Final Curtain (25 page)

Fox came forward with a bag. Alleyn, muttering something about futile gestures, lifted the tin by the handkerchief. ‘You don't mind,' he said to Thomas, ‘if we take charge of this? We'll give you a receipt for it.'

‘Oh, will you?' asked Thomas mildly. ‘Thanks awfully.' He watched them stow away the tin, and then, seeing that they were about to go, scrambled to his feet. ‘You must have a drink,' he said. ‘There's a bottle of Papa's whisky—I think.'

Alleyn and Fox managed to head him off a further search. He sat down, and listened with an air of helplessness to Alleyn's parting exposition.

‘Now, Mr Ancred,' Alleyn said, ‘I think I ought to make as clear as possible the usual procedure following the sort of information you have brought to us. Before any definite step can be taken, the police make what are known as “further inquiries.” They do this as inconspicuously as possible, since neither their original informant, nor they, enjoy the public exploration of a mare's nest. If these inquiries seem to point to a suspicion of ill practice, the police then get permission from the Home Secretary for the next step to be taken. You know what that is, I expect?'

‘I say,' said Thomas, ‘that
would
be beastly, wouldn't it?' A sudden thought seemed to strike him. ‘I say,' he repeated, ‘would I have to be there?'

‘We'd probably ask for formal identification by a member of his family.'

‘Oh, Lor'!' Thomas whispered dismally. He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. A gleam of consolation appeared to visit him.

‘I say,' he said, ‘it's a good job after all, isn't it, that the Nation didn't plump for the Abbey?'

‘
I
N OUR GAME,'
said Fox as they drove back to the Yard, ‘you get some funny glimpses into what you might call human nature. I dare say I've said that before, but it's a fact.'

‘I believe you,' said Alleyn.

‘Look at this chap we've just left,' Fox continued with an air of controversy. ‘Vague! And yet he must be good at his job, wouldn't you say, sir?'

‘Indisputably.'

‘There! Good at his job, and yet to meet him you'd say he'd lose his play, and his actors, and his way to the theatre. In view of which,' Fox summed up, ‘I ask myself if this chap's as muddle-headed as he lets on.'

‘A pose, you think, do you, Fox?'

‘You never know with some jokers,' Fox muttered, and, wiping his great hand over his face, seemed by that gesture to dispose of Thomas Ancred's vagaries. ‘I suppose,' he said, ‘it'll be a matter of seeing the doctor, won't it?'

‘I'm afraid so. I've looked out trains. There's one in an hour. Get us there by midday. We may have to spend the night in Ancreton village. We can pick up our emergency bags at the Yard. I'll talk to the AC and telephone Troy. What a hell of a thing to turn up.'

‘It doesn't look as if we'll be able to let it alone, do you reckon, Mr Alleyn?'

‘I still have hopes. As it stands, there's not a case in Thomas's story to hang a dead dog on. They lose a tin of rat poison and find it in a garret. Somebody reads a book about embalming, and thinks up an elaborate theme based on an arbitrary supposition. Counsel could play skittles with it—as it stands.'

‘Suppose we
did
get an order for exhumation. Suppose they found arsenic in the body. With this embalming business it'd seem as if it would prove nothing.'

‘On the contrary,' said Alleyn, ‘I rather think, Fox, that if they did find arsenic in the body it would prove everything.'

Fox turned slowly and looked at him. ‘I don't get that one, Mr Alleyn,' he said.

‘I'm not at all sure that I'm right. We'll have to look it up. Here we are. I'll explain on the way down to this accursed village. Come on.
'

He saw his Assistant Commissioner, who, with the air of a connoisseur, discussed the propriety of an investigator handling a case in which his wife might be called as a witness. ‘Of course, my dear Rory, if by any chance the thing should come into court and your wife be subpoenaed, we would have to reconsider our position. We've no precedent, so far as I know. But for the time being I imagine it's more reasonable for you to discuss it with her than for anybody else to do so—Fox, for instance. Now, you go down to this place, talk to the indigenous GP and come back and tell us what you think about it. Tiresome, if it comes to anything. Good luck.'

As they left, Alleyn took from his desk the second volume of a work on medical jurisprudence. It dealt principally with poisons. In the train he commended certain passages to Fox's notice. He watched his old friend put on his spectacles, raise his eyebrows, and develop the slightly catarrhal breathing that invariably accompanied his reading.

‘Yes,' said Fox, removing his spectacles as the train drew into Ancreton Halt, ‘that's different, of course.'

Doctor Herbert Withers was a short, tolerably plump man, with little of the air of wellbeing normally associated with plumpness. He came out into his hall as they arrived, admitting from some inner room the sound of a racing broadcast. After a glance at Alleyn's professional card he took them to his consulting-room, and sat at his desk with a movement whose briskness seemed to overlie a controlled fatigue.

‘What's the trouble?' he asked.

It was the conventional opening. Alleyn thought it had slipped involuntarily from Dr Withers's lips.

‘We hope there's no trouble,' he said. ‘Would you mind if I asked you to clear up a few points about Sir Henry Ancred's death?'

The mechanical attentiveness of Dr Withers's glance sharpened. He made an abrupt movement and looked from Alleyn to Fox.

‘Certainly,' he said, ‘if there's any necessity. But why?' He still held Alleyn's card in his hand and he glanced at it again. ‘You don't mean to say—' he began, and stopped short. ‘Well, what are these few points?'

‘I think I'd better tell you exactly what's happened,' Alleyn said. He took a copy of the anonymous letter from his pocket and handed it to Dr Withers. ‘Mr Thomas Ancred brought eight of these to us this morning,' he said.

‘Damn disgusting piffle,' said Dr Withers and handed it back.

‘I hope so. But when we're shown these wretched things we have to do something about them.'

‘Well?'

‘You signed the death certificate, Dr Withers, and—'

‘And I shouldn't have done so if I hadn't been perfectly satisfied as to the cause.'

‘Exactly. Now will you, like a good chap, help us to dispose of these letters by giving us, in non-scientific words, the cause of Sir Henry's death?'

Dr Withers fretted a little, but at last went to his files and pulled out a card.

‘There you are,' he said. ‘That's the last of his cards. I made routine calls at Ancreton. It covers about six weeks.'

Alleyn looked at it. It bore the usual list of dates with appropriate notes. Much of it was illegible and almost all obscure to the lay mind. The final note, however, was flatly lucid. It read: ‘Deceased. Between twelve-thirty and two a.m., Nov. 25
^th
.'

‘Yes,' said Alleyn. ‘Thank you. Now will you translate some of this?'

‘He suffered,' said Dr Withers angrily, ‘from gastric ulcers and degeneration of the heart. He was exceedingly indiscriminate in his diet. He'd eaten a disastrous meal, had drunk champagne, and had flown into one of his rages. From the look of the room, I diagnosed a severe gastric attack followed by heart failure. I may add that if I had heard about the manner in which he'd spent the evening I should have expected some such development.'

‘You'd have expected him to die?'

‘That would be an extremely unprofessional prognostication. I would have anticipated grave trouble,' said Dr Withers stuffily.

‘Was he in the habit of playing up with his diet?'

‘He was. Not continuously, but in bouts.'

‘Yet survived?'

‘The not unusual tale of “once too often”.'

‘Yes,' said Alleyn, looking down at the card. ‘Would you mind describing the room and the body?'

‘Would you, in your turn, Chief Inspector, mind telling me if you have any reason for this interview beyond these utterly preposterous anonymous letters?'

‘Some of the family suspect arsenical poisoning.'

‘Oh, my God and the little starfish!' Dr Withers shouted and shook his fists above his head. ‘That
bloody
family!'

He appeared to wrestle obscurely with his feelings. ‘I'm sorry about that,' he said at last, ‘inexcusable outburst. I've been busy lately and worried, and there you are. The Ancreds, collectively, have tried me rather high. Why, may one ask, do they suspect arsenical poisoning?'

‘It's a long story,' said Alleyn carefully, ‘and it involves a tin of rat poison. May I add also, very unprofessionally, that I shall be enormously glad if you can tell me that the condition of the room and the body precludes the smallest likelihood of arsenical poisoning?'

‘I can't tell you anything of the sort. Why? (a) Because the room had been cleaned up when I got there. And (b) because the evidence as described to me, and the appearance of the body were entirely consistent with a severe gastric attack, and therefore
not
inconsistent with arsenical poisoning.'

‘Damn!' Alleyn grunted. ‘I thought it'd be like that.'

‘How the hell could the old fool have got at any rat poison? Will you tell me that?' He jabbed his finger at Alleyn.

‘They don't think,' Alleyn explained, ‘that he got at it. They think it was introduced to him.'

The well-kept hand closed so strongly that the knuckles whitened. For a moment he held it clenched, and then, as if to cancel this gesture, opened the palm and examined his fingernails.

‘That,' he said, ‘is implicit in the letter, of course. Even that I can believe of the Ancreds. Who is supposed to have murdered Sir Henry? Am I, by any pleasant chance?'

‘Not that I know,' said Alleyn comfortably. Fox cleared his throat and added primly: ‘What an idea!'

‘Are they going to press for an exhumation? Or are you?'

‘Not without more reason than we've got at the moment,' Alleyn said. ‘You didn't hold a post-mortem?'

‘One doesn't hold a PM on a patient who was liable to go off in precisely this fashion at any moment.'

‘True enough. Dr Withers, may I make our position quite clear? We've had a queer set of circumstances placed before us and we've got to take stock of them. Contrary to popular belief, the police do not, in such cases, burn to get a pile of evidence that points unavoidably to exhumation. If the whole thing turns out to be so much nonsense they are, as a general rule, delighted to write it off. Give us a sound argument against arsenical poisoning and we'll be extremely grateful to you.'

Dr Withers waved his hands. ‘I can't give you, at a moment's notice, absolute proof that he didn't get arsenic. You couldn't do it for ninety-nine deaths out of a hundred, when there was gastric trouble with vomiting and purging and no analysis was taken of anything. As a matter of fact—'

‘Yes?' Alleyn prompted as he paused.

‘As a matter of fact, I dare say if there'd been anything left I might have done an analysis simply as a routine measure and to satisfy a somewhat pedantic medical conscience. But the whole place had been washed up.'

‘By whose orders?'

‘My dear man, by Barker's orders or Mrs Kentish's, or Mrs Henry Ancred's, or whoever happened to think of it. They didn't like to move him. Couldn't very well. Rigor was pretty well established, which gave me, by the way, a lead about the time of his death. When I saw him later in the day they'd fixed him up, of course, and a nice time Mrs Ancred must have had of it with all of them milling about the house in an advanced condition of hysteria and Mrs Kentish “insisting on taking a hand in the laying-out”.'