“Too bloody rum by half. Come on.”
When they went into the room Troy put her hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone and turned to them. Her face was white.
“Rory,” she said, “it’s Thomas Ancred. He wants to come and see you. He says they’ve all had letters. He says he’s made a discovery. He wants to come. What shall I say?”
“I’ll speak to him,” said Alleyn. “He can see me at the Yard in the morning, damn him.”
CHAPTER X
Bombshell from Thomas
i
Thomas Ancred arrived punctually at nine o’clock, the hour Alleyn had appointed. Fox was present at the interview, which took place in Alleyn’s room.
Troy had the painter’s trick of accurate description, and she had been particularly good on Thomas. Alleyn felt he was already familiar with that crest of fine hair, those eyes wide open and palely astonished, that rather tight, small mouth, and the mild meandering voice.
“Thank you very much,” said Thomas, “for letting me come. I didn’t much want to, of course, but it’s nice of you to have me. It was knowing Mrs. Alleyn that put it into their heads.”
“Whose heads?” asked Alleyn.
“Well, Pauline’s and Dessy’s, principally. Paul and Fenella were quite keen too. I suppose Mrs. Alleyn has told you about my people?”
“I think,” said Alleyn, “that it might be best if we adopt the idea that I know nothing about anybody.”
“Oh, dear!” said Thomas, sighing. “That means a lot of talking, doesn’t it?”
“What about these letters?”
“Yes, to be sure,” said Thomas, beginning to pat himself all over. “The letters. I’ve got them somewhere. Anonymous, you know. Of course I’ve had them before in the theatre from disappointed patrons and angry actresses, but this is different— really. Now, where?” He picked up one corner of his jacket, looked suspiciously at a bulging pocket, and finally pulled out a number of papers, two pencils and a box of matches. Thomas beamed at Alleyn. “And there, after all, they are,” he said. In mild triumph he laid them out on the desk — eight copies of the letter Alleyn had already seen, all printed with the same type of pen on the same type of paper.
“What about the envelopes?” Alleyn asked.
“Oh,” said Thomas, “we didn’t keep them. I wasn’t going to say anything about mine,” Thomas continued after a pause, “and nor were Jenetta and Milly, but of course everybody noticed everybody else had the same sort of letter, and Pauline (my sister, Pauline Kentish) made a great hallabaloo over hers, and there we were, you know.”
“Eight,” said Alleyn. “And there are nine in the party at Ancreton?”
“Sonia didn’t get one, so everybody says she’s the person meant.”
“Do you take that view, Mr. Ancred?”
“Oh, yes,” said Thomas, opening his eyes very wide. “It seems obvious, doesn’t it? With the Will and everything. Sonia’s meant, of course, but for my part,” said Thomas with a diffident cough, “I don’t fancy she murdered Papa.”
He gave Alleyn a rather anxious smile. “It would be such a beastly thing to do, you know,” he said. “Somehow one can’t quite — however. Pauline actually almost leapt at the idea. Dessy, in a way, too. They’re both dreadfully upset. Pauline fainted at the funeral anyway, and then with those letters on top of it all she’s in a great state of emotional upheaval. You can’t imagine what it’s like at Ancreton.”
“It was Mrs. Kentish, wasn’t it, who suggested you should come to the Yard?”
“And Dessy. My unmarried sister, Desdemona. We all opened our letters yesterday morning at breakfast. Can you imagine? I got down first and really — such a shock! I was going to throw it on the fire, but just then Fenella came in, so I folded it up very small under the table. You can see which is mine by the creases. Paul’s is the one that looks as if it had been chewed. He crunched it up, don’t you know, in his agitation. Well, then I noticed that there were the same kind of envelopes in front of everybody’s plate. Sonia has breakfast in her room, but I asked Barker if there were any letters for her. Fenella was by that time looking rather odd, having opened hers. Pauline said: ‘What an extraordinary looking letter I’ve got. Written by a child, I should think,’ and Milly said: ‘Panty again, perhaps,’ and there was a row, because Pauline and Milly don’t see eye to eye over Panty. And then everybody said: ‘I’ve got one too,’ and then you know they opened them. Well, Pauline swooned away, of course, and Dessy said: ‘O, my prophetic soul,’ and began to get very excitable, and Milly said: ‘I think people who write anonymous letters are the end,’ and Jenetta (my sister-in-law), Fenella’s mother (who is married to my brother Claude), said: ‘I agree, Milly.’ Then the next thing was, let me see — the next thing was everybody suspecting everybody else of writing the letter, until Paul got the idea — you must excuse me — that perhaps Mrs. Alleyn being married to—”
Alleyn, catching sight of Fox’s scandalised countenance, didn’t answer, and Thomas, rather pink in the face, hurried on. “Of course,” he said, “the rest of us pooh-poohed the notion; quite howled it down, in fact. ‘The very idea,’ Fenella, for instance, said, ‘of Mrs. Alleyn writing anonymous letters is just so bloody silly that we needn’t discuss it,’ which led directly into another row, because Pauline made the suggestion and Fenella and Paul are engaged against her wish. It ended by my nephew Cedric, who is now the head of the family, saying that he thought the letter sounded like Pauline herself. He mentioned that a favourite phrase of Pauline’s is: ‘I have reason to believe.’ Milly, Cedric’s mother, you know, laughed rather pointedly, so naturally there was another row.”
“Last night,” Alleyn said, “you told me you had made a discovery at Ancreton. What was it?”
“Oh, yes. I was coming to that some time. Now, actually, because it happened after lunch. I really don’t care at all for this part of the story. Indeed, I quite forgot myself, and said I would not go back to Ancreton until I was assured of not having to get involved in any more goings on.”
“I’m afraid—” Alleyn began, but Thomas at once interrupted him. “You don’t follow? Well, of course you wouldn’t, would you, because I haven’t told you? Still, I suppose I’d better.”
Alleyn waited without comment.
“Well,” said Thomas at last. “Here, after all, we go.”
ii
“All yesterday morning,” Thomas said, “after reading the letters, the battle, as you might put it, raged. Nobody really on anybody else’s side except Paul and Fenella and Jenetta wanting to burn the letters and Pauline and Desdemona thinking there was something in it and we ought to keep them. And by lunch-time, you may depend on it, feeling ran very high indeed. And then, you know—”
Here Thomas paused and stared meditatively at a spot on the wall somewhere behind Fox’s head. He had this odd trick of stopping short in his narratives. It was as if a gramophone needle was abruptly and unreasonably lifted from the disc. It was impossible to discover whether Thomas was suddenly bereft of the right word or smitten by the intervention of a new train of thought, or whether he had merely forgotten what he was talking about. Apart from a slight glazing of his eyes, his facial expression remained uncannily fixed.
“And then,” Alleyn prompted after a long pause.
“Because, when you come to think of it,” Thomas’s voice began, “it’s the last thing one expects to find in the cheese-dish. It was New Zealand cheese, of course. Papa was fortunate in his friends.”
“What,” Alleyn asked temperately, “is the last thing, Fox, that one would expect to find in the cheese-dish?”