Taking in the scene, Alleyn turned from the semi-circle of old wall to the hideous façade of the Victorian house. He found himself being stared at by a squarish wooden old lady behind a ground-floor window. A second lady, sandy and middle-aged, stood behind her.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“The Dame,” said Carey. “And Miss Mardian.”
“I suppose I ought to make a polite noise.”
“She’s not,” Carey muttered, “in a wonderful good mood today.”
“Never mind.”
“And Miss Mardian’s — well — er — well, she’s just not right smart, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Like Ernie?”
“No, sir. Not exactly. It may be,” Carey ventured, “on account of in-breeding, which is what’s been going on hot and strong in the Mardian family for a great time. Not that there’s anything like that about the Dame, mind. She’s ninety-four and a proper masterpiece.”
“I’d better try my luck. Here goes.”
He walked past the window, separated from the basilisk glare by two feet of air and a pane of glass. As he mounted the steps between dead braziers half full of wet ash, the door was opened by Dulcie.
Alleyn said, “Miss Mardian? I wonder if I may have two words with Dame Alice Mardian?”
“Oh, dear!” Dulcie said. “I don’t honestly know if you can. I expect I ought to remember who you are, oughtn’t I, but with so many new people in the county these days it’s a bit muddly. Ordinarily I’m sure Aunt Akky would love to see you. She adores visitors. But this morning she’s awfully upset and says she won’t talk to anybody but policemen.”
“I am a policeman.”
“Really? How very peculiar. You are sure,” Dulcie added, “that you are not just pretending to be one in order to find out about the Mardian Morris and all that?”
“Quite sure. Here’s my card.”
“Goodness! Well, I’ll ask Aunt Akky.”
As she forgot to shut the door Alleyn heard the conversation. “It’s a man who says he’s a policeman, Aunt Akky, and here’s his card. He’s a gent.”
“I won’t stomach these filthy ’breviations.”
“Sorry, Aunt Akky.”
“ ’Any case you’re talkin’ rot. Show him in.”
So Alleyn was admitted and found her staring at his card.
“ ’Mornin’ to yer,” said Dame Alice. “Sit down.”
He did so.
“This is a pretty kettle-of-fish,” she said. “Ain’t it?”
“Awful.”
“What are you, may I ask? ’Tective?”
It wouldn’t have surprised him much if she’d asked if he were a Bow Street Runner.
“Yes,” he said. “A plain-clothes detective from Scotland Yard.”
“Superintendent?” she read, squinting at the card.
“That’s it.”
“Ha! Are you goin’ to be quick about this? Catch the feller?”
“I expect we shall.”
“What’d yer want to see me for?”
“To apologize for making a nuisance of myself, to say I hope you’ll put up with us and to ask you, at the most, six questions.”
She looked at him steadily over the top of her glasses.
“Blaze away,” she said at last.
“You sat on the steps there, last night during the performance.”
“Certainly.”
“What step exactly?”
“Top. Why?”
“The top. So you had a pretty good view. Dame Alice, could William Andersen, after the mock killing, have left the courtyard without being seen?”
“No.”
“Not under cover of the last dance of the Five Sons?”
“No.”
“Not if he crawled out?”
“No.”
“As he lay there could he have been struck without your noticing?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Could his body have been brought in and put behind the stone without the manoeuvre attracting your attention?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Dulcie, who hovered uncertainly near the door. “You were with Dame Alice, Miss Mardian. Do you agree with what she says?”
“Oh, yes,” Dulcie said a little vaguely and added, “Rather!” with a misplaced show of enthusiasm.
“Was anyone else with you?”
“Sam,” Dulcie said in a hurry.
“Fat lot of good that is, Dulcie. She means the Rector, Sam Stayne, who’s my great-nephew-in-law. Bit of a milksop.”
“Right. Thank you so much. We’ll bother you as little as possible. It was kind of you to see me.”
Alleyn got up and made her a little bow. She held out her hand. “Hope you find,” she said as he shook it.
Dulcie, astonished, showed him out.
There were three chairs in the hall that looked as if they didn’t belong there. They had rugs safety-pinned over them. Alleyn asked Dulcie if these were the chairs they had sat on and, learning that they were, got her startled permission to take one of them out again.
He put it on the top step, sat in it and surveyed the courtyard. He was conscious that Dame Alice, at the drawing-room window, surveyed him.
From here, he could see over the top of the dolmen to within about two feet of its base and between its standing legs. An upturned box stood on the horizontal stone and three others, which he could just see, on the ground beyond and behind it. The distance from the dolmen to the rear archway in the old semi-circular wall — the archway that had served as an entrance and exit for the performers — was perhaps twenty-five feet. The other openings into the courtyard were provided at the extremities of the old wall by two further archways that joined it to the house. Each of these was about twenty feet distant from the dolmen.
There was, on the air, a tang of dead fire and, through the central archway at the back, Alleyn could see a patch of seared earth, damp now, but bearing the scar of heat.
Fox, who with Carey, Thompson, Bailey and the policeman was looking at the dolmen, glanced up at his chief.
“You have to come early,” he remarked, “to get the good seats.”
Alleyn grinned, replaced his chair in the hall and picked up a crumpled piece of damp paper. It was one of last night’s programmes. He read it through with interest, put it in his pocket and went down into the courtyard.
“It rained in the night, didn’t it, Carey?”
“Mortal hard. Started soon after the fatality. I covered up the stone and the place where he lay, but that was the best we could do.”
“And with a team of morris-men, if that’s what you call them, galumphing like baby elephants over the terrain there wouldn’t be much hope anyway. Let’s have a look, shall we, Obby?”
The sergeant removed the inverted box from the top of the dolmen. Alleyn examined the surface of the stone.
“Visible prints where Ernie stood on it,” he said. “Rubber soles. It had a thin coat of rime, I should think, at the time. Hullo! What’s this, Carey?”
He pointed a long finger at a small darkness in the grain of the stone. “Notice it? What is it?”
Before Carey could answer there was a vigorous tapping on the drawing-room window. Alleyn turned in time to see it being opened by Dulcie evidently under orders from her great-aunt, who, from within, leant forward in her chair, shouted, “If you want to know what that is, it’s blood,” and leant back again.
“How do you know?” Alleyn shouted in return. He had decided that his only hope with Dame Alice was to meet her on her own ground. “What blood?”
“Goose’s. One of mine. Head cut off yesterday afternoon and left on the stone.”
“Good Lord!”
“You may well say so. Guess who did it.”
“Ernie?” Alleyn asked involuntarily.
“How yer know?”
“I guessed. Dame Alice, where’s the body?”
“In the pot.”
“Damn!”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Shut the window, Dulcie.”
Before Dulcie had succeeded in doing so, they heard Dame Alice say, “Ask that man to dinner. He’s got brains.”
“You’ve made a hit, Mr. Alleyn,” said Fox.