There followed a long silence. “So she was right,” said Mr. Reece heavily. “She was right to be afraid. I shall never forgive myself.”
Ben Ruby said Mr. Reece didn’t want to start thinking that way. “We none of us thought there was anything in it,” he pleaded. “She used to dream up such funny ideas. You couldn’t credit them.”
Signor Lattienzo threw up his hands. “Wolf. Wolf,” he said.
“I’ve yet to be convinced,” Mr. Reece said. “I cannot believe it of Maria. I know they used to fall out occasionally, but there was nothing in that. Maria was devoted. Proof!” he said still contemplating his keys. “You have advanced no proof.”
“I see I must now give some account of the puzzle of the keys.”
“The keys? Whose keys?” asked Mr. Reece, swinging his own.
Alleyn suppressed a crazy impulse to reply, “The Queen’s keys,” in the age-old challenge of the Tower of London. He merely gave as clean an account as possible of the enigma of the Sommita’s key and the impossibility of her having had time to remove it from a bag in the bottom drawer of the dressing table and lock the bedroom door in the seconds that elapsed between her kicking out Mr. Reece and Maria and their hearing it click in the lock.
Mr. Reece chewed this over and then said: “One can only suppose that at this stage her bag was not in the drawer but close at hand.”
“Even so: ask yourself. She orders you out, you shut the door and immediately afterwards hear it locked: a matter of perhaps two seconds.”
“It may have already been in her hand.”
“Do you remember her hands during the interview?”
“They were clenched. She was angry.”
“Well — it could be argued, I suppose. Just. But there is a sequel,” Alleyn said. And he told them of Maria’s final performance and arrest.
“I’m afraid,” he ended, “that all the pious protestations, all her passionate demands to perform the last duties, were an act. She realized that she had blundered, that we would, on her own statement, expect to find her mistress’s key in the room, and that she must at all costs get into the room and push it under the body, where we would find it in due course.”
“What did she say when you arrested her?” Lattienzo asked.
“Nothing. She hasn’t spoken except—”
“Well? Except?”
“She accused Rupert Bartholomew of murder.”
Hanley let out an exclamation. Lattienzo stared at him. “You spoke, Mr. Hanley?” he said.
“No, no. Nothing. Sorry.”
Ben Ruby said: “All the same, you know — well, I mean you can’t ignore — I mean to say, there was that scene, wasn’t there? I mean she had put him through it, no kidding. And the curtain speech and the way he acted. I mean-to-say, he’s the only one of us who you could say had motive and opportunity— I mean—”
“My good Ben,” Lattienzo said wearily, “we all know in general terms, what you mean. But when you say ‘opportunity,’ what precisely do you mean? Opportunity to murder? But Mr. Alleyn tells us he does not as yet accuse the perpetrator of the dagger-and-photograph operation of the murder. And Mr. Alleyn convinces me, for what it’s worth, that he knows what he’s talking about. I would like to ask Mr. Alleyn if he links Maria, who has been arrested for the photograph abomination, with the murder and if so what that link is. Or are we to suppose that Maria, on reentering the room, hot drink in hand, discovered the dead body and was inspired to go downstairs, unobserved by the milling crowd, remove the dagger from the wall, collect the photograph from wherever she’d put it, return to the bedroom, perform her atrocity, and then raise the alarm? Is that, as dear Ben would put it, the story?” ”
“Not quite,” said Alleyn.
“Ah!” said Lattienzo. “So I supposed.”
“I didn’t say we don’t suspect her of murder: on the contrary, I merely said she was arrested on the charge of mutilating the body, not on a charge of murder.”
“But that may follow?”
Alleyn was silent.
“Which is as much as to say,” Ben Ruby said, “that you reckon it’s a case of conspiracy and that Maria is half of the conspiracy and that one of us — I mean of the people in this house — was the principal. Yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Charming!” said Mr. Ruby.
“Are we to hear any more?” Mr. Reece asked. “After all apart from the modus operandi in Maria’s case, we have learned nothing new, have we? As, for instance, whether you have been able to clear any of us of suspicion. Particularly the young man — Bartholomew.”
“Monty, my dear,” said Lattienzo, who had turned quite pale, “how right you are. And here I would like to say, with the greatest emphasis, that I resist vehemently any suggestion, open or covert, that this unfortunate boy is capable of such a crime. Mr. Alleyn, I beg you to consider! What does such a theory ask us to accept? Consider his behavior.”
“Yes,” Alleyn said, “consider it. He makes what amounts to a public announcement of his break with her. He puts himself into the worst possible light as a potential murderer. He even writes a threatening message on a scrap of his score. He is at particular pains to avoid laying on an alibi. He faints, is taken upstairs, recovers, and hurries along to the bedroom, where he chloroforms and asphyxiates his victim and returns to his own quarters.”
Lattienzo stared at Alleyn for a second or two. The color returned to his face, he made his little crowing sound and seized Alleyn’s hands. “Ah!” he cried. “You agree! You see! You see! It is impossible! It is ridiculous!”
“If I may just pipe up,” Hanley said, appealing to Mr. Reece. “I mean, all this virtuous indignation on behalf of the Boy Beautiful! Very touching and all that.” He shot a glance at his employer and another at Lattienzo. “One might be forgiven for drawing one’s own conclusions.”
“That will do,” said Mr. Reece.
“Well, all right, then, sir. Enough said. But I mean — after all, one would like to be officially in the clear. I mean: take me. From the time you escorted Madame upstairs and she turned you and Maria out until Maria returned and found her— dead — I was in the dining room and hall calming down guests and talking to Les and telling you about the Lake and making a list for Les to check the guests by. I really could not,” said Hanley on a rising note of hysteria, “have popped upstairs and murdered Madame and come back, as bright as a button, to speed the parting guests and tramp about with umbrellas. And anyway,” he added, “I hadn’t got a key.”
“As far as that goes,” said Ben Ruby, “she could have let you in and I don’t mean anything nasty. Just to set the record straight.”
“Thank you very much,” said Hanley bitterly.
“To return to the keys,” Mr. Reece said slowly, still swinging his own as if to illustrate his point. “About the third key, her key.” He appealed to Hazelmere and Alleyn. “There must be some explanation. Some quite simple explanation. Surely.”
Alleyn looked at Hazelmere, who nodded very slightly.
“There is,” said Alleyn, “a very simple explanation. The third key was in the bag in the bottom drawer, where it had lain unmolested throughout the proceedings.”
Into the silence that followed there intruded a distant pulsation: the chopper returning, thought Alleyn.
Mr. Reece said: “But when Maria and I left — we — heard the key turn in the lock. What key? You’ve accounted for the other two. She locked us out with her own key.”
“We think not.”
“But Maria heard it, too. She has said so. I don’t understand this,” said Mr. Reece. “Unless — But no. No, I don’t understand. Why did Maria do as you say she did? Come back and try to hide the key under—? It’s horrible. Why did she do that?”