“What about Ned?”
Carlisle picked up her bag and gloves. “If Ned writes the monstrous bilge you’ve fallen for in Harmony I never want to speak to him again,” she said violently. “For the love of Mike pipe down and let me go and be grilled.”
But she was not to leave without further incident. On the first floor landing she encountered Miss Henderson. After her early morning scene with Alleyn on the stairs, Carlisle had returned to her room and remained there, fighting down the storm of illogical weeping that had so suddenly overtaken her. So she had not met Miss Henderson until now.
“Hendy!” she cried out. “What’s the matter?”
“Good morning, Carlisle. The matter, dear?”
“I thought you looked — I’m sorry. I expect we all look a bit odd. Are you hunting for something?”
“I’ve dropped my little silver pencil somewhere. It can’t be here,” she said as Carlisle began vaguely to look. “Are you going out?”
“Mr. Alleyn wants me to call and see him.”
“Why?” Miss Henderson asked sharply.
“I don’t know. Hendy, isn’t this awful, this business? And to make matters worse I’ve had a sort of row with Fée.”
The light on the first landing was always rather strange, Carlisle told herself, a cold reflected light coming from a distant window making people look greenish. It must be that because Miss Henderson answered her quite tranquilly and with her usual lack of emphasis. “Why, of all mornings, did you two want to have a row?”
“I suppose we’re both scratchy. I told her I thought the unfortunate Rivera was ghastly and she thinks I’m shaking my curls at Mr. Alleyn. It was too stupid for words.”
“I should think so, indeed.”
“I’d better go!”
Carlisle touched her lightly on the arm and crossed to the stairs. She hesitated there, without turning to face Miss Henderson, who had not moved. “What is it?” Miss Henderson said. “Have you forgotten something?”
“No. Hendy, you know, don’t you, about the fantastic thing they say killed him? The piece of parasol with an embroidery stiletto in the end?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember — I know this is ridiculous — but do you remember, last night, when there was that devastating bang from the ballroom? Do you remember you and Aunt Cile and Fée and I were in the drawing-room and you were sorting Aunt Cue’s work-box?”
“Was I?”
“Yes. And you jumped at the bang and dropped something?”
“Did I?”
“And Fée picked it up.”
“Did she?”
“Hendy, was it an embroidery stiletto?”
“I remember nothing about it. Nothing at all.”
“I didn’t notice where she put it. I wondered if you had noticed.”
“If it was something from the work-box, I expect she put it back. Won’t you be late, Carlisle?”
“Yes,” Carlisle said without turning. “Yes, I’ll go.”
She heard Miss Henderson walk away into the drawing-room. The door closed gently and Carlisle went downstairs. There was a man in a dark suit in the hall. He got up when he saw her and said: “Excuse me, miss, but are you Miss Wayne?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Thank you, Miss Wayne.”
He opened the glass doors for her and then the front door. Carlisle went quickly past him and out into the sunshine. She was quite unaware of the man who stepped out from the corner a little way down Duke’s Gate and who, glancing impatiently at his watch, waited at the bus stop and journeyed with her to Scotland Yard. “Keep observation on the whole damn boiling,” Alleyn had said irritably at six o’clock that morning. “We don’t know what we want.”
She followed a constable, who looked oddly domesticated without his helmet, down a linoleumed corridor to the Chief Inspector’s room. She thought: “They invite people to come and make statements. It means something. Suppose they suspect me. Suppose they’ve found out some little thing that makes them think I’ve done it.” Her imagination galloped wildly. Suppose, when she went into the room, Alleyn said: “I’m afraid this is serious. Carlisle Loveday Wayne, I arrest you for the murder of Carlos Rivera and I warn you…” They would telephone for any clothes she wanted. Hendy, perhaps, would pack a suitcase. Perhaps, secretly, they would all be a little lightened, almost pleasurably worried, because they would no longer be in fear for themselves. Perhaps Ned would come to see her.
“In here, if you please, miss,” the constable was saying with his hand on the door-knob.
Alleyn rose quickly from his desk and came towards her. “Punctilious,” she thought. “He’s got nice manners. Are his manners like this when he’s going to arrest people?”
“I’m so sorry,” he was saying. “This must be a nuisance for you.”
The solid grizzled detective was behind him. Fox. That was Inspector Fox. He had pulled up a chair for her and she sat in it, facing Alleyn. “With the light on my face,” she thought, “that’s what they do.”
Fox moved away and sat behind a second desk. She could see his head and shoulders but his hands were hidden from her.
“You’ll think my object in asking you to come very aimless, I expect,” Alleyn said, “and my first question will no doubt strike you as being completely potty. However, here it is. You told us last night that you were with Lord Pastern when he made the dummies and loaded the revolver.”
“Yes.”
“Well, now, did anything happen, particularly in respect of the revolver, that struck you both as being at all comic?”
Carlisle gaped at him. “Comic!”
“I told you it was a potty question,” he said.
“If you mean did we take one look at the revolver and then shake with uncontrollable laughter, we didn’t.”
“No,” he said. “I was afraid not.”
“The mood was sentimental if anything. The revolver was one of a pair given to Uncle George by my father and he told me so.”
“You were familiar with it then?”
“Not in the least. My father died ten years ago and when he lived was not in the habit of showing me his armoury. He and Uncle George were both crack shots, I believe. Uncle George told me my father had the revolvers made for target shooting.”
“You looked at the gun last night? Closely?”
“Yes — because — ” Beset by nervous and unreasoned caution, she hesitated.
“Because?”
“My father’s initials are scratched on it. Uncle George told me to look for them.”
There was a long pause. “Yes, I see,” Alleyn said.
She found she had twisted her gloves tightly together and doubled them over. She felt a kind of impatience with herself and abruptly smoothed them out.
“It was one of a pair,” Alleyn said, “Did you look at both of them?”
“No. The other was in a case in the drawer on his desk. I just saw it there. I noticed the drawer was under my nose, almost, and Uncle George kept putting the extra dummies, if that’s what you call them, into it.”
“Ah, yes. I saw them there.”
“He made a lot more than he wanted in case,” her voice faltered, “in case he was asked to do his turn again sometime.”
“I see.”
“Is that all?” she said.
“As you’ve been kind enough to come,” Alleyn said with a smile, “perhaps we should think up something more.”
“You needn’t bother, thank you.”
He smiled more broadly. “Fée was doing her stuff for him on the stairs this morning,” Carlisle thought. “Was she actually showing the go-ahead signal or was she merely trying to stall him off?”
“It’s about the steel end in this eccentric weapon. The bolt or dart,” Alleyn said, and her attention snapped taut again. “We are almost certain that it’s the business end of an embroidery stiletto from the work-box in the drawing-room. We found the discarded handle. I wonder if by any chance you remember when you last noticed the stiletto. If, of course, you happen to have noticed it.”