Ngaio Marsh - Hand in Glove

“Nothing! My man must have made a nonsense.”

“Your man didn’t, by some act of clairvoyance, anticipate a letter of condolence, and forge a copy and deliver it to a lady before anyone knew she was bereaved?”

“There’s no need to be facetious,” said Mr. Period.

“I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s an extremely serious matter.”

“Very well,” Mr. Period said angrily. “Very well! I ah — I—ah — I had occasion to write to Connie Cartell about something else. Something entirely different and extremely private.”

Astonishingly he broke into a crazy little laugh which seemed immediately to horrify him. He stared wildly at Alleyn. “I — ah — I must have—” He stopped short. Alleyn would have thought it impossible for him to become redder in the face, but he now did so. “The wrong letter,” he said, “was put in the envelope. Obviously.”

“But that doesn’t explain…Wait a bit!” Alleyn exclaimed. “Come!” he said after a moment. “Perhaps sense does begin to dawn after all. Tell me, and I promise I’ll be as discreet as may be, has anybody else of your acquaintance been bereaved of a brother?”

Mr. Period’s eyeglass dropped with a click. “In point of fact,” he said unhappily, “yes.”

“When?”

“It was in yesterday’s — ah! I heard of it yesterday.”

“And wrote?”

Mr. Period inclined his head.

“And the letter was…” Alleyn wondered how on earth his victim’s discomfiture could be reduced, and decided there was nothing much to be done about it. “The letters were identical?” he suggested. “After all, why not? One can’t go on forever inventing consolatory phrases.”

Mr. Period bowed and was silent. Alleyn hurried on. “Do you mind giving me, in confidence, the name of the—” It was difficult to avoid a touch of grotesquery. “The other bereaved sister?”

“Forgive me. I prefer not.”

Remembering there was always Nicola and the Daily Telegraph , Alleyn didn’t press the point.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you wouldn’t mind telling me what the missing letter was about: I mean, the one that you intended for Miss Cartell?”

“Again,” Mr. Period said with miserable dignity, “I regret.” He really looked as if he might cry.

“Presumably it has gone to the other bereaved sister? The wrong letter in the right envelope, as it were?”

Mr. Period momentarily closed his eyes as if overtaken by nausea and said nothing.

“You know,” Alleyn went on very gently, “I have to ask about these things. If they’re irrelevant to the case I can’t tell you how completely and thankfully one puts them out of mind.”

“They are irrelevant,” Mr. Period assured him with vehemence. “Believe me, believe me, they are. Entirely irrelevant! My dear Alleyn — really — I promise you. There now,” Mr. Period concluded with crackpot gaiety, “ ’nuff said! Tell me, my dear fellow, you did have luncheon? I meant to suggest…but this frightful business puts everything out of one’s head. Not , I hope, at our rather baleful little pub?”

He babbled on distractedly. Alleyn listened in the hope of hearing something useful, and, this not being the case, brought him up with a round turn.

He said: “There’s one other thing. I understand that Lady Bantling drove you home last night?”

Mr. Period gaped at him. “But, of course,” he said at last. “Dear Désirée! So kind. Of course! Why?”

“And I believe,” Alleyn plodded on, “that after you had left her she didn’t at once return to Baynesholme, but went into your garden and from there conducted a duologue with Mr. Cartell, who was looking out of his bedroom window. Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I don’t — really, I don’t know.”

“But I think you do. You looked through your own bedroom window and asked if anything was the matter.”

“And nothing was!” Mr. Period ejaculated with a kind of pale triumph. “Nothing! She said so! She said—”

“She said: ‘Nothing in the wide world. Go to bed, darling.”

“Precisely. So exuberant, always!”

“Did you hear anything of the conversation?”

“Nothing!” Mr. Period ejaculated. “Nothing at all! But nothing. I simply heard their voices. And in my opinion she was just being naughty and teasing poor old Hal.”

As Mr. Period could not be dislodged from this position Alleyn made his excuses and sought out Nicola in the study.

She was able to find a copy of yesterday’s Telegraph . He read through the obituary notices.

“Look here,” he said, “your employer is in a great taking-on about his correspondence. Did you happen to notice what mail was ready to go out yesterday evening?”

“Yes,” Nicola said. “Two letters.”

“Local addresses?”

“That’s right,” she said uneasily.

“Mind telling me what they were?”

“Well — I mean…”

“All right. Were they to Miss Cartell and Désirée, Lady Bantling?”

“Why ask me,” Nicola said, rather crossly, “if you alread know?”

“I was tricking you, my pretty one, oiled Hawkshaw the detective.”

“Ha-ha, very funny… I suppose,” Nicola sourly remarked.

“Well, only fairly funny.” Alleyn had wandered over to the corner of the room that bore Mr. Period’s illuminated genealogy. “He seems woundily keen on begatteries,” he muttered. “Look at all this. Hung up in a dark spot for modesty’s sake, but framed and hung up, all the same. It’s not an old one. Done at his cost, I’ll be bound.”

“How do you know?”

“If you keep on asking ‘feed’ questions you must expect to be handed the pay-off line. By the paper, gilt and paint.”

“Oh.”

“Where’s Ribblethorpe?”

“Beyond Baynesholme, I think.”

“The Pyke family seems to have come from there.”

“So I’ve been told,” Nicola sighed, “and at some length, poor lamb. He went on and on about it yesterday after luncheon. I think he was working something off.”

“Tell me again about the conversation at lunch.”

Nicola did so and he thanked her.

“I must go,” he said.

“Where to?”

“Oh — up and down in the world seeking whom I may devour. See you later, no doubt.”

As he left the house Alleyn thought: That was all pretty bloody facetious, but the girl makes me feel young. And as he got into the police car he added to himself: But so, after all, does my wife. And that’s what I call being happily married.

“To Baynesholme,” he added, to his driver. On the way there, he sat with his hat cocked forward, noticing that spring was advancing in the countryside and wondering what Désirée Ormsbury, as he remembered her, would look like after all these years. Pretty tough, I daresay, what with one thing and another, he supposed; and when he was shown into her boudoir and she came forward to greet him, he found he had been right.

Désirée was wearing tight pants and an Italian shirt. The shirt was mostly orange and so were her hair and lipstick. Her make-up generally was impressionistic rather than representational and her hands quite desperately haggard.

But when she grinned at him there was the old raffish, disreputable charm he remembered so well, and he thought: “She’s formidable, still.”

“It is you, then,” she said hoarsely. “I wasn’t sure if it was going to be you or your brother — George, was he? — who’d turned into a policeman.”

“I wonder at your remembering either of us.”

“I do, though. But of course George turned into a baronet. You’re Rory, the dashing one.”

“You appall me,” Alleyn said.

“You don’t look all that different. I wish I could say as much for myself. Shall we have a drink?”