Ngaio Marsh - Death in a White Tie

“The final departures? No, she didn’t. She simply bore out everything we’d already been told.”

“She’s an observant little lady, isn’t she?” said Fox.

“Yes, Fox, she’s no fool, for all her tender qualms. And now we have a delightful job ahead of us. We’ve got to try to bamboozle, cajole, or bully Mrs Halcut-Hackett into giving away her best young man. A charming occupation.”

“Will we be seeing the General, too? I suppose we’ll have to. I don’t think the other chaps will have tackled him. I told them not to touch any of our lot.”

“Quite right,” said Alleyn, with a sigh. “We shall be seeing the General. And here we are at Halkin Street. The Halcut-Hacketts of Halkin Street! An important collection of aspirates and rending consonants. The General first, I suppose.”

The General was expecting them. They walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London. They were shown into a study smelling of leather and cigars and decorated with that pleasant sequence of prints of the Nightcap Steeplechase. Alleyn wondered if the General had stood with his cavalry sabre on the threshold of this room, daring the fashionable decorator to come on and see what he would get. Or possibly Mrs Halcut-Hackett, being an American, caused her husband’s study to be aggressively British. Alleyn and Fox waited for five minutes before they heard a very firm step and a loud cough. General Halcut-Hackett walked into the room.

“Hullo! Afternoon! What!” he shouted.

His face was terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess. So true to type was he that he would have seemed unreal, a two-dimensional figure that had stepped from a coloured cartoon of a regimental dinner, had it not been for a certain air of solidity and a kind of childlike constancy that was rather appealing. Alleyn thought: “Now, he really is a simple soldier-man.”

“Sit down,” said General Halcut-Hackett. “Bad business! Damn blackguardly killer. Place is getting no better than Chicago. What are you fellows doing about it? What? Going to get the feller? What?”

“I hope so, sir,” said Alleyn.

“Hope so! By Gad, I should hope you hope so. Well, what can I do for you?”

“Answer one or two questions, if you will, sir.”

“Course I will. Bloody outrage. The country’s going to pieces in my opinion and this is only another proof of it. Men like Robert Gospell can’t take a cab without gettin’ the life choked out of them. What it amounts to. Well?”

“Well, sir, the first point is this. Did you walk into the green sitting-room on the top landing at one o’clock this morning while Lord Robert Gospell was using the telephone?”

“No. Never went near the place. Next!”

“What time did you leave Marsdon House?”

“Between twelve and one.”

“Early,” remarked Alleyn.

“My wife’s charge had toothache. Brought her home. Whole damn business had been too much for her. Poodle-faking and racketing! All people think of nowadays. Goin’ through her paces from morning till night. Enough to kill a horse.”

“Yes,” said Alleyn. “One wonders how they get through it.”

“Is your name Alleyn?”

“Yes, sir.”

“George Alleyn’s son, are you? You’re like him. He was in my regiment. I’m sixty-seven,” added General Halcut-Hackett with considerable force. “Sixty-seven. Why didn’t you go into your father’s regiment? Because you preferred this? What?”

“That’s it, sir. The next point is—”

“What? Get on with the job, eh? Quite right.”

“Did you return to Marsdon House?”

“Why the devil should I do that?”

“I thought perhaps your wife was—”

The General glared at the second print in the Nightcap series and said:

“M’wife preferred to stay on. Matter of fact, Robert Gospell offered to see her home.”

“He didn’t do so, however?”

“Damn it, sir, my wife is not a murderess.”

“Lord Robert might have crossed the square as escort to your wife, sir, and returned.”

“Well, he didn’t. She tells me they missed each other.”

“And you, sir. You saw your daughter in and then —”

“She’s not my daughter!” said the General with a good deal of emphasis. “She’s the daughter of some friend of my wife’s.” He glowered and then muttered half to himself: “Unheard of in my day, that sort of thing. Makes a woman look like a damn trainer. Girl’s no more than a miserable scared filly. Pah!”

Alleyn said: “Yes, sir. Well, then, you saw Miss—”

“Birnbaum. Rose Birnbaum, poor little devil. Call her Poppet.”

“ — Miss Birnbaum in and then—”

“Well?”

“Did you stay up?”

To Alleyn’s astonishment the General’s face turned from terra-cotta to purple, not, it seemed, with anger, but with embarrassment. He blew out his moustache several times, pouted like a baby, and blinked. At last he said:

“Upon my soul, I can’t see what the devil it matters whether I went to bed at twelve or one.”

“The question may sound impertinent,” said Alleyn. “If it does I’m sorry. But, as a matter of police routine, we want to establish alibis—”

“ Alibis !” roared the General. “ Alibis ! Good God, sir, are you going to sit there and tell me I’m in need of an alibi? Hell blast it, sir—”

“But, General Halcut-Hackett,” said Alleyn quickly, while the empurpled General sucked in his breath, “every guest at Marsdon House is in need of an alibi.”

“Every guest! Every guest! But, damn it, sir, the man was murdered in a bloody cab, not a bloody ballroom. Some filthy bolshevistic fascist,” shouted the General, having a good deal of difficulty with this strange collection of sibilants. He slightly dislodged his upper plate but impatiently champed it back into position. “They’re all alike!” he added confusedly. “The whole damn boiling.”

Alleyn hunted for a suitable phrase in a language that General Halcut-Hackett would understand. He glanced at Fox who was staring solemnly at the General over the top of his spectacles.

“I’m sure you’ll realize, sir,” said Alleyn, “that we are simply obeying orders.”

“ What ?”

“That’s done it,” thought Alleyn.

“Orders! I can toe the line as well as the next fellow,” said the General, and Alleyn, remembering Carrados had used the same phrase, reflected that in this instance it was probably true. The General, he saw, was preparing to toe the line.

“I apologize,” said the General. “Lost me temper. Always doing it nowadays. Indigestion.”

“It’s enough to make anybody lose their temper, sir.”

“Well,” said the General, “you’ve kept yours. Come on, then.”

“It’s just a statement, sir, that you didn’t go out again after you got back here and, if possible, someone to support the statement.”

Once again the General looked strangely embarrassed.

“I can’t give you a witness,” he said. “Nobody saw me go to bed.”

“I see. Well then, sir, if you’ll just give me your word that you didn’t go out again.”

“But, damme, I did take a — take a — take a turn round the Square before I went to bed. Always do.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t give me an idea? Was it long after you got home?”

“Some time. I saw the child to her room and stirred up my wife’s maid to look after her. Then I came down here and got myself a drink. I read for a bit. I dare say I dozed for a bit. Couldn’t make up my mind to turn in.”