Ngaio Marsh - Grave Mistake

Mr. Markos fetched from his car two large sheets of cardboard tied together. “Do you remember,” he asked, “when we examined Prunella’s original plans of Quintern Place there was a smaller plan of the grounds that you said you had not seen before?”

“Yes, of course.”

“This is it.”

He put the cardboards on the table and opened them out. There was the plan.

“I think it is later than the others,” he said, “and by a different hand. It is drawn on the scale of a quarter of an inch to the foot and is very detailed. Now. Have a close, a very close look. Can you find a minute extra touch that doesn’t explain itself? Take your time,” Mr. Markos invited, with an air of extraordinary relish. He took her arm and led her close to the table.

Verity felt that he was making a great build-up and that the climax had better be good but she obediently pored over the map.

Since it was a scheme for laying out the grounds, the house was shown simply as an outline. The stable block was indicated in the same manner. Verity, not madly engaged, plodded conscientiously over elaborate indications of water-gardens, pavilions, fountains, terraces and spinnies but although they suggested a prospect that Evelyn himself would have treasured, she could find nothing untoward. She was about to say so when she noticed that within the empty outline of the stables there was an interior line suggesting a division into two rooms, a line that seemed to be drawn free-hand in pencil rather than ruled in the brownish ink of the rest of the plan. She bent down to examine it more closely and found, in one corner of the indicated stableroom a tiny X, also, she was sure, pencilled.

Mr. Markos, who had been watching her intently, gave a triumphant little crow. “Aha!” he cried. “You see! You’ve spotted it.”

“Well, yes,” said Verity. “If you mean—” and she pointed to the pencilled additions.

“Of course, of course. And what, my dear Miss Preston-Watson, do you deduce? You know my methods. Don’t bustle.”

“Only, I’m afraid, that someone at some time has thought of making some alteration in the old stable buildings.”

“A strictly Watsonian conclusion: I must tell you that at the moment a workman is converting the outer half of the amended portion — now an open-fronted broken-down lean-to, into a mushroom bed.”

“That will be Bruce, the gardener. Perhaps he and Sybil, in talking over the project, got out this plan and marked the place where it was to go.”

“But why ‘the point marked X’? It does not indicate the mushroom bed. It is in a deserted room that opens off the mushroom shed.”

“They might have changed their minds.”

“It is crammed into a corner where there are the remains of an open fireplace. I must tell you that after making this discovery I strolled round the stable yard and examined the premises.”

“I can’t think of anything else,” said Verity.

“I have cheated. I have withheld evidence. You must know, as Scheherazade would have said, meaning that you are to learn, that a few evenings after Prunella brought the plans to Mardling she found me poring over this one in the library. She remarked that it was strange that I should be so fascinated by it and then, with one of her nervous little spurts of confidence (she is , you will have noticed, unusually but, Heaven knows, understandably nervous just now), she told me that the egregious Claude Carter exhibited a similar interest in the plans and had been discovered examining this one through a magnifying glass. And I should like to know,” cried Mr. Markos, sparkling at Verity, “what you make of all that!”

Verity did not make a great deal of it. She knew he expected her to enter into zestful speculation but, truth to tell she found herself out of humour with the situation. There was something unbecoming in Nikolas Markos’s glee over his discovery and if, as she suspected, he was going to link it in some way with Sybil Foster’s death, she herself wanted no part in the proceedings. At the same time she felt apologetic — guilty, even — about her withdrawal, particularly as she was sure he was very well aware of it “He really is,” she thought, “so remarkably sharp.”

“To look at the situation quite cold-bloodedly,” he was saying, “and of course that is the only sensible way to look at it, the police clearly are treating Mrs. Foster’s death as a case of homicide. This being so, anything untoward that has occurred at Quintern either before or after the event should be brought to their notice. You agree?”

Verity pulled herself together. “I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course. Unless they’ve already found it out for themselves. What’s the matter?”

“If they have not, we have, little as I welcome the intrusion, an opportunity to inform them. Alas, you have a visitor, dear Verity,” said Mr. Markos and quickly kissed her hand.

Alleyn, in fact, was walking up the drive.

iv

“I’m sorry,” he said, “to come at such an unlikely time of day but I’m on my way back from Quintern Place and I thought perhaps you might like to know about the arrangements for this evening and tomorrow.”

He told them. “I daresay the Vicar will let you know,” he added, “but in case he doesn’t, that’s what will happen.”

“Thank you,” Verity said. “We were to do flowers first thing in the morning. It had better be this afternoon, hadn’t it? Nice of you to think of it.”

She told herself she knew precisely why she was glad Alleyn had arrived: idiotically it was because of Mr. Markos’s manner, which had become inappropriately warm. Old hand though she was, this had flustered Verity. He had made assumptions. He had been too adroit. Quite a long time had gone by since assumptions had been made about Verity and still longer since she had been ruffled by them. Mr. Markos made her feel clumsy and foolish.

Alleyn had spotted the plan. He said Prunella had mentioned the collection. He bent over it, made interested noises, looked closer and finally took out a pocket lens. Mr. Markos crowed delightedly: “At last!” he cried, “we can believe you are the genuine article.” He put his arm round Verity and gave her a quick little squeeze. “What is he going to look at?” he said. “What do you think?”

And when Alleyn used his lens over the stable buildings, Mr. Markos was enraptured.

“There’s an extra bit pencilled in,” Alleyn said. “Indicating the room next the mushroom bed.”

“So, my dear Alleyn, what do you make of that ?”

“Nothing very much, do you?”

“Not of the ‘point marked X’? No buried treasure, for instance? Come!”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “you can always dig for it, can’t you? Actually it marks the position of a dilapidated fireplace. Perhaps there was some thought of renovating the rooms. A flat for the gardener, for instance.”

“Do you know,” Verity exclaimed, “I believe I remember Sybil said something about doing just that. Setting him up on the premises because his room at his sister’s house was tiny and he’d nowhere to put his things and they didn’t hit it off, anyway.”

“No doubt you are right, both of you,” admitted Mr. Markos, “but what a dreary solution. I am desolate.”

“Perhaps I can cheer you up with news of an unexpected development,” said Alleyn. “It emerges that Bruce Gardener was Captain Maurice Carter’s soldier-servant during the war.”

After a considerable interval Mr. Markos said: “The gardener . You mean the local man? Are you saying that this was known to Sybil Foster? And to Prunella? No. No, certainly not to Prunella.”

“Not, it seems, even to Gardener himself.”