“What makes you think so?”
“Peregrine Jay recognized his signature on the menu you destroyed in his presence.”
“Mr. Jay was not himself that morning.”
“Do you mean, sir, that he made a mistake and Knight was not a guest in the Kalliope?”
After a long pause Mr. Gonducis said: “He was a guest. He behaved badly. He took offense at an imagined slight. He left the yacht, at my suggestion, at Villefranche.”
“And so escaped the disaster?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Conducis had seated himself again: this time in an upright chair. He sat rigidly erect, but as if conscious of this, crossed his legs and put his hands in his trouser pockets. Alleyn stood a short distance from him.
“I am going to ask you,” he said, “to talk about something that may be painful to you. I want you to tell me about the night of the fancy-dress dinner party on board the Kalliope.”
Alleyn had seen people sit with the particular kind of stillness that now invested Mr. Conducis. They sat like that in the cells underneath the dock while they waited for the jury to come back. In the days of capital punishment, he had been told by a warder that they sat like that while they waited to hear if they were reprieved. He could see a very slight rhythmic movement of the crimson silk handkerchief and he could hear, ever so faintly, the breathing of Mr. Conducis.
“It was six years ago, wasn’t it?” Alleyn said. “And the dinner party took place on the night of the disaster?”
Mr. Conducis’s eyes closed in a momentary assent but he did not speak.
“Was Mrs. Constantin Guzmann one of your guests in the yacht?”
“Yes,” he said indifferently.
“You told Mr. Jay, I believe, that you bought the Shakespeare relics six years ago?”
“That is so.”
“Had you this treasure on board the yacht?”
“Why should you think so?”
“Because Jay found under the glove the menu for a dinner in the Kalliope—he thinks it was headed ‘Villefranche.’ Which you burnt in the fireplace over there.”
“The menu must have been dropped in the desk. It was an unpleasant reminder of a painful event”
“So the desk and its contents were in the yacht?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask why, sir?”
Mr. Conduds’s lips moved, were compressed and moved again. “I bought them,” he said, “from—” he gave a grotesque little cough—“ from a person in the yacht.”
“Who was this person, if you please?”
“I have forgotten.”
“Forgotten?”
“The name.”
“Was it Knight?”
“No.”
“There are maritime records. We shall be able to trace it. Will you go on, please?”
“He was a member of the ship’s complement. He asked to see me and showed me the desk which he said he wanted to sell. I understand that it had been given him by the proprietress of a lodging-house. I thought the contents were almost certainly worthless but I gave him what he asked for them.”
“Which was—?”
“Thirty pounds.”
“What became of this man?”
“Drowned,” said a voice from somewhere inside Mr. Conducis.
“How did it come about that the desk and its contents were saved?”
“I cannot conjecture by what fantastic process of thought you imagine any of this relates to your inquiry.”
“I hope to show that it does. I believe it does.”
“I had the desk on deck. I had shown the contents, as a matter of curiosity, to some of my guests.”
“Did Mrs. Guzmann see it, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“Was she interested?”
A look which Alleyn afterwards described as being profoundly professional drifted into Mr. Conducis’s face.
He said, “She is a collector.”
“Did she make an offer?”
“She did. I was not inclined to sell.”
Alleyn was visited by a strange notion.
“Tell me,” he said, “were you both in fancy dress?”
Mr. Conducis looked at him with an air of wondering contempt. “Mrs. Guzmann,” he said, “was in costume: Andalusian, I understand. I wore a domino over evening dress.”
“Gloved, either of you?”
“No!” he said loudly and added: “We had been playing bridge.”
“Were any of the others gloved?”
“A ridiculous question. Some may have been.”
“Were the ship’s company in fancy dress?”
“Certainly not!”
“The stewards?”
“As eighteenth-century flunkeys.”
“Gloved?”
“I do not remember.”
“Why do you dislike pale gloves, Mr. Conducis?”
“I have no idea,” he said breathlessly, “what you mean.”
“You told Peregrine Jay that you dislike them.”
“A personal prejudice. I cannot account for it.”
“Were there gloved hands that disturbed you on the night of the disaster? Mr. Conducis, are you ill?”
“I—no. No, I am well. You insist on questioning me about an episode which distressed me, which was painful, tragic, an outrage to one’s sensibilities.”
“I would avoid it if I could. I’m afraid I must go further. Will you tell me exactly what happened at the moment of disaster: to you, I mean, and to whoever was near you then or later?”
For a moment Alleyn thought he was going to refuse. He wondered if there would be a sudden outbreak or whether Mr. Conducis would merely walk out of the room and leave them to take what action they chose. He did none of these things. He embarked upon a toneless, rapid recital of facts. Of the fact of fog, the sudden looming of the tanker, the splitting apart of the Kalliope. Of the fact of fire breaking out
Of oil on the water and of how he found himself looking down on the wooden raft from the swimming pool and of how the deck turned into a precipice and he slid from it and landed on the raft
“Still with the little desk?”
Yes. Clutched under his left arm, it seemed, but with no consciousness of this. He had lain across the raft with the desk underneath him. It had bruised him very badly. He gripped a rope loop at the side with his right hand. Mrs. Guzmann had appeared beside the raft and was clinging to one of the loops. Alleyn had a mental picture of an enormous nose, an open mouth, a mantilla plastered over a big head and a floundering mass of wet black lace and white flesh.
The recital stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
“That is all. We were picked up by the tanker.”
“Were there other people on the raft?”
“I believe so. My memory is not clear. I lost consciousness.”
“Men? Mrs. Guzmann?”
“I believe so. I was told so.”
“Pretty hazardous, I should have thought. It wouldn’t accommodate more than—how many?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Mr. Conducis, when you saw Peregrine Jay’s gloved hands clinging to the edge of that hole in the stage at the Dolphin and heard him call out that he would drown if you didn’t save him—were you reminded—”
Mr. Conducis had risen and now began to move backwards, like an image in slow motion, towards the bureau. Fox rose, too, and shifted in front of it. Mr. Conducis drew his crimson silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressed it against his mouth, and above it his upper lip glistened. His brows were defined by beaded margins and the dark skin of his face was stretched too tight and had blanched over the bones.
“Be quiet,” he said. “No. Be quiet.”
Somebody had come into the house. A distant voice spoke loudly but indistinguishably.
The door opened and the visitor came in.
Mr. Conducis screamed: “You’ve told them. You’ve betrayed me. I wish to Christ I’d killed you.”
Fox took him from behind. Almost at once he stopped struggling.
Trevor could be, as Alleyn put it, bent at the waist. He had been so bent and was propped up in a sitting position in his private room. A bed-tray on legs was arranged across his stomach, ready for any offerings that might be forthcoming. His condition had markedly improved since Alleyn’s visit of the day before, and he was inclined, though still feebly, to throw his weight about