False Scent

Richard said, “Ever since you told me and all through that last scene with them, I’ve been trying to see why. Why should he, having put up with so much for so long, do such a monstrous thing? It’s — it’s… I’ve always thought him — he was so…” Richard drove his fingers through his hair. “Maurice! You knew him. Better than any of us.”

Warrender, looking at his clasped hands, muttered unhappily, “What’s that word they use nowadays? Perfectionist?”

“But what do you… Yes. All right. He was a perfectionist, I suppose.”

“Couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t up to his own standard. Look at those T’ang figures. Little lady with a flute and little lady with a lute. Lovely little creatures. Prized them more than anything else in the house. But when the parlour-maid or somebody knocked the end off one of the little lute pegs, he wouldn’t have it. Gave it to me, by God!” said Warrender.

Alleyn said, “That’s illuminating, isn’t it?”

“But it’s one thing to feel like that and another to — No!” Richard exclaimed, “it’s a nightmare. You can’t reduce it to that size. It’s irreducible. Monstrous!”

“It’s happened,” Warrender said flatly.

“Mr. Alleyn,” Anelida suggested, “would you tell us what you think? Would you take the things that led up to it out of their background and put them in order for us? Might that help, do you think, Richard?”

“I think it might, darling. If anything can.”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “shall I try? First of all, then, there’s her personal history. There are the bouts of temperament that have increased in severity and frequency — to such a degree that they have begun to suggest a serious mental condition. You’re all agreed about that, aren’t you? Colonel Warrender?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“What was she like thirty years ago, when he married her?”

Warrender looked at Richard. “Enchanting. Law unto herself. Gay. Lovely.” He raised his hand and let it fall. “Ah, well! There it is. Never mind.”

“Different? From these days?” Alleyn pursued.

“My God, yes!”

“So the musician’s lute was broken? The perfect had become imperfect?”

“Very well. Go on.”

“May we think back to yesterday, the day of the party? You must tell me if I’m all to blazes but this is how I see it. My reading, by the way, is pieced together from the statements Fox and I have collected from all of you and from the servants, who, true to form, knew more than any of you might suppose. Things began to go wrong quite early, didn’t they? Wasn’t it in the morning that she learnt for the first time that her…” He hesitated for a moment.

“It’s all right,” Richard said. “Anelida knows. Everything. She says she doesn’t mind.”

“Why on earth should I?” Anelida asked of the world at large. “We’re not living in the reign of King Lear. In any case, Mr. Alleyn’s talking about Husbandry in Heaven and me and how your mama didn’t much fancy the idea that you’d taken up with me and still less the idea of my reading for the part.”

“Which she’d assumed was written for her. That’s it,” Alleyn said. “That exacerbated a sense of being the victim of a conspiracy, which was set up by the scene in which she learnt that Miss Cavendish was to play the lead in another comedy and that Gantry and Saracen were in the ‘plot.’ She was a jealous, aging actress, abnormally possessive.”

“But not always,” Richard protested. “Not anything like always.”

“Getting more so,” Warrender muttered.

“Exactly. And perhaps because of that her husband, the perfectionist, may have transferred his ruling preoccupation from her to the young man whom he believed to be his son and on whom she was loath to relinquish her hold.”

“But did he?” Richard cried out. “Maurice, did he think that?”

“She’d — let him assume it.”

“I see. And in those days, as you’ve told us, he believed everything she said. I understand now,” Richard said to Alleyn, “why you agreed that there was no need to tell him about me. He already knew, didn’t he?”

“She herself,” Alleyn went on, “told Colonel Warrender, after the flare-up in the conservatory, that she had disillusioned her husband.”

“Did Charles,” Richard asked Warrender, “say anything to you afterwards? Did he?”

“When we were boxed up together in the study. He hated my being there. It came out. He was…” Warrender seemed to search for an appropriate phrase. “I’ve never seen a man so angry,” he said at last. “So sick with anger.”

“Oh God!” Richard said.

“And then,” Alleyn continued, “there was the row over the scent. He asked her not to use it. She made you, Colonel Warrender, spray it lavishly over her, in her husband’s presence. You left the room. You felt, didn’t you, that there was going to be a scene?”

“I shouldn’t have done it. She could always make me do what she wanted,” Warrender said. “I knew at the time but — isn’t it?”

“Never mind,” Richard said, and to Alleyn, “Was it then she told him?”

“I think it was at the climax of this scene. As he went out she was heard to shout after him, ‘Which only shows how wrong you were. You can get out whenever you like, my friend, and the sooner the better.’ She was not, as the hearer supposed, giving a servant the sack, she was giving it to him.”

“And half an hour later,” Richard said to Anelida, “there he was — standing beside her, shaking hands with her friends. I thought, when I was telephoning, he looked ill. I told you. He wouldn’t speak.”

“And then,” Anelida said to Alleyn, “came the scene in the conservatory.”

“Exactly. And, you see, he knew she had the power to make good her threats. Hard on the heels of the blow she had dealt him, he had to stand by and listen to her saying what she did say to all of you.”

“Richard,” Anelida said, “can you see? He’d loved her and he was watching her disintegrate. Anything to stop it!”

“I can see, darling, but I can’t accept it. Not that.”

“To put it very brutally,” Alleyn said, “the treasured possession was not only hideously flawed, but possessed of a devil. She reeked of the scent he’d asked her not to wear. I don’t think it would be too much to say that at that moment it symbolized for him the full horror of his feeling for her.”

“D’you mean it was then he did it?” Warrender asked.

“Yes. Then. It must have been then. During all the movement and excitement just before the speeches. He went upstairs, emptied out some of the scent and filled up the atomizer with Slaypest. He returned during the speeches. As she left the drawing-room she came face to face with him. Florence heard him ask her not to use the scent.”

Warrender gave an exclamation. “Yes?” Alleyn asked.

“Good God, d’you mean it was a — kind of gamble? If she did as he’d asked — like those gambles on suicide? Fella with a revolver. Half live, half blank cartridges.”

“Exactly that. Only this time it was a gamble in murder.” Alleyn looked at them. “It may seem strange that I tell you in detail so much that is painful and shocking. I do so because I believe that it is less damaging in the long run to know rather than to doubt.”

“Of course it is,” Anelida said quickly. “Richard, my dear, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Richard said. “I expect it is. Yes, it is.”

“Well, then,” Alleyn said, “immediately after he’d spoken to her, you came in. The photographs were taken and you went upstairs together. You tackled her about her treatment of Anelida, didn’t you?”

“It would be truer to say she attacked me. But, yes — we were both terribly angry. I’ve told you.”

“And it ended in her throwing your parentage in your teeth?”

“It ended with that.”

“When you’d gone she hurled your birthday present into the bathroom where it smashed to pieces. Instead of at once returning downstairs she went through an automatic performance. She powdered her face and painted her mouth. And then — well, then it happened. She used her scent-spray, holding it at arm’s length. The windows were shut. It had an immediate effect, but not the effect he’d anticipated.”