Yours ever,
Roderick Alleyn.
Alleyn sealed and addressed his letter and glanced at the lounge clock. Ten o’clock. Perhaps he had better take another look at Master Gordon Palmer who, at nine o’clock, appeared to be sunk in the very depths of sottish slumber. Alleyn took the lift to the second floor. The unwavering stare of the lift-boy told him that his identity was no longer a secret. He went to Gordon’s room, tapped on the door and walked in.
Gordon was awake but in bed. He looked very unattractive and rather ill.
“Good morning,” said Alleyn. “Feeling poorly?”
“I feel like death,” said Gordon. He glanced nervously at the chief inspector, moistened his lips and then said rather sheepishly: “I say, I’m sorry about last night. Can I have my key back? I want to get up.”
“I unlocked your door an hour ago,”“ said Alleyn. ”Haven’t you noticed?”
“As a matter of fact my head is so frightful I haven’t moved yet.”
“I suppose you drank yourself to sleep?”
Gordon was silent.
“How old are you?” asked Alleyn.
“Seventeen.”
“Good God!” exclaimed Alleyn involuntarily. “What do you suppose you’ll look like when you’ve grown up? An enfeebled old dotard. However, it’s your affair.”
Gordon attempted to smile.
“And yet,” continued Alleyn, raising one eyebrow and screwing up his face, “you don’t look altogether vicious. You’re pimply, of course, and your skin’s a nauseating colour — that’s late hours and alcohol — but if you gave your stomach and your lungs and your nerves a sporting chance you might improve enormously.”
“Thanks, very much.”
“Rude, you think? I’m twenty-five years older than you. Old gentlemen of forty-two are allowed to be impertinent. Especially when they are policemen. Do you want to get into trouble with the police, by the way?”
“I’m not longing to,” said Gordon, with a faint suggestion of humour.
“Then why, in Heaven’s name, did you bolt? You have permanently changed the silhouette of Detective-Sergeant Cass. He now presents the contour of a pouter-pigeon.”
“Oh no, does he? How superb!”
“How superb!” imitated Alleyn. “The new inflexion. How superb for you, my lad, if you’re clapped into durance vile.”
Gordon looked nervous.
“Come on,” continued Alleyn. “Why did you bolt. Was it funk?”
“Oh, rather. I was terrified,” said Gordon lightly.
“Of what? Of your position in regard to Courtney Broadhead? Were you afraid the police would press you to re-state your theory?”
“It’s not my theory.”
“We came to that conclusion. Liversidge filled you up with that tarradiddle, didn’t he? Yes, I thought so. Were you afraid we’d find that out?”
“Yes.”
“I see. So you postponed the evil hour by running away?”
“It was pretty bloody waiting in that room. Hour after hour. I was cold.”
His eyes dilated. Suddenly he looked like a frightened schoolboy.
“I’ve never seen anyone — dead — before,” said Gordon.
Alleyn looked at him thoughtfully.
“Yes,” he said at last, “it was pretty foul, wasn’t it? Given you the horrors?”
Gordon nodded. “A bit.”
“That’s bad luck,” said Alleyn. “It’ll wear off in time. I don’t want to nag, you know, but alcohol’s no good at all. Makes it worse. So you eluded Mr. Cass because you’d got the jim-jams while you were waiting in the wardrobe-room?”
“It was so quiet. And outside there — on the stage — getting cold and stiff—”
“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Alleyn. “They took him away long before that, you silly fellow. Now tell me, what did Liversidge say to you when you left the scene of the disaster?”
“Frankie?”
“Yes. In the dressing-room-passage, before you went to the wardrobe-room?”
“He — he — I think he said something about — did I remember what we’d said.”
“What did he mean?”
“About Courtney and the money.”
“Now think carefully and answer me truthfully. It’s important. Who first made the suggestion that Broadhead might have taken that money — you or Mr. Liversidge?”
“He did, of course,” said Gordon at once.
“Ah, yes,” said Alleyn.
He sat down on the end of the bed and again he contemplated Gordon. It seemed to him that after all the boy was not so intolerably sophisticated. “His sophistication is no more than a spurious glaze over his half-baked adolescence,” thought Alleyn. “Under the stress of this affair it has already begun to crack. Perhaps he may even read detective stories.” And suddenly he asked Gordon:
“Are you at all interested in my sort of job?”
“I was, rather, in the abstract,” said Gordon.
“I’m puzzled by your reactions to this affair. Last night, you know, you were so very alert and cock-a-hoop. Your attack on Broadhead! It was most determined.”
“I hadn’t had time to think. It didn’t seem real then. None of it seemed real. Just rather exciting.”
“I know. Perhaps you are one of the people that ricochet from a shock, as a bullet does from an impenetrable surface. You fly off at an uncalculated angle, but do not at once lose speed.”
“Perhaps I am,” agreed Gordon, cheered by the delicious promise of self-analysis. “Yes, I think I am like that. I—”
“It’s a very common reaction,” said Alleyn. “Let us see how the theory may be applied to your case. A man was murdered almost under your nose, and instead of screaming like Miss Gaynes, or being sick like Mr. Mason, you found yourself sailing along in a sort of unreal state of stimulation. You felt rather intoxicated and into your mind, with startling insistence, came a little sequence of ideas about Courtney Broadhead. You thought of your discussion with Mr. Liversidge and — an additional fillip — he actually reminded you of it in the passage. Still sailing along, you were seized with the idea of bringing off one of those startling coups, which, unfortunately for us, occur more often in fiction than in police investigations. You would confront Broadhead with his infamy and surprise him into betraying himself. It’s a typical piece of adolescent behaviourism. Very interesting in its way. A projection of the king-of-the-castle phantasy — I forget the psycho-analytical description.”