Ngaio Marsh: Overture to Death

“But what the suffering cats did she want with an onion? She wasn’t going to make Irish stew.”

“Haven’t you heard that she has never been known to shed tears until Saturday night, when floods were induced by sheer pain and disappointment because she couldn’t play the piano? She took a good sniff at the onion, opened her dressing-room door, swayed to and fro, moaned and wept and wept and wept until Dr. Templett heard her and behaved exactly as she knew he would behave. Later on she chucked the onion into the débris in the supper-room. She ought to have returned it to the teapot.”

“I boggle at the onion.”

“Boggle away, my boy. If it was an innocent onion, why didn’t she own to it? There are her powder and her prints. Nobody else extracted it from the teapot. But it doesn’t matter. It’s only another corroborative detail.”

“The whole thing sounds a bit like Pooh Bah.”

“It’s a beastly business. I detest it. She’s a horrible woman, not a generous thought in her make-up; but that doesn’t make much odds. If Georgie Biggins hadn’t set his trap she’d have gone on to the end of her days, most likely, hating Miss C, scheming, scratching, adoring. Everybody will talk psychiatry and nonsense. Her idée fixe will be pitchforked about the studios of the intelligentsia. That old fool Jernigham, who’s a nice old fool, and his son, who’s no fool at all, will go through hell. The rector, who supplied the idée fixe, will blame himself; and God knows he’s not to blame. Templett will hover on the brink of professional odium, but he’ll be cured of Mrs. Ross.”

“What of Mrs. Ross?”

“At least she’s scored a miss in the Vale of Pen Cuckoo. No hope now of blackmailing old Jernigham into matrimony, or out of hard cash. We’ll catch the Rosen sooner or later, please heaven, for she’s a nasty bit of work, and that’s a fact. She would have seen Templett in the dock before she’d have risked an eyelash to clear him, and yet I imagine she’s very much attracted by Templett. As soon as she knew we thought him innocent, she was all for him. Here we are.”

Nigel pulled up outside the police station.

“May I come in with you?” he asked.

“If you like, certainly.”

Fox met Alleyn in the door.

“She’s locked up,” said Fox. “Making a great old rumpus. The doctor’s gone for a strait-jacket. Here’s a letter for you, Mr. Alleyn. It came this afternoon.”

Alleyn looked at the letter and took it quickly. The firm small writing of the woman he loved brought the idea of her into his mind.

“It’s from Troy,” he said.

And before he went into the lighted building he looked at Nigel.

“If one could send every grand passion to the laboratory, do you suppose, in each resulting formula, we should find something of Dinah and Henry’s young idyll, something of Templett’s infatuation, something of Miss P.‘s madness, and even something of old Jernigham’s foolishness?”

“Who knows?” said Nigel.

“Not I,” said Alleyn.

The End