Black As He's Painted

  ‘Why’ve you come down, Chrissie?’ he said. ‘You’re meant to stay in bed.’

  ‘I – I’d run out of cigarettes.’ She pointed a shaky finger at Alleyn. ‘You again!’ she said with a pretty awful attempt at playfulness.

  ‘Me again, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry to pounce like this but one or two things have cropped up.’

  Her hands were at her hair, ‘I’m in no state – Too shaming!’ she cried. ‘What will you think!’

  ‘You’d better go back to bed,’ her husband said brutally. ‘Here! I’ll take you.’

  She’s signalled, Alleyn thought. I can’t prevent this.

  ‘I’ll just tidy up a bit,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ll do.’

  They went out, he holding her arm above the elbow.

  And now, Alleyn thought, she’ll tell him she’s telephoned the Sanskrit. If it was the Sanskrit and I’ll lay my shirt on it. They’re cooking up what they’re going to say to me.

  He heard a door slam upstairs.

  He looked round the drawing-room. Half conventional, half ‘contemporary’. Different coloured walls, ‘with-it’ ornaments and one or two collages and a mobile mingled disconsolately with pouffes, simpering water-colours and martial photographs of the Colonel, one of which showed him in shorts and helmet with a Ng’ombwanan regiment forming a background. A ladylike desk upon which the telephone now gave out a click.

  Alleyn was beside it. He lifted the receiver and heard someone dialling. The ringing sound set in. After a longish pause a muffled voice said ‘Yes?’

  ‘That you, Zenoclea?’ The Colonel said, ‘Chrissie rang you a moment ago, didn’t she? All right. He’s here.’

  ‘Be careful.’ (The Sanskrit, sure enough.)

  ‘Of course. This is only to warn you.’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘My dear Xenny! Look! He may call on you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘God knows. I’ll come round later, or ring. ’Bye.’

  A click and then the dialling tone.

  Alleyn hung up and walked over to the window.

  He was gazing at the distant prospect of the Basilica when the Colonel re-entered the room. Alleyn saw at once that he had decided on a change of manner. He came in jauntily.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘There we are! Chrissie’s insisting on making herself presentable. She’ll be down in a moment. Says she feels quite equal to it. Command take a pew. I think a drink while we wait is indicated, don’t you? What shall it be?’

  ‘Very civil of you,’ Alleyn said, speaking the language, ‘but it’s not on for me, I’m afraid. Please don’t let me stop you, though.’

  ‘Not when you’re on guard duty, what? Bad luck! Well, just to show there’s no ill-feeling,’ said the Colonel, ‘I think I will.’

  He opened a door at the far end of the room and went into what evidently was his study. Alleyn saw a martial collection of sword, service automatic and a massive hunting rifle hung on the wall. The Colonel returned with a bottle in one hand and a very large gin in the other.

  ‘Your very good health,’ he said and drank half of it.

  Fortified and refreshed, it seemed, he talked away easily about the assassination. He took it for granted, or appeared to do so, that the spearsman had killed the Ambassador in mistake for the President. He said that you never could tell with blacks, that he knew them, that he’d had more experience of them, he ventured to claim, than most. ‘Bloody good fighting men, mind you, but you can’t trust them beyond a certain point.’ He thought you could depend upon it that when the President and his entourage had got back to Ng’ombwana the whole thing would be dealt with in their way and very little would be heard of it. ‘There’ll be a new mlinzi on duty and no questions asked, I wouldn’t wonder. On the other hand, he may decide to make a public example.’

  ‘By that do you mean a public execution?’

  ‘Don’t take me up on that, old man,’ said the Colonel, who was helping himself to another double gin. ‘He hasn’t gone in for that particular exercise, so far. Not like the late lamented, f’instance.’

  ‘The Ambassador?’

  ‘That’s right. He had a pretty lurid past in that respect. Between you and me and the gatepost.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘As a young man. Ran a sort of guerrilla group. When we were still here. Never brought to book but it’s common knowledge. He’s turned respectable of late years.’

  His wife made her entrance: fully clothed, coiffured and regrettably made-up.

  ‘Time for dinkies?’ she asked. ‘Super! Give me one, darling: kick-sticks.’

  Alleyn thought: She’s already given herself one or more. This is excessively distasteful.

  ‘In a minute,’ said her husband, ‘sit down, Chris.’

  She did, with an insecure suggestion of gaiety.

  ‘What have you two been gossiping about?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Alleyn said, ‘to bother you at an inopportune time and when you’re not feeling well, but there is one question I’d like to ask you, Mrs Cockburn-Montfort.’

  ‘Me? Is there? What?’

  ‘Why did you fire off that Luger and then throw it in the pond?’

  She gaped at him, emitted a strange whining sound that, incongruously enough, reminded him of Mrs Chubb. Before she could speak her husband said: ‘Shut up, Chris. I’ll handle it. I mean that. Shut up.’

  He turned on Alleyn. The glass in his hand was unsteady but, Alleyn thought, he was in pretty good command of himself. One of those heavy drinkers who are seldom really drunk. He’d had a shock but he was equal to it.

  He said: ‘My wife will not answer any questions until we have consulted our solicitor. What you suggest is obviously unwarranted and quite ridiculous. And ’stremely ’fensive. You haven’t heard the last of this, whatever-your-rank-is Alleyn.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right, there,’ Alleyn said. ‘And nor have you, perhaps. Good evening to you. I’ll show myself out.’

  IV

  ‘And the odd thing about that little episode, Br’er Fox, is this: my bit of personal bugging on the Cockburn-Montfort telephone exchange copped Miss Xenoclea Sanskrit – Xenny for short – in an apparently motiveless lie. The gallant Colonel said: “He –” meaning me – “may call on you” and instead of saying: “He has called on me,” she merely growled “Why?” Uncandid behaviour from a comrade, don’t you think?’

  ‘If,’ said Fox carefully, ‘this little lot, meaning the Colonel and his lady, the Sanskrit combination, the Sheridan gentleman and this chap Chubb, are all tied up in some hate-the-blacks club and if, as seems possible, seeing most of them were at the party, and seeing the way the lady carried on, they’re mixed up in the fatality –’ He drew breath.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ Alleyn said.

  ‘I was only going to say it wouldn’t, given all these circumstances, be anything out of the way if they got round to looking sideways at each other,’ He sighed heavily. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘and I must say on the face of it this is the view I’m inclined to favour, we may have a perfectly straightforward job. The man with the spear used the spear and what else took place round about in the dark has little or no bearing on the matter.’

  ‘How about Mrs C-M and her Luger in the ladies’ loo?’

  ‘Blast!’ said Fox.

  ‘The whole thing’s so bloody untidy,’ Alleyn grumbled

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going over the headings,’ Fox confessed.

  ‘Plough ahead and much good may it do you.’

  ‘A.’ said Fox, massively checking it off with finger and thumb. ‘A. The occurrence. Ambassador killed by spear. Spearsman stationed at rear in handy position. Says he was clobbered and his spear taken off him. Says he’s innocent. B. Chubb. Ex-commando. Also at rear. Member of this secret society or whatever it is. Suggestion that he’s a black-hater. Says he was clobbered by black waiter. C. Mrs C-M. Fires shot, probably blank, from ladies’ convenien
ces. Why? To draw attention? To get the President on his feet, so’s he could be speared? By whom? This is the nitty-gritty one.’ said Fox. ‘If the club’s an anti-black show would they collaborate with the spearsman or the waiter? The answer is: unlikely. Very unlikely. Where does this take us?’

  ‘Hold on to your hats, boys.’

  ‘To Chubb,’ said Fox. ‘It takes us to Chubb. Well, doesn’t it? Chubb, set up by the club, clobbers the spearsman, and does the job on the Ambassador and afterwards says the waiter clobbered him and held him down.’

  ‘But the waiter maintains that he stumbled in the dark and accidentally grabbed Chubb. If Chubb was the spearsman, what are we to make of this?’

  ‘Mightn’t it be the case, though? Mightn’t he have stumbled and momentarily clung to Chubb?’

  ‘Before or after Chubb clobbered the spearsman and grabbed the spear?’

  Fox began to look disconcerted, ‘I don’t like it much,’ he confessed. ‘Still, after a fashion it fits. After a fashion it does.’

  ‘It’s a brave show, Br’er Fox, and does you credit. Carry on.’

  ‘I don’t know that I’ve all that much more to offer. This Sanskrit couple, now. At least there’s a CRO on him. Fraud, fortune-telling and hard drugs, I think you mentioned. Big importer into Ng’ombwana until the present government turned him out. They’re members of this club, if Mr Whipplestone’s right when he says he saw them wearing the medallion.’

  ‘Not only that,’ Alleyn said. He opened a drawer in his desk and produced his black pottery cat. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said and exhibited the base. It bore, as a trademark, a wavy X. ‘That’s on the reverse of the medallions, too,’ he said. ‘X for Xenoclea, I suppose. Xenny not only wears a medallion, she makes ’em in her little kiln, fat witch that she is.’

  ‘You’re building up quite a case, Mr Alleyn, aren’t you? But against whom? And for what?’

  ‘You tell me. But whatever turns up in the ambassadorial department, I’ll kick myself all round the Capricorns if I don’t get something on the Sanskrits. What rot they talk when they teach us we should never get involved. Of course we get involved: we merely learn not to show it.’

  ‘Oh, come now! You never do, Mr Alleyn.’

  ‘Don’t I? All right, Foxkin, I’m talking through my hat. But I’ve taken a scunner on la belle Xenny and Big Brother and I’ll have to watch it. Look, let’s get the CRO file and have a look for ourselves. Fred Gibson wasn’t all that interested at that stage. One of his henchmen looked it up for him. There was nothing there that directly concerned security and he may not have given me all the details.’

  So they called on the Criminal Records Office for the entry under Sanskrit.

  Alleyn said, ‘Just as Fred quoted it. Fraudulent practices. Fortune-telling. Suspected drug peddling. All in the past before he made his pile as an importer of fancy goods in Ng’ombwana. And he did, apparently, make a tidy pile before he was forced to sell out to a Ng’ombwanan interest.’

  ‘That was recently?’

  ‘Quite recently. I actually happened to catch sight of him standing outside the erstwhile premises when I was over there. He doesn’t seem to have lost face – and God knows he’s got plenty to lose – or he wouldn’t have been asked to the party.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say it was a bit funny their being invited, anyway?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alleyn agreed thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I think I would.’

  ‘Would you reckon this pottery business of the sister’s was a money-spinner?’

  ‘Not on a big scale.’

  ‘Was she involved in any of the former charges?’

  ‘She hasn’t got a CRO. Wait a bit though. There’s a cross reference. “See McGuigan, O.” Fetch us down the Macs.’ The sergeant on duty obliged.

  ‘Here you are,’ said Mr Fox presently. ‘Take a look,’ and without waiting for Alleyn to do so he continued in the slightly catarrhal voice he kept for reading aloud: ‘“McGuigan, Olive, supposed widow of Sean McGuigan of whom nothing known. Sister of Kenneth Sanskrit q.v. Later assumed as first name, Xenoclea. Sus. drug traffic with brother. Charged with fortune-telling for which, fined, June 1953. Reported to RSPCA cruelty to cat, 1967. Charged and convicted. Fined with costs.” Fred Gibson’s henchmen left this out. He’ll be getting some “advice” on this one,’ said Fox.

  ‘Ah. And Sam Whipplestone thinks she ill-treated his cat. Pretty little picture we’re building up, aren’t we? I must say I thought the “Xenoclea” bit was too good to be true,’ Alleyn grunted.

  ‘Is it a made-up job, then, that name?’

  ‘Not by her, at least. Xenoclea was a mythical prophetess who wouldn’t do her stuff for Hercules because he hadn’t had a bath. After his Augean stables job, perhaps. I bet la belle Xenny re-christened herself and reverted to her maiden name when she took to her fortune-telling lay.’

  ‘Where do they live?’

  ‘Above the pottery pigs. There seems to be a flat up there: quite a sizeable one, by the look of it.’

  ‘Does the brother live there with her – wait a bit,’ said Fox interrupting himself. ‘Where’s the guest list we made last night?’

  ‘In my office but you needn’t worry. I looked it up. That’s their joint address. While we’re at it, Br’er Fox, let’s see, for the hell of it, whether there’s anything on Sheridan, A. R. G., 1a, Capricorn Walk.’

  But Mr Sheridan had no criminal record.

  ‘All the same,’ Alleyn said, ‘we’ll have to get him sorted out. Even if it comes to asking the President if there’s a Ng’ombwanan link. He wasn’t asked to the reception, of course. Oh well, press on.’

  They left the CRO and returned to Alleyn’s rooms, where he managed to reach Superintendent Gibson on the telephone.

  ‘What’s horrible, Fred?’

  ‘Nothing to report,’ said that colourless man. ‘All quiet inside the premises, seemingly. We’ve stopped the demolition. Routine precaution.’

  ‘Demolition?’

  ‘Clearing up after the party. The Vistas people and the electrics. It’s silly really, seeing we can’t go in. If nothing develops they may as well get on with it.’

  ‘Any ingoings or outcomings of interest?’

  ‘Post. Tradesmen. We looked over all deliveries which wasn’t very popular. Callers offering condolences and leaving cards. The media of course. One incident.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘His Nibs, believe it or not.’

  ‘The President?’

  ‘That’s right. Suddenly comes out by the front entrance with a dirty great dog on a leash and says he’s taking it for a walk in the Park.’

  Alleyn swore vigorously.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Gibson.

  ‘Never mind. Go on.’

  ‘My sergeant, on duty at the entrance, tries to reason with him. I’m doing a cruise round in a job car and they give me a shout and I come in and try to reason with him. He’s very la-di-da, making out we’re fussy. It’s awkward,’ said Mr Gibson drearily.

  ‘How did you handle it, Fred?’

  ‘I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? So I say we’ll keep with it and he says if it’s a bodyguard I’m worried about he’s got the dog and his own personal protection and with that the door opens and guess who appears?’ invited Mr Gibson without animation.

  ‘The spearsman of last night?’

  ‘That’s correct. The number one suspect in my book who we’d’ve borrowed last night, there and then, if we’d had a fair go. There he was, large as life.’

  ‘You don’t surprise me. What was the upshot?’

  ‘Ask yourself. In flocks the media, telly, press, the lot. He says “no comment” and off he goes to his constitutional with the dog and the prime sus and five of my chaps in a panda doing their best in the way of protection. So they go and look at Peter Pan,’ said Mr Gibson bitterly, ‘and nobody shoots anybody or lobs in a bomb and they come home again. Tonight it’s the Palace caper.’

  ‘That’s been scaled
down considerably, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Nondescript transport. Changed route. Small party.’

  ‘At least he’s not taking the spearsman with him.’

  ‘Not according to my info. It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Poor Fred!’

  ‘Well, it’s not what you’d pick in the way of a job,’ said Gibson. ‘Oh yes, and there’s another thing. He wants to see you. Or talk to you.’

  ‘Why? Did you gather?’

  ‘No. He just chucks it over his shoulder when he walks away. He’s awkward.’

  ‘The visit may be cut short.’

  ‘Can’t be too short for me,’ said Gibson and they took leave of each other.

  ‘It’s a case,’ Alleyn said when he’d replaced the receiver, ‘of “where do we go for honey?” I dunno, Br’er Fox. Press on, press on but in what direction?’

  ‘This Mr Sheridan,’ Fox ruminated. ‘He seems to have been kind of side-tracked, doesn’t he? I mean from the secret society or what-have-you angle.’

  ‘I know he does. He wasn’t at the party. That’s why.’

  ‘But he is a member of whatever they are.’

  ‘Yes. Look here, Fox. The only reason – the only tenable reason – we’ve got for thinking there was some hanky-panky based on this idiot-group is the evidence, if you can call it that, of Mrs C-M having loosed off a Luger with a blank charge in the ladies’ loo. I’m quite convinced, if only because of their reaction – hers and the gallant Colonel’s – that she’s the girl who did it, though proving it will be something else again. All right. The highly suspect, the generally inadmissible word “coincidental” keeps on rearing its vacant head in these proceedings but I’ll be damned if I accept any argument based on the notion that two entirely unrelated attempts at homicide occurred within the same five minutes at an Ambassadorial party.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Fox, ‘the idea that Mrs C-M and this little gang had something laid on and never got beyond the first move because the spearsman hopped in and beat them to it?’

  ‘Is that what I mean? Yes, of course it is, but blow me down flat if it sounds as silly as I expected it to.’