“I thought I remembered,” Alleyn improvised, “seeing press photographs of her in a group of guests abroad Hoffman’s yacht.”
“I see. It was not a desirable association. I broke it off.”
“He came to grief, didn’t he?”
“Deservedly so,” said Mr. Reece, pursing his mouth rather in the manner of a disapproving governess. Perhaps he felt he could not quite leave it at that, because he added, stuffily, as if he were humoring an inquisitive child: “Hoffman-Beilstein had approached me with a view to interesting me in an enterprise he hoped to float. Actually, he invited me to join the cruise you allude to. I did so and was confirmed in my opinion of his activities.” Mr. Reece waited for a moment. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it was then that I met one of his executives— young Ned Hanley. I considered he might well come to grief in that company and, as I required a private secretary, offered him the position.” He looked much more fixedly at Alleyn. “Has he been prattling?” he asked, and Alleyn thought: He’s formidable, all right.
“No, no,” he said. “Not indiscreetly, I promise you. I asked him how long he’d been in your employ, and he simply arrived at the answer by recalling the date of the cruise.”
“He talks too much,” said Mr. Reece, dismissing him, but with an air of — what? Indulgence? Tolerance? Proprietorship? He turned to Dr. Carmichael. “I wanted to speak to you, doctor,” he said. “I want to hear from you exactly how my friend was killed. I do not wish, if it can be spared me, to see her again as she was last night and I presume still is. But I must know how it was done. I must know.”
Dr. Carmichael glanced at Alleyn, who nodded very slightly.
“Madame Sommita,” said Dr. Carmichael, “was almost certainly anesthetized, probably asphyxiated when she had become unconscious, and, after death, stabbed. There will be an autopsy, of course, which will tell us more.”
“Did she suffer?”
“I think, most unlikely.”
“Anesthetized? With what? How?”
“I suspect, chloroform.”
“But — chloroform? Do you mean somebody came here prepared to commit this crime? Provided?”
“It looks like it. Unless there was chloroform somewhere on the premises.”
“Not to my knowledge. I can’t imagine it.”
Alleyn suddenly remembered the gossip of Bert the chauffeur. “Did you by any chance have a vet come to the house?” he asked.
“Ah! Yes. Yes, we did. To see Isabella’s afghan hound. She was very — distressed. The vet examined the dog under an anesthetic and found it had a malignant growth. He advised that it be put down immediately, and it was done.”
“You wouldn’t, of course, know if by any chance the vet forgot to take the chloroform away with him?”
“No. Ned might know. He superintended the whole thing.”
“I’ll ask him,” said Alleyn.
“Or, perhaps, Marco,” speculated Mr. Reece. “I seem to remember he was involved.”
“Ah, yes. Marco,” said Alleyn. “You have told me, haven’t you, that Marco is completely dependable?”
“Certainly. I have no reason to suppose anything else.”
“In the very nature of the circumstances and the development of events as we hear about them, we must all have been asking ourselves disturbing questions about each other, mustn’t we? Have you not asked yourself disturbing questions about Marco?”
“Well, of course I have,” Mr. Reece said at once. “About him, and, as you say, about all of them. But there is no earthly reason, no conceivable motive for Marco to do anything— wrong.”
“Not if Marco should happen to be Strix?” Alleyn asked.
Chapter seven
Strix
i
When Alleyn and Dr. Carmichael joined Troy in the studio, rifts had appeared in the rampart of clouds and, at intervals, shafts of sunlight played fitfully across Lake Waihoe and struck up patches of livid green on mountain flanks that had begun to reappear through the mist.
The landing stage was still under turbulent water. No one could have used it. There were now no signs of Les on the mainland.
“You gave Mr. Reece a bit of a shakeup,” said Dr. Carmichael. “Do you think he was right when he said the idea had never entered his head?”
“What, that Marco was Strix? Who can tell? I imagine Marco has been conspicuously zealous in the anti-Strix cause. His reporting an intruder on the Island topped up with his production of the lens cap was highly convincing. Remember how you all plunged about in the undergrowth? I suppose you assisted in the search for nobody, didn’t you?”
“Blast!” said Dr. Carmichael.
“Incidentally, the cap was a mistake, a fancy touch too many. It’s off a mass-produced camera, probably his own, as it were, official toy and not at all the sort of job that Strix must use to get his results. Perhaps he didn’t want to part with the Strix cap and hadn’t quite got the nerve to produce it, or perhaps it hasn’t got a cap.”
“Why,” asked Troy, “did he embark on all that nonsense about an intruder?”
“Well, darling, don’t you think because he intended to take a ‘Strix’ photograph of the Sommita — his bonne bouche—and it seemed advisable to plant the idea that a visiting Strix was lurking in the underbrush. But the whole story of the intruder was fishy. The search party was a shocking-awful carry-on, but by virtue of sheer numbers one of you would have floundered into an intruder if he’d been there.”
“And you are certain,” said Dr. Carmichael, “that he is not your man?”
“He couldn’t be. He was waiting in the dining room and busy in the hall until the guests left and trotting to and from the launch with an umbrella while they were leaving.”
“And incidentally on the porch, with me, watching the launch after they had gone. Yes. That’s right,” agreed Dr. Carmichael.
“Is Mr. Reece going to tackle him about Strix?” Troy asked.
“Not yet. He says he’s not fully persuaded. He prefers to leave it with me.”
“And you?”
“I’m trying to make up my mind. On the whole I think it may be best to settle Strix before the police get here.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
Troy said: “Of course he knows you’re onto it. After your breakfast tray remarks.”
“He’s got a pretty good idea of it, at least,” said Alleyn and put his thumb on the bell.
“Perhaps he won’t come.”
“I think he will. What’s the alternative? Fling himself into the billowy wave and do a Leander for the mainland?”
“Shall I disappear?” offered Dr. Carmichael.
“And I?” said Troy.
“Not unless you’d rather. After all, I’m not going to arrest him.”
“Oh? Not?” they said.
“Why would I do that? For being Strix? I’ve no authority. Or do you think we might borrow him for being a public nuisance or perhaps for false pretenses? On my information he’s never actually conned anybody. He’s just dressed himself up funny-like and taken unflattering photographs. There’s the forged letter in the Watchman, of course. That might come within the meaning of some act: I’d have to look it up. Oh, yes, and makes himself out to be a gentleman’s gent, with forged references, I daresay.”
“Little beast,” said Troy. “Cruel little pig, tormenting her like that. And everybody thinking it a jolly joke. And the shaming thing is, it was rather funny.”
“That’s the worst of ill-doing, isn’t it? It so often has its funny side. Come to think of it, I don’t believe I could have stuck my job out if it wasn’t so. The earliest playwrights knew all about that: their devils more often than not were clowns and their clowns were always cruel. Here we go.”