“Don’t talk like that,” Anelida said desperately. “I love you. It’s my right to share.”
“You’re so young.”
“I’ve got all the sense I’m ever likely to have.”
“Darling!”
“Never mind about me! You needn’t tell me anything you don’t want to. It’s what you’re going to say to them that matters.”
“I will tell you — soon — when I can.”
“If it clears you they won’t make any further to-do about it. That’s all they’ll worry about. Clearing it up. You must tell them what happened. Everything.”
“I can’t.”
“My God, why?”
“Have you any doubts about me? Have you!”
She went to him. “You must know I haven’t.”
“Yes,” he said. “I can see that.”
They stared at each other. He gave an inarticulate cry and suddenly she was in his arms.
Gracefield came through the folding doors from the dining-room.
“Supper is served, sir,” he said.
Alleyn rose from his comfortable seclusion behind the screen, slipped through the door into the hall, shut it soundlessly behind him and went up to their office.
“I’ve been talking,” Mr. Fox remarked, “to a press photographer and the servants.”
“And I,” Alleyn said sourly, “have been eavesdropping on a pair of lovers. How low can you get? Next stop, with Polonius behind the arras in a bedroom.”
“All for their good, I daresay,” Fox observed comfortably.
“There is that. Fox, that blasted playwright is holding out on us. And on his girl for a matter of that. But I’m damned if I like him as a suspect.”
“He seems,” Fox considered, “a very pleasant young fellow.”
“What the devil happened between him and Mary Bellamy when he came back? He won’t tell his girl. He merely says the interview ended in Miss Bellamy laughing. We’ve got the reports from those two intensely prejudiced women, who both agree he looked ghastly. All right. He goes out. There’s this crash Florence talked about. Florence goes down to the half-landing and Ninn hears a spray being used. Templeton comes out from the drawing-room to the foot of the stairs. He calls up to Florence to tell her mistress they’re waiting for her. Florence goes up to the room and finds her mistress in her death throes. Dakers returns two hours after the death, comes up to his room, writes a letter and tries to go away. End of information. Next step: confront him with the letter?”
“Your reconstruction of it?”
“Oh,” Alleyn said. “I fancy I can lay my hands on the original.”
Fox looked at him with placid approval and said nothing.
“What did you get from your press photographer? And which photographer?” Alleyn asked.
“He was hanging about in the street and said he’d something to tell me. Put-up job to get inside, of course, but I thought I’d see what it was. He took a picture of deceased with Mr. Dakers in the background at twenty to eight by the hall clock. He saw them go upstairs together. Gives us an approximate time for the demise, for what it’s worth.”
“About ten minutes later. What did you extract from the servants?”
“Not a great deal. It seems the deceased wasn’t all that popular with the staff, except Florence, who was hers, as the cook put it, body and soul. Gracefield held out on me for a bit, but he’s taken quite a liking to you, sir, and I built on that with good results.”
“What the hell have you been saying?”
“Well, Mr. Alleyn, you know as well as I do what snobs these high-class servants are.”
Alleyn didn’t pursue the subject.
“There was a dust-up,” Fox continued, “this morning with Miss Cavendish and Mr. Saracen. Gracefield happened to overhear it.” He repeated Gracefield’s account, which had been detailed and accurate.
“According to Anelida Lee this row was revived in the conservatory,” Alleyn muttered. “What were they doing here this morning?”
“Mr. Saracen had come to do the flowers, about which Gracefield spoke very sarcastically, and Miss Cavendish had brought the deceased that bottle of scent.”
“What!” Alleyn said. “Not the muck on her dressing-table? Not Formidable? This morning?”
“That’s right.”
Alleyn slapped his hand down on Richard’s desk and got up. “My God, what an ass I’ve been!” he said and then, sharply, “Who opened it?”
“She did. In the dining-room.”
“And used it? Then?”
“Had a bit of a dab, Gracefield said. He happened to be glancing through the serving-hatch at the time.”
“What became of it after that?”
“Florence took charge of it. I’m afraid,” Fox said, “I’m not with you, Mr. Alleyn, in respect of the scent.”
“My dear old boy, think! Think of the bottle.”
“Very big,” Fox said judiciously.
“Exactly. Very big. Well then…?”
“Yes. Ah, yes,” Fox said slowly and then, “Well, I’ll be staggered!”
“And so you jolly well should. This could blow the whole damn case wide open again.”
“Will I fetch them?”
“Do. And call on Florence, wherever she is. Get the whole story, Fox. Tactfully, as usual. Find out when the scent was decanted into the spray and when she used it. Watch the reactions, won’t you? And see if there’s anything in the Plumtree stories: about Richard Dakers’s parentage and Florence being threatened with the sack.”
Fox looked at his watch. “Ten o’clock,” he said. “She may have gone to bed.”
“That’ll be a treat for you. Leave me your notes. Away you go.”
While Fox was on this errand, Alleyn made a plot, according to information, of the whereabouts of Charles Templeton, the four guests, the servants and Richard Dakers up to the time when he himself arrived on the scene. Fox’s spadework had been exhaustive, as usual, and a pretty complicated pattern emerged. Alleyn lifted an eyebrow over the result. How many of them had told the whole truth? Which of them had told a cardinal lie? He put a query against one name and was shaking his head over it when Fox returned.
“Bailey’s finished with them,” Fox said and placed on Richard’s desk the scent-spray, the empty Formidable bottle and the tin of Slay pest.
“What’d he find in the way of dabs?”
“Plenty. All sorts, but none that you wouldn’t expect. He’s identified the deceased’s. Florence says she and Mr. Templeton and Colonel Warrender all handled the exhibit during the day. She says the deceased got the Colonel to operate the spray on her, just before the party. Florence filled it from the bottle.”
“And how much was left in the bottle?”
“She thinks it was about a quarter-full. She was in bed,” Fox added in a melancholy tone.
“That would tally,” Alleyn muttered. “No sign of the bottle being knocked over and spilling, is there?”
“None.”
Alleyn began to tap the Slaypest tin with his pencil. “About half-full. Anyone know when it was first used?”
“Florence reckons, a week ago. Mr. Templeton didn’t like her using it and tried to get Florence to make away with it.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“No chance according to her. She went into a great taking-on and asked me if I was accusing her of murder.”
“Did she get the sack, this morning?”
“When I asked her she went up like a rocket bomb, the story being that Mrs. Plumtree has taken against her and let out something that was told in confidence.”
Alleyn put his head in his hands. “Oh Lord!” he said.
“You meet that kind of thing,” Mr. Fox observed, “in middle-age ladies. Florence says that when Miss Bellamy or Mr. Templeton was out of humour, she would make out she was going to sack Florence, but there was nothing in it. She says she only told Mrs. Plumtree as a joke. I kind of nudged in a remark about Mr. Dakers’s parentage, but she wasn’t having any of that. She turned around and accused me of having a dirty mind and in the next breath had another go at Mrs. Plumtree. All the same,” Mr. Fox added primly, “I reckon there’s something in it. I reckon so from her manner. She appears to be very jealous of anybody who was near the deceased and that takes in Mr. Templeton, Mr. Dakers, Mrs. Plumtree and the Colonel.”