Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

“More or less,” he murmured, looking at his fingernails.

Gantry rose to his enormous height and stood over Marchant.

“It would be becoming in you, Monty,” he said dangerously, “if you acknowledged that as far as I enter into the picture the question of occupational anxiety does not arise. I choose my managements; they do not choose me.”

Marchant glanced at him. “Nobody questions your prestige, I imagine, Timmy. I certainly don’t.”

“Or mine, I hope,” said Bertie, rallying. “The offers I’ve turned down for the Management! Well, I mean to say! Face it, Monty dear, if Mary had bullied you into breaking off with Dicky and Timmy and Pinky and me, you’d have been in a very pretty pickle yourself.”

“I am not,” Marchant said, “a propitious subject for bullying.”

“No.” Bertie agreed. “Evidently.” And there followed a deadly little pause. “I’d be obliged to everybody,” he added rather breathlessly, “if they wouldn’t set about reading horrors of any sort into what was an utterly unmeaningful little observation.”

“In common,” Warrender remarked, “with the rest of your conversation.”

“Oh but what a catty big Colonel we’ve got!” Bertie said.

Marchant opened his cigarette case. “It seems,” he observed, “incumbent on me to point out that, unlike the rest of you, I am ignorant of the circumstances. After Mary’s death, I left the house at the request of—” he put a cigarette between his lips and turned his head slightly to look at Fox —“yes, at the request of this gentleman, who merely informed me that there had been a fatal accident. Throughout the entire time that Mary was absent until Florence made her announcement, I was in full view of about forty guests and those of you who had not left the drawing-room. I imagine I do not qualify for the star role.” He lit his cigarette. “Or am I wrong?” he asked Alleyn.

“As it turns out, Monty,” Gantry intervened, “you’re dead wrong. It appears that the whole thing was laid on before Mary went to her room.”

Marchant waited for a moment, and then said, “You astonish me.”

“Fancy!” Bertie exclaimed and added in an exasperated voice, “I do wish, oh how I do wish, dearest Monty, that you would stop being a parody of your smooth little self and get down to tin-tacks ( why tin-tacks, one wonders?) and admit that, like all the rest of us, you qualify for the homicide stakes.”

“And what,” Alleyn asked, “have you got to say to that, Mr. Marchant?”

An uneven flush mounted over Marchant’s cheekbones. “Simply,” he said, “that I think everybody has, most understandably, become overwrought by this tragedy and that, as a consequence, a great deal of nonsense is being bandied about on all hands. And, as an afterthought, that I agree with Timon Gantry. I prefer to take no further part in this discussion until I have consulted my solicitor.”

“By all means,” Alleyn said. “Will you ring him up? The telephone is over there in the corner.”

Marchant leant a little further back in his chair. “I’m afraid that’s quite out of the question,” he said. “He lives in Buckinghamshire. I can’t possibly call him up at this time of night.”

“In that case you will give me your own address, if you please, and I shan’t detain you any longer.”

“My address is in the telephone book and I can assure you that you are not detaining me now nor are you likely to do so in the future.” He half-closed his eyes. “I resent,” he said, “the tone of this interview, but I prefer to keep observation — if that is the accepted police jargon — upon its sequel. I’ll leave when it suits me to do so.”

“You can’t,” Colonel Warrender suddenly announced in a parade-ground voice, “take that tone with the police, sir.”

“Can’t I?” Marchant murmured. “I promise you, my dear Colonel, I can take whatever tone I bloody well choose with whoever I bloody well like.”

Into the dead silence that followed this announcement, there intruded a distant but reminiscent commotion. A door slammed and somebody came running up the hall.

“My God , what now!” Bertie Saracen cried out. With the exception of Marchant and Dr. Harkness they were all on their feet when Florence, grotesque in tin curling pins, burst into the room.

In an appalling parody of her fatal entrance she stood there, mouthing at them.

Alleyn strode over to her and took her by the wrist. “What is it?” he said. “Speak up.”

And Florence, as if in moments of catastrophe she was in command of only one phrase, gabbled, “The doctor! Quick! For Christ’s sake! Is the doctor in the house!”

Charles Templeton lay face down, as if he had fallen forward, with his head toward the foot of the bed that had been made up for him in the study. One arm hung to the floor, the other was outstretched beyond the end of the bed. The back of his neck was empurpled under its margin of thin white hair. His pyjama jacket was dragged up, revealing an expanse of torso — old, white and flaccid. When Alleyn raised him and held him in a sitting position, his head lolled sideways, his mouth and eyes opened and a flutter of sound wavered in his throat. Dr. Harkness leant over him, pinching up the skin of his forearm to admit the needle. Fox hovered nearby. Florence, her knuckles clenched between her teeth, stood just inside the door. Charles seemed to be unaware of these four onlookers; his gaze wandered past them, fixed itself in terror on the fifth; the short person who stood pressed back against the wall in shadow at the end of the room.

The sound in his throat was shaped with great difficulty into one word. “No!” it whispered. “No! No!”

Dr. Harkness withdrew the needle.

“What is it?” Alleyn said. “What do you want to tell us?”

The eyes did not blink or change their direction, but after a second or two they lost focus, glazed, and remained fixed. The jaw dropped, the body quivered and sank.

Dr. Harkness leant over it for some time and then drew back.

“Gone,” he said.

Alleyn laid his burden down and covered it.

In a voice that they had not heard from him before. Dr. Harkness said, “He was all right ten minutes ago. Settled. Quiet. Something’s gone wrong here and I’ve got to hear what it was.” He turned on Florence. “Well?”

Florence, with an air that was half combative, half frightened, moved forward, keeping her eyes on Alleyn.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, answering her look, “we must hear from you. You raised the alarm. What happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know!” she said at once. “I did the right thing, didn’t I? I called the doctor. Now!”

“You’ll do the right thing again, if you please, by telling me what happened before you called him.”

She darted a glance at the small motionless figure in shadow at the end of the room and wetted her lips.

“Come on, now,” Fox said. “Speak up.”

Standing where she was, a serio-comic figure under her, panoply of tin hair curlers, she did tell her story.

After Dr. Harkness had given his order, she and — again that sidelong glance — she and Mrs. Plumtree had made up the bed in the study. Dr. Harkness had helped Mr. Templeton undress and had seen him into bed and they had all waited until he was settled down, comfortably. Dr. Harkness had left after giving orders that he was to be called if wanted. Florence had then gone to the pantry to fill a second hot-water bottle. This had taken some time as she had been obliged to boil a kettle. When she returned to the hall she had heard voices raised in the study. It seemed that she had paused outside the door. Alleyn had a picture of her, a hot-water bottle under her arm, listening avidly. She had heard Mrs. Plumtree’s voice but had been unable to distinguish any words. Then, she said, she had heard Mr. Templeton cry “No!” three times, just as he did before he died, only much louder; as if, Florence said, he was frightened. After that there had been a clatter and Mrs. Plumtree had suddenly become audible. She had shouted, Florence reported, at the top of her voice, “I’ll put a stop to it,” Mr. Templeton had given a loud cry and Florence had burst into the room.