Ngaio Marsh - Death And The Dancing Footman

“I’m sorry if I’ve kept you waiting, Mr. Alleyn,” she said. “There were things to do upstairs and nobody else to do them.”

He pushed forward a chair and she sat down slowly and wearily, letting her head fall back against the chair. A sequence of fine lines appeared about her mouth and eyes, and her hands looked exhausted. “If you’re going to ask me to provide myself with three nice little alibis,” said Hersey, “you may as well know straight away that I can’t do it. I seem to remember reading somewhere that that makes me innocent and I’m sure I hope it’s true.”

“It’s in the best tradition of detective fiction, I understand,” said Alleyn with a smile.

“That’s not very comforting. Am I allowed to smoke?”

Alleyn offered her his case and lit her cigarette for her, dropping his length of fishing line over her wrist as he did so. He apologized and gathered it into his hand.

“Is that a clue or something?” asked Hersey. “It looks like fishing line.”

“Are you a fisherman, Lady Hersey?”

“I used to be. Jonathan’s father taught me when I was a child. He’s the old party in the photograph in that ghastly room next door.”

“Hubert St. John Worthington Royal, who caught a four-and-a-half-pounder in Penfelton Reach?”

“If I wasn’t so tired,” said Hersey, “I’d fall into a rapture over your powers of observation. That’s the man. And the rod on the wall is his rod. Now I come to think of it, your bit of string looks very much like his line.”

Alleyn opened his hand. Without moving her head or her hands she looked languidly at it.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s it. It’s been looped back from the point of the rod to the reel, for years.” She looked up into Alleyn’s face. “There’s something in this, isn’t there? What is it?”

“There’s a lot in it,” Alleyn said, slowly. “Lady Hersey, will you try to remember, without straining at your memory, when you last saw the line in its customary position?”

“Friday night,” said Hersey instantly. “There was an old cast on it, shrivelled up with age, and a fly. I remember staring at it while I was trying to fit in a letter in that foul parlour game of Jo’s. It was the cast that caught the famous four-and-a-half-pounder. Or so we’ve always been told.”

“You went into the smoking-room last night some little time before the tragedy, but when the two brothers were there?”

“Yes. I went in to see if they had calmed down. That was before the row over the radio.”

“You didn’t by any chance look at the old rod, then?”

“No. No, but I did at lunch-time. Just before lunch I was warming my toes at the fire, and I stared absently at it as one does at things one has seen a thousand times before.”

“And there was the line looped from the tip to the reel?”

Hersey knitted her brows, and for the first time her full attention seemed to be aroused. “Now you ask me,” she said, “it wasn’t. I remember thinking vaguely that someone must have wound it up or something.”

“You are positive?”

“Yes. Yes, absolutely positive.”

“Suppose I began to heckle you about it.”‘

“I should dig my toes in.”

“Good!” said Alleyn heartily, and wrote it down.

When he looked up, Hersey’s eyes were closed, but she opened them and said: “Before I forget or go to sleep there’s one thing I must say. I don’t believe that face-lifter did it.”

“Why?” asked Alleyn, without emphasis.

“Because I’ve spent a good many hours working for him up there in Sandra Compline’s room. I like him and I don’t think he’s a murderer, and anyway I don’t see how you can get over the dancing footman’s story.” Alleyn dropped the coil of fishing line on the desk. “That little man’s no killer,” Hersey added. “He worked like a navvy over Sandra, and if she’d lived she’d have done her best, poor darling, to have him convicted of homicidal lunacy. He knew that.”

“Why are you so sure she would have taken that line?”

“Don’t forget,” said Hersey, “I was the last person to see her alive. I gave her a half-dose of that stuff. She wouldn’t take more and she said she had no aspirin. I suppose she wanted — wanted to make sure later on. Nick had broken Bill’s death to her. She seemed absolutely stunned, almost incredulous if that’s not too strange a word to use. Not sorrowful so much as horrified. She wouldn’t say anything much about it, although I did try gently to talk to her. It seemed to me it would be better if she broke down. She was stony with bewilderment. But just as I was going she said: ‘Dr. Hart is mad, Hersey. I thought I could never forgive him but I think my face has haunted him as badly as it has haunted me.’ And then she said: ‘Don’t forget, Hersey, he’s out of his mind.’ I haven’t told anyone else of this. I can’t tell you how strange her manner was, and how astonished I was to hear her say all that so deliberately when a moment before she had seemed so confused.”

Alleyn asked Hersey to repeat this statement and wrote it down. When he had finished she said: “There’s one other thing. Have you examined her room?”

“Only superficially. I had a look round, after Compline went out.”

“Did you look at her clothes?” asked Hersey.

“Yes.”

“The blue Harris tweed overcoat?”

“The one that is still very damp? Yes.”

“It was soaking wet yesterday afternoon, and she told me she hadn’t stirred out of the house all day.”

Alleyn opened Mrs. Compline’s letter to her son in the presence of Jonathan Royal, Nicholas Compline, and Aubrey Mandrake. He did not read it aloud, but he showed it to Mandrake and asked him to make a copy. While they waited, in an uncomfortable silence, Mandrake performed this office and at Alleyn’s request re-sealed the original in a fresh envelope, across the flap of which Jonathan was asked to sign his name. Alleyn then tied a string round the envelope and sealed the knot down with wax from his chemist’s parcel. He said that he would be obliged if Jonathan and Nicholas would leave him alone with Mandrake. Jonathan seemed perfectly ready to comply with this request, but Nicholas treated them to a sudden and violent outbreak of hysteria. He demanded that the letter should be returned, stormed at Alleyn, threatened Hart, and at last, sobbing breathlessly, flung himself into a chair and refused to move. As the best means of cutting this performance short, Alleyn gathered up his possessions and, followed by a very much shaken Mandrake, moved to the green “boudoir.” Here he asked Mandrake to read over the copy of the letter.

My darling [Mandrake read],

You must not let this make you very sad. If I stayed with you, even for the little time there would be left to me, the memory of these terrible days would lie between us. I think that during these last hours I have been insane. I cannot write a confession. I have tried but the words were so terrible I could not write them. What I am going to do will make everything clear enough, and the innocent shall not suffer through me. Already Hersey suspects that I went out of the house this morning. I think she knows where I went. I cannot face it. You should have been my eldest son, my darling. If I could have taken any other way — but there was no other way. All my life, everything I have done has been for you, even this last terrible thing is for you, and however wicked it may seem, you must always remember that. And now, darling, I must write down what I mean to do. I have kept the sleeping powders they took from that man’s room, and I have an unopened bottle of aspirins. I shan’t feel anything at all. My last thoughts and my last prayers are for you.