Страница 53 из 56
Alleyn looked at the three men. There was no change in their posture or their expressions, but a dull red had crept into Chubb’s face, and the Colonel’s (which habitually looked as if it had reached saturation point in respect of purple) seemed to darken. They said nothing.
“I see I’ve come near enough the mark for none of you to contradict me,” Alleyn remarked.
“On the contrary,” Gomez countered. “Your entire story is a fantasy and a libel. It is too farcical to merit a reply.”
“Well, Chubb?”
“I’m not answering the charge, sir. Except what I said before. I was clobbered.”
“Colonel?”
“What? No comment. No bloody comment.”
“Why were you all trying to get in here half an hour ago?”
“No comment,” they said together, and Chubb added his former statement that he’d had no intention of calling on the Sanskrits but had merely stopped off to offer his support to the Colonel and take him home.
The Colonel said something that sounded like: “Most irregular and u
“Are you sticking to that?” Alleyn said. “Are you sure you weren’t, all three of you, going to throw a farewell party for the Sanskrits and give them, or at any rate, him, something handsome to remember you by?”
They were very still. They didn’t look at Alleyn or at each other, but for a moment the shadow of a fugitive smile moved across their faces.
The front doorbell was pealing again, continuously. Alleyn went out to the landing.
Mrs. Chubb was at the street door demanding to be let in. The constable on duty turned, looked up the stairs, and saw Alleyn.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “Ask her to come up.”
It was a very different Mrs. Chubb who came quickly up the stairs, thrusting her shoulders forward and jerking up her head to confront Alleyn on the landing.
“Where is he?” she demanded, breathing hard. “Where’s Chubb? You said keep him home and now you’ve got him in here. And with them others. Haven’t you? I know he’s here. I was in the Mews and I seen. Why? What are you doing to him? Where,” Mrs. Chubb reiterated, “is my Chubb?”
“Come in,” Alleyn said. “He’s here.”
She looked past him into the room. Her husband stood up and she went to him. “What are you doing?” she said. “You come back with me. You’ve got no call to be here.”
Chubb said: “You don’t want to be like this. You keep out of it. You’re out of place here, Min.”
“I’m out of place! Standing by my own husband!”
“Look — dear—”
“Don’t talk to me!” She turned on the other two men. “You two gentlemen,” she said, “you got no call because he works for you to get him involved stirring it all up again. Putting ideas in his head. It won’t bring her back. Leave us alone. Syd — you come home with me. Come home.”
“I can’t,” he said. “Min. I can’t.”
“Why can’t you?” She clapped her hand to her mouth. “They’ve arrested you! They’ve found out—”
“Shut up,” he shouted. “You silly cow. You don’t know what you’re saying. Shut up.” They stared aghast at each other. “I’m sorry, Min,” he said. “I never meant to speak rough. I’m not arrested. It’s not like that.”
“Where are they, then? Those two?”
Gomez said: “You! Chubb! Have you no control over your woman. Get rid of her.”
“And that’ll do from you,” Chubb said, turning savagely on him.
From the depths of his armchair, Colonel Cockburn-Montfort, in an astonishingly clear and incisive tone, said: “Chubb!
“Sir!”
“You’re forgetting yourself.”
“Sir.”
Alleyn said: “Mrs. Chubb, everything I said to you this morning was said in good faith. Circumstances have changed profoundly since then in a way that you know nothing about. You will know before long. In the meantime, if you please, you will either stay here, quietly, in this room—”
“You better, Min,” Chubb said.
“—or,” Alleyn said, “just go home and wait there. It won’t be for long.”
“Go on, then, Min. You better.”
“I’ll stay,” she said. She walked to the far end of the room and sat down.
Gomez, trembling with what seemed to be rage, shouted: “For the last time — where are they? Where have they gone? Have they escaped? I demand an answer. Where are the Sanskrits?”
“They are downstairs,” Alleyn said.
Gomez leapt to his feet, let out an exclamation — in Portuguese, Alleyn supposed — seemed to be in two minds what to say, and at last with a sort of doubtful relish said: “Have you arrested them?”
“No.”
“I want to see them,” he said. “I am longing to see them.”
“And so you shall,” said Alleyn.
He glanced at Fox, who went downstairs. Gomez moved towards the door.
The constable who had been on duty in the room came back and stationed himself inside the door.
“Shall we go down?” Alleyn said and led the way.
It was from this point that the sequence of events in the pig-pottery took on such a grotesque, such a macabre aspect that Alleyn was to look back on the episode as possibly the most outlandish in his professional career. From the moment the corpse of Miss Sanskrit received the first of her gentlemen visitors, they all three in turn became puppet-like caricatures of themselves, acting in a two-dimensional, crudely exaggerated style. In any other setting the element of black farce would have rioted. Even here, under the terrible auspices of the Sanskrits, it rose from time to time like a bout of unseemly hysteria at the bad performance of a Jacobean tragedy.
The room downstairs had been made ready for the visit. Bailey and Thompson waited near the window, Gibson by the desk, and Fox, with his notebook in hand, near the alcove. Two uniform police stood inside the door and a third at the back of the alcove. The bodies of the Sanskrits, brother and sister, had not been moved or shrouded. The room was now dreadfully stuffy.
Alleyn joined Fox. “Come in, Mr. Gomez,” he said.
Gomez stood on the threshold, a wary animal, Alleyn thought, waiting with its ears laid back before advancing into strange territory. He looked, without moving his head, from one to another of the men in the room, seemed to hesitate, seemed to suspect, and then, swaggering a little, came into the room.
He stopped dead in front of Alleyn and said: “Well?”
Alleyn made a slight gesture. Gomez followed it, turned his head — and saw.
The noise he made was something between a retch and an exclamation. For a moment he was perfectly still, and it was as if he and Miss Sanskrit actually and sensibly confronted each other. And because of the arch ma
He walked down the room and into the alcove. The policeman by the furnace gave a slight cough and eased his chin. Gomez inspected the bodies. He walked round the work table and he looked into the packing case. He might have been a visitor to a museum. There was no sound in the room other than the light fall of his feet on the wooden floor and the dry buzzing of flies.
Then he turned his back on the alcove, pointed at Alleyn, and said: “You! What did you think to achieve by this? Make me lose my nerve? Terrify me into saying something you could twist into an admission? Oh, no, my friend! I had no hand in the destruction of this vermin. Show me the man who did it and I’ll kiss him on both cheeks and salute him as a brother, but I had no hand in it and you’ll never prove anything else.”
He stopped. He was shaking as if with a rigor. He made to leave the room and saw that the door was guarded. And then he screamed out: “Cover them up. They’re obscene,” and went to the curtained window, turning his back on the room.
Fox, on a look from Alleyn, had gone upstairs. Thompson said under his breath, “Could I have a second, Mr. Alleyn?”
They went into the hallway. Thompson produced an envelope from his pocket and shook the contents out in his palm — two circular flattish objects about the size of an old sixpence, with convex upper surfaces. The under-surface of one had a pimple on it and on the other, a hole. They were blistered and there were tiny fragments of an indistinguishable charred substance clinging to them.