“As a matter of fact I do.” Parish raised his arms and then let them fall limply to his sides. “Work!” he said. “Back to the old grind. Ah well!” And he added with an air of martyrdom, “I can go back by train.”
“I’ll drive you into Illington, of course.”
“Thank you, old boy. Yes, I’d better get back to the treadmill.”
“Keep a stiff upper lip, Seb,” said Cubitt with a grin.
The door opened and Alleyn came in. He wore a dinner jacket and stiff shirt. Someone once said of him that he looked like a cross between a grandee and a monk. In evening clothes the grandee predominated. Parish gave him a quick appraising glance, Mr. Nark goggled, and Miss Darragh looked up with a smile. Cubitt rumpled his hair and said: “Hullo! Here comes the county!”
Mr. Legge shrank back into the inglenook. Upon all of them a kind of wariness descended. They seemed to melt away from him and towards each other. Alleyn asked for two glasses of the special sherry and told Abel that he and Fox would be out till latish.
“May we have a key, Mr. Pomeroy?”
“Us’ll leave side-door open,” said Abel. “No need fur key, sir. Be no criminals in this neighbourhood. Leastways—” He stopped short and looked pointedly at Legge.
“That’s splendid,” said Alleyn. “How far is it to Colonel Brammington’s?”
“ ’Bout eight mile, sir. Shankley Court. A great masterpiece of a place, sir, with iron gates and a deer park. Carry on for mile beyond Illington and turn left at The Man of Devon.”
“Right,” said Alleyn. “We needn’t leave for half an hour.”
Cubitt went out.
Alleyn fidgeted with a piece of rag round his left hand. It was clumsily tied and fell away, disclosing a trail of red.
He twitched the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, glanced at it and swore. There was a bright red spot on the handkerchief.
“Blast that cut,” said Alleyn. “Now I’ll have to get a clean one.”
“Hurt hurrself, sir?” asked Abel.
“Tore my hand on a rusty nail in the garage.”
“In the garage!” ejaculated Mr. Nark. “That’s a powerful dangerous place to get a cut finger. Germs galore, I dessay, and as like as not some of the poison fumes still floating about”
“Aye,” said Abel angrily, “that’s right, George Nark. All my premises is still with poison. Wonder ’tis you come anigh ’em. Here, Mr. Alleyn, sir, I’ll get ’ee a dressing fur that-thurr cut.”
“If I could have a bit of rag and a dab of peroxide or something.”
“Doan’t you have anything out of that fatal cupboard,” said Mr. Nark. “Not if you value the purity of your blood stream.”
“You know as well as I do,” said Abel, “that thurr cupboard’s been scrubbed and fumigated. Not that thurr’s anything in it. Thurr b’ain’t. Nicholas Harper made off with my first-aid set, innocent though it wurr.”
“And the iodine bottle,” pointed out Mr. Nark, “so you can’t give the inspector iodine, lethal or otherwise.”
“Thurr’s another first-aid box upstairs,” said Abel. “In bathroom cupboard. Will!” He looked into the public bar. “Will! Get t’other out of bathroom cupboard, my sonny. Look lively.”
“It doesn’t matter, Mr. Pomeroy,” said Alleyn. “Don’t bother. I’ll use this handkerchief.”
“No trouble, sir, and you’ll need a bit of antiseptic in that cut if you took it off a rusty nail. I’m a terror fur iodine, sir. I wurr a surgeon’s orderly in France, Mr. Alleyn, and learned hospital ways. Scientific ideas b’ain’t George Nark’s private property though you might think they wurr.”
Will Pomeroy came downstairs and into the private bar. He put a small first-aid box on the counter and returned to the public bar. Abel opened the box.
“ ’Tis spandy-new,” he said, “I bought it from a traveller only couple of days afore accident. Hullo! Yurr, Will!”
“What’s up?” called Will.
“Iodine bottle’s gone.”
“Eh?”
“Where’s iodine?”
“I dunno. It’s not there!” shouted Will.
“Who’s had it?”
“I dunno. I haven’t.”
“It really doesn’t matter, Mr. Pomeroy,” said Alleyn. “It’s bled itself clean. Perhaps there wasn’t any iodine.”
“Course there wurr,” said Abel. “Yurr’s lil’ bed whurr it lay. Damme, who’s been at it? Mrs. Ives!”
He stumped out and could be heard roaring angrily about the back premises.
Alleyn put a bit of lint over his finger and Miss Darragh stuck it down with strapping. He went upstairs, carrying his own glass of sherry and Fox’s. Fox was standing before the looking-glass in his room, knotting a sober tie. He caught sight of Alleyn in the glass.
“Lucky I brought my blue suit,” said Fox, “and lucky you brought your dress clothes, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Why didn’t you let me tell Colonel Brammington that we’d neither of us change, Foxkin?”
“No, no, sir. It’s the right thing for you to dress, just as much as it’d be silly for me to do so. Well, it’d be an affected kind of way for me to act, Mr. Alleyn. I never get a black coat and boiled shirt on my back except at the Lodge meetings and when I’m on a night-club job. The Colonel would only think I was trying to put myself in a place where I don’t belong. Did you find what you wanted, Mr. Alleyn?”
‘“Abel bought another first-aid set, two days before Watchman died. The iodine has been taken. He can’t find it.”
“Is that so?”
Fox brushed the sleeves of his coat and cast a final searching glance at himself in the glass. “I washed that razor blade,” he said.
“Thank you, Fox. I was a little too free with it. Bled all over Abel’s bar. Most convincing. What’s the time? Half-past seven. A bit early yet. Let’s think this out.”
“Right-o, sir,” said Fox. He lifted his glass of sherry. “Good luck, Mr. Alleyn,” he said.
ii
Decima had promised to come to Coombe Head at eight o’clock. Cubitt lay on the lip of the cliff and stared at the sea beneath him, trying, as Alleyn had tried, to read order and sequence into the hieroglyphics traced by the restless seaweed. The sequence was long and subtle, unpausing, unhurried. Each pattern seemed significant but all melted into fluidity and he decided, as Alleyn had decided, that the forces that governed these beautiful but inane gestures ranged beyond the confines of his imagination. He fell to appraising the colour and the shifting tones of the water, translating these things into terms of paint, and he began to think of how, in the morning, he would make a rapid study from the lip of the cliff.
“But I must fix one pattern only in my memory and watch for it to appear in the sequence, like a measure in some intricate saraband.”
He was so intent on this project that he did not hear Decima come and was startled when she spoke to him.
“Norman?”
Her figure was dark and tall against the sky. He rose and faced her.
“Have you risen from the sea?” he asked. “You are lovely enough.”
She did not answer and he took her hand and led her a little way over the headland to a place where their figures no longer showed against the sky. Here they faced each other again.
“I am so bewildered,” said Decima. “I have tried since this morning to feel all sorts of things. Shame. Compassion for Will. Anxiety. I can feel none of them. I can only wonder why we should so suddenly have fallen in love.”
“It was only sudden for you,” said Cubitt. “Not for me.”
“But — Is that true? How long…?”
“Since last year. Since the first week of last year.”
Decima drew away from him.
“But, didn’t you know? I thought last year that you had guessed.”