“Assault on Mr. Mandrake?”
“Well,” said Alleyn, “we might do that. I suppose I haven’t gone wrong anywhere. The thing’s so blasted obvious I keep wondering if there’s a catch in it. We’ll have to experiment, of course, with the business next door. Might do that now, if Bailey’s finished. They’ve taken that poor chap out, haven’t they? All right. Come on, Foxkin.”
They went into the smoking-room. Bailey, a taciturn officer with an air of permanent resentment, was packing away his finger-print apparatus, and Thompson had taken down his camera.
“Finished?” asked Alleyn. “Got a shot of the ash in the grate all right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Thompson. “Made a little find there, Mr. Alleyn. Bailey spotted it. You know this trace in the ash, the sort of coil affair?”
“Yes.”
“Well, sir, it’s what you said all right. String or cord or something. There’s a bit not quite burnt out up at the back. Charred-like but still a bit of substance in it. Seems as if it was green originally.”
“We’ll have it,” said Alleyn. “Good work, Bailey. I missed that.”
The mulish expression on Sergeant Bailey’s face deepened.
“We had a five-hundred-watt lamp on it,” he said. “Looks as if someone’d chucked this string on the fire and pulled those two side logs over it. They must have fallen apart and the stuff smouldered out slowly. Tough, fine-fibred stuff, I’d say. Might be silk. It finishes with a trace of structureless fairly tough black ash that has kept its form and run into lumps. What’s the next job, sir?”
“Well have to get their prints. I don’t for a moment suppose they’ll object. I warned Mr. Royal about it. Thank the Lord I shan’t have to use any of the funny things they brought me from the chemist. Anything to report?”
“There’s a couple of nice ones on that brass image affair, sir. Latent, but came up nicely under the dust. Same as the ones on the stone cosh. There’s something on the neck of the cosh, but badly blurred. As good a set as you’d want on the blade.”
“What about the wireless?”
“Regular mix-up, Mr. Alleyn, like you’d expect. But there’s a kind of smudge on the volume control.” Bailey looked at his boots. “Might be gloves,” he muttered.
“Very easily,” said Alleyn. “Now, look here: Mr. Fox and I are going to make an experiment. I’ll get you two to stay in here and look on. If it’s a success, I think we might stage a little show for a select audience.” He squatted down and laid his piece of fishing-line out on the floor. “You might just lock the door,” he said.
“This is a big house,” said Chloris, “and yet there seems nowhere to go. I’ve no stomach for the party in the drawing-room.”
“There’s the ‘boudoir,’ ” Mandrake suggested.
“Aren’t the police overflowing into that?”
“Not now. Alleyn and that vast red man went down to the pond a few minutes ago. Now they’ve gone back into the smoking-room. Let’s try the ‘boudoir.’ ”
“All right, let’s.”
They went into the “boudoir.” The curtains were closed and the lamps alight. A cheerful fire crackled in the grate.
Chloris moved restlessly about the room and Mandrake intercepted a quick glance at the door into the smoking-room. “It’s all right,” she said. “William’s gone, you know, and the police seem to have moved into the library.” There was a sudden blare of radio on the other side of the door, and both Mandrake and Chloris jumped nervously. Chloris gave a little cry. “They’re in there,” she whispered. “What are they doing?”
“I’ll damn’ well see!”
“No, don’t,” cried Chloris, as Mandrake stooped to the communicating door and applied his eye to the keyhole.
“It’s not very helpful,” he murmured. “The key’s in the lock. What can they be doing? God, the noise! Wait a minute.”
“Oh, do come away.”
“I’m quite shameless. I consider they are fair game. One can see a little past the key, but only in a straight line. Keyhole lurking is not what it’s said to be in eighteenth-century literature. Hardly worth doing, in fact. I can see nothing but that red screen in front of the door into the library. There’s no one—” He broke off suddenly.
“What is it?” Chloris said and he held up his hand warningly. The wireless was switched off. Mandrake got up and drew Chloris to the far end of the “boudoir.”
“It’s very curious,” he said. “There are only four of them. I know that, because I saw the others come. There’s Alleyn and the red man and two others. Well, they’ve all just walked out of the library into the smoking-room. Who the devil turned on the radio?”
“They must have gone into the library after they turned it on.”
“But they didn’t. They hadn’t time. The moment that noise started, I looked through the keyhole and I looked straight at the door. Why should they turn on the wireless and make a blackguard rush into the library?”
“It’s horrible. It sounded so like…”
“It’s rather intriguing, though,” said Mandrake.
“How you can!”
He went quickly to her and took her hands. “Darling Chloris,” he said, “it wouldn’t be much use if I pretended I wasn’t interested, would it? You’ll have to get used to my common ways, because I think I might want to marry you. I’m going to alter my name by deed poll, so you wouldn’t have to be Mrs. Stanley Footling. And if you think Mrs. Aubrey Mandrake is too arty, we could find something else. I can’t conceive why people are so dull about their names. I don’t suppose deed polls are very expensive. One could have a new name quite often, I daresay. My dear darling,” Mandrake continued, “you’re all white and trembly and I really and truly believe I love you. Could you possibly love me, or shan’t we mention it just now?”
“We shan’t mention it just now,” said Chloris. “I don’t know why, but I’m frightened. I want to be at home, going to my W.R.E.N. classes, and taking dogs for walks. I’m sick of horrors.”
“But you won’t mix me up with horrors when you get back to your lusty girl-friends, will you? You won’t say: ‘There was a killing highbrow cripple who made a pass at me during the murder’?”
“No. Honestly, I won’t. I’ll ask you to come and stay and we might even have a gossip about the dear old days at Highfold. But at the moment I want my mother,” said Chloris, and her lower lip trembled.
“Well, I expect you’ll be able to go quite soon. I fancy the police have finished with you and me.”
There was a tap on the door and Detective-Sergeant Bailey came in.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said sombrely. “Chief-Inspector Alleyn’s compliments, and he’d be obliged if you’d let me take your finger-prints. Yours and the young lady’s. Just a matter of routine, sir.”
“Oh,” said Chloris under her breath, “that’s what they always say to reassure murderers.”
“I beg pardon, Miss?”
“We should be delighted.”
“Much obliged,” said Bailey gloomily, and laid his case down on a small table. Mandrake and Chloris stood side by side in awkward silence while Bailey set out on the table a glass plate, two sheets of paper, some cotton wool, a rubber roller, a fat tube, and a small bottle which, when he uncorked it, let loose a strong smell of ether.
“Are we to be anaesthetized?” asked Mandrake with nervous facetiousness. Bailey gave him a not very complimentary stare. He squeezed some black substance from the tube onto the plate, and rolled it out into a thin film.
“I’ll just clean your fingers with a drop of ether, if you please,” he said.
“Our hands are quite clean,” cried Mandrake.
“Not chemically,” Bailey corrected. “There’ll be a good deal of perspiration, I daresay. There usually is. Now, sir. Now, Miss.”