Donald Bain - Gin and Daggers

Harris, who’d displayed some initial bravado, turned and looked at Jane Portelaine with eyes that sought help.

She stood, came around the table, and faced me. She looked the way she had at the reading of her aunt’s will-rose-colored lipstick outlined the contours of her mouth, and her hair was in that loose, becoming style. And, of course, there was the heavy scent of Victorian posy. “How dare you enter my home without my permission,” she said.

“I didn’t think you’d mind, Jane. After all, you’d instructed Marshall to accommodate me at my convenience.” I looked at Marshall, who’d abandoned his butler’s uniform for a more appropriate jacket and open shirt. He looked panicked.

Harris stood. “What in bloody hell is she talking about?” he snarled at Jane. “Invite her?”

I said, “Mr. Harris, Jane did not invite me this evening. She invited me yesterday while she was soaking up sun on the Costa del Sol.”

“It was a good time to let her do her snooping around,” Jane angrily answered Jason, “when no one was here.” She turned to me and said, “Please leave this house immediately. You are not welcome here.”

“I don’t think your aunt would feel that way, Jane.”

“My aunt is dead!”

“Yes, we all know that. The question is whether it was necessary to brutally do away with her in order for Mr. Harris to gain some measure of financial success that his own literary talents aren’t capable of generating.”

Harris sat down again and assumed a posture of nonchalance. He smiled at me, which offended me deeply, and said, “I don’t see why you should be upset, Mrs. Fletcher.” He lighted a cigarette and drew casually on it. “After all, I think you’ve had enough evidence presented to you to make the point that I did, in fact, write Gin and Daggers. You’ve had a chance to go over the manuscript.”

“I assume it was you who gave it to your stepbrother, Mr. Simpson here.”

“Yes… well, not exactly, but what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t. I had an opportunity yesterday to see Marjorie’s original manuscript. It contained none of the names and events you marked on the copy given to Mr. Simpson. Obviously, you, with Jane’s help, inserted those things after Marjorie had finished dictating it to embellish your claim of authorship. Unfortunately for you, there was one name you should have changed.”

“What’s that?” Harris asked, trying to sound incurious but failing.

“The name of your mentor’s friend and lover.”

“She had no such person,” Jane said.

“Oh yes she did, Jane.”

David Simpson displayed no emotion at all. He sat and stared at a large silver candelabrum in the center of the table.

“You are not his stepbrother, Mr. Simpson. That relationship was created so that you could identify the body dragged from the Thames as Jason. How big a slice of the pie were you to receive for that criminal act?”

He said nothing, but continued to stare at the ornate centerpiece.

I looked around the room before asking, “Where is Ms. Giacona?”

If Jane Portelaine had appeared to be angry before, her face now flooded with rage. “How dare you mention her in my house.”

“You didn’t have to hit her so hard, Jane. She didn’t deserve that.”

“She’s nothing but a slut.”

I looked at Jason. “But a useful one, obviously. She is a very good actress, Jason. She had me thoroughly convinced at first that she was deeply in love with you and was anxious to right the wrong of having your work attributed to someone else.”

Harris got up once again, came around the table, and stood next to Jane. “Why don’t you get out of here, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“To do what, make my announcement that you wrote Gin and Daggers? You didn’t really think I intended to do that tomorrow, did you?”

The first words out of Walter Cole’s mouth were “ I thought you were going to. You damn well announced you were going to. That’s why we’re celebrating tonight.”

“A wasted celebration, I’m afraid. I think the only announcement to be made will be that Jason Harris murdered Marjorie Ainsworth.”

I said it directly to Harris, and my words had their intended effect. His mask of defiance cracked a little, and he took a step toward me, as though to strike. Seth and Morton took their own instinctive steps forward, which caused Harris to think better of it.

“You can’t prove anything,” Harris said, leaning back against the edge of the table.

“I don’t think it will be difficult for the police to establish the fact that the body found in the Thames, and falsely identified as being you by your bogus stepbrother, was part of an elaborate, ill-conceived scheme.”

Harris started to say something but stopped himself.

I shook my head and smiled. “What a wonderful play this would have made. Why didn’t you write it, instead of acting it out? It might have had a long run in the West End.”

Walter Cole stood. “I don’t know what any of this is about, but I’m leaving. I’ve done nothing but agree to publish Jason’s works. No crime in that for a publisher.”

“Unless you were part of the conspiracy to enhance Jason’s worth in the marketplace. I have a feeling, Mr. Cole, that you were in on this from the very beginning-that the four of you sat down one night, probably with a few bottles of wine, and decided to pull a grand hoax on the world.”

I looked at Jane Portelaine. “How could you have betrayed your aunt this way?”

Until I asked that, she’d been glaring at me with a face of stone. There was a discernible tremor in her long, lean body, and her fists were clenched at her sides.

“Marjorie Ainsworth was a difficult person, Jane, but she did not deserve to have her life end that way.”

“She was old, about to die anyway,” Harris said from where he sat in Marjorie’s usual chair, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his fingers.

Now I was angry. I said, “I suppose the person floating in the Thames was old and about to die, too.”

Suddenly the room was bathed in harsh white light that poured through the window. Automobiles could be heard outside, along with the voices of many men. Marshall bolted from the table and ran into the adjacent drawing room. He looked through windows to the front, turned, and shouted, “There’s bloody police everywhere.”

“We can continue this discussion at Scotland Yard,” I said.

“There’ll be no discussion with me,” Jason said. “I didn’t kill the old lady, although I wouldn’t have minded doing it. I hated her, but I didn’t have to be the one to kill her.” He looked up at Jane. “Tell her how you did it, Jane, how you drove the stake into the witch’s heart.”

I stared at Jane, said nothing.

“It wasn’t hard, was it?” Harris said to Marjorie’s niece. “Over as quick as that.”

I continued to look at Jane and noticed that the nature of her trembling had changed. Now it was less born of anger and more rooted in other emotions. I asked softly, “Why, Jane?”

She slowly shook her head and lowered her eyes.

“Was it so important to you that Jason have a career he didn’t deserve that you would kill your own aunt?”

Jane’s voice matched the softening of her face. She slowly shook her head and said, “No.”

“Why did you kill her, Jane?”

“Because…” She slowly turned and looked at Jason Harris, who was smiling at her. She looked at me again and said, “Because I would lose him if I didn’t.”

The smug expression on Jason’s face caused me to want to rake it with my nails, throw lye in it, disfigure it the way the body dragged from the Thames had been disfigured.

The heavy metal knocker sounded against the front door. Marshall returned to the dining room, his face plastered with fright. “What do we do?” he asked Jason.