Coombe got out his insufflator and a lens. They developed a good set of prints on the lid, and turned to the paper impaled over the figurine’s head.
After a minute or two Alleyn gave a satisfied grunt.
“Fair enough,” he said. “The prints of index and thumb are as good as you’d ask. I think I’ll call on the gallant Major.”
He left Coombe still poring lovingly over the exhibits, walked down to his car, collected his suitcases and crossed by the hotel launch to the Island. Trehern was in charge. His manner unattractively combined truculence with servility.
It was now two o’clock.
The Major, it presently transpired, was in the habit of taking a siesta.
“He got used to it in India,” Mrs. Barrimore said. “People do.”
Alleyn had run into her at the door of the old pub. She was perfectly composed and remote in her manner: a beautiful woman who could not, he thought, ever be completely unaware of the effect she made. It was inescapable. She must, over and over again, have seen it reflected in the eyes of men who looked at, and at once recognized, her. She was immensely attractive.
He said: “Perhaps, in the meantime, I may have a word with you?”
“Very well. In the parlour, if you like. The children are out, just now.”
“The children?”
“Jenny and Patrick. I should have said ‘the young,’ I expect. Will you come in?”
He could hardly recognize the woman he had seen in her garden veering this way and that like a rudderless ship and unable to control her hands. She sat perfectly still and allowed him to look at her while she kept her own gaze on her quietly interlaced fingers.
He supposed she must have had a hand in the transformation of the old bar-parlour into a private living-room: if so she could have taken little interest in the process. Apart from the introduction of a few unexceptionable easy-chairs, one or two photographs, a noncommittal assembly of books and a vase of the flowers she had so mishandled in the garden, it must be much as it was two years ago: an impersonal room.
Alleyn began by following the beaten path of routine investigation. He tried to establish some corroboration of her alibi — though he did not give it this name — for the period covered by Miss Emily’s visit to the enclosure up to the probable time of Miss Cost’s death. There was none to be had. Nobody had visited the kitchen-dining-room while she drank her coffee and ate her toast. The servants were all busy in the main building. Jenny and Patrick had breakfasted in the public dining-room; her husband was presumably asleep. Alleyn gathered that they occupied separate rooms. She had no idea how long this solitary meal had lasted. When it was over she had attended to one or two jobs; interviewed the kitchen staff and then gone up to her room and changed from a housecoat to a day dress. When she came downstairs again, she had found the young people in the parlour. Alleyn had arrived soon afterwards.
“And for the rest of the morning,” he asked casually, “did you go out at all?”
“No further than the garden,” she said after a fractional pause. “I went into the garden for a time.”
“To cut flowers?” he suggested, looking at those in the room.
She lifted her eyes to his for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “to cut flowers. I do the flowers on Sunday as a rule: it takes quite a time. Jenny helped me,” she added as an afterthought.
“In the garden?”
Again the brief look at him, this time, perhaps, fractionally less controlled. “No. Not in the garden. In the house. Afterwards.”
“So you were alone in the garden?”
She said quickly, with the slight hesitation he had noticed before in her speech: “Yes. Alone. Why d-do you keep on about the garden? What interest can it have for you? It was after — afterwards. Long afterwards.”
“Yes, of course. Did the news distress you very much, Mrs. Barrimore?”
The full, unbridled mouth, so much at variance with the rest of her face, moved as if to speak; but, as in a badly synchronized sound-film, her voice failed. Then she said: “Naturally. It’s a terrible thing to have happened, isn’t it?”
“You were fond of Miss Cost?”
Something in her look reminded him, fantastically, of the strange veiling of a bird’s eyes. Hers were heavy-lidded and she had closed them for a second. “Not particularly,” she said. “We had nothing—” She stopped, unaccountably.
“Nothing in common?”
She nodded. Her hands moved but she looked at them and refolded them in her lap.
“Had she made enemies?”
“I don’t know of any,” she said at once, as if she had anticipated the question. “I know very little about her.”
Alleyn asked her if she subscribed to the theory of mistaken identity, and she said that she did. She was emphatic about this, and seemed relieved when he spoke of it. She was, she said, forced to think that it might have been Wally.
“Excited, originally, by Miss Cost herself?”
“I think it’s possible. She was…It doesn’t matter.”
“Inclined to be vindictive?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m afraid,” Alleyn said, “that in these cases one can’t always avoid speaking ill of the dead. I did rather gather from something in Mrs. Carstairs’s manner—”
“Dulcie Carstairs!” she exclaimed, spontaneously and with animation. “She never says anything unkind about anybody!”
“I’m sure she doesn’t. It was just that — Well, I thought she was rather desperately determined not to do so, in this case.”
She gave him a faint smile. It transfigured her face.
“Dear Dulcie,” she murmured.
“She and the Rector are horrified, of course. They struck me as being such a completely unworldly pair, those two.”
“Did they? You were right. They are.”
“I mean — not only about Miss Cost, but about the whole business of the spring’s being more or less discredited by the present owner. The events of the last two years must have made a great difference to them, I suppose.”
“Yes,” she said. “Enormous.”
“Were they very hard up before?”
“Oh yes. It was a dreadfully poor parish. The stipend was the least that’s given, I believe, and they’d no private means. We were all so sorry about it. Their clothes! She’s nice-looking but she needs careful dressing,” said Mrs. Barrimore, with all the unconscious arrogance of a woman who would look lovely in a sack. “Of course everyone did what they could. I don’t think she ever bought anything for herself.”
“She looked quite nice this morning, I thought.”
“Did she?” For the first time, Margaret Barrimore spoke as if there was some kind of rapprochement between them. “I thought men never noticed women’s clothes,” she said.
“Do you bet me I can’t tell you what you wore yesterday at the spring?”
“Well?”
“A white linen dress with a square neck and a leather belt. Brown Italian shoes with large buckles. Brown suede gloves. A wide string-coloured straw hat, with a brown velvet ribbon. A brown leather bag. No jewelry.”
“You win,” said Mrs. Barrimore. “You don’t look like the sort of man who notices but I suppose it’s part of your training and I shouldn’t feel flattered. Or should I?”
“I should like you to feel flattered. And now I’m going to ruin my success by telling you that Mrs. Carstairs, too, wore a linen dress, this morning.” He described it. She listened to this talk about clothes as if it were a serious matter.
“White?” she asked.
“No. Green.”
“Oh yes. That one.”
“Was it originally yours?”
“If it’s the one I think it is, yes.”
“When did you give it to her?”