Ngaio Marsh - Black As He Is Painted

“Pack up,” Alleyn said, “and leave your stuff up the alley there. You’ll get a shout from Mr. Fox in a matter of seconds.”

“Is it a knock-off, sir?”

“It may be. If that lot, there, start to move, we hold them. Nice and quiet, though. All right. Make it quick. And when you get the office from Mr. Fox, come out here again where I can see you and we’ll move in. Right?”

“Right, sir.”

The delivery van from the Napoli lurched noisily down the Mews, did a complicated turn-about in front of the pottery, and went back the way it had come. Alleyn moved towards the pottery.

A police-car siren, braying in Baronsgate, was coming nearer. Another, closer at hand, approached from somewhere on the outer borders of the Capricorns.

Sergeant Jacks came out of the garage alleyway. Fox and Gibson had been quick.

Gomez walked rapidly up the Mews on the opposite side to Alleyn, who crossed over and stepped in front of him. The sirens, close at hand now, stopped.

“Mr. Sheridan?” Alleyn said.

For a moment the living image of an infuriated middle-aged man overlay that of the same man fifteen years younger in Mr. Whipplestone’s album. He had turned so white that his close-shaved beard started up, blue-black, as if it had been painted across his face.

He said: “Yes? My name is Sheridan.”

“Yes, of course. You’ve been trying to call upon the Sanskrits, haven’t you?”

He made a very slight movement: an adjustment of his weight, rather like Mr. Whipplestone’s cat preparing to spring or bolt. Fox had come up behind Alleyn. Two of Gibson’s uniform men had turned into the Mews from Capricorn Place. There were more large men converging on the pottery. Sergeant Jacks was talking to Chubb and Fred Gibson loomed over Colonel Cockburn-Montfort by the door into the flat.

Gomez stared from Alleyn to Fox. “What is this?” he lisped. “What do you want? Who are you?”

“We’re police officers. We’re about to effect an entry into the pottery and I suggest that you come with us. Better not to make a scene in the street, don’t you think?”

For a moment Gomez had looked as if he meant to do so, but he now said between his teeth: “I want to see those people.”

“Now’s your chance,” said Alleyn.

He glowered, hesitated, and then said: “Very well,” and walked between Alleyn and Fox towards the pottery.

Gibson and the sergeant were having no trouble. Chubb was standing bolt upright and saying nothing. Colonel Cockburn-Montfort had been detached from the bell, deftly rolled round and propped against the door-jamb by Gibson. His eyes were glazed and his mouth slightly open, but like Chubb he actually maintained a trace of his soldierly bearing.

Four uniform men had arrived and bystanders had begun to collect.

Alleyn rang the bell and knocked on the top of the door. He waited for half a minute and then said to one of the policemen: “It’s a Yale. Let’s hope it’s not double-locked. Got anything?”

The policeman fished in his breast pocket, produced a small polythene ready-reckoner of a kind used for conversion to metric quantities. Alleyn slid it past the tongue of the lock and manipulated it.

“Bob’s your uncle,” the constable murmured and the door was open.

Alleyn said to Fox and Gibson, “Would you wait a moment with these gentlemen.” He then nodded to the constables, who followed him in, one remaining inside the door.

“Hullo!” Alleyn called. “Anyone at homer

He had a resonant voice, but it sounded stifled in the airless flat. They were in a narrow lobby hung with dim native cloth of some sort and smelling of dust and the stale fumes of sandarac. A staircase rose steeply on the left from just inside the door. At the far end on the right was a door that presumably led into the shop. Two large suitcases, strapped and labelled, leant against the wall.

Alleyn turned on a switch and a pseudo-Oriental lamp with red panes came to life in the ceiling. He looked at the labels on the suitcases: Sanskrit, Ngombwana . “Come on,” he said.

He led the way upstairs. On the landing he called out again.

Silence.

There were four doors, all shut.

Two bedrooms, small, exotically furnished, crowded and in disarray. Discarded garments flung on unmade beds. Cupboards and drawers open and half-emptied. Two small, half-packed suitcases. An all-pervading and most unlovely smell.

A bathroom, stale and grubby, smelling of hot wet fat. The wall-cupboard was locked.

Finally, a large, heavily furnished room with divans, deep rugs, horrid silk-shaded and beaded lamps, incense burners, and a number of ostensibly African artifacts. But no Sanskrits.

They returned downstairs. Alleyn opened the door at the end of the lobby and walked through.

He was in the piggery.

It was very dark. Only a thin sliver of light penetrated the slit between the heavy window curtains.

He stood inside the door with the two uniform men behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom the interior began to emerge: a desk, a litter of paper and packing material, open cases, and on the shelves, dimly flowering, one pottery pig. The end of the old stable formed, as he remembered, a sort of alcove or cavern in which were the kiln and a long work table. He saw a faint red glow there now.

He was taken with a sensation of inertia that he had long ago learnt to recognize as the kind of nightmare which drains one of the power to move.

As now, when his hand was unable to grope about the dirty wall for a light switch.

The experience never lasted for more than a few seconds, and now it had passed and left him with the knowledge that he was watched.

Someone at the far end of the shop, in the alcove room, sitting on the other side of the work table, was watching him: a looming mass that he had mistaken for shadow.

It began to define itself. An enormous person whose chin rested with a suggestion of doggy roguishness on her arm, and whose eyes were very wide open indeed.

Alleyn’s hand found the switch and the room was flooded with light.

It was Miss Sanskrit who ogled him so coyly with her chin on her arm and her head all askew and her eyes wide open.

Behind the table with his back towards her, with his vast rump upheaved and with his head and arms and barrel submerged in a packing case like a monstrous puppet doubled over its box, dangled her brother. They were both dead.

And between them, on the floor and the bench, were blooded shards of pottery.

And in the packing case lay the headless carcass of an enormous pottery pig.

A whispered stream of obscenities had been surprised out of one of the constables, but he had stopped when Alleyn walked into the alcove and had followed a short way behind.

“Stay where you are,” Alleyn said, and then: “No! One of you get that lot in off the street and lock the door. Take them to the room upstairs, keep them there and stay with them. Note anything that’s said.

“The other call Homicide and give the necessary information. Ask Mr. Fox and Mr. Gibson to come here.”

They went out, shutting the door behind them. In a minute Alleyn heard sounds of a general entry and of people walking upstairs.

When Fox and Gibson arrived they found Alleyn standing between the Sanskrits. They moved towards him but checked when he raised his hand.

“This is nasty,” Fox said. “What was it?”

“Come and see but walk warily.”

They moved round the table and saw the back of Miss Sanskrit’s head. It was smashed in like an egg. Beetroot-dyed hair, dark and wet, stuck in the wound. The back of her dress was saturated — there was a dark puddle on the table under her arm. She was dressed for the street. Her bloodied hat lay on the floor and her handbag was on the work table.