Ngaio Marsh - Artists in Crime

“Go and ask him to give his name,” said Alleyn.

The policeman retired.

Fox eyed Alleyn excitedly.

“By gum, sir, you don’t think it may be this Garcia? By all accounts he’s eccentric enough to send in a message like that.”

“No,” said Alleyn, as the door opened. “I rather fancy I recognize the style. I rather fancy, Fox, that an old and persistent friend of ours has got in first on the news.”

“Unerring as ever, Mr. Alleyn,” said a voice from the hall, and Nigel Bathgate walked into the room.

Where the devil did you spring from?” asked Alleyn. Nigel advanced with a shamless grin.

“ ‘Where did I come from, ’Specky dear?

The blue sky opened and I am here!’ ”

“Hullo, Fox!”

“Good evening, Mr. Bathgate,” said Fox.

“I suppose you’ve talked to my mamma on the telephone,” said Alleyn as they shook hands.

“There now,” returned Nigel, “aren’t you wonderful, Inspector? Yes, Lady Alleyn rang me up to say you’d been sooled on to the trail before your time, and she thought the odds were you’d forget to let us know you couldn’t come and stay with us.”

“So you instantly motored twenty miles in not much more than as many minutes in order to tell me how sorry you were?”

“That’s it,” said Nigel cheerfully. “You read me like a book. Angela sends her fondest love. She’d have come too only she’s not feeling quite up to long drives just now.”

He sat down in one of the largest chairs.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” he said. “You can give me the story later on. I’ve got enough to go on with from the local cop. I’ll ring up the office presently and give them the headlines. Your mother — divine woman — has asked me to stay.”

“Has my mother gone out of her mind?” asked Alleyn of nobody in particular.

“Come, come, Inspector,” reasoned Nigel, with a trace of nervousness in his eye, “you know you’re delighted to have me.”

“There’s not the smallest excuse for your bluffing your way in, you know. I’ve a damn’ good mind to have you chucked out.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll take everything down in shorthand and nobody will see me if I turn the chair round. Fox will then be able to fix the stammering witnesses with a basilisk glare. All will go like clock-work. All right?”

“All right. It’s quite irregular, but you occasionally have your uses. Go into the corner there.”

Nigel hurried into a shadowy corner, turned a high armchair with its back to the room and dived into it.

“ ‘I am invisible,’ ” he said. “ ‘And I shall overhear their conference,’ The Bard.”

“I’ll deal with you later,” said Alleyn grimly. “Tell them to send another of these people along, Fox.”

When Fox had gone Nigel asked hoarsely from the armchair if Alleyn had enjoyed himself in New Zealand.

“Yes,” said Alleyn.

“Funny you getting a case there,” ventured Nigel. “Rather a busman’s holiday, wasn’t it?”

“I enjoyed it. Nobody interfered and the reporters were very well-behaved.”

“Oh,” said Nigel.

There was a short silence broken by Nigel.

“Did you have a slap-and-tickle with the American lady on the boat deck?”

“I did not.”

“Oh! Funny coincidence about Agatha Troy. I mean she was in the same ship, wasn’t she? Lady Alleyn tells me the portrait is quite miraculously like you.”

“Don’t prattle,” said Alleyn. “Have you turned into a gossip hound?”

“No. I say!”

“What!”

“Angela’s started a baby.”

“So I gathered, and so no doubt Fox also gathered, from your opening remarks.”

“I’m so thrilled I could yell it in the teeth of the whole police force.”

Alleyn smiled to himself.

“Is she all right?” he asked.

“She’s not sick in the mornings any more. We want you to be a godfather. Will you, Alleyn?”

“I should be charmed.”

“Alleyn!”

“What?”

“You might tell me a bit about this case. Somebody’s murdered the model, haven’t they?”

“Quite possibly.”

“How?”

“Stuck a knife through the throne so that when she took the pose— ”

“She sat on it?”

“Don’t be an ass. She lay on it and was stabbed to the heart, poor little fool!”

“Who’s the prime suspect?”

“A bloke called Garcia, who has been her lover, was heard to threaten her, has possibly got tired of her, and has probably been living on her money.”

“Is he here?”

“No. He’s gone on a walking tour to Lord knows where, and is expected to turn up at an unknown warehouse in London in the vaguely near future, to execute a marble statue of ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ for a talkie house.”

“D’you think he’s bolted?”

“I don’t know. He seems to be one of those incredible and unpleasant people with strict aesthetic standards, and no moral ones. He appears to be a genius. Now shut up. Here comes another of his fellow-students.”

Fox came in with Phillida Lee.

Alleyn, who had only met her across the dining-room table was rather surprised to see how small she was. She wore a dull red dress covered in a hand-painted design. It was, he realised, deliberately unfashionable and very deliberately interesting. Miss Lee’s hair was parted down the centre and dragged back from her forehead with such passionate determination that the corners of her eyes had attempted to follow it. Her face, if left to itself, would have been round and eager, but the austerities of the Slade school had superimposed upon it a careful expression of detachment. When she spoke one heard a faint undercurrent of the Midlands. Alleyn asked her to sit down. She perched on the edge of a chair and stared fixedly at him.

“Well, Miss Lee,” Alleyn began in his best official manner, “we shan’t keep you very long. I just want to have an idea of your movements during the week-end.”

“How ghastly!” said Miss Lee.

“But why?”

“I don’t know. It’s all so terrible. I feel I’ll never be quite the same again. The shock . Of course, I ought to try and sublimate it, I suppose, but it’s so difficult.”

“I shouldn’t try to do anything but be common-sensical if I were you,” said Alleyn.

“But I thought they used psycho methods in the police!”

“At all events we don’t need to apply them to the matter in hand. You left Tatler’s End House on Friday afternoon by the three o’clock bus?”

“Yes.”

“With Mr. Ormerin and Mr. Watt Hatchett?”

“Yes,” agreed Miss Lee, looking self-conscious and maidenly.

“What did you do when you got to London?”

“We all had tea at The Flat Hat in Vincent Square.”

“And then?”

“Ormerin suggested we should go to an exhibition of poster-work at the Westminster. We did go, and met some people we knew.”

“Their names, please, Miss Lee.”

She gave him the names of half a dozen people and the addresses of two.

“When did you leave the Westminster Art School?”

“I don’t know. About six, I should think. Ormerin had a date somewhere. Hatchett and I had dinner together at a Lyons. He took me. Then we went to the show at the Vortex Theatre.”

“That’s in Maida Vale, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I’m a subscriber and I had tickets. They were doing a play by Michael Sasha. It’s called Angle of Incidence . It’s frightfully thrilling and absolutely new. All about three county council labourers in a sewer. Of course,” added Miss Lee, adopting a more mature manner, “the Vortex is purely experimental.”

“So it would seem. Did you speak to anyone while you were there?”