Ngaio Marsh - Spinsters in Jeopardy

Carbury Glande must have come up the stairs from beneath the courtyard. His face, on a level with her knees, peered through the interstices of the wrought-iron banister. Recognition dawned on it.

“Can it be Troy?” he exclaimed hoarsely. “But it is! Dear heart, how magical and how peculiar. Where have you sprung from? And why are you scrabbling away at doors? Has Oberon alarmed you? I may say he petrifies me. What are you up to?”

He had arrived at her level, a short gnarled man whose hair and beard were red and whose face, at the moment, was a dreadful grey. He blinked up at Troy as if he couldn’t get her into focus. He was wearing a pair of floral shorts and a magenta shirt.

“I’m not up to anything,” said Troy. “In fact, I’m scarcely here at all. We’ve brought your host a middle-aged spinster with a perforated appendix and now we’re on our way.”

“Ah, yes. I heard about the spinster. Ali Baradi woke me at cockcrow, full of professional zeal, and asked me if I’d like to thread needles and count sponges. How he dared! Are you going?”

“I must,” Troy said. “Do open this damned door for me.”

She could hear Alleyn’s and Herrington’s voice in the hall and the thump of Herrington’s stick.

Glande reached for the latch. His hand, stained round the nails with paint, was tremulous. “I am, as you can see, a wreck,” he said. “A Homeric party and only four hours sottish insensitivity in which to recover. Imagine it! There you are.”

He opened the doors and winced at the glare outside. “Oberon will be thrilled you’re here,” he said. “Did you know he bought a thing of yours at the Rond-Point show? If s in the library. ‘Boy with a Kite.’ He adores it.”

“Look here,” Troy said hurriedly, “be a good chap and don’t tell him I’m me. I’ve come here for a holiday and I’d so much rather…”

“Well, if you like. Yes, of course. Yes, I understand. And on mature consideration I fancy this menage is not entirely your cup of tea. You’re almost pathologically normal, aren’t you? Forgive me if I bolt back to my burrow, the glare is really more than I can endure. God, somebody’s coming?”

He stumbled away from the door. Alleyn, with Ricky in his arms came out of the hall followed by Robin Herrington. Glande ejaculated: “Oh, sorry!” and bolted down the stairs. Herrington scowled after him and said: “That’s our tame genius. I’ll come to the car, if I may.”

As they walked in single file down the steps and past the maker of figurines, Troy had the feeling that Robin wanted to say something to them and didn’t know how to begin. They had reached the open platform where Raoul waited by the car before he blurted out:

“I do hope you will let me drive you down, to see the yacht. Both of you, I mean. I mean…” he stopped short. Alleyn said: “That’s very nice of you. I hadn’t heard about a yacht.”

“She’s quite fun.” He stood there, still with an air of hesitancy. Alleyn shifted Ricky and looked at Troy, who held out her hand to Robin.

“Don’t come any further,” she said. “Goodbye and thank you.”

“Goodbye. If we may, Ginny and I will call at the hotel. It’s the Royal, I suppose. I mean, it might amuse you to come for a drive. I mean, if you don’t know anybody here…”

“It’d be lovely,” Troy temporized, wondering if Alleyn wanted her to accept.

“As a matter of fact,” Alleyn said, “we have got someone we ought to look up in Roqueville. Do you know anybody about here with the unlikely name of Garbel?”

Robin’s jaw dropped. He stared at them with an expression of extraordinary consternation. “I… no. We haven’t really met any of the local people. No. Well, I mustn’t keep you standing in the sun. Goodbye.”

And with a precipitancy as marked as his former hesitation, he turned and limped off down the passageway.

“Now what,” Troy asked her husband, “in a crazy world, is the significance of that particular bit of lunacy?”

“I’ve not the beginning of a notion,” he said. “But I suggest that when we’ve got time to think, we call on Mr. Garbel.”

i

Ricky woke up before they could get him to the car and was bewildered to find himself transported. He was hot, hungry, thirsty and uncomfortable, and he required immediate attention.

While Troy and Alleyn looked helplessly about the open platform Raoul advanced from the car, his face brilliant with understanding. He squatted on his heels beside the flushed and urgent Ricky and addressed him in very simple French which he appeared to understand and to which he readily responded. Marie, of the figurines, Raoul explained to the parents, would offer suitable hospitality and he and Ricky went off together, Ricky glancing up at him with admiration.

“It appears,” Alleyn said, “that a French nanny and those bi-weekly conversational tramps with Mademoiselle to the Round Pond have not been unproductive. Our child has the rudiments of the language.”

“Mademoiselle,” Troy rejoined, “says he’s prodigiously quick for his age. An amazing child, she thinks.” And she added hotly: “Well, all right, I don’t say so to anyone else, do I?”

“My darling, you do not and you shall never say so too often to me. But for the moment let us take our infant phenomenon for granted and look at the situation Chèvre d’Argent. Tell me as quickly as you can, what happened before i cropped up among those cups of tea on the roof-top.”

They sat together on the running-board of the car and Troy did her best. “Admirable,” he said when she had finished. “I felt in love with you in the first instance because you made such beautiful statements. Now, what do you suppose goes on in that house?”

“Something quite beastly,” she said vigorously. “I’m sure of it. Oberon’s obviously dishing out to his chums some fantastic hodgepodge of mysticism-cum-religion-cum, I’m very much afraid, eroticism. Grizel Locke attempted a sort of résumé. You never heard such a rigmarole… yoga, Nietzsche, black-magic. Voo-doo, I wouldn’t be surprised. With Lord knows what fancy touch of their own thrown in. It ought to be merely silly but it’s not, its frightening. Grizel Locke, I should say, is potty but the two young ones in any other setting would have struck me as being pleasant children. The boy’s obviously in a state about the girl, who seems to be completely in Oberon’s toils. It’s so fantastic, it isn’t true.”

“Have you ever heard of the case of Horus and the Swami Vivi Ananda?”

“No.”

“They appeared before Curtis Bennett with Edward Carson prosecuting and got swinging sentences for their pains. There’s no time to tell you about them now, but you’ve more or less described their setup and I assure you there’s nothing so very unusual about the religio-erotic racket. Oberon’s name, by the way, is Albert George Clarkson. He’s a millionaire and undoubtedly one of the drug barons. The cult of the Children of the Sun in the Outer is merely a useful sideline and a means, I suspect, of gratifying a particularly nasty personal taste. They suggested as much at the Sûreté though they don’t know exactly what goes on among the Sun’s Babies. The Sûreté is interested solely in the narcotics side of the show and the Yard’s watching it from our end.”

“And you?”

“I’m supposed to be the perishing link or something. What about the red-headed gentleman with painty hands and a carryover who was letting you out?”

“He might be serious, Rory. He’s Carbury Glande. He paints those post-surrealist things… witches’ sabbaths and mystic unions. You must remember. Rather pretty colour and good design, but a bit nasty in feeling. The thing is, he knows me and although I asked him not to, he’ll probably talk.”