Ngaio Marsh - Color Scheme

Smith sucked his teeth savagely, muttered “Excuse me” and slouched out to the verandah. The pressman looked up hopefully and spoke to him but evidently got an uncompromising answer. He let Smith move off, looking wistfully after him.

In heavy silence the remaining seven men finished their meal.

“One can hardly hear oneself speak for the buzz of gay inconsequent chatter,” said Gaunt. “I think I shall relax for half an hour.”

He pushed back his chair.

“There is, after all, sufficient reason for our silence,” said Mr. Falls.

Something in his attitude, though he had not risen, and some new quality in the tone of his voice, which was a deep one, brought a sudden stillness upon his hearers.

“When one is in danger of arrest,” said Mr. Falls, “one does not feel disposed for chatter. May I, however, claim the attention of the company for a moment? Sergeant Webley, will you indulge me?”

Webley, who had made a brusque movement when Gaunt’s chair scraped on the floor, leant the palms of his hands on the table and, looking attentively at Falls, said: “Go ahead, sir.”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Falls, “whether you are all devotees of detective fiction. I must confess that I am. It is argued, in respect of these tales, that they bear little or no relation to fact. Police investigation, we protest, is not a matter of equally balanced motives, tortuous elaborations, and a final revelation in the course of which the investigator’s threat hangs like an ignis fatuus over first one and then another of the artificially assembled suspects. It is rather the slow amassment of facts sufficient to justify the arrest of someone who has been more or less suspect from the moment that the crime was discovered. Sergeant Webley,” said Mr. Falls, “will correct me if I am wrong.”

Sergeant Webley cleared his throat sluggishly. One of the men outside the window looked over his shoulder into the room, turned away again, and moved out of sight.

“However that may be,” Falls continued, and they listened to him with confused attention as if he had, without warning, thrust an embarrassing ceremony upon them, “however that may be, I detect some resemblance in our present assembly to those arbitrary musters, and with the permission of Sergeant Webley I should like, before we break up, to clear the memory of Mr. Maurice Questing. Mr. Questing was not an enemy agent.”

Here Dr. Ackrington broke out with some violence and was not silenced until an account of Questing’s letter had, by a sort of forcible feeding, been rammed down the gullet of his understanding. He took it rather badly. The recovery of Questing’s skull had evidently been broken to him but this final blow to the very cornerstone of all his theories seemed literally to horrify him. He turned quite pale, his protestations ceased, and he waited in silence for Falls to go on.

“Not only was Questing innocent of espionage but, if we are to believe his letter, he actually recognized and accused the real culprit, who adopted a threatening attitude, and, by a species of blackmail, extracted an undertaking from Questing that he would not betray him. Questing suggests that when they parted they were mutually distrustful of one another, and I suggest that fright, rather than business, prompted his sudden decision to go to Australia. He felt himself to be in danger just as we now feel ourselves to be in danger, and, in a figure that he himself might have used, he passed the buck to Mr. Bell. I think he must have written that letter just before we left for the concert. I happened to pass his open door and saw him with his elbows squared on his table. As you know, some three hours later he was killed.”

“Will you excuse me,” said Gaunt. “I don’t want to be difficult but, as I’ve tried to point out before, I’ve been extremely upset by this unspeakably horrible affair and I’m afraid I just haven’t got the kind of mind that revels in post mortems . I’m sorry. I shall leave you to it.”

“One moment, Mr. Gaunt,” said Falls. “You’re upset, I fancy, not so much by the knowledge that Questing died very horridly, as by the fear that you yourself might be implicated.”

“I won’t have this!” cried Gaunt, and sprang to his feet. “I resent this, bitterly.”

“Do sit down. You see,” said Mr. Falls looking amiably about him, “in spite of ourselves we are becoming the orthodox muster of suspects. Here is Mr. Gaunt who quarrelled with Mr. Questing because Mr. Questing used his name as an advertisement, and because he pretended he was the author of a gift that Mr. Gaunt himself had made.”

Barbara started galvanically. Gaunt began to accuse Dikon. “So I’ve got you to thank — ”

“No,” said Falls. “My dear Gaunt, who but you could have made this gift? A quotation from Shakespeare on the card? Written by the shop assistant? You see I have heard all about it. And, if that was not enough, your very expressive face betrayed you most completely last night, when Questing spoke of her enchanting dress to Miss Barbara. You looked — please forgive the unhappy phrase — positively murderous. Was it not the memory of this that led you to conceal your subsequent quarrel with Questing? It seems to me you had quite a lot to agitate you when Questing was killed.”

“I have explained to the point of hysteria that I was anxious to avoid publicity. Good God, who ever committed murder for such a motive? Sergeant Webley, I beg that you — ”

“I quite agree,” said Falls. “Who ever did? May I pass on, for the moment, to another of our suspects? Mr. Smith.”

“Here, you lay off Bert!” shouted Simon. “He’s right out of this. He’d got his agreement.”

“His motive,” Mr. Falls continued precisely, “appears at first to be revenge. Revenge for an attempt on his life.”

“Revenge, my foot. They buried the hatchet.”

“In order to resurrect a much more valuable one in the form of Rewi’s adze. Yes, yes, I agree that the revenge motive breaks down but it does well enough for a red herring. Dr. Ackrington: your motive, at first, would seem to be a kind of quintessence of fury. You believed Questing to be a traitor and you could find little support in your efforts to bring him to book.”

“It’s perfectly obvious to me now, Falls, that the man was done to death by someone from the native settlement. No doubt some wretched youth in the pay of the enemy.”

“Ah! The Maori theme. Shall we leave that for the moment? Now, in your case, Colonel, the motive is much more credible. Forgive me for introducing a painful theme but your position was, I’m afraid, only too clear. Questing’s extraordinary assumption of proprietorship alone would have betrayed it. He was, as Mr. Bell remarked a little while ago, a keen man of business. Have you not benefited greatly by his death…”

“Cut that out!” Simon cried out angrily. “You damn’ well lay off my father.”

“Be quiet, Simon,” said the Colonel.

“… as indeed,” Mr. Falls completed his sentence, “have all the members of your family?” He looked at his hands, lightly clasped on the table. “The Maori element,” he said, and paused. “Revenge for the violation of a sacred object? Not an inconsiderable motive. To my mind, a perfectly credible motive. But did anybody beside Mr. Gaunt, outside the Old Firm, as I feel tempted to call the Smith-Questing-Saul link-up, know of the disappearance of the adze? And beyond that there seems to be a jealousy theme centering round your maid, Colonel. Questing appears to have supplanted the man with the debatable shirt. Eru. Eru Saul.”

“But my dear Falls,” said Dr. Ackrington, “you seem to accept Questing’s letter. Surely, then, the murderer is the spy?”