Black As He Is Painted

IX Climax

Alleyn said: “Don’t—” but she cut in.

“No, listen! The thing is, he’s gone. Five minutes ago. In his car.”

“Where?”

“The Embassy.”

“Right. Stay put.”

“Urgent,” Alleyn said to Mr. Whipplestone. “See you later.”

He left the house as Fox got out of the car under the trees and came towards him.

“Bomb scare,” said Fox. “On the blower.”

“I know. Come on. The Embassy.”

They got into the car. On the way to the Embassy, which was more roundabout than the way through the hole in the wall, Fox said a disguised voice had rung the Yard. The Yard was ringing Troy and had alerted Gibson and all on duty in the area.

“The President’s on his way back,” Alleyn said. “Troy’s had the muffled voice, too.”

“The escort car will have got the message.”

“I hope so.”

“A hoax, do you reckon?”

“Considering the outlandish nature of the material we’re supposed to be handling, it’s impossible to guess. As usual we take it for real. But I tell you what, Br’er Fox, I’ve got a nasty feeling that if it is a hoax it’s a hoax with a purpose. Another name for it might be red-herring. We’ll see Fred and then get back to our own patch. That Royal Academician in the Mews had better be keeping his eyes open. Here we are.”

They had turned out of a main thoroughfare, with their siren blaring, into Palace Park Gardens, and there outside the Embassy, emerging from his police escort’s car, was the Boomer, closely followed by his mlinzi and the Afghan hound. Alleyn and Fox left their car and approached him. He hailed them vigorously.

“Hullo, hullo!” shouted the Boomer. “Here are turn-ups for the books! You have heard the latest, I suppose?”

“We have,” said Alleyn. “Where’s the Embassy car?”

“Where? Where? Half-way between here and there, ‘there’ being your own house, to be specific. The good Gibson and his henchmen are looking under the seats for bombs. Your wife required me no longer. I left a little early. Shall we go indoors?”

Alleyn excused himself and was glad to see them off. The driver of the official police car was talking into his radio. He said: “Mr. Alleyn’s here now, sir. Yes, sir.”

“All right,” Alleyn said and got into the car.

It was Gibson. “So you’ve heard?” he said. “Nothing so far but we haven’t finished.”

“Did you hear the call?”

“No. He or she rang the Yard. Info is that he probably spoke through a handkerchief.”

“He or she?”

“The voice was peculiar. A kind of squeaky whisper. They reckon it sounded frightened or excited or both. The exact words were: ‘Is that Scotland Yard? There’s a bomb in the Black Embassy car. Won’t be long now.’ Call not traced. They thought the car would be outside your place and a minute or so was lost ascertaining it was on the way back. All my chaps were alerted and came on the scene pronto. Oh, and they say he seemed to speak with a lisp.”

“Like hell they do! So would they with a mouthful of handkerchief. Who’s on the Capricorn ground?”

“A copper in a wig with coloured chalks.”

“I know all about him. That all?”

“Yes,” said Gibson. “The others were ordered round here,” and added with a show of resentment, “My job’s mounting security over this big, bloody black headache and a bloody gutty show it’s turned out to be.”

“All right, Fred. I know. It’s a stinker. I’ll get back there myself. What about you?”

“I’ll stick here with the suspect car. Look!” said Gibson with the nearest approach of shrillness that Alleyn would have thought possible, “it’s got to such a pitch that I’d welcome a straight case of bomb disposal and no nonsense. There you are! I’d welcome it.”

Alleyn was forming what conciliatory phrases he could offer when he was again called to the radio. It was the gifted Sergeant Jacks.

“Sir,” said the sergeant in some agitation. “I better report.”

“What?”

“This bomb scare, sir. Just before it broke the military gentleman, Colonel Whatsit, beg pardon, came walking very rigid and careful up to the pig-pottery and leant on the bell of the door into their flat. And then the scare broke, sir. Mr. Gibson’s chap, keeping obbo in a car near the entrance to Capricorn Passage, sir, came round and told me quick, through the driving window, that it was a general alert, sir. And while he was talking, a dirty great van pulled out of the garage and obscured my view of the pottery. Well, sir, I’d got my orders from you to stay where I am. And Mr. Gibson’s chap drove off. Meanwhile a traffic jam had built up in the Mews behind the van. I couldn’t get a sight of the pottery but I could hear the Colonel. He’d started up yelling. Something like: ‘Open the bloody door, damn you, and let me in.’ And then the drivers began sounding off on their horns. It was like that for at least five minutes, sir.”

“Could anybody — could two enormous people — have got out and away while this lasted?”

“I reckon not, because it sorted itself out, sir, and when it had cleared, there was the Colonel still at the piggery door and still leaning on the bell. And he’s leaning on it now. And yelling a bit but kind of fading out. I reckon he’s so drunk he’s had it. What’ll I do, sir?”

“Where are you?”

“Ducked down behind my easel. It’s a bit awkward but I thought I’d risk it. Could you hold on, sir?”

An interval of street noises. Alleyn held on and the voice returned. “I’m up the alleyway, sir. I had to duck. The gentleman from the basement of No. 1, the Walk, passed the end of the alleyway going toward the pottery.”

“Get back to your easel and watch.”

“Sir.”

“I’m on my way. Over and out. Capricorn Square,” Alleyn said to the driver. “Quick as you can make it but no siren.”

“What was all that, then?” asked Fox. When he was informed he remarked that the painter-chap seemed to be reasonably practical and active even if he did get himself up like a right Charlie. Mr. Fox had a prejudice against what he called “fancy-dress coppers.” His own sole gesture in that line was to put on an ancient Donegal tweed ulster and an out-of-date felt hat. It was surprising how effectively these lendings disguised his personality.

When they reached the Square, Alleyn said: “We’d better separate. This is tricky. Sheridan-Gomez is the only one of the gang that doesn’t know me. The others might remember you from your checking out activities after the party. Have you got your nighty with you?”

“If you mean my Donegal ulster, yes I have. It’s in the back.”

“And the head-gear?”

“Rolled up in the pocket.”

“When you’ve dolled yourself up in them you might stroll to the piggery by way of the Square and Capricorn Place. I’ll take the Walk and the Mews. We’ll no doubt encounter each other in the vicinity of the piggery.”

Fox went off looking like a North of Ireland corn chandler on holiday, and Alleyn turned into Capricorn Walk looking like himself.

Lucy Lockett, taking the sun on the steps of No. 1, rolled over at him as he passed.

No doubt, Alleyn reflected, Gibson’s men patrolling the Capricorns, who had been diverted to the Embassy on the bomb alarm, would soon return to their ground. At the moment there was no sign of them.

It was the busiest time of day in the Capricorns and a pretty constant two-way stream of traffic moved along the Walk. Alleyn used it to screen his approach to the house-decorator’s shop on the corner of the Mews. From here, looking sideways through the windows, he had a view down the Mews to the pottery at the far end. Intermittently he had glimpses of the gifted Sergeant Jacks at his easel, but commercial vehicles backing and filling outside the garage constantly shut him off. The pottery flashed in and out of view like the fractional revelations of commercial television. Now it was Colonel Cockburn-Montfort, still at the pottery flat door, with Gomez beside him. And then, as if by sleight-of-hand, Chubb was there with them in consultation. Now a van drove into the Mews, fetched up outside the Napoli and began to deliver cartons and crates, and there was no view at all.

Between the Napoli and the garage, and next door to the flower shop, there was a tiny bistro, calling itself the Bijou. On fine days it put four tables out on the pavement and served coffee and patisseries. One of the tables was unoccupied. Alleyn walked past the van and flower shop, sat at the table, ordered coffee and lit his pipe. He had his back to the pottery but got a fair reflection of it in the flower shop window.

Gomez and Chubb were near the flat door. The Colonel still leant against it, looking dreadfully groggy. Chubb stood back a little way with his fingers to his mouth. Gomez seemed to be peering in at the curtained shop window.

He was joined there by Inspector Fox, who had arrived via Capricorn Place. He appeared to search for an address and find it in the pottery. He approached the shop door, took out his spectacles, read the notice Closed for stocktaking and evidently spoke to Gomez, who shrugged and turned his back.

Fox continued down the Mews. He paused by the talented Sergeant Jacks, again assumed his spectacles and bent massively towards the drawing. Alleyn watched with relish as his colleague straightened up, tilted his head appreciatively to one side, fell back a step or two, apologized to a passer-by and continued on his way. When he reached the table he said: “Excuse me, is that chair taken?” and Alleyn said: “No. Please.”

Fox took it, ordered coffee, and when he had been served asked Alleyn the time.

“Come off it,” Alleyn said. “Nobody’s looking at you.”

But they both kept up the show of casual conversation between strangers.

Fox said: “It’s a funny set-up back there. They act as if they don’t know each other. The Colonel seems to be on the blink. If you poked a finger at him, he’d fall flat.”

“What about the premises?”

“You can’t see anything in the shop. There’s curtains almost closed across the window and no light inside.”

He blew on his coffee and took a sip.

“They’re in a funny sort of shape,” he said. “The Gomez man’s shaking. Very pale. Gives the impression he might cut up violent. Think they’ve skedaddled, Mr. Alleyn? The Sanskrits?”

“It would have to be after nine-ten this morning, when Sanskrit was seen to go home.”

“That copper with the crayons reckons they couldn’t have made it since he’s been on the job.”

“He dodged up the garage alley to talk to me, he might remember. Of course that damn bomb scare drew Fred Gibson’s men off. But, no. I don’t think they’ve flitted. I don’t think so. I think they’re lying doggo.”

“What’s the drill, then?” Fox asked his coffee.

“I’ve got a search-warrant. Blow me down flat, Br’er Fox, if I don’t take a chance and execute it. Look,” Alleyn said, drawing on his pipe and gazing contentedly at the sky. “We may be in a bloody awkward patch. You get back to the car and whistle up support. Fred’s lot ought to be available again now. We’ll move in as soon as they’re on tap. Call us up on the artist’s buzzer. Then we close in.”

“What about Gomez and the Colonel? And Chubb?”

“We keep it nice and easy but we hold them. See you on the doorstep.”

Fox put down his empty cup, looked about him, rose, nodded to Alleyn, and strolled away in the direction of Capricorn Walk. Alleyn waited until he had disappeared round the corner, finished his coffee, and at a leisurely pace rejoined Sergeant Jacks, who was touching up his architectural details.

“Pack up,” Alleyn said, “and leave your stuff up the alley there. You’ll get a shout from Mr. Fox in a matter of seconds.”

“Is it a knock-off, sir?”

“It may be. If that lot, there, start to move, we hold them. Nice and quiet, though. All right. Make it quick. And when you get the office from Mr. Fox, come out here again where I can see you and we’ll move in. Right?”

“Right, sir.”

The delivery van from the Napoli lurched noisily down the Mews, did a complicated turn-about in front of the pottery, and went back the way it had come. Alleyn moved towards the pottery.

A police-car siren, braying in Baronsgate, was coming nearer. Another, closer at hand, approached from somewhere on the outer borders of the Capricorns.

Sergeant Jacks came out of the garage alleyway. Fox and Gibson had been quick.

Gomez walked rapidly up the Mews on the opposite side to Alleyn, who crossed over and stepped in front of him. The sirens, close at hand now, stopped.

“Mr. Sheridan?” Alleyn said.

For a moment the living image of an infuriated middle-aged man overlay that of the same man fifteen years younger in Mr. Whipplestone’s album. He had turned so white that his close-shaved beard started up, blue-black, as if it had been painted across his face.

He said: “Yes? My name is Sheridan.”

“Yes, of course. You’ve been trying to call upon the Sanskrits, haven’t you?”

He made a very slight movement: an adjustment of his weight, rather like Mr. Whipplestone’s cat preparing to spring or bolt. Fox had come up behind Alleyn. Two of Gibson’s uniform men had turned into the Mews from Capricorn Place. There were more large men converging on the pottery. Sergeant Jacks was talking to Chubb and Fred Gibson loomed over Colonel Cockburn-Montfort by the door into the flat.

Gomez stared from Alleyn to Fox. “What is this?” he lisped. “What do you want? Who are you?”

“We’re police officers. We’re about to effect an entry into the pottery and I suggest that you come with us. Better not to make a scene in the street, don’t you think?”

For a moment Gomez had looked as if he meant to do so, but he now said between his teeth: “I want to see those people.”

“Now’s your chance,” said Alleyn.

He glowered, hesitated, and then said: “Very well,” and walked between Alleyn and Fox towards the pottery.

Gibson and the sergeant were having no trouble. Chubb was standing bolt upright and saying nothing. Colonel Cockburn-Montfort had been detached from the bell, deftly rolled round and propped against the door-jamb by Gibson. His eyes were glazed and his mouth slightly open, but like Chubb he actually maintained a trace of his soldierly bearing.

Four uniform men had arrived and bystanders had begun to collect.

Alleyn rang the bell and knocked on the top of the door. He waited for half a minute and then said to one of the policemen: “It’s a Yale. Let’s hope it’s not double-locked. Got anything?”

The policeman fished in his breast pocket, produced a small polythene ready-reckoner of a kind used for conversion to metric quantities. Alleyn slid it past the tongue of the lock and manipulated it.

“Bob’s your uncle,” the constable murmured and the door was open.

Alleyn said to Fox and Gibson, “Would you wait a moment with these gentlemen.” He then nodded to the constables, who followed him in, one remaining inside the door.

“Hullo!” Alleyn called. “Anyone at homer

He had a resonant voice, but it sounded stifled in the airless flat. They were in a narrow lobby hung with dim native cloth of some sort and smelling of dust and the stale fumes of sandarac. A staircase rose steeply on the left from just inside the door. At the far end on the right was a door that presumably led into the shop. Two large suitcases, strapped and labelled, leant against the wall.

Alleyn turned on a switch and a pseudo-Oriental lamp with red panes came to life in the ceiling. He looked at the labels on the suitcases: Sanskrit, Ngombwana. “Come on,” he said.

He led the way upstairs. On the landing he called out again.

Silence.

There were four doors, all shut.

Two bedrooms, small, exotically furnished, crowded and in disarray. Discarded garments flung on unmade beds. Cupboards and drawers open and half-emptied. Two small, half-packed suitcases. An all-pervading and most unlovely smell.

A bathroom, stale and grubby, smelling of hot wet fat. The wall-cupboard was locked.

Finally, a large, heavily furnished room with divans, deep rugs, horrid silk-shaded and beaded lamps, incense burners, and a number of ostensibly African artifacts. But no Sanskrits.

They returned downstairs. Alleyn opened the door at the end of the lobby and walked through.

He was in the piggery.

It was very dark. Only a thin sliver of light penetrated the slit between the heavy window curtains.

He stood inside the door with the two uniform men behind him. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom the interior began to emerge: a desk, a litter of paper and packing material, open cases, and on the shelves, dimly flowering, one pottery pig. The end of the old stable formed, as he remembered, a sort of alcove or cavern in which were the kiln and a long work table. He saw a faint red glow there now.

He was taken with a sensation of inertia that he had long ago learnt to recognize as the kind of nightmare which drains one of the power to move.

As now, when his hand was unable to grope about the dirty wall for a light switch.

The experience never lasted for more than a few seconds, and now it had passed and left him with the knowledge that he was watched.

Someone at the far end of the shop, in the alcove room, sitting on the other side of the work table, was watching him: a looming mass that he had mistaken for shadow.

It began to define itself. An enormous person whose chin rested with a suggestion of doggy roguishness on her arm, and whose eyes were very wide open indeed.

Alleyn’s hand found the switch and the room was flooded with light.

It was Miss Sanskrit who ogled him so coyly with her chin on her arm and her head all askew and her eyes wide open.

Behind the table with his back towards her, with his vast rump upheaved and with his head and arms and barrel submerged in a packing case like a monstrous puppet doubled over its box, dangled her brother. They were both dead.

And between them, on the floor and the bench, were blooded shards of pottery.

And in the packing case lay the headless carcass of an enormous pottery pig.

A whispered stream of obscenities had been surprised out of one of the constables, but he had stopped when Alleyn walked into the alcove and had followed a short way behind.

“Stay where you are,” Alleyn said, and then: “No! One of you get that lot in off the street and lock the door. Take them to the room upstairs, keep them there and stay with them. Note anything that’s said.

“The other call Homicide and give the necessary information. Ask Mr. Fox and Mr. Gibson to come here.”

They went out, shutting the door behind them. In a minute Alleyn heard sounds of a general entry and of people walking upstairs.

When Fox and Gibson arrived they found Alleyn standing between the Sanskrits. They moved towards him but checked when he raised his hand.

“This is nasty,” Fox said. “What was it?”

“Come and see but walk warily.”

They moved round the table and saw the back of Miss Sanskrit’s head. It was smashed in like an egg. Beetroot-dyed hair, dark and wet, stuck in the wound. The back of her dress was saturated — there was a dark puddle on the table under her arm. She was dressed for the street. Her bloodied hat lay on the floor and her handbag was on the work table.

Alleyn turned to face the vast rump of her brother, clothed in a camel overcoat, which was all that could be seen of him.

“Is it the same?” Gibson asked.

“Yes. A pottery pig. The head broke off on the first attack and the rest fell in the box after the second.”

“But — how exactly—?” Fox said.

“Look what’s on the table. Under her hand.”

It was a sheet of headed letter paper. “The Piggie Potterie. 12, Capricorn Mews, S.W.3.” Written beneath this legend was: “To Messrs. Able and Virtue. Kindly…” and no more.

“A green ball-point,” Alleyn said. “It’s still in her right hand.”

Fox touched the hand. “Still warm,” he said.

“Yes.”

There was a checkered cloth of sorts near the kiln. Alleyn masked the terrible head with it. “One of the really bad ones,” he said.

“What was he doing?” Fox asked.

“Stowing away the remaining pigs. Doubled up, and reaching down into the packing case.”

“So you read the situation — how?”

“Like this, unless something else turns up to contradict it. She’s writing. He’s putting pigs from the bench into the packing case. Someone comes between them. Someone who perhaps has offered to help. Someone, at any rate, whose presence doesn’t disturb them. And this person picks up a pig, deals two mighty downward blows, left and right, quick as you please, and walks out.”

Gibson said angrily: “Walks out! When? And when did he walk in? I’ve had these premises under close observation for twelve hours.”

“Until the bomb scare, Fred.”

“Sergeant Jacks stayed put.”

“With a traffic jam building up between him and the pottery.”

“By God, this is a gutty job,” said Gibson.

“And the gallant Colonel was on the doorstep,” Alleyn added.

“I reckon he wouldn’t have been any the wiser,” Fox offered, “if the Brigade of Guards had walked in and out.”

“We’ll see about that,” Alleyn said.

A silence fell between them. The room was oppressively warm and airless. Flies buzzed between the window curtains and the glass. One of them darted out and made like a bullet for the far end.

With startling unexpectedness the telephone on the desk rang. Alleyn wrapped his handkerchief round his hand and lifted the receiver.

He gave the number, speaking well above his natural level. An unmistakably Ng’ombwanan voice said: “It is the Embassy. You have not kept your appointment.”

Alleyn made an ambiguous falsetto noise.

“I said,” the voice insisted, “you have not kept your appointment. To collect the passports. Your plane leaves at five-thirty.”

Alleyn whispered: “I was prevented. Please send them. Please.”

A long pause.

“Very well. It is not convenient but very well. They will be put into your letter-box. In a few minutes. Yes?”

He said nothing and heard a deep sound of impatience and the click of the receiver being replaced.

He hung up. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “we now know that the envelope we saw Sanskrit deliver at the Embassy contained their passports. I’d got as much already from the President. In a few minutes they’ll be dropping them in. He failed to keep his appointment to collect.”

Fox looked at the upturned remains of Sanskrit. “He could hardly help himself,” he said. “Could he?”

The front doorbell rang. Alleyn looked through the slit in the curtains. A car had arrived with Bailey and Thompson, their driver and their gear. A smallish crowd had been moved down the Mews into the Passage.

The constable in the hallway admitted Bailey and Thompson. Alleyn said: “The lot. Complete coverage. Particularly the broken pottery.”

Thompson walked carefully past the partition into the alcove and stopped short.

“Two, eh?” he said and unshipped his camera.

“Go ahead,” Alleyn said.

Bailey went to the table and looked incredulously from the enormous bodies to Alleyn, who nodded and turned his back. Bailey delicately lifted the checked cloth and said: “Cor!”

“Not pretty,” Alleyn said.

Bailey, shocked into a unique flight of fancy, said: “It’s kind of not real. Like those blown-up affairs they run in fun shows. Giants. Gone into the horrors.”

“It’s very much like that,” Alleyn said. “Did you hear if they’d got through to Sir James?”

“Yes, Mr. Alleyn. On his way.”

“Good. All right. Push on with it, you two.” He turned to Gibson and Fox. “I suggest,” he said, “that we let that lot upstairs have a look at this scene.”

“Shock tactics?” Gibson asked.

“Something like that. Agreed?”

“This is your ground, not mine,” said Gibson, still dully resentful. “I’m only meant to be bloody security.”

Alleyn knew it was advisable to disregard these plaints. He said: “Fox, would you go upstairs? Take the copper in the hall with you. Leave him in the room and have a quiet word on the landing with the man who’s been with them. If he’s got anything I ought to hear, hand it on to me. Otherwise, just stick with them for a bit, would you? Don’t give a clue as to what’s happened. All right?”

“I think so,” said Fox placidly and went upstairs.

Bailey’s camera clicked and flashed. Miss Sanskrit’s awful face started up and out in a travesty of life. Thompson collected pottery shards and laid them out on the far end of the work table. More exploratory flies darted down the room. Alleyn continued to watch through the curtains.

A Ng’ombwanan in civilian dress drove up to the door, had a word with the constable on guard, and pushed something through the letter-box. Alleyn heard the flap of the clapper. The car drove away and he went into the hall and collected the package.

“What’s that, then?” Gibson asked.

Alleyn opened it: two passports elaborately stamped and endorsed and a letter on Embassy paper in Ng’ombwanan.

“Giving them the V.I.P. treatment, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Alleyn said and pocketed the lot.

Action known as “routine” was now steadily under way. Sir James Curtis and his secretary arrived, Sir James remarking a little acidly that he would like to know this time whether he would be allowed to follow the usual procedure and hold his damned post mortems if, when and where he wanted them. On being shown the subjects he came as near to exhibiting physical repulsion as Alleyn had ever seen him and asked appallingly if they would provide him with bulldozers.

He said that death had probably occurred within the hour, agreed with Alleyn’s reading of the evidence, listened to what action he proposed to take, and was about to leave when Alleyn said: “There’s a former record of drug-pushing against the man. No sign of them taking anything themselves, I suppose?”

“I’ll look out for it but they don’t often, do they?”

“Do we expect to find blood on the assailant?”

Sir James considered this. “Not necessarily, I think,” he said. “The size of the weapon might form a kind of shield in the case of the woman and the position of the head in the man.”

“Might the weapon have been dropped or hurled down on the man? They’re extremely heavy, those things.”

“Very possible.”

“I see.”

“You’ll send these monstrosities along then, Rory? Good day to you.”

When he’d gone, Fox and the constable who had been on duty upstairs came down.

“Thought we’d better wait till Sir James had finished,” ’ Fox said. “I’ve been up there in the room with them. Chubb’s very quiet but you can see he’s put out.’ ”

This, in Fox’s language, could mean anything from being; irritated to going berserk or suicidal. “He breaks out every now and then,” he went on, “asking where the Sanskrits are and why this lot’s being kept. I asked him what he’d wanted to see them for and he comes out with that he didn’t want to see them. He reckons he was on his way back from the chemist’s by way of Capricorn Passage and just ran into the Colonel and Mr. Sheridan. The Colonel was in such a bad way, Chubb makes out, he was trying to get him to let himself be taken home, but all the Colonel would do was lean on the bell.”

“What about the Colonel?”

“It doesn’t really make sense. He’s beyond it. He said something or another about Sanskrit being a poisonous specimen who ought to be court-martialled.”

“And Gomez-Sheridan?”

“He’s taking the line of righteous indignation. Demands an explanation. Will see there’s information laid in the right quarters and we haven’t heard the last of it. You’d think it was all quite ordinary except for a kind of twitch under his left eye. They all keep asking where the Sanskrits are.”

“It’s time they found out,” Alleyn said, and to Bailey and Thompson: “There’s a smell of burnt leather. We’ll have to rake out the furnace.”

“Looking for anything in particular, Mr. Alleyn?”

“No. Well — no. Just looking. For traces of anything anyone wanted to destroy. Come on.”

He and Fox went upstairs.

As he opened the door and went in he got the impression that Gomez had leapt to his feet. He stood facing Alleyn with his bald head sunk between his shoulders and his eyes like black boot-buttons in his white kid face. He might have been an actor in a bad Latin-American film.

At the far end of the room Chubb stood facing the window with the dogged, conditioned look of a soldier in detention, as if whatever he thought or felt or had done must be thrust back behind a mask of conformity.

Colonel Cockburn-Montfort lay in an armchair with his mouth open, snoring profoundly and hideously. He would have presented a less distasteful picture, Alleyn thought, if he had discarded the outward showing of an officer and — ambiguous addition — gentleman: the conservative suit, the signet ring on the correct finger, the handmade brogues, the regimental tie, the quietly elegant socks and, lying on the floor by his chair, the hat from Jermyn Street — all so very much in order. And Colonel Cockburn-Montfort so very far astray.

Gomez began at once: “You are the officer in charge of these extraordinary proceedings, I believe. I must ask you to inform me, at once, why I am detained here without reason, without explanation or apology.”

“Certainly,” Alleyn said. “It is because I hope you may be able to help us in our present job.”

“Police parrot talk!” he spat out, making a great thing of the plosives. The muscle under his eye flickered.

“I hope not,” Alleyn said.

“What is this ‘present job’?”

“We are making enquiries about the couple living in these premises. Brother and sister. Their name is Sanskrit.”

“Where are they!”

“They haven’t gone far.”

“Are they in trouble?” he asked, showing his teeth.

“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’nly,” 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 poised 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 of 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 spear-carrier. 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 spearman’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 a 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 off 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, you will 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.

It was from this point that the sequence of events in the pig-pottery 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 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 uniform 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 work table 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 at 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 convex 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 on 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?”

la its own succinct way Chubb’s reaction was a classic. He marched in almost as if Fox were 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 rattled, 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’ombwana 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 replay, 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 of 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.

There being nowhere else to put her, they carried her upstairs and left her with Mrs. Chubb, gabbling wildly about how badly he treated her and how she knew when he left the house in a blind rage he would do what he said he would do. All of which was noted down by the officer on duty in the upstairs room.

In the downstairs room Alleyn, not having a warrant for his arrest, asked Colonel Cockburn-Montfort to come to the Yard, where he would be formally charged with the murder of the Sanskrits.

“And I should warn you that—”