Ngaio Marsh - Hand in Glove

“You’re only guessing,” Moppett said. “You don’t know.”

“You enter the library by the French windows. During the interview you smoke. You drop ash on the carpet and grind it in with your heel. You leave two butts of Mainsail cigarettes in the ashtray. Mr. Period tells you he heard someone whistling in the lane very late last night and that he recognized the tune. You and Mr. Leiss knew your way about the garden, I believe. To support this theory, we have the theft of Mr. Period’s cigarette case—”

“I never,” Leonard interrupted, “heard anything so fantastic. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“…Which you, Mr. Leiss, left on the sill, having opened the window with this theft in mind. Subsequently, it may be, the case became too hot and you threw it in the drain, hoping it would be supposed that Mr. Period had lost it there, or that the workmen had stolen and dumped it. Alternatively, you might have dropped it, inadvertently, when you altered the planks in order to bring about Mr. Cartell’s death.”

He waited for a moment. An all-too-familiar look of conceit and insolence appeared in Leonard. He stretched out his legs, leant back in his chair and stared through half-closed eyes at the opposite wall. A shadow trembled on his shirt and he kept his hands in his pockets.

Connie said: “It’s not true: none of it’s true.”

Moppett repeated: “Not true,” in a whisper.

“As to what actually took place at this interview,” Alleyn went on, “Mr. Period will no doubt be willing to talk about it when he recovers. My guess would be that he tackled Miss Ralston pretty firmly, told her what he suspected, and said that if she could give him an adequate explanation he would, for Miss Cartell’s sake, go no further. She may have admitted she was the whistler he heard from his window and said that she had come into his garden on the way home from the party to get water for Mr. Leiss’s car-radiator, which had sprung a leak. I think this explanation is true.”

Moppett cried out: “Of course it’s true. I did. I got the water and I put the bloody can back. I remembered having seen it under the tap.”

“After lunch, when you took Mr. Period’s cigarette case off the sill?”

“Fantastic!” Leonard repeated. “That’s all. Fantastic!”

“Very well,” Alleyn said. “Let it remain in the realms of fantasy.”

“If it’s in order,” Désirée said. “I’d like to ask something.”

“Of course.”

“Are we meant to think that whoever threw the fish laid the trap for Hal?”

“A fish?” Leonard asked with an insufferable air of innocence. “But has anyone said anything about a fish?”

Désirée disregarded him. She said to Alleyn: “I ought to know. I gave it to P.P. yesterday morning. He’s dotty about pikes and this thing looked like one. He put it in the library.…Could I have an answer to my question?”

“I think the murderer and the paperweight thrower are one and the same person.”

“Good,” said Désirée. “That lets us out, Bimbo.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Bimbo said with a short laugh. “Why?”

“Well, because neither of us has the slightest motive for hurling anything at P.P.”

“Isn’t he one of the trustees for Andrew Bantling’s estate?” Leonard asked of nobody in particular.

She turned her head and looked very steadily at him. “Certainly,” she said. “What of it?”

“I was just wondering, Lady Bantling. You might have discussed business with Mr. Period when you called on him this evening?”

Bimbo said angrily: “I’m afraid I fail entirely to see why you should wonder anything of the sort, or how you can possibly know the smallest thing about it.”

“Yes, but I do, as it happens. I heard you talking things over with your dashing stepson at the party.”

“Good God!” Bimbo said, and turned up his eyes.

Désirée said to Alleyn: “I told you. I called to own up that I’d given you his letter. I felt shabby about it and wanted to get it off my chest.”

“What’s his attitude about the Grantham Gallery proposal, do you know?”

“Oh,” Désirée said easily, “he waffles.”

“He’ll be all right,” Bimbo said.

“Just a moment,” Leonard intervened. He still lay back in his chair and looked at the ceiling but there was a new edge in his voice. “If you’re talking about this proposition to buy an art gallery,” he said, “I happen to know P.P. was all against it.”

Bimbo said: “You met Mr. Period for the first time when you got yourself asked to lunch in his house. I fail to see how that gives you any insight into his views on anything.”

“You don’t,” Leonard observed, “have to know people all their lives to find out some of the bits and pieces. The same might apply to you, chum. How about that affair over a certain club?”

“You bloody little pipsqueak—”

“All right, darling,” Désirée said easily. “Pipe down. It couldn’t matter less.”

“Not when you marry money, it couldn’t,” Leonard agreed offensively.

Bimbo strode down the room towards him: “By God, if the police don’t do something about you, I will.”

Fox rose from obscurity. “Now, then, sir,” he said blandly. “We mustn’t get too hot, must we?”

“Get out of my way.”

Leonard was on his feet. Moppett snatched his arm. He jabbed at her with his elbow, side-stepped, and backed down the room, his hand in his jacket pocket. Alleyn took him from behind by the arms.

“You’ve forgotten,” he said. “I’ve got your knife.”

Leonard uttered an elaborate obscenity, and at the same time Fox, with the greatest economy, caused Bimbo to drop backwards into the nearest chair. “That’s right, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to get too warm. It wouldn’t look well, in the circumstances, would it?”

Bimbo swore at him. “I demand,” he said, pointing a bandaged hand at Alleyn, “I demand an explanation. You’re keeping us here without authority. You’re listening to a lot of bloody, damaging, malicious lies. If you suspect one of us, I demand to know who and why. Now then!”

“Fair enough,” said Désirée. “You stick out for your rights, duckie. All the same,” she added, looking Alleyn full in the face, “I don’t believe he knows. He’s letting us cut up rough and hoping something will come out of it. Aren’t you, Rory?”

She was inviting Alleyn, as he very well knew, to acknowledge, however slightly, that he and she spoke the same language: that alone, of all this assembly, they could understand each other without elaboration. He released the now quiescent Leonard and answered her directly.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t quite like that. It’s true that I believe I know who murdered Harold Cartell. I believe that there is only one of you who fills the bill. Naturally, I’m looking for all the corroborative evidence I can find.”

“I demand—” Bimbo reiterated, but his wife cut him short.

“All right, darling,” she said. “So you’ve told us. You demand an explanation and I rather fancy you’re going to get it. So do pipe down.” She returned to Alleyn. “Are you going to tell us,” she asked, “that we all had red-hot motives for getting rid of Hal? Because I feel sure we did.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” he said, “the police are concerned less with motive than with opportunity and behaviour. But, yes. As it happens you all had motives of a sort. Yours, for instance, could be thought to come under the heading of maternal love.”

“Could it, indeed?” said Désirée.

“By God!” Bimbo shouted, but Alleyn cut him short.

“And you,” he said, “wanted to invest in this project that Cartell wouldn’t countenance. Judging from the unopened bills on your desk and your past history, this could be a formidable motive.”