False Scent (22 page)

And Florence, as if in moments of catastrophe she was in command of only one phrase, gabbled, “The doctor! Quick! For Christ’s sake! Is the doctor in the house!”

Charles Templeton lay face down, as if he had fallen forward, with his head toward the foot of the bed that had been made up for him in the study. One arm hung to the floor, the other was outstretched beyond the end of the bed. The back of his neck was empurpled under its margin of thin white hair. His pyjama jacket was dragged up, revealing an expanse of torso — old, white and flaccid. When Alleyn raised him and held him in a sitting position, his head lolled sideways, his mouth and eyes opened and a flutter of sound wavered in his throat. Dr. Harkness leant over him, pinching up the skin of his forearm to admit the needle. Fox hovered nearby. Florence, her knuckles clenched between her teeth, stood just inside the door. Charles seemed to be unaware of these four onlookers; his gaze wandered past them, fixed itself in terror on the fifth; the short person who stood pressed back against the wall in shadow at the end of the room.

The sound in his throat was shaped with great difficulty into one word. “No!” it whispered. “No! No!”

Dr. Harkness withdrew the needle.

“What is it?” Alleyn said. “What do you want to tell us?”

The eyes did not blink or change their direction, but after a second or two they lost focus, glazed, and remained fixed. The jaw dropped, the body quivered and sank.

Dr. Harkness leant over it for some time and then drew back.

“Gone,” he said.

Alleyn laid his burden down and covered it.

In a voice that they had not heard from him before. Dr. Harkness said, “He was all right ten minutes ago. Settled. Quiet. Something’s gone wrong here and I’ve got to hear what it was.” He turned on Florence. “Well?”

Florence, with an air that was half combative, half frightened, moved forward, keeping her eyes on Alleyn.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, answering her look, “we must hear from you. You raised the alarm. What happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to know!” she said at once. “I did the right thing, didn’t I? I called the doctor. Now!”

“You’ll do the right thing again, if you please, by telling me what happened before you called him.”

She darted a glance at the small motionless figure in shadow at the end of the room and wetted her lips.

“Come on, now,” Fox said. “Speak up.”

Standing where she was, a serio-comic figure under her, panoply of tin hair curlers, she did tell her story.

After Dr. Harkness had given his order, she and — again that sidelong glance — she and Mrs. Plumtree had made up the bed in the study. Dr. Harkness had helped Mr. Templeton undress and had seen him into bed and they had all waited until he was settled down, comfortably. Dr. Harkness had left after giving orders that he was to be called if wanted. Florence had then gone to the pantry to fill a second hot-water bottle. This had taken some time as she had been obliged to boil a kettle. When she returned to the hall she had heard voices raised in the study. It seemed that she had paused outside the door. Alleyn had a picture of her, a hot-water bottle under her arm, listening avidly. She had heard Mrs. Plumtree’s voice but had been unable to distinguish any words. Then, she said, she had heard Mr. Templeton cry “No!” three times, just as he did before he died, only much louder; as if, Florence said, he was frightened. After that there had been a clatter and Mrs. Plumtree had suddenly become audible. She had shouted, Florence reported, at the top of her voice, “I’ll put a stop to it,” Mr. Templeton had given a loud cry and Florence had burst into the room.

“All right,” Alleyn said. “And what did you find?”

A scene, it appeared, of melodrama. Mrs. Plumtree with the poker grasped and upraised, Mr. Templeton sprawled along the bed, facing her.

“And when they seen me,” Florence said, “she dropped the poker in the hearth and he gasped ‘Florrie, don’t let ’er’ and then he took a turn for the worse and I see he was very bad. So I said, ‘Don’t you touch ’im. Don’t you dare,’ and I fetched the doctor like you say. And God’s my witness,” Florence concluded, “if she isn’t the cause of his death! As good as if she’d struck him down, ill and all as he was, and which she’d of done if I hadn’t come in when I did and which she’d do to me now if it wasn’t for you gentlemen.”

She stopped breathless. There was a considerable pause. “Well!” she demanded. “Don’t you believe it? All right, then. Ask her. Go on. Ask her!”

“Everything in its turn,” Alleyn said. “That will do from you for the moment. Stay where you are.” He turned to the short motionless figure in the shadows. “Come along,” he said. “You can’t avoid it, you know. Come along.”

She moved out into the light. Her small nose and the areas over her cheekbones were still patched with red, but otherwise her face was a dreadful colour. She said, automatically, it seemed, “You’re a wicked girl, Floy.”

“Never mind about that,” Alleyn said. “Are
you
going to tell me what happened?”

She looked steadily up into his face. Her mouth was shut like a trap, but her eyes were terrified.

“Look here, Ninn,” Dr. Harkness began very loudly. Alleyn raised a finger and he stopped short.

“Has Florence,” Alleyn asked, “spoken the truth? I mean as to facts. As to what she saw and heard when she came back to this room?”

She nodded, very slightly.

“You had the poker in your hand. You dropped it when she came in. Mr. Templeton said, ‘Florrie, don’t let her.’ That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And before she came in you had said, very loudly, to Mr. Templeton ‘I’ll put a stop to it’? Did you say this?”

“Yes.”

“What were you going to put a stop to?”

Silence.

“Was it something Mr. Templeton had said he would do?”

She shook her head.

For a lunatic second or two Alleyn was reminded of a panel game on television. He saw the Plumtree face in close-up; tight-lipped, inimical, giving nothing away, winning the round.

He looked at Fox. “Would you take Florence into the hall? You too, Dr. Harkness, if you will?”

“I’m not going,” Florence said. “You can’t make me.”

“Oh yes, I can,” Alleyn rejoined tranquilly, “but you’d be very foolish to put it to the test. Out you go, my girl.”

Fox approached her. “You keep your hands off me!” she said.

“Now, now!” Fox rumbled cosily. He opened the door. For a moment she looked as if she would show fight and then, with a lift of her chin, she went out. Fox followed her.

Dr. Harkness said, “There are things to be done. I mean…” He gestured at the covered form on the bed.

“I know. I don’t expect to be long. Wait for me in the hall, will you, Harkness?”

The door shut behind them.

For perhaps ten seconds Alleyn and that small, determined and miserable little woman looked at each other.

Then he said, “It’s got to come out, you know. You’ve been trying to save him, haven’t you?”

Her hands moved convulsively, and she looked in terror at the bed.

“No, no,” Alleyn said. “Not there. I’m not talking about him. You didn’t care about him. You were trying to shield the boy, weren’t you? You did what you did for Richard Dakers.”

She broke into a passion of weeping and from then until the end of the case he had no more trouble with Ninn.

When it was over he sent her up to her room.

“Well,” he said to Fox, “now for the final and far from delectable scene. We should, of course, have prevented all this, but I’m damned if I see how. We couldn’t arrest on what we’d got. Unless they find some trace of Slaypest in the scent-spray my reading of the case will never be anything but an unsupported theory.”

“They ought to be coming through with the result before long.”

“You might ring up and see where they’ve got to.”

Fox dialled a number. There was a tap at the door and Philpott looked in. He stared at the covered body on the bed.

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “A death. Mr. Templeton.”

“By violence, sir?”

“Not by physical violence. Heart disease. What is it, Philpott?”

“It’s the lot in there, sir. They’re getting very restive, especially Mr. Dakers and the Colonel. Wondering what was wrong with”—he looked again at the bed—“with him, sir.”

“Yes. Will you ask Mr. Dakers and Colonel Warrenderto go into the small sitting-room next door. I’ll be there in a moment. Oh, and Philpott, I think you might ask Miss Lee to come too. And you may tell the others they will have very little longer to wait.”

“Sir,” said Philpott and withdrew.

Fox was talking into the telephone. “Yes. Yes. I’ll tell him. He’ll be very much obliged. Thank you.”

He hung up. “They were just going to ring. They’ve found an identifiable trace inside the bulb of the scent-spray.”

“Have they indeed? That provides the complete answer.”

“So you were right, Mr. Alleyn.”

“And what satisfaction,” Alleyn said wryly, “is to be had out of that?”

He went to the bed and turned back the sheet. The eyes, unseeing, still stared past him. The imprint of a fear, already nonexistent, still disfigured the face. Alleyn looked down at it for a second or two. “What unhappiness!” he said and closed the eyes.

“He had a lot to try him,” Fox observed with his customary simplicity.

“He had indeed, poor chap.”

“So did they all, if it comes to that. She must have been a very vexing sort of lady. There’ll have to be a p.m., Mr. Alleyn.”

“Yes, of course. All right. I’ll see these people next door.”

He re-covered the face and went out.

Dr. Harkness and Florence were in the hall, watched over by a Yard reinforcement. Alleyn said, “I think you’d better come in with me, if you will, Harkness.” And to Florence, “You’ll stay where you are for the moment, if you please.”

Harkness followed him into the boudoir.

It had been created by Bertie Saracen in an opulent mood and contrasted strangely with the exquisite austerity of the study. “Almost indecently
you
, darling!” Bertie had told Miss Bellamy and, almost indecently, it was so.

Its present occupants — Richard, Anelida and Warrender — were standing awkwardly in the middle of this room, overlooked by an enormous and immensely vivacious portrait in pastel of Mary Bellamy. Charles, photographed some twenty years ago, gazed mildly from the centre of an occasional table. To Alleyn there was something atrociously ironic in this circumstance.

Richard demanded at once: “What is it? What happened? Is Charles…?”

“Yes,” Alleyn said. “It’s bad news. He collapsed a few minutes ago.”

“But…? You don’t mean…?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Richard said, “Anelida! It’s Charles. He means Charles has died. Doesn’t he?”

“Why,” she said fiercely, “must these things happen to you.
Why
?”

Dr. Harkness went up to him. “Sorry, old boy,” he said, “I tried but it was no good. It might have happened any time during the last five years, you know.”

Richard stared blankly at him. “My God!” he cried out. “You can’t talk like that!”

“Steady, old chap. You’ll realize, when you think it over. Any time.”

“I don’t believe you. It’s because of everything else. It’s because of Mary and…” Richard turned on Alleyn. “You’d no right to subject him to all this. It’s killed him. You’d no right. If it hadn’t been for you it needn’t have happened.”

Alleyn said very compassionately, “That may be true. He was in great distress. It may even be that for him this was the best solution.”

“How dare you say that!” Richard exclaimed and then, “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think he’d pretty well got to the end of his tether? He’d lost the thing he most valued in life, hadn’t he?”

“I–I want to see him.”

Alleyn remembered Charles’s face. “Then you shall,” he promised, “presently.”

“Yes,” Harkness agreed quickly. “Presently.”

“For the moment,” Alleyn said, turning to Anelida, “I suggest that you take him up to his old room and give him a drink. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” Anelida said. “That’s the thing.” She put her hand in Richard’s. “Coming?”

He looked down at her. “I wonder,” he said, “what on earth I should do without you, Anelida.”

“Come on,” she said, and they went out together.

Alleyn nodded to Harkness and he too went out.

An affected little French clock above the fireplace cleared its throat, broke into a perfect frenzy of silvery chimes and then struck midnight. Inspector Fox came into the room and shut the door.

Alleyn looked at Maurice Warrender.

“And now,” he said, “there must be an end to equivocation. I must have the truth.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Warrender, and could scarcely have sounded less convincing.

“I wonder why people always say that when they know precisely what one does mean. However, I’d better tell you. A few minutes ago, immediately after Charles Templeton died, I talked to the nanny, Mrs. Plumtree, who had been alone with him at the moment of his collapse. I told her that I believed she had uttered threats, that she had acted in this way because she thought Templeton was withholding information which would clear your son from suspicion of murder and that under the stress of this scene, Templeton suffered the heart attack from which he died. I told her your son was in no danger of arrest and she then admitted the whole story. I now tell you, too, that your son is in no danger. If you have withheld information for fear of incriminating him, you may understand that you have acted mistakenly.”

Warrender seemed to be on the point of speaking but instead turned abruptly away and stood very still.

“You refused to tell me of the threats Mrs. Templeton uttered in the conservatory and I got them, after great difficulty it’s true, from the other people who were there. When I asked you if you had quarrelled with Charles Templeton you denied it. I believe that, in fact, you
had
quarrelled with him and that it happened while you were together in the study before I saw you for the first time. For the whole of that interview you scarcely so much as looked at each other. He was obviously distressed by your presence and you were violently opposed to rejoining him there. I must ask you again. Had you quarrelled?”