Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

“All right,” Alleyn said. “And what did you find?”

A scene, it appeared, of melodrama. Mrs. Plumtree with the poker grasped and upraised, Mr. Templeton sprawled along the bed, facing her.

“And when they seen me,” Florence said, “she dropped the poker in the hearth and he gasped ‘Florrie, don’t let ’er’ and then he took a turn for the worse and I see he was very bad. So I said, ‘Don’t you touch ’im. Don’t you dare,’ and I fetched the doctor like you say. And God’s my witness,” Florence concluded, “if she isn’t the cause of his death! As good as if she’d struck him down, ill and all as he was, and which she’d of done if I hadn’t come in when I did and which she’d do to me now if it wasn’t for you gentlemen.”

She stopped breathless. There was a considerable pause. “Well!” she demanded. “Don’t you believe it? All right, then. Ask her. Go on. Ask her!”

“Everything in its turn,” Alleyn said. “That will do from you for the moment. Stay where you are.” He turned to the short motionless figure in the shadows. “Come along,” he said. “You can’t avoid it, you know. Come along.”

She moved out into the light. Her small nose and the areas over her cheekbones were still patched with red, but otherwise her face was a dreadful colour. She said, automatically, it seemed, “You’re a wicked girl, Floy.”

“Never mind about that,” Alleyn said. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

She looked steadily up into his face. Her mouth was shut like a trap, but her eyes were terrified.

“Look here, Ninn,” Dr. Harkness began very loudly. Alleyn raised a finger and he stopped short.

“Has Florence,” Alleyn asked, “spoken the truth? I mean as to facts. As to what she saw and heard when she came back to this room?”

She nodded, very slightly.

“You had the poker in your hand. You dropped it when she came in. Mr. Templeton said, ‘Florrie, don’t let her.’ That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And before she came in you had said, very loudly, to Mr. Templeton ‘I’ll put a stop to it’? Did you say this?”

“Yes.”

“What were you going to put a stop to?”

Silence.

“Was it something Mr. Templeton had said he would do?”

She shook her head.

For a lunatic second or two Alleyn was reminded of a panel game on television. He saw the Plumtree face in close-up; tight-lipped, inimical, giving nothing away, winning the round.

He looked at Fox. “Would you take Florence into the hall? You too, Dr. Harkness, if you will?”

“I’m not going,” Florence said. “You can’t make me.”

“Oh yes, I can,” Alleyn rejoined tranquilly, “but you’d be very foolish to put it to the test. Out you go, my girl.”

Fox approached her. “You keep your hands off me!” she said.

“Now, now!” Fox rumbled cosily. He opened the door. For a moment she looked as if she would show fight and then, with a lift of her chin, she went out. Fox followed her.

Dr. Harkness said, “There are things to be done. I mean…” He gestured at the covered form on the bed.

“I know. I don’t expect to be long. Wait for me in the hall, will you, Harkness?”

The door shut behind them.

For perhaps ten seconds Alleyn and that small, determined and miserable little woman looked at each other.

Then he said, “It’s got to come out, you know. You’ve been trying to save him, haven’t you?”

Her hands moved convulsively, and she looked in terror at the bed.

“No, no,” Alleyn said. “Not there. I’m not talking about him. You didn’t care about him. You were trying to shield the boy, weren’t you? You did what you did for Richard Dakers.”

She broke into a passion of weeping and from then until the end of the case he had no more trouble with Ninn.

When it was over he sent her up to her room.

“Well,” he said to Fox, “now for the final and far from delectable scene. We should, of course, have prevented all this, but I’m damned if I see how. We couldn’t arrest on what we’d got. Unless they find some trace of Slaypest in the scent-spray my reading of the case will never be anything but an unsupported theory.”

“They ought to be coming through with the result before long.”

“You might ring up and see where they’ve got to.”

Fox dialled a number. There was a tap at the door and Philpott looked in. He stared at the covered body on the bed.

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “A death. Mr. Templeton.”

“By violence, sir?”

“Not by physical violence. Heart disease. What is it, Philpott?”

“It’s the lot in there, sir. They’re getting very restive, especially Mr. Dakers and the Colonel. Wondering what was wrong with”—he looked again at the bed—“with him, sir.”

“Yes. Will you ask Mr. Dakers and Colonel Warrenderto go into the small sitting-room next door. I’ll be there in a moment. Oh, and Philpott, I think you might ask Miss Lee to come too. And you may tell the others they will have very little longer to wait.”

“Sir,” said Philpott and withdrew.

Fox was talking into the telephone. “Yes. Yes. I’ll tell him. He’ll be very much obliged. Thank you.”

He hung up. “They were just going to ring. They’ve found an identifiable trace inside the bulb of the scent-spray.”

“Have they indeed? That provides the complete answer.”

“So you were right, Mr. Alleyn.”

“And what satisfaction,” Alleyn said wryly, “is to be had out of that?”

He went to the bed and turned back the sheet. The eyes, unseeing, still stared past him. The imprint of a fear, already nonexistent, still disfigured the face. Alleyn looked down at it for a second or two. “What unhappiness!” he said and closed the eyes.

“He had a lot to try him,” Fox observed with his customary simplicity.

“He had indeed, poor chap.”

“So did they all, if it comes to that. She must have been a very vexing sort of lady. There’ll have to be a p.m., Mr. Alleyn.”

“Yes, of course. All right. I’ll see these people next door.”

He re-covered the face and went out.

Dr. Harkness and Florence were in the hall, watched over by a Yard reinforcement. Alleyn said, “I think you’d better come in with me, if you will, Harkness.” And to Florence, “You’ll stay where you are for the moment, if you please.”

Harkness followed him into the boudoir.

It had been created by Bertie Saracen in an opulent mood and contrasted strangely with the exquisite austerity of the study. “Almost indecently you , darling!” Bertie had told Miss Bellamy and, almost indecently, it was so.

Its present occupants — Richard, Anelida and Warrender — were standing awkwardly in the middle of this room, overlooked by an enormous and immensely vivacious portrait in pastel of Mary Bellamy. Charles, photographed some twenty years ago, gazed mildly from the centre of an occasional table. To Alleyn there was something atrociously ironic in this circumstance.

Richard demanded at once: “What is it? What happened? Is Charles…?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “It’s bad news. He collapsed a few minutes ago.”

“But…? You don’t mean…?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Richard said, “Anelida! It’s Charles. He means Charles has died. Doesn’t he?”

“Why,” she said fiercely, “must these things happen to you. Why ?”

Dr. Harkness went up to him. “Sorry, old boy,” he said, “I tried but it was no good. It might have happened any time during the last five years, you know.”

Richard stared blankly at him. “My God!” he cried out. “You can’t talk like that!”

“Steady, old chap. You’ll realize, when you think it over. Any time.”