Black As He Is Painted ra-28

by Ngaio Marsh

  Sergeant Jacks came out of the garage alleyway. Fox and Gibson had been quick.

  Gomez walked rapidly up the Mews on the opposite side to Alleyn, who crossed over and stepped in front of him. The sirens, close at hand now, stopped.

  “Mr. Sheridan?” Alleyn said.

  For a moment the living image of an infuriated middle-aged man overlay that of the same man fifteen years younger in Mr. Whipplestone’s album. He had turned so white that his close-shaved beard started up, blue-black, as if it had been painted across his face.

  He said: “Yes? My name is Sheridan.”

  “Yes, of course. You’ve been trying to call upon the Sanskrits, haven’t you?”

  He made a very slight movement: an adjustment of his weight, rather like Mr. Whipplestone’s cat preparing to spring or bolt. Fox had come up behind Alleyn. Two of Gibson’s uniform men had turned into the Mews from Capricorn Place. There were more large men converging on the pottery. Sergeant Jacks was talking to Chubb and Fred Gibson loomed over Colonel Cockburn-Montfort by the door into the flat.

  Gomez stared from Alleyn to Fox. “What is this?” he lisped. “What do you want? Who are you?”

  “We’re police officers. We’re about to effect an entry into the pottery and I suggest that you come with us. Better not to make a scene in the street, don’t you think?”

  For a moment Gomez had looked as if he meant to do so, but he now said between his teeth: “I want to see those people.”

  “Now’s your chance,” said Alleyn.

  He glowered, hesitated, and then said: “Very well,” and walked between Alleyn and Fox towards the pottery.

  Gibson and the sergeant were having no trouble. Chubb was standing bolt upright and saying nothing. Colonel Cockburn-Montfort had been detached from the bell, deftly rolled round and propped against the door-jamb by Gibson. His eyes were glazed and his mouth slightly open, but like Chubb he actually maintained a trace of his soldierly bearing.

  Four uniform men had arrived and bystanders had begun to collect.

  Alleyn rang the bell and knocked on the top of the door. He waited for half a minute and then said to one of the policemen: “It’s a Yale. Let’s hope it’s not double-locked. Got anything?”

  The policeman fished in his breast pocket, produced a small polythene ready-reckoner of a kind used for conversion to metric quantities. Alleyn slid it past the tongue of the lock and manipulated it.

  “Bob’s your uncle,” the constable murmured and the door was open.

  Alleyn said to Fox and Gibson, “Would you wait a moment with these gentlemen.” He then nodded to the constables, who followed him in, one remaining inside the door.

  “Hullo!” Alleyn called. “Anyone at homer

  He had a resonant voice, but it sounded stifled in the airless flat. They were in a narrow lobby hung with dim native cloth of some sort and smelling of dust and the stale fumes of sandarac. A staircase rose steeply on the left from just inside the door. At the far end on the right was a door that presumably led into the shop. Two large suitcases, strapped and labelled, leant against the wall.

  Alleyn turned on a switch and a pseudo-Oriental lamp with red panes came to life in the ceiling. He looked at the labels on the suitcases: Sanskrit, Ngombwana. “Come on,” he said.

  He led the way upstairs. On the landing he called out again.

  Silence.

  There were four doors, all shut.

  Two bedrooms, small, exotically furnished, crowded and in disarray. Discarded garments flung on unmade beds. Cupboards and drawers open and half-emptied. Two small, half-packed suitcases. An all-pervading and most unlovely smell.

  A bathroom, stale and grubby, smelling of hot wet fat. The wall-cupboard was locked.

  Finally, a large, heavily furnished room with divans, deep rugs, horrid silk-shaded and beaded lamps, incense burners, and a number of ostensibly African artifacts. But no Sanskrits.

  They returned downstairs. Alleyn opened the door at the end of the lobby and walked through.

  He was in the piggery.

  It was very dark. Only a thin sliver of light penetrated the slit between the heavy window curtains.

  He stood inside the door with the two uniform men behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom the interior began to emerge: a desk, a litter of paper and packing material, open cases, and on the shelves, dimly flowering, one pottery pig. The end of the old stable formed, as he remembered, a sort of alcove or cavern in which were the kiln and a long work table. He saw a faint red glow there now.

  He was taken with a sensation of inertia that he had long ago learnt to recognize as the kind of nightmare which drains one of the power to move.

  As now, when his hand was unable to grope about the dirty wall for a light switch.

  The experience never lasted for more than a few seconds, and now it had passed and left him with the knowledge that he was watched.

  Someone at the far end of the shop, in the alcove room, sitting on the other side of the work table, was watching him: a looming mass that he had mistaken for shadow.

  It began to define itself. An enormous person whose chin rested with a suggestion of doggy roguishness on her arm, and whose eyes were very wide open indeed.

  Alleyn’s hand found the switch and the room was flooded with light.

  It was Miss Sanskrit who ogled him so coyly with her chin on her arm and her head all askew and her eyes wide open.

  Behind the table with his back towards her, with his vast rump upheaved and with his head and arms and barrel submerged in a packing case like a monstrous puppet doubled over its box, dangled her brother. They were both dead.

  And between them, on the floor and the bench, were blooded shards of pottery.

  And in the packing case lay the headless carcass of an enormous pottery pig.

  A whispered stream of obscenities had been surprised out of one of the constables, but he had stopped when Alleyn walked into the alcove and had followed a short way behind.

  “Stay where you are,” Alleyn said, and then: “No! One of you get that lot in off the street and lock the door. Take them to the room upstairs, keep them there and stay with them. Note anything that’s said.

  “The other call Homicide and give the necessary information. Ask Mr. Fox and Mr. Gibson to come here.”

  They went out, shutting the door behind them. In a minute Alleyn heard sounds of a general entry and of people walking upstairs.

  When Fox and Gibson arrived they found Alleyn standing between the Sanskrits. They moved towards him but checked when he raised his hand.

  “This is nasty,” Fox said. “What was it?”

  “Come and see but walk warily.”

  They moved round the table and saw the back of Miss Sanskrit’s head. It was smashed in like an egg. Beetroot-dyed hair, dark and wet, stuck in the wound. The back of her dress was saturated — there was a dark puddle on the table under her arm. She was dressed for the street. Her bloodied hat lay on the floor and her handbag was on the work table.

  Alleyn turned to face the vast rump of her brother, clothed in a camel overcoat, which was all that could be seen of him.

  “Is it the same?” Gibson asked.

  “Yes. A pottery pig. The head broke off on the first attack and the rest fell in the box after the second.”

  “But — how exactly—?” Fox said.

  “Look what’s on the table. Under her hand.”

  It was a sheet of headed letter paper. “The Piggie Potterie. 12, Capricorn Mews, S.W.3.” Written beneath this legend was: “To Messrs. Able and Virtue. Kindly…” and no more.

  “A green ball-point,” Alleyn said. “It’s still in her right hand.”

  Fox touched the hand. “Still warm,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  There was a checkered cloth of sorts near the kiln. Alleyn masked the terrible head with it. “One of the really bad ones,” he said.

  “What was he doing?” Fox asked.

  “Stowing away the rema
ining pigs. Doubled up, and reaching down into the packing case.”

  “So you read the situation — how?”

  “Like this, unless something else turns up to contradict it. She’s writing. He’s putting pigs from the bench into the packing case. Someone comes between them. Someone who perhaps has offered to help. Someone, at any rate, whose presence doesn’t disturb them. And this person picks up a pig, deals two mighty downward blows, left and right, quick as you please, and walks out.”

  Gibson said angrily: “Walks out! When? And when did he walk in? I’ve had these premises under close observation for twelve hours.”

  “Until the bomb scare, Fred.”

  “Sergeant Jacks stayed put.”

  “With a traffic jam building up between him and the pottery.”

  “By God, this is a gutty job,” said Gibson.

  “And the gallant Colonel was on the doorstep,” Alleyn added.

  “I reckon he wouldn’t have been any the wiser,” Fox offered, “if the Brigade of Guards had walked in and out.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Alleyn said.

  A silence fell between them. The room was oppressively warm and airless. Flies buzzed between the window curtains and the glass. One of them darted out and made like a bullet for the far end.

  With startling unexpectedness the telephone on the desk rang. Alleyn wrapped his handkerchief round his hand and lifted the receiver.

  He gave the number, speaking well above his natural level. An unmistakably Ng’ombwanan voice said: “It is the Embassy. You have not kept your appointment.”

  Alleyn made an ambiguous falsetto noise.

  “I said,” the voice insisted, “you have not kept your appointment. To collect the passports. Your plane leaves at five-thirty.”

  Alleyn whispered: “I was prevented. Please send them. Please.”

  A long pause.

  “Very well. It is not convenient but very well. They will be put into your letter-box. In a few minutes. Yes?”

  He said nothing and heard a deep sound of impatience and the click of the receiver being replaced.

  He hung up. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “we now know that the envelope we saw Sanskrit deliver at the Embassy contained their passports. I’d got as much already from the President. In a few minutes they’ll be dropping them in. He failed to keep his appointment to collect.”

  Fox looked at the upturned remains of Sanskrit. “He could hardly help himself,” he said. “Could he?”

  The front doorbell rang. Alleyn looked through the slit in the curtains. A car had arrived with Bailey and Thompson, their driver and their gear. A smallish crowd had been moved down the Mews into the Passage.

  The constable in the hallway admitted Bailey and Thompson. Alleyn said: “The lot. Complete coverage. Particularly the broken pottery.”

  Thompson walked carefully past the partition into the alcove and stopped short.

  “Two, eh?” he said and unshipped his camera.

  “Go ahead,” Alleyn said.

  Bailey went to the table and looked incredulously from the enormous bodies to Alleyn, who nodded and turned his back. Bailey delicately lifted the checked cloth and said: “Cor!”

  “Not pretty,” Alleyn said.

  Bailey, shocked into a unique flight of fancy, said: “It’s kind of not real. Like those blown-up affairs they run in fun shows. Giants. Gone into the horrors.”

  “It’s very much like that,” Alleyn said. “Did you hear if they’d got through to Sir James?”

  “Yes, Mr. Alleyn. On his way.”

  “Good. All right. Push on with it, you two.” He turned to Gibson and Fox. “I suggest,” he said, “that we let that lot upstairs have a look at this scene.”

  “Shock tactics?” Gibson asked.

  “Something like that. Agreed?”

  “This is your ground, not mine,” said Gibson, still dully resentful. “I’m only meant to be bloody security.”

  Alleyn knew it was advisable to disregard these plaints. He said: “Fox, would you go upstairs? Take the copper in the hall with you. Leave him in the room and have a quiet word on the landing with the man who’s been with them. If he’s got anything I ought to hear, hand it on to me. Otherwise, just stick with them for a bit, would you? Don’t give a clue as to what’s happened. All right?”

  “I think so,” said Fox placidly and went upstairs.

  Bailey’s camera clicked and flashed. Miss Sanskrit’s awful face started up and out in a travesty of life. Thompson collected pottery shards and laid them out on the far end of the work table. More exploratory flies darted down the room. Alleyn continued to watch through the curtains.

  A Ng’ombwanan in civilian dress drove up to the door, had a word with the constable on guard, and pushed something through the letter-box. Alleyn heard the flap of the clapper. The car drove away and he went into the hall and collected the package.

  “What’s that, then?” Gibson asked.

  Alleyn opened it: two passports elaborately stamped and endorsed and a letter on Embassy paper in Ng’ombwanan.

  “Giving them the V.I.P. treatment, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Alleyn said and pocketed the lot.

  Action known as “routine” was now steadily under way. Sir James Curtis and his secretary arrived, Sir James remarking a little acidly that he would like to know this time whether he would be allowed to follow the usual procedure and hold his damned post mortems if, when and where he wanted them. On being shown the subjects he came as near to exhibiting physical repulsion as Alleyn had ever seen him and asked appallingly if they would provide him with bulldozers.

  He said that death had probably occurred within the hour, agreed with Alleyn’s reading of the evidence, listened to what action he proposed to take, and was about to leave when Alleyn said: “There’s a former record of drug-pushing against the man. No sign of them taking anything themselves, I suppose?”

  “I’ll look out for it but they don’t often, do they?”

  “Do we expect to find blood on the assailant?”

  Sir James considered this. “Not necessarily, I think,” he said. “The size of the weapon might form a kind of shield in the case of the woman and the position of the head in the man.”

  “Might the weapon have been dropped or hurled down on the man? They’re extremely heavy, those things.”

  “Very possible.”

  “I see.”

  “You’ll send these monstrosities along then, Rory? Good day to you.”

  When he’d gone, Fox and the constable who had been on duty upstairs came down.

  “Thought we’d better wait till Sir James had finished,” ’ Fox said. “I’ve been up there in the room with them. Chubb’s very quiet but you can see he’s put out.’ ”

  This, in Fox’s language, could mean anything from being; irritated to going berserk or suicidal. “He breaks out every now and then,” he went on, “asking where the Sanskrits are and why this lot’s being kept. I asked him what he’d wanted to see them for and he comes out with that he didn’t want to see them. He reckons he was on his way back from the chemist’s by way of Capricorn Passage and just ran into the Colonel and Mr. Sheridan. The Colonel was in such a bad way, Chubb makes out, he was trying to get him to let himself be taken home, but all the Colonel would do was lean on the bell.”

  “What about the Colonel?”

  “It doesn’t really make sense. He’s beyond it. He said something or another about Sanskrit being a poisonous specimen who ought to be court-martialled.”

  “And Gomez-Sheridan?”

  “He’s taking the line of righteous indignation. Demands an explanation. Will see there’s information laid in the right quarters and we haven’t heard the last of it. You’d think it was all quite ordinary except for a kind of twitch under his left eye. They all keep asking where the Sanskrits are.”

  “It’s time they found out,” Alleyn said, and to Bailey and Thompson: “There’s a smell of burnt leather. We’ll have to r
ake out the furnace.”

  “Looking for anything in particular, Mr. Alleyn?”

  “No. Well — no. Just looking. For traces of anything anyone wanted to destroy. Come on.”

  He and Fox went upstairs.

  As he opened the door and went in he got the impression that Gomez had leapt to his feet. He stood facing Alleyn with his bald head sunk between his shoulders and his eyes like black boot-buttons in his white kid face. He might have been an actor in a bad Latin-American film.

  At the far end of the room Chubb stood facing the window with the dogged, conditioned look of a soldier in detention, as if whatever he thought or felt or had done must be thrust back behind a mask of conformity.

  Colonel Cockburn-Montfort lay in an armchair with his mouth open, snoring profoundly and hideously. He would have presented a less distasteful picture, Alleyn thought, if he had discarded the outward showing of an officer and — ambiguous addition — gentleman: the conservative suit, the signet ring on the correct finger, the handmade brogues, the regimental tie, the quietly elegant socks and, lying on the floor by his chair, the hat from Jermyn Street — all so very much in order. And Colonel Cockburn-Montfort so very far astray.

  Gomez began at once: “You are the officer in charge of these extraordinary proceedings, I believe. I must ask you to inform me, at once, why I am detained here without reason, without explanation or apology.”

  “Certainly,” Alleyn said. “It is because I hope you may be able to help us in our present job.”

  “Police parrot talk!” he spat out, making a great thing of the plosives. The muscle under his eye flickered.

  “I hope not,” Alleyn said.

  “What is this ‘present job’?”

  “We are making enquiries about the couple living in these premises. Brother and sister. Their name is Sanskrit.”

  “Where are they!”

  “They haven’t gone far.”

  “Are they in trouble?” he asked, showing his teeth.

  “Yes.”

  “I am not surprised. They are criminals. Monsters.”

  The Colonel snorted and opened his eyes. “What!” he said. “Who are you talking ’bout? Monsters?”

  Gomez made a contemptuous noise. “Go to sleep,” he said. “You are disgusting.”