“Clever boy,” he said. “And I thought I’d got away with it. I couldn’t resist pulling your leg, Mr. Merryman. You will forgive me, won’t you?”
Mr. Merryman did not reply. He merely stared very fixedly at Aubyn Dale, and as Brigid muttered to Tim, may have been restraining himself from saying he would see him in his study after prep.
Dale added to this impression by saying with uneasy boyishness, “I swear, by the way, I was just about to come clean. Naturally.”
“Then,” Alleyn said, “it was not a live transmission?”
“Not that one. Usually is, but I was meant to be on my way to the States, so we filmed it.”
“Indeed?” Mr. Merryman said. “And were you on your way to the United States, sir?”
“Actually, no. One of those things. There was a nonsense made over dates. I flew three days later. Damn nuisance. It meant I didn’t get back till the day before we sailed.”
“And your alibi?” Mr. Merryman continued ominously.
“Well… ah… well — don’t look at me, padre. I spent the evening with my popsey. Don’t ask me to elaborate, will you? No names, no packdrill.”
“And no alibi,” said Mr. Merryman neatly.
There was a moment’s uneasy suspense during which nobody looked at anybody else and then Mr. McAngus unexpectedly surfaced. “I remember it all quite perfectly,” he announced. “It was the evening before my first hint of trouble and I did watch television!”
“Programme?” Mr. Merryman snapped. Mr. McAngus smiled timidly at Aubyn Dale. “Oh,” he tittered, “I’m no end of a fan, you know.”
It turned out that he had, in fact, watched Pack Up Your Troubles. When asked if he could remember it, he said at once, “Very clearly.” Alleyn saw Miss Abbott close her eyes momentarily as if she felt giddy. “There was a lady,” Mr. MacAngus continued, “asking, I recollect, whether she ought to get married.”
“There almost always is,” Dale groaned and made a face of comic despair.
“But this was very complicated because, poor thing, she felt she would be deserting her great friend and her great friend didn’t know about it and would be dreadfully upset. There!” Mr. McAngus cried. “I’ve remembered! If only one could be sure which evening. The twenty-fifth, I ask myself? I mean the fifteenth, of course.”
Dale said, “I couldn’t tell you which programme but, ah, poor darling, I remember her. I think I helped her. I hope I did!”
“Perhaps,” Captain Bannerman suggested, “Miss Abbott remembers now you’ve mentioned it. That’d fix your alibi for you.”
“Do you, Miss Abbott?” Mr. McAngus asked anxiously.
Everybody looked at Miss Abbott and it was at once apparent to everybody but Mr. McAngus that she was greatly upset. Her lips trembled. She covered them with her hand in a rather dreadful parody of cogitation. She shook her head and her eyes overflowed.
“No?” Mr. McAngus said, wistfully oblivious and shortsightedly blinking, “Do try, Miss Abbott. She was a dark, rather heavy lady. I mean, of course, that was the impression one had. Because one doesn’t see the face and the back of the head is rather out of focus, isn’t it, Mr. Dale? But she kept saying (and I think they must distort the voice a little, too) that she knew her friend would be dreadfully hurt because apart from herself, she had so few to care for her.” He made a little bob at Aubyn Dale. “You were wonderful,” he said, “so tactful. About loneliness. I’m sure if you saw it, Miss Abbott, you must remember. Mr. Dale made such practical and helpful suggestions. I don’t remember exactly what they were but—”
Miss Abbott rounded on him and cried out with shocking violence, “For God’s sake stop talking. ‘Helpful suggestions’! What ‘suggestions’ can help in that kind of hell!” She looked round at them all with an expression of evident despair. “For some of us,” she said, “there’s no escape. We are our own slaves. No escape or release.”
“Nonsense!” Mr. Merryman said sharply. “There is always an escape and a release. It is a matter of courage and resolution.”
Miss Abbott gave a harsh sob. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I’m not myself. I shouldn’t have had so much champagne.” She turned away.
Father Jourdain said quickly, “You know, Mr. McAngus, I’m afraid you haven’t quite convinced us.”
“And that’s the last alibi gone overboard,” said the captain. “Mr. Merryman wins.”
He made a great business of handing over his five shillings. Alleyn, Mr. McAngus, and Aubyn Dale followed suit.
They all began to talk at once, and with the exception of the Cuddys, avoided looking at Miss Abbott. Brigid moved in front of her and screened her from the others. It was tactfully done and Alleyn was confirmed in his view that Brigid was a nice child. Mrs. Dillington-Blick joined her and automatically a group assembled round Mrs. Dillington-Blick. So between Miss Abbott and the rest of the world there was a barrier behind which she trumpeted privately into her handkerchief.
Presently she got up, now mistress of herself, thanked Alleyn for his party and left it.
The Cuddys came forward, clearly agog, eager, by allusion and then by direct reference, to speculate upon Miss Abbott’s distress. Nobody supported them. Mr. McAngus merely looked bewildered. Tim talked to Brigid and Captain Bannerman and Aubyn Dale talked to Mrs. Dillington-Blick. Mr. Merryman looked once at the Cuddys over his spectacles, rumpled his hair and said something about “Hoc morbido cupiditatis” in a loud voice to Alleyn and Father Jourdain. Alleyn was suddenly visited by an emotion that is unorthodox in an investigating officer; he felt a liking and warmth for these people. He respected them because they refused to gossip with the Cuddys about Miss Abbott’s unhappiness and because they had behaved with decency and compassion when she broke down. He saw Brigid and Mrs. Dillington-Blick speak together and then slip out of the room and he knew they had gone to see if they could help Miss Abbott. He was very much troubled.
Father Jourdain came up to him and said, “Shall we move over here?” He led Alleyn to the far end of the room.
“That was unfortunate,” he said.
“I’m sorry about it.”
“You couldn’t possibly know it would happen. She is a very unhappy woman. She exhales unhappiness.”
“It was the reference to that damn spiritual striptease session of Dale’s,” Alleyn said. “I suppose something in the programme had upset her.”
“Undoubtedly,” Father Jourdain smiled. “That’s a good description of it, a spiritual striptease. I suppose you’ll think I’m lugging in my cloth, but you know I really do think it’s better to leave confession to the professional.”
“Dale would call himself a professional.”
“What he does,” Father Jourdain said, with some warmth, “is vulgar, dangerous, and altogether odious. But he’s not a bad chap, of course. At least I don’t think so. Not a bad sort of chap at all.”
Alleyn said, “There’s something else you want to say to me, isn’t there?”
“There is, but I hesitate to say it. I am not sure of myself. Will you laugh at me if I tell you that, by virtue of my training perhaps, and perhaps because of some instinct, I am peculiarly sensitive to — to spiritual atmosphere?”
“I don’t know that I—”
Father Jourdain interrupted him.
“I mean that when I feel there is something really out of joint spiritually — I use this word because I’m a priest, you know — with a group of people, I’m usually right.”
“And do you feel it now?”
“Very strongly. I suspect it’s a sense of unexpressed misery,” said Father Jourdain. “But I can’t hunt it home.”