Ngaio Marsh - Death At The Bar

“I don’t—”

“But you do,” insisted Alleyn gently.

Decima turned her head and stared searchingly at him.

“You don’t look a brute,” she said doubtfully.

“I’m glad of that.”

“I mean you don’t look a complete robot. I suppose, having once committed yourself to a machine, you have to tick-over in the appointed manner.”

“Always providing someone doesn’t throw a spanner in the works.”

“Look here,” said Decima. “Bob Legge had an appointment in Illington that evening. He was just going, he would have gone if Will hadn’t persuaded him not to. Will told him he’d be a fool to drive through the tunnel with the surface water pouring through it.”

She was watching Alleyn and she said quickly, “Ah! You didn’t know that?”

Alleyn said nothing.

“Ask Will. Ask the man he was to meet in Illington.”

“The local police have done that,” said Alleyn. “We won’t question the appointment. We only know Mr. Legge didn’t keep it.”

“He couldn’t. You can’t drive through that tunnel when there’s a stream of surface-water pouring down it.”

“I should hate to try,” Alleyn agreed. “We’re not making much of an outcry over Mr. Legge’s failure to appear. It was you, wasn’t it, who raised the question?”

“I was only going to point out that Bob didn’t know there would be a thunderstorm, did he?”

“Unless the pricking of his thumbs or something—”

“If this was murder I suppose it was premeditated. You won’t deny that?”

“No. I don’t deny that.”

“Well then! Suppose he was the murderer. He didn’t know it would rain. It would have looked pretty fishy for him to put off his appointment for no reason at all.”

“It would. I wonder why he didn’t tell me this himself.”

“Because he’s so worried that he’s at the end of his tether. Because you got hold of him last night and deliberately played on his nerves until he couldn’t think. Because—”

“Hullo!” said Alleyn. “You’ve seen him this morning, have you?”

If Decima was disconcerted she didn’t show it. She blazed at Alleyn.

“Yes, I’ve seen him and I scarcely recognized him. He’s a mass of overwrought nerves. His condition’s pathological. The next thing will be a confession of a crime he didn’t commit.”

“How about the crime he did commit?” asked Alleyn. “It would be more sensible.”

And that did shake her. She caught her breath in a little gasping sigh. Her fingers went to her lips. She looked very young and very guilty.

“So you knew all the time,” said Decima.

i

Alleyn had expected that Decima would hedge, rage, or possibly pretend to misunderstand him. Her sudden capitulation took him by surprise and he was obliged to make an embarrassingly quick decision. He plumped for comparative frankness.

“We expect,” he said, “a report on his fingerprints. When that comes through, we shall have official confirmation of a record that we suspected from the first and of which we are now certain.”

“And you immediately put two and two together and make an absurdity.”

“What sort of absurdity?”

“You will say that because he didn’t come forward and announce ‘I’m a man with a police record,’ he’s a murderer. Can’t you see how he felt? Have you the faintest notion what it’s like for a man who’s been in prison to try to get back, to try to earn a miserable pittance? Have you ever thought about it at all or wondered for two seconds what becomes of the people you send to jail? To their minds? I know you look after their bodies with the most intolerable solicitude. You are there always. Every employer is warned. There is no escape. It would be better, upon my honour, I believe it would be better, to hang them outright than — than to tear their wings off and let them go crawling out into the sun.”

“That’s a horrible analogy,” said Alleyn, “and a false one.”

“It’s a true analogy. Can’t you see why Legge was so frightened? He’s only just stopped having to report. Only now has he got his thin freedom. He thought, poor wretch, that we wouldn’t keep him on if we knew he’d been to jail. Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”

“How long have you known this about him?” asked Alleyn.

She stood up abruptly, her palm against her forehead as though her head ached.

“Oh, for some time.”

“He confided in you? When?”

“When he got the job,” said Decima flatly. Alleyn did not believe her, but he said politely —

“That was very straightforward, wasn’t it?” And as she did not answer he added: “Do you know why he went to prison?”

“No. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. He’s wiped it out, God knows, poor thing. Don’t tell me.”

Alleyn reflected, with a certain amount of amusement, that it was as well she didn’t want to know what Legge’s offence had been. Some image of this thought may have appeared in his face. He saw Decima look sharply at him and he said hurriedly: “All this is by the way. What I really want to ask you is whether, on the morning you encountered Mr. Watchman by the furze-bush, you were alone with him all the time.”

He saw that now she was frightened for herself. Her eyes widened, and she turned extremely pale.

“Yes. At least — I—no. Not at the end. I rather think Norman Cubitt and Sebastian Parish came up.”

“You rather think?”

“They did come up. I remember now. They did.”

“And yet,” said Alleyn, “when I asked them if they saw Watchman that morning, they said definitely that they did not.”

“They must have forgotten.”

“Please! You can’t think I’ll believe that. They must have been over every word that was spoken by Watchman during the last hours of his life. They have told me as much. Why, they must have walked back to the inn with him. How could they forget?”

Decima said: “They didn’t forget.”

“No?”

“It was for me. They are being little gents.”

Alleyn waited.

“Well,” she said, “I won’t have it. I won’t have their chivalry. If you must know, they surprised their friend in a spirited attempt upon my modesty. I wasn’t pleased and I was telling him precisely what I thought of him. I suppose they were afraid you would transfer your attentions from Bob Legge to me.”

“Possibly,” agreed Alleyn. “They seem to think I am a sort of investigating chameleon.”

“I imagine,” said Decima in a high voice, “that because I didn’t relish Mr. Watchman’s embraces and told him so it doesn’t follow that I set to work and murdered him.”

“It’s not a strikingly good working hypothesis. I’m sorry to labour this point but we’ve no sense of decency in the force. Had he shown signs of these tricks before?”

The clear pallor of Decima’s face was again flooded with red. Alleyn thought: “Good Lord, she’s an attractive creature, I wonder what the devil she’s like.” He saw, with discomfort, that she could not look at him. Fox made an uneasy noise in his throat and stared over the downs. Alleyn waited. At last Decima raised her eyes.

“He was like that,” she murmured.

Alleyn now saw a sort of furtiveness in Decima. She was no longer tense, her pose had changed and she offered him no challenge,

“I suppose he couldn’t help it,” she said, and then with a strange look from Alleyn to Fox, she added: “It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. You needn’t think ill of him. I was all right.”

In half a minute she had changed. The educational amenities, provided by that superior mother, had fallen away from her. She had turned into a rustic beauty, conscious of her power of provocation. The rumoured engagement to Will Pomeroy no longer seemed ridiculous. And as if she had followed Alleyn’s thought, she said: “I’d be very glad if you wouldn’t say anything of this to Will Pomeroy. He knows nothing about it. He wouldn’t understand.”