Ngaio Marsh - Dead Water

When they had eaten a flaccid lunch they called on the nearest J.P. and picked up a search-warrant for Wally’s cottage. They went on to the station, where Alleyn collected a short piece of the trip wire. It was agreed that he would return to the Boy-and-Lobster; Coombe was to remain at the station, relieving his one spare constable, until the Yard men arrived. He would then telephone Alleyn at the Boy-and-Lobster. Pender would remain on duty at Miss Cost’s shop.

Coombe said: “It’s an unusual business, this. You finding the body, and then this gap before your chaps come in.”

“I hope you’ll still be on tap, but I do realize it’s taking more time than you can spare.”

“Well, you know how it is.” He waited for a moment and then said: “I appreciate your reluctance to form a theory too soon. I mean, it’s what we all know. You can’t. But as I’m pulling out, I can’t help saying it looks a sure thing to me. Here’s this dopey kid as good as letting on he pitched in with the stones. There’s more than a hint that his old man was behind it, and a damn good indication that he set the trip wire. The kid says Miss Pride came back, and there’s every likelihood he mistook Miss Cost for her. I reckon he’d let himself into the enclosure and was up by the boulder. He looked down and saw the umbrella below and let fly at it. I mean — well, it hangs together, doesn’t it?”

“Who do you think planted the figurine in Miss Pride’s sitting-room and sent her the anonymous messages and rang her up?”

“Well, she reckons Miss Cost.”

“So Miss Cost’s death was the end product of the whole series? Laid on, you might say, by herself?”

“In a sense. Yes.”

“Has it struck you at all,” Alleyn asked, “that there’s one feature of the whole story about which nobody seems to show the slightest curiosity?”

“I can’t say it has.”

Alleyn took from his pocket the figurine that he had wrapped in paper and in his handkerchief. He opened it up and, holding it very gingerly, stood it on Coombe’s desk. The single word, Death, gummed to a sheet of paper, was still fixed in position.

“Nobody,” Alleyn said, “as far as I can gather, has ever asked themselves who was the original Green Lady.”

“That piece of paper,” Alleyn said, “is not the kind used for the original messages. It’s the same make as this other piece, which is a bit of the Boy-and-Lobster letter paper. The word Death is not in a type that is used in your local rag. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s from a London sporting paper called the Racing Supplement . The printer’s ink, as you see, is a bluish black, and the type’s distinctive. Was Miss Cost a racing fan?”

“Her?” Coombe said. “Don’t be funny.”

“The Major is. He takes the Racing Supplement .”

“Does he, by gum!”

“Yes. Have you got a dabs-kit handy?”

“Nothing very flash, but, yes: we’ve got the doings.”

Alleyn produced his box of cigars. “He opened this up. There ought to be good impressions inside the lid. Bailey can give it the full works, if necessary, but we’ll take a fly at it, shall we?”

Coombe got out his insufflator and a lens. They developed a good set of prints on the lid, and turned to the paper impaled over the figurine’s head.

After a minute or two Alleyn gave a satisfied grunt.

“Fair enough,” he said. “The prints of index and thumb are as good as you’d ask. I think I’ll call on the gallant Major.”

He left Coombe still poring lovingly over the exhibits, walked down to his car, collected his suitcases and crossed by the hotel launch to the Island. Trehern was in charge. His manner unattractively combined truculence with servility.

It was now two o’clock.

The Major, it presently transpired, was in the habit of taking a siesta.

“He got used to it in India,” Mrs. Barrimore said. “People do.”

Alleyn had run into her at the door of the old pub. She was perfectly composed and remote in her manner: a beautiful woman who could not, he thought, ever be completely unaware of the effect she made. It was inescapable. She must, over and over again, have seen it reflected in the eyes of men who looked at, and at once recognized, her. She was immensely attractive.

He said: “Perhaps, in the meantime, I may have a word with you?”

“Very well. In the parlour, if you like. The children are out, just now.”

“The children?”

“Jenny and Patrick. I should have said ‘the young,’ I expect. Will you come in?”

He could hardly recognize the woman he had seen in her garden veering this way and that like a rudderless ship and unable to control her hands. She sat perfectly still and allowed him to look at her while she kept her own gaze on her quietly interlaced fingers.

He supposed she must have had a hand in the transformation of the old bar-parlour into a private living-room: if so she could have taken little interest in the process. Apart from the introduction of a few unexceptionable easy-chairs, one or two photographs, a noncommittal assembly of books and a vase of the flowers she had so mishandled in the garden, it must be much as it was two years ago: an impersonal room.

Alleyn began by following the beaten path of routine investigation. He tried to establish some corroboration of her alibi — though he did not give it this name — for the period covered by Miss Emily’s visit to the enclosure up to the probable time of Miss Cost’s death. There was none to be had. Nobody had visited the kitchen-dining-room while she drank her coffee and ate her toast. The servants were all busy in the main building. Jenny and Patrick had breakfasted in the public dining-room; her husband was presumably asleep. Alleyn gathered that they occupied separate rooms. She had no idea how long this solitary meal had lasted. When it was over she had attended to one or two jobs; interviewed the kitchen staff and then gone up to her room and changed from a housecoat to a day dress. When she came downstairs again, she had found the young people in the parlour. Alleyn had arrived soon afterwards.

“And for the rest of the morning,” he asked casually, “did you go out at all?”

“No further than the garden,” she said after a fractional pause. “I went into the garden for a time.”

“To cut flowers?” he suggested, looking at those in the room.

She lifted her eyes to his for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “to cut flowers. I do the flowers on Sunday as a rule: it takes quite a time. Jenny helped me,” she added as an afterthought.

“In the garden?”

Again the brief look at him, this time, perhaps, fractionally less controlled. “No. Not in the garden. In the house. Afterwards.”

“So you were alone in the garden?”

She said quickly, with the slight hesitation he had noticed before in her speech: “Yes. Alone. Why d-do you keep on about the garden? What interest can it have for you? It was after — afterwards. Long afterwards.”

“Yes, of course. Did the news distress you very much, Mrs. Barrimore?”

The full, unbridled mouth, so much at variance with the rest of her face, moved as if to speak; but, as in a badly synchronized sound-film, her voice failed. Then she said: “Naturally. It’s a terrible thing to have happened, isn’t it?”

“You were fond of Miss Cost?”

Something in her look reminded him, fantastically, of the strange veiling of a bird’s eyes. Hers were heavy-lidded and she had closed them for a second. “Not particularly,” she said. “We had nothing—” She stopped, unaccountably.

“Nothing in common?”

She nodded. Her hands moved but she looked at them and refolded them in her lap.