Final Curtain (30 page)

‘All upstage and county!' she said. ‘Fancy! And what were you wanting to know?'

‘About the Will, for instance.'

‘The Will's all right,' she said quickly. ‘You can turn the place inside out. Crawl up the chimney if you like. You won't find another Will. I'm telling you, and I know.'

‘Why are you so positive?'

She had slipped back until she rested easily on her forearm. ‘I don't mind,' she said. ‘I'll tell you. When I came in here last thing that night, my fiancé showed it to me. He'd had old Rattisbon up and a couple of witnesses and he'd signed it. He showed me. The ink was still wet. He'd burnt the old one in the fireplace there.'

‘I see.'

‘And he couldn't have written another one even if he'd wanted to. Because he was tired and his pain was bad and he said he was going to take his medicine and go to sleep.'

‘He was in bed when you visited him?'

‘Yes.' She waited for a moment, looking at her enamelled fingernails. ‘People seem to think I've got no feelings, but I've been very upset. Honestly. Well, he was sweet. And when a girl's going to be married and everything's marvellous it's a terrible thing for this to happen, I don't care what any one says.'

‘Did he seem very ill?'

‘That's what everybody keeps asking. The doctor and old Pauline and Milly. On and on. Honestly, I could scream. He just had one of his turns and he felt queer. And with the way he'd eaten and thrown a temperament on top of it, no wonder. I gave him his hot drink and kissed him nighty-nighty and he seemed all right and that's all I know.'

‘He drank his hot milk while you were with him?'

She swung over a little with a luxurious movement and looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘That's right,' she said. ‘Drank it and liked it.'

‘And his medicine?'

‘He poured that out for himself. I told him to drink up like a good boy, but he said he'd wait a bit and see if his tummy wouldn't settle down without it. So I went.'

‘Right. Now, Miss Orrincourt,' said Alleyn, facing her with his hands in his pockets, ‘you've been very frank. I shall follow your example. You want to know what we're doing here. I'll tell you. Our job, or a major part of it, is to find out why you played a string of rather infantile practical jokes on Sir Henry Ancred and let it be thought that his granddaughter was responsible.'

She was on her feet so quickly that he actually felt his nerves jump. She was close to him now; her under-lip jutted out and her brows, thin hairy lines, were drawn together in a scowl. She resembled some drawing in a man's magazine of an infuriated baggage in a bedroom. One almost expected some dubious caption to issue in a balloon from her lips.

‘Who says I did it?' she demanded.

‘I do, at the moment,' Alleyn said. ‘Come now. Let's start at Mr Juniper's shop. You bought the Raspberry there, you know.'

‘The dirty little so-and-so,' she said meditatively. ‘What a pal!
And
what a gentleman, I don't suppose.'

Alleyn ignored these strictures upon Mr Juniper. ‘Then,' he said, ‘there's that business about the paint on the banisters.'

Obviously this astonished her. Her face was suddenly bereft of expression, a mask with slightly dilated eyes. ‘Wait a bit,' she said. ‘That's funny!'

Alleyn waited.

‘Here!' she said. ‘Have you been talking to young Ceddie?'

‘No.'

‘That's what you say,' she muttered, and turned on Fox. ‘What about you, then?'

‘No, Miss Orrincourt,' said Fox blandly. ‘Not me or the Chief Inspector.'

‘Chief Inspector?' she said. ‘Coo!'

Alleyn saw that she was looking at him with a new interest and had a premonition of what was to come.

‘That'd be one of the high-ups, wouldn't it? Chief Inspector who? I don't seem to have caught the name.'

Any hopes he may have entertained that his connection with Troy was unknown to her vanished when she repeated his name, clapped her hand over her mouth and ejaculating ‘Coo! That's a good one,' burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

‘Pardon me,' she said presently, ‘but when you come to think of it it's funny. You can't get away from it, you know, it's funny. Seeing it was her that—Well, of course! That's how you knew about the paint on the banisters.'

‘And what,' Alleyn asked, ‘is the connection between Sir Cedric Ancred and the paint on the banisters?'

‘I'm not going to give myself away,' said Miss Orrincourt, ‘nor Ceddie either, if it comes to that. Ceddie's pretty well up the spout anyway. If he's let me down he's crazy. There's a whole lot of things I want to know first. What's all this stuff about a book? What's the idea? Is it me, or is it everybody else in this dump that's gone haywire? Look! Somebody puts a dirty little book in a cheese-dish and serves it up for lunch. And when they find it, what do these half-wits do? Look at me as if I was the original hoodunit. Well, I mean to say, it's silly. And what a book! Written by somebody with a lisp and what about? Keeping people fresh after they're dead. Give you the willies. And when I say I never put it in the cheese-dish what do they do? Pauline starts tearing herself to shreds and Dessy says, “We're not so foolish as to suppose you'd want to run your head in a noose,” and Milly says she happens to know I've read it, and they all go out as if I was something the cat'd brought in, and I sit there wondering if it's me or all of them who ought to be locked up.'

‘And had you ever seen the book before?'

‘I seem to remember,' she began, and then looking from Alleyn to Fox with a new wariness, she said sharply: ‘Not to notice. Not to know what it was about.' And after a pause she added dully: ‘I'm not much of a one for reading.'

Alleyn said: ‘Miss Orrincourt, will you without prejudice tell me if you personally were responsible for any of the practical jokes other than the ones already under discussion?'

‘I'm not answering any questions. I don't know what's going on here. A girl's got to look after herself. I thought I had one friend in this crazy-gang, now I'm beginning to think
he's
let me down.'

‘I suppose,' said Alleyn, wearily, ‘you mean Sir Cedric Ancred?'

‘
Sir
Cedric Ancred,' Miss Orrincourt repeated with a shrill laugh. ‘The bloody little baronet. Excuse my smile, but honestly it's a scream.' She turned her back on them and walked out, leaving the door open.

They could still hear her laughing with unconvincing virtuosity as she walked away down the corridor.

‘Have we,' Fox asked blandly, ‘got anywhere with that young lady? Or have we not?'

‘Not very far, if anywhere at all,' Alleyn said, morosely. ‘I don't know about you, Fox, but I found her performance tolerably convincing. Not that impressions of that sort amount to very much. Suppose she did put arsenic in the old man's hot milk, wouldn't this be the only line she could reasonably take? And at this stage of the proceedings, when I still have a very faint hope that we may come across something that blows their damn' suspicions to smithereens, I couldn't very well insist on anything. We'll just have to go mousing along.'

‘Where to?' Fox asked.

‘For the moment, in different directions. I've been carrying you about like a broody hen, Foxkin, and it's time you brought forth. Down you go and exercise the famous technique on Barker and his retinue of elderly maids. Find out all about the milk, trace its whole insipid history from cow to Thermos. Inspire gossip. Prattle. Seek out the paper-dump, the bottle-dump, the mops and the pails. Let us go clanking back to London like a dry canteen. Salvage the Thermos flask. We'll have to try for an analysis but what a hope! Get along with you, Fox. Do your stuff.'

‘And where may I ask, Mr Alleyn, are you going?'

‘Oh,' said Alleyn, ‘I'm a snob. I'm going to see the baronet.'

Fox paused at the doorway. ‘Taking it by and large, sir,' he said, ‘and on the face of it as it stands, do you reckon there'll be an exhumation?'

‘There'll be one exhumation at all events. Tomorrow, if Dr Curtis can manage it.'

‘Tomorrow!' said Fox, startled. ‘Dr Curtis? Sir Henry Ancred?'

‘No,' Alleyn said, ‘the cat, Carabbas.'

A
LLEYN INTERVIEWED CEDRIC
in the library. It was a place without character or life. Rows of uniform editions stood coldly behind glass doors. There was no smell of tobacco, or memory of fires, only the darkness of an unused room.

Cedric's manner was both effusive and uneasy. He made a little dart at Alleyn and flapped at his hand. He began at once to talk about Troy. ‘She was too marvellous, a perfect darling. So thrilling to watch her at work: that
magical
directness, almost intimidating, one felt. You must be madly proud of her, of course.'

His mouth opened and shut, his teeth glinted, his pale eyes stared and his voice gabbled on and on. He was restless too, and wandered about the room aimlessly, lifting lids of empty cigarette boxes and moving ornaments. He recalled acquaintance with Alleyn's nephews, with whom, he said, he had been at school. He professed a passionate interest in Alleyn's work. He returned again to Troy, suggesting that he alone among the Philistines had spoken her language. There was a disquieting element in all this, and Alleyn, when an opportunity came, cut across it.

‘One moment,' he said. ‘Our visit is an official one. I'm sure you will agree that we should keep it so. May we simply think the fact of my wife having been commissioned to paint Sir Henry a sort of freakish coincidence and nothing to do with the matter in hand? Except, of course, in so far as her job may turn out to have any bearing on the circumstances.'

Cedric's mouth had remained slightly open. He turned pink, touched his hair, and said: ‘Of course if you feel like that about it. I merely thought that a friendly atmosphere—'

‘That was extremely kind,' said Alleyn.

‘Unless your somewhat muscular sense of the official proprieties forbids it,' Cedric suggested acidly, ‘shall we at least sit down?'

‘Thank you,' said Alleyn tranquilly, ‘that would be much more comfortable.'

He sat in a vast armchair, crossed his knees, joined his hands, and with what Troy called his donnish manner, prepared to tackle Cedric.

‘Mr Thomas Ancred tells me you share the feeling that further inquiries should be made into the circumstances of Sir Henry's death.'

‘Well, I suppose I do,' Cedric agreed fretfully. ‘I mean, it's all pretty vexing, isn't it? Well, I mean one would like to know. All sorts of things depend…And yet again it's not very delicious…Of course, when one considers that I'm the one who's most involved…Well,
look
at me.
Incarcerated
, in this frightful house! And the entail a pittance. All those taxes too, and
rapacious
death duties. Never, never will anybody be found mad enough to rent it, and as for schools, Carol Able does nothing but exclaim how inconvenient and how damp. And now the war's over the problem children will be hurried away. One will be left to wander in rags down whispering corridors. So that you see,' he added, waving his hands, ‘one does rather wonder—'

‘Quite so.'

‘And they
will
keep talking about me as Head of the Family. Before I know where I am I shall have turned into another Old Person.'

‘There are one or two points,' Alleyn began, and immediately Cedric leant forward with an ineffable air of concentration, ‘that we'd like to clear up. The first is the authorship of these anonymous letters.'

‘Well, I didn't write them.'

‘Have you any idea who did?'

‘Personally I favour my Aunt Pauline.'

‘Really? Why?'