Ngaio Marsh - False Scent

“I don’t believe you. It’s because of everything else. It’s because of Mary and…” Richard turned on Alleyn. “You’d no right to subject him to all this. It’s killed him. You’d no right. If it hadn’t been for you it needn’t have happened.”

Alleyn said very compassionately, “That may be true. He was in great distress. It may even be that for him this was the best solution.”

“How dare you say that!” Richard exclaimed and then, “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think he’d pretty well got to the end of his tether? He’d lost the thing he most valued in life, hadn’t he?”

“I–I want to see him.”

Alleyn remembered Charles’s face. “Then you shall,” he promised, “presently.”

“Yes,” Harkness agreed quickly. “Presently.”

“For the moment,” Alleyn said, turning to Anelida, “I suggest that you take him up to his old room and give him a drink. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” Anelida said. “That’s the thing.” She put her hand in Richard’s. “Coming?”

He looked down at her. “I wonder,” he said, “what on earth I should do without you, Anelida.”

“Come on,” she said, and they went out together.

Alleyn nodded to Harkness and he too went out.

An affected little French clock above the fireplace cleared its throat, broke into a perfect frenzy of silvery chimes and then struck midnight. Inspector Fox came into the room and shut the door.

Alleyn looked at Maurice Warrender.

“And now,” he said, “there must be an end to equivocation. I must have the truth.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Warrender, and could scarcely have sounded less convincing.

“I wonder why people always say that when they know precisely what one does mean. However, I’d better tell you. A few minutes ago, immediately after Charles Templeton died, I talked to the nanny, Mrs. Plumtree, who had been alone with him at the moment of his collapse. I told her that I believed she had uttered threats, that she had acted in this way because she thought Templeton was withholding information which would clear your son from suspicion of murder and that under the stress of this scene, Templeton suffered the heart attack from which he died. I told her your son was in no danger of arrest and she then admitted the whole story. I now tell you, too, that your son is in no danger. If you have withheld information for fear of incriminating him, you may understand that you have acted mistakenly.”

Warrender seemed to be on the point of speaking but instead turned abruptly away and stood very still.

“You refused to tell me of the threats Mrs. Templeton uttered in the conservatory and I got them, after great difficulty it’s true, from the other people who were there. When I asked you if you had quarrelled with Charles Templeton you denied it. I believe that, in fact, you had quarrelled with him and that it happened while you were together in the study before I saw you for the first time. For the whole of that interview you scarcely so much as looked at each other. He was obviously distressed by your presence and you were violently opposed to rejoining him there. I must ask you again. Had you quarrelled?”

Warrender muttered, “If you call it a quarrel.”

“Was it about Richard Dakers?” Alleyn waited. “I think it was,” he said, “but of course that’s mere speculation and open, if you like, to contradiction.”

Warrender squared his shoulders. “What’s all this leading up to?” he demanded. “An arrest?”

“Surely you’ve heard of the usual warning. Come, sir, you did have a scene with Charles Templeton and I believe it was about Richard Dakers. Did you tell Templeton you were the father?”

“I did not,” he said quickly.

“Did he know you were the father?”

“Not… We agreed from the outset that it was better that he shouldn’t know. That nobody should know. Better on all counts.”

“You haven’t really answered my question, have you? Shall I put it this way? Did Templeton learn for the first time, this afternoon, that Dakers is your son?”

“Why should you suppose anything of the sort?”

“Your normal relationship appears to have been happy, yet at this time, when one would have expected you all to come together in your common trouble, he showed a vehement disinclination to see Dakers — or you.”

Warrender made an unexpected gesture. He flung out his hands and lifted his shoulders. “Very well,” he said.

“And you didn’t tell him.” Alleyn walked up to him and looked him full in the face. “She told him,” he said. “Didn’t she? Without consulting you, without any consideration for you or the boy. Because she was in one of those tantrums that have become less and less controllable. She made you spray that unspeakable scent over her in his presence, I suppose to irritate him. You went out and left them together. And she broke the silence of thirty years and told him.”

“You can’t possibly know.”

“When she left the room a minute or two later she shouted at the top of her voice: ‘Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.’ Florence had gone. You had gone. She was speaking to her husband. Did she tell you?”

“Tell me ! What the hell…”

“Did she tell you what she’d said to Templeton?”

Warrender turned away to the fireplace, leant his arm on the shelf and hid his face.

“All right!” he stammered. “All right! What does it matter, now. All right.”

“Was it during the party?”

He made some kind of sound, apparently in assent.

“Before or after the row in the conservatory?”

“After.” He didn’t raise his head and his voice sounded as if it didn’t belong to him. “I tried to stop her attacking the girl.”

“And that turned her against you? Yes, I see.”

“I was following them, the girl and her uncle, and she whispered it. ‘Charles knows about Dicky.’ It was quite dreadful to see her look like that. I–I simply walked out — I…” He raised his head and looked at Alleyn. “It was indescribable.”

“And your great fear after that was that she would tell the boy?”

He said nothing.

“As, of course, she did. Her demon was let loose. She took him up to her room and told him. They were, I daresay, the last words she spoke.”

Warrender said, “You assume — you say these things — you…” and was unable to go on. His eyes were wet and bloodshot and his face grey. He looked quite old. “I don’t know what’s come over me,” he said.

Alleyn thought he knew.

“It’s not much cop,” he said, “when a life’s preoccupation turns out to have been misplaced. It seems to me that a man in such a position would rather see the woman dead than watch her turning into a monster.”

“Why do you say these things to me. Why !”

“Isn’t it so?”

With a strange parody of his habitual mannerism he raised a shaking hand to his tie and pulled at it.

“I understand,” he said. “You’ve been very clever, I suppose.”

“Not very, I’m afraid.”

Warrender looked up at the beaming portrait of Mary Bellamy. “There’s nothing left,” he said. “Nothing. What do you want me to do?”

“I must speak to Dakers and then to those people in there. I think I must ask you to join us.”

“Very well,” Warrender said.

“Would you like a drink?”

“Thank you. If I may.”

Alleyn looked at Fox who went out and returned with a tumbler and the decanter that Alleyn had seen on the table between Warrender and Charles at his first encounter with them.

“Whisky,” Fox said. “If that’s agreeable. Shall I pour it out, sir?”