“And did you do anything else while you were there?”
There was no answer. Alleyn said, “You wrote a letter, didn’t you?”
Richard stared at him with a sort of horror. “How do you — why should you…?” He made a small desperate gesture and petered out.
“To whom?”
“It was private. I prefer not to say.”
“Where is it now? You’ve had no opportunity to post it.”
“I — haven’t got it.”
“What have you done with it?”
“I got rid of it.” Richard raised his voice. “I hope it’s destroyed. It had nothing whatever to do with all this. I’ve told you it was private.”
“If that’s true I can promise you it will remain so. Will you tell me — in private — what it was about?”
Richard looked at him, hesitated, and then said, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Alleyn drew a folded paper from his pocket. “Will you read this, if you please? Perhaps you would rather take it to the light.”
“I can… All right,” Richard said. He took the paper, left the table and moved over to a wall lamp. The paper rustled as he opened it. He glanced at it, crushed it in his hand, strode to the far end of the table and flung it down in front of Warrender.
“Did you have to do this?” he said. “My God, what sort of a man are you!” He went back to his place beside Anelida.
Warrender, opening and closing his hands, sheet-white and speaking in an unrecognizable voice, said, “I don’t understand. I’ve done nothing. What do you mean?”
His hand moved shakily towards the inside pocket of his coat. “No! It’s not… It can’t be.”
“Colonel Warrender,” Alleyn said to Richard, “has not shown me the letter. I came by its content in an entirely different way. The thing I have shown you is a transcription. The original, I imagine, is still in his pocket.”
Warrender and Richard wouldn’t look at each other. Warrender said, “Then how the hell…” and stopped.
“Evidently,” Alleyn said, “the transcription is near enough to the original. I don’t propose at the moment to make it generally known. I will only put it to you that when you, Mr. Dakers, returned the second time, you went to your study, wrote the original of this letter and subsequently, when you were lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, passed it to Colonel Warrender, saying, for my benefit, that you had forgotten to post it for him. Do you agree?”
“Yes.”
“I suggest that it refers to whatever passed between you and Mrs. Templeton when you were alone with her in her room a few minutes before she died and that you wished to make Colonel Warrender read it. I’m still ready to listen to any statement you may care to make to me in private.”
To Anelida the silence seemed interminable.
“Very well,” Alleyn said. “We shall have to leave it for the time being.”
None of them looked at Richard. Anelida suddenly and horribly remembered something she had once heard Alleyn tell her uncle. “You always know, in a capital charge, if the jury are going to bring in a verdict of guilty: they never look at the accused when they come back.” With a sense of doing something momentous she turned, looked Richard full in the face and found she could smile at him.
“It’ll be all right,” he said gently.
“All right!” Florence said bitterly. “It doesn’t strike me as being all right, and I wonder you’ve the nerve to say so!”
As if Florence had put a match to her, Old Ninn exploded into fury. “You’re a bad girl, Floy,” she said, trembling very much and leaning across the table. “Riddled through and through with wickedness and jealousy and always have been.”
“Thank you very much, I’m sure, Mrs. Plumtree,” Florence countered with a shrill outbreak of laughter. “Everyone knows where your favour lies, Mrs. Plumtree, especially when you’ve had a drop of port wine. You wouldn’t stop short of murder to back it up.”
“Ninn,” Richard said, before she could speak, “for the love of Mike, darling, shut up.”
She reached out her small knotted hands to Charles Templeton. “You speak for him, sir. Speak for him.”
Charles said gently, “You’re making too much of this, Ninn. There’s no need.”
“There shouldn’t be the need!” she cried. “And she knows it as well as I do.” She appealed to Alleyn. “I’ve told you. I’ve told you. After Mr. Richard came out I heard her. That wicked woman, there, knows as well as I do.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the spray-gun. “We heard her using that thing after everyone had warned her against it.”
“How do you know it was the spray-gun, Ninn?”
“What else could it have been?”
Alleyn said, “It might have been her scent, you know.”
“If it was! If it was, that makes no difference.”
“I’m afraid it would,” Alleyn said. “If the scent-spray had been filled up with Slaypest.”
Chapter seven
Re-entry of Mr. Marchant
The scent-spray, the bottle and the Slaypest tin had assumed star-quality. There they stood in a neat row, three inarticulate objects, thrust into the spotlight. They might have been so many stagehands, yanked out of their anonymity and required to give an account of themselves before an unresponsive audience. They met with a frozen reception.
Timon Gantry was the first to speak. “Have you,” he asked, “any argument to support your extraordinary assumption?”
“I have,” Alleyn rejoined, “but I don’t propose to advance it in detail. You might call it a reductio ad absurdum. Nothing else fits. One hopes,” he added, “that a chemical analysis of the scent-spray will do something to support it. The supposition is based on a notion that while Mrs. Templeton had very little reason, after what seems to have been a stormy interview, to deluge her plants and herself with insecticide, she may more reasonably be pictured as taking up her scent-spray, and using that.”
“Not full on her face,” Bertie said unexpectedly. “She’d never use it on her face. Not directly. Not after she was made-up. Would she, Pinky? Pinky — would she?”
But Pinky was not listening to him. She was watching Alleyn.
“Well, anyway,” Bertie said crossly. “She wouldn’t.”
“Oh yes she would, Mr. Saracen,” Florence said tartly. “And did. Quite regular. Standing far enough off to get the fine spray only, which was what she done, as the Colonel and Mr. Templeton will bear me out, this afternoon.”
“The point,” Alleyn said, “is well taken, but it doesn’t, I think, affect the argument. Shall we leave it for the time being? I’m following, by the way, a very unorthodox line over this inquiry and I see no reason for not telling you why. Severally, I believe you will all go on withholding information that may be crucial. Together I have hopes that you may find these tactics impracticable.” And while they still gaped at him he added, “I may be wrong about this, of course, but it does seem to me that each of you, with one exception, is most mistakenly concealing something. I say mistakenly because I don’t for a moment believe that there has been any collusion in this business. I believe that one of you, under pressure of an extraordinary emotional upheaval, has acted in a solitary and an extraordinary way. It’s my duty to find out who this person is. So let’s press on, shall we?” He looked at Charles. “There’s a dictionary of poisons in Mr. Dakers’s former study. I believe it belongs to you, sir.”
Charles lifted a hand, saw that it trembled, and lowered it again. “Yes,” he said. “I bought it a week ago. I wanted to look up plant sprays.”
“Oh my goodness me!” Bertie ejaculated and stared at him. There was a general shocked silence.