Grave Mistake

by Ngaio Marsh

  This interview concluded, Alleyn was approached by the manager of the hotel, who evidently viewed their visit with minimal enthusiasm. He hustled them into his office, offered drinks and looked apprehensive when these were declined.

  ‘It’s just about the room,’ he said. ‘How much longer do you people want it? We’re expecting a full house by next week and it’s extremely inconvenient, you know.’

  ‘I hope this will be positively our last appearance,’ said Alleyn cheerfully.

  ‘Without being uncivil, so do I. Do you want someone to take you up?’

  ‘We’ll take ourselves, thank you all the same. Come along, Br’er Fox,’ said Alleyn. ‘En avant. You’re having one of your dreamy spells.’

  He led the way quickly to the lifts.

  The second floor seemed to be deserted. They walked soundlessly down the carpeted passage to No. 20. The fingerprint and photography men had called and gone and their seal was still on the door. Fox was about to break it when Alleyn said, ‘Half a jiffy. Look at this.’

  Opposite the bedroom door was a curtained alcove. He had lifted the curtain and disclosed a vacuum-cleaner. ‘Handy little hidey-hole, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Got your torch on you?’

  ‘As it happens,’ Fox said and gave it to him. He went into the alcove and closed the curtain.

  The lift at the far end of the long passage whined to a stop. Sister Jackson and another lady emerged. Fox, with a movement surprisingly nippy for one of his bulk, joined his superior in the alcove.

  ‘Herself,’ he whispered. Alleyn switched off his torch.

  ‘See you?’

  ‘Not to recognize.’

  ‘Impossible. Once seen.’

  ‘She had somebody with her.’

  ‘No need for you to hide, you fathead. Why should you?’

  ‘She flusters me.’

  ‘You’re bulging the curtain.’

  But it was too late. The curtain was suddenly withdrawn and Sister Jackson discovered. She screamed.

  ‘Good morning, Sister,’ Alleyn said and flashed his torchlight full in her face. ‘Do forgive us for startling you.’

  ‘What,’ she panted, her hand on her spectacular bosom, ‘are you doing in the broom-cupboard?’

  ‘Routine procedure. Don’t give it another thought.’

  ‘And you, don’t shine that thing in my face. Come out.’ They emerged.

  In a more conciliatory tone and with a sort of huffy come-to-ishness, she said, ‘You gave me a shock.’

  ‘So did you us,’ said Mr Fox. ‘A nice one,’ he roguishly added.

  ‘I dare say.’

  She was between them. She flashed upward glances first at one, then the other. Her bosom slightly heaved. Alleyn was reminded of Mr Dick Emery and expected to be told he was awful.

  ‘We really do apologize,’ he said.

  ‘I should hope so.’ She laid her hand, which was plump, on his closed one. He was surprised to feel a marked tremor and to see that the colour had ebbed out of her face. She kept up the flirtatious note, however, though her voice was unsteady. ‘I suppose I’ll have to forgive you,’ she said. ‘But only if you tell me why you were there.’

  ‘I caught sight of something.’

  He turned his hand over, opened it and exposed the crumpled head of a pink lily. It was very dead and its brown pollen had stained his palm.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘it will team up with the ones in Mrs Foster’s last bouquet. I wondered what the electrician was doing in the broom-cupboard.’

  She gaped at him. ‘Electrician?’ she said. ‘What electrician?’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you. Excuse us, please. Come on, Fox. Goodbye, Sister.’

  When she had starched and bosomed herself away he said, ‘I’m going to take another look at that broom-hide. Don’t spring any more confrontations this time. Stay here.’

  He went into the alcove, drew the curtains on himself and was away for some minutes. When he rejoined Fox he said, ‘They’re not so fussy about housework in there. Quite a lot of dust on the floor. Plenty of prints – housemaids’ no doubt, but at the far end, in the corner away from the vacuum-cleaner where nobody would go normally, there are prints, left and right, side by side, with the heels almost touching the wall. Men’s crêpe-soled shoes, and beside them – guess.’

  He opened his hand and disclosed another dead lily-head. ‘Near the curtain I could just find the prints again but overlaid by the housemaids’ and some regulation-type extras. Whose do you think?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Fox. ‘Mine.’

  ‘When we go down we’ll look like sleuths and ask the desk lady if she noticed the electrician’s feet.’

  ‘That’s a flight of fancy, if you like,’ said Fox. ‘And she won’t have.’

  ‘In any case Bailey and Thompson will have to do their stuff. Come on.’

  When they were inside No. 20 he went to the bathroom where the fetid bouquet still mouldered in the basin. It was possible to see that the finds matched exactly and actually to distinguish the truss from which they had been lost.

  ‘So I make a note – “Find the electrician”?’ asked Fox.

  ‘You anticipate my every need.’

  ‘How do you fancy this gardener? Gardener?’

  ‘Not much!’ said Alleyn. ‘Do you?’

  ‘You wouldn’t fancy him sneaking back with the flowers when Miss Foster and party had gone?’

  ‘Not unless he’s had himself stretched. The reception girl said slight, short and bespectacled. Bruce Gardener’s six foot three and big with it. He doesn’t wear spectacles.’

  ‘He’d be that chap in the Harris tweed suit at the inquest?’

  ‘He would. I meant to point him out to you.’

  ‘I guessed,’ said Fox heavily.

  ‘Claude Carter, on the contrary, is short, slight, bespectacled and in common with the electrician and several million other males doesn’t wear overalls.’

  ‘Motive? No. Hang on. He gets Mrs Foster’s bit from her first husband.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ask if anyone knows about electricians? And nobody will,’ Fox prophesied.

  ‘Ask about what bus he caught back to Quintern and get a dusty answer.’

  ‘Ask if anyone saw him any time, anywhere.’

  ‘With or without lilies. In the meantime, Fox, I seem to remember there’s an empty cardboard box and a paper shopping-bag in the wardrobe. Could you put those disgusting lilies in the box? Keep the ones from the broom-cupboard separate. I want another look at her pillows.’

  They lay as they had lain before – three of them, luxuriant pillowcases in fine lawn with broderie-anglaise threaded with ribbon. Brought them with her, Alleyn thought. Even Greengages wouldn’t run to these lengths.

  The smallest of them carried a hollow made by her dead or alive head. The largest lay at the foot of the bed and was smooth. Alleyn turned it over. The under surface was crumpled, particularly in the centre – crumpled and stained as if it had been wet and, in two places, faintly pink with small, more positive indentations, one of them so sharp that it actually had broken the delicate fabric. He bent down and caught a faint nauseating reek. He went to the dressing-table and found three lipsticks, all of them, as was the fashion at that time, very pale. He took one of them to the pillow. It matched.

  III

  During the remaining sixty hours before Sybil Foster’s burial in the churchyard of St Crispin-in-Quintern the police investigations, largely carried out over the telephone, multiplied and accelerated. As is always the case, much of what was unearthed turned out to be of no relevance, much was of a doubtful or self-contradictory nature and only a scanty winnowing found to be of real significance. It was as if the components of several jigsaw puzzles had been thrown down on the table and before the one required picture could be assembled the rest would have to be discarded.

  The winnowings, Alleyn thought, were for the most part suggestive rather than definitive. A call to St Luk
e’s Hospital established that Basil Smythe, as he then was, had indeed been a first-year medical student at the appropriate time and had not completed the course. A contact of Alleyn’s in Swiss police headquarters put through a call to a hospital in Lausanne confirming that Dr Basile Schramm had graduated from a teaching hospital in that city. Basile, Alleyn was prepared to accept, might well have been a Swiss shot at Basil. Schramm had accounted to Verity Preston for the change from Smythe. They would have to check if this was indeed his mother’s maiden name.

  So far nothing had been found in respect of his activities in the United States.

  Mrs Jim Jobbin had, at Mrs Foster’s request and a week before she died, handed a bottle of sleeping-pills over to Bruce Gardener. Mrs Foster had told Bruce where they would be found – in her writing-desk. They had been bought some time ago from a Maidstone chemist and were a proprietary brand of barbiturate. Mrs Jim and Bruce had both noticed that the bottle was almost full. He had duly delivered it that same afternoon.

  Claude Carter had what Mr Fox called a sussy record. He had been mixed up, as a very minor figure, in the drug racket. In his youth he had served a short sentence for attempted blackmail. He was thought to have brought a small quantity of heroin ashore from SS Poseidon. If so, he had got rid of it before he was searched at the Customs.

  Verity Preston had remembered the august name of Bruce Gardener’s latest employer. Discreet enquiries had confirmed the authenticity of Bruce’s references and his unblemished record. The head gardener, named McWhirter, was emphatic in his praise and very, very Scotch.

  This, thought Alleyn, might tally with Verity Preston’s theory about Bruce’s dialectical vagaries.

  Enquiries at appropriate quarters in the City elicited the opinion that Nikolas Markos was a millionaire with a great number of interests of which oil, predictably, was the chief. He was also the owner of a string of luxury hotels in Switzerland, the South Pacific, and the Costa Brava. His origin was Greek. Gideon had been educated at a celebrated public school and at the Sorbonne and was believed to be in training for a responsible part in his father’s multiple business activities.

  Nothing further could be discovered about the ‘electrician’ who had taken Bruce’s flowers up to Sybil Foster’s room. The desk lady had not noticed his feet.

  ‘We’ll be having a chat with Mr Claude Carter, then?’ asked Fox, two nights before the funeral. He and Alleyn were at the Yard having been separated during the day on their several occasions, Fox in and about Upper Quintern and Alleyn mostly on the telephone and in the City.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Yes. We’ll have to, of course. But we’d better walk gingerly over that particular patch, Br’er Fox. If he’s in deep, he’ll be fidgety. If he thinks we’re getting too interested he may take off and we’ll have to waste time and men on running him down.’

  ‘Or on keeping obbo to prevent it. Do you reckon he’ll attend the funeral?’

  ‘He may decide we’d think it odd if he didn’t. After his being so assiduous about gracing the inquests. There you are! We’ll need to go damn carefully. After all, what have we got? He’s short, thin, wears spectacles and doesn’t wear overalls.’

  ‘If you put it like that.’

  ‘How would you put it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Fox, scraping his chin, ‘he’d been hanging about the premises for we don’t know how long and, by the way, no joy from the bus scene. Nobody remembers him or Gardener. I talked to the conductors on every return trip that either of them might have taken but it was a Saturday and there was a motor rally in the district and they were crowded all the way. They laughed at me.’

  ‘Cads.’

  ‘There’s the motive, of course,’ Fox continued moodily. ‘Not that you can do much with that on its own. How about the lilies in the broom-cupboard?’

  ‘How about them falling off in the passage and failing to get themselves sucked up by the vacuum-cleaner?’

  ‘You make everything so difficult,’ Fox sighed.

  ‘Take heart. We have yet to see his feet. And him, if it comes to that. Bailey and Thompson may have come up with something dynamic. Where are they?’

  ‘Like they say in theatrical circles. Below and awaiting your pleasure.’

  ‘Admit them.’

  Bailey and Thompson came in with their customary air of being incapable of surprise. Using the minimum quota of words, they laid out for Alleyn’s inspection an array of photographs: of the pillowcase in toto, of the stained area on the front in detail and of one particular indentation blown up to the limit which had actually left a cut in the material. Over this, Alleyn and Fox concentrated.

  ‘Well, you two,’ Alleyn said at last, ‘what do you make of this lot?’

  It was by virtue of such invitations that his relationship with his subordinates achieved its character. Bailey, slightly more communicative than his colleague, said, ‘Teeth. Like you thought, Governor. Biting the pillow.’

  ‘All right. How about it?’

  Thompson laid another exhibit before him. It was a sort of macabre triptych: first a reproduction of the enlargement he had already shown and beside it, corresponding in scale, a photograph of all too unmistakably human teeth from which the lips had been retracted in a dead mouth.

  ‘We dropped in at the morgue,’ said Bailey. ‘The bite could tally.’

  The third photograph, one of Thompson’s montages, showed the first superimposed upon the second. Over this, Thompson had ruled vertical and horizontal lines.

  ‘Tallies,’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Can’t fault it,’ said Bailey dispassionately.

  He produced a further exhibit: the vital section of the pillowcase itself mounted between two polythene sheets and set it beside Thompson’s display of photographs.

  ‘Right,’ Alleyn said. ‘We send this to the laboratory, of course, and in the meantime, Fox, we trust our reluctant noses. People who are trying to kill themselves with an overdose of sleeping-pills may vomit but they don’t bite holes in the pillowcase.’

  ‘It’s nice to know we haven’t been wasting our time,’ said Fox.

  ‘You are,’ said Alleyn, staring at him, ‘probably the most remorseless realist in the service.’

  ‘It was only a passing thought. Do we take it she was smothered, then?’

  ‘If Sir James concurs, we do. He’ll be cross about the pillowcase.’

  ‘You’d have expected the doctors to spot it. Well,’ Fox amended, ‘you’d have expected the Field-Innis one to, anyway.’

  ‘At that stage their minds were set on suicide. Presumably the great busty Jackson had got rid of the stomach-pumping impedimenta after she and Schramm, as they tell us, had seen to the bottling of the results. Field-Innis says that by the time he got there, this had been done. It was he, don’t forget, who said the room should be left untouched and the police informed. The pillow was face downwards at the foot of the bed but in any case only a very close examination reveals the mark of the tooth. The stains, which largely obscure it, could well have been the result of the overdose. What about dabs, Bailey?’

  ‘What you’d expect. Dr Schramm’s, the nurse Jackson’s. Deceased’s of course, all over the shop. The other doctor’s – Field-Innis. I called at his surgery and asked for a take. He wasn’t all that keen but he obliged. The girl Foster’s on the vanity box and her mother’s like you indicated.’

  ‘The tumbler?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bailey, with his look of mulish satisfaction. ‘That’s right. That’s the funny bit. Nothing. Clean. Same goes for the pill bottle and the whisky bottle.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Fox.

  ‘Where do we get to, Br’er Fox?’

  ‘Gloves used but only after she lost consciousness.’

  ‘What I reckoned,’ said Bailey.

  ‘Or after she’d passed away?’ Fox speculated.

  ‘No, Mr Fox. Not if smothering’s the story.’

  Alleyn said, ‘No dabs on the reverse side
of the pillow?’

  ‘That’s the story,’ said Thompson.

  Bailey produced, finally, a polythene bag containing the back panel of the pretty lawn pillowcase, threaded with ribbon. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is kind of crushed on the part opposite to the tooth print and stains. Crumpled up, like. As if by hands. No dabs, but crumpled. What I reckon – hands.’

  ‘Gloved. Like the Americans say, it figures. Anything else in the bedroom?’

  ‘Not to signify.’

  The telephone rang. It was a long-distance call from Berne. Alleyn’s contact came through loud and clear.

  ‘M. le Superintendant? I am calling immediately to make an amendment to our former conversations.’

  ‘An amendment, mon ami?’

  ‘An addition, perhaps more accurately. In reference to the Doctor Schramm at the Sacré-Coeur, you recollect?’

  ‘Vividly.’

  ‘M. le Superintendant, I regret. My contact at the bureau has made a further search. It is now evident that the Doctor Schramm in question is deceased. In effect, since 1952.’

  During the pause of the kind often described as pregnant Alleyn made a face at Fox and said, ‘Dead.’ Fox looked affronted.

  ‘At the risk,’ Alleyn said into the telephone, ‘of making the most intolerable nuisance of myself, dare I ask if your source would have the very great kindness to find out if, over the same period, there is any record of an Englishman called Basil Smythe having qualified at Sacré-Coeur. I should explain, my dear colleague, that there is now the possibility of a not unfamiliar form of false pretence.’

  ‘But of course. You have but to ask. And the name again?’

  Alleyn spelt it out, and was told he could expect a return call within the hour. It came through in twelve minutes. An Englishman called Basil Smythe had attended the courses at the time in question but had failed to complete them. Alleyn thanked his expeditious confrère profusely. There was a further interchange of compliments and he hung up.

  IV

  ‘It’s not only in the story-books,’ observed Fox on the following morning as they drove once more to Greengages, ‘that you get a surplus of suspects but I’ll say this for it – it’s unusual. The dates tally, don’t they?’