“Since the damage has been done,” Alleyn said, “I’m prepared to put a certain amount of the evidence before you.”
“Damn’ big of you, I must say! Though why it should concern Désirée—”
Alleyn said: “Directly or indirectly, you are all concerned.”
He waited for a moment. Nobody said anything and he went on:
“It’s too much to expect that each one of you will answer any questions fully or even truthfully, but it’s my duty to ask you to do so.”
“Why shouldn’t we?” Connie protested. “I don’t see why you’ve got to say a thing like that. Boysie always said that in murder trials the guilty have nothing to fear. He always said that. I mean the innocent,” she added distractedly. “You know what I mean.”
“How right he was. Very well, shall we start with that premise in mind? Now. Yesterday at luncheon, Mr. Cartell told a story about a man who cooked a baptismal register in order to establish blood relationship with a certain family. Those of you who were there may have thought that Mr. Period seemed to be very much put out by this anecdote. Would you agree?”
Connie said bluntly: “I thought P.P.’s behaviour was jolly peculiar. I thought he’d got his knife into Boysie about something.”
Moppett, who seemed to have regained her composure, said: “If you ask me, P.P. was terrified Uncle Hal would tell the whole story. He looked murder at him. Not that I mean anything by that.”
“In any case,” Alleyn continued, “Mr. Period was disturbed by the incident. He wrote a short and rather ambiguous letter to Miss Cartell, suggesting that his ancestry did, in fact, go back as far as anyone who bothered about such things might wish, and asking her to forgive him for pursuing the matter. At the same time he wrote a letter of condolence to Lady Bantling. Unfortunately he transferred the envelopes.”
“How bad is he?” Désirée asked suddenly.
Alleyn told her how bad Mr. Period seemed to be and she said: “We can take him if it’d help.”
Bimbo started to say something and stopped.
“Now this misfortune with the letter,” Alleyn plodded on, “threw him into a fever. On the one hand he had appeared to condole with Miss Cartell for a loss that had not yet been discovered, and, on the other, he had sent Lady Bantling a letter that he would give the world to withdraw, since, once it got into my hands, I might follow it up. As long as this letter remained undisclosed, Mr. Period remained unwilling to make any statement that might lead to an arrest for the murder of Mr. Cartell. He was afraid, first, that he might bring disaster upon an innocent person, and, second, that anything he said might lead to an examination of his own activities and Mr. Cartell’s veiled allusions to them. All this,” he added, “supposes him, for the moment, to be innocent of the murder.”
“Of course he is,” Désirée muttered impatiently. “Good Lord! P.P.!”
“You don’t know,” Bimbo intervened with a sharp look at her. “If he’d go to those lengths, he might go the whole hog.”
“Murder Hal, to save his own face! Honestly, darling!”
“You don’t know,” Bimbo repeated obstinately. “He might.”
“Assume for the moment,” Alleyn said, “that he didn’t, but that he was in possession of evidence that might well throw suspicion on someone else. Assume that his motive in not laying this information was made up of consideration for an old friend and fear of the consequences to himself. He learns that I have been told of yesterday’s luncheon party, and also that 1 have been given the letter that was occasioned by the conversation at the party. It’s more than possible that he heard, on the village grapevine, that I visited Ribblethorpe Church this afternoon. So the gaff, he thinks, is as good as blown. With a certain bit of evidence weighing on his conscience, he sends his man here with a note asking you, Miss Ralston, to visit him. Wanting to keep the encounter private, he suggests a late hour. After a good deal of discussion with Mr. Leiss, no doubt, you decide to fall in with this plan. You do, in fact, cross the Green at about 10:45, and visit Mr. Period in his library.”
“You’re only guessing,” Moppett said. “You don’t know.”
“You enter the library by the French windows. During the interview you smoke. You drop ash on the carpet and grind it in with your heel. You leave two butts of Mainsail cigarettes in the ashtray. Mr. Period tells you he heard someone whistling in the lane very late last night and that he recognized the tune. You and Mr. Leiss knew your way about the garden, I believe. To support this theory, we have the theft of Mr. Period’s cigarette case—”
“I never,” Leonard interrupted, “heard anything so fantastic. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“…Which you, Mr. Leiss, left on the sill, having opened the window with this theft in mind. Subsequently, it may be, the case became too hot and you threw it in the drain, hoping it would be supposed that Mr. Period had lost it there, or that the workmen had stolen and dumped it. Alternatively, you might have dropped it, inadvertently, when you altered the planks in order to bring about Mr. Cartell’s death.”
He waited for a moment. An all-too-familiar look of conceit and insolence appeared in Leonard. He stretched out his legs, leant back in his chair and stared through half-closed eyes at the opposite wall. A shadow trembled on his shirt and he kept his hands in his pockets.
Connie said: “It’s not true: none of it’s true.”
Moppett repeated: “Not true,” in a whisper.
“As to what actually took place at this interview,” Alleyn went on, “Mr. Period will no doubt be willing to talk about it when he recovers. My guess would be that he tackled Miss Ralston pretty firmly, told her what he suspected, and said that if she could give him an adequate explanation he would, for Miss Cartell’s sake, go no further. She may have admitted she was the whistler he heard from his window and said that she had come into his garden on the way home from the party to get water for Mr. Leiss’s car-radiator, which had sprung a leak. I think this explanation is true.”
Moppett cried out: “Of course it’s true. I did. I got the water and I put the bloody can back. I remembered having seen it under the tap.”
“After lunch, when you took Mr. Period’s cigarette case off the sill?”
“Fantastic!” Leonard repeated. “That’s all. Fantastic!”
“Very well,” Alleyn said. “Let it remain in the realms of fantasy.”
“If it’s in order,” Désirée said. “I’d like to ask something.”
“Of course.”
“Are we meant to think that whoever threw the fish laid the trap for Hal?”
“A fish?” Leonard asked with an insufferable air of innocence. “But has anyone said anything about a fish?”
Désirée disregarded him. She said to Alleyn: “I ought to know. I gave it to P.P. yesterday morning. He’s dotty about pikes and this thing looked like one. He put it in the library.…Could I have an answer to my question?”
“I think the murderer and the paperweight thrower are one and the same person.”
“Good,” said Désirée. “That lets us out, Bimbo.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Bimbo said with a short laugh. “Why?”
“Well, because neither of us has the slightest motive for hurling anything at P.P.”
“Isn’t he one of the trustees for Andrew Bantling’s estate?” Leonard asked of nobody in particular.
She turned her head and looked very steadily at him. “Certainly,” she said. “What of it?”
“I was just wondering, Lady Bantling. You might have discussed business with Mr. Period when you called on him this evening?”