’ said Mr Nark grandly.

  Somewhat ostentatiously Abel wiped out a shining pint-pot with a spotless cloth. He then drew the mild and bitter.

  ‘Thank ‘ee,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Glad to see you’re acting careful. Not but what, scientifically speaking, you ought to bile them pots. I don’t know what the law has to say on the point,’ continued Mr Nark, staring very hard at Alleyn. ‘I’d have to look it up. The law may touch on it, and it may not.’

  ‘Don’t tell us you’re hazy on the subject,’ said Abel bitterly. ‘Us can’t believe it.’

  Mr Nark smiled in an exasperating manner and took a pull at his beer. He made a rabbit-like noise with his lips, snapping them together several times with a speculative air. He then looked dubiously into his pint-pot.

  ‘Well,’ said Abel tartly, ‘what’s wrong with it? You’m not pisoned this time, I suppose?’

  ‘I dessay it’s all right,’ said Mr Nark. ‘New barrel bain’t it?’

  Abel disregarded this inquiry. The ship’s decanter that they had been seen in the cupboard now stood on the bar counter. It was spotlessly clean. Abel took the bottle of Amontillado from a shelf above the bar. He put a strainer in the neck of the decanter and began, carefully, to pour the sherry through it.

  ‘What jiggery-pokery are you up to now, Abel?’ inquired Mr Nark. ‘Why, Gor’dang it, that thurr decanter was in the pison cupboard.’

  Abel addressed himself exclusively to Alleyn and Fox. He explained the various methods used by Mrs Ives to clean the decanter. He poured himself out a glass of the sherry and invited them to join him. Under the circumstances they could scarcely refuse. Mr Nark watched them with extraordinary solicitude and remarked that they were braver men than himself.

  ‘Axcuse me for a bit if you please, gentlemen,’ said Abel elaborately to Alleyn and Fox. ‘I do mind me of summat I’ve got to tell Mrs Ives. If you’d be so good as to ring if I’m wanted.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Pomeroy,’ said Alleyn.

  Abel left them with Mr Nark.

  ‘Fine morning, sir,’ said Mr Nark.

  Alleyn agreed.

  ‘Though I suppose,’ continued Mr Nark wooingly, ‘all weathers and climates are one to a man of your calling. Science,’ continued Mr Nark, drawing closer and closer to Alleyn, ‘is a powerful high-handed mistress. Now, just as a matter of curiosity, sir, would you call yourself a man of science?’

  ‘Not I,’ said Alleyn, good-naturedly. ‘I’m a policeman, Mr Nark.’

  ‘Ah! That’s my point. See? That’s my point. Now, sir, with all respect you did ought to make a power more use of the great wonders of science. I’ll give in your fingerprints. There’s an astonishing thing, now! To think us walks about unconscious-like, leaving our pores and loops all over the shop for science to pick up and have the laugh on us.’

  It was a peculiarity of Mr Nark’s conversational style that as he drew nearer to his victim he raised his voice. His face was now about twenty inches away from Alleyn’s and he roared like an infuriated auctioneer.

  ‘I’m a reader,’ shouted Mr Nark. ‘I’m a reader and you might say a student. How many printed words would you say I’d absorbed in my life? At a guess, now?’

  ‘Really,’ said Alleyn. ‘I don’t think I could possibly—’

  ‘Fifty-eight million!’ bawled Mr Nark. ‘Nigh on it. Not reckoning twice overs. I’ve soaked up four hundred words, some of ‘em as much as five syllable, mind you, every night for the last forty years. Started in at the age of fifteen. “Sink or swim,” I said, “I’ll improve my brain to the tune of four hundred words per day till I passes out or goes blind!” And I done it. I don’t
suppose you know a piece of work called The Evvylootion of the Spices?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s a tough masterpiece of a job. Took me a year and more, that did. Yes, I’ve tackled most branches of science. Now the last two years I’ve turned my eyes in the direction of crime. Trials of famous criminals, lives of murderers, feats of detection, all the whole biling of ‘em. Can’t get enough of ‘em. I’m like that. Whole hog or nothing. Reckon I’ve sucked it dry.’

  Mr Nark emptied his pint-pot and, perhaps as an illustrative gesture, sucked his moustache. He looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes.

  ‘This is a very pretty little case now,’ he said. ‘I don’t say there’s much in it but it’s quite a pretty bit of an affair in its way. You’ll be counting on knocking it off in a day or two, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Mr Nark.’

  ‘I was a witness.’

  ‘At the inquest? I thought—’

  ‘Not at the inquest,’ interrupted Mr Nark in a great hurry. ‘No. Superintendent Nicholas Gawd-Almighty Harper had the running of the inquest. I was a witness to the event. More than that I’ve made a study of the affair and I’ve drew my own deductions. I don’t suppose they’d interest you. But I’ve drew ‘em.’

  Alleyn reflected that it was extremely unlikely that Mr Nark’s deductions would be either intelligible or interesting, but he made an agreeable noise and invited him to have another drink. Mr Nark accepted and drew it for himself.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I reckon I know as much as anybody about this affair. There’s criminal carelessness done on purpose, and there’s criminal carelessness done by accident. There’s motives here and there’s motives there, each of ‘em making ‘tother look like a fool, and all of ‘em making the biggest fool of Nicholas Harper. Yes. Us chaps takes our lives in our hands when we calls in at Feathers for a pint. Abel knows it. Abel be too mortal deathly proud to own up.’

  ‘Carelessness, you said? How did it come about?’

  If Mr Nark’s theory of how cyanide got on the dart was ever understood by himself he had no gift for imparting it to others. He became incoherent, and defensively mysterious. He dropped hints and, when pressed to explain them, took fright and dived into obscurities. He uttered generalizations of bewildering stupidity, assumed an air of huf-finess, floundered into deep water, and remained there blowing like a grampus. Alleyn was about to leave him in this plight when, perhaps as a last desperate bid for official approval, Mr Nark made a singular statement.

  ‘The Garden of Eden,’ he said, ‘as any eddicated chap knows, is bunk. You can’t tell me there’s any harm in apples. I grow ‘em. Us started off as a drop of jelly. We’ve come on gradual ever since, working our way up through slime and scales and tails to where we are. We had to have a female to do the job. Us knows that. Biological necessity. But she’s been a poisonous snare and a curse to us as even the ignorant author of Genesis had spotted and noted down in his foolish fashion, under cover of a lot of claptrap. She’s wuss than a serpent on her own, and she’s mostly always at the back of our troubles. Searchy la fem as the French detectives say and you ought to bear in mind. This ghastly affair started a year ago and there’s three alive now that knows it. There was four.’

  Alleyn realized with a sinking heart that he would have to pay attention to Mr Nark. He saw in Mr Nark a desire for fame struggling with an excessive natural timidity. Mr Nark hungered for the admiring attention of the experts. He also dreaded the law, to which he seemed to accord the veneration and alarm of a neophyte before the altar of some tricky and fickle diety. Alleyn decided that he must attempt to speak to him in his own language.

  He said, ‘That’s very interesting, Mr Nark. Strange, isn’t it, Fox? Mr Nark has evidently—’ he fumbled for the magic word—‘evidently made the same deductions as we have from the evidence in hand.’

  Fox gave his superior a bewildered and disgusted glance. Alleyn said rather loudly, ‘See what I mean, Fox?’

  Fox saw. ‘Very striking, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to get you into the force, Mr Nark.’

  Mr Nark buttoned his coat.

  ‘What’ll you take, gentlemen?’ he asked.

  But it was heavy going. To get any sense out of him Alleyn had to flatter, hint, and cajole. A direct suggestion threw him into a fever of incoherence, at a hint of doubt he became huffy and mysterious. As she seemed to be the only woman in the case, Alleyn attempted to crystalize on Decima.

  ‘Miss Moore,’ he said at last, ‘is naturally very much upset by Mr Watchman’s death.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Is she? She may be. P’raps! I don’t know anything about women. She may be. Huh!’

  Alleyn achieved a knowing laugh in which Fox joined.

  ‘You look below the surface, I see,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘I base my deductions on facts. Take an example,’ said Mr Nark. His third drink, a Treble Extra, had begun to have a mellowing effect. His native burr returned to his usually careful utterance and he smiled knowingly. ‘Take an example. I don’t say it’s true to natur’. It’s an illustration. A parrible. If I take a stroll up along Apple Lane of a warm night and hears a courting couple ‘tother side of hedge in old Jim Moore’s orchard, I draws my own conclusions. Doan’t I?’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘‘Ess. And ef,’ said Mr Nark, ‘ef I do bide thurr not with idea of eavesdropping but only to reflect and ponder in my deep bitter manner on the wiles of females in gineral, and ef I yurrs a female voice I axpects to yurr, and a maskeline voice I doan’t axpects to yurr, and ef,’ continued Mr Nark fighting his way to the end of his sentence, ‘I says “Hallo!” to myself and passes on a step, and ef I meets the owner of the maskuline voice I did axpect to yurr, standing sly and silent in hedge: what do I say? Wait a bit. Doan’t tell me. I’ll tell you. I says “Durn it!” I says, “thurr’ll be bloodshed along of this yurr if us doan’t look out.” And ef I bides a twelve month or more and nothing happens and then something does happen, bloody and murderous, what do I say then?’

  Mr Nark raised his hand as a signal that this question also was rhetorical and paused for so long that Fox clenched both his fists and Alleyn had time to light a cigarette.

  ‘I sez,’ said Mr Nark loudly, ‘not a damn‘ thing.’

  ‘What!’ ejaculated Alleyn.

  ‘Not a damn’ thing. But I thinks like a furnace.’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Nark?’ asked Alleyn with difficulty.

  ‘I thinks ‘tis better to yold my tongue ef I want to keep breath in my body. And I yolds it. ‘Ess fay, I be mum and I stays mum.’

  Mr Nark brought off a mysterious gesture with his right forefinger, leered knowingly at Alleyn, and tacked rapidly towards the door. Once there, he turned to deliver his last word.

  ‘Doan’t you go calling my words statements,’ he said, ‘they’re a nallegory, and a nallegory’s got nothing to do with the law. You doan’t trip me up thicky fashion. I know natur’ of an oath. Searchy la fem.’

  CHAPTER 16

  Alleyn Exceeds His Duty

  After they had lunched Alleyn brought his report up to date and Fox, sitting solemnly at the parlour table, typed it in duplicate. Alleyn had a brief interview with Abel Pomeroy and returned with three tumblers. One of these he smashed to splinters with the poker, keeping the pieces together, and emptying them into a tin. The other two he wrapped up and placed, with a copy of his report, in his case. He also spent some time throwing down darts and finding that they stuck in the floor. These employments at an end, they drove to Illington. The day had turned gloomy, heavy rain was falling, and the road was slimy.

  Alleyn dropped Fox at Woolworth’s and went on to Dr Shaw’s house at the end of the principal street. He was shown into a surgery that smelt of leather, iodine, and ether. Here he found Dr Shaw. He had an air of authority and a pleasing directness of manner.

  ‘I hope I’m not an infernal nuisance, coming at this hour,’ said Alleyn. ‘Your patients—�
��

  ‘That’s all right. Surgery doesn’t start till two. Old trot sitting out there in the waiting-room. Malade imaginaire. Do her good to wait a bit, she plagues my life out. Sit down. What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Principally about the wound and the dart. I’ve read the police report of the inquest.’

  ‘Thought it rather full of gaps? So it is. Mordant, the coroner, you know, is a dry old stick, but he’s got his wits about him. Respectable bacteriologist in his day. He and Harper got their heads together, I imagine, and decided just how much would be good for the jury. What about the wound?’

  ‘Were there any traces of cyanide, prussic acid, or whatever the blasted stuff is?’

  ‘No. We got a man from London, you know. One of your tame experts. Good man. Mordant and I were both there when he made his tests. We didn’t expect a positive result from the wound.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Two reasons. He’d bled pretty freely and, if the stuff was introduced on the dart, what wasn’t absorbed would be washed away by blood. Also, the stuff’s very volatile.’

  ‘They found the trace on the dart.’

  ‘Yes. Oates kept his head and put the dart into a clean soda-water bottle and corked it up. Couldn’t do that with the finger.’

  ‘Even so, wouldn’t you expect the stuff to evaporate on the dart.’

  Dr Shaw uttered a deep growl and scratched his cheek.

  ‘Perfectly correct,’ he said, ‘you would. Puzzling.’

  ‘Doesn’t it look as if the Scheele’s acid, or rather the fifty per cent prussic acid solution, must have been put on the dart a very short time before Oates bottled it up?’

  ‘It does. Thought so all along.’

  ‘How long was it, after the event, that you got there?’

  ‘Within half an hour after his death.’

  ‘Yes. Now, look here. For private consumption only, would you expect a cyanide solution, however concentrated, to kill a man after that fashion?’