Ngaio Marsh - Enter A Murderer

“THE UNICORN MURDER.

“Fresh Developments

Saint Libel Case Recalled.”

As he worked his thoughts kept turning to Alleyn. The inspector ought to know about Felix. At last he reached out his hand and took up the telephone. Surely by this time Alleyn would be home. He dialled the number of his flat, rested his head on his hand and waited.

After Nigel and Inspector Fox had gone out of the room, and the door was shut, Inspector Alleyn stood very still and listened to their footsteps dying away down the passage. He heard Fox speak to the constable at the entrance door, and a little later their voices floated up from the footpath beneath.

If an onlooker had been there, he might perhaps have supposed Alleyn’s thoughts were unpleasant ones. The inspector had the type of face that is sometimes described as “winged.” The corners of his mouth made two deep depressions such as a painter will render with a crisp upward stroke of the brush. His nostrils, too, slanted up, and so did the outside corners of his very dark eyebrows. It was an attractive and fastidious face and, when nobody watched him, a very expressive one. At the moment it suggested extreme distaste. One might have guessed that he had just done something that was repugnant to him, or that he was about to undertake a task which displeased him.

Alleyn looked at his watch, sighed, turned out the lights, and went to the window, where he was careful to stand behind the curtains. From here he could watch, unseen, the desultory traffic of Gerald’s Row. Perhaps only two minutes had passed since Nigel and Fox had gone. A solitary taxi came very slowly down the little street. It loitered past the flat. He had an aeroplane view of it, but he fancied that the occupant’s face was in an unusual and uncomfortable position, below the window, for all the world as though its owner were kneeling on the floor, enjoying a worm’s-eye view of the flat, and taking rather particular care not to be seen. At this Inspector Alleyn smiled sideways. He was trying to remember the exact location of the nearest telephone booth. The taxi disappeared and he moved away from the window, took out his cigarette-case, thought better of it, and pocketed it again. Three or four minutes passed. His meditations were uncannily checked by the bedside telephone, which came to life abruptly with a piercing double ring. Alleyn smiled rather more broadly, and sat on the bed with his hands in his pockets. The telephone rang twenty times and then inconsequently went dead. He returned to the window. It was now very quiet in the street, so that when someone came briskly on foot from Elizabeth Street, he heard the steps a long way off. Suddenly he drew back from the window, and with a very desolate groan, crawled under the bed, which was a low one. He was obliged to lie flat on his front. He rearranged the valance, which he had noted disgustedly was of rose-coloured taffeta. Then he lay perfectly still.

Presently a key turned in the entrance door to the flat, and whoever it was who came in must have taken off their shoes, because only the faintest sound, a kind of sensation of movement, told him someone was coming, step by stealthy step, along the passage. Then he heard the handle of the door turn and from under the edge of the valance, in the dim light reflected from the street lamps, he saw the door itself swing slowly open. In the shadow beyond a darker shadow moved forward. The faintest rustle told him that someone had come into the room. Another rustle and the scaly sound of curtain rings. The light from the street was blotted out. When the silence had become intolerable, the telephone above him rang out again shrilly. The bell pealed on and on. The bed above him sank down and touched his shoulders stealthily. The noise of the telephone changed into a stupidly coarse clatter. Something had been pressed down over it. Alleyn counted twenty more double rings before it stopped.

Nigel over in Chester Terrace had hung up his receiver and gone to dine with Gardener.

A faint sigh of relief sounded above Alleyn’s head. He could have echoed it with heartfelt enthusiasm when the bed rustled again and the weight on his shoulders was lifted. Next came the sound of chair legs, dragging a little on the carpet, and coming down finally across the room. The wardrobe door creaked. A pause, followed by furtive scrabblings. Then a metallic click. Alleyn cleared his throat.

“You’ll simply have to turn up the light, Miss Vaughan,” he said.

She didn’t scream, but he knew how near she came to it by the desperate little gasp she gave. Then she whispered bravely:

“Who is it?”

“The Law,” said Alleyn grandly.

“You!”

“Yes. Do turn the light on. There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t. The switch is just inside the door.” He sneezed violently. “Bless you, Mr. Alleyn,” he said piously.

The room was flooded with pink light. Alleyn had thrust his head and shoulders out from the end of the bed.

She stood with one hand still on the switch. In the other she carried the little iron-bound box. Her eyes were dilated like those of a terrified child. She looked fantastically beautiful.

Alleyn wriggled out and stood up.

“I think bed dust is quite the beastliest kind of dust there is,” he complained.

Her fingers slid away from the door handle. Her figure slackened. As she pitched forward he caught her. The box fell with a clatter to the floor.

“No, no,” he said. “This won’t do. You’re not a woman who faints when she meets a reverse. You, with your iron nerve. You haven’t fainted. Your heart beats steadily.”

“Yours, on the contrary,” she whispered, “is hammering violently.”

He put her on her feet and held her elbows.

“Sit down,” he said curtly.

She pulled herself away, and sat in the arm-chair he lugged forward.

“All the same,” said Miss Vaughan, “you did give me a fright” She looked at him very steadily. “What a fool I’ve been. Such an obvious trap.”

“I was surprised that it caught you. When I saw you in the taxi, I knew I had succeeded, and then a little later, when you rang — I thought Surbonadier would have given you a latch-key.”

“I had meant to return it.”

“Really? I must say, I can’t think where the attraction lay. Evidently you are a bad selector.”

“Not always.”

“Perhaps not always.”

“After all, you have nothing against me. Why shouldn’t I come here? You yourself suggested it.”

“At nine, with me. What were you looking for in that box?”

“My letters,” she said quickly. “I wanted to destroy them.”

“They are not there.”

“Then like Ophelia I was the more deceived.”

“You weren’t deceived,” he said bitterly.

“Mr. Alleyn — give me my letters. If I give you my word, my solemn word, that they had nothing whatever to do with his death—”

“I’ve read them.”

She turned very white.

“All of them?”

“Yes. Even yesterday’s note.”

“What are you going to do — arrest me? You are alone here.”

“I do not think you would struggle and make a scene. I can’t picture myself dragging you, dishevelled and breathless, into the street, and blowing a fanfare on my police whistle while you lacerated my face with your nails.”

“No, that would be too undignified.”

She began to weep, not noisily or with ugly distortions of her face, but beautifully. Her eyes flooded and then overflowed. She held her handkerchief over them for a moment

“I’m cold,” she said.

He took the eiderdown cover off the bed and gave it to her. It slipped out of her hands and she looked at him helplessly. He put it round her, tucking it into the chair. Suddenly she seized the collar of his coat.