Hand in Glove ra-22

by Ngaio Marsh

  “Rather late for a dinner party.”

  “With bridge afterwards, darling.”

  “I see. Tell me,” Alleyn said, “have you seen or heard anything of Pyke Period since I left Baynesholme this afternoon?”

  “No,” said Bimbo, at once. “Why?”

  Alleyn turned to Désirée, who raised her eyebrows at him. “And you?” he asked her.

  “I ran in for a moment on our way to Bomlee Green. There was something I wanted to tell him. Bimbo waited in the car.”

  “Was it something about the letter we discussed just before I left Baynesholme?”

  “Actually, yes.” She gave him a half smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I changed my mind. I told him.”

  “I don’t know what anybody’s talking about,” Connie grumbled. She looked anxiously at Moppett, who had got herself under control and, with Leonard, stayed at the far end of the room, avidly listening.

  “You’re not alone in that, Auntie,” said Moppett.

  Bimbo said, loudly: “Look here, I don’t know if anybody agrees with me, but I’m getting very bored with the turn this affair is taking. We’re being asked all sorts of personal questions without the smallest reason being given, and I don’t feel inclined to take much more of it.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Leonard. Bimbo glanced at him with profound distaste.

  “I fear, my darling,” Désirée said, “you will have to lump it. Our finer feelings are not of much account, I fancy.”

  “All the same, I want to know. What’s this about P.P.? Why the hell shouldn’t you call in to see him? We might be living in a police state,” he blustered, looking sideways at Alleyn.

  “Mr. Dodds,” Alleyn said, “any visit to Mr. Period during the last few hours is perfectly relevant, since, at about eleven o’clock this evening, somebody attempted to murder him.”

  There are not so very many ways in which people react to news of this sort. They may cry out in what appears to be astonishment, they may turn red or white and look ambiguous, or they may simply sit and gape. Bimbo and Désirée followed this last pattern.

  After a moment Désirée exclaimed: “P.P.? Not true!” And, at the same time, Bimbo said: “Not possible!”

  “On the contrary,” said Alleyn, “possible and, unfortunately, true.”

  “Attempted to murder him,” Bimbo echoed. “How? Why?”

  “With a brass paperweight. Possibly,” Alleyn said, turning to Désirée, “because you told him that I’d got the letter he sent by mistake to you.”

  Looking at Désirée, Alleyn thought: But I won’t get any change out of you, my girl. If I’ve given you a jolt, you’re not going to let anyone know it.

  “That seems very far-fetched,” she said composedly.

  “Here!” Connie intervened. “Did you get a funny letter too, Désirée? Here — What is all this?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe you,” Désirée said to Alleyn.

  “You’ve no right to make an accusation of that sort,” Bimbo cried out. “Making out people are responsible for murderous attacks and not giving the smallest explanation. What evidence have you got?”

  “Since the damage has been done,” Alleyn said, “I’m prepared to put a certain amount of the evidence before you.”

  “Damn’ big of you, I must say! Though why it should concern Désirée—”

  Alleyn said: “Directly or indirectly, you are all concerned.”

  He waited for a moment. Nobody said anything and he went on:

  “It’s too much to expect that each one of you will answer any questions fully or even truthfully, but it’s my duty to ask you to do so.”

  “Why shouldn’t we?” Connie protested. “I don’t see why you’ve got to say a thing like that. Boysie always said that in murder trials the guilty have nothing to fear. He always said that. I mean the innocent,” she added distractedly. “You know what I mean.”

  “How right he was. Very well, shall we start with that premise in mind? Now. Yesterday at luncheon, Mr. Cartell told a story about a man who cooked a baptismal register in order to establish blood relationship with a certain family. Those of you who were there may have thought that Mr. Period seemed to be very much put out by this anecdote. Would you agree?”

  Connie said bluntly: “I thought P.P.’s behaviour was jolly peculiar. I thought he’d got his knife into Boysie about something.”

  Moppett, who seemed to have regained her composure, said: “If you ask me, P.P. was terrified Uncle Hal would tell the whole story. He looked murder at him. Not that I mean anything by that.”

  “In any case,” Alleyn continued, “Mr. Period was disturbed by the incident. He wrote a short and rather ambiguous letter to Miss Cartell, suggesting that his ancestry did, in fact, go back as far as anyone who bothered about such things might wish, and asking her to forgive him for pursuing the matter. At the same time he wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Bantling. Unfortunately he transferred the envelopes.”

  “How bad is he?” Désirée asked suddenly.

  Alleyn told her how bad Mr. Period seemed to be and she said: “We can take him if it’d help.”

  Bimbo started to say something and stopped.

  “Now this misfortune with the letter,” Alleyn plodded on, “threw him into a fever. On the one hand he had appeared to condole with Miss Cartell for a loss that had not yet been discovered, and, on the other, he had sent Lady Bantling a letter that he would give the world to withdraw, since, once it got into my hands, I might follow it up. As long as this letter remained undisclosed, Mr. Period remained unwilling to make any statement that might lead to an arrest for the murder of Mr. Cartell. He was afraid, first, that he might bring disaster upon an innocent person, and, second, that anything he said might lead to an examination of his own activities and Mr. Cartell’s veiled allusions to them. All this,” he added, “supposes him, for the moment, to be innocent of the murder.”

  “Of course he is,” Désirée muttered impatiently. “Good Lord! P.P.!”

  “You don’t know,” Bimbo intervened with a sharp look at her. “If he’d go to those lengths, he might go the whole hog.”

  “Murder Hal, to save his own face! Honestly, darling!”

  “You don’t know,” Bimbo repeated obstinately. “He might.”

  “Assume for the moment,” Alleyn said, “that he didn’t, but that he was in possession of evidence that might well throw suspicion on someone else. Assume that his motive in not laying this information was made up of consideration for an old friend and fear of the consequences to himself. He learns that I have been told of yesterday’s luncheon party, and also that 1 have been given the letter that was occasioned by the conversation at the party. It’s more than possible that he heard, on the village grapevine, that I visited Ribblethorpe Church this afternoon. So the gaff, he thinks, is as good as blown. With a certain bit of evidence weighing on his conscience, he sends his man here with a note asking you, Miss Ralston, to visit him. Wanting to keep the encounter private, he suggests a late hour. After a good deal of discussion with Mr. Leiss, no doubt, you decide to fall in with this plan. You do, in fact, cross the Green at about 10:45, and visit Mr. Period in his library.”

  “You’re only guessing,” Moppett said. “You don’t know.”

  “You enter the library by the French windows. During the interview you smoke. You drop ash on the carpet and grind it in with your heel. You leave two butts of Mainsail cigarettes in the ashtray. Mr. Period tells you he heard someone whistling in the lane very late last night and that he recognized the tune. You and Mr. Leiss knew your way about the garden, I believe. To support this theory, we have the theft of Mr. Period’s cigarette case—”

  “I never,” Leonard interrupted, “heard anything so fantastic. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “…Which you, Mr. Leiss, left on the sill, having opened the window with this theft in mind. Subsequently, it may be, the case became too hot and you threw it in the drain, hoping it woul
d be supposed that Mr. Period had lost it there, or that the workmen had stolen and dumped it. Alternatively, you might have dropped it, inadvertently, when you altered the planks in order to bring about Mr. Cartell’s death.”

  He waited for a moment. An all-too-familiar look of conceit and insolence appeared in Leonard. He stretched out his legs, leant back in his chair and stared through half-closed eyes at the opposite wall. A shadow trembled on his shirt and he kept his hands in his pockets.

  Connie said: “It’s not true: none of it’s true.”

  Moppett repeated: “Not true,” in a whisper.

  “As to what actually took place at this interview,” Alleyn went on, “Mr. Period will no doubt be willing to talk about it when he recovers. My guess would be that he tackled Miss Ralston pretty firmly, told her what he suspected, and said that if she could give him an adequate explanation he would, for Miss Cartell’s sake, go no further. She may have admitted she was the whistler he heard from his window and said that she had come into his garden on the way home from the party to get water for Mr. Leiss’s car-radiator, which had sprung a leak. I think this explanation is true.”

  Moppett cried out: “Of course it’s true. I did. I got the water and I put the bloody can back. I remembered having seen it under the tap.”

  “After lunch, when you took Mr. Period’s cigarette case off the sill?”

  “Fantastic!” Leonard repeated. “That’s all. Fantastic!”

  “Very well,” Alleyn said. “Let it remain in the realms of fantasy.”

  “If it’s in order,” Désirée said. “I’d like to ask something.”

  “Of course.”

  “Are we meant to think that whoever threw the fish laid the trap for Hal?”

  “A fish?” Leonard asked with an insufferable air of innocence. “But has anyone said anything about a fish?”

  Désirée disregarded him. She said to Alleyn: “I ought to know. I gave it to P.P. yesterday morning. He’s dotty about pikes and this thing looked like one. He put it in the library.…Could I have an answer to my question?”

  “I think the murderer and the paperweight thrower are one and the same person.”

  “Good,” said Désirée. “That lets us out, Bimbo.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Bimbo said with a short laugh. “Why?”

  “Well, because neither of us has the slightest motive for hurling anything at P.P.”

  “Isn’t he one of the trustees for Andrew Bantling’s estate?” Leonard asked of nobody in particular.

  She turned her head and looked very steadily at him. “Certainly,” she said. “What of it?”

  “I was just wondering, Lady Bantling. You might have discussed business with Mr. Period when you called on him this evening?”

  Bimbo said angrily: “I’m afraid I fail entirely to see why you should wonder anything of the sort, or how you can possibly know the smallest thing about it.”

  “Yes, but I do, as it happens. I heard you talking things over with your dashing stepson at the party.”

  “Good God!” Bimbo said, and turned up his eyes.

  Désirée said to Alleyn: “I told you. I called to own up that I’d given you his letter. I felt shabby about it and wanted to get it off my chest.”

  “What’s his attitude about the Grantham Gallery proposal, do you know?”

  “Oh,” Désirée said easily, “he waffles.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Bimbo said.

  “Just a moment,” Leonard intervened. He still lay back in his chair and looked at the ceiling but there was a new edge in his voice. “If you’re talking about this proposition to buy an art gallery,” he said, “I happen to know P.P. was all against it.”

  Bimbo said: “You met Mr. Period for the first time when you got yourself asked to lunch in his house. I fail to see how that gives you any insight into his views on anything.”

  “You don’t,” Leonard observed, “have to know people all their lives to find out some of the bits and pieces. The same might apply to you, chum. How about that affair over a certain club?”

  “You bloody little pipsqueak—”

  “All right, darling,” Désirée said easily. “Pipe down. It couldn’t matter less.”

  “Not when you marry money, it couldn’t,” Leonard agreed offensively.

  Bimbo strode down the room towards him: “By God, if the police don’t do something about you, I will.”

  Fox rose from obscurity. “Now, then, sir,” he said blandly. “We mustn’t get too hot, must we?”

  “Get out of my way.”

  Leonard was on his feet. Moppett snatched his arm. He jabbed at her with his elbow, side-stepped, and backed down the room, his hand in his jacket pocket. Alleyn took him from behind by the arms.

  “You’ve forgotten,” he said. “I’ve got your knife.”

  Leonard uttered an elaborate obscenity, and at the same time Fox, with the greatest economy, caused Bimbo to drop backwards into the nearest chair. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to get too warm. It wouldn’t look well, in the circumstances, would it?”

  Bimbo swore at him. “I demand,” he said, pointing a bandaged hand at Alleyn, “I demand an explanation. You’re keeping us here without authority. You’re listening to a lot of bloody, damaging, malicious lies. If you suspect one of us, I demand to know who and why. Now then!”

  “Fair enough,” said Désirée. “You stick out for your rights, duckie. All the same,” she added, looking Alleyn full in the face, “I don’t believe he knows. He’s letting us cut up rough and hoping something will come out of it. Aren’t you, Rory?”

  She was inviting Alleyn, as he very well knew, to acknowledge, however slightly, that he and she spoke the same language: that alone, of all this assembly, they could understand each other without elaboration. He released the now quiescent Leonard and answered her directly.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t quite like that. It’s true that I believe I know who murdered Harold Cartell. I believe that there is only one of you who fills the bill. Naturally, I’m looking for all the corroborative evidence I can find.”

  “I demand—” Bimbo reiterated, but his wife cut him short.

  “All right, darling,” she said. “So you’ve told us. You demand an explanation and I rather fancy you’re going to get it. So do pipe down.” She returned to Alleyn. “Are you going to tell us,” she asked, “that we all had red-hot motives for getting rid of Hal? Because I feel sure we did.”

  “Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “the police are concerned less with motive than with opportunity and behaviour. But, yes. As it happens you all had motives of a sort. Yours, for instance, could be thought to come under the heading of maternal love.”

  “Could it, indeed?” said Désirée.

  “By God!” Bimbo shouted, but Alleyn cut him short.

  “And you,” he said, “wanted to invest in this project that Cartell wouldn’t countenance. Judging from the unopened bills on your desk and your past history, this could be a formidable motive.”

  “And that,” Leonard observed, smirking at Bimbo, “takes the silly grin off your face, Jack, doesn’t it?”

  “Whereas,” Alleyn continued, “you, Mr. Leiss, and Miss Ralston were directly threatened, both by Mr. Cartell and, I think, Mr. Period, with criminal proceedings which would almost certainly land you in jail.”

  “No!” Connie ejaculated.

  “A threat,” Alleyn said, “that may be said to provide your motive as well, I’m afraid, Miss Cartell. As for Alfred Belt and Mrs. Mitchell, who are not present, they were both greatly concerned to end Mr. Cartell’s tenancy, which they found intolerable. Murder has been done for less.”

  It was not pleasant, he thought, to see the veiled eagerness with which they welcomed this departure. Leonard actually said: “Well, of course. Now you’re talking,” and Moppett flicked the tip of her tongue over her lips.

  “But I repeat,” Alleyn went on, “that it is circumsta
nce, opportunity and behaviour that must concern us. Opportunity, after a fashion, you all had. Miss Ralston and Mr. Leiss were on the premises late that night; they had stolen the cigarette case and the case was found by the body. The trap was laid by somebody wearing leather-and-string gloves, and Mr. Leiss has lost such a pair of gloves.”

  Leonard and Moppett began to talk together, but Alleyn held up his hand and they stopped dead.

  “Their behaviour, however, doesn’t make sense. If they were planning to murder Mr. Cartell they would hardly have publicized their actions by singing and whistling under Mr. Period’s window.”

  Moppett gave a strangulated sob, presumably of relief.

  “Lady Bantling had opportunity, and she knew the lay of the land. She could have set the trap; but it’s obvious that she didn’t do so, as she was seen, by Mr. Bantling and Miss Maitland-Mayne, returning across the planks to her car. She, too, had publicized her visit by serenading Mr. Cartell from the garden. Her behaviour does not commend itself as that of an obsession maternal murderess.”

  “Too kind of you to say so,” Désirée murmured.

  “Moreover, I fancy she is very well aware that her son could anticipate his inheritance by borrowing upon his expectations and insuring his life as security for the loan. This reduces her motive to one of mere exasperation, and the same may be said of Mr. Bantling himself.”

  “And of me,” said Bimbo quickly.

  Alleyn said: “In your case, there might well be something we haven’t yet winkled out. Which is what I mean about the secondary importance of motive. However, I was coming to you. You had ample opportunity. You retired to a bathroom, where you tell me you spent a long time bandaging your hand. You could equally well have spent it driving back to the ditch and arranging the trap. No, please don’t interrupt. I know you were bitten. That proves nothing. You may also say that you took Mr. Leiss’s overcoat to him. Were his gloves in the pocket?”

  “How the hell do I know! I didn’t pick his ghastly pockets,” said Bimbo, turning very white.

  “A statement that at the moment can’t be checked. All the same, there’s this to be said for you: if you are both telling the truth about your movements this evening, you are unlikely to have chucked the paperweight at Mr. Period’s head. Although,” Alleyn said very coolly, “the amorous dog chase might well have led you into Mr. Period’s garden.”