“Chief Inspector-Detective Alleyn wants you in the study,” said Nigel, enjoying the rhymic sequence of the titles and name.
“Oh!” said Bunce, rousing himself. “Thank you, sir, I’ll come along. It’ll be a bit of a change after these urbashus borders. I’m not a great nature-lover myself.”
“No?”
“No. Altogether too ’ap’azard to my way of thinking. Sloppy. That’s Nature. Well, I’ll be shifting.”
“I’m coming too,” said Nigel, and they returned in silence to the study.
Alleyn was standing by the fireplace examining a revolver. He slipped it into his pocket.
“Bunce,” he said crisply, “have a man outside the front door in ten minutes’ time, another in the drawing-room and a third here. The members of the household will then be assembled in the hall. Keep your wits about you and your ears well open. When you hear me say, ‘Now, let us begin,’ come very quietly into the hall and keep the person, of whom I have already informed you, under observation. I expect no trouble, but-well, the quieter the better. The arrest will probably take place immediately. By the way, I shall want you to impersonate the victim as you did during the first reconstruction.”
Bunce’s eye lightened.
“Very good, sir. ’Ead first into the gong as usual, I presoom?”
“Yes, Bunce. You may retain your helmet if you like.”
“’Ardly artistic would it be, sir? I shan’t notice the blow in my excitement.”
“As you please. Very well then, off you go. Place your men now, will you, and don’t discuss anything. That clear?”
“Abundantly, sir,” ejaculated Bunce. He turned about smartly and left the room by the French window.
“Now, Bathgate,” said Alleyn, “I shall make certain of everybody being in the hall in half an hour. The cars will be outside to take you all to the station. Miss Angela has just returned so we shall be complete—with the exception of the Russians of course. By the way, Bathgate, can you slide down bannisters face first?”
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
‘Well, it may not be necessary—I’ll spare you if I can. Would you mind ringing that bell?”
The summons was answered by the ubiquitous Ethel.
“Would you find Miss North, Ethel?” asked the Inspector. “Ask her, if it is not very inconvenient, to speak to me for a moment.”
“Very good, sir.”
Angela came in looking as if the drive up to London had agreed with her.
“I put back the letters quite successfully,” she said, “but I do wish you hadn’t kept those two. It makes me feel abominable. Where are they?”
“At the police station,” Alleyn told her. “They proved to be of considerable value. You need not feel abominable. All you have done is to save Mrs. Wilde from the indignity of an official search through her house. Your part in obtaining the letters will never appear.”
“That’s not quite the point,” objected Angela. “I’ve played Marjorie a dirty trick but if it’s helped Rosamund—”
“It has helped to establish evidence which I needed,” said Alleyn firmly. “I cannot see that anything else is of consequence. I am unable to feel any sympathy with the incalculable megrims of the layman.”
“You are not very human this morning,” said Angela unsteadily.
“So Bathgate has intimated. If you feel qualms in your conscience on Mrs. Wilde’s account, you shall be given ample opportunities of helping her. Has she any great woman friend?”
“I don’t know,” said Angela, nervously. “I don’t really believe she has.”
“That sort don’t as a rule. ‘Cats that walk by their wild lone.’ ”
“I have never liked you less,” said Angela vigorously.
“I seem to be generally unpopular. However that, too, is irrelevant. I have only asked to see you for a moment in order to say that I would be deeply grateful if you could muster your guests and Sir Hubert for the last time in the hall. Perhaps you could suggest that there is just time for a cocktail before they leave for the train.”
“Certainly,” said Angela rather grandly.
Alleyn was ahead of Nigel in opening the door to her. He looked at her very searchingly.
“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” he said wryly. “This case has now reached a point which I invariably find almost intolerable. Will you remember that?”
Angela had turned rather pale.
“Very well,” she said, “I’ll remember,” and went away on his errand.
“Now, Bathgate,” said Alleyn, “go out into the hall and keep quiet and don’t look as if anything in particular is afoot. Remember—I want as many unbiassed records as possible of the reconstruction. Off with you, for heaven’s sake. The buzzer is ringing, the house-lights are down, the curtain’s going up. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, for the last act.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Accused Was Charged
THE HOUSE-PARTY was assembled for the last time in the hall at Frantock. The grouping, the lighting, the clothes, the faces, the background, were all much as they had been on that previous Sunday, not yet a week ago. It was a repetition of the same theme in a minor key, a theme less rich, impoverished since it lacked the colour of Rankin’s verve and Tokareff’s robust vowels.
The cocktail tray was in its accustomed place. No one stood near it. It was as though the ghost of Rankin’s body set up a barrier there and were best avoided.
Sir Hubert came slowly down the stairs and joined his guests. He seemed to feel some obligation to smother the dismal silence with words and made painfully disjointed conversation to Wilde and Nigel, who answered him with punctilious constraint. The others were quite silent. The cars would come soon and they just waited.
The study door opened and Alleyn came through into the hall. They all looked at him warily, united in a profound and subtle antagonism. In their thoughts, so secret to each other, they were yet conscious of this one common feeling of enmity to the detective. Perhaps, thought Nigel, it is an instinctive animal opposition to discipline. They waited for the detective to speak. He walked into the centre of the hall and faced them.
“May I ask for your attention?” he began formally. “I have been obliged to detain you here until the inquest, a delay of four days which I realize many of you have found inconvenient and all of you extremely distasteful. This restriction is now withdrawn, and in a few minutes Frantock will be left to its own meditations. Before you go, however, I have decided to let you all understand the theory of the police as to the manner in which the crime was committed.”
He paused, and a dead, shocked silence held the echo of his voice. After a moment he began to speak again:
“The simplest way of making myself clearly understood is to reconstruct the machinery of the murder. To do this I must ask for your assistance. We shall need two persons to play the parts of the victim and of the murderer as the police have visualized them. Perhaps someone will volunteer to give me this much assistance.”
“No—oh no—no!” Mrs. Wilde’s voice, shrill and out of tune, disconcerted them by its vehemence.
“Steady, darling,” said Arthur Wilde quietly. “It’s all right. It will be better for all of us to learn everything that Inspector Alleyn can tell us. It is very largely our ignorance of the official theory that has made this suspense intolerable.”
“I agree, Arthur,” said Handesley. He turned to Alleyn. “If I can be of any help I am quite willing.”
Alleyn looked steadily at him.
“Thank you very much indeed, Sir Hubert, but I think I won’t ask you to perform the curious feat that I believe to be necessary. I want a man who can slide down the bannister— face foremost.”
“I am afraid I cannot quite do that,” said Handesley after a long pause.
“No. Perhaps you, Mr. Wilde?”
“I?” said Wilde. “Well, I’m getting a bit stiff in the joints for that sort of exercise, Inspector.”
“Still, I understand you have accomplished it before, so if you don’t mind—”
“Very well,” agreed Wilde and Nigel felt that Alleyn was letting him off a piece of pantomime he had been so loath to perform.
“Now,” Alleyn continued, “I shall get the constable who assisted me before to impersonate Mr. Rankin, as that, perhaps, would be too painful an obligation to put upon any of his friends. Are you there, Bunce?” he said loudly. That officer emerged from the study.
“Just stand as you did before, will you,” said Alleyn. The constable moved to the cocktail tray, picked up the shaker and bent over with his back to the stairs.
“Thank you,” said Alleyn, “that will do. Now, Mr. Wilde. It is my theory that the murderer slid down the bannister rail, took the knife from the leather strip on the wall there with his right hand, leant across and drove it home. Will you mimic his movements along those lines?”
“It seems a bit fantastic,” said Wilde dubiously.
“Doesn’t it? Let us begin.”
Another silence and then Wilde slowly climbed the stairs. Two men had appeared in the hall, standing unobtrusively in the dining-room and drawing-room doorways. A third could be seen darkly through the glass door into the entrance lobby.
The lights, with the exception of the wall bracket above the cocktail tray, had all been switched off.
“What exactly is the procedure?” Wilde’s voice sounded plaintively from the shadowy stair head. Alleyn repeated his description.
“I’m not a star performer at this,” murmured the voice.
“Never mind—do your best.”
The slight figure could scarcely be seen straddling the bannister. It began to move towards them very slowly, its spectacles gleaming a little in the dark.
“I can’t stand it!” screamed a woman’s voice suddenly. It was Mrs. Wilde. Nigel, resting his hands against Rosamund Grant’s chair, could feel it shaking.
“Faster!” said Alleyn urgently.
Wilde, leaning back and gripping the rail with his knees, shot downwards into the light.
“Now—now the knife,” cried Alleyn.
“I—don’t—quite—understand.”
“Yes, you do. With your right hand. Reach out to the leather strip. Lean over—further. Now—you have seized the knife. Lean over the other way. Watch him, watch carefully. Lean over the other way, man—but quick—quick as lightning. Now—strike down at him. Do as I tell you!”
The straddling figure moved its arm. Bunce fell forward. The great voice of the gong sounded again—ominous and intolerable. Through it the detective’s voice rose excitedly.
“There—there! That’s how it was. Turn all the lights on. Don’t move, Mr. Wilde. You are fully dressed now, you know. Lights, Bathgate!”
Nigel switched on the central candelabra. The hall was flooded with a hard white light.
Wilde still sat astride the bannister. His face, contorted into a horrible grimace, shone clammily. One corner of his mouth twitched. Alleyn moved swiftly towards him.
“Excellent,” he said, “only you should have been quicker— and you had forgotten something. Look here!” He suddenly thrust a yellow dogskin glove in front of Wilde’s face.
“That yours?” he said.
“God rot your bloody soul,” said Arthur Wilde.
“Arrest him,” said Alleyn.
Nigel stared out of his carriage window at a rapidly diminishing group of winter trees through whose ghostly branches glowed the warmth of old brick. A blue spiral of threadbare smoke rose from one of the chimneys, wavering uncertainly and spreading like a wraith of the tree-shapes beneath it. A little figure moved across the home field where Nigel had walked with Handesley. Already it was growing dark and a fragile mist skirted the woods.
“Good-bye, Frantock,” said Alleyn.
The train roared into a cutting and the picture was turned into a dream.
“For you, Bathgate, au revoir, I suppose?”
“Who knows?” murmured Nigel and the detective did not answer.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Alleyn wrote in his little note-book. Nigel thought confusedly of his strange adventures and of Angela. At last, with his eyes on the fast-darkening windowpane he asked his question: “When were you first positive of him?”
Alleyn pressed a wisp of tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Do you realize that it was you who, from the very beginning, led me up the garden path?”
“I? What do you mean?”
“Can’t you see—can’t you see? You swore over and over again that during that fatal five minutes you were talking continuously to Arthur Wilde. So did his goat of a wife, poor little devil. She didn’t suspect him—she was terrified for herself. Oh, I know you said so in all good faith. You thought he had been talking all the time. Of course you did. You had an unconscious mental picture of Arthur Wilde lying in his tub and washing behind his ears. You heard all the suitable noises—splashy, soapy noises, running taps, and so on. If you could have seen!”
“Seen?”
“Seen through the wall. If only the wall had been like a transparency on the stage! If you could have seen Wilde come into the bathroom, wearing those silly little underpants Rankin had laughed at, as you told me, I remember, that very afternoon! You would have watched him lean over the bath, turn on the taps, splash about with his hands and move his lips as he spoke to you. You would have watched the inglorious little figure wipe his hands carefully, run into his wife’s dressing-room and come back with one glove on. He had a nerve-racking hunt for the left-hand glove but he had scuffled it over the back of the drawer in his hurry and it had fallen down through a gap in the old casing. How you would have gaped when he opened the door and (perhaps calling out to you first) peeped on to the landing and then, just as Ethel the housemaid entered your room, slipped out. Eight seconds later the gong sounded and the bathroom was blotted out in darkness so that you would not have seen the figure return, pull off its clothes and tumble into the bath. Still he talked to you while he washed and washed in case any of Rankin’s blood had splashed his body. It must have been awful waiting for the lights to show him if the glove was stained. I expect he pushed it into his pocket to wait until later when Mrs. Wilde was having hysterics in the drawing-room and you others were all clustered round her. That was his chance, I dare say, to run into the hall and thrust his wife’s dogskin glove into the fire and heap coal over it. The press button would have gone with the rest if it hadn’t dropped down between the bars into the tray beneath. That, with the left-hand glove, was my one exhibit. He kept his head pretty well. Even remembered to say ‘You are the corpse’ to someone on the landing. This was bound to come out with the rest of the evidence and it made a very good impression.”
“Why did he do it?” Nigel asked.
“Ah, the motive—or motives rather. Primarily, money. Wilde’s wife owes a thousand to various dressmakers. He is dunned by his landlord, and is deeply involved otherwise, and he lost heavily on his last book. He knew Rankin was leaving him three thousand pounds. Secondarily, we have two very interesting reasons why Wilde should have cause to welcome, if not to compass, Rankin’s death. He hated your cousin. I have gone extensively into their past relationship. Rankin bullied and goaded Wilde when they were at Eton. He showed a sort of contemptuous disregard for him in their later relations. I have learned from the waiters at night clubs, from a dismissed lady’s maid, and from you in your unsuspecting account of the ragging on Sunday, that Rankin flirted openly with Mrs. Wilde under the very nose of her supposedly good-natured, mild, and absent-minded husband. He had read Rankin’s letters. Here I had a stroke of luck. The packet of letters Miss Angela produced last night I examined and tested for finger-prints this morning. Mrs. Wilde had not touched them for some time, but he had quite recently. He must have spied upon her methodically and industriously, and of course there would be no difficulty in finding a key to the Tunbridge box. Pos
sibly she had some inkling of this when she wrote to her old sewing maid and confidante asking her to burn the letters. More likely she was terrified of their being found and in some way incriminating her. I should say her husband was a bitterly jealous man.
“He is extremely clever. I watched him with the closest interest from the first. His rendering of the part of a conscientious witness at our mock trial was quite brilliant. His subsequent confession in the teeth of his own carefully arranged alibi was just a little too subtle. He was trying to play that game of bluff that goes on ad infinitum: ‘If I say I did it, he will never believe me, or will he guess I would reason like this, and therefore suspect me; or will he think that I would have thought this out also as an innocent man, and yet being determined to save my wife, have given myself up, and am therefore not guilty?’ He probably got as far as this bend in the endless and profitless road and, on an impulse, made his decision. You came in beautifully with a recapitulation of his alibi and he then gave a clever impersonation of the would-be martyr foiled by facts.
“From that moment I was certain of him, but I had to clear up the Russian element, and I had to make out a case. What a case!”
Alleyn hitched his long legs on to the seat and stared up at the luggage rack.
“When I found the left-hand dogskin glove at the back of the tallboy in her bedroom and learnt that the fastening corresponded with the one I had raked out of the hall grate, I knew I was on the right track. If he had worn both gloves and destroyed them, leaving only the half-burnt button, I should have traced it and should have been tempted to suspect his wife perhaps, although I had noted his small hands. But the left-hand glove was lost behind the drawer and the left-hand print was on the bannister.”
“Will they get a conviction?”
“How can I say? Remember he has already confessed once.”
“Gosh, yes! What bitter irony! But it seems to me a clever counsel—”
“Oh, quite possibly. Still, what will you all say, on oath, when questioned about his behaviour just now in my reconstruction?”