by Ngaio Marsh
“Well, Miss Henderson,” he said, “I wonder if you will be able to throw any light on this very obscure business.”
“I’m afraid it’s most unlikely,” she said tranquilly.
“You never know. There’s one point, at least, where I hope you will help us. You were present at last night’s party in this house, both before and after dinner, and you were in the drawing-room when Lord Pastern, with the help of all the people concerned, worked out and wrote down the time-table which he afterwards gave to me.”
“Yes,” she agreed after he had waited for a second or two.
“Would you say that as far as your personal observations and recollections cover them, the movements set down in the time-table are accurate?”
“Oh yes,” she said at once, “I think so. But of course they don’t go very far — my recollections. I was the last to arrive in the drawing-room, you know, before dinner and the first to leave after dinner.”
“Not quite the first, according to the time-table, surely?”
She drew her brows together as if perturbed at the suggestion of inaccuracy. “Not?” she said.
“The time-table puts Miss de Suze’s exit from the drawing-room a second or two before yours.”
“How stupid of me. Félicité did go out first but I followed almost at once. I forgot for the moment.”
“You were all agreed on this point last night when Lord Pastern compiled his time-table?”
“Yes. Perfectly.”
“Do you remember that just before this there was a great rumpus in the ballroom? It startled you and you dropped a little stiletto on the carpet. You were tidying Lady Pastern’s work-box at the time. Do you remember?”
He had thought at first that she used no more make-up than a little powder but he saw now that the faint warmth of her cheeks was artificial. The colour became isolated as the skin beneath and about it bleached. Her voice was quite even and clear.
“It was certainly rather an alarming noise,” she said.
“Do you remember, too, that Miss de Suze picked up the stiletto? I expect she meant to return it to you or to the box but she was rather put out just then. She was annoyed, wasn’t she, by the, as she considered, uncordial reception given to her fiancé?”
“He was not her fiancé. They were not engaged.”
“Not officially, I know.”
“Not officially. There was no engagement.”
“I see. In any case, do you remember that instead of replacing the stiletto, she still had it in her hand when, a moment later, she left the room?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t notice.”
“What did you do?”
“Do?”
“At that moment. You had been tidying the box. It was exquisitely neat when we found it this morning. Was it on your knees? The table was a little too far from your chair for you to have used it, I think.”
“Then,” she said, with her first hint of impatience, “the box was on my knees.”
“So that was how the miniature silver pencil you wear on a chain came to be in the box?”
Her hands went to the bosom of her suit, fingering it. “Yes. I suppose so. Yes. I didn’t realize… Was that where it was?”
“Perhaps you dropped the lid and caught the pencil, dragging it off the chain.”
“Yes,” she repeated. “Yes. I suppose so. Yes, I remember I did do that.”
“Then why did you hunt for it this morning on the landing?”
“I had forgotten about catching it in the box,” she said rapidly.
“Not,” Alleyn murmured apologetically, “a frightfully good memory.”
“These are trivial things that you ask me to remember. In this house we are none of us, at the moment, concerned with trivial things.”
“Are you not? Then, I suggest that you searched the landing, not for your trinket, which you say was a trivial thing, but for something that you knew could not be in the work-box because you had seen Miss de Suze take it out with her when she left the drawing-room in a rage. The needlework stiletto.”
“But, Inspector Alleyn, I told you I didn’t notice anything of the sort.”
“Then what were you looking for?”
“You have apparently been told. My pencil.”
“A trivial thing but your own? Here it is.”
He opened his hand, showing her the pencil. She made no movement and he dropped it in her lap. “You don’t seem to me,” he remarked casually, “to be an unobservant woman.”
“If that’s a compliment,” she said, “thank you.”
“Did you see Miss de Suze again, after she left the drawing-room with the stiletto in her hand and after she had quarrelled with Rivera when they were alone together in the study?”
“Why do you say they quarrelled?”
“I have it on pretty good authority.”
“Carlisle?” she said sharply.
“No. But if you cross-examine a policeman about this sort of job, you know, he’s not likely to be very communicative.”
“One of the servants, I suppose,” she said, dismissing it and him without emphasis. He asked her again if she had seen Félicité later that evening and after watching him for a moment she said that she had. Félicité had come to this room and had been in the happiest possible mood. “Excited?” he suggested and she replied that Félicité had been pleasurably excited. She was glad to be going out with her cousin, Edward Manx, to whom she was attached and was looking forward to the performance at the Metronome.
“After this encounter you went to Lady Pastern’s room, didn’t you? Lady Pastern’s maid was with her. She was dismissed, but not before she had heard you say that Miss de Suze was very much excited and that you wanted to have a word with her mother about this.”
“Again, the servants.”
“Anybody,” Alleyn said, “who is prepared to speak the truth. A man has been murdered.”
“I have spoken nothing but the truth.” Her lips trembled and she pressed them together.
“Good. Let’s go on with it then, shall we?”
“There’s nothing at all that I can tell you. Nothing at all.”
“But at least you can tell me about the family. You understand, don’t you, that my job, at the moment, is not so much finding the guilty person as clearing persons who may have been associated with Rivera but are innocent of his murder. That may, indeed it does, take in certain members of the household, the detailed as well as the general set-up. Now, in your position…”
“My position!” she muttered, with a sort of repressed contempt. Almost inaudibly she added: “What do you know of my position!”
Alleyn said pleasantly: “I’ve heard you’re called the Controller of the Household.” She didn’t answer and he went on: “In any case it has been a long association and I suppose, in many ways, an intimate one. With Miss de Suze, for instance. You have brought her up, really, haven’t you?”
“Why do you keep speaking about Félicité? This has nothing to do with Félicité.” She got up, and stood with her back towards him, changing the position of an ornament on the mantelpiece. He could see her carefully kept and very white hand steady itself on the edge of the shelf. “I’m afraid I’m not behaving very well, am I?” she murmured. “But I find your insistence rather trying.”
“Is that because, at the moment, it’s directed at Miss de Suze and the stiletto?”
“Naturally, I’m uneasy. It’s disturbing to feel that she will be in the smallest degree involved.” She leant her head against her hand. From where he stood, behind her, she looked like a woman who had come to rest for a moment and fallen into an idle speculation. Her voice came to him remotely from beyond her stooped shoulders as if her mouth were against her hand. “I suppose she simply left it in the study. She didn’t even realize she had it in her hand. It was not in her hand when she came upstairs. It had no importance for her at all.” She turned and faced him. “I shall tell you something,” she said. “I don’t want to. I’d m
ade up my mind I’d have no hand in this. It’s distasteful to me. But I see now that I must tell you.”
“Right.”
“It’s this. Before dinner last night and during dinner, I had opportunity to watch those — those two men.”
“Rivera and Bellairs?”
“Yes. They were extraordinary creatures and I suppose in a sort of way I was interested.”
“Naturally. In Rivera at all events.”
“I don’t know what servants’ gossip you have been listening to, Inspector Alleyn.”
“Miss Henderson, I’ve heard enough from Miss de Suze herself to tell me that there was an understanding between them.”
“I watched those two men,” she said exactly as if he hadn’t spoken. “And I saw at once there was bad blood between them. They looked at each other — I can’t describe it — with enmity. They were both, of course, incredibly common and blatant. They scarcely spoke to each other but during dinner, over and over again, I saw the other one, the conductor, eyeing him. He talked a great deal to Félicité and to Lord Pastern but he listened to…”
“To Rivera?” Alleyn prompted. She seemed to be incapable of pronouncing his name.
“Yes. He listened to him as if he resented every word he spoke. That would have been natural enough from any of us.” ‘
“Was Rivera so offensive?”
An expression of eagerness appeared on her face. Here was something, at last, about which she was ready to speak.
“Offensive?” she said. “He was beyond everything. He sat next to Carlisle and even she was nonplussed. Evidently she attracted him. It was perfectly revolting.”
Alleyn thought distastefully: “Now what’s behind all this? Resentment? At Carlisle rather than Félicité attracting the atrocious Rivera? Or righteous indignation? Or what?”
She had raised her head. Her arm still rested on the mantelpiece and she had stretched out her hand to a framed photograph of Félicité in presentation dress. He moved slightly and saw that her eyes were fixed on the photograph. Félicité’s eyes, under her triple plumage, stared back with the glazed distaste (so suggestive of the unwitting influence of Mr. John Gielgud) that characterizes the modish photograph. Miss Henderson began to speak again and it was as if she addressed herself to the photograph. “Of course, Félicité didn’t mind in the least. It was nothing to her. A relief, no doubt. Anything rather than suffer his odious attentions. But it was clear to me that the other creature and he had quarrelled. It was quite obvious.”
“But if they hardly spoke to each other how could…?”
“I’ve told you. It was the way the other person, Bellairs, looked at him. He watched him perpetually.”
Alleyn now stood before her. They made a formal conversation piece with the length of the mantelpiece between them. He said: “Miss Henderson, who was beside you at the dinner table?”
“I sat next to Lord Pastern. On his left.”
“And on your left?”
She made a fastidious movement with her shoulders. “Mr. Bellairs.”
“Do you remember what he talked to you about?”
Her mouth twisted. “I don’t remember that he spoke to me at all,” she said. “He had evidently realized that I was a person of no importance. He devoted himself to Félicité, who was on his other side. He gave me his shoulder.”
Her voice faded out almost before she had uttered the last word as if, too late, she had tried to stop herself.
“If he gave you his shoulder,” Alleyn said, “how did it come about that you could see this inimical fixed stare of his?”
The photograph of Félicité crashed on the hearth. Miss Henderson cried out and knelt. “How clumsy of me,” she whispered.
“Let me do it. You may cut your fingers.”
“No,” she said sharply, “don’t touch it.”
She began to pick the slivers of glass from the frame and drop them in the grate. “There’s a looking-glass on the wall of the dining-room,” she said. “I could see him in that.” And in a flat voice that had lost all its urgency she repeated: “He watched him perpetually.”
“Yes,” Alleyn said, “I remember the looking-glass. I accept that.”
“Thank you,” she said ironically.
“One more question. Did you go into the ballroom at any time after dinner?”
She looked up at him warily and after a moment said: “I believe I did. Yes. I did.”
“When?”
“Félicité had lost her cigarette case. It was when they were changing and she called out from her room. She had been in the ballroom during the afternoon and thought she might have left it there.”
“Had she done so?”
“Yes. It was on the piano. Under some music.”
“What else was on the piano?”
“A bundle of parasols.”
“Anything else?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Or on the chairs or floor?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Perfectly sure,” she said and dropped a piece of glass with a little tinkle in the grate.
“Well,” Alleyn said, “if I can’t help you, perhaps I’d better take myself off.”
She seemed to examine the photograph. She peered at it as if to make certain there were no flaws or scratches on Félicité’s image. “Very well,” she said and stood up, holding the face of the photograph against her flattish chest. “I’m sorry if I haven’t told you the kind of things you want to be told. The truth is so seldom what one really wants to hear, is it? But perhaps you don’t think I have told you the truth.”
“I think I am nearer to it than I was before I visited you.”
He left her, with the broken photograph still pressed against the bosom of her dark suit. On the landing he encountered Hortense. Her ladyship, Hortense said, smiling knowledgeably at him, would be glad to see him before he left. She was in her boudoir.
It was a small, delicately appointed room on the same floor. Lady Pastern rose from her desk, a pretty Empire affair, as he came in. She was firmly encased in her morning dress. Her hair was rigid, her hands ringed. A thin film of make-up had been carefully spread over the folds and shadows of her face. She looked ghastly but completely in order.
“It is so good of you to spare me a moment,” she said and held out her hand. This was unexepected. Evidently she considered that her change of manner required an explanation and, without wasting time, let him have it.
“I did not realize last night,” she said concisely, “that you must be the younger son of an old friend of my father’s. You are Sir George Alleyn’s son, are you not?”
Alleyn bowed. This, he thought, is going to be tiresome.
“Your father,” she said, “was a frequent visitor at my parents’ house in the Faubourg St.-Germain. He was, in those days, an attaché, I think, at your embassy in Paris.” Her voice faded and an extraordinary look came over her face. He was unable to interpret it.
“What is it, Lady Pastern?” he asked.
“Nothing. I was reminded, for a moment, of a former conversation. We were speaking of your father. I remember that he and your mother called upon one occasion, bringing their two boys with them. Perhaps you do not recollect the visit.”
“It is extremely kind of you to do so.”
“I had understood that you were to be entered in the British Diplomatic Service.”
“I was entirely unsuited for it, I’m afraid.”
“Of course,” she said with a sort of creaking graciousness, “young men after the first war began to find their vocation in unconventional fields. One understands and accepts these changes, doesn’t one?”
“Since I am here as a policeman,” Alleyn said politely, “I hope so.”
Lady Pastern examined him with that complete lack of reticence which is often the characteristic of royal personages. It occurred to him that she herself would also have shaped up well, in an intimidating way, as a p
olicewoman.
“It is a relief to me,” she announced, after a pause, “that we are in your hands. You will appreciate my difficulties. It will make an enormous difference.”
Alleyn was familiar enough with this point of view, and detested it.
He thought it advisable however, to say nothing. Lady Pastern, erecting her bust and settling her shoulders, continued:
“I need not remind you of my husband’s eccentricities. They are public property. You have seen for yourself to what lengths of imbecility he will go. I can only assure you that though he may be, and indeed is, criminally stupid, he is perfectly incapable of crime as the word is understood in the profession you have elected to follow. He is not, in a word, a potential murderer. Or,” she added, apparently as an afterthought, “an actual one. Of that you may be assured.” She looked affably at Alleyn. Evidently, he thought, she had been a dark woman. There was a tinge of sable in her hair. Her skin was sallow and he thought she probably used something to deal with a darkness of the upper lip. It was odd that she should have such pale eyes. “I cannot blame you,” she said, as he was still silent, “if you suspect my husband. He has done everything to invite suspicion. In this instance, however, I am perfectly satisfied that he is guiltless.”
“We shall be glad to find proof of his innocence,” Alleyn said.
Lady Pastern closed one hand over the other. “Usually,” she said, “I comprehend entirely his motives. But entirely. On this occasion, however, I find myself somewhat at a loss. It is obvious to me that he develops some scheme. But what? Yes: I confess myself at a loss. I merely warn you, Mr. Alleyn, that to suspect my husband of this crime is to court acute embarrassment. You will gratify his unquenchable passion for self-dramatization. He prepares a dénouement.”
Alleyn took a quick decision. “It’s possible,” he said, “that we’ve anticipated him there.”
“Indeed?” she said quickly. “I am glad to hear it.”
“It appears that the revolver produced last night was not the one Lord Pastern loaded and took to the platform. I think he knows this. Apparently it amuses him to say nothing.”
