“I’ll call you at half-past nine,” Alleyn said. “Did you know you were going to be a godfather, Br’er Fox?” And as Fox’s eyes widened he shut the door and went whistling to the bathroom.
CHAPTER IX
THE YARD
At ten-thirty in the Chief-Inspector’s room at New Scotland Yard, routine procedure following a case of homicide was efficiently established. Alleyn sat at his desk taking reports from Detective-Sergeants Gibson, Watson, Scott and Sallis. Mr. Fox, with that air of good-humour crossed with severity which was his habitual reaction to reports following observation, listened critically to his juniors, each of whom held his official notebook. Six men going soberly about their day’s work. Earlier that morning, in other parts of London, Captain Entwhistle, an expert on ballistics, had fitted a dart made from a piece of a parasol into a revolver and had fired it into a bag of sand; Mr. Carrick, a government analyst, had submitted a small cork to various tests for certain oils; and Sir Grantly Morton, the famous pathologist, assisted by Curtis, had opened Carlos Rivera’s thorax, and, with the greatest delicacy, removed his heart.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “Get yourselves chairs and smoke if you want to. This is liable to be a session.”
When they were settled, he pointed the stem of his pipe at a heavy-jawed, straw-coloured detective-sergeant with a habitually startled expression. “You searched the deceased’s rooms, didn’t you Gibson? Let’s take you first.”
Gibson thumbed his notebook open, contemplating it in apparent astonishment, and embarked on a high-pitched recital.
“The deceased man, Carlos Rivera,” he said, “lived at 102 Bedford Mansions, Austerly Square S.W.I. Service flats. Rental £500 a year.”
“Why don’t we all play piano-accordions?” Fox asked of nobody in particular.
“At 3 a.m. on the morning of June 1st,” Gibson continued in a shrill — ish voice, “having obtained a search-warrant, I effected entrance to above premises by means of a key on a ring removed from the body of the deceased. The flat consists of an entrance lobby, six-by-eight feet, a sitting-room, twelve-by-fourteen feet, and a bedroom nine-by-eleven feet. Furnishings. Sitting-room: Carpet, purple, thick. Curtains, full length, purple satin.”
“Stay me with flagons!” Alleyn muttered. “Purple.”
“You might call it morve, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Well, go on.”
“Couch, upholstered green velvet, three armchairs ditto, dining table, six dining chairs, open fireplace. Walls painted fawn. Cushions: Seven. Green and purple satin.” He glanced at Alleyn. “I beg pardon, Mr. Alleyn? Anything wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Go on.”
“Bookcase. Fourteen books. Foreign. Recognized four as on police lists. Pictures: four.”
“What were they like?” Fox asked.
“Never you mind, you dirty old man,” said Alleyn.
“Two were nude studies, Mr. Fox, what you might call heavy pinups. The others were a bit more so. Cigarette boxes: four. Cigarettes, commercial product. Have taken one from each box. Wall safe. Combination lock but found note of number in deceased’s pocket-book. Contents — ”
“Half a minute,” Alleyn said. “Have all the flats got these safes?”
“I ascertained from inquiries, sir, that deceased had his installed.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Contents. I removed a number of papers, two ledgers or account-books and a locked cash-box containing three hundred pounds in notes of low denomination, and thirteen shillings in silver.” Here Gibson paused of his own accord.
“There now!” said Fox. “Now we may be on to something.”
“I left a note of the contents of the safe in the safe and I locked the safe,” said Gibson, on a note of uncertainty, induced perhaps by misgivings about his prose style. “Shall I produce the contents now, sir, or go on to the bedroom?”
“I doubt if I can take the bedroom,” Alleyn said. “But go on.”
“It was done up in black, sir. Black satin.”
“Do you put all this in your notes?” Fox demanded suddenly. “All this about colours and satin?”
“They tell us to be thorough, Mr. Fox.”
“There’s a medium to all things,” Fox pronounced somberly. “I beg pardon, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Not at all, Br’er Fox. The bedroom, Gibson.”
But there wasn’t anything much to the purpose in Gibson’s meticulous account of Rivera’s bedroom unless the revelation that he wore black satin pyjamas with embroidered initials could be called, as Alleyn suggested, damning and conclusive evidence as to character. Gibson produced the spoil of the wall safe and they examined it. Alleyn took the ledgers and Fox the bundle of correspondence. For some time there was silence, broken only by the whisper of papers.
Presently, however, Fox brought his palm down on his knee and Alleyn, without looking up, said: “Hullo?”
“Peculiar,” Fox grunted. “Listen to this, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
How tender [Mr. Fox began] is the first burgeoning of love! How delicate the tiny bud, how easily cut with frost! Touch it with gentle fingers, dear lad, lest its fragrance be lost to you forever.
“Cor’!” whispered Detective-Sergeant Scott.
You say [Mr. Fox continued] that she is changeable. So is a day in spring. Be patient. Wait for the wee petals to unfold. If you would care for a very special, etc.
Fox removed his spectacles and contemplated his superior.
“What do you mean by your ‘etc.,’ Fox? Why don’t you go on?”
“That’s what it says. Etc. Then it stops. Look.”
He flattened a piece of creased blue letter paper out on the desk before Alleyn. It was covered with typing, closely spaced. The Duke’s Gate address was stamped on the top.
Alleyn said, “What’s that you’re holding back?”
Fox laid his second exhibit before him. It was a press-cutting and printed on paper of the kind used in the more exotic magazines. Alleyn read aloud:
Dear G.P.F.: I am engaged to a young lady who at times is very affectionate and then again goes cold on me. It’s not halitosis because I asked her and she said it wasn’t and wished I wouldn’t harp on about it. I am twenty-two, five-foot-eleven in my socks and well built. I drag down £550 per annum. I am an A grade motor-mechanic and I have prospects of a rise. She reckons she loves me and yet she acts like this. What should be my attitude?
Spark-plug.
“I should advise a damn’ good hiding,” Alleyn said. “Poor old Spark-plug.”
“Go on, sir. Read the answer.” Alleyn continued:
Dear Spark-plug: Yours is not as unusual a problem as perhaps you, in your distress of mind, incline to believe. How tender is the first burgeoning —!
“Yes, here we go again. Yes. All right, Fox. You’ve found, apparently, a bit of the rough draft and the finished article. The draft, typed on Duke’s Gate letter-paper, looks as if it had been crumpled up in somebody’s pocket, doesn’t it? Half a minute.”
He opened his own file and in a moment the letter Félicité had dropped from her bag at the Metronome had been placed beside the other. Alleyn bent over them. “It’s a pot-shot, of course,” he said, “but I’m ready to bet it’s the same machine. The s out of alignment. All the usual indications.”
“Where does this lead us?” Fox asked. Gibson, looking gratified, cleared his throat. Alleyn said: “It leads us into a bit of a tangle. The letter to Miss de Suze was typed on the machine in Lord Pastern’s study on the paper he uses for that purpose. The machine carried his dabs only. I took a chance and asked him, point-blank, how long he’d known that Edward Manx was G.P.F. He wouldn’t answer but I’ll swear I rocked him. I’ll undertake he typed the letter after he saw Manx put a white carnation in his coat, marked the envelope, ‘By District Messenger’ and put it on the hall table where it was discovered by the butler. All right. Now, not so long ago, Manx stayed at Duke’s Gate for three weeks and I suppose it’s reasonable to assume that he may have used the typewriter and the blue letter-paper in the study when he was jotting down notes for his nauseating little G.P.F. numbers in Harmony. So this draft may have been typed by Manx. But, as far as we know, Manx met Rivera for the first time last night and incidentally dotted him what William pleasingly called a fourpenny one, because Rivera kissed, not Miss de Suze but Miss Wayne. Now, if we’re right so far, how and when the hell did Rivera get hold of Manx’s rough draft of this sickening G.P.F. stuff? Not last night because we’ve got it from Rivera’s safe, and he didn’t go back to his rooms. Answer me that, Fox.”