Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

“And I’m sure you must want to have the whole thing cleared up as soon and as quietly as possible.”

“Clear enough, isn’t it? She’s dead. You can’t have it much clearer than that.”

“You can’t indeed. But you see it’s our job to find out why.”

“Short of seeing it happen you wouldn’t get much nearer, would you? If you can read, that is.”

“You mean the tin of Slaypest?”

“Well, it wasn’t perfume,” Florence said impertinently. “They put that in bottles.” She shot a glance at Alleyn and seemed to undergo a slight change of temper. Her lips trembled and she compressed them. “It wasn’t all that pleasant,” she said. “Seeing what I seen. Finding her like that. You’d think I might be let alone.”

“So you will be if you behave like a sensible girl. You’ve been with her a long time, haven’t you?”

“Thirty years, near enough.”

“You must have got along very well to have stayed together all that time.”

Florence didn’t answer and he waited. At last she said, “I knew her ways.”

“And you were fond of her?”

“She was all right. Others might have their own ideas. I knew ’er. Inside out. She’d talk to me like she wouldn’t to others. She was all right.”

It was, Alleyn thought, after its fashion, a tribute.

He said, “Florence, I’m going to be very frank indeed with you. Suppose it wasn’t an accident. You’d want to know, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s no good you thinking she did it deliberate. She never! Not she. Wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t mean suicide.”

Florence watched him for a moment. Her mouth, casually but emphatically painted, narrowed into a scarlet thread.

“If you mean murder,” she said flatly, “that’s different.”

“You’d want to know,” he repeated. “Wouldn’t you?”

The tip of her tongue showed for a moment in the corner of her mouth. “That’s right,” she said.

“So do we. Now, Inspector Fox has already asked you about this, but never mind, I’m asking you again. I want you to tell me in as much detail as you can remember just what happened from the time when Miss Bellamy dressed for her party up to the time you entered her room and found her — as you did find her. Let’s start with the preparations, shall we?”

She was a difficult subject. She seemed to be filled with some kind of resentment and everything had to be dragged out of her. After luncheon, it appeared, Miss Bellamy rested. At half-past four Florence went in to her. She seemed to be “much as usual.”

“She hadn’t been upset by anything during the day?”

“Nothing,” Florence muttered, after a further silence, “to matter.”

“I only ask,” Alleyn said, “because there’s a bottle of sal volatile left out in the bathroom. Did you give her sal volatile at any stage?”

“This morning.”

“What was the matter, this morning? Was she faint?”

Florence said, “Overexcited.”

“About what?”

“I couldn’t say,” Florence said, and shut her mouth like a trap.

“Very well,” he said patiently. “Let’s get on with the preparation for the party. Did you give her a facial treatment of some kind?”

She stared at him. “That’s correct,” she said. “A mask.”

“What did she talk about, Florence?”

“Nothing. You don’t with that stuff over your face. Can’t.”

“And then.”

“She make up and dressed. The two gentlemen came in and I went out.”

“That would be Mr. Templeton and — who?”

“The Colonel.”

“Did either of them bring her Parma violets?”

She stared at him. “Vi’lets? Them? No. She didn’t like vi’lets.”

“There’s a bunch on her dressing-table.”

“I never noticed,” she said. “I don’t know anything about vi’lets. There wasn’t any when I left the room.”

“And you saw her again — when?”

“At the party.”

“Well, let’s hear about it.”

For a second or two he thought she was going to keep mum. She had the least eloquent face he had ever seen. But she began to speak as if somebody had switched her on. She said that from the time she left her mistress and during the early part of the cocktail party she had been with Mrs. Plumtree in their little sitting room. When the gong sounded they went down to take their places in the procession. After the speeches were over Old Ninn had dropped her awful brick about candles. Florence recounted the incident with detachment, merely observing that Old Ninn was, in fact, very old and sometimes forgot herself. “Fifty candles,” Florence said grimly. “What a remark to pass!” It was the only piece of comment, so far, that she had proffered. She had realized, Alleyn gathered, that her mistress had been upset and thinking she might be wanted had gone into the hall. She heard her mistress speak for a moment to Mr. Templeton, something about him asking her not to use her scent. Up to here Florence’s statement had been about as emotional as a grocery list, but at this point she appeared to boggle. She looked sideways at Alleyn, seemed to lose her bearings and came to a stop.

Alleyn said, “That’s all perfectly clear so far. Then did Miss Bellamy and the nanny — Mrs. Plumtree, isn’t it? — go upstairs together?”

Florence, blankly staring, said, “No.”

“They didn’t? What happened exactly?”

Ninn, it appeared, had gone first.

“Why? What delayed Miss Bellamy?”

“A photographer come butting in.”

“He took a photograph of her, did he?”

“That’s right. By the front door.”

“Alone?”

“ He came in. The chap wanted him in too.”

“Who?”

Her hands ground together in her lap. After waiting for a moment he asked, “Don’t you want to answer that one?”

“I want to know,” Florence burst out, “if it’s murder. If it’s murder I don’t care who it was, I want to see ’er righted. Never mind who! You can be mistaken in people, as I often told her. Them you think nearest and dearest are likely as not the ones that you didn’t ought to trust. What I told her. Often and often.”

How vindictive, Alleyn wondered, was Florence? Of what character, precisely, was her relationship with her mistress? She was looking at him now, guardedly but with a kind of arrogance. “What I want to know,” she repeated, “is it murder?”

He said, “I believe it may be.”

She muttered, “You ought to know: being trained to it. They tell you the coppers always know.”

From what background had Florence emerged nearly thirty years ago into Miss Bellamy’s dressing-room? She was speaking now like a Bermondsey girl. Fly and wary. Her voice, hitherto negative and respectable, had ripened into strong Cockney.

Alleyn decided to take a long shot. He said, “I expect you know Mr. Richard Dakers very well, don’t you?”

“Hardly help meself, could I?”

“No, indeed. He was more like a son than a ward to her, I daresay.”

Florence stared at him out of two eyes that closely resembled, and were about as eloquent as, boot-buttons.

“Acted like it,” she said. “If getting nothing but the best goes for anything. And taking it as if it was ’is right.”

“Well,” Alleyn said lightly, “he’s repaid her with two very successful plays, hasn’t he?”

“Them! What’d they have been without her? See another actress in the lead! Oh dear! What a change! She made them, he couldn’t have touched it on ’is own. She’d have breathed life into a corpse,” Florence said and then looked sick.

Alleyn said, “Mr. Dakers left the house before the speeches, I understand?”

“He did. What a way to behave!”