by Ngaio Marsh
“That be damned!” shouted Lord Pastern. “I’m the most truthful man I know. You’re an ass.”
“So be it,” said Lady Pastern in her deepest voice, and folded her hands.
“When you came out on the dais,” Alleyn went on, disregarding this interlude, “you brought the revolver with you and put it on the floor under a hat. It was near your right foot, I think, and behind the drums. Quite near the edge of the dais.”
Félicité had opened her bag and for the fourth time had taken out her lipstick and mirror. She made an involuntary movement of her hands, jerking the lipstick away as if she threw it. The mirror fell at her feet. She half rose. Her open bag dropped to the floor, and the glass splintered under her heel. The carpet was littered with the contents of her bag and blotted with powder. Alleyn moved forward quickly. He picked up the lipstick and a folded paper with typewriting on it. Félicite snatched the paper from his hand. “Thank you. Don’t bother. What a fool I am,” she said breathlessly.
She crushed the paper in her hand and held it while, with the other hand, she gathered up the contents of her bag. One of the waiters came forward, like an automaton, to help her.
“Quite near the edge of the dais,” Alleyn repeated. “So that, for the sake of argument, you, Miss de Suze, or Miss Wayne, or Mr. Manx, could have reached out to the sombrero. In fact, while some of your party were dancing, anyone who was left at the table could also have done this. Do you all agree?”
Carlisle was acutely aware of the muscles of her face. She was conscious of Alleyn’s gaze, impersonal and deliberate, resting on her eyes and her mouth and her hands. She remembered noticing him — how many hours ago? — when he sat at the next table. “I mustn’t look at Fée or at Ned,” she thought. She heard Edward move stealthily in his chair. The paper in Félicité’s hand rustled. There was a sharp click and Carlisle jumped galvanically. Lady Pastern had flicked open her lorgnette and was now staring through it at Alleyn.
Manx said: “You were next to our table, I think, weren’t you, Alleyn?”
“By an odd coincidence,” Alleyn rejoined pleasantly.
“I think it better for us to postpone our answers.”
“Do you?” Alleyn said lightly. “Why?”
“Obviously, the question about whether we could have touched this hat, or whatever it was…”
“You know perfectly well what it was, Ned,” Lord Pastern interjected. “It was my sombrero, and the gun was under it. We’ve had all that.”
“… this sombrero,” Edward amended, “is a question that has dangerous implications for all of us. I’d like to say that quite apart from the possibility, which we have not admitted, of any of us touching it, there is surely no possibility at all that any of us could have taken a revolver from underneath it, shoved a bit of a parasol up the barrel and replaced the gun, without anything being noticed. If you don’t mind my saying so, the suggestion of any such manoeuvre is obviously ridiculous.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lord Pastern with an air of judicial impartiality. “All that switchin’ about of the light and the metronome waggin’ and everybody naturally watchin’ me, you know. I should say, in point of fact, it was quite possible. I wouldn’t have noticed, I promise you.”
“George,” Félicité whispered fiercely, “do you want to do us in?”
“I want the truth,” her stepfather shouted crossly. “I was a Theosophist, once,” he added.
“You are and have been and always will be an imbecile,” said his wife, shutting her lorgnette.
“Well,” Alleyn said and, the attention of the band, the employees of the restaurant and its guests having been diverted to this domestic interchange, swung back to him, “ridiculous or not, I shall put the question. You are, of course, under no compulsion to answer it. Did any of you handle Lord Pastern’s sombrero?”
They were silent. The waiter, who had gathered up the pieces of broken mirror, faced Alleyn with an anxious smile. “Excuse me, sir,” he said.
“Yes?”
“The young lady,” said the waiter, bowing towards Félicité, “did put her hand under the hat. I was the waiter for that table, sir, and I happened to notice. I hope you will excuse me, miss, but I did happen to notice.”
Fox’s pencil whispered over the paper.
“Thank you,” said Alleyn.
Félicité cried out: “This is the absolute end. Suppose I said it’s not true.”
“I shouldn’t,” Alleyn said. “As Mr. Manx has pointed out, I was sitting next to your table.”
“Then why ask?”
“To see if you would frankly admit that you did, in fact, put your hand under the sombrero.”
“People,” said Carlisle suddenly, “think twice about making frank statements all over the place when a capital crime is involved.”
She looked up at Alleyn and found him smiling at her. “How right you are,” he said. “That’s what makes homicide cases so tiresome.”
“Are we to hang about all night,” Lord Pastern demanded, “while you sit gossipin’? Never saw such a damned amateur set-up in all m’ life. Makes you sick.”
“Let us get on by all means, sir. We haven’t very much more ground to cover here. It will be necessary, I’m afraid, for us to search you before we can let you off.”
“All of us?” Félicité said quickly.
They looked, with something like awe, at Lady Pastern.
“There is a wardress in the ladies’ cloak-room,” Alleyn said, “and a detective-sergeant in the men’s. We shall also need your finger-prints, if you please. Sergeant Bailey will attend to that. Shall we set about it? Perhaps you, Lady Pastern, will go in first?”
Lady Pastern rose. Her figure, tightly encased, seemed to enlarge itself. Everybody stole uneasy glances at it. She faced her husband. “Of the many indignities you have forced upon me,” she said, “this is the most intolerable. For this I shall never forgive you.”
“Good Lord, C,” he rejoined, “what’s the matter with bein’ searched? Trouble with you is you’ve got a dirty mind. If you’d listened to my talks on the Body Beautiful that time in Kent…”
“Silence!” she said (in French) and swept into the ladies’ cloakroom. Félicité giggled nervously.
“Anybody may search me,” Lord Pastern said generously. “Come on.”
He led the way to the men’s cloak-room.
Alleyn said: “Perhaps, Miss de Suze, you would like to go with your mother. It’s perfectly in order, if you think she’d prefer it.”
Félicité was sitting in her chair with her left hand clutching her bag and her right hand out of sight. “I expect she’d rather have a private martyrdom, Mr. Alleyn,” she said.
“Suppose you go and ask her? You can get your part of the programme over when she is free.”
He stood close to Félicité, smiling down at her. She said, “Oh, all right. If you like.” Without enthusiasm, and with a backward glance at Manx, she followed her mother. Alleyn immediately took her chair and addressed himself to Manx and Carlisle.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you can help me with one or two routine jobs that will have to be tidied up. I believe you were both at the dinner party at Lord Pastern’s house — it’s in Duke’s Gate, isn’t it? — before this show to-night.”
“Yes,” Edward said. “We were there.”
“And the rest of the party? Bellairs and Rivera and of course Lord and Lady Pastern. Anyone else?”
“No,” Carlisle said and immediately corrected herself. “I’d forgotten. Miss Henderson.”
“Miss Henderson?”
“She used to be Félicité’s governess and stayed on as a sort of general prop and stay to everybody.”
“What is her full name?”
“I–I really don’t know. Ned, have you ever heard Hendy’s Christian name?”
“No,” Edward said. “Never. She’s simply Hendy. I should think it might be Edith. Wait a moment though,” he added, “I do know. Fée told me years ag
o. She saw it on an electoral roll or something. It’s Petronella Xantippe.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“People so seldom have the names you expect,” Alleyn murmured vaguely. “Can you give me a detailed description of your evening at Duke’s Gate? You see, as Rivera was there, the dinner party assumes a kind of importance.”
Carlisle thought: “We’re waiting too long. One of us ought to have replied at once.”
“I want,” Alleyn said at last, “if you can give it to me, an account of the whole thing. When everybody arrived. What you talked about. Whether you were all together most of the time or whether you split up, for instance, after dinner, and were in different rooms. That kind of thing.”
They began to speak together and stopped short. They laughed uncomfortably, apologized and invited each other to proceed. At last Carlisle embarked alone on a colourless narrative. She had arrived at Duke’s Gate at about five and had seen her aunt and uncle and Félicité. Naturally there had been a good deal of talk about the evening performance. Her uncle had been in very good spirits.
“And Lady Pastern and Miss de Suze?” Alleyn said. Carlisle replied carefully that they were in much their usual form. “And how is that?” he asked. “Cheerful? Happy family atmosphere, would you say?”
Manx said lightly: “My dear Alleyn, like most families they rub along together without — without — ”
“Were you going to say ‘without actually busting up’?”
“Well — well — ”
“Ned,” Carlisle interjected, “it’s no good pretending Uncle George and Aunt Cécile represent the dead norm of British family life. Presumably, Mr. Alleyn reads the papers. If I say they were much as usual it means they were much as usual on their own lines.” She turned to Alleyn. “On their own lines, Mr. Alleyn, they were perfectly normal.”
“If you’ll allow me to say so, Miss Wayne,” Alleyn rejoined warmly, “you are evidently an extremely sensible person. May I implore you to keep it up.”
“Not to the extent of letting you think a routine argument to them is matter for suspicion to you.”
“They argue,” Manx added, “perpetually and vehemently. It means nothing. Well, you’ve heard them.”
“And did they, for example, argue about Lord Pastern’s performance in the band?”
“Oh, yes,” they said together.
“And about Bellairs or Rivera?”
“A bit,” said Carlisle after a pause.
“Boogie-woogie merchants,” Manx said, “are not, in the nature of things, my cousin Cécilc’s cups of tea. She is, as you may have noticed, a little in the grande dame line of business.”
Alleyn leant forward in his chair and rubbed his nose. He looked, Carlisle thought, like a bookish man considering some point that had been raised in an interminable argument.
“Yes,” he said at last. “That’s all right, of course. One can see the obvious and rather eccentric mise en scène. Everything you’ve told me is no doubt quite true. But the devil of it is, you know, that you’re going to use the palpable eccentricities as a sort of smoke screen for the more profound disturbances.”
They were astonished and disconcerted. Carlisle said tentatively that she didn’t understand. “Don’t you?” Alleyn murmured. “Oh, well! Shall we get on with it? Bellairs has suggested an engagement between Rivera and Miss de Suze. Was there an engagement, if you please?”
“No, I don’t think so. Was there, Lisle?”
Carlisle said that she didn’t think so either. Nothing had been announced.
“An understanding?”
“He wanted her to marry him, I think. I mean,” Carlisle amended with heightened colour, “I know he did. I don’t think she was going to. I’m sure she wasn’t.”
“How did Lord Pastern feel about it?”
“Who can tell?” Edward muttered.
“I don’t think it bothered him much one way or the other,” Carlisle said. “He was too busy planning his début.”
But into her memory came the figure of Lord Pastern, bent over his task of drawing bullets from cartridges, and she heard again his grunted: “much better leave things to me.”
Alleyn began to lead them step by step through the evening at Duke’s Gate. What had they talked about before dinner? How had the party been divided, and into which rooms? What had they themselves done and said? Carlisle found herself charged with an account of her arrival. It was easy to say that her aunt and uncle had argued about whether there should be extra guests for dinner. It was not so easy when he led her back to the likelihood of an engagement between Rivera and Félicité, asking if it had been discussed and by whom, and whether Félicité had confided in her.
“These seem impertinent questions,” Alleyn said, and anticipated her attempt to suggest as much. “But, believe me, they are entirely impersonal. Irrelevant matters will be most thankfully rejected and forgotten. We want to tidy up the field of inquiry, that’s all.” And then it seemed to Carlisle that evasions would be silly and wrong and she said that Félicité had been worried and unhappy about Rivera. She sensed Edward’s uneasiness and added that there had been nothing in the Félicité-Rivera situation, nothing at all. “Félicité makes emotional mountains out of sentimental mole-hills,” she said. “I think she enjoys it.” But she knew while she said this that Félicité’s outburst had been more serious than she suggested and she heard her voice lose its integrity and guessed that Alleyn heard this too. She began to be oppressed by his quiet insistence and yet her taste for detail made her a little pleased with her own accuracy, and she felt something like an artist’s reluctance to slur or distort. It was easy again to recall her solitary time before dinner in the ballroom. As soon as she began to speak of it the sensation of nostalgia flashed up in her memory and she found herself telling Alleyn that her coming-out ball had been there, that the room had a host of associations for her and that she had stood there, recollecting them.
“Did you notice if the umbrellas and parasols were there?”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “I did. They were there on the piano. I remembered the French parasol. It was Aunt Cile’s. I remembered Félicité playing with it as a child. It takes to pieces.” She caught her breath. “But you know it does that,” she said.
“And it was intact then, when you saw it? No bits gone out of the shaft?”
“No, no.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I picked it up and opened it. That’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it? It was all right then.”
“Good. And after this you went into the drawing-room. I know this sounds aimlessly exacting but what happened next, do you remember?”
Before she knew where she was she had told him about the magazine, Harmony, and there seemed no harm in repeating her notion that Félicité had written one of the letters on G.P.F.’s page. Alleyn gave no sign that this was of interest. It was Edward who, unaccountably, made a stifled ejaculation. Carlisle thought, “Have I blundered?” and hurried on to an account of her visit to her uncle’s study when he drew the bullets from the cartridges. Alleyn asked casually how he had set about this and seemed to be diverted from the matter in hand, amused at Lord Pastern’s neatness and dexterity.
Carlisle was accustomed to being questioned about Lord Pastern’s eccentricities. She considered him fair game and normally enjoyed trying to make sharp, not unkindly little word-sketches of him for her friends. His notoriety was so gross that she had always felt it would be ridiculous to hesitate. She slipped into this habit now.
Then, the picture of the drawer, pulled out and laid on the desk at his elbow, suddenly presented itself. She felt a kind of shrinking in her midriff and stopped short.
But Alleyn had turned to Ned Manx and Ned, dryly and slowly, answered questions about his own arrival in the drawing-room. What impression did he get of Bellairs and Rivera? He hadn’t spoken to them very much. Lady Pastern had taken him apart to show him her embroidery.
“Gros point?” A
lleyn asked.
“And petit point. Like most Frenchwomen of her period, she’s pretty good. I really didn’t notice the others much.”
The dinner party itself came next. The conversation, Ned was saying, had been fragmentary, about all sorts of things. He couldn’t remember in detail.
“Miss Wayne has an observer’s eye and ear,” Alleyn said, turning to her. “Perhaps you can remember, can you? What did you talk about? You sat, where?”
“On Uncle George’s right.”
“And on your other hand?”
“Mr. Rivera.”
“Can you remember what he spoke about, Miss Wayne?” Alleyn offered his cigarette case to her. As he lit her cigarette Carlisle looked past him at Ned, who shook his head very slightly.
“I thought him rather awful, I’m afraid,” she said. “He really was a bit too thick. All flowery compliments and too Spanish-grandee for anyone to swallow.”
“Do you agree, Mr. Manx?”
“Oh, yes. He was quite unreal and rather ridiculous I thought.”
“Offensively so, would you say?”
They did not look at each other. Edward said: “He just bounded sky-high, if you call that offensive.”
“Did they speak of the performance to-night?”
“Oh, yes,” Edward said. “And I must say I’m not surprised that the waiters were muddled about who they were to carry out. It struck me that both Uncle George and Rivera wanted all the fat and that neither of them could make up his mind to letting the other have the stretcher. Bellairs was clearly at the end of his professional tether about it.”
Alleyn asked how long the men had stayed behind in the dining-room. Reluctantly — too reluctantly Carlisle thought, with a rising sense of danger — Ned told them that Lord Pastern had taken Breezy away to show him the blank cartridges. “So you and Rivera were left with the port?” Alleyn said.
“Yes. Not for long.”
“Can you recall the conversation?”
“There was nothing that would be any help to you.”
