‘There you are,’ interrupted Harper. ‘He could—sorry. Go on.’
‘I know he could, Nick, but wait a bit. According to your report they all, with the exception of Miss Darragh, who had gone to bed, stayed in the private taproom until closing time. Our forty-five minutes have gone.’
‘I suppose,’ said Harper, ‘one of them might have gone out for a few minutes without being noticed.’
‘Yes, and that is a point that will be urged by counsel. All we can prove here is opportunity—possibility. We can’t bring anything home. May we have the stuff you took from the rat-hole, Nick? Fox, would you get my bag? Mr Noggins was generous with his prussic acid and there are at least three ounces of the water, if it is water. The analyst can lend us half. Let’s poach on his preserves and find out for ourselves.’
Fox opened Alleyn’s bag. From it he took two open-mouthed vessels about two inches high, two watch-glasses, and a small bottle. Alleyn squinted at the bottle.
‘Silver nitrate. That’s the stuff. Can you produce some warm water, Nick? Well, well, I am exceeding my duty to be sure.’
Harper went out and returned with a jug of water and a photographic dish. Alleyn poured a little water into the dish, half-filled one of his tiny vessels with the fluid found in the rat-hole, and the other with acid from Abel’s bottle. He wetted the underside of the watch-glasses with nitrate solution and placed them over the vessels. He then stood the vessels, closed by the watch-glasses, in the warm water.
‘Fox now says the Lord’s Prayer backwards,’ he explained. ‘I emit a few oddments of ectoplasm and Hi Cockalorum the spell is wound up! Take a look at that, Nick.’
They stared at the dish. On the surface of the prussic acid a little spiral had risen. It became denser, it flocculated and the watch-glass was no longer transparent but covered with an opaque whiteness.
‘That’s cyanide, that was,’ said Alleyn. ‘Now, look at the other. A blank, my lord. It’s water, Br’er Fox, it’s water. Now let’s pour them back into their respective bottles and don’t give me away to the analyst.’
‘I suppose,’ said Harper, as Alleyn tidied up. ‘I suppose this means we needn’t worry ourselves about the cupboard. The cupboard doesn’t come into the blasted affair.’
Alleyn held on the palm of his hand the three pieces of glass he had separated from the fragments of the broken brandy tumbler, and the small misshapen lumps he had found in the ashes of the fire.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. We’re not home yet, not by a long march, but the cupboard still comes into the picture. Think.’
Harper looked from the pieces of glass to Alleyn’s face and back again.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘yes. But you’ll have the devil of a job to prove it.’
‘I agree,’ said Alleyn. ‘Nevertheless, Nick, I hope to prove it.’
CHAPTER 17
Mr Fox Takes Sherry
Parish came downstairs singing ‘La Donna è Mobile’. He had a pleasant baritone voice which had been half-trained in the days when he had contemplated musical comedy. He sang stylishly and one could not believe that he sang unconsciously. He swung open the door of the private tap and entered on the last flourish of that impertinent, that complacently debonair refrain.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Abel from behind the bar. ‘‘Tis again.’
Parish smiled wistfully.
‘Ah, Abel,’ he said with a slight sigh, ‘it’s not as easy as it sounds; but my cousin would have been the last man to want long faces, poor dear old fellow.’
‘So he would, then,’ rejoined Abel heartily, ‘the very last.’
‘Ah,’ said Mr Nark, shaking his head. Norman Cubitt looked over the top of his tankard and raised his eyebrows. Legge moved into the ingle-nook where Miss Darragh sat knitting.
‘What’ll you take, Mr Parish?’ asked Abel.
‘A Treble Extra. I need it. Hallo, Norman, old man,’ said Parish with a sort of brave gaiety. ‘How’s the work going?’
‘Nicely, thank you, Seb.’ Cubitt glanced at the clock. It was a quarter past seven. ‘I’m thinking of starting a big canvas,’ he said.
‘Are you? What subject?’
‘Decima,’ said Cubitt. He put his tankard down on the bar. ‘She has very kindly said she’ll sit for me.’
‘How’ll you paint her?’ asked Parish.
‘I thought on the downs by Cary Edge. She’s got a red sweater thing. It’ll be life size. Full length.’
‘Ah, now,’ exclaimed Miss Darragh from the ingle-nook, ‘you’ve taken my advice in the latter end. Haven’t I been at you, now, ever since I got here to take Miss Moore for your subject? I’ve never seen a better. Sure the picture’ll be your masterpiece for she’s a lovely young creature.’
‘But, my dear chap,’ objected Parish, ‘we’re off in a day or two. You’ll never finish it.’
‘I was going to break it gently to you, Seb. If you don’t object I think I’ll stay on for a bit.’
Parish looked slightly hurt.
‘That’s just as you like, of course,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me to stay. The place is too full of memories.’
‘Besides,’ said Cubitt dryly, ‘you start rehearsals on today week, don’t you?’
‘As a matter of fact I do.’ Parish raised his arms and then let them fall limply to his sides. ‘Work!’ he said. ‘Back to the old grind. Ah well!’ And he added with an air of martyrdom, ‘I can go back by train.’
‘I’ll drive you into Illington, of course.’
‘Thank you, old boy. Yes, I’d better get back to the treadmill.’
‘Keep a stiff upper lip, Seb,’ said Cubitt with a grin.
The door opened and Alleyn came in. He wore a dinner jacket and stiff shirt. Someone once said of him that he looked like a cross between a grandee and a monk. In evening clothes the grandee predominated. Parish gave him a quick appraising glance, Mr Nark goggled, and Miss Darragh looked up with a smile. Cubitt rumpled his hair and said: ‘Hallo! Here comes the county!’
Mr Legge shrank back into the ingle-nook. Upon all of them a kind of weariness descended. They seemed to melt away from him and towards each other. Alleyn asked for two glasses of the special sherry and told Abel that he and Fox would be out till latish.
‘May we have a key, Mr Pomeroy?’
‘Us’ll leave side-door open,’ said Abel. ‘No need fur key, sir. Be no criminals in this neighbourhood. Leastways—’ He stopped short and looked pointedly at Legge.
‘That’s splendid,’ said Alleyn. ‘How far is it to Colonel Brammington’s?’
‘‘Bout eight mile, sir. Shankley Court. A great masterpiece of a place, sir, with iron gates and a deer-park. Carry on four miles beyond Illington and turn left at The Man of Devon.’
‘Right,’ said Alleyn. ‘We needn’t leave for half an hour.’
Cubitt went out.
Alleyn fidgeted with a piece of rag round his left hand. It was clumsily tied and fell away, disclosing a trail of red.
He twitched the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, glanced at it and swore. There was a bright red spot on the handkerchief.
‘Blast that cut,’ said Alleyn. ‘Now I’ll have to get a clean one.’
‘Hurt yurrself, sir?’ asked Abel.
‘Tore my hand on a rusty nail in the garage.’
‘In the garage!’ ejaculated Mr Nark. ‘That’s a powerful dangerous place to get a cut finger. Germs galore, I dessay, and as like as not some of the poison fumes still floating about.’
‘Aye,’ said Abel angrily, ‘that’s right, George Nark. All my premises is stiff with poison. Wonder ‘tis you come anigh ‘em. Here, Mr Alleyn, sir, I’ll get ‘ee a dressing fur that thurr cut.’
‘If I could have a bit of rag and a dab of peroxide or something.’
‘Doan’t you have anything out of that fatal cupboard,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Not if you value the purity of your bloodstream.’
‘You know as well as I do,’ said Abel, ‘that thur cupbo
ard’s been scrubbed and fumigated. Not that thurr’s anything in it. Thurr baint. Nicholas Harper made off with my first-aid set, innocent though it wurr.’
‘And the iodine bottle,’ pointed out Mr Nark, ‘so you can’t give the inspector iodine, lethal or otherwise.’
‘Thurr’s another first-aid box upstairs,’ said Abel. ‘In bathroom cupboard. Will!’ He looked into the public bar. ‘Will! Get ‘tother box out of bathroom cupboard, my sonny. Look lively.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Mr Pomeroy,’ said Alleyn. ‘Don’t bother. I’ll use this handkerchief.’
‘No trouble, sir, and you’ll need a bit of antiseptic in that cut if you took it off of a rusty nail. I’m a terror fur iodine, sir. I wurr a surgeon’s orderly in France, Mr Alleyn, and learned hospital ways. Scientific ideas baint George Nark’s private property though you might think they wurr.’
Will Pomeroy came downstairs and into the private tap. He put a small first-aid box on the counter and returned to the public bar. Abel opened the box.
‘‘Tis spandy-new,’ he said. ‘I bought it from a traveller only couple of days afore accident. Hallo! Yurr, Will!’
‘What’s up?’ called Will.
‘Iodine bottle’s gone.’
‘Eh?’
‘Where’s iodine?’
‘I dunno. It’s not there,’ shouted Will.
‘Who’s had it?’
‘I dunno. I haven’t.’
‘It really doesn’t matter, Mr Pomeroy,’ said Alleyn. ‘It’s bled itself clean. If I may have a bit of this lint and an inch of the strapping. Perhaps there wasn’t any iodine?’
‘‘Course there wurr,’ said Abel. ‘Yurr’s lil’ bed whurr it lay. Damme, who’s been at it? Mrs Ives!’
He stumped out and could be heard roaring angrily about the back premises.
Alleyn put a bit of lint over his finger and Miss Darragh stuck it down with strapping. He went upstairs, carrying his own glass of sherry and Fox’s. Fox was standing before the looking-glass in his room knotting a sober tie. He caught sight of Alleyn in the glass.
‘Lucky I brought my blue suit,’ said Fox, ‘and lucky you brought your dress clothes, Mr Alleyn.’
‘Why didn’t you let me tell Colonel Brammington that we’d neither of us change, Foxkin?’
‘No, no, sir. It’s the right thing for you to dress, just as much as it’d be silly for me to do so. Well, it’d be an affected kind of way for me to act, Mr Alleyn. I never get a black coat and boiled shirt on my back except at the Lodge meetings and when I’m on a night-club job. The colonel would only think I was trying to put myself in a place where I don’t belong. Did you find what you wanted, Mr Alleyn?’
‘Abel bought another first-aid set, two days before Watchman died. The iodine has been taken. He can’t find it.’
‘Is that so?’
Fox brushed the sleeves of his coat and cast a final searching glance at himself in the glass. ‘I washed that razor blade,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Fox. I was a little too free with it. Bled all over Abel’s bar. Most convincing. What’s the time? Half-past seven. A bit early yet. Let’s think this out.’
‘Right oh, sir,’ said Fox. He lifted his glass of sherry. ‘Good luck, Mr Alleyn,’ he said.
II
Decima had promised to come to Coombe Head at eight o’clock. Cubitt lay on the lip of the cliff and stared at the sea beneath him, trying, as Alleyn had tried, to read order in the hieroglyphics traced by the restless seaweed. The sequence was long and subtle, unpausing, unhurried. Each pattern seemed significant but all melted into fluidity, and he decided, as Alleyn had decided, that the forces that governed these beautiful but inane gestures ranged beyond the confines of his imagination. He fell to appraising the colour and the shifting tones of the water, translating these things into terms of paint, and he began to think of how, in the morning, he would make a rapid study from the lip of the cliff.
‘But I must fix one pattern only in my memory and watch for it to appear in the sequence, like a measure in some intricate saraband.’
He was so intent on this project that he did not hear Decima come and was startled when she spoke to him.
‘Norman?’
Her figure was dark and tall against the sky. He rose and faced her.
‘Have you risen from the sea?’ he asked. ‘You are lovely enough.’
She did not answer and he took her hand and led her a little way over the headland to a place where their figures no longer showed against the sky. Here they faced each other again.
‘I am so bewildered,’ said Decima. ‘I have tried since this morning to feel all sorts of things. Shame. Compassion for Will. Anxiety. I can feel none of them. I can only wonder why we should so suddenly have fallen in love.’
‘It was only sudden for you,’ said Cubitt. ‘Not for me.’
‘But—? Is that true. How long—?’
‘Since last year. Since the first week of last year.’
Decima drew away from him.
‘But, didn’t you know? I thought last year that you had guessed.’
‘About Luke? Yes, I guessed.’
‘Everything?’
‘Yes, my dear.’
‘I wish very much that it hadn’t happened,’ said Decima. ‘Of that I am ashamed. Not for the orthodox reason but because it made such a fool of me; because I pretended to myself that I was sanely satisfying a need, whereas in reality I merely lost my head and behaved like a dairymaid.’
‘Hallo!’ said Cubitt. ‘You’re being very county. What’s wrong with dairymaids in the proletariat?’
‘Brute,’ muttered Decima and, between laughter and tears, stumbled into his arms.
‘I love you very much,’ whispered Cubitt.
‘You’d a funny way of showing it. Nobody ever would have dreamt you thought anything about me.’
‘Oh, yes, they would. They did.’
‘Who?’ cried Decima in terror. ‘Not Will?’
‘No. Miss Darragh. She as good as told me so. I’ve seen her eyeing me whenever you were in the offing. God knows I had a hard job to keep my eyes off you. I’ve wanted like hell to do this.’
But after a few moments Decima freed herself.
‘This is going the wrong way,’ she said. ‘There mustn’t be any of this.’
Cubitt said, ‘All right. We’ll come back to earth. I promised myself I’d keep my head. Here, my darling, have a cigarette, for God’s sake, and don’t look at me. Sit down. That’s right. Now, listen. You remember the morning of that day?’
‘When you and Sebastian came over the hill?’
‘Yes. Just as you were telling Luke you could kill him. Did you?’
‘No.’
‘Of course you didn’t. Nor did I. But we made a botch of things this morning. Seb and I denied that we saw Luke as we came back from Coombe Head, and I think Alleyn knew we were lying. I got a nasty jolt when he announced that he was going to see you. I didn’t know what to do. I dithered round and finally followed him, leaving Seb to come home by himself. I was too late. You’d told him?’
‘I told him that Luke and I quarrelled that morning because Luke had tried—had tried to make love to me. I didn’t tell him—Norman, I lied about the rest. I said it hadn’t happened before. I was afraid. I was cold with panic. I didn’t know what you and Sebastian had told him. I thought, if he found out that I had been Luke’s mistress and that we’d quarrelled, he might think—They say poison’s a woman’s weapon, don’t they? It was like one of those awful dreams. I don’t know what I said. I lost my head. And that other man, Fox, kept writing in a book. And then you came and it was as if—oh, as if instead of being alone in the dark and terrified I had someone beside me.’
‘Why wouldn’t you stay with me when they’d gone?’
‘I don’t know. I wanted to think. I was muddled.’
‘I was terrified you wouldn’t come here tonight, Decima.’
‘I shouldn’t have come. What are we to d
o about Will?’
‘Tell him.’
‘He’ll be so bewildered,’ said Decima, ‘and so miserable.’
‘Would you have married him if this hadn’t happened?’
‘I haven’t said I would marry you.’
‘I have,’ said Cubitt.
‘I don’t know that I believe in the institution of marriage.’
‘You’ll find that out when you’ve tried it, my darling.’
‘I’m a farmer’s daughter. A peasant.’
‘The worst of you communists,’ said Cubitt, ‘is that you’re such snobs. Always worrying about class distinctions. Come here.’
‘Norman,’ said Decima presently, ‘who do you think it was?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Cubitt pressed her hands against him and, after a moment, spoke evenly. ‘Did Will ever guess about you and Luke?’
She moved away from him at arm’s length. ‘You can’t think Will would do it?’
‘Did he guess?’
‘I don’t think I—’
‘I rather thought he had guessed,’ said Cubitt.
III
When Alleyn had gone out, the atmosphere of the taproom changed. Parish began to talk to Abel, Miss Darrah asked Legge when he was moving into Illington, Mr Nark cleared his throat and, by the simple expedient of shouting down every one else, won the attention of the company.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Axing the road to Shankley Court, was he? Ah. I expected it.’
Abel gave a disgruntled snort.
‘I expected it,’ repeated Mr Nark firmly. ‘I had a chat with the chief inspector this morning.’
‘After which, in course,’ said Abel, ‘he knew his business. All he’s got to do is to clap handcuffs on somebody.’
‘Abel,’ said Mr Nark, ‘you’re a bitter man. I’m not blaming you. A chap with a tumble load on his conscience, same as what you’ve got, is scarcely responsible for his words.’