Ngaio Marsh - Spinsters in Jeopardy

Alleyn moved close to Dupont. “Keep your eye on that girl, Dupont. I think she’s our bird.”

“Indeed? Milano has not identified her.”

“I think Ricky will.”

Watched by the completely silent crowd, Alleyn went out of the hall and, standing in the sunshine, waved to Troy. She and Ricky got out of the car and, hand-in-hand, came towards him.

“Come on, Rick,” he said, “let’s see if you can find the driver and the Nanny. If you do we’ll go and call on the goatshop lady again. What do you say?”

He hoisted his little son across his shoulders and, holding his ankles in either hand, turned him towards the steps.

“Coming, Mum?” Ricky asked.

“Rather! Try and stop me.”

“Strike up the band,” Alleyn said. “Here comes the Alleyn family on parade.”

He heard his son give a doubtful chuckle. A small hand was laid against his cheek. “Good old horse,” Ricky said courageously and in an uncertain falsetto: “How many miles to Babylon?”

“Five score and ten,” Alleyn and Troy chanted and she linked her arm through his.

They marched up the steps and into the hall.

The crowd was still herded at one end of the great room and had broken into a subdued chattering. One of the gendarmes stood near the man Raoul had identified. Another had moved round behind the crowd to a group of girls. Alleyn saw the back of that startlingly bronze head of hair and the curve of the opulent neck. M. Callard had not moved. M. Dupont had come down from his eminence and Raoul stood by himself behind the statue, looking at his own feet.

“Ah-ha!” cried M. Dupont, advancing with an air of camaraderie, “so here is Ricketts.”

He reached up his hand. Ricky stooped uncertainly from his father’s shoulders to put his own in it.

“This is Ricky,” Alleyn said, “M. Dupont, Ricky, Superintendent of Police in Roqueville. M. Dupont speaks English.”

“How do you do, sir,” said Ricky in his company voice.

M. Dupont threw a complimentary glance at Troy.

“So we have an assistant,” he said. “This is splendid. I leave the formalities to you, M. Alleyn.”

“Just have a look at all these people, Rick,” Alleyn said, “and tell us if you can find the driver and the Nanny who brought you up here.”

Troy and Dupont looked at Ricky. Raoul, behind the statue, continued to look at his boots. Ricky, wearing the blank expression he reserved for strangers, surveyed the crowd. His attention came to halt on the thick-set fellow in the short-sleeved jersey. Dupont and Troy watched him.

“Mum?” said Ricky.

“Hallo?”

Ricky whispered something inaudible and nodded violently.

“Tell Daddy.”

Rick stooped his head and breathed noisily into his father’s ear.

“O.K.,” Alleyn said. “Sure?”

“ ’M.”

“Tell M. Dupont.”

“ Monsieur, voici le chauffeur .”

“ Montrez avec le doigt, mon brave, ” said M. Dupont.

“Point him out, Rick,” said Alleyn.

Ricky had been instructed by his French Nanny that it was rude to point. He turned pink in the face and made a rapid gesture, shooting out his finger at the man. The man drew back his upper lip and bared a row of blackened teeth. The first gendarme shoved in beside him. The crowed stirred and shifted.

“Bravo,” said M. Dupont.

“Now the Nanny,” Alleyn said. “Can you see her?”

There was a long pause. Ricky, looking at the group of girls at the back, said: “There’s someone that hasn’t turned around.”

M. Dupont shouted: “ Présentez-vous de face, tout le monde !”

The second gendarme pushed through the group of girls. They melted away to either side as if an invisible wedge had been driven through them. The impulse communicated itself to their neighbours: the gap widened and stretched, opening out as Alleyn carried Ricky towards it. Finally Ricky, on his father’s shoulders, looked up an exaggerated perspective to where the girl stood with her back to them, her hands clasped across the nape of her neck as if to protect it from a blow. The gendarme took her by the arm, turned her, and held down the hands that now struggled to reach her face. She and Ricky looked at each other.

“Hallo, Teresa,” said Ricky.

v

Two cars drove down the Roqueville road. In the first was M. Callard and two policemen and in the second, a blue Citroën, were its owner and a third policeman. The staff of the factory had gone. M. Dupont was busy in M. Callard’s office and a fourth gendarme stood, lonely and important, in the empty hall. Troy had taken Ricky, who had begun to be very pleased with himself, to Raoul’s car. Alleyn, Raoul and Teresa sat on an ornamental garden seat in the factory grounds. Teresa wept and Raoul gave her cause to do so.

“Infamous girl,” Raoul said, “to what sink of depravity have you retired? I think of your perfidy,” he went on, “and I spit.”

He rose, retired a few paces, spat and returned. “I compare your behaviour,” he continued, “to its disadvantage with that of Herod, the Anti-Christ who slit the throats of first-born innocents. Ricky is an innocent and also, Monsieur will correct me if I speak in error, a first-born. He is, moreover, the son of Monsieur, my employer, who, as you observe, can find no words to express his loathing of the fallen woman with whom he finds himself in occupation of this contaminated piece of garden furniture.”

“Spare me,” Teresa sobbed. “I can explain myself.”

Raoul bent down in order to place his exquisite but distorted face close to hers. “Female ravisher of infants,” he apostrophized. “Trafficker in unmentionable vices. Associate of perverts.”

“You insult me,” Teresa sobbed. She rallied slightly. “You also lie like a brigand. The Holy Virgin is my witness.”

“She blushes to hear you. Answer me.” Raoul shouted and made a complicated gesture a few inches from her eyes. “Did you not steal the child? Answer!”

“Where there is no intention, there is no sin,” Teresa bawled, taking her stand on dogma. “I am as pure as the child himself. If anything, purer. They told me his papa wished me to call for him.”

“Who told you?”

“Monsieur,” said Teresa, changing colour.

“Monsieur Goat! Monsieur Filth! In a word, Monsieur Oberon.”

“It is a lie,” Teresa repeated but rather vaguely. She turned her sumptuous and tear-blubbered face to Alleyn. “I appeal to Monsieur who is an English nobleman and will not spit upon the good name of a virtuous girl. I throw myself at his feet and implore him to hear me.”

Raoul also turned to Alleyn and spread his hands out in a gesture of ineffable poignancy.

“If Monsieur pleases,” he said, making Alleyn a present of the whole situation.

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Yes. Well now—”

He looked from one grand-opera countenance to the other. Teresa gazed at him with nerveless compliance, Raoul with grandeur and a sort of gloomy sympathy. Alleyn got up and stood over the girl.

“Now, see here, Teresa,” he began. Raoul took a respectful step backwards. “It appears that you have behaved very foolishly for a long time and you are a fortunate girl to have come out of it without involving yourself in disaster.”

“Undoubtedly,” Teresa said with a hint of complacency, “I am under the protection of Our Lady of Paysdoux for whom I have a special devotion.”

“Which you atrociously abuse,” Raoul remarked to the landscape.

“Be that as it may,” Alleyn hurriedly intervened. “It’s time you pulled yourself together and tried to make amends for all the harm you have done. I think you must know very well that your employer at the Château is a bad man. In your heart you know it, don’t you, Teresa?”