Grave Mistake

Chapter 6: Point Marked X

i

Prunella was at home at Quintern Place. Her car was in the drive and she herself answered the door, explaining that she was staying at Mardling and had merely called in to pick up her mail. She took Alleyn and Fox into the drawing-room. It was a room of just proportions with appointments that had occurred quietly over many years rather than by any immediate process of collective assembly. The panelling and ceiling were graceful. It was a room that seemed to be full of gentle light.

Alleyn exclaimed with pleasure.

“Do you like it?” Prunella said. “Most people seem to like it.”

“I’m sure you do, don’t you?”

“I expect so. It always feels quite nice to come back to. It’s not exactly rivetting, of course. Too predictable. I mean it doesn’t send one, does it? I don’t know though. It sends my father-in-law-to-be up like a rocket. Do sit down.”

She herself sat between them. She arranged her pretty face in a pout almost as if she parodied some Victorian girl. She was pale and, Alleyn thought, very tense.

“We won’t be long about this,” he said. “There are one or two bits and pieces we’re supposed to tidy up. Nothing troublesome, I hope.”

“Oh,” said Prunella. “I see. I thought that probably you’d come to tell me my mother was murdered. Officially tell me, I mean. I know, of course, that you thought so.”

Until now she had spoken in her customary whisper but this was brought out rapidly and loudly. She stared straight in front of her and her hands were clenched in her lap.

“No,” Alleyn said. “That’s not it.”

“But you think she was, don’t you?”

“I’m afraid we do think it’s possible. Do you?”

Prunella darted a look at him and waited a moment before she said: “I don’t know. The more I wonder the less I can make up my mind. But then, of course, there are all sorts of things the police dig up that other people know nothing about. Aren’t there?”

“I suppose so.”

“My first reason for coming is to make sure you have been properly consulted about the arrangements for tomorrow and to ask if there is anything we can do to help. The service is at half-past-three, isn’t it? The present suggestion is that your mother will be brought from Maidstone to the church arriving about two o’clock but it has occurred to me that you might like her to rest there tonight. If so, that can easily be arranged.”

Prunella for the first time looked directly at him. “That’s kind,” she said. “I’d like that, I think. Please.”

“Good. I’ll check with our chaps in Maidstone and have a word with your Vicar. I expect he’ll let you know.”

“Thank you.”

“All right, then?”

“Super,” said Prunella with shaking lips. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d got over all this. I thought I was O.K.” She knuckled her eyes and fished a handkerchief out of her pocket. Mr. Fox rose and walked away to the farthest windows through which he contemplated the prospect.

“Never mind,” Alleyn said. “That’s the way delayed shock works. Catches you on the hop when you least expect it”

“Sickening of it,” Prunella mumbled into her handkerchief. “You’d better say what you wanted to ask.”

“It can wait a bit.”

“No!” said Prunella and stamped like an angry child. “Now.”

“All right. I’d better say first what we always say. Don’t jump to conclusions and read all sorts of sinister interpretations into routine questions. You must realize that in a case of this sort everyone who saw anything at all of your mother or had contact, however trivial, with her during the time she was at Greengages, and especially on the last day, has to be crossed off.”

“All except one.”

“Perhaps not excepting even one and then we do look silly.”

Prunella sniffed. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Do you know a great deal about your mother’s first husband?”

Prunella stared at him.

“Know? Me? Only what everyone knows. Do you mean about how he was killed and about the Black Alexander stamp?”

“Yes. We’ve heard about the stamp. And about the unfinished letter to your mother.”

“Well then—. There’s nothing else that I can think of.”

“Do you know if she kept that letter? And any other of his letters?”

Prunella began: “If I did I wouldn’t—” and pulled herself up. “Sorry,” she said, “yes, she did. I found them at the back of a drawer in her dressing-table. It’s a converted sofa-table and it’s got a not terribly secret, secret drawer.”

“And you have them still?”

She waited for a second or two and then nodded. “I’ve read them,” she said. “They’re fantastic, lovely letters. They can’t possibly have anything at all to do with any of this. Not possibly.”

“I’ve seen the regimental group photograph.”

“Mrs. Jim told me.”

“He was very good-looking, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. They used to call him Beau Carter. It’s hard to believe when you see Claude, isn’t it? He was only twenty-one when his first wife died. Producing Claude. Such an awful waste, I’ve always thought. Much better if it’d been the other way round though of course in that case I would have been — just not. Or would I? How muddling.”

She glanced down the long room to where Mr. Fox, at its furthest extreme, having put on his spectacles, was bent over a glass-topped curio table. “What’s he doing?” she whispered.

“Being tactful.”

“Oh. I see.”

“About your mother — did she often speak of her first husband?”

“Not often. I think she got out of the way of it when my papa was alive. I think he must have been jealous, poor love. He wasn’t exactly a heart-throb to look at, himself. You know — pink and portly. So I think she kept things like pre-papa photographs and letters discreetly out of circulation. Sort of. But she did tell me about Maurice — that was his name.”

“About his soldiering days? During the war when I suppose that photograph was taken?”

“Yes. A bit about him. Why?”

“About his brother officers, for instance? Or the men under him?”

“Why?” Prunella insisted. “Don’t be like those awful pressmen who keep bawling out rude questions that haven’t got anything to do with the case. Not,” she added hastily, “that you’d really do that because you’re not at all that kind. But, I mean what on earth can my mum’s first husband’s brother officers and men have to do with his wife’s murder when most of them are dead, I daresay, themselves?”

“His soldier-servant, for instance? Was there anything in the letters about him? The officer-batman relationship can be, in its way, quite a close one.”

“Now you mention it,” said Prunella on a note of impatience, “there were jokey bits about somebody he called The Corp, who I suppose might have been his servant but they weren’t anything out of the way. In the last letter, for instance. It was written here. He’d got an unexpected leave and come home but Mummy was with her WRENS in Scotland. It says he’s trying to get a call through to her but will leave the letter in case he doesn’t. It breaks off abruptly saying he’s been recalled, urgently to London and has just time to get to the station. I expect you know about the train being bombed.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Well,” said Prunella shortly, “it was a direct hit. On his carriage. So that’s all.”

“And what about The Corp? In the letter?”

“What? Oh. There’s a very effing bit about — sorry,” said Prunella. “ ‘Effing’ is family slang for ‘affecting’ or kind of ‘terribly touching.’ This bit is about what she’s to do if he’s killed and how much — how he feels about her and she’s not to worry and anyway The Corp looks after him like a nanny. He must have been rather a super chap, Maurice, I always think.”

“Anything about the Black Alexander?”

“Oh, that! Well — actually, yes, there is something. He says he supposes she’ll think him a fuss-pot but, after all, his London bank’s in the hottest blitz area and he’s taken the stamp out and will store it elsewhere. There’s something about it being in a waterproof case or something. It was at that point he got the urgent recall to London. So he breaks off — and — says goodbye. Sort of.”

“And the stamp was never found.”

“That’s right. Not for want of looking. But obviously he had it on him.”

“Miss Foster, I wouldn’t ask you this if it wasn’t important and I hope you won’t mind very much that I do ask. Will you let me see those letters?”

Prunella looked at her own hands. They were clenched tightly on her handkerchief and she hurriedly relaxed them. The handkerchief lay in a small damply crumpled heap in her lap. Alleyn saw where a fingernail had bitten into it.

“I simply can’t imagine why,” she said. “I mean, it’s fantastic. Love letters, pure and simple, written almost forty years ago and concerning nothing and nobody but the writer. And Mummy, of course.”

“I know. It seems preposterous, doesn’t it? But I can’t tell you how ‘professional’ and detached I shall be about it. Rather like a doctor. Please let me see them.”

She glanced at the distant Fox, still absorbed in the contents of the curio table. “I don’t want to make a fuss about nothing,” she said. “I’ll get them.”

“Are they still in the not-so-secret, secret drawer of the converted sofa-table?”

“Yes.”

“I should like to see it.”

They had both risen.

“Secret drawers,” said Alleyn lightly, “are my specialty. At the Yard they call me Peeping Tom Alleyn.” Prunella compressed her lips. “Fox,” Alleyn said loudly, “may I tear you away?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Alleyn,” Fox said, removing his spectacles but staying where he was. “I beg your pardon, Miss Foster. My attention was caught by this — should I call it specimen table? My aunt, Miss Elsie Smith, has just such another in her shop in Brighton.”

“Really?” said Prunella and stared at him.

Alleyn strolled down to the other end of the room and bent over the table. It contained a heterogeneous collection of medals, a vinaigrette, two miniatures, several little boxes in silver or cloisonné and one musical box, all set out on a blue velvet base.

“I’m always drawn to these assemblies,” Alleyn said. “They are family history in hieroglyphics. I see you’ve rearranged them lately.”

“No, I haven’t. Why?” asked Prunella, suddenly alerted. She joined them. It was indeed clear from indentations in the velvet that a rearrangement had taken place. “Damn!” she said. “At it again! No, it’s too much.”

“At it?” Alleyn ventured. “Again? Who?”

“Claude Carter. I suppose you know he’s staying here. He — does so fiddle and pry.”

“What does he pry into?”

“All over the place. He’s always like that. The old plans of this house and garden. Drawers in tables. He turns over other people’s letters when they come. I wouldn’t put him past reading them. I’m not living here at the moment so I daresay he’s having field days. I don’t know why I’m talking about it.”

“Is he in the house at this moment?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only just come in, myself. Never mind. Forget it. Do you want to see the letters?”

She walked out of the room, Alleyn opening the door for her. He followed her into the hall and up the staircase.

“How happy Mr. Markos will be,” he remarked, “climbing up the golden stairs. They are almost golden, aren’t they? Where the sun catches them?”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, but you should. You mustn’t allow ownership to dull the edge of appetite. One should always know how lucky one is.”

Prunella turned on the upper landing and stared at him.

“Is it your habit,” she asked, “to go on like this? When you’re on duty?”

“Only if I dare hope for a sympathetic reception. What happens now? Turn right, proceed in a westerly direction and effect an entrance?”

Since this was in fact what had to be done, Prunella said nothing and led the way into her mother’s bedroom.

A sumptuous room. There was a canopied bed and a silken counterpane with a lacy nightgown case topped up by an enormous artificial rose. A largesse of white bearskin rugs. But for all its luxury the room had a depleted air as if the heart had gone out of it. One of the wardrobe doors was open and disclosed complete emptiness.

Prunella said rapidly: “I sent everything, all the clothes, away to the nearest professional theatre. They can sell the things they don’t use: fur hats and coats and things.”

There were no photographs or feminine toys of any kind on the tables and chimney-piece, and Sybil’s sofa-cum-dressing-table, with its cupid-encircled looking-glass, had been bereft of all the pots, bottles and jars that Alleyn supposed had adorned it.

Prunella said, following his look. “I got rid of everything. Everything.” She was defiant.

“I expect it was the best thing to do.”

“We’re going to change the room. Completely. My father-in-law-to-be’s fantastic about houses — an expert. He’ll advise us.”

“Ah, yes,” said Alleyn politely.

She almost shouted at him: “I suppose you think I’m hard and modern and over-reacting to everything. Well, so I may be. But I’ll thank you to remember that Will. How she tried to bribe me, because that’s what it was, into marrying a monster, because that’s what he is, and punish me if I didn’t. I never thought she had it in her to be so mean and despicable and I’m not going to bloody cry again and I don’t in the least know why I’m talking to you like this. The letters are in the dressing-table and I bet you can’t find the hidden bit.”

She turned her back on Alleyn and blew her nose.

He went to the table, opened the central drawer, slid his finger round inside the frame and found a neat little knob that released a false wall at the back. It opened and there in the “secret” recess was the classic bundle of letters tied with the inevitable faded ribbon.

There was also an open envelope with some half-dozen sepia snapshots inside.

“I think,” he said, “the best way will be for me to look at once through the letters and if they are irrelevant return them to you. Perhaps there’s somewhere downstairs where Fox and I could make ourselves scarce and get it settled.”

Without saying anything further Prunella led the way downstairs to the “boudoir” he had visited on his earlier call. They paused at the drawing-room to collect Mr. Fox, who was discovered in contemplation of a portrait in pastel of Sybil as a young girl.

“If,” said Prunella, “you don’t take the letters away perhaps you’d be kind enough to leave them in the desk.”

“Yes, of course,” Alleyn rejoined with equal formality. “We mustn’t use up any more of your time. Thank you so much for being helpful.”

He made her a little bow and was about to turn away when she suddenly thrust out her hand.

“Sorry I was idiotic. No bones broken?” Prunella asked.

“Not even a green fracture.”

“Goodbye, then.”

They shook hands.

“That child,” said Alleyn when they were alone, “turned on four entirely separate moods, if that’s what they should be called, in scarcely more than as many minutes. Not counting the drawing-room comedy which was not a comedy. You and your Aunt Elsie!”

“Perhaps the young lady’s put about by recent experience,” Fox hazarded.

“It’s the obvious conclusion, I suppose.”

In the boudoir Alleyn divided the letters — there were eight — between them. Fox put on his spectacles and read with the catarrhal breathing that always afflicted him when engaged in that exercise.

Prunella had been right They were indeed love letters, “pure and simple” within the literal meaning of the phrase, and most touching. The young husband had been deeply in love and able to say so.

As his regiment moved from the Western Desert to Italy, the reader became accustomed to the nicknames of fellow officers and regimental jokes. The Corp, who was indeed Captain Carter’s servant, featured more often as time went on. Some of the letters were illustrated with lively little drawings. There was one of the enormous Corp being harassed by bees in Tuscany. They were represented as swarming inside his kilt and he was depicted with a violent squint and his mouth wide open. A balloon issued from it with a legend that said: “It’s no sae much the ticklin’, it’s the imperrtinence, ye ken.”

The last letter was as Prunella had described it. The final sentences read: “So my darling love, I shan’t see you this time. If I don’t stop I’ll miss the bloody train. About the stamp — sorry, no time left Your totally besotted husband, Maurice.”

Alleyn assembled the letters, tied the ribbon and put the little packet in the desk. He emptied out the snapshots: a desolate, faded company well on its slow way to oblivion. Maurice Carter appeared in all of them and in all of them looked like a near relation of Rupert Brooke. In one, he held by the hand a very small nondescript child: Claude, no doubt. In another, he and a ravishingly pretty young Sybil appeared together. A third was yet another replica of the regimental group still in her desk drawer. The fourth and last showed Maurice kilted and a captain now, with his enormous “Corp” stood-to-attention in the background.

Alleyn took it to the window, brought out his pocket lens and examined it. Fox folded his arms and watched him,

Presently he looked up and nodded.

“We’ll borrow these four,” he said. “I’ll leave a receipt.”

He wrote it out, left it in the desk and put the snap-shots in his pocket. “Come on,” he said.

They met nobody on their way out. Prunella’s car was gone. Fox followed Alleyn past the long windows of a library and the lower west flank of the house. They turned right and came at last to the stables.

“As likely as not, he’ll still be growing mushrooms,” Alleyn said.

And so he was. Stripped to the waist, bronzed, golden-bearded and looking like a much younger man. Bruce was hard at work in the converted lean-to. When he saw Alleyn he grounded his shovel and arched his earthy hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

“Ou aye,” he said, “so it’s you again, Chief Superintendent. What can I do for you, the noo?”

“You can tell us, if you will, Corporal Gardener, the name of your regiment, and of its captain,” said Alleyn.

ii

“I canna credit it,” Bruce muttered and gazed out of his nonaligned blue eyes at Alleyn. “It doesna seem within the bounds of possibility. It’s dealt me a wee shock. I’ll say that for it.”

“You hadn’t an inkling?”

“Don’t be sae daft, man,” Bruce said crossly. “Sir, I should say. How would I have an inkling, will you tell me that? I doubt if her first husband was ever mentioned in my hearing and why would he be?”

“There was this stepson,” Fox said to nobody in particular. “Name of Carter.”

“Be damned to that,” Bruce shouted. “Carrrter! Carrrter! Why would he not be Carrrter? Would I be sae daft as to say: my Captain, dead nigh on forty years, was a man o’ the name of Carrrter so you must be his son and he the bonniest lad you’d ever set eyes on and you, not’ to dra’ it mild, a puir, sickly, ill-put-taegither apology for a man? Here, sir, can I have another keek at them photies?”

Alleyn gave them to him.

“Ah,” he said, “I mind it fine, the day that group was taken. I’d forgotten all about it but I mind it fine the noo.”

“But didn’t you notice the replica of this one in her bedroom at the hotel?”

Bruce stared at him. His expression became prudish. He half-closed his eyes and pursed his enormous mouth. He said, in a scandalized voice: “Sir, I never set fut in her bedroom. It would have not been the thing at a’. Not at a’.”

“Indeed?”

“She received me in her wee private parlour upstairs or in the garden.”

“I see. I beg your pardon.”

“As for these ither ones: I never saw them before.”

He gazed at them in silence for some moments. “My God,” he said quietly, “look at the bairn, just. That’ll be the bairn by the first wife. My God, it’ll be this Claude! Who’d’ve thought it. And here’s anither wi’ me in the background. It’s a strange coincidence, this, it is indeed.”

“You never came to Quintern or heard him speak of it?”

“If I did, the name didna stick in my mind. I never came here. What for would I? When we had leave and we only had but one before he was kilt, he let me gang awa’ home. Aye, he was a considerate officer. Christ!”

“What’s the matter?” Alleyn asked. Bruce had dealt his knees a devastating smack with his ginger-haired earthy hands.

“When I think of it,” he said. “When I mind how me and her would have our bit crack of an evening when I came in for my dram. Making plans for the planting season and a’ that. When I remember how she’d talk sae free and friendly and there, all unbeknownst, was my captain’s wife that he’d let on to me was the sonsiest lass in the land. He had her picture in his wallet and liked fine to look at it. I took a wee keek mysel’ one morning when I was brushing his tunic. She was bonny, aye she was that. Fair as a flooer. She seems to have changed and why wouldn’t she over the passage of the years? Ou aye,” he said heavily. “She changed.”

“We all do,” said Alleyn. “You’ve changed, yourself. I didn’t recognize you at first, in the photographs.”

“That’d be the beard,” he said seriously and looked over his lightly sweating torso with the naïve self-approval of the physically fit male. “I’m no’ so bad in other respects,” he said.

“You got to know Captain Carter quite well, I suppose?”

“Not to say well, just. And yet you could put it like that. What’s that speil to the effect that no man’s a hero to his valet? He can be so to his soldier-servant and the Captain came near enough to it with me.”

“Did you get in touch with his wife after he was killed? Perhaps write to her?”

“Na, na. I wadna tak’ the liberty. And foreby I was back wi’ the regiment that same night and awa’ to the front. We didna get the news until after we landed.”

“When did you return to England?”

“After the war. I was taken at Cassino and spent the rest of the duration in a prison camp.”

“And Mrs. Carter never got in touch? I mean: Captain Carter wrote quite a lot about you in his letters. He always referred to you as The Corp. I would have thought she would have liked to get in touch.”

“Did he? Did he mention me, now?” said Bruce eagerly. “To think o’ that.”

“Look here, Gardener, you realize by this time, don’t you, that we are considering the possibility of foul play in this business?”

Bruce arranged the photographs carefully like playing cards, in his left fist and contemplated them as if they were all aces.

“I’m aware of that,” he said absently. “It’s a horrid conclusion but I’m aware of it. To think he made mention of me in his correspondence. Well, now!”

“Are you prepared to help us if you can? Do,” begged Alleyn, “stop looking at those damn’ photographs. Here — give them to me and attend to what I say.”

Bruce with every sign of reluctance yielded up the photographs.

“I hear you,” he said. “Ou aye. I am prepared.”

“Good. Now. First question. Did Captain Carter ever mention to you or in your hearing, a valuable stamp in his possession?”

“He did not. Wait!” said Bruce dramatically. “Aye. I mind it now. It was before he went on his last leave. He said it was in his bank in the City but he was no’ just easy in his mind on account of the blitz and intended to uplift it.”

“Did he say what he meant to do with it?”

“Na, na. Not a wurrred to that effect.”

“Sure?”

“Aye, I’m sure,” said Bruce, indifferently.

“Oh, well,” Alleyn said after a pause and looked at Fox.

“You can’t win all the time,” said Fox.

Bruce shook himself like a wet dog. “I’ll not deny this has been a shock to me,” he said. “It’s given me an unco awkward feeling. As if,” he added opening his eyes very wide and producing a flight of fancy that seemed to surprise him, “as if time, in a manner of speaking, had got itself mixed. That’s a gey weird notion, to be sure.”

“Tell me, Gardener. Are you a Scot by birth?”

“Me? Na, na, I’m naething of the sort, sir. Naething of the sort. But I’ve worked since I was a laddie, in Scotland and under Scots instruction. I enlisted in Scotland. I served in a Scots regiment and I daresay you’ve noticed I’ve picked up a trick or two of the speech.”

“Yes,” said Alleyn. “I had noticed.

“Aye,” said Bruce complacently. “I daresay I’d pass for one in a crowd and proud to do it.” As if to put a signature to his affirmation he gave Alleyn a look that he would have undoubtedly described as “canny.”

“I ken well enough,” he said, “that I must feature on your short list if it’s with homicide that you’re concerning yourself, Superintendent. For the simple reason the deceased left me twenty-five thousand pounds, et cetera. That’s correct, is it not?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “That’s correct.”

“I didna reckon to be contradicted and I can only hope it won’t be long before you eliminate me from the file. In the meantime I can do what any guiltless man can do under the circumstances: tell the truth and hope I’m believed. For I have told you the truth, Chief Superintendent. I have indeed.”

“By and large, Bruce,” said Alleyn, “I believe you have.”

“There’s no ‘by’ and there’s no ‘large’ in it,” he said seriously, “and I don’t doubt you’ll come to acknowledge the fact.”

“I hope to,” Alleyn said cheerfully. “With that end in view tell me what you think of Dr. Schramm? You’ve met him, haven’t you?”

Bruce stared at him. He turned red and looked wary. “I canna see what my opinion of the doctor would have to do wi’ the matter in hand,” he said.

“You prefer not to give it?”

“I didna say so. I make no secret of what I think of the doctor. I think he’s not to be trusted.”

“Really? Why?”

“Leave it at that. Call it instinct. I canna thole the man and that’s the long and the short of it.”

He looked at his wrist-watch, a Big Ben of its species, glanced at the sun and said he ought to be getting down to the churchyard.

“At St. Crispin’s?”

“Aye. Did ye no’ hear? Jim Jobbin has the lumbago on him and I’m digging the grave. It’s entirely appropriate that I should do so.”

“Yes?”

“Aye, ’tis. I’ve done her digging up here and she’d have been well content I’d do it down there in the finish. The difference being we canna have our bit crack over the matter. So if you’ve no further requirements of me, sir, I’ll bid you good-day and get on with it.”

“Can we give you a lift?”

“I’m much obliged, sir, but I have my ain auld car. Mrs. Jim has left a piece and a bottle ready and I’ll take them with me. If its a long job and it may be that, I’ll get a bite of supper at my sister’s. She has a wee piece up Stile Lane, overlooking the kirk. When would the deceased be brought for burying, can you tell me that?”

“This evening. After dark, very likely.”

“And rest in the kirk overnight?”

“Yes.”

“Ou aye,” said Bruce on an indrawn breath. “That’s a very decent arrangement. Aweel, I’ve a long job ahead of me.”

“Thank you for your help.”

Alleyn went to the yard door of the empty room. He opened it and looked in. Nothing had changed.

“Is this part of the flat that was to be built for you?” he called out

“Aye, that was the idea,” said Bruce.

“Does Mr. Carter take an interest in it?”

“Ach, he’s always peering and prying. You’d think,” said Bruce distastefully, “it was him that’s the lawful heir.”

“Would you so,” said Alleyn absently. “Come along, Fox.”

They left Bruce pulling his shirt over his head in an easy workmanlike manner. He threw his jacket across his shoulder, took up his shovel and marched off,

“In his way,” said Fox, “a remarkable chap.”

iii

Verity, to her surprise, was entertaining Nikolas Markos to luncheon. He had rung her up the day before and asked her to “take pity” on him.

“If you would prefer it,” he had said, “I will drive you somewhere else, all the way to the Ritz if you like, and you shall be my guest. But I did wonder, rather wistfully, if we might have an egg under your lime trees. Our enchanting Prue is staying with us and I suddenly discover myself to be elderly. Worse: she, dear child, is taking pains with me.”

“You mean?”

“She laughs a little too kindly at my dated jokes. She remembers not to forget I’m there. She includes me, with scarcely an effort, in their conversations. She’s even taken to bestowing the odd butterfly kiss on the top of my head. I might as well be bald,” said Mr. Markos bitterly.

“I’ll undertake not to do that, at least. But I’m not much of a cook.”

“My dear, my adorable lady, I said Egg and I meant Egg. I am,” said Mr. Markos, “your slave forever and if you will allow me will endorse the declaration with what used to be called a bottle of The Widow. Perhaps, at this juncture I should warn you that I shall also present you with a problem. A demain and a thousand thanks.”

“He gets away with it,” Verity thought, “but only just. And if he says eggs, eggs he shall have. On creamed spinach. And my standby: iced sorrel soup first and the Stilton afterwards.”

And as it was a lovely day they did have lunch under the limes. Mr. Markos, good as his word, had brought a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket and the slightly elevated atmosphere that Verity associated with him was quickly established. She could believe that he enjoyed himself as fully as he professed to do but he was as much of an exotic in her not very tidy English garden as frangipani. His hair luxuriant but disciplined, his richly curved, clever mouth and large, black eyes, his clothes that, while they avoided extravagance were inescapably very, very expensive — all these factors reminded Verity of Sybil Foster’s strictures.

“The difference is,” she thought, “that I don’t mind him being like this. What’s more I don’t think Syb would have minded either if he’d taken a bit more notice of her.”

When they had arrived at the coffee stage and he at his Turkish cigarette, he said: “I would choose, of course, to hear you talk about your work and this house and lovely garden. I should like you to confide in me and perhaps a little to confide in you myself.” He spread his hands. “What am I saying! How ridiculous! Of course I am about to confide in you; that is my whole intention, after all. I think you are accustomed to confidences: they are poured into your lap and you are discreet and never pass them on. Am I right?”

“Well,” said Verity, who was not much of a hand at talking about herself and didn’t enjoy it, “I don’t know so much about that.” And she thought how Alleyn, though without any Markosian floridity, had also introduced confidences. “Ratsy too,” she remembered, and thought irrelevantly that she had become quite a one for gentlemen callers over the last fortnight.

Mr. Markos fetched from his car two large sheets of cardboard tied together. “Do you remember,” he asked, “when we examined Prunella’s original plans of Quintern Place there was a smaller plan of the grounds that you said you had not seen before?”

“Yes, of course.”

“This is it.”

He put the cardboards on the table and opened them out. There was the plan.

“I think it is later than the others,” he said, “and by a different hand. It is drawn on the scale of a quarter of an inch to the foot and is very detailed. Now. Have a close, a very close look. Can you find a minute extra touch that doesn’t explain itself? Take your time,” Mr. Markos invited, with an air of extraordinary relish. He took her arm and led her close to the table.

Verity felt that he was making a great build-up and that the climax had better be good but she obediently pored over the map.

Since it was a scheme for laying out the grounds, the house was shown simply as an outline. The stable block was indicated in the same manner. Verity, not madly engaged, plodded conscientiously over elaborate indications of water-gardens, pavilions, fountains, terraces and spinnies but although they suggested a prospect that Evelyn himself would have treasured, she could find nothing untoward. She was about to say so when she noticed that within the empty outline of the stables there was an interior line suggesting a division into two rooms, a line that seemed to be drawn free-hand in pencil rather than ruled in the brownish ink of the rest of the plan. She bent down to examine it more closely and found, in one corner of the indicated stableroom a tiny X, also, she was sure, pencilled.

Mr. Markos, who had been watching her intently, gave a triumphant little crow. “Aha!” he cried. “You see! You’ve spotted it.”

“Well, yes,” said Verity. “If you mean—” and she pointed to the pencilled additions.

“Of course, of course. And what, my dear Miss Preston-Watson, do you deduce? You know my methods. Don’t bustle.”

“Only, I’m afraid, that someone at some time has thought of making some alteration in the old stable buildings.”

“A strictly Watsonian conclusion: I must tell you that at the moment a workman is converting the outer half of the amended portion — now an open-fronted broken-down lean-to, into a mushroom bed.”

“That will be Bruce, the gardener. Perhaps he and Sybil, in talking over the project, got out this plan and marked the place where it was to go.”

“But why ‘the point marked X’? It does not indicate the mushroom bed. It is in a deserted room that opens off the mushroom shed.”

“They might have changed their minds.”

“It is crammed into a corner where there are the remains of an open fireplace. I must tell you that after making this discovery I strolled round the stable yard and examined the premises.”

“I can’t think of anything else,” said Verity.

“I have cheated. I have withheld evidence. You must know, as Scheherazade would have said, meaning that you are to learn, that a few evenings after Prunella brought the plans to Mardling she found me poring over this one in the library. She remarked that it was strange that I should be so fascinated by it and then, with one of her nervous little spurts of confidence (she is, you will have noticed, unusually but, Heaven knows, understandably nervous just now), she told me that the egregious Claude Carter exhibited a similar interest in the plans and had been discovered examining this one through a magnifying glass. And I should like to know,” cried Mr. Markos, sparkling at Verity, “what you make of all that!”

Verity did not make a great deal of it. She knew he expected her to enter into zestful speculation but, truth to tell she found herself out of humour with the situation. There was something unbecoming in Nikolas Markos’s glee over his discovery and if, as she suspected, he was going to link it in some way with Sybil Foster’s death, she herself wanted no part in the proceedings. At the same time she felt apologetic — guilty, even — about her withdrawal, particularly as she was sure he was very well aware of it “He really is,” she thought, “so remarkably sharp.”

“To look at the situation quite cold-bloodedly,” he was saying, “and of course that is the only sensible way to look at it, the police clearly are treating Mrs. Foster’s death as a case of homicide. This being so, anything untoward that has occurred at Quintern either before or after the event should be brought to their notice. You agree?”

Verity pulled herself together. “I suppose so. I mean, yes, of course. Unless they’ve already found it out for themselves. What’s the matter?”

“If they have not, we have, little as I welcome the intrusion, an opportunity to inform them. Alas, you have a visitor, dear Verity,” said Mr. Markos and quickly kissed her hand.

Alleyn, in fact, was walking up the drive.

iv

“I’m sorry,” he said, “to come at such an unlikely time of day but I’m on my way back from Quintern Place and I thought perhaps you might like to know about the arrangements for this evening and tomorrow.”

He told them. “I daresay the Vicar will let you know,” he added, “but in case he doesn’t, that’s what will happen.”

“Thank you,” Verity said. “We were to do flowers first thing in the morning. It had better be this afternoon, hadn’t it? Nice of you to think of it.”

She told herself she knew precisely why she was glad Alleyn had arrived: idiotically it was because of Mr. Markos’s manner, which had become inappropriately warm. Old hand though she was, this had flustered Verity. He had made assumptions. He had been too adroit. Quite a long time had gone by since assumptions had been made about Verity and still longer since she had been ruffled by them. Mr. Markos made her feel clumsy and foolish.

Alleyn had spotted the plan. He said Prunella had mentioned the collection. He bent over it, made interested noises, looked closer and finally took out a pocket lens. Mr. Markos crowed delightedly: “At last!” he cried, “we can believe you are the genuine article.” He put his arm round Verity and gave her a quick little squeeze. “What is he going to look at?” he said. “What do you think?”

And when Alleyn used his lens over the stable buildings, Mr. Markos was enraptured.

“There’s an extra bit pencilled in,” Alleyn said. “Indicating the room next the mushroom bed.”

“So, my dear Alleyn, what do you make of that?”

“Nothing very much, do you?”

“Not of the ‘point marked X’? No buried treasure, for instance? Come!”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “you can always dig for it, can’t you? Actually it marks the position of a dilapidated fireplace. Perhaps there was some thought of renovating the rooms. A flat for the gardener, for instance.”

“Do you know,” Verity exclaimed, “I believe I remember Sybil said something about doing just that. Setting him up on the premises because his room at his sister’s house was tiny and he’d nowhere to put his things and they didn’t hit it off, anyway.”

“No doubt you are right, both of you,” admitted Mr. Markos, “but what a dreary solution. I am desolate.”

“Perhaps I can cheer you up with news of an unexpected development,” said Alleyn. “It emerges that Bruce Gardener was Captain Maurice Carter’s soldier-servant during the war.”

After a considerable interval Mr. Markos said: “The gardener. You mean the local man? Are you saying that this was known to Sybil Foster? And to Prunella? No. No, certainly not to Prunella.”

“Not, it seems, even to Gardener himself.”

Verity sat down abruptly. “What can you mean?” she said.

Alleyn told her.

“I have always,” Mr. Markos said, “regarded stories of coincidence in a dubious light. My invariable instinct is to discredit them.”

“Is it?” said Verity. “I always believe them and find them boring. I am prepared to acknowledge, since everyone tells me so, that life is littered with coincidences. I don’t mind. But this,” she said to Alleyn, “is something else again. This takes a hell of a lot of acceptance.”

“Is that perhaps because of what has happened? If Mrs. Foster hadn’t died and if one day in the course of conversation it had emerged that her Maurice Carter had been Bruce Gardener’s Captain Carter, what would have been the reaction?”

“I can tell you what Syb’s reaction would have been. She’d have made a big tra-la about it and said she’d always sensed there was ‘something.’ ”

“And you?”

Verity thought it over. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. I’d have said: fancy! Extraordinary coincidence, but wouldn’t have thought much more about it.”

“If one may ask?” said Mr. Markos, already asking. “How did you find out? You or whoever it was?”

“I recognized him in an old photograph of the regiment. Not at first. I was shamefully slow. He hadn’t got a beard in those days but he had got his squint”

“Was he embarrassed?” Verity asked. “When you mentioned it, I mean?”

“I wouldn’t have said so. Flabbergasted is the word that springs to mind. From there he passed quickly to the ‘what a coincidence’ bit and then into the realms of misty Scottish sentiment on ‘who would have thought it’ and ‘had I but known’ lines.”

“I can imagine.”

“Your Edinburgh Castle guide would have been brassy in comparison.”

“Castle?” asked Mr. Markos. “Edinburgh?”

Verity explained.

“What’s he doing now?” Mr. Markos sharply demanded. “Still cultivating mushrooms? Next door, by yet another coincidence”—he tapped the plan—“to the point marked X.”

“When we left him he was going to the church.”

“To the church! Why?”

Verity said: “I know why.”

“You do?”

“Yes. Oh,” said Verity, “this is all getting too much. Like a Jacobean play. He’s digging Sybil’s grave.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Markos.

“Because Jim Jobbin has got lumbago.”

“Who is — no,” Mr. Markos corrected himself, “it doesn’t matter. My dear Alleyn, forgive me if I’m tiresome, but doesn’t all this throw a very dubious light upon the jobbing Gardener?”

“If it does he’s not the only one.”

“No? No, of course. I am forgetting the egregious Claude. By the way — I’m sorry, but you may slap me back if I’m insufferable — where does all this information come from?”

“In no small part,” said Alleyn, “from Mrs. Jim Jobbin.”

Mr. Markos flung up his hands. “These Jobbins!” he lamented and turned to Verity. “Come to my rescue. Who are the Jobbins?”

“Mrs. Jim helps you out once a week at Mardling. Her husband digs drains and mows lawns. I daresay he mows yours if the truth were known.”

“Odd job Jobbins, in fact,” said Alleyn and Verity giggled.

“Gideon would know,” his father said. “He looks after that sort of thing. In any case, it doesn’t matter. Unless — I suppose she’s — to be perfectly cold-blooded about it — trustworthy?”

“She’s a long-standing friend,” said Verity, “and the salt of the earth. I’d sooner suspect the Vicar’s wife of hanky-panky than Mrs. Jim.”

“Well, of course, my very dear Verity” (damn’, thought Verity, I wish he wouldn’t) “that disposes of her, no doubt.” He turned to Alleyn. “So the field is, after all, not extensive. Far too few suspects for a good read.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alleyn rejoined. “You may have overlooked a candidate.”

In the pause that followed a blackbird somewhere in Verity’s garden made a brief statement and traffic on the London motorway four miles distant established itself as a vague rumour.

Mr. Markos said: “Ah, yes. Of course. But I hadn’t overlooked him. You’re talking about my acquaintance, Dr. Basil Schramm.”

“Only because I was going to ring up and ask if I might have a word with you about him. I think you introduced him to the Upper Quintern scene, didn’t you?”

“Well — fleetingly, I suppose I did.”

Verity said: “Would you excuse me? I’ve got a telephone call I must make and I must see about the flowers.”

“Are you being diplomatic?” Mr. Markos asked archly.

“I don’t even know how,” she said and left them not, she hoped, too hurriedly. The two men sat down.

“I’ll come straight to the point, shall I?” Alleyn said. “Can you and if so, will you, tell me anything of Dr. Schramm’s history? Where he qualified, for instance? Why he changed his name? Anything?”

“Are you checking his own account of himself? Or hasn’t he given a satisfactory one? You won’t answer that, of course, and very properly not.”

“I don’t in the least mind answering. I haven’t asked him.”

“As yet?”

“That’s right. As yet.”

“Well,” said Mr. Markos, airily waving his hand, “I’m afraid I’m not much use to you. I know next to nothing of his background except that he took his degree somewhere in Switzerland. I had no idea he’d changed his name, still less why. We met when crossing the Atlantic in the Q.E. Two and subsequently in New York at a cocktail party given at the St. Regis by fellow passengers. Later on that same evening at his suggestion we dined together and afterwards visited some remarkable clubs to which he had the entrée. The entertainment was curious. That was the last time I saw him until he rang me up at Mardling on his way to Greengages. On the spur of the moment I asked him to dinner. I have not seen him since then.”

“Did he ever talk about his professional activities — I mean whether he had a practise in New York or was attached to a hospital or clinic or what have you?”

“Not in any detail. In the ship going over he was the life and soul of a party that revolved round an acquaintance of mine — the Princess Palevsky. I rather gathered that he acquired her and two American ladies of considerable renown as — patients. I imagine,” said Mr. Markos smoothly, “that he is the happy possessor of a certain expertise in that direction. And, really, my dear Alleyn, that is the full extent of my acquaintance with Basil Schramm.”

“What do you think of him?” said Alleyn abruptly.

“Think of him? What can I say? And what exactly do you mean?”

“Did you form an opinion of his character, for instance? Nice chap? Lightweight? Man of integrity?”

“He is quite entertaining. A lightweight, certainly, but good value as a mixer and with considerable charm. I would trust him,” said Mr. Markos, “no further than I could toss a grand piano. A concert grand.”

“Where women are concerned?”

“Particularly where women are concerned.”

“I see,” said Alleyn cheerfully and got up. “I must go,” he said, “I’m running late. By the way, is Miss Foster at Quintern Place now, do you happen to know?”

“Prunella? No. She and Gideon went up to London this morning. They’ll be back for dinner. She’s staying with us.”

“Ah yes. I must go. Would you apologize for me to Miss Preston?”

“I’ll do that. Sorry not to have been more informative.‘’

“Oh,” Alleyn said, “the visit has not been unproductive. Goodbye to you.”

Fox was in the car in the lane. When he saw Alleyn he started up his engine.

“To the nearest telephone,” Alleyn said. “We’ll use the one at Quintern Place. We’ve got to lay on surveillance and be quick about it. The local branch’ll have to spare a copper. Send him up to Quintern as a labourer. He’s to dig up the fireplace and hearth and dig deep and anything he finds that’s not rubble, keep it. And when he’s finished tell him to board up the room and seal it. If anyone asks what he’s up to he’ll have to say he’s under police orders. But I hope no one will ask.”

“What about Gardener?”

“Gardener’s digging the grave.”

“Fair enough,” said Fox.

“Claude Carter may be there though.”

“Oh,” said Fox. “Aha. Him.”

But before they reached Quintern they met Mrs. Jim on her way to do flowers in the church. She said Claude Carter had gone out that morning. “To see a man about a car,” he had told her and he said he would ba away all day.

“Mrs. Jim,” Alleyn said. “We want a telephone and we want to take a look inside the house. Miss Foster’s out. Could you help us? Do you have a key?”

She looked fixedly at him. Her workaday hands moved uneasily.

“I don’t know as I have the right,” she said. “It’s not my business.”

“I know. But it is, I promise you, very important. An urgent call. Look, come with us, let us in, follow us about if you like or we’ll drive you back to the church at once. Will you do that? Please?”

There was another and a longer pause. “All right,” said Mrs. Jim and got into the car.

They arrived at Quintern and were admitted by Mrs. Jim’s key, which she kept under a stone in the coal house.

While Fox rang the Upper Quintern police station from the staff sitting-room telephone. Alleyn went out to the stable yard. Bruce’s mushroom beds were of course in the same shape as they had been earlier in the afternoon when he left them, taking his shovel with him. The ramshackle door into the deserted room was shut. Alleyn dragged it open and stood on the threshold. At first glance it looked and smelt as it had on his earlier visit. The westering sun shone through the dirty window and showed traces of his own and Carter’s footprints on the dusty floorboards. Nobody else’s, he thought, but more of Carter’s than his own. The litter of rubbish lay undisturbed in the corner. With a dry-mouthed sensation of foreboding he turned to the fireplace.

Alleyn began to swear softly and prolifically, an exercise in which he did not often indulge.

He was squatting over the fireplace when Fox appeared at the window, saw him and looked in at the yard door.

“They’re sending up a chap at once,” he said.

“Like hell, they are,” said Alleyn. “Look here.”

“Had I better walk in?”

“The point’s academic.”

Fox took four giant strides on tiptoe and stooped over the hearth. “Broken up, eh?” he said. “Fancy that, eh?”

“As you say. But look at this.” He pointed a long finger. “Do you see what I see?”

“Remains of a square hole. Something regular in shape like a box or tin’s been dug out. Right?”

“I think so. And take a look here. And here. And in the rubble.”

“Crepe soles, by gum.”

“So what do you say now to the point marked bloody X?”

“I’d say the name of the game is Carter. But why? What’s he up to?”

“I’ll tell you this, Br’er Fox. When I looked in here before this hearth was as it had been for Lord knows how long.”

“Gardener left when we left,” Fox mused.

“And is digging a grave and should continue to do so for some considerable time.”

“Anybody up here since then?”

“Not Mrs. Jim, at all events.”

“So we’re left—” Fox said.

“—with the elusive Claude. We’ll have to put Bailey and Thompson in but I bet you that’s going to be the story.”

“Yes. And he’s seeing a man about a car,” said Fox bitterly. “It might as well be a dog.”

“And we might as well continue in our futile ways by seeing if there’s a pick and shovel on the premises. After all, he couldn’t have rootled up the hearth with his fingernails. Where’s the gardener’s shed?”

It was near at hand, hard by the asparagus beds. They stood in the doorway and if they had entered would have fallen over a pick that lay on the floor, an untidy note in an impeccably tidy interior. Bruce kept his tools as they should be kept, polished, sharpened and in racks. Beside the pick, leaning against a bench was a lightweight shovel and, nearby, a crowbar.

They all bore signs of recent and hard usage.

Alleyn stooped down and without touching, examined them.

“Scratches,” he said. “Blunted. Chucked in here in a hurry. And take a look — crepe-soled prints on the path.”

“Is Bob your uncle, then?” said Fox.

“If you’re asking whether Claude Carter came down to the stable yard as soon as Bruce Gardener and you and I left it, dug up the hearth and returned the tools to this shed, I suppose he is. But if you’re asking whether this means that Claude Carter murdered his stepmother I can’t say it follows as the night the day.”

Alleyn reached inside the door and took a key from a nail. He shut and locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

“Bailey and Thompson can pick it up from the nick,” he said. “They’d better get here as soon as possible.”

He led the way back to the car. Halfway there he stopped. “I tell you what, Br’er Fox,” he said. “I’ve got a strong feeling of being just a couple of lengths behind and being beaten to the post.”

“What,” said Fox, pursuing his own line of thought, “would it be? What was it? That’s what I ask myself.”

“And how do you answer?”

“I don’t. I can’t. Can you?”

“One can always make wild guesses, of course. Mr. Markos was facetious about buried treasure. He might turn out to be right.”

“Buried treasure,” Fox echoed disgustedly. “What sort of buried treasure?”

“How do you fancy a Black Alexander stamp?” said Alleyn.