“This morning.”
“Did you visit it between then and the final time when you returned from the Pegasus and this disturbing scene took place?”
“I’ve told you. How could I? I…” His voice changed. “I was with Anelida until she left and I followed her into the Pegasus.”
“Well,” Alleyn said after a pause, “if all this is provable, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be, you’re in the clear.”
Warrender gave a sharp outcry and turned quickly, but Richard said flatly, “I don’t understand.”
“If our reading of the facts is the true one, this crime was to all intents and purposes committed between the time (somewhere about six o’clock) when Mrs. Templeton was sprayed with scent by Colonel Warrender and the time fixed by a press photographer at twenty-five minutes to eight, when she returned to her room with you. She never left her room and died in it a few minutes after you had gone.”
Richard flinched at the last phrase but seemed to have paid little attention to the earlier part. For the first time, he was looking at his father, who had turned his back to them.
“Colonel Warrender,” Alleyn said, “why did you go to the Pegasus?”
Without moving he said, “Does it matter? I wanted to get things straight. With the gel.”
“But you didn’t see her?”
“No.”
“Maurice,” Richard said abruptly.
Colonel Warrender faced him.
“I call you that still,” Richard went on. “I suppose it’s not becoming, but I can’t manage anything else. There are all sorts of adjustments to be arranged, aren’t there? I know I’m not making this easy for either of us. You see one doesn’t know how one’s meant to behave. But I hope in time to do better: you’ll have to give me time.”
“I’ll do that,” Warrender said unevenly.
He made a slight movement as if to hold out his hand, glanced at Alleyn and withdrew it.
“I think,” Alleyn said, “that I should get on with my job. I’ll let you knew when we need you.”
And he went out, leaving them helplessly together.
In the hall he encountered Fox.
“Peculiar party in there,” he said. “Boy meets father. Both heavily embarrassed. They manage these things better in France. What goes on at your end of the table?”
“I came out to tell you, sir. Mr. Templeton’s come over very poorly again, and Dr. Harkness thinks he’s had about as much as he can take. He’s lying down in the drawing-room, but as soon as he can manage it the doctor wants to get him into bed. The idea is to make one up in his study and save the stairs. I thought the best thing would be to let those two — Florence and Mrs. Plumtree — fix it up. The doctor’ll help him when the time comes.”
“Yes. All right. What a hell of a party this is, by and large. All right. But they’ll have to bung the mixed-up playwright and his custom-built poppa out of it. Where? Into mama-deceased’s boudoir, I suppose. Or they can rejoin that goon-show round the dining-room table. I don’t know. Nobody tells me a thing. What else?”
“None of them will own up to knowing anything about the Parma violets. They all say she had no time for violets.”
“Blast and stink! Then who the devil put them on her dressing-table? The caterer in a fit of frustrated passion? Why the devil should we be stuck with a bunch of Parma violets wilting on our plates.”
Like Scheherazade, Fox discreetly fell silent.
“Pardon me, sir, but did I hear you mention violets?”
It was Gracefield, wan in the countenance, who had emerged from the far end of the hall.
“You did indeed,” Alleyn said warmly.
“If it is of any assistance, sir, a bunch of violets was brought in immediately prior to the reception. I admitted the gentleman myself, sir, and he subsequently presented them to madam on the first floor landing.”
“You took his name, I hope, Gracefield?”
“Quite so, sir. It was the elderly gentleman from the bookshop. The name is Octavius Browne.”
“And what the merry hell,” Alleyn ejaculated when Gracefield had withdrawn, “did Octavius think he was up to, prancing about with violets at that hour of the day? Damnation, I’ll have to find out, and Marchant’s due any minute. Come on.”
They went out at the front door. Light still glowed behind the curtains at the Pegasus.
“You hold the fort here, Fox, for five minutes. Let them get Templeton settled down in the study, and if Marchant turns up, keep him till I’m back. Don’t put him in with that horde of extroverts in the dining-room. Save him up. What a go!”
He rang the bell and Octavius opened the door.
“You again!” he said. “How late! I thought you were Anelida.”
“Well, I’m not and I’m sorry it’s late, but you’ll have to let me in.”
“Very well,” Octavius said, standing aside. “What’s up, now?”
“Why,” Alleyn asked, as soon as the door was shut, “did you take violets to Mrs. Templeton?”
Octavius blushed. “A man with a handcart,” he said, “went past the window. They came from the Channel Islands.”
“I don’t give a damn where they came from. It’s where they went to that matters. When did the cart go past?”
Octavius, disconcerted and rather huffy, was bustled into telling his story. Anelida had sent him downstairs while she got ready for the party. He was fretful because they’d been asked for half-past six and it was now twenty-five to seven and he didn’t believe her story of the need to arrive late. He saw the handcart with the Parma violets and remembered that in his youth these flowers had been considered appropriate adjuncts to ladies of the theatre. So he went out and bought some. He then, Alleyn gathered, felt shy about presenting them in front of Anelida. The door of Miss Bellamy’s house was open. The butler was discernible in the hall. Octavius mounted the steps. “After all,” he said, “one preferred to give her the opportunity of attaching them in advance if she chose to do so.”
He was in the act of handing them over to Gracefield when he heard a commotion on the first landing and a moment later Miss Bellamy shouted out at the top of her voice. “Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.”
For a moment Octavius was extremely flustered, imagining that he himself was thus addressed, but the next second she appeared above him on the stairs. She stopped short and gazed down at him in astonishment. “A vision,” Octavius said. “Rose-coloured or more accurately, geranium, but with the air, I must confess, of a Fury.”
This impression, however, was almost at once dissipated. Miss Bellamy seemed to hesitate, Gracefield murmured an explanation which Octavius himself elaborated. “And then, you know,” he said, “suddenly she was all graciousness. Overwhelmingly so. She”—he blushed again—“asked me to come up and I went. I presented my little votive offering. And then, in point of fact, she invited me into her room: a pleasing and Gallic informality. I was not unmoved by it. She laid the flowers on her dressing-table and told me she had just given an old bore the sack. Those were her words. I gathered that it was somebody who had been in her service for a long period. What did you say?”
“Nothing, Go on. You interest me strangely.”
“Do I? Well. At that juncture there were sounds of voices downstairs — the door, naturally, remained open — and she said, ‘Wait a moment, will you?’ And left me.”
“Well?” Alleyn said after a pause.
“Well, I did wait. Nothing happened. I bethought me of Nelly, who would surely be ready by now. Rightly or wrongly,” Octavius said, with a sidelong look at Alleyn, “I felt that Nelly would be not entirely in sympathy with my impulsive little sortie and I was therefore concerned to return before I could be missed. So I went downstairs and there she was, speaking to Colonel Warrender in the drawing-room. They paid no attention to me. I don’t think they saw me. Warrender, I thought, looked very much put out. There seemed nothing to do but go away. So I went. A curious and not unintriguing experience.”