‘Thorn.’ Wilkes spoke emphatically and clearly, as though addressing himself to rather a slow understanding. ‘The name is Thorn. A small, hyena-like woman.’
‘Ah.’
‘We drank coffee together,’ said Wilkes dreamily. ‘I imagine they arrived at half past ten. Then at eleven they suddenly made off.’
‘Made off?’
‘That’s what I said,’ said Wilkes. ‘Heh. They made off. In pursuance, I imagined, of some bodily necessity.’ He lingered over the delicate obliquity of this statement. ‘But on reflexion,’ he continued reluctantly, ‘I don’t think that can have been the reason. For one thing, they weren’t back until half past eleven.’
‘They left, and came back, together?’
Wilkes assented, with a regal nod.
‘And didn’t they give any explanation of their absence?’
‘Now let me see.’ Wilkes’ gaze wandered about the lounge, seeming to seek inspiration in its mock-Tudor fireplace and leather-covered armchairs. ‘Yes. Now I remember. Shorthouse explained to me, in confidence, that he was intending to kill his brother.’
Fen moved convulsively, and upset an ash-tray into his lap.
‘Really,’ he grumbled, brushing himself disjointedly, ‘that is the limit . . . I presume you didn’t take this seriously?’
‘On the whole, no.’ Wilkes began to display interest. ‘But did he, in fact . . . ?’
‘Someone did.’
‘Well, I never,’ said Wilkes.
‘Charles Shorthouse and the Thorn woman,’ said Adam, ‘have no alibi, then?’
‘No. Nor has Stapleton. Nor has Judith Haynes.’ Fen blew his nose with a trumpeting sound. ‘Well, there’s nothing to be gained from sitting here.’ He got to his feet.
‘Where are you going now?’ Wilkes demanded.
‘I shan’t tell you,’ said Fen offensively, ‘because if I did you’d come tagging along behind. You were quite enough of a nuisance during that toyshop business. You stole a bicycle,’ he added reproachfully.
‘Heh,’ said Wilkes, pleased. ‘So I did. For two pins I’d steal another.’
‘You stay here and get quietly drunk.’
‘By the way,’ said Wilkes. ‘I found that whisky you’d hidden behind your books.’
Fen stared at him in exasperation. ‘Really, Wilkes, I hope you didn’t take it. You don’t seem to realize how difficult it is to get.’
‘It isn’t difficult to get,’ Wilkes pointed out, ‘when one has access to your rooms.’
‘You must put it back at once, Wilkes.’
‘Can’t hear you.’
‘I said, thief.’
‘Yes,’ said Wilkes thoughtfully, ‘the wind’s bitter. I shouldn’t be surprised if we had a really heavy fall of snow.’
They left him. In the entrance-hall they were met by a page-boy with a message for Adam.
‘Good Lord,’ Adam exclaimed in dismay after reading it, ‘they’re having a rehearsal and they want to know why I’m not there.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m a bit late, but I suppose I can still get to some of it . . . Oh, blast.’
‘Where is your wife, one wonders?’
‘Somewhere about, I expect. I’d better try and get hold of her before I go off to the theatre.’ Adam went to the reception desk. ‘The key of room 72, please.’
‘I think Mrs Langley took it, sir, about an hour ago.’
‘I imagine she’s upstairs,’ said Adam, rejoining Fen.
They took the lift, and walked along a passage prolific of giggling chambermaids to room 72. Adam knocked. For a moment there was no reply.
‘Odd,’ he said. ‘I suppose she must have gone off somewhere with the key.’ He knocked again.
Then there was a small movement on the other side of the door, and they heard Elizabeth say in a low voice:
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, darling. Adam.’
‘Have you got someone with you?’
‘Only Professor Fen. Are you undressed, or something?’
The door opened, and Elizabeth stood in the gap. She was pale, and breathing quickly, and she looked very young and defenceless. She said:
‘Oh . . . Adam . . .’
He took her in his arms. ‘My dear, what is it?’
She attempted to smile. ‘It’s just – ignoble panic,’ she said, and they realized that she was very near to tears. ‘You see – someone’s been trying to poison me.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE ROOM WAS as undistinguished as most hotel bedrooms, with its discreet printed injunctions, its elaborate apparatus of blinds and curtains, and its multiplicity of lights: and though Adam and Elizabeth had been there long enough to impress a certain amount of character on its blankness, it remained at bottom obstinately functional. Fen settled in an armchair, after casting his hat inaccurately at a hook on the door, and offered them cigarettes.
‘Well?’ he queried.
‘Aconitine,’ said Elizabeth briefly. ‘In the tea.’
They all looked at the tray. There was a full cup on it, now almost cold.
‘How do you know?’ said Fen.
‘It comes of poring over these things. I held a little in my mouth, and it made my lips go numb.’
‘You must have had some reason for suspecting.’
‘Suspecting,’ Elizabeth repeated wryly. Her big eyes, with their uneven, sardonic brows, were very grave. ‘Yes. I had reason enough. You see–’
She went on to narrate, in detail, the events of the afternoon.
‘So you can understand,’ she concluded, ‘just why I began to have doubts about the tea.’ She gestured apologetically. ‘When one’s studying these things, one gets cagey – just as medical students tend to credit themselves with having the diseases they’re working on. At all events, I tried the stuff and’ – she shrugged – ‘that’s all. Except that I decided I wasn’t going to budge from here until Adam came back.’
Adam took her hand and pressed it gently. They were neither of them demonstrative persons, and there was much that they could afford to leave unsaid.
‘Well, Gervase, what’s the answer?’ Adam demanded.
‘The answer’ – Fen was unusually pensive – ‘would seem to be that someone is becoming very frightened indeed . . . What time did all this happen?’
‘Between half past four and five.’
‘I see.’ Fen rose, crossed to the tea-tray, and picked up the cup. ‘I think I’ll try this,’ he said, ‘so as to be sure you’re not mistaken.’
‘Be careful,’ Adam warned, joining him.
‘Well, don’t buffet me about,’ Fen complained, ‘while I’m putting it into my mouth. I don’t want to appear prematurely at the judgement seat.’
He sipped apprehensively – and almost immediately fled into the bathroom, whence he reappeared accompanied by a strong smell of disinfectant.
‘Yes, you were quite right,’ he announced. ‘Of course, it might be veratrine, but that’s rather rare. Aconite’s the obvious answer. We’ll have to get the tea tested, though as far as I can remember it takes several days.’
‘Stas-Otto process,’ Elizabeth supplied competently.
‘Would the aconite be difficult to get?’ inquired Adam, whose ideas on toxicology were primitive to the point of superstition.
‘You go out into the fields and hedgerows,’ Fen condescended to explain, ‘and dig up some monkshood. Then you dry the roots and powder them . . . Et voilà.’ He began to prowl restlessly about the room. ‘It would seem,’ he said, ‘that the motive for this attack lay in your rash remarks about knowing the murderer’s identity. And yet’ – he stopped pacing abruptly – ‘and yet a completely unsupported assertion like that oughtn’t to have caused such undue alarm.’ He shook his head. ‘You know, it really doesn’t constitute an adequate motive at all. I’m wondering if there isn’t some damning fact you’ve got hold of without being aware of it . . . No, I don’t see that we can get any sort of help from the motive.’ H
e began to walk about again, fidgeting as he went with the handles of drawers and cupboards. ‘Let me get this clear; a moment before you were attacked you heard someone knocking on the door?’
Elizabeth assented. Fen continued on his orbit.
‘I wonder who that was,’ he said. ‘The probability would be that it was Joan Davis, of course. One assumes that your attacker was alarmed by the knocking and concealed him or herself somewhere while Joan came in and left the note. Then . . . what happens then?’
‘He’s about to come out of his hiding-place,’ said Adam, ‘when the chambermaid arrives with the tea. After she’s gone, Elizabeth shuts the door and returns to the bathroom. Our X creeps from hiding, pops the aconite in the tea, lets himself out, and vanishes.’
‘Yes, I see,’ said Elizabeth. ‘And that means that it certainly can’t have been Joan who tried to poison me. On the other hand –’
‘On the other hand,’ Fen interposed, ‘it could have been she who tried to strangle you. In that case the knocking may well have been due to the person who wanted to poison . . .’
‘You don’t really mean’ – Elizabeth was plaintive – ‘that you think two people were trying to finish me off?’
‘I agree,’ said Fen, ‘that it is rather an embarras de richesses. But then’ – he became aggrieved – ‘this bedroom seems to have been about as populous as Piccadilly tube station, and there is just the possibility –’
Adam interrupted. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that our first reconstruction must be the right one. When all’s said and done it’s very unlikely that Joan killed Edwin Shorthouse. I admit she disliked him in a general way – who didn’t? – but he wasn’t specifically a nuisance to her. And if, as one imagines, Edwin’s death and this business this afternoon are connected –’
It was Fen’s turn to interrupt. ‘If they’re connected. I’m not saying they aren’t, mind you. But it is, I suppose, possible that Joan Davis had some entirely independent grudge against Elizabeth.’
Adam snorted. ‘No, no, that’s absurd.’
‘She wasn’t, for example, in love with you, Adam?’
‘Good God, no.’
‘You mightn’t yourself have perceived the fact.’
‘No,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But I certainly should have done. You can really count that out, Professor Fen.’
Fen paused to gaze gloomily out of the window at the uncompromising brick façade of the New Theatre. ‘Did you happen to notice,’ he asked, ‘if the person who attacked you was wearing gloves?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth promptly. ‘Quite definitely, yes.’
Fen went to the wardrobe and peered cautiously inside. He then disappeared into it, closing the door behind him. After a few moments he reappeared, awkwardly disentangling himself from Elizabeth’s dresses and swearing quietly to himself. He made as if to examine the floor of the wardrobe, and then lost heart and abandoned the attempt. He gazed perfunctorily under the beds.
‘A friend of mine,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘has his chamberpots fitted with musical boxes which come into operation when they’re lifted from the floor. It embarrasses his guests greatly . . . As to what we do now’ – he scratched his head, by no means improving the natural unruliness of his hair – ‘I think really that we’d better find out whether any of these comings and goings were observed. And we must see Joan Davis. If it was she who knocked on the door, she may well have had a glimpse of anyone who came along here in front of her.’
‘She’ll be at the rehearsal by now,’ said Adam. ‘And that’s where I ought to be, too.’
Fen lit another cigarette; plainly he was worried.
‘Look here, Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘until this business is cleared up you mustn’t be alone – at any time. We’d better all go along to the rehearsal together.’
They began wrapping themselves up against the cold.
‘By the way,’ said Elizabeth, ‘you never told me what came of your visit to Amersham.’
‘Nothing to speak of.’ Fen acquainted her with the indefinite results of their interviews with Charles Shorthouse and with Wilkes. ‘It’s simply a question,’ he concluded, ‘of whether, in this respect, Shorthouse is genuinely eccentric, or whether it’s just a bluff.’
‘He’s eccentric normally,’ Adam pointed out.
‘Yes. But no doubt he’s aware of the fact, and he may be trading on it. After all, his tale’s so unlikely that on the face of it no one but a dolt would have invented it in self-defence . . . Well, are we all ready?’
They locked the door, and in the corridor outside Fen pounced on a passing chambermaid.
‘And where have you been all afternoon, my girl?’ he demanded with Rhadamanthine severity.
‘Ooh,’ said the chambermaid, alarmed. She was young, with popping eyes and straight, straw-coloured hair. ‘I ‘aven’t done nothing, sir.’
‘I didn’t ask you whether you’d done anything,’ said Fen, peeved. ‘I simply want to know if you were anywhere about here between half past four and five this afternoon.’
‘Nothing’s bin took, ‘as it, sir?’ The girl was open-mouthed with dismay.
‘Took?’ Fen applied himself laboriously to the elucidation of this remark, and then, finding the effort too much, abruptly abandoned it. ‘Did you or did you not see anyone go into or come out of room 72 between those times?’
‘Because if it ‘as, you ought to tell the manager.’
‘If it ‘as what?’ said Fen, disconcerted. ‘The girl’s a half-wit.’
What at last emerged from a good deal of tedious inquisition was unhelpful. It appeared that at half past four the chambermaids were in the habit of assembling in their sitting-room to brew tea; consequently none of them had been in the corridor, or within sight of it, at the crucial time.
‘Except Effie,’ added the victim of their inquiries after a pause for reflexion. ‘She ‘ad to take someone a tray. But as I say, sir, if anything’s gorn . . .’
The significance of these recurrent utterances had at last penetrated to Fen’s understanding. He became irresponsible.
‘There’s a diamond tiara gone,’ he said sternly. ‘And the specifications of the atomic bomb. So if we’re all reduced to molecular dust before we have time to turn round it will be your fault.’
‘Oh, sir,’ said the chambermaid. ‘You’re ‘aving me on.’
‘You just wait and see,’ said Fen, wagging his forefinger at her, ‘you just wait and see if I’m having you on or not.’ He departed, with Adam and Elizabeth, in search of Effie.
But here again they were unsuccessful; apart from Joan Davis, Effie had seen no one, either on her way to room 72 with Elizabeth’s tea, or subsequently. Fen ascertained that the poison could not have been introduced into the tea before it arrived at the bedroom, and left it at that.
‘Ye gods,’ he exclaimed gloomily as they stood in the entrance hall. ‘Or to crib a phrase from my illustrious colleague at the War Office – burn me. What other lines of approach are there?’ He considered. ‘Whereabouts in the hotel are the rooms of the other people connected with the opera?’
‘Peacock’s a few doors along the corridor from us,’ said Adam. ‘And Joan’s on the floor above and John Barfield’s on the floor below, I think. But we can look at the board.’
They went to the porter’s box and studied the names and room-numbers displayed beside it.
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘First floor.’
‘What’s more,’ Fen put in, ‘this wretchedly informative device ensures that no one needed to ask for your room number – which might have given us some kind of clue . . . Well, I’d better go to the manager and make sure those tea-things aren’t taken away.’
‘What about informing the police?’
‘Mudge may be at the theatre. If not, we’ll ring him up from there. We shall have to find out now where our sundry suspects were just before five.’
‘It lets out Charles Shorthouse and the Thorn woman, doesn’t it?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Remember that we delayed about half an hour in Wycombe to get Lily Christine mended, and that there’s an alternative route to Oxford through Amersham and Missenden and Aylesbury. They could have got here well before us . . . Ridley,’ he called to the porter, ‘do you know Mr Charles Shorthouse by sight?’
Ridley, a thin, competent-looking elderly man in blue and braid, made negative gestures. ‘I think not, sir. Mr Edwin Shorthouse – yes.’
Fen sighed. ‘You see? Of course the waiter who served them last night may have seen him come in this afternoon . . . Ridley, is the waiter who was serving in the lounge after ten-thirty last night anywhere about?’
The porter consulted some kind of roster. ‘McNeill. I’m afraid not, sir. It’s his afternoon off today. He’ll be at the cinema.’
‘Oh, my dear paws,’ said Fen in disgust. ‘I suppose in that case there’s nothing more we can do for the moment. I’ll just look in on the manager, and then we can go.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE REHEARSAL, WHEN they reached it, was in a state of confusion which really amounted to total deadlock. It had been called, rather suddenly, for five o’clock; and since most of those concerned had assumed that there would be no rehearsal that day, and had gone out in search of such merriment as Oxford affords on a week-day afternoon, there were considerable gaps in the ranks, and it was difficult to do any useful work. However, the new Sachs had arrived with remarkable promptness – he was a competent singer whom Adam knew and liked – and Rutherston, in the absence of about a third of the orchestra, was taking him through moves. The remaining two-thirds of the orchestra, along with the chorus and one or two of the principals, pottered funereally about engaged in muted execration of Peacock, who had declined to let them go home on the grounds that the remainder of the cast and of the orchestra might yet appear, and so enable them to do at least an hour’s work. Adam thought that on the whole he was justified, in view of the fact that the performance was due in less than a week’s time.
There were few lights in the auditorium, though it was possible to make out the coffered ceiling and the white balcony with the illuminated clock set in its centre. On either side there was one tier of boxes, almost antiseptically severe in design, with blue velvet curtains and concealed lighting; while on the carved shield above the proscenium-arch two symbolic young women were sprawled, scantily clad, lubriciously curved, and holding slender angelic trumpets to their lips. (‘They represent,’ said Fen, ‘the proctorial authority, summoning the youth of Oxford to virtue and sobriety.’) On the stage, Rutherston could be heard complaining to George Green about the demeanour of the apprentices in the brawl at the end of the second act. ‘They scamper about,’ he said, ‘like a herd of deer attacked by a Pekingese.’ In the orchestra-pit, a trombonist was doing a very creditable imitation of a Spitfire diving, and a clarinettist was surreptitiously playing jazz. John Barfield was seated in the front row of the stalls, consuming a large orange.
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