“Wouldn’t it be noticed, if he was out of his own room all that time?”
“My dear old man, if you knew Pym’s! Everybody is always out of his room; if he isn’t chatting with the copy-department, or fooling round the typists, he’s in the studio, clamouring for a lay-out, or in the printing, complaining about a folder, or in the press-department, inquiring about an appropriation, or in the vouchers, demanding back numbers of something, or if he isn’t in any of those places, he’s somewhere else-slipping out for surreptitious coffee or haircuts. The word ‘alibi’ has no meaning in a place like Pym’s.”
“You’re going to have a lovely time with it all, I can see that,” said Parker. “But what sort of irregularity could possibly be going on in a place like that, which would lead to murder?”
“Now we’re coming to it. Young Dean used to tag round with the de Momerie crowd-”
Parker whistled.
“Sinning above his station in life?”
“Very much so. But you know Dian de Momerie. She gets more kick out of corrupting the bourgeois-she enjoys the wrestle with their little consciences. She’s a bad lot, that girl. I took her home last night, so I ought to know.”
“Peter!” said Lady Mary. “Quite apart from your morals, which alarm me, how did you get into that gang? I should have thought they’d as soon have taken up with Charles, here, or the Chief Commissioner.”
“Oh, I went incog. A comedy of masks. And you needn’t worry about my morals. The young woman became incapably drunk on the way home, so I pushed her inside her dinky little maisonette in Garlic Mews and tucked her up on a divan in the sitting-room to astonish her maid in the morning. Though she’s probably past being astonished. But the point is that I found out a good bit about Victor Dean.”
“Just a moment,” interrupted Parker, “did he dope?”
“Apparently not, though I’ll swear it wasn’t Dian’s fault if he didn’t. According to his sister, he was too strong-minded. Possibly he tried it once and felt so rotten that he didn’t try it again… Yes-I know what you’re thinking. If he was dopey, he might have fallen downstairs on his own account. But I don’t think that’ll work. These things have a way of coming out at post-mortems. The question was raised… no; it wasn’t that.”
“Did Dian have any opinion on the subject?”
“She said he wasn’t a sport. All the same, she seems to have kept him in tow from about the end of November to the end of April-nearly six months, and that’s a long time for Dian. I wonder what the attraction was. I suppose the whelp must have had something engaging about him.”
“Is that the sister’s story?”
“Yes; but she says that Victor ‘had great ambitions.’ I don’t quite know what she thinks he meant by that.”
“I suppose she realized that Dian was his mistress. Or wasn’t she?”
“Must have been. But I rather gather his sister thought he was contemplating matrimony.”
Parker laughed.
“After all,” said Lady Mary, “he probably didn’t tell his sister everything.”
“Damned little, I should imagine. She was quite honestly upset by last night’s show. Apparently the party Dean took her to wasn’t quite so hot. Why did he take her? That’s another problem. He said he wanted her to meet Dian, and no doubt the kid imagined she was being introduced to a future-in-law. But Dean-you’d think he’d want to keep his sister out of it. He couldn’t, surely, really have wanted to corrupt her, as Willis said.”
“Who is Willis?”
“Willis is a young man who foams at the mouth if you mention Victor Dean, who was once Victor Dean’s dearest friend, who is in love with Victor Dean’s sister, is furiously jealous of me, thinks I’m tarred with the same brush as Victor Dean, and dogs my footsteps with the incompetent zeal of fifty Watsons. He writes copy about face-cream and corsets, is the son of a provincial draper, was educated at a grammar school and wears, I deeply regret to say, a double-breasted waistcoat. That is the most sinister thing about him-except that he admits to having been in the lavatory when Victor Dean fell downstairs, and the lavatory, as I said before, is the next step to the roof.”
“Who else was in the lavatory?”
“I haven’t asked him yet. How can I? It’s horribly hampering to one’s detective work when one isn’t supposed to be detecting, because one daren’t ask any questions, much. But if whoever it was knew I was detecting, then whatsoever questions I asked, I shouldn’t get any answers. It wouldn’t matter if only I had the foggiest notion whom or what I was detecting, but looking among about a hundred people for the perpetrator of an unidentified crime is rather difficult.”
“I thought you were looking for a murderer.”
“So I am-but I don’t think I shall ever get the murderer till I know why the murder was done. Besides, what Pym engaged me to do was to look for the irregularity in the office. Of course, murder is an irregularity, but it’s not the one I’m commissioned to hunt for. And the only person I can fix a motive for the murder on to is Willis-and it’s not the sort of motive I’m looking for.”
“What was Willis’s row with Dean?”
“Damn silliest thing in the world. Willis used to go home with Dean at week-ends. Dean lived in a flat with his sister, by the way-no parents or anything. Willis fell in love with sister. Sister wasn’t sure about him. Dean took sister to one of Dian’s hot parties. Willis found out. Willis, being a boob, talked to sister like a Dutch uncle. Sister called Willis a disgusting, stuck-up, idiotic, officious prig. Willis rebuked Dean. Dean told Willis to go to hell. Loud row. Sister joined in. Dean family united in telling Willis to go and bury himself. Willis told Dean that if he (Dean) persisted in corrupting his (Dean’s) sister he (Willis) would shoot him like a dog. His very words, or so I am told.”
“Willis,” said Mary, “appears to think in clichés.”
“Of course he does-that’s why he writes such good corset-copy. Anyhow, there it was. Dean and Willis at daggers drawn for three months. Then Dean fell downstairs. Now Willis has started on me. I told off Pamela Dean to take him home last night, but I don’t know what came of it. I’ve explained to her that those hot-stuff parties are genuinely dangerous, and that Willis has some method in his madness, though a prize juggins as regards tact and knowledge of the sex. It was frightfully comic to see old Willis sneaking in after us in a sort of Ku Klux Klan outfit-incredibly stealthy, and wearing the same shoes he wears in the office and a seal-ring on his little finger that one could identify from here to the Monument.”
“Poor lad! I suppose it wasn’t Willis who tipped friend Dean down the stairs?”
“I don’t think so, Polly-but you never know. He’s such a melodramatic ass. He might consider it a splendid sin. But I don’t think he’d have had the brains to work out the details. And if he had done it, I fancy he’d have gone straight round to the police-station, smitten the double-breasted waistcoat a resounding blow and proclaimed ‘I did it, in the cause of purity.’ But against that, there’s the undoubted fact that Dean’s connection with Dian and Co. definitely came to an end in April-so why should he wait till the end of May to strike the blow? The row with Dean took place in March.”
“Possibly, Peter, the sister has been leading you up the garden. The connection may not have stopped when she said it did. She may have kept it up on her own. She may even be a drug-taker or something herself. You never know.”
“No; but generally one can make a shrewd guess. No; I don’t think there’s anything like that wrong with Pamela Dean. I’ll swear her disgust last night was genuine. It was pretty foul, I must say. By the way, Charles, where the devil do these people get their stuff from? There was enough dope floating about that house to poison a city.”