Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

Bertie, looking frightened, said to Pinky, “He’s right, you know. Or isn’t he?”

“I suppose so,” she agreed unhappily. “There is a limit — I suppose. All the same…”

“If ever you’ve trusted yourselves to my direction,” Gantry said, “you do so now.”

“All right.” She looked at Alleyn. “Sorry.”

Alleyn said, “Then I must ask Colonel Warrender and Mr. Templeton. Did Miss Bellamy utter threats of any sort?”

Warrender said, “In my opinion, Charles, this may be a case for a solicitor. One doesn’t know what turn things may take. Meantime, wait and see, isn’t it?”

“Very well,” Charles said. “Very well.”

“Mr. Dakers?” Alleyn asked.

“I’m bound by the general decision,” Richard said, and Anelida, after a troubled look at him, added reluctantly:

“And I by yours.”

“In that case,” Alleyn said, “there’s only one thing to be done. We must appeal to the sole remaining witness.”

“Who the hell’s that!” Warrender barked out.

“Will you see if you can get him, Fox? Mr. Montague Marchant,” said Alleyn.

On Pinky and Bertie’s part little attempt was made to disguise their consternation. It was obvious that they desired, more than anything else, an opportunity to consult together. Gantry, however, merely folded his arms, lay back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. He might have been waiting to rise in protest at a conference of Actors’ Unity. Warrender, for his part, resembled a senior member at a club committee meeting. Charles fetched a heavy sigh and rested his head on his hand.

Fox went out of the room. As he opened the door into the hall a grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs was striking eleven. It provoked an involuntary exclamation from the persons Alleyn had brought together round the table. Several of them glanced in despair at their watches.

“In the meantime,” Alleyn said, “shall we try to clear up the position of Mr. Richard Dakers?”

Anelida’s heart suddenly thudded against her ribs as if drawing attention to its disregarded sovereignty. She had time to think: “I’m involved, almost without warning, in a monstrous situation. I’m committed, absolutely, to a man of whom I know next to nothing. It’s a kind of dedication and I’m not prepared for it.” She turned to look at Richard and, at once, knew that her allegiance, active or helpless, was irrevocable. “So this,” Anelida thought in astonishment, “is what it’s like to be in love.”

Alleyn, aware of the immediate reactions, saw Old Ninn’s hands move convulsively in her lap. He saw Florence look at her with a flash of something that might have been triumph and he saw the colour fade unevenly from Warrender’s heavy face.

He went over the ground again up to the time of Richard’s final return to the house.

“As you will see,” he said, “there are blank passages. We don’t know what passed between Mr. Dakers and Miss Bellamy in her room. We do know that, whatever it was, it seemed to distress him. We know he then went out and walked about Chelsea. We know he returned. We don’t know why.”

“I wanted,” Richard said, “to pick up a copy of my play.”

“Good. Why didn’t you say so before?”

“I clean forgot,” he said and looked astonished.

“Do you now remember what else you did?”

“I went up to my old study to get it.”

“And did you do anything else while you were there?”

There was no answer. Alleyn said, “You wrote a letter, didn’t you?”

Richard stared at him with a sort of horror. “How do you — why should you…?” He made a small desperate gesture and petered out.

“To whom?”

“It was private. I prefer not to say.”

“Where is it now? You’ve had no opportunity to post it.”

“I — haven’t got it.”

“What have you done with it?”

“I got rid of it.” Richard raised his voice. “I hope it’s destroyed. It had nothing whatever to do with all this. I’ve told you it was private.”

“If that’s true I can promise you it will remain so. Will you tell me — in private — what it was about?”

Richard looked at him, hesitated, and then said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

Alleyn drew a folded paper from his pocket. “Will you read this, if you please? Perhaps you would rather take it to the light.”

“I can… All right,” Richard said. He took the paper, left the table and moved over to a wall lamp. The paper rustled as he opened it. He glanced at it, crushed it in his hand, strode to the far end of the table and flung it down in front of Warrender.

“Did you have to do this?” he said. “My God, what sort of a man are you!” He went back to his place beside Anelida.

Warrender, opening and closing his hands, sheet-white and speaking in an unrecognizable voice, said, “I don’t understand. I’ve done nothing. What do you mean?”

His hand moved shakily towards the inside pocket of his coat. “No! It’s not… It can’t be.”

“Colonel Warrender,” Alleyn said to Richard, “has not shown me the letter. I came by its content in an entirely different way. The thing I have shown you is a transcription. The original, I imagine, is still in his pocket.”

Warrender and Richard wouldn’t look at each other. Warrender said, “Then how the hell…” and stopped.

“Evidently,” Alleyn said, “the transcription is near enough to the original. I don’t propose at the moment to make it generally known. I will only put it to you that when you, Mr. Dakers, returned the second time, you went to your study, wrote the original of this letter and subsequently, when you were lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, passed it to Colonel Warrender, saying, for my benefit, that you had forgotten to post it for him. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“I suggest that it refers to whatever passed between you and Mrs. Templeton when you were alone with her in her room a few minutes before she died and that you wished to make Colonel Warrender read it. I’m still ready to listen to any statement you may care to make to me in private.”

To Anelida the silence seemed interminable.

“Very well,” Alleyn said. “We shall have to leave it for the time being.”

None of them looked at Richard. Anelida suddenly and horribly remembered something she had once heard Alleyn tell her uncle. “You always know, in a capital charge, if the jury are going to bring in a verdict of guilty: they never look at the accused when they come back.” With a sense of doing something momentous she turned, looked Richard full in the face and found she could smile at him.

“It’ll be all right,” he said gently.

“All right!” Florence said bitterly. “It doesn’t strike me as being all right, and I wonder you’ve the nerve to say so!”

As if Florence had put a match to her, Old Ninn exploded into fury. “You’re a bad girl, Floy,” she said, trembling very much and leaning across the table. “Riddled through and through with wickedness and jealousy and always have been.”

“Thank you very much, I’m sure, Mrs. Plumtree,” Florence countered with a shrill outbreak of laughter. “Everyone knows where your favour lies, Mrs. Plumtree, especially when you’ve had a drop of port wine. You wouldn’t stop short of murder to back it up.”

“Ninn,” Richard said, before she could speak, “for the love of Mike, darling, shut up.”

She reached out her small knotted hands to Charles Templeton. “You speak for him, sir. Speak for him.”

Charles said gently, “You’re making too much of this, Ninn. There’s no need.”

“There shouldn’t be the need!” she cried. “And she knows it as well as I do.” She appealed to Alleyn. “I’ve told you. I’ve told you . After Mr. Richard came out I heard her. That wicked woman, there, knows as well as I do.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the spray-gun. “We heard her using that thing after everyone had warned her against it.”