Ngaio Marsh - Death in a White Tie

“That would be almost funny, wouldn’t it?” Lady Carrados looked into Alleyn’s compassionate eyes. She reached out her hand and he took it firmly between both of his.

“Roderick,” she said, “how old are you?”

“Forty-three, my dear.”

“I’m nearly forty,” and absent-mindedly she added, as women do: “Isn’t it awful?”

“Dreadful,” agreed Alleyn, smiling at her.

“Why haven’t you married?”

“My mother says she tried to make a match of it between you and me. But Paddy O’Brien came along and I hadn’t a chance.”

“That seems odd, now, doesn’t it? If it’s true. I don’t remember that you ever paid me any particular attention.”

He saw that she had reached the lull in the sensibilities that sometimes follows extreme emotional tension. She spoke idly with an echo of her customary gentle gaiety. She sounded as if her mind had gone as limp as the thin hand he still held.

“You ought to marry,” she said vaguely and added: “I must go.”

“I’m coming down. I’ll see you to your car.”

As she drove away he stood looking after her for a second or two, and then shook his head doubtfully and set out for Cheyne Walk.

Alleyn wondered if it was only because he knew the body of his friend had come home that he felt its presence. Perhaps the house was not more quiet than it had been that morning. Perhaps the dead did not in truth cast about them so deep a spell. And then he smelt lilies and all the hushed chill of ceremonial death closed about his heart. He turned to Bunchy’s old butler who was in the condition so often found in the faithful retainers of Victorian melodrama. He had been weeping. His eyes were red and his face blotted with tears, and his lips trembled. He showed Alleyn into Mildred’s sitting-room. When she came forward in her lustreless black clothes, he found in her face the same unlovely reflection of sorrow. Mildred wore the customary expression of bereavement, and though he knew it to be the stamp of sincere grief, he felt a kind of impatience. He felt a profound loathing of the formalities of death. A dead body was nothing, nothing but an intolerable caricature of something someone had loved. It was a reminder of unspeakable indignities, and yet people surrounded their dead with owlish circumstances, asked you, as Mildred was asking him now, in a special muted voice, to look at them. “I know you’d like to see him, Roderick.” He followed her into a room on the ground floor. The merciless scent of flowers was so heavy here that it hung like mist on the cold air. The room was crowded with flowers. In the centre, on three shrouded trestles, Robert Gospell’s body lay in its coffin. It was the face of an elderly baby, dignified by the possession of some terrific secret. Alleyn was not troubled by the face. All dead faces looked like that. But the small fat hands, which in life had moved with staccato emphasis, were obediently folded, and when he saw these his eyes were blinded by tears. He groped in his overcoat pocket for a handkerchief and his fingers found the bunch of rosemary from Mr Harris’s garden. The grey-green spikes were crisp and unsentimental and they smelt of the sun. When Mildred turned aside, he gave them to the dead.

He followed her back to her drawing-room and she began to tell him about the arrangements for the funeral.

“Broomfield, who as you know is the head of the family, is only sixteen. He’s abroad with his tutor and can’t get back in time. We are not going to alter his plans. So that Donald and I are the nearest. Donald is perfectly splendid. He has been such a comfort all day. Quite different. And then dear Troy has come to stay with me and has answered all the letters and done everything.”

Her voice, still with that special muted note, droned on, but Alleyn’s thoughts had been arrested by this news of Troy and he had to force himself to listen to Mildred. When she had finished he asked her if she wished to know anything about his side of the picture and discovered that she was putting all the circumstances of her brother’s death away from her. Mildred had adopted an ostrich attitude towards the murder and he got the impression that she rather hoped the murderer would never be caught. She wished to cut the whole thing dead and he thought it was rather clever and rather nice of her to be able to welcome him so cordially as a friend and pay no attention to him as a policeman.

After a minute or two there seemed to be nothing more to say to Mildred. Alleyn said good-bye to her, promised to attend the memorial service at eleven and to do his part at the funeral. He went out into the hall.

In the doorway he met Troy.

He heard his own voice saying: “Hullo, you’re just in time. You’re going to save my life.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“It’s nearly five. I’ve had six hours’ sleep in the last fifty-eight hours. That’s nothing for us hardy coppers but for some reason I’m feeling sorry for myself. Will you take tea or a drink or possibly both with me? For God’s sake say you will.”

“Very well, where shall we go?”

“I thought,” said Alleyn, who up to that moment had thought nothing of the sort, “that we might have tea at my flat. Unless you object to my flat.”

“I’m not a débutante,” said Troy. “I don’t think I need coddle my reputation. Your flat let it be.”

“Good,” said Alleyn. “I’ve got mother’s car. I’ll just warn my servant and tell the Yard where to find me. Do you think I may use the telephone.”

“I’m sure you may.”

He darted to telephone and was back in a minute.

“Vassily is tremendously excited,” he said. “A lady to tea! Come on.”

On the way Alleyn was so filled with astonishment at finding himself agreeably alone with Troy that he fell into a trance from which he only woke when he pulled the car up outside his own flat. He did not apologize for his silence: he felt a tranquillity in Troy that had accepted it, and when they were indoors he was delighted to hear her say: “This is peaceful,” and to see her pull off her cap and sit on a low stool before the fireplace.

“Shall we have a fire?” asked Alleyn. “Do say yes. It’s not a warm day, really.”

“Yes, let’s,” agreed Troy.

“Will you light it while I see about tea?”

He went out of the room to give Vassily a series of rather confused orders, and when he returned there was Troy before the fire, bareheaded, strangely familiar.

“So you’re still here,” said Alleyn.

“It’s a nice room, this.”

He put a box of cigarettes on the floor beside her and took out his pipe. Troy turned and saw her own picture of Suva at the far end of the room.

“Oh, yes,” said Alleyn, “there’s that.”

“How did you get hold of it?”

“I got someone to buy it for me.”

“But why—”

“I don’t know why I was so disingenuous about it except that I wanted it so very badly for reasons that were not purely aesthetic and I thought you would see through them if I made a personal business of it.”

“I should have been rather embarrassed, I suppose.”

“Yes.” Alleyn waited for a moment and then said: “Do you remember how I found you that day, painting and cursing? It was just as the ship moved out of Suva. Those sulky hills and that ominous sky were behind you.”

“We had a row, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

Troy’s face became rather pink.

“In fact,” said Alleyn, “there is scarcely an occasion on which we have met when we have not had a row. Why is that, do you suppose?”

“I’ve always been on the defensive.”

“Have you? For a long time I thought you merely disliked me.”