Ngaio Marsh - Hand in Glove

Alleyn said: “Just a minute, if you don’t mind.”

She looked at him in her leisurely unconcerned way. “What, again?” she remarked and sat down.

“Where exactly did you find the dog?”

With Pixie, it appeared, on the Green. It had taken Désirée and Bimbo some time to catch Li, and they must have looked, she said, pretty silly, if there’d been anyone to see them. She fitted a cigarette into a holder. Her beautiful gloves were dirty.

“Where had you come from?”

“My dears, we’d been dining near Bornlee Green. A dim general and his wife; and pretty heavy weather, by and large, we made of it.”

“Rather late for a dinner party.”

“With bridge afterwards, darling.”

“I see. Tell me,” Alleyn said, “have you seen or heard anything of Pyke Period since I left Baynesholme this afternoon?”

“No,” said Bimbo, at once. “Why?”

Alleyn turned to Désirée, who raised her eyebrows at him. “And you?” he asked her.

“I ran in for a moment on our way to Bomlee Green. There was something I wanted to tell him. Bimbo waited in the car.”

“Was it something about the letter we discussed just before I left Baynesholme?”

“Actually, yes.” She gave him a half smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I changed my mind. I told him.”

“I don’t know what anybody’s talking about,” Connie grumbled. She looked anxiously at Moppett, who had got herself under control and, with Leonard, stayed at the far end of the room, avidly listening.

“You’re not alone in that, Auntie,” said Moppett.

Bimbo said, loudly: “Look here, I don’t know if anybody agrees with me, but I’m getting very bored with the turn this affair is taking. We’re being asked all sorts of personal questions without the smallest reason being given, and I don’t feel inclined to take much more of it.”

“Hear, hear,” said Leonard. Bimbo glanced at him with profound distaste.

“I fear, my darling,” Désirée said, “you will have to lump it. Our finer feelings are not of much account, I fancy.”

“All the same, I want to know. What’s this about P.P.? Why the hell shouldn’t you call in to see him? We might be living in a police state,” he blustered, looking sideways at Alleyn.

“Mr. Dodds,” Alleyn said, “any visit to Mr. Period during the last few hours is perfectly relevant, since, at about eleven o’clock this evening, somebody attempted to murder him.”

There are not so very many ways in which people react to news of this sort. They may cry out in what appears to be astonishment, they may turn red or white and look ambiguous, or they may simply sit and gape. Bimbo and Désirée followed this last pattern.

After a moment Désirée exclaimed: “P.P.? Not true!” And, at the same time, Bimbo said: “Not possible!”

“On the contrary,” said Alleyn, “possible and, unfortunately, true.”

“Attempted to murder him,” Bimbo echoed. “How? Why?”

“With a brass paperweight. Possibly,” Alleyn said, turning to Désirée, “because you told him that I’d got the letter he sent by mistake to you.”

Looking at Désirée, Alleyn thought: But I won’t get any change out of you, my girl. If I’ve given you a jolt, you’re not going to let anyone know it.

“That seems very far-fetched,” she said composedly.

“Here!” Connie intervened. “Did you get a funny letter too, Désirée? Here — What is all this?”

“I’m afraid I don’t believe you,” Désirée said to Alleyn.

“You’ve no right to make an accusation of that sort,” Bimbo cried out. “Making out people are responsible for murderous attacks and not giving the smallest explanation. What evidence have you got?”

“Since the damage has been done,” Alleyn said, “I’m prepared to put a certain amount of the evidence before you.”

“Damn’ big of you, I must say! Though why it should concern Désirée—”

Alleyn said: “Directly or indirectly, you are all concerned.”

He waited for a moment. Nobody said anything and he went on:

“It’s too much to expect that each one of you will answer any questions fully or even truthfully, but it’s my duty to ask you to do so.”

“Why shouldn’t we?” Connie protested. “I don’t see why you’ve got to say a thing like that. Boysie always said that in murder trials the guilty have nothing to fear. He always said that. I mean the innocent,” she added distractedly. “You know what I mean.”

“How right he was. Very well, shall we start with that premise in mind? Now. Yesterday at luncheon, Mr. Cartell told a story about a man who cooked a baptismal register in order to establish blood relationship with a certain family. Those of you who were there may have thought that Mr. Period seemed to be very much put out by this anecdote. Would you agree?”

Connie said bluntly: “I thought P.P.’s behaviour was jolly peculiar. I thought he’d got his knife into Boysie about something.”

Moppett, who seemed to have regained her composure, said: “If you ask me, P.P. was terrified Uncle Hal would tell the whole story. He looked murder at him. Not that I mean anything by that.”

“In any case,” Alleyn continued, “Mr. Period was disturbed by the incident. He wrote a short and rather ambiguous letter to Miss Cartell, suggesting that his ancestry did, in fact, go back as far as anyone who bothered about such things might wish, and asking her to forgive him for pursuing the matter. At the same time he wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Bantling. Unfortunately he transferred the envelopes.”

“How bad is he?” Désirée asked suddenly.

Alleyn told her how bad Mr. Period seemed to be and she said: “We can take him if it’d help.”

Bimbo started to say something and stopped.

“Now this misfortune with the letter,” Alleyn plodded on, “threw him into a fever. On the one hand he had appeared to condole with Miss Cartell for a loss that had not yet been discovered, and, on the other, he had sent Lady Bantling a letter that he would give the world to withdraw, since, once it got into my hands, I might follow it up. As long as this letter remained undisclosed, Mr. Period remained unwilling to make any statement that might lead to an arrest for the murder of Mr. Cartell. He was afraid, first, that he might bring disaster upon an innocent person, and, second, that anything he said might lead to an examination of his own activities and Mr. Cartell’s veiled allusions to them. All this,” he added, “supposes him, for the moment, to be innocent of the murder.”

“Of course he is,” Désirée muttered impatiently. “Good Lord! P.P.!”

“You don’t know,” Bimbo intervened with a sharp look at her. “If he’d go to those lengths, he might go the whole hog.”

“Murder Hal, to save his own face! Honestly, darling!”

“You don’t know,” Bimbo repeated obstinately. “He might.”

“Assume for the moment,” Alleyn said, “that he didn’t, but that he was in possession of evidence that might well throw suspicion on someone else. Assume that his motive in not laying this information was made up of consideration for an old friend and fear of the consequences to himself. He learns that I have been told of yesterday’s luncheon party, and also that 1 have been given the letter that was occasioned by the conversation at the party. It’s more than possible that he heard, on the village grapevine, that I visited Ribblethorpe Church this afternoon. So the gaff, he thinks, is as good as blown. With a certain bit of evidence weighing on his conscience, he sends his man here with a note asking you, Miss Ralston, to visit him. Wanting to keep the encounter private, he suggests a late hour. After a good deal of discussion with Mr. Leiss, no doubt, you decide to fall in with this plan. You do, in fact, cross the Green at about 10:45, and visit Mr. Period in his library.”