Josephine Tey - The Collected Works

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If there was one thing Toselli hated more than another it was the police. All his life he had been no poor hater, Toselli. As commis he had hated the maître d’hôtel, as maître d’hôtel he had hated the management, as the management he hated many things: the chef, wet weather, his wife, the head porter’s moustache, clients who demanded to see him at breakfast time—oh, many things! But more than all he hated the police. They were bad for business and bad for the digestion. It stopped his digestive juices flowing just to see one of them walk in through the glass doors. It was bad enough to remember his annual bill for New Year “presents” to the local officers—thirty bottles of Scotch, thirty of gin, two dozen champagne, and six of liqueur brandy it had come to last year—but to suffer the invasion of officers not so far “looked after,” and therefore callous to the brittle delicacy of hotel well-being—well, it was more than Toselli’s abundant flesh and high-pressured blood could stand.

That is why he smiled so sweetly upon Grant—all his life Toselli’s smile had been stretched across his rage, like a tight-rope spanning a chasm—and gave him one of the second-best cigars. Inspector Grant wanted to interview the new waiter, did he? But certainly! This was the waiter’s hour off—between lunch and afternoon tea—but he should be sent for immediately.

“Stop!” said Grant. “You say the man is off duty? Do you know where he will be?”

“Very probably in his room. Waiters like to take the weight off their feet for a little, you understand.”

“I’d like to see him there.”

“But certainly. Tony!” Toselli called to a page passing the office door. “Take this gentleman up to the room of the new waiter.”

“Thank you,” Grant said. “You’ll be here when I come down? I should like to talk to you.”

“I shall be here.” Toselli’s tone expressed dramatic resignation. His smile deepened as he flung out his hands. “Last week it was a stabbing affair in the kitchen; this week it is—what? Theft? Affiliation?”

“I’ll tell you all about it presently, Mr. Toselli.”

“I shall be here.” His smile became ferocious. “But not for long, no! I am going to buy one of those businesses where one puts sixpence into a slot and the meal comes out. Yes. There, but there, would be happiness.”

“Even there, there are bent coins,” Grant said as he followed Tony to the lift.

“Sanger, you come up with me,” he said as they passed through the busy hall. “You can wait for us here, Williams. We’ll bring him out this way. Much less fuss than through the servants’ side. No one will notice anything. Car waiting?”

“Yes, sir.”

Grant and Sanger went up in the lift. In those few seconds of sudden quiet and suspended action, Grant found time to wonder why he had not shown his warrant and told Toselli what he had come for. That would have been his normal course. Why was he so anxious to have the bird in his hand? Was it just the canniness of his Scots ancestry coming out, or was there a presentiment that—That what? He didn’t know. He knew only that now that he was here he could not wait. Explanations could follow. He must have the man in his hands.

The soft sound of the lift in the silence was like the sound of the curtain going up.

At the very top of the colossal building which was the Westover Marine Hotel, were the quarters of those waiters who were resident: small single rooms set in a row close together under the roof. As the page put out a bony fist to knock on a door, Grant restrained him. “All right, thank you,” he said, and page and liftman disappeared into the crowded and luxurious depths, leaving the two policemen on the deserted cocoanut-matted landing. It was very quiet up there.

Grant knocked.

Tisdall’s indifferent voice bade him come in.

The room was so small that Grant’s involuntary thought was that the cell that waited would be no great change. A bed on one side, a window on the other, and in the far wall two cupboard doors. On the bed lay Tisdall in his shirt sleeves, his shoes on the floor. A book lay open, face down, on the coverlet.

He had expected to see a colleague. That was obvious. At the sight of Grant his eyes widened, and as they travelled to Sanger, standing behind Grant in the doorway, realisation flooded them.

Before Grant could speak, he said, “You can’t mean it!”

“Yes, I’m afraid we do,” Grant said. He said his regulation piece of announcement and warning, Tisdall sitting with feet dangling on the bed’s edge, not apparently listening.

When he had finished Tisdall said slowly: “I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.”

“How were you so sure what we had come for?”

“It doesn’t need two of you to ask about my health.” His voice rose a little. “What I want to know is why you’re doing it? What have you against me? You can’t have proved that button was mine because it wasn’t. Why don’t you tell me what you have found so that I can explain away whatever it was? If you have new evidence you can surely ask me for an explanation. I have a right to know, haven’t I? Whether I can explain or not?”

“There isn’t anything you could explain away, Tisdall. You’d better get ready to come with us.”

Tisdall got to his feet, his mind still entangled in the unbelievableness of what was happening to him. “I can’t go in these things,” he said, looking down at his waiter’s dress. “Can I change?”

“Yes, you can change, and take some things with you.” Grant’s hands ran over his pockets in expert questioning, and came away empty. “But you’ll have to do it with us here. Don’t be too long about it, will you? You can wait there, Sanger,” he added, and swung the door to, leaving Sanger outside. He himself moved over to lean against the window-sill. It was a long way to the ground, and Tisdall, in Grant’s opinion, was the suicide type. Not enough guts to brazen a thing out. Not enough vanity, perhaps, to like the limelight at any price. Certainly the “everyone sorry when I’m dead” type.

Grant watched him now with minute attention. To an outsider he was a casual visitor, propped casually in the window while he indulged in casual conversation. In reality he was ready for instant emergency.

But there was no excitement. Tisdall pulled his suit-case from under the bed, and began with automatic method to change into his tweed and flannels. Grant felt that if the man carried poison, it would be somewhere in his working garments, and unconsciously relaxed a little as the waiter’s dress was cast aside. There was going to be no trouble. The man was coming quietly.

“I needn’t have worried as to how I was going to live,” Tisdall was saying. “There seems to be a moral somewhere in this very immoral proceeding. What do I do about a lawyer, by the way, when I have no money and no friends?”

“One will be provided.”

“Like a table napkin. I see.”

He opened the cupboard nearest to Grant, and began to take things from their hangers and fold them into his case.

“At least you can tell me what my motive was?” he said presently, as if a new thought had struck him. “You can mistake buttons; you can even wish a button on to a coat that never had it; but you can’t pin a motive where there couldn’t be one!”

“So you had no motive?”

“Certainly not. Quite the opposite. What happened last Thursday morning was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I should have thought that was obvious even to an outsider.”

“And of course you had not the faintest idea that Miss Clay had made a codicil to her will leaving you a ranch and a large sum of money.”