Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh

by Ngaio Marsh

  As she tumbled out her story, filled with relief at telling him, a large man with uncommonly bright eyes came up behind them.

  “Listen to this, Fox,” Roderick Alleyn said. “We’re in demand, it seems.” He put his arm through Troy’s and closed his hand round hers. “Let’s go indoors, shall we? Here’s Fox, darling, come for a nice bucolic rest. Can we give him a bed?”

  Troy pulled herself together and greeted Inspector Fox. Presently she was able to give them a coherent account of the evening’s tragedy. When she had finished, Alleyn said, “Poor little Bates. He was a nice little bloke.” He put his hand on Troy’s. “You need a drink,” he said, “and so, by the way, do we.”

  While he was getting the drinks he asked quite casually, “You’ve had a shock and a beastly one at that, but there’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Troy swallowed hard, “there is. They’re all saying it’s an accident.”

  “Yes?”

  “And, Rory, I don’t think it is.”

  Mr. Fox cleared his throat. “Fancy,” he said.

  “Suicide?” Alleyn suggested, bringing her drink to her.

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “A bit of rough stuff, then?”

  “You sound as if you’re asking about the sort of weather we’ve been having.”

  “Well, darling, you don’t expect Fox and me to go into hysterics. Why not an accident?”

  “He knew all about the other accidents, he knew it was dangerous. And then the oddness of it, Rory. To leave the Harvest Festival service and climb the tower in the dark, carrying that enormous Bible!”

  “And he was hell-bent on tracing these Hadets?”

  “Yes. He kept saying you’d be interested. He actually brought a copy of the entries for you.”

  “Have you got it?”

  She found it for him. “The selected texts,” he said, “are pretty rum, aren’t they, Br’er Fox?” and handed it over.

  “Very vindictive,” said Mr. Fox.

  “Mr. Bates thought it was in your line,” Troy said.

  “The devil he did! What’s been done about this?”

  “The village policeman was in the church. They sent for the doctor. And—well, you see, Mr. Bates had talked a lot about you and they hope you’ll be able to tell them something about him—whom they should get in touch with and so on.”

  “Have they moved him?”

  “They weren’t going to until the doctor had seen him.”

  Alleyn pulled his wife’s ear and looked at Fox. “Do you fancy a stroll through the village, Foxkin?”

  “There’s a lovely moon,” Fox said bitterly and got to his feet.

  The moon was high in the heavens when they came to the base of the tower and it shone on a group of four men—the rector, Richard De’ath, Edward Pilbrow, and Sergeant Botting, the village constable. When they saw Alleyn and Fox, they separated and revealed a fifth, who was kneeling by the body of Timothy Bates.

  “Kind of you to come,” the rector said, shaking hands with Alleyn. “And a great relief to all of us.”

  Their manner indicated that Alleyn’s arrival would remove a sense of personal responsibility. “If you’d like to have a look—?” the doctor said.

  The broken body lay huddled on its side. The head rested on the open Bible. The right hand, rigid in cadaveric spasm, clutched a torn page. Alleyn knelt and Fox came closer with the torch. At the top of the page Alleyn saw the word Ezekiel and a little farther down, Chapter 12.

  Using the tip of his finger Alleyn straightened the page. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the thirteenth verse. “My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare.”

  The words had been faintly underlined in mauve.

  Alleyn stood up and looked round the circle of faces.

  “Well,” the doctor said, “we’d better see about moving him.”

  Alleyn said, “I don’t think he should be moved just yet.”

  “Not!” the rector cried out. “But surely—to leave him like this—I mean, after this terrible accident—”

  “It has yet to be proved,” Alleyn said, “that it was an accident.”

  There was a sharp sound from Richard De’ath.

  “—and I fancy,” Alleyn went on, glancing at De’ath, “that it’s going to take quite a lot of proving.”

  After that, events, as Fox observed with resignation, took the course that was to be expected. The local Superintendent said that under the circumstances it would be silly not to ask Alleyn to carry on, the Chief Constable agreed, and appropriate instructions came through from Scotland Yard. The rest of the night was spent in routine procedure. The body having been photographed and the Bible set aside for fingerprinting, both were removed and arrangements put in hand for the inquest.

  At dawn Alleyn and Fox climbed the tower. The winding stair brought them to an extremely narrow doorway through which they saw the countryside lying vaporous in the faint light. Fox was about to go through to the balcony when Alleyn stopped him and pointed to the door jambs. They were covered with a growth of stonecrop.

  About three feet from the floor this had been brushed off over a space of perhaps four inches and fragments of the microscopic plant hung from the scars. From among these, on either side, Alleyn removed morsels of dark-colored thread. “And here,” he sighed, “as sure as fate, we go again. O Lord, O Lord!”

  They stepped through to the balcony and there was a sudden whirr and beating of wings as a company of pigeons flew out of the tower. The balcony was narrow and the balustrade indeed very low. “If there’s any looking over,” Alleyn said, “you, my dear Foxkin, may do it.”

  Nevertheless he leaned over the balustrade and presently knelt beside it. “Look at this. Bates rested the open Bible here—blow me down flat if he didn’t! There’s a powder of leather where it scraped on the stone and a fragment where it tore. It must have been moved—outward. Now, why, why?”

  “Shoved it accidentally with his knees, then made a grab and overbalanced?”

  “But why put the open Bible there? To read by moonlight? My net also will I spread upon him and he shall be taken in my snare. Are you going to tell me he underlined it and then dived overboard?”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything,” Fox grunted and then: “That old chap Edward Pilbrow’s down below swabbing the stones. He looks like a beetle.”

  “Let him look like a rhinoceros if he wants to, but for the love of Mike don’t leer over the edge—you give me the willies. Here, let’s pick this stuff up before it blows away.”

  They salvaged the scraps of leather and put them in an envelope. Since there was nothing more to do, they went down and out through the vestry and so home to breakfast.

  “Darling,” Alleyn told his wife, “you’ve landed us with a snorter.”

  “Then you do think—?”

  “There’s a certain degree of fishiness. Now, see here, wouldn’t somebody have noticed little Bates get up and go out? I know he sat all alone on the back bench, but wasn’t there someone?”

  “The rector?”

  “No. I asked him. Too intent on his sermon, it seems.”

  “Mrs. Simpson? If she looks through her little red curtain she faces the nave.”

  “We’d better call on her, Fox. I’ll take the opportunity to send a couple of cables to New Zealand. She’s fat, jolly, keeps the shop-cum-postoffice, and is supposed to read all the postcards. Just your cup of tea. You’re dynamite with postmistresses. Away we go.”

  Mrs. Simpson sat behind her counter doing a crossword puzzle and refreshing herself with licorice. She welcomed Alleyn with enthusiasm. He introduced Fox and then he retired to a corner to write out his cables.

  “What a catastrophe!” Mrs. Simpson said, plunging straight into the tragedy. “Shocking! As nice a little gentleman as you’d wish to meet, Mr. Fox. Typical New Zealander. Pick him a mile away and a friend of Mr. Alleyn’s, I’m told, and if I’ve said it once I’ve sai
d it a hundred times, Mr. Fox, they ought to have put something up to prevent it. Wire netting or a bit of ironwork; but, no, they let it go on from year to year and now see what’s happened —history repeating itself and giving the village a bad name. Terrible!”

  Fox bought a packet of tobacco from Mrs. Simpson and paid her a number of compliments on the layout of her shop, modulating from there into an appreciation of the village. He said that one always found such pleasant company in small communities. Mrs. Simpson was impressed and offered him a piece of licorice.

  “As for pleasant company,” she chuckled, “that’s as may be, though by and large I suppose I mustn’t grumble. I’m a cockney and a stranger here myself, Mr. Fox. Only twenty-four years and that doesn’t go for anything with this lot.”

  “Ah,” Fox said, “then you wouldn’t recollect the former tragedies. Though to be sure,” he added, “you wouldn’t do that in any case, being much too young, if you’ll excuse the liberty, Mrs. Simpson.”

  After this classic opening Alleyn was not surprised to hear Mrs. Simpson embark on a retrospective survey of life in Little Copplestone. She was particularly lively on Miss Hart, who, she hinted, had had her eye on Mr. Richard De’ath for many a long day.

  “As far back as when Old Jimmy Wagstaff died, which was why she was so set on getting the next-door house; but Mr. De’ath never looked at anybody except Ruth Wall, and her head-over-heels in love with young Castle, which together with her falling to her destruction when feeding pigeons led Mr. De’ath to forsake religion and take to drink, which he has done something cruel ever since.

  “They do say he’s got a terrible temper, Mr. Fox, and it’s well known he give Old Jimmy Wagstaff a thrashing on account of straying cattle and threatened young Castle, saying if he couldn’t have Ruth, nobody else would, but fair’s fair and personally I’ve never seen him anything but nice-mannered, drunk or sober. Speak as you find’s my motto and always has been, but these old maids, when they take a fancy they get it pitiful hard. You wouldn’t know a word of nine letters meaning ‘pale-faced lure like a sprat in a fishy story,’ would you?”

  Fox was speechless, but Alleyn, emerging with his cables, suggested “whitebait.”

  “Correct!” shouted Mrs. Simpson. “Fits like a glove. Although it’s not a bit like a sprat and a quarter the size. Cheating, I call it. Still, it fits.” She licked her indelible pencil and triumphantly added it to her crossword.

  They managed to lead her back to Timothy Bates. Fox, professing a passionate interest in organ music, was able to extract from her that when the rector began his sermon she had in fact dimly observed someone move out of the back bench and through the doors. “He must have walked round the church and in through the vestry and little did I think he was going to his death,” Mrs. Simpson said with considerable relish and a sigh like an earthquake.

  “You didn’t happen to hear him in the vestry?” Fox ventured, but it appeared that the door from the vestry into the organ loft was shut and Mrs. Simpson, having settled herself to enjoy the sermon with, as she shamelessly admitted, a bag of chocolates, was not in a position to notice.

  Alleyn gave her his two cables: the first to Timothy Bates’s partner in New Zealand and the second to one of his own colleagues in that country asking for any available information about relatives of the late William James Wagstaff of Little Copplestone, Kent, possibly resident in New Zealand after 1921, and of any persons of the name of Peter Rook Hadet or Naomi Balbus Hadet.

  Mrs. Simpson agitatedly checked over the cables, professional etiquette and burning curiosity struggling together in her enormous bosom. She restrained herself, however, merely observing that an event of this sort set you thinking, didn’t it?

  “And no doubt,” Alleyn said as they walked up the lane, “she’ll be telling her customers that the next stop’s bloodhounds and manacles.”

  “Quite a tidy armful of lady, isn’t she, Mr. Alleyn?” Fox calmly rejoined.

  The inquest was at 10:20 in the smoking room of the Star and Garter. With half an hour in hand, Alleyn and Fox visited the churchyard. Alleyn gave particular attention to the headstones of Old Jimmy Wagstaff, Ruth Wall, and Simon Castle. “No mention of the month or day,” he said. And after a moment: “I wonder. We must ask the rector.”

  “No need to ask the rector,” said a voice behind them. It was Miss Hart. She must have come soundlessly across the soft turf. Her air was truculent. “Though why,” she said, “it should be of interest, I’m sure I don’t know. Ruth Wall died on August thirteenth, 1921. It was a Saturday.”

  “You’ve a remarkable memory,” Alleyn observed.

  “Not as good as it sounds. That Saturday afternoon I came to do the flowers in the church. I found her and I’m not likely ever to forget it. Young Castle went the same way almost a month later. September twelfth. In my opinion there was never a more glaring case of suicide. I believe,” Miss Hart said harshly, “in facing facts.”

  “She was a beautiful girl, wasn’t she?”

  “I’m no judge of beauty. She set the men by the ears. He was a fine-looking young fellow. Fanny Wagstaff did her best to get him.”

  “Had Ruth Wall,” Alleyn asked, “other admirers?”

  Miss Hart didn’t answer and he turned to her. Her face was blotted with an unlovely flush. “She ruined two men’s lives, if you want to know. Castle and Richard De’ath,” said Miss Hart. She turned on her heel and without another word marched away.

  “September twelfth,” Alleyn murmured. “That would be a Monday, Br’er Fox.”

  “So it would,” Fox agreed, after a short calculation, “so it would. Quite a coincidence.”

  “Or not, as the case may be. I’m going to take a gamble on this one. Come on.”

  They left the churchyard and walked down the lane, overtaking Edward Pilbrow on the way. He was wearing his town crier’s coat and hat and carrying his bell by the clapper. He manifested great excitement when he saw them.

  “Hey!” he shouted, “what’s this I hear? Murder’s the game, is it? What a go! Come on, gents, let’s have it. Did ’e fall or was ’e pushed? Hor, hor, hor! Come on.”

  “Not until after the inquest,” Alleyn shouted.

  “Do we get a look at the body?”

  “Shut up,” Mr. Fox bellowed suddenly.

  “I got to know, haven’t I? It’ll be the smartest bit of crying I ever done, this will! I reckon I might get on the telly with this. ‘Town crier tells old-world village death stalks the churchyard.’ Hor, hor, hor!”

  “Let us,” Alleyn whispered, “leave this horrible old man.”

  They quickened their stride and arrived at the pub, to be met with covert glances and dead silence.

  The smoking room was crowded for the inquest. Everybody was there, including Mrs. Simpson who sat in the back row with her candies and her crossword puzzle. It went through very quickly. The rector deposed to finding the body. Richard De’ath, sober and less truculent than usual, was questioned as to his sojourn outside the churchyard and said he’d noticed nothing unusual apart from hearing a disturbance among the pigeons roosting in the balcony. From where he stood, he said, he couldn’t see the face of the tower.

  An open verdict was recorded.

  Alleyn had invited the rector, Miss Hart, Mrs. Simpson, Richard De’ath, and, reluctantly, Edward Pilbrow, to join him in the Bar-Parlor and had arranged with the landlord that nobody else would be admitted. The Public Bar, as a result, drove a roaring trade.

  When they had all been served and the hatch closed, Alleyn walked into the middle of the room and raised his hand. It was the slightest of gestures but it secured their attention.

  He said, “I think you must all realize that we are not satisfied this was an accident. The evidence against accident has been collected piecemeal from the persons in this room and I am going to put it before you. If I go wrong I want you to correct me. I ask you to do this with absolute frankness, even if you are obliged to implicate someone who you would say was
the last person in the world to be capable of a crime of violence.”

  He waited. Pilbrow, who had come very close, had his ear cupped in his hand. The rector looked vaguely horrified. Richard De’ath suddenly gulped down his double whiskey. Miss Hart coughed over her lemonade and Mrs. Simpson avidly popped a peppermint cream in her mouth and took a swig of her port-and-raspberry.

  Alleyn nodded to Fox, who laid Mr. Bates’s Bible, open at the flyleaf, on the table before him.

  “The case,” Alleyn said, “hinges on this book. You have all seen the entries. I remind you of the recorded deaths in 1779 of the three Hadets—Stewart Shakespeare, Naomi Balbus, and Peter Rook. To each of these is attached a biblical text suggesting that they met their death by violence. There have never been any Hadets in this village and the days of the week are wrong for the given dates. They are right, however, for the year 1921 and they fit the deaths, all by falling from a height, of William Wagstaff, Ruth Wall, and Simon Castle.

  “By analogy the Christian names agree. William suggests Shakespeare. Naomi—Ruth; Balbus—a wall. Simon —Peter; and a Rook is a Castle in chess. And Hadet,” Alleyn said without emphasis, “is an anagram of Death.”

  “Balderdash!” Miss Hart cried out in an unrecognizable voice.

  “No, it’s not,” said Mrs. Simpson. “It’s jolly good crossword stuff.”

  “Wicked balderdash. Richard!”

  De’ath said, “Be quiet. Let him go on.”

  “We believe,” Alleyn said, “that these three people met their deaths by one hand. Motive is a secondary consideration, but it is present in several instances, predominantly in one. Who had cause to wish the death of these three people? Someone whom old Wagstaff had bullied and to whom he had left his money and who killed him for it. Someone who was infatuated with Simon Castle and bitterly jealous of Ruth Wall. Someone who hoped, as an heiress, to win Castle for herself and who, failing, was determined nobody else should have him. Wagstaff’s orphaned niece—Fanny Wagstaff.”

  There were cries of relief from all but one of his hearers. He went on. “Fanny Wagstaff sold everything, disappeared, and was never heard of again in the village. But twenty-four years later she returned, and has remained here ever since.”