Ngaio Marsh - A Wreath for Rivera

“Did you notice if the umbrellas and parasols were there?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I did. They were there on the piano. I remembered the French parasol. It was Aunt Cile’s. I remembered Félicité playing with it as a child. It takes to pieces.” She caught her breath. “But you know it does that,” she said.

“And it was intact then, when you saw it? No bits gone out of the shaft?”

“No, no.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. I picked it up and opened it. That’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it? It was all right then.”

“Good. And after this you went into the drawing-room. I know this sounds aimlessly exacting but what happened next, do you remember?”

Before she knew where she was she had told him about the magazine, Harmony , and there seemed no harm in repeating her notion that Félicité had written one of the letters on G.P.F.’s page. Alleyn gave no sign that this was of interest. It was Edward who, unaccountably, made a stifled ejaculation. Carlisle thought, “Have I blundered?” and hurried on to an account of her visit to her uncle’s study when he drew the bullets from the cartridges. Alleyn asked casually how he had set about this and seemed to be diverted from the matter in hand, amused at Lord Pastern’s neatness and dexterity.

Carlisle was accustomed to being questioned about Lord Pastern’s eccentricities. She considered him fair game and normally enjoyed trying to make sharp, not unkindly little word-sketches of him for her friends. His notoriety was so gross that she had always felt it would be ridiculous to hesitate. She slipped into this habit now.

Then, the picture of the drawer, pulled out and laid on the desk at his elbow, suddenly presented itself. She felt a kind of shrinking in her midriff and stopped short.

But Alleyn had turned to Ned Manx and Ned, dryly and slowly, answered questions about his own arrival in the drawing-room. What impression did he get of Bellairs and Rivera? He hadn’t spoken to them very much. Lady Pastern had taken him apart to show him her embroidery.

“ Gros point ?” Alleyn asked.

“And petit point. Like most Frenchwomen of her period, she’s pretty good. I really didn’t notice the others much.”

The dinner party itself came next. The conversation, Ned was saying, had been fragmentary, about all sorts of things. He couldn’t remember in detail.

“Miss Wayne has an observer’s eye and ear,” Alleyn said, turning to her. “Perhaps you can remember, can you? What did you talk about? You sat, where?”

“On Uncle George’s right.”

“And on your other hand?”

“Mr. Rivera.”

“Can you remember what he spoke about, Miss Wayne?” Alleyn offered his cigarette case to her. As he lit her cigarette Carlisle looked past him at Ned, who shook his head very slightly.

“I thought him rather awful, I’m afraid,” she said. “He really was a bit too thick. All flowery compliments and too Spanish-grandee for anyone to swallow.”

“Do you agree, Mr. Manx?”

“Oh, yes. He was quite unreal and rather ridiculous I thought.”

“Offensively so, would you say?”

They did not look at each other. Edward said: “He just bounded sky-high, if you call that offensive.”

“Did they speak of the performance to-night?”

“Oh, yes,” Edward said. “And I must say I’m not surprised that the waiters were muddled about who they were to carry out. It struck me that both Uncle George and Rivera wanted all the fat and that neither of them could make up his mind to letting the other have the stretcher. Bellairs was clearly at the end of his professional tether about it.”

Alleyn asked how long the men had stayed behind in the dining-room. Reluctantly — too reluctantly Carlisle thought, with a rising sense of danger — Ned told them that Lord Pastern had taken Breezy away to show him the blank cartridges. “So you and Rivera were left with the port?” Alleyn said.

“Yes. Not for long.”

“Can you recall the conversation?”

“There was nothing that would be any help to you.”

“You never know.”

“I didn’t encourage conversation. He asked all sorts of questions about our various relationships to each other and I snubbed him.”

“How did he take that?”

“Nobody enjoys being snubbed, I suppose, but I fancy he had a tolerably thick hide on him.”

“Was there actually a quarrel?”

Edward stood up. “Look here, Alleyn,” he said, “if I was in the slightest degree implicated in this business I should have followed my own advice and refused to answer any of your questions. I am not implicated. I did not monkey with the revolver. I did not bring about Rivera’s death.”

“And now,” Carlisle thought in despair, “Ned’s going to give him a sample of the family temper. O God,” she thought, “please don’t let him.”

“Good,” Alleyn said and waited.

“Very well then,” Edward said grandly and sat down.

“So there was a quarrel.”

“I merely,” Edward shouted, “showed the man I thought he was impertinent and he walked out of the room.”

“Did you speak to him again after this incident?”

Carlisle remembered a scene in the hall, the two men facing each other, Rivera with his hand clapped to his ear. What was it Ned had said to him? Something ridiculous, like a perky schoolboy. “Put that in your hurdy-gurdy and squeeze it,” he had shouted with evident relish.

“I merely ask these questions,” Alleyn said, “because the bloke had a thick ear, and I wondered who gave it to him. The skin’s broken and I notice you wear a signet ring.”

In the main office, Dr. Curtis contemplated Breezy Bellairs with the air of wary satisfaction. “He’ll do,” he said, and stepping neatly behind Breezy’s chair, he winked at Alleyn. “He must have got hold of something over and above the shot I gave him. But he’ll do.”

Breezy looked up at Alleyn and gave him the celebrated smile. He was pallid and sweating lightly. His expression was one of relief, of well-being. Dr. Curtis washed his syringe in a tumbler of water on the desk and then returned it to his case.

Alleyn opened the door into the foyer and nodded to Fox, who rose and joined him. Together they returned to the contemplation of Breezy.

Fox cleared his throat. “ Alors ,” he said cautiously and stopped.

“ Évidemment ,” he said, “ il y a un avancement, n’est-ce pas ?”

He paused, slightly flushed, and looked out of the corners of his eyes at Alleyn.

“ Pas grand’chose ,” Alleyn muttered. “But as Curtis says, he’ll do for our purpose. You go, by the way, Br’er Fox, from strength to strength. The accent improves.”

“I still don’t get the practice though,” Fox complained. Breezy, who was looking with complete tranquillity at the opposite wall, laughed comfortably. “I feel lovely, now,” he volunteered.

“He’s had a pretty solid shot,” Dr. Curtis said. “I don’t know what he’d been up to before but it seems to have packed him up a bit. But he’s all right. He can answer questions, can’t you, Bellairs?”

“I’m fine,” Breezy rejoined dreamily. “Box of birds.”

“Well…” Alleyn said dubiously. Fox added in a sepulchral undertone: “ Faute de mieux .” “Exactly,” Alleyn said and, drawing up a chair, placed himself in front of Breezy.

“I’d like you to tell me something,” he said. Breezy lazily withdrew his gaze from the opposite wall and Alleyn found himself staring into eyes that, because of the enormous size of their pupils, seemed mere structures and devoid of intelligence.

“Do you remember,” he said, “what you did at Lord Pastern’s house?”