Death and the Dancing Footman

  “I’m afraid,” said Alleyn grimly, “that she will not succeed.”

  “Of course not. But if you interview her she will try to persuade you that his motive was purely mercenary and that she was the victim of his importunities. She will also offer to return to me.”

  Alleyn glanced up quickly. “No,” said Dr. Hart. “I have recovered from that sickness. She would have betrayed me. In our last interview before the crime she told me that if anything happened to Compline she would accuse me. I said she would not have the courage and she replied that where much was at stake she would dare much. I felt as a man might feel if some possession he had treasured was suddenly proved to be worthless. I have lost all desire for my wife.”

  “You have been very frank,” said Alleyn, after a pause. “When this is all over what do you mean to do?”

  “I am a surgeon. I think in a little while there will be a need for many surgeons in England. Perhaps, who knows, I may do more admirable work than the patching-up of faded women’s faces.” Dr. Hart pulled at his lips with his finger. “All the same,” he said, “I wish I had been able to save her life.”

  “It would have been no great service to her, you know.”

  “I suppose not.” He held out his hand. “Good-bye, Chief-Inspector,” he said, and bowed stiffly from the waist. Alleyn watched him go, an almost arrogantly foreign figure in his English tweeds. A little while later he heard a car drive round the house. Bailey came in to say that Madame Lisse wished to see him before she left. Alleyn grimaced. “I’m engaged,” he said. “Tell her Mr. Fox will see her. I think she’ll say it doesn’t matter.”

  At half-past six, Mandrake and Chloris came into the library with their top-coats over their arms, and asked if they too might leave Highfold.

  “Yes,” Alleyn said. “You’ll be asked to attend the inquest, you know, so I’ll have to keep in touch with you.”

  “I know,” Mandrake agreed. “we’d thought of that. When will it be?”

  “Wednesday, I should think.”

  “Jonathan’s asked us to stay but we thought we’d him to go up to London for a slight change of scene. We might look in at the rectory. The road’ll be all right now. Can we take a message for you?”

  Alleyn gave his message. Mandrake and Chloris still hung off and on.

  “We also thought,” said Mandrake at last, “that we’d like a few of the worst knots unravelled by a master hand. Or doesn’t one ask?”

  “What knots?” said Alleyn with a smile.

  “Well,” said Chloris, “why Aubrey was shoved in the pond, for one. Did Nicholas shove him?”

  “He did.”

  “But he recognized Aubrey.”

  “Because he recognized him.”

  “Oh.”

  “But,” said Mandrake, “we’d worked that out quite differently. After the evidence of the footprints and her letter, we decided that Mrs. Compline had followed out to stop Nicholas taking the plunge and had thought I was William gloating and, on a wave of long pent-up resentment, had shoved me overboard.”

  “And then,” said Chloris, “we thought that when she heard Bill was dead, she’d gone out of her mind and imagined that in some way she had killed him. That’s how we read the letter.”

  “It’s a very ingenious reading,” said Alleyn with the ghost of a smile, “but it doesn’t quite fit. How could she have gone down the steps without your seeing her? And even suppose she did manage to do that, she would have had a very clear view of you, as you stood facing the pond. Moreover she watched William go downstairs. And, finally, she had a full account of the whole affair afterwards and heard you being brought upstairs and all the rest of it. Even if she had pushed you overboard she must have very soon heard of her mistake, so how on earth could she think she’d killed William?”

  “But the letter?” said Chloris.

  “The letter is more tragic and less demented than you thought. The evidence of the footprints tells us that Mrs. Compline stood on the terrace and looked down. A few moments later a housemaid saw her return looking terribly upset. I believe that Mrs. Compline saw her son Nicholas make his assault upon you, Mandrake. At the time she may have thought it a dangerous piece of horseplay, but what was she to think when she heard him declare that Hart had done it, believing the victim to be Nicholas himself? And what was she to think when the booby-trap was set and again Nicholas accused Hart? Don’t you think that through the hysteria she displayed, ran some inkling of the truth? Last of all, when Nicholas went to her last night and told her William had been killed in mistake for himself, what was she to think then? With her secret knowledge how could she escape the terrible conclusion? Her adored son had murdered his brother. She made her last effort to save him and the legend she had made round his character. She wrote a letter that told him she knew and at the same time accused herself to us. She could not quite bring herself to say, in so many words, that she had killed her son; but Nicholas understood—and so did we.”

  “I never thought,” said Mandrake after a long silence, “that Nicholas did it.”

  “I must say I’d have thought you’d have guessed. Compline gave you the cape, Mandrake, didn’t he? He looked out of the pavilion window and recognized you as you came down. He might have been looking at himself when you stood there in the other cloak. I think at that moment he saw his chance to bring off his tom-fool idea.”

  “What tom-fool idea?”

  “To stage a series of apparent attempts on his own life based on an idea of mistaken identity. He planted that idea in all your heads. He insisted on it. He shoved you in and rescued you and then went about shouting that Hart had tried to drown him. Evidently he’d some such plan in his head on the first night. Hart had written threatening letters and Compline followed up by writing himself a threatening message with a rather crude imitation of Hart’s handwriting. Once we’d proved Hart didn’t write the message on the Charter form it was obvious only Nicholas could have done so. Perhaps he chucked you that cape deliberately. Before the bathing incident he knew where you all were and no doubt he watched Hart set off alone down the drive. If the plan failed there wasn’t much harm done. Next, he staged his own flight over country that he knew damned well was impassable. If nobody had gone with him he’d have come back half-drowned in snow and told the tale. Next he rigged up his own booby-trap, choosing a moment when you were all changing in your rooms. He hadn’t bargained on Madame Lisse looking after him as he went down the passage. He was going to kick the door open and let the brass Buddha fall on the floor. But, knowing that she was watching, he had to go a bit further than was comfortable, and he mucked up the business. He chose the Buddha because he’d seen Hart handle it the night before. He chose the Maori mere for the same reason, but he smudged Hart’s prints when he used it. He himself wore gloves, of course.”

  “But the wireless?” asked Chloris.

  “Do you remember that Hart had complained bitterly of the wireless? That appears in Mandrake’s most useful and exhaustive notes. Compline knew Hart loathed radio. After the fiasco at the pond he shut himself up in the smoking-room, didn’t he, until he was turned out by William, who wanted to make his drawing? And discordant noises were heard? He was always at the radio? Yes; well, he was making himself very familiar with that wireless set. Do you remember the fishing-rod above the mantelpiece in the smoking-room?”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Complete with fly and cast and green line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when we came on the scene there was no fly and the line had been freshly cut. On the screw-hole on the volume control I found a number of almost invisible scratches, all radiating outwards. I also found some minute fragments of red and green feathers. The card on the rod tells us that the late Mr. St. J. Worthington Royal used that red-and-green fly when he caught his four-and-a-half-pounder. There were other marks on the double tuning control which, at its centre, was free of dust. In the jamb of the door into the library there was a hole
which accommodated the drawing-pin Mandrake picked up in the sole of his shoe. You saw that William dropped one of his drawing-pins in the smoking-room. I fancy Nicholas found and used it. In Mrs. Compline’s hat I found two flies, one red-and-green, rather the worse for wear. The maid who looked after her swears there was only one, a yellow-and-black salmon fly, when she arrived. Who went straight to his mother’s room after the murder? Right,” said Alleyn, answering their startled glances. “Well, yesterday evening we experimented. We found that if we used a length of fishing-line with a fly attached but without a cast, we could hook the fly in the screw-hole of the volume control, pass the green line under the wave band and over the timing-control axis, which served as a sort of smooth-running pulley, and fix the other end of the line to the library doorjamb with a drawing-pin. When you tweaked the line the hook pulled the volume control from Zero to fairly loud, the line playing over the tuning control, which we had set in such a way that the slight pull turned it to the station. As the hook in the screw-hole reached the bottom of the circuit, it fell out and the wireless was giving tongue.”

  There was a long silence, broken at last by Mandrake. “But nobody could have fixed it,” said Mandrake.

  “Only after William was dead. He would have seen it when he was tuning, wouldn’t he? But this is the place, I see, to introduce Thomas, the dancing footman. Thomas set a limit to the time when the murderer departed. Incidentally he also proved, by a little excursion, that Hart couldn’t have shoved you in the pond. Thomas was Nicholas Compline’s undoing. If it hadn’t been for Thomas we would have had a job proving that Hart didn’t do exactly what Nicholas said he did: creep in by the door from the hall into the smoking-room and kill William. The mistaken identity stunt had to be supported by an approach from the ‘boudoir.’ But as things stood it was perfectly clear from the start that only Nicholas could have benefited by the wireless alibi. Mr. Royal, whose trip into the hall looked rather fishy, left the library after the wireless started, and Dr. Hart would have gained nothing whatsoever by the trick since he was alone for the entire time. Lady Hersey, who had no motive, is the stock figure of thriller-fiction—the all-too-obvious suspect. Moreover the trout-line device would have been of no use to her, either, since she went in after the noise started.”

  “What exactly did he do, though?” asked Chloris.

  “He killed his brother, rigged the wireless trick, came out and shut the door. Later, he opened the door, held a one-sided conversation with William, asked for the news, tweaked the string which he had pinned to the door-jamb—and waited, with God knows what sensations, for someone to go into the smoking-room.”

  “What happened to the line?”

  “You will remember, Mandrake, that while you and Mr. Royal were together by the body, Nicholas came in. He had shut the door after him and was hidden from you by the screen. He had only to stoop and pull the line towards him. The drawing-pin had jerked away and he had not time to hunt for it. The line was in heavy shadow and the same colour as the carpet. It throws back well towards the screen when the trick is worked. He gathered it up and put it on the fire when he got the chance. You left him by the fire for a moment, perhaps.”

  “He asked us to leave him to himself.”

  “I’ll be bound he did. But a trout-line doesn’t burn without leaving a trace and we found its trace in the ashes.”

  “I see,” said Mandrake.

  “I can’t help thinking about his mother,” said Chloris. “I mean, it was Nicholas she adored.”

  “And for that reason she killed herself. At the inquest you will hear the letter she wrote. Mandrake has already seen it. She hoped to save Nicholas by that letter. While seeming to make a confession, it tells him that she knew what he done. No wonder he was upset when he read it. It was her last gesture of love—a very terrible gesture.”

  “I think,” said Chloris shakily, “that he truly was fond of her.”

  “Perhaps,” said Alleyn.

  The library door opened and Hersey’s face, very pale and exhausted, looked in. “Is it an official party?” she asked. Alleyn asked her to come in. “I have already been over a good deal of this with Lady Hersey and with Mr. Royal,” he explained, and to Hersey: “I have not got as far as your visit with Nicholas Compline to his mother.”

  “Oh, yes. You asked me last night to tell you exactly what he did and I couldn’t remember very clearly. That’s why I’ve come in. I’ve remembered what happened after he’d tried to tell her about William. I’m afraid it’s quite insignificant. He seemed frightfully upset, of course; and I suppose in a ghastly sort of way he was. He didn’t make her understand and turned away. I had to tell her. I knelt by her bed and put my arms around her. We were old friends, you know. I told her as best I could. I remember, now, hearing him walk away behind me and I remember that in the back of my head I was irritated with him because he seemed to be fidgeting about by the wardrobe. He must have been in a pretty awful state of mind. He was swinging the wardrobe door, I thought. I suppose he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “I think he knew,” said Alleyn. “The tweed hat was on the top shelf of the wardrobe. He was getting rid of a green-and-red Alexander trout-fly.”

  “Wasn’t that rather a mad thing to do?” asked Hersey wearily, when Alleyn had explained about the trout-fly.

  “Not quite as mad as it sounds. The hook was not an easy thing to get rid of. He couldn’t burn it or risk putting it in a wastepaper basket. He would have been wiser to keep the hook until he could safely dispose of it, or merely leave it on the mantelpiece, but no doubt he was possessed by the intense desire of all homicides to rid himself of the corpus delicti. In the shock of William’s death his mother would have been most unlikely to notice a second and very insignificant trout-fly in her hat-band.”

  “And that’s all,” said Mandrake after a long silence.

  “That, I think, is all. You would like to go now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Shall we go?” Mandrake asked Chloris. She nodded listlessly but didn’t move. “I think I should go if I were you,” said Alleyn, looking very directly at Mandrake.

  “Come along, darling,” Mandrake said, gently. They bade good-bye to Hersey and Alleyn and went out.

  “ ‘Darling’?” murmured Hersey. “But it means nothing, nowadays, does it? Why do you want to get rid of them, Mr. Alleyn?”

  “We’re expecting the police car and the ambulance. It won’t be very pleasant. You would like to get away too, I expect, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, thank you,” said Hersey. “I think I’ll stay with my cousin Jo. He’s pretty well cut up about this, you know. After all, he gave the party. It’s not a pleasant thought.” She looked at the door into the smoking-room, the door with its rows of dummy books. “Mr. Alleyn,” she said, “he’s a despicable monster, but I was fond of his mother. Would she perhaps have liked me to see him now?”

  “I don’t think I should if I were you. We can tell him you’ve offered to see him and we can let you know later on if he’d like it.”

  “I must ask you—has he confessed?”

  “He has made a written statement. It’s not a confession.”

  “But…?”

  “I can’t tell you more than that, I’m afraid,” said Alleyn, and before his imagination rose the memory of sheets of paper covered with phrases that had no form, ending abruptly or straggling off into incoherence, phrases that contradicted each other and that made wild accusations against Hart, against the mother who had accused herself. He heard Fox saying: “I’ve given him the warning over and over again, but he will do it. He’s hanging himself with every word of it.” He felt Hersey’s gaze upon him, and looking up saw that she was white to the lips. “Mr. Alleyn,” she said, “what will happen to Nicholas?” And when he did not answer Hersey covered her face with her hands.

  Through the sound of pouring rain Alleyn heard a car coming up the drive and out on the sweep before the house.

  Fox came in. “It’s our
people, Mr. Alleyn.”

  “All right,” said Alleyn, and he turned to Hersey. “I must go,” Hersey walked to the door. He opened it and he and Fox went into the hall.

  Jonathan was standing there. Hersey went straight to him and he took her by the hands. “Well, dear,” said Jonathan, “it’s—it’s time, I think.”

  Fox had gone to the front door and opened it. The sound of rain filled the hall. A large man in plain clothes came in, followed by two policemen. Alleyn met him and the large man shook hands. Jonathan came forward.

  “Well, Blandish,” he said.

  “Very sorry about this, sir,” said Superintendent Blandish. Jonathan made a small waving of his hands and turned back to Hersey.

  “All ready for us, Mr. Alleyn?”

  “I think so,” Alleyn said, and they went into the green sitting-room, shutting the door behind them.

  “Hersey, my dearest,” said Jonathan, “don’t stay out here, now.”

  “Would you rather I went away, Jo?”

  “I—it’s for your sake.”

  “Then I’ll stay.”

  So Hersey saw Nicholas come out between Bailey and Fox, the senior officers keeping close behind him. He walked stiffly with short steps, looking out of the corners of his eyes. His unshaven cheeks were creased with a sort of grin and his mouth was not quite shut. His blond hair hung across his forehead in disheveled streaks. Without turning his head, he looked at his host. Jonathan moved towards him and at once the two men halted.

  “I want to tell you,” Jonathan said, “that if you wish me to see your solicitors or do anything else that I am able to do, you have only to send instructions.”

  “There now,” said Fox, comfortingly, “that’ll be very nice, won’t it?”

  Nicholas said, in an unrecognizable voice: “Stop them hanging me,” and suddenly sagged at the knees.