“And what,” Alleyn asked, “have you got to say to that, Mr. Marchant?”
An uneven flush mounted over Marchant’s cheekbones. “Simply,” he said, “that I think everybody has, most understandably, become overwrought by this tragedy and that, as a consequence, a great deal of nonsense is being bandied about on all hands. And, as an afterthought, that I agree with Timon Gantry. I prefer to take no further part in this discussion until I have consulted my solicitor.”
“By all means,” Alleyn said. “Will you ring him up? The telephone is over there in the corner.”
Marchant leant a little further back in his chair. “I’m afraid that’s quite out of the question,” he said. “He lives in Buckinghamshire. I can’t possibly call him up at this time of night.”
“In that case you will give me your own address, if you please, and I shan’t detain you any longer.”
“My address is in the telephone book and I can assure you that you are not detaining me now nor are you likely to do so in the future.” He half-closed his eyes. “I resent,” he said, “the tone of this interview, but I prefer to keep observation — if that is the accepted police jargon — upon its sequel. I’ll leave when it suits me to do so.”
“You can’t,” Colonel Warrender suddenly announced in a parade-ground voice, “take that tone with the police, sir.”
“Can’t I?” Marchant murmured. “I promise you, my dear Colonel, I can take whatever tone I bloody well choose with whoever I bloody well like.”
Into the dead silence that followed this announcement, there intruded a distant but reminiscent commotion. A door slammed and somebody came running up the hall.
“My God, what now!” Bertie Saracen cried out. With the exception of Marchant and Dr. Harkness they were all on their feet when Florence, grotesque in tin curling pins, burst into the room.
In an appalling parody of her fatal entrance she stood there, mouthing at them.
Alleyn strode over to her and took her by the wrist. “What is it?” he said. “Speak up.”
And Florence, as if in moments of catastrophe she was in command of only one phrase, gabbled, “The doctor! Quick! For Christ’s sake! Is the doctor in the house!”
Chapter eight
Pattern Completed
Charles Templeton lay face down, as if he had fallen forward, with his head toward the foot of the bed that had been made up for him in the study. One arm hung to the floor, the other was outstretched beyond the end of the bed. The back of his neck was empurpled under its margin of thin white hair. His pyjama jacket was dragged up, revealing an expanse of torso — old, white and flaccid. When Alleyn raised him and held him in a sitting position, his head lolled sideways, his mouth and eyes opened and a flutter of sound wavered in his throat. Dr. Harkness leant over him, pinching up the skin of his forearm to admit the needle. Fox hovered nearby. Florence, her knuckles clenched between her teeth, stood just inside the door. Charles seemed to be unaware of these four onlookers; his gaze wandered past them, fixed itself in terror on the fifth; the short person who stood pressed back against the wall in shadow at the end of the room.
The sound in his throat was shaped with great difficulty into one word. “No!” it whispered. “No! No!”
Dr. Harkness withdrew the needle.
“What is it?” Alleyn said. “What do you want to tell us?”
The eyes did not blink or change their direction, but after a second or two they lost focus, glazed, and remained fixed. The jaw dropped, the body quivered and sank.
Dr. Harkness leant over it for some time and then drew back.
“Gone,” he said.
Alleyn laid his burden down and covered it.
In a voice that they had not heard from him before. Dr. Harkness said, “He was all right ten minutes ago. Settled. Quiet. Something’s gone wrong here and I’ve got to hear what it was.” He turned on Florence. “Well?”
Florence, with an air that was half combative, half frightened, moved forward, keeping her eyes on Alleyn.
“Yes,” Alleyn said, answering her look, “we must hear from you. You raised the alarm. What happened?”
“That’s what I’d like to know!” she said at once. “I did the right thing, didn’t I? I called the doctor. Now!”
“You’ll do the right thing again, if you please, by telling me what happened before you called him.”
She darted a glance at the small motionless figure in shadow at the end of the room and wetted her lips.
“Come on, now,” Fox said. “Speak up.”
Standing where she was, a serio-comic figure under her, panoply of tin hair curlers, she did tell her story.
After Dr. Harkness had given his order, she and — again that sidelong glance — she and Mrs. Plumtree had made up the bed in the study. Dr. Harkness had helped Mr. Templeton undress and had seen him into bed and they had all waited until he was settled down, comfortably. Dr. Harkness had left after giving orders that he was to be called if wanted. Florence had then gone to the pantry to fill a second hot-water bottle. This had taken some time as she had been obliged to boil a kettle. When she returned to the hall she had heard voices raised in the study. It seemed that she had paused outside the door. Alleyn had a picture of her, a hot-water bottle under her arm, listening avidly. She had heard Mrs. Plumtree’s voice but had been unable to distinguish any words. Then, she said, she had heard Mr. Templeton cry “No!” three times, just as he did before he died, only much louder; as if, Florence said, he was frightened. After that there had been a clatter and Mrs. Plumtree had suddenly become audible. She had shouted, Florence reported, at the top of her voice, “I’ll put a stop to it,” Mr. Templeton had given a loud cry and Florence had burst into the room.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “And what did you find?”
A scene, it appeared, of melodrama. Mrs. Plumtree with the poker grasped and upraised, Mr. Templeton sprawled along the bed, facing her.
“And when they seen me,” Florence said, “she dropped the poker in the hearth and he gasped ‘Florrie, don’t let ’er’ and then he took a turn for the worse and I see he was very bad. So I said, ‘Don’t you touch ’im. Don’t you dare,’ and I fetched the doctor like you say. And God’s my witness,” Florence concluded, “if she isn’t the cause of his death! As good as if she’d struck him down, ill and all as he was, and which she’d of done if I hadn’t come in when I did and which she’d do to me now if it wasn’t for you gentlemen.”
She stopped breathless. There was a considerable pause. “Well!” she demanded. “Don’t you believe it? All right, then. Ask her. Go on. Ask her!”
“Everything in its turn,” Alleyn said. “That will do from you for the moment. Stay where you are.” He turned to the short motionless figure in the shadows. “Come along,” he said. “You can’t avoid it, you know. Come along.”
She moved out into the light. Her small nose and the areas over her cheekbones were still patched with red, but otherwise her face was a dreadful colour. She said, automatically, it seemed, “You’re a wicked girl, Floy.”
“Never mind about that,” Alleyn said. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”
She looked steadily up into his face. Her mouth was shut like a trap, but her eyes were terrified.
“Look here, Ninn,” Dr. Harkness began very loudly. Alleyn raised a finger and he stopped short.
“Has Florence,” Alleyn asked, “spoken the truth? I mean as to facts. As to what she saw and heard when she came back to this room?”