Black As He's Painted

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am not surprised. They are criminals. Monsters.’

  The Colonel snorted and opened his eyes. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Who are you talking ’bout? Monsters?’

  Gomez made a contemptuous noise. ‘Go to sleep,’ he said. ‘You are disgusting.’

  ‘I take ’ception that remark, sir,’ said the Colonel and sounded exactly like Major Bloodknock, long ago. He shut his eyes.

  ‘How do you know they are criminals?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘I have reliable information,’ said Gomez.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘From friends in Africa.’

  ‘In Ng’ombwana?’

  ‘One of the so-called emergent nations. I believe that is the name.’

  ‘You ought to know,’ Alleyn remarked, ‘seeing that you spent so long there.’ And he thought: He really is rather like an adder.

  ‘You speak nonsense,’ Gomez lisped.

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr Gomez.’

  Chubb, by the window, turned and gaped at him.

  ‘My name is Sheridan,’ Gomez said loudly.

  ‘If you prefer it.’

  ‘’Ere!’ Chubb said with some violence. ‘What is all this? Names!’

  Alleyn said: ‘Come over here, Chubb, and sit down. I’ve got something to say to all of you and for your own sakes you’d better listen to it. Sit down. That’s right. Colonel Cockburn-Montfort –’

  ‘Cert’n’ly,’ said the Colonel, opening his eyes.

  ‘Can you follow me or shall I send for a corpse-reviver?’

  ‘’Course I can follow you. F’what it’s worth.’

  ‘Very well. I’m going to put something to the three of you and it’s this. You are members of a coterie which is motivated by racial hatred, more specifically, hatred of the Ng’ombwanan people in particular. On the night before last you conspired to murder the President.’

  Gomez said, ‘What is this idiot talk!’

  ‘You had an informant in the Embassy: the Ambassador himself, who believed that on the death of the President and with your backing, he would achieve a coup d’état and assume power. In return, you, Mr Gomez, and you, Colonel Montfort, were to be reinstated in Ng’ombwana.’

  The Colonel waved his hand as if these statements were too trivial to merit consideration. Gomez, his left ankle elegantly posed on his right thigh, watched Alleyn over his locked fingers. Chubb, wooden, sat bolt upright on the edge of his chair.

  ‘The Sanskrits, brother and sister,’ Alleyn went on, ‘were also members of the clique. Miss Sanskrit produced your medallion in her pottery downstairs. They, however, were double agents. From the time the plan was first conceived to the moment for its execution and without the knowledge of the Ambassador, every move was being conveyed by the Sanskrits back to the Ng’ombwanan authorities. I think you must have suspected something of the sort when your plan miscarried. I think that last night after your meeting here broke up, one of the group followed Sanskrit to the Embassy and from a distance saw him deliver an envelope. He had passed by your house, Colonel Montfort.’

  ‘I don’t go out at night much nowadays,’ the Colonel said, rather sadly.

  ‘Your wife perhaps? It wouldn’t be the first time you’d delegated one of the fancy touches to her. Well, it’s of no great matter. I think the full realization of what the Sanskrits had done really dawned this morning when you learned that they were shutting up shop and leaving.’

  ‘Have they made it?’ Chubb suddenly demanded. ‘Have they cleared out? Where are they?’

  ‘To return to the actual event. Everything seemed to go according to plan up to the moment when, after the shot was fired and the guests’ attention had been deflected, you, Chubb, made your assault on the spearcarrier. You delivered the chop from behind, probably standing on a subsequently overturned chair to do so. At the crucial moment you were yourself attacked from the rear by the Ng’ombwanan servant. He was a little slow off the mark. Your blow fell: not as intended on the spearsman’s arm but on his collar-bone. He was still able to use his spear and he did use it, with both hands and full knowledge of what he was doing, on the Ambassador.’

  Alleyn looked at the three men. There was no change in their posture or their expressions but a dull red had crept into Chubb’s face and the Colonel’s (which habitually looked as if it had reached saturation point in respect of purple) seemed to darken. They said nothing.

  ‘I see I’ve come near enough the mark for none of you to contradict me,’ Alleyn remarked.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Gomez countered. ‘Your entire story is fantasy and a libel. It is too farcical to merit a reply.’

  ‘Well, Chubb?’

  ‘I’m not answering the charge, sir. Except what I said before. I was clobbered.’

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘What? No comment. No bloody comment.’

  ‘Why were you all trying to get in here, half an hour ago?’

  ‘No comment,’ they said together and Chubb added his former statement that he’d had no intention of calling on the Sanskrits but had merely stopped to offer his support to the Colonel and take him home.

  The Colonel said something that sounded like: ‘Most irregular and unnecessary.’

  ‘Are you sticking to that?’ Alleyn said. ‘Are you sure you weren’t, all three of you, going to throw a farewell party for the Sanskrits and give them, or at any rate, him, something handsome to remember you by?’

  They were very still. They didn’t look at Alleyn or at each other but for a moment the shadow of a fugitive smile moved across their faces.

  The front doorbell was pealing again, continuously. Alleyn went out to the landing.

  Mrs Chubb was at the street door, demanding to be let in. The constable on duty turned, looked up the stairs and saw Alleyn.

  ‘All right,’ Alleyn said. ‘Ask her to come up.’

  It was a very different Mrs Chubb who came quickly up the stairs, thrusting her shoulders forward and jerking up her head to confront Alleyn on the landing.

  ‘Where is he?’ she demanded, breathing hard. ‘Where’s Chubb? You said keep him home and now you’ve got him in here. And with them others. Haven’t you? I know he’s here. I was in the Mews and I seen. Why? What are you doing to him? Where,’ Mrs Chubb reiterated, ‘is my Chubb?’

  ‘Come in,’ Alleyn said. ‘He’s here.’

  She looked past him into the room. Her husband stood up and she went to him. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘You come back with me. You’ve got no call to be here.’

  Chubb said: ‘You don’t want to be like this. You keep out of it. You’re out of place here, Min.’

  ‘I’m out of place! Standing by my own husband!’

  ‘Look – dear –’

  ‘Don’t talk to me!’ She turned on the other two men. ‘You two gentlemen,’ she said, ‘you got no call because he works for you to get him involved, stirring it all up again. Putting ideas in his head. It won’t bring her back. Leave us alone. Syd – you come home with me. Come home.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Min. I can’t.’

  ‘Why can’t you?’ She clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘They’ve arrested you! They’ve found out –’

  ‘Shut up!’ he shouted. ‘You silly cow. You don’t know what you’re saying. Shut up!’ They stared aghast at each other. ‘I’m sorry, Min,’ he said. ‘I never meant to speak rough. I’m not arrested. It’s not like that.’

  ‘Where are they, then? Those two?’

  Gomez said: ‘You! Chubb! Have you no control over your woman? Get rid of her.’

  ‘And that’ll do from you,’ Chubb said, turning savagely on him.

  From the depths of his armchair, Colonel Cockburn-Montfort, in an astonishingly clear and incisive tone, said: ‘Chubb!’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘You’re forgetting yourself.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Alleyn said: ‘Mrs Chubb, everything I said to you this morning was said in good faith.
Circumstances have changed profoundly since then in a way that you know nothing about. You will know before long. In the meantime, if you please will you either stay here, quietly, in this room –’

  ‘You better, Min,’ Chubb said.

  ‘– or,’ Alleyn said, ‘just go home and wait there. It won’t be for long.’

  ‘Go on, then, Min. You better.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ she said. She walked to the far end of the room and sat down.

  Gomez, trembling with what seemed to be rage, shouted: ‘For the last time – where are they? Where have they gone? Have they escaped? I demand an answer. Where are the Sanskrits?’

  ‘They are downstairs,’ Alleyn said.

  Gomez leapt to his feet, let out an exclamation – in Portuguese, Alleyn supposed – seemed to be in two minds what to say and at last with a sort of doubtful relish said: ‘Have you arrested them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to see them,’ he said. ‘I am longing to see them.’

  ‘And so you shall,’ said Alleyn.

  He glanced at Fox, who went downstairs. Gomez moved towards the door.

  The constable who had been on duty in the room came back and stationed himself inside the door.

  ‘Shall we go down?’ Alleyn said and led the way.

  III

  It was from this point that the sequence of events in the pig-pottery shop took on such a grotesque, such a macabre aspect, that Alleyn was to look back on the episode as possibly the most outlandish in his professional career. From the moment when the corpse of Miss Sanskrit received the first of her gentlemen visitors, they all three in turn became puppet-like caricatures of themselves, acting in a two-dimensional, crudely exaggerated style. In any other setting the element of black farce would have rioted. Even here, under the terrible auspices of the Sanskrits, it rose from time to time, like a bout of unseemly hysteria at the bad performance of a Jacobean tragedy.

  The room downstairs had been made ready for the visit. Bailey and Thompson waited near the window, Gibson by the desk and Fox, with his notebook in hand, near the alcove. Two uniformed police stood inside the door and a third at the back of the alcove. The bodies of the Sanskrits, brother and sister, had not been moved or shrouded. The room was now dreadfully stuffy.

  Alleyn joined Fox.

  ‘Come in, Mr Gomez,’ he said.

  Gomez stood on the threshold, a wary animal, Alleyn thought, waiting with its ears laid back before advancing into strange territory. He looked, without moving his head, from one to another of the men in the room, seemed to hesitate, seemed to suspect and then, swaggering a little, came into the room.

  He stopped dead in front of Alleyn and said: ‘Well?’

  Alleyn made a slight gesture. Gomez followed it, turned his head – and saw.

  The noise he made was something between a retch and an exclamation. For a moment he was perfectly still and it was as if he and Miss Sanskrit actually and sensibly confronted each other. And because of the arch manner in which the lifeless head lolled on the lifeless arm and the dead eyes seemed to leer at him, it was as if Miss Sanskrit had done a Banquo and found Mr Gomez out.

  He walked down the room and into the alcove. The policeman by the furnace gave a slight cough and eased his chin. Gomez inspected the bodies. He walked round the workbench and he looked into the packing-case. He might have been a visitor to a museum. There was no sound in the room other than the light fall of his feet on the wooden floor and the dry buzzing of flies.

  Then he turned his back on the alcove, pointed to Alleyn and said: ‘You! What did you think to achieve by this? Make me lose my nerve? Terrify me into saying something you could twist into an admission? Oh no, my friend! I had no hand in the destruction of this vermin. Show me the man who did it and I’ll kiss him on both cheeks and salute him as a brother, but I had no hand in it and you’ll never prove anything else.’

  He stopped. He was shaking as if with a rigor. He made to leave the room and saw that the door was guarded. And then he screamed out: ‘Cover them up. They’re obscene,’ and went to the curtained window, turning his back on the room.

  Fox, on a look from Alleyn, had gone upstairs. Thompson said under his breath, ‘Could I have a second, Mr Alleyn?’

  They went into the hallway. Thompson produced an envelope from his pocket and shook the contents out in his palm – two circular flattish objects about the size of an old sixpence, with concave upper surfaces. The under-surface of one had a pimple on it and on the other, a hole. They were blistered and there were tiny fragments of an indistinguishable charred substance clinging to them.

  ‘Furnace?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Good. I’ll take them.’

  He restored them to their envelope, put them in his pocket and looked up the stairs to where Fox waited in the landing. ‘Next,’ he said, and thought: It’s like a dentist’s waiting-room.

  The next was the Colonel. He came down in fairly good order with his shoulders squared and his chin up and feeling with the back of his heels for the stair-treads. As he turned into the shop he pressed up the corners of his moustache.

  After the histrionics of Gomez, the Colonel’s confrontation with the Sanskrits passed off quietly. He fetched up short, stood in absolute silence for a few seconds, and then said with an air that almost resembled dignity, ‘This is disgraceful.’

  ‘Disgraceful?’ Alleyn repeated.

  ‘They’ve been murdered.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘The bodies ought to be covered. It’s most irregular. And disgusting,’ and he added, almost, it seemed, as an afterthought: ‘It makes me feel sick.’ And indeed he perceptibly changed colour.

  He turned his back on the Sanskrits and joined Gomez by the window, ‘I protest categorically,’ he said, successfully negotiating the phrase, ‘at the conduct of these proceedings. And I wish to leave the room.’

  ‘Not just yet, I’m afraid,’ Alleyn said as Gomez made a move towards the door, ‘for either of you.’

  ‘What right,’ Gomez demanded, ‘have you to keep me here? You have no right.’

  ‘Well,’ Alleyn said mildly, ‘if you press the point we can note your objection, which I see Inspector Fox is doing in any case, and if you insist on leaving you may do so in a minute. In that case, of course, we shall ask you to come with us to the Yard. In the meantime: there’s Chubb, Would you, Fox?’

  In its own succint way Chubb’s reaction was a classic. He marched in almost as if Fox was a sergeant-major’s escort, executed a smart left turn, saw Miss Sanskrit, halted, became rigid, asked – unbelievably – ‘Who done it?’ and fainted backwards like the soldier he had been.

  And the Colonel, rivalling him in established behaviour, made a sharp exasperated noise and said: ‘Damn bad show.’

  Chubb recovered almost immediately. One of the constables brought him a drink of water. He was supported to the only chair in the room and sat in it with his back to the alcove.

  ‘Very sorry, sir,’ he mumbled, not to Alleyn but to the Colonel. His gaze alighted on Gomez.

  ‘You done it!’ he said, sweating and trembling. ‘Din’ you? You said you’d fix it and you did. You fixed it.’

  ‘Do you lay a charge against Mr Gomez?’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Gomez? I don’t know any Gomez.’

  ‘Against Mr Sheridan?’

  ‘I don’t know what it means, lay a charge, and I don’t know how he worked it, do I? But he said last night if it turned out they’d ratted, he’d get them. And I reckon he’s kept ’is word. He’s got them.’

  Gomez sprang at him like a released spring, so suddenly and with such venom that it took Gibson and both the constables all their time to hold him. He let out short, disjointed phrases, presumably in Portuguese, wetting his blue chin and mouthing at Alleyn. Perhaps because the supply of invective ran out he at last fell silent and watchful and seemed the more dangerous for it.

  ‘That was a touch of your old Ng?
??ombwanan form,’ Alleyn said. ‘You’d much better pipe down, Mr Gomez. Otherwise, you know, we shall have to lock you up.’

  ‘Filth!’ said Mr Gomez, and spat inaccurately in Chubb’s direction.

  ‘Bad show. Damn bad show,’ reiterated the Colonel, who seemed to have turned himself into a sort of Chorus to The Action.

  Alleyn said: ‘Has one of you lost a pair of gloves?’

  The scene went silent. For a second or two nobody moved and then Chubb got to his feet. Gomez, whose arms were still in custody, looked at his hands with their garnish of black hair and the Colonel thrust his into his pockets. And then, on a common impulse, it seemed they all three began accusing each other incoherently and inanely of the murder of the Sanskrits, and would no doubt have gone on doing so if the front doorbell had not pealed once more. As if the sound-track for whatever drama was being ground out had been turned back for a re-play, a woman could be heard making a commotion in the hallway.

  ‘I want to see my husband. Stop that. Don’t touch me. I’m going to see my husband.’

  The Colonel whispered, ‘No! For Chrissake keep her out. Keep her out.’

  But she was already in the room with the constable on duty in the hall making an ineffectual grab after her and the two men inside the door, taken completely by surprise, looking to Alleyn for orders.

  He had her by the arms. She was dishevelled and her eyes were out of focus. It would be hard to say whether she smelt stronger of gin or scent.

  Alleyn turned her with her back to the alcove and her face towards her husband. He felt her sagging in his grasp.

  ‘Hughie!’ she said. ‘You haven’t have you? Hughie, promise you haven’t. Hughie!’

  She fought with Alleyn, trying to reach her husband.

  ‘I couldn’t stand it, Hughie,’ she cried. ‘Alone, after what you said you’d do. I had to come. I had to know.’

  And as Chubb had turned on his wife, so the Colonel, in a different key, turned on her.

  ‘Hold your tongue!’ he roared out. ‘You’re drunk.’

  She struggled violently with Alleyn and in doing so swung round in his grasp and faced the alcove.

  And screamed. And screamed. And poured out such a stream of fatal words that her husband made a savage attempt to get at her and was held off by Fox and Thompson and Bailey. And then she became terrified of him, begged Alleyn not to let him get to her and finally collapsed.