Ngaio Marsh - Death in a White Tie

“Lord Robert was with her at the time—” Alleyn began.

“You seem equally interested in the fact that I returned my mother’s bag to her. Why? Neither of these incidents had anything to do with Bunchy Gospell. My mother’s not well and I won’t have her worried.”

“Quite right,” said Alleyn. “I won’t either if I can help it.”

She seemed to accept that, but he could see that she had something else to say. Her young, beautifully made-up face in its frame of careful curls had a frightened look.

“I want you to tell me,” said Bridget, “if you suspect Donald of anything.”

“It is much too soon for us to form any definite suspicion of anybody,” Alleyn said. “You shouldn’t attach too much significance to any one question in police interrogations. Many of our questions are nothing but routine. As Lord Robert’s heir — no, don’t storm at me again, you asked me and I tell you — as Lord Robert’s heir Donald is bound to come in for his share of questions. If you are worrying about him, and I see you are, may I give you a tip? Encourage him to return to medicine. If he starts running night clubs the chances are that sooner or later he will fall into our clutches. And then what?”

“Of course,” said Bridget thoughtfully, “it’ll be different now. We could get married quite soon, even if he was at a hospital or something all day. He will have some money.”

“Yes,” agreed Alleyn, “yes.”

“I mean I don’t want to be heartless,” continued Bridget looking at him quite frankly, “but naturally one can’t help thinking of that. We’re terribly, terribly sorry about Bunchy. We couldn’t be sorrier. But he wasn’t young like us.”

Into Alleyn’s mind came suddenly the memory of a thinning head, leant sideways, of fat hands, of small feet turned inwards.

“No,” he said, “he wasn’t young like you.”

“I think he was stupid and tiresome over Donald,” Bridget went on in a high voice, “and I’m not going to pretend I don’t, although I am sorry I wasn’t friends with him last night. But all the same I don’t believe he’d have minded us thinking about the difference the money would make. I believe he would have understood that.”

“I’m sure he would have understood.”

“Well then, don’t look as if you’re thinking I’m hard and beastly.”

“I don’t think you’re beastly and I don’t believe you are really very hard.”

“Thank you for nothing,” said Bridget and added immediately: “Oh, damn, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” said Alleyn. “Good-bye.”

“Yes, but—”

“Well?”

“Nothing. Only, you make me feel shabby and it’s not fair. If there was anything I could do for Bunchy I’d do it. So would Donald, of course. But he’s dead. You can’t do anything for dead people.”

“If they have been murdered you can try to catch the man that killed them.”

“ ‘An eye for an eye.’ It doesn’t do them any good. It’s only savagery.”

“Let the murderer asphyxiate someone else if it’s going to suit his book,” said Alleyn. “Is that the idea?”

“If there was any real thing we could do—”

“How about Donald doing what his uncle wanted so much? Taking his medical? That is,” said Alleyn quickly, “unless he really has got a genuine ambition in another direction. Not by way of Captain Withers’s night clubs.”

“I’ve just said he might be a doctor, now, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” said Alleyn, “you have. So we’re talking in circles.” His hand was on the door-knob.

“I should have thought,” said Bridget, “that as a detective you would have wanted to make me talk.”

Alleyn laughed outright.

“You little egoist,” he said, “I’ve listened to you for the last ten minutes and all you want to talk about is yourself and your young man. Quite right too, but not the policeman’s cup of tea. You take care of your mother who needs you rather badly just now, encourage your young man to renew his studies and, if you can, wean him from Withers. Good-bye, now, I’m off.”

When he had closed the nursery door behind him, Alleyn made for the stairs. If Fox was still closeted in the library with Carrados conversation must be getting a bit strained. He passed Lady Carrados’s room and heard a distant noise.

“It’s insufferable, my dear Evelyn, that—”

Alleyn grimaced and went on downstairs.

He found Fox alone in the library.

“Hullo, Brer Fox,” said Alleyn. “Lost the simple soldier-man?”

“Gone upstairs,” said Fox. “I can’t say I’m sorry. I had a job to keep him here at all after you went.”

“How did you manage it?”

“Asked him if he had any experience of police investigation. That did it. We went from there to how he helped the police catch a footman that stole somebody’s pearls in Tunbridge and how if he just hadn’t happened to notice the man watching the vase on the piano nobody would ever have thought of looking in the Duchess’s potpourri. Funny how vain some of these old gentlemen get, isn’t it?”

“Screamingly. As we seem to have this important room all to ourselves we’d better see if we can get hold of Miss Harris. You might go and ask—”

But before Fox got as far as the door it opened and Miss Harris herself walked in.

“Good afternoon,” she said crisply, “I believe you wished to see me. Lady Carrados’s secretary.”

“We were on the point of asking for you, Miss Harris,” said Alleyn. “Won’t you sit down? My name is Alleyn and this is Inspector Fox.”

“Good afternoon,” repeated Miss Harris and sat down.

She was neither plain nor beautiful, short nor tall, dark nor fair. It crossed his mind that she might have won a newspaper competition for the average woman, that she represented the dead norm of femininity. Her clothes were perfectly adequate and completely without character. She was steeped in nonentity. No wonder that few people had noticed her at Marsdon House. She might have gone everywhere, heard everything like a sort of upper middle-class Oberon at Theseus’s party. Unless, indeed, nonentity itself was conspicuous at Marsdon House last night.

He noticed that she was not in the least nervous. Her hands rested quietly in her lap. She had laid a pad and pencil on the arm of her chair exactly as if she was about to take notes at his dictation. Fox took his own notebook out and waited.

“May we have your name and address?” asked Alleyn.

“Certainly, Mr Alleyn,” said Miss Harris crisply. “Dorothea Violet Harris. Address — town or country?”

“Both, please.”

“Town: fifty-seven Ebury Mews, S.W. Country: The Rectory, Barbicon-Bramley, Bucks.” She glanced at Fox. “B-a-r-b-i—”

“Thank you, miss, I think I’ve got it,” said Fox.

“Now, Miss Harris,” Alleyn began, “I wonder if you can give me any help at all in this business.”

To his tense astonishment Miss Harris at once opened her pad on which he could see a column of shorthand hieroglyphics. She drew out from her bosom on a spring extension a pair of rimless pince-nez. She placed them on her nose and waited with composure for Alleyn’s next remark.

He said: “Have you some notes there, Miss Harris?”

“Yes, Mr Alleyn. I saw Miss O’Brien just now and she told me you would be requiring any information I could give about Lord Gospell’s movements last night and this morning. I thought it better to prepare what I have to say. So I just jotted down one or two little memos.”

“Admirable! Let’s have ’em.”

Miss Harris cleared her throat.

“At about twelve-thirty,” she began in an incisive monotone, “I met Lord Robert Gospell in the hall. I was speaking to Miss O’Brien. He asked me to dance with him later in the evening. I remained in the hall until a quarter to one. I happened to glance at my watch. I then went downstairs to top landing. Remained there. Period of time unknown but I went down to the ballroom landing before one-thirty. Lord Gospell — I mean Lord Robert Gospell — then asked me to dance.”