“Then,” she said quickly, “it doesn’t fit. The letter must have been written before he ever saw the carnation. It doesn’t fit. She said the letter came by district messenger. Ned wouldn’t have known.”
“By district messenger, did she? We’ll have to check that. Perhaps we’ll find the envelope. Would you say,” Alleyn continued, “that he seemed to be very much attached to her?”
(Edward had said: “About Fée. Something very odd has occurred. I can’t explain but I’d like to think you understand.”)
“Strongly attracted, would you think?” Alleyn said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”
“Do they see much of each other?”
“I don’t know. He — he stayed at Duke’s Gate while he was flat hunting.”
“Perhaps an attachment developed then. What do you think?”
She shook her head. Alleyn waited. Carlisle now found his unstressed persistence intolerable. She felt her moorings go and was adrift in the darkness. A wretchedness of spirit that she was unable to control or understand took possession of her. “I won’t talk about it,” she stammered, “it’s none of my business. I can’t go on like this. Let me go, please. Please let me go.”
“Of course,” Alleyn said. “I’ll take you home.”
When they arrived at Duke’s Gate, dawn was so far established that the houses with their blind windows and locked doors were clearly distinguishable in a wan half-light.
The familiar street, emerging from night, had an air of emaciation and secrecy, Carlisle thought, and she was vaguely relieved when milk bottles jingled up a side alley breaking across the blank emptiness. “Have you got a key?” Alleyn said. He and Fox and the man from the front seat waited while she groped in her bag. As she opened the door a second car drew up and four men got out. The men from the front seat joined them. She thought: “This makes us all seem very important. This is an important case. A case of murder.”
In the old days she had come back from parties once or twice with Ned Manx at this hour. The indefinable house-smell made itself felt as they entered. She turned on a lamp and it was light in the silent hall. She saw herself reflected in the inner glass doors, her face stained with tears. Alleyn came in first. Standing there, in evening dress, with his hat in his hand, he might have been seeing her home, about to wish her good-bye. The other men followed quickly. “What happens now?” she wondered. “Will he let me go now? What are they going to do?”
Alleyn had drawn a paper from his pocket. “This is a search-warrant,” he said. “I don’t want to hunt Lord Pastern out of his bed. It will do I think, if — ”
He broke off, moved quickly to the shadowed staircase and up half-a-dozen steps. Fox and the other men stood quiet inside the doors. A little French clock in the stair well ticked flurriedly. Upstairs on the first floor a door was flung open. A faint reflected light shone on Alleyn’s face. A voice, unmistakably Lord Pastern’s, said loudly: “I don’t give a damn how upset you are. You can have kittens if you like but you don’t go to bed till I’ve got my time-table worked out. Sit down.”
With a faint grin Alleyn moved upstairs and Carlisle, after a moment’s hesitation, followed him.
They were all in the drawing-room. Lady Pastern, still in evening dress and now very grey about the eyes and mouth, sat in a chair near the door. Félicité, who had changed into a housecoat and reduced her make-up, looked frail and lovely. Edward had evidently been sitting near her and had risen on Alleyn’s entrance. Lord Pastern, with his coat off and his sleeves turned up, sat at a table in the middle of the room. Sheets of paper lay before him and he had a pencil between his teeth. A little removed from this group, her hands folded in the lap of her woollen dressing gown and her grey hair neatly braided down her back, sat Miss Henderson. A plain-clothes officer stood inside the door. Carlisle knew all about him. He was the man who had escorted them home: hours ago, it seemed, in another age. She had given him the slip when she returned to the Metronome and now wondered, for the first time, how dim a view the police would take of this manoeuvre. The man looked awkwardly at Alleyn, who seemed about to speak to him as Carlisle entered, but stood aside to let her pass. Edward came quickly towards her. “Where have you been?” he said angrily. “What’s the matter? I — ” He looked into her face. “Lisle,” he said. “What is it?”
Lord Pastern glanced up. “Hello,” he said. “Where the devil did you get to, Lisle? I want you. Sit down.”
“It’s like a scene from a play,” she thought. “All of them sitting about exhausted, in a grand drawing-room. The third act of a thriller.” She caught the eye of the plain-clothes officer, who was looking at her with distaste.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I just walked out by the back door.”
“I realize that, miss,” he said.
“We can’t be in two places at once, can we?” Carlisle added brightly. She was trying to avoid Félicité. Félicité was looking at her anxiously, obviously, with inquiring eyebrows.
Lord Pastern said briskly: “Glad you’ve come, Alleyn, though I must say you’ve taken your time about it. I’ve been doin’ your job for you. Sit down.”
Lady Pastern’s voice, sepulchral with fatigue, said: “May I suggest, George, that as in all probability this gentleman is about to arrest you, your choice of phrase is inappropriate.”
“That’s a damn tiresome sort of thing to say, C,” her husband rejoined. “Gets you nowhere. What you want,” he continued, darting his pencil at Alleyn, “is a time-table. You want to know what we were all doin’ with ourselves before we went to the Metronome. System. All right. I’ve worked it out for you.” He slapped the paper before him. “It’s incomplete without Breezy’s evidence, of course, but we can get that to-morrow. Lisle, there are one or two things I want from you. Come here.”
Carlisle stood behind him and looked at Alleyn. His face was politely attentive, his eyes were on Lord Pastern’s notes. In her turn and in response to an impatient tattoo of the pencil, she too looked at them.
She saw a sort of table, drawn up with ruled lines. Across the top, one each at the head of nine columns, she read their names: her own, Lady Pastern’s, Félicité’s, Edward’s, Lord Pastern’s, Bellairs’s, Rivera’s, Miss Henderson’s, and Spence’s. Down the left-hand side, Lord Pastern had written a series of times, beginning at 8:45 and ending at 10:30. These were ruled off horizontally and in the spaces thus formed, under each name, were notes as to the owner’s whereabouts. Thus, at “9:15 approx” it appeared that she and Lady Pastern had been in the drawing-room, Miss Henderson on her way upstairs, Félicité in the study, Rivera in the hall, Lord Pastern and Breezy Bellairs in the ballroom, and Spence in the servants’ quarters.
“The times,” Lord Pastern explained importantly, “are mostly only approximate. We know some of them for certain but not all. Thing is, it shows you the groupin’. Who was with who and who was alone. Method. Here y’are, Lisle. Go over it carefully and check up your entries.”
He flung himself back in his chair and ruffled his hair. He reeked of complacency. Carlisle took up the pencil and found that her hand trembled. Exhaustion had suddenly overwhelmed her. She was nauseated and fuddled with fatigue. Lord Pastern’s time-table swam before her. She heard her voice saying, “I think you’ve got it right,” and felt a hand under her arm. It was Alleyn’s. “Sit down,” he said from an enormous distance. She was sitting down and Ned, close beside her, was making some sort of angry protest. She leant forward, propping her head on her hands. Presently it cleared and she listened, with an extraordinary sense of detachment, to what Alleyn was now saying.
“… very helpful, thank you. And now, I’m sure, you’ll all be glad to get to bed. We shall be here during what’s left of the night — hardly anything, I’m afraid, but we shan’t disturb you.”
They were on their feet. Carlisle, feeling very sick, wondered what would happen if she got to hers. She looked at the others through her fingers and thought that there was something a little wrong, a little misshapen, about all of them. Her aunt, for instance. Why had she not seen before that Lady Pastern’s body was too long and her head too big? It was so. And surely Félicité was fantastically narrow. Her skeleton must be all wrong: a tiny pelvis with the hip-bones jutting out from it like rocks. Carlisle’s eyes, behind their sheltering fingers, turned to Lord Pastern and she thought how monstrous it was that his forehead should overhang the rest of his face — a blind over a shop window; that his monkey’s cheeks should bunch themselves up when he was angry. Even Hendy: Hendy’s throat was like some bird’s and now that her hair was braided one saw that it was thin on top. Her scalp showed. They were caricatures, really, all of them. Subtly off-pitch: instruments very slightly out of tune. And Ned? He was behind her, but if she turned to look at him, what, in the perceptiveness born of nervous exhaustion, would she see? Were not his eyes black and small? Didn’t his mouth, when it smiled, twist and show canine teeth a little too long? But she would not look at Ned.