“Splendid,” said Dikon. “I congratulate you. By the way, I was to ask you to go and see your father and I may as well warn you that you’re going to be bound over to secrecy about your theory of Falls’s signals with the pipe. And now I think I shall go to bed.”
He had reached the door when Simon stopped him. “I forgot to tell you,” said Simon. “I asked them the name of this big pot out from Home. They looked a bit funny on it and I thought they weren’t going to tell me but they came across with it in the end. It’s Alleyn. Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn.”
Dikon’s notions as to the legal proceedings arising out of the circumstances of Questing’s disappearance were exceedingly vague. Half-forgotten phrases about presumption of death after a lapse of time occurred to him. He had speculated briefly about Questing’s nationality and next-of-kin. He had never anticipated that on the following morning he would wake to find several large men standing about the Claires’ verandah, staring at their boots, mumbling to each other, and exuding the unmistakable aroma of plain-clothes policemen.
This, however, was what he did find. The drone of voices awakened him; the light was excluded from his room by a massive back which actually bulged through the open window. Dikon put on his dressing gown and went to see his employer. He had looked in on Gaunt before going to bed and had discovered him to be in a state of nervous prostration, undergoing massage from Colly. Dikon, having been told for God’s sake to let him alone, had left the room followed by Colly. “Oh, my aunt!” Colly had whispered, jerking his thumb at the door. “High strikes with bells on. A fit of the flutters with musical honours. We’re in for a nice helping of ter-hemperament, sir, and no beg pardons. Watch out for skids, and count your collars. We’ll be out on tour again to-morrow.” He turned down his thumbs. “Colly!” Gaunt had yelled at this juncture. “Colly! Damnation! Colly!” And Colly had darted back into the bedroom.
Remembering this episode, Dikon approached his employer with some misgivings. He listened at the door, caught a whiff of Turkish tobacco, heard Gaunt’s cigarette cough, tapped and walked in. Gaunt, wearing a purple dressing gown, was propped up in bed, smoking. When Dikon asked how he had slept he laughed bitterly and said nothing. Dikon attempted one or two other little opening gambits all of which were received in silence. He was about to make an uncomfortable exit when Gaunt said: “Ring up that hotel in Auckland and book rooms for to-night.”
With a feeling of the most utter desolation Dikon said: “Then we are leaving, sir?”
“I should have thought,” said Gaunt, “that it followed as the night the day. I do not book rooms out of sheer elfin whimsy. Please settle with the Claires. We leave as soon as possible.”
“But, sir, your cure?”
Gaunt shook a finger at him. “Are you so grossly lacking in sensibility,” he asked, “that you can blandly suggest that I, with the loathsome picture of last night starting up before my eyes whenever I close them, should steep my body, mine, in seething mud?”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” said Dikon lamely. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell the Claires.”
“Pray do,” said Gaunt and turned his shoulder on him.
Dikon went to find Mrs. Claire and encountered Colly on the way. Colly turned his eyes up and affected to dash a tear from them. The phrase, “He’s too cheeky,” formed itself in Dikon’s thoughts and instantly reminded him of the small brown boys who had grimaced in the moonlight. He continued on his way without an answering gesture. He ran the Colonel to earth in his study where he was closeted with a large dark man with a high colour, wearing an uneventful suit and a pair of repellent boots. This person turned upon Dikon a hard speculative stare.
“Sergeant Webley,” said the Colonel. Sergeant Webley rose slowly.
“How do you do, sir?” he said in a muffled voice. “Mr…?”
“Bell,” said the Colonel.
“Ah, yes. Mr. Bell,” repeated Sergeant Webley. He half-opened his hand, which was broad, flat and flabby with lateral creases. He seemed to peer into its palm. Dikon realized with a stab of alarm that he was consulting a small note-book. “That’s right,” repeated Sergeant Webley heavily. “Mr. Dikon Bell. Would that be a kind of nickname, sir?”
“Not at all,” said Dikon. “It was given me in my baptism.”
“Is that so, sir? Very unusual. Old English perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” said Dikon coldly. Webley cleared his throat and waited.
“Sergeant Webley,” said the Colonel uncomfortably, “is making some inquiries…”
“Yes, of course,” said Dikon hurriedly. “I’m sorry I interrupted, sir. I’ll go.”
“No need for that, Mr. Bell,” said Webley with a sort of fumbling cordiality. “Very glad you looked in. Quite an unfortunate affair. Yes. Take a seat, Mr. Bell, take a seat.”
With a claustrophobic sensation of something closing in upon him, Dikon sat down and waited.
“I understand,” said Webley, “that your movements last night were as follows.” He flattened his note-book on his knees and began to read from it. “But I’ve heard all this before,” Dikon thought. “I’ve read it a hundred times in air-liners, on the decks of steamers, in hotel bedrooms.” And he saw yellow dust-jackets picturing lethal weapons, clutching hands, handcuffs, and men like Mr. Webley squinting along the barrels of revolvers. More in answer to his thoughts than to Webley’s questions he cried aloud: “But it was only an accident!”
“In a case of this sort, Mr. Bell, disappearance of the party concerned under circumstances pointing to demise, we make inquiries. Now, you were saying?”
His heavy interrogation began to take on a kind of lifeless rhythm: question, answer, pause, while Sergeant Webley wrote and Dikon fidgeted, and again, question. It was a colourless measure reiterated drearily with variations. Under its burden Dikon walked again down a narrow track, through a gap in a hedge, and across a barren place where white flags showed clearly. Beyond the drone of Webley’s voice a single scream rose and fell like a jet from a geyser.
Webley was very insistent about the scream. Was Dikon positive that it had come from the direction of the mud cauldron? Sounds were deceptive, Webley said. Might it not have come from the village? Dikon was quite positive that it had not and, on consideration, said he would swear that it had arisen close at hand in the thermal region. Where precisely had he been when he first saw Mr. Falls? Here Webley unfolded a large-scale and extremely detailed map of the district. Dikon was able to find his place on the map and, a punctual wraith, Mr. Falls walked again towards him in the starlight. “Then you’d say he was about half-way between you and the mud pot?” The sense of impending horror which had haunted Dikon ever since he woke was now intensified and translated physically into a dryness of the throat. “About that,” he said.
Webley looked up from the map, his pale finger still flattened on the point where Dikon had stood. “Now, Mr. Bell, how long would you say it was from the time you left Mrs. and Miss Claire until the moment you first saw Mr. Falls?”
“No longer than it takes to walk fairly briskly from the car to the point under your finger. Perhaps a couple of minutes. No more.”
“A couple of minutes,” Webley repeated, and stooped over his note-book. With his head bent, so that his voice sounded more muffled than ever, he said much too casually: “You’re in young Mr. Claire’s confidence, aren’t you, Mr. Bell?”
“In what sense?”
“Didn’t he tell you about his ideas on Mr. Questing?”
“He talked to me about them. Yes.”