by Ngaio Marsh
He came from the darkened ballroom and was picked up in front of the screen by a strong spotlight: a black man in conventional evening dress, with a quite extraordinary air of distinction.
All the golden stars and all the lights in the house were out. The orchestra lamps were masked. Only the single lamp by the President, complained of by Gibson, remained alight, so that the President and the singer, at opposite ends of the lake, were the only persons to be seen in the benighted garden.
The orchestra played an introductory phrase.
A single deep sustained note of extraordinary strength and beauty floated from the singer.
While it still hung on the air a sound like that of a whiplash cracked out, and somewhere in the house a woman screamed and screamed and screamed.
The light in the pavilion went out.
What followed was like the outbreak of a violent storm: a confusion of voices, of isolated screams, less insistent than the continuous one, of shouted orders, of chairs overturned, of something or someone falling into the water. Of Alleyn’s hand on Troy’s shoulder. Then of his voice: “Don’t move, Troy. Stay there.” And then, unmistakably, the Boomer’s great voice roaring out something in his own tongue and Alleyn saying: “No, you don’t. No!” Of a short guttural cry near at hand and a thud. And then from many voices like the king and courtiers in the play: “Lights! Lights! Lights!”
They came up, first in the ballroom and then overhead in the garden. They revealed some of the guests still seated on either side of the lake but many on their feet talking confusedly. They revealed also the great singer, motionless, still in his spotlight, and a number of men who emerged purposefully from several directions, some striding up to the pavilion and some into the house.
And in the pavilion itself men with their backs to Troy shutting her in, crowding together and hiding her husband from her. Women making intermittent exclamations in the background.
She heard her brother-in-law’s voice raised in conventional admonition — “Don’t panic, anybody. Keep calm. No need to panic” — and even in her confusion thought that however admirable the advice, he did unfortunately sound ridiculous.
His instructions were in effect repeated, not at all ridiculously, by a large, powerful man who had appeared beside the singer.
“Keep quiet and stay where you are, ladies and gentlemen, if you please,” said this person, and Troy at once recognized the Yard manner.
The screaming woman had moved away somewhere inside the house. Her cries had broken down into hysterical and incomprehensible speech. They became more distant and were finally subdued.
And now the large purposeful man came into the pavilion. The men who had blocked Troy’s view backed away, and she saw what they had been looking at.
A prone figure, face down, arms spread, dressed in a flamboyant uniform, split down the back by a plumed spear. The sky-blue tunic had a glistening patch round the place of entry. The plume, where it touched the split, was red.
Alleyn was kneeling by the figure.
The large purposeful man moved in front of her and shut off this picture. She heard Alleyn’s voice: “Better clear the place.” After a moment he was beside her, holding her arm and turning her away. “All right?” he said. “Yes?” She nodded and found herself being shepherded out of the pavilion with the other guests.
When they had gone Alleyn returned to the spiked figure and again knelt beside it. He looked up at his colleague and slightly shook his head.
Superintendent Gibson muttered, “They’ve done it!”
“Not precisely,” Alleyn said. He stood up and at once the group of men moved further back. And there was the Boomer, bolt upright in the chair that was not quite a throne, breathing deeply and looking straight before him.
“It’s the Ambassador,” Alleyn said.
IV
Aftermath
The handling of the affair at the Ng’ombwanan Embassy was to become a classic in the annals of police procedure. Gibson, under the hard drive of a muffled fury, and with Alleyn’s co-operation, had within minutes transformed the scene into one that resembled a sort of high-toned drafting-yard. The speed with which this was accomplished was remarkable.
The guests, marshalled into the ballroom, were, as Gibson afterwards put it, “processed” through the dining-room. There they were shepherded up to a trestle table upon which the elaborate confections of Costard et Cie had been shoved aside to make room for six officers summoned from Scotland Yard. These men sat with copies of the guest list before them and with regulation tact checked off names and addresses.
Most of the guests were then encouraged to leave by a side door, a general signal having been sent out for their transport. A small group were asked, very civilly, to remain.
As Troy approached the table she saw that among the Yard officers Inspector Fox, Alleyn’s constant associate, sat at the end of the row, his left ear intermittently tickled by the tail of an elaborately presented cold pheasant. When he looked over the top of his elderly spectacles and saw her, he was momentarily transfixed. She leant down. “Yes, Br’er Fox, me,” she murmured. “Mrs. R. Alleyn, 48 Regency Close, S.W.3.”
“Fancy!” said Mr. Fox to his list. “What about getting home?” he mumbled. “All right?”
“Perfectly. Hired car. Someone’s ringing them. Rory’s fixed it.”
Mr. Fox ticked off the name, “Thank you, madam,” he said aloud. “We won’t keep you”; and so Troy went home, and not until she got there was she to realize how very churned up she had become.
The curtained pavilion had been closed and police constables posted outside. It was lit inside and glowed like some scarlet and white striped bauble in the dark garden. Distorted shadows moved, swelled and vanished across its walls. Specialists were busy within.
In a small room normally used by the controller of the household as an office, Alleyn and Gibson attempted to get some sort of sense out of Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort.
She had left off screaming but had the air of being liable to start up again at the least provocation. Her face was streaked with mascara, her mouth hung open, and she pulled incessantly at her lower lip. Beside her stood her husband, the Colonel, holding, incongruously, a bottle of smelling-salts.
Three women in lavender dresses with caps and stylish aprons sat in a row against the wall as if waiting to make an entrance in unison for some soubrettish turn. The largest of them was a police sergeant.
Behind the desk a male uniform sergeant took notes and upon it sat Alleyn, facing Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort. Gibson stood to one side, holding on to the lower half of his face as if it were his temper and had to be stifled.
Alleyn said: “Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort, we are all very sorry indeed to badger you like this, but it really is a most urgent matter. Now. I’m going to repeat, as well as I can, what I think you have been telling us, and if I go wrong please, please stop me and say so. Will you?”
“Come on, Chrissy old girl,” urged her husband. “Stiff upper lip. It’s all over now. Here!” He offered the smelling-salts but was flapped away.
“You,” Alleyn said, “were in the ladies’ cloakroom. You had gone there during the general exodus of the guests from the ballroom and were to rejoin your husband for the concert in the garden. There were no other guests in the cloakroom, but these ladies, the cloakroom attendants, were there? Right? Good. Now. You had had occasion to use one of the four lavatories, the second from the left. You were still there when the lights went out. So far, then, have we got it right?”
She nodded, rolling her gaze from Alleyn to her husband. “Now the next bit. As clearly as you can, won’t you? What happened immediately after the lights went out?”
“I couldn’t think what had happened. I mean why? I’ve told you. I really do think,” said Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort, squeezing out her voice like toothpaste, “that I might be let off. I’ve been hideously shocked, I thought I was going to be killed. Truly. Hughie—?”
“Pull yourself together
, Chrissy, for God’s sake. Nobody’s killed you. Get on with it. Sooner said, sooner we’ll be shot of it.”
“You’re so hard,” she whimpered. And to Alleyn: “Isn’t he? Isn’t he hard?”
But after a little further persuasion she did get on with it.
“I was still there,” she said. “In the loo. Honestly! — Too awkward. And all the lights had gone out but there was a kind of glow outside those slatted sort of windows. And I suppose it was something to do with the performance. You know. That drumming and some sort of dance. I knew you’d be cross, Hughie, waiting for me out there and the concert started and all that, but one can’t help these things, can one?”
“All right. We all know something had upset you.”
“Yes, well they finished — the dancing and drums had finished — and — and so had I and I was nearly going when the door burst open and hit me. Hard. On — on the back. And he took hold of me. By the arm. Brutally. And threw me out. I’m bruised and shaken and suffering from shock and you keep me here. He threw me so violently that I fell. In the cloakroom. It was much darker there than in the loo. Almost pitch dark. And I lay there. And outside I could hear clapping and after that there was music and a voice. I suppose it was wonderful, but to me, lying there hurt and shocked, it was like a lost soul.”
“Go on, please.”
“And then there was that ghastly shot. Close. Shattering, in the loo. And the next thing — straight after that — he burst out and kicked me.”
“Kicked you. You mean deliberately—?”
“He fell over me,” said Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort. “Almost fell, and in so doing kicked me. And I thought now he’s going to shoot me. So of course I screamed. And screamed.”
“Yes?”
“And he bolted.”
“And then?”
“Well, then there were those three.” She indicated the attendants. “Milling about in the dark and kicking me too. By accident, of course.”
The three ladies stirred in their seats.
“Where had they come from?”
“How should I know! Well, anyway, I do know because I heard the doors bang. They’d been in the other three loos.”
“All of them?” Alleyn looked at the sergeant. She stood up. “Well?” he asked.
“To try and see Karbo, sir,” she said, scarlet-faced. “He was just outside. Singing.”
“Standing on the seats, I suppose, the lot of you.”
“Sir.”
“I’ll see you later,” Gibson threatened. “Sit down.”
“Sir.”
“Now, Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort,” Alleyn said. “What happened next?”
Someone, it appeared, had a torch, and by its light they had hauled Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort to her feet.
“Was this you?” Alleyn asked the sergeant, who said it was. Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort had continued to yell. There was a great commotion going on in the garden and other parts of the house. And then all the lights went on. “And that girl” she said, pointing at the sergeant, “that one. There. Do you know what she did!”
“Slapped your face, perhaps, to stop you screaming?”
“How she dared! After all that. And shouting questions at me. And then she had the impertinence to say she couldn’t hang round there and left me to the other two. I must say, they had the decency to give me aspirins.”
“I’m so glad,” said Alleyn politely. “Now, will you please answer the next one very carefully. Did you get any impression at all of what this man was like? There was a certain amount of reflected light from the louvres. Did you get anything like a look at him, however momentary?”
“Oh, yes,” she said quite calmly. “Yes, indeed I did. He was black.”
An appreciable silence followed this statement. Gibson cleared his throat.
“Are you sure of that? Really sure?” Alleyn asked.
“Oh, perfectly. I saw his head against the window.”
“It couldn’t, for instance, have been a white person with a black stocking over his head?”
“Oh, no. I think he had a stocking over his head but I could tell.” She glanced at her husband and lowered her voice. “Besides,” she said, “I smelt him. If you’ve lived out there as we did, you can’t mistake it.”
Her husband made a sort of corroborative noise.
“Yes?” Alleyn said. “I understand they notice the same phenomenon in us. An African friend of mine told me that it took him almost a year before he left off feeling faint in lifts during the London rush hours.”
And before anyone could remark upon this, he said: “Well, and then one of our people took over and I think from this point we can depend upon his report.” He looked at Gibson. “Unless you—?”
“No,” Gibson said. “Thanks. Nothing. We’ll have a typewritten transcript of this little chat, madam, and we’ll ask you to look it over and sign it if it seems O.K. Sorry to have troubled you.” And he added the predictable coda. “You’ve been very helpful,” he said. Alleyn wondered how much these routine civilities cost him.
The Colonel, ignoring Mr. Gibson, barked at Alleyn. “I take it I may remove my wife. She ought to see her doctor.”
“Of course. Do. Who is your doctor, Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort? Can we ring him up and ask him to meet you at your house?”
She opened her mouth and shut it again when the Colonel said: “We won’t trouble you, thank you, good evening to you.”
They had got as far as the door before Alleyn said: “Oh, by the way! Did you by any chance get the impression that the man was in some kind of uniform? Or livery?”
There was a long pause before Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort said: “I’m afraid not. No. I’ve no idea.”
“No? By the way, Colonel, are those your smelling-salts?”
The Colonel stared at him as if he were mad and then, vacantly, at the bottle in his hand.
“Mine!” he said. “Why the devil should they be mine?”
“They are mine,” said his wife, grandly. “Anyone would suppose we’d been shop-lifting. Honestly!”
She put her arm in her husband’s and, clinging to him, gazed resentfully at Alleyn.
“When that peculiar little Whipple-whatever-it-is introduced you, he might have told us you were a policeman. Come on, Hughie darling,” said Mrs. Cockburn-Montfort, and achieved quite a magnificent exit.
It had taken all of Alleyn’s tact, patience and sheer authority to get the Boomer stowed away in the library, a smallish room on the first floor. When he had recovered from the effects of shock, which must surely, Alleyn thought, have been more severe than he permitted himself to show, he developed a strong inclination to conduct enquiries on his own account.
This was extremly tricky. At the Embassy they were technically on Ng’ombwanan soil. Gibson and his Special Branch were there specifically at the invitation of the Ng’ombwanan Ambassador, and how far their authority extended in the somewhat rococo circumstance of that Ambassador having been murdered on the premises was a bit of a poser.
So, in a different key, Alleyn felt, was his own presence on the scene. The Special Branch very much likes to keep itself to itself. Fred Gibson’s frame of mind, at the moment, was one of rigidly suppressed professional chagrin and personal mortification. His initial approach would never have been made under ordinary circumstances, and now Alleyn’s presence on, as it were, the S.B.’s pitch, gave an almost grotesque twist to an already extremely delicate situation. Particularly since, with the occurrence of a homicide, the focus of responsibility might now be said to have shifted to Alleyn, in whose division the crime had taken place.
Gibson had cut through this dilemma by ringing up his principals and getting authority for himself and Alleyn with the consent of the Embassy to handle the case together. But Alleyn knew the situation could well become a very tricky one.
“Apparently,” Gibson said, “we carry on until somebody stops us. Those are my instructions, anyway. Yours, too, on three counts: your A.C., your division, and the persona
l request of the President.”
“Who at the moment wants to summon the entire household including the spear-carrier and harangue them in their own language.”
“Bloody farce,” Gibson mumbled.
“Yes, but if he insists — Look,” Alleyn said, “it mightn’t be such a bad idea for them to go ahead if we could understand what they were talking about.”
“Well—”
“Fred, suppose we put out a personal call for Mr. Samuel Whipplestone to come at once — you know: ‘be kind enough’ and all that. Not sound as if we’re breathing down his neck.”
“What about it—?” asked Gibson unenthusiastically.
“He speaks Ng’ombwanan. He lives five minutes away and will be home by now. No. 1, Capricorn Walk. We can ring up. Not in the book yet, I daresay, but get through,” said Alleyn to an attendant sergeant and as he went to the telephone, “Samuel Whipplestone. Send a car round. I’ll speak to him.”
“The idea being?” Mr. Gibson asked woodenly.
“We let the President address the troops — indeed, come to that, we can’t stop him, but at least we’ll know what’s being said.”
“Where is he, for God’s sake? You put him somewhere,” Mr. Gibson said, as if the President were a mislaid household utensil.
“In the library. He’s undertaken to stay there until I go back. We’ve got coppers keeping obbo in the passage.”
“I should hope so. If this was a case of the wrong victim, chummy may well be gunning for the right one.”
The sergeant was speaking on the telephone. “Superintendent Alleyn would like a word with you, sir.”
Alleyn detected in Mr. Whipplestone’s voice an overtone of occupational cool. “My dear Alleyn,” he said, “this is a most disturbing occurrence. I understand the Ambassador has been — assassinated.”
“Yes.”
“How very dreadful. Nothing could have been worse.”
“Except the intended target taking the knock.”
“Oh — I see. The President.”
“Listen,” Alleyn said and made his request.
“Dear me,” said Mr. Whipplestone.
