‘We’ll soon get this business cleared up,’ said the latter, confidently. ‘We’ll check up on this Bright lad’s movements, but they’re probably right enough. They fit in O.K. with what that man said at Seahampton. And we’ll keep an eye on Bright. He’s had to give us an address and his promise to stay in Wilvercombe, because, of course, he’ll be wanted for the inquest – when we get an inquest. The body’s bound to turn up soon. I can’t understand why it’s not been found before this. It’s been five days in the water now, and it can’t stay there for ever. They float first, you know, and then they sink, but they have to come up again when the gases start to form. I’ve seen ’em blown up like balloons. It must have got caught somewhere, that’s about the way of it; but we’ll be dragging the bay near the Grinders again this afternoon, and we’re sure to get something before long. I’ll be glad when we do. Makes one feel kind of foolish to be carrying on an investigation without a body to show for it.’
‘Satisfied?’ asked Hardy, as Wimsey returned from the police-station. He had telephoned his story to Town and was absorbing a little refreshment after his labours.
‘I ought to be,’ replied his lordship. ‘The only thing that worries me, Sally, is that if I’d wanted to invent a story to fit this case, that is exactly the story I should have invented. I wonder where Mr Bright was at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon.’
‘What an obstinate devil you are,’ said Mr Hardy. ‘Fact is, you’re so damned keen on a murder, you smell murder everywhere. Forget it.’
Wimsey was silent, but when he had got rid of Sally Hardy, he drew out of his pocket a small leaflet entitled ‘Tide Tables’, and studied it carefully.
‘I thought so,’ he said.
He took a piece of paper and wrote out a schedule of Things to be noted and Things to be Done under the name of William Bright. It embodied the substance of Bright’s story and of the conversation with the police; but the left-hand column ended with this observation:
‘He states that the tide, lapping against the Esplanade, seemed to call him in a very convincing and poetic manner. But at midnight on Tuesday, 16 June the tide was not lapping against the Esplanade. It was the extreme bottom of the ebb.’
And in the right-hand column he wrote:
‘Keep an eye on him.’
After a little more thought, he took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, asking for information about Bolshevik agents. One never could tell. Queer things have happened before this – queerer things even than Bolshevik conspiracies. Incidentally, he mentioned Mr Haviland Martin and his banking account. Parker, with the Bolsheviks as an excuse, might find ways and means to unlock even a bank-manager’s lips. Superintendent Glaisher might not like this horning in on his province – but Parker had married Lord Peter’s sister, and may not a man write a private letter to his own brother-in-law?
XV
THE EVIDENCE OF THE LADYLOVE AND THE LANDLADY
‘You are an adept in these chamber-passions,
And have a heart that’s Cupid’s arrow-cushion
Worn out with use.’
Death’s Jest-Book
‘What’s this? Did you not see a white convulsion
Rut through his cheek and fling his eyelids up?
There’s mischief in the paper.’
Fragment
Tuesday, 23 June
In the meantime, Harriet’s novel was not getting along very well. Not only was there the tiresomeness about the town-clock – or ought it to be called the Tolbooth clock? – but also she had arrived at the point where, according to the serial editor who was paying for the first rights, the heroine and the detective’s friend were expected to indulge in a spot of love-making. Now, a person whose previous experience of love has been disappointing, and who has just been through a harassing scene with another suitor and is, further, busily engaged in investigating the rather sordid love-affairs of a third party who has been brought to a violent and blood-boltered end, is in no mood to sit down and deal competently with the raptures of two innocents holding hands in a rose-garden. Harriet shook her head impatiently, and plunged into her distasteful task.
‘I say, Betty, I’m afraid you must think I’m a pretty average sort of idiot.’
‘But I don’t think you’re an idiot at all, you idiot.’
Would even the readers of the Daily Message think that amusing? Harriet feared not. Well, better get on with it. The girl would have to say something encouraging now, or the stammering young imbecile would never come to the point.
‘I think it’s perfectly wonderful that you should be doing all this to help me.’
Here she was, remorselessly binding this hideous load of gratitude on the unfortunate girl. But Betty and Jack were a pair of hypocrites, anyway, because they both knew perfectly well that Robert Templeton was doing all the work. However.
‘As if there was anything in the world I wouldn’t try and do for you – Betty!’
‘Well, Jack?’
‘Betty – darling – I suppose you couldn’t possibly –’
Harriet came to the conclusion that she couldn’t – not possibly. She picked up the telephone, got put through to Telegrams, and dictated a brief, snappy message to her long-suffering agent. ‘Tell Bootle I absolutely refuse induce love-interest – Vane.’
After that she felt better, but the novel was perfectly impossible. Wasn’t there anything else she could do? Yes. She again seized the telephone and put an inquiry through to the office. Was it possible to get into touch with M. Antoine?
The management seemed quite used to putting clients in touch with M. Antoine. They had a telephone number which ought to find him. It did. Could M. Antoine put Miss Vane in touch with Miss Leila Garland and Mr da Soto? Certainly. Nothing was more simple. Mr da Soto was playing at the Winter Gardens, and the morning concert would be just finishing. Miss Garland would probably be joining him for lunch. In any case, Antoine would charge himself with all that and would, if Miss Vane desired it, call for her and accompany her to the Winter Gardens. It was most good of M. Antoine. On the contrary, it was a pleasure; in a quarter of an hour’s time, then? Parfaitement.
‘Tell me, M. Antoine,’ said Harriet, as their taxi rolled along the Esplanade. ‘You who are a person of great experience, is love, in your opinion, a matter of the first importance?’
‘It is, alas! of a great importance, mademoiselle, but of the first importance, no!’
‘What is of the first importance?’
‘Mademoiselle, I tell you frankly that to have a healthy mind in a healthy body is the greatest gift of le bon Dieu, and when I see so many people who have clean blood and strong bodies spoiling themselves and distorting their brains with drugs and drink and foolishness, it makes me angry. They should leave that to the people who cannot help themselves because to them life is without hope.’
Harriet hardly knew what to reply; the words were spoken with such personal and tragic significance. Rather fortunately, Antoine did not wait.
‘L’amour! These ladies come and dance and excite themselves and want love and think it is happiness. And they tell me about their sorrows – me – and they have no sorrows at all, only that they are silly and selfish and lazy. Their husbands are unfaithful and their lovers run away and what do they say? Do they say, I have two hands, two feet, all my faculties, I will make a life for myself? No. They say, Give me cocaine, give me the cocktail, give me the thrill, give me my gigolo, give me l’amo-o-ur! Like a mouton bleating in a field. If they knew!
Harriet laughed.
‘You’re right, M. Antoine. I don’t believe l’amour matters so terribly, after all.’
‘But understand me,’ said Antoine who, like most French-men, was fundamentally serious and domestic, ‘I do not say that love is not important. It is no doubt agreeable to love, and to marry an amiable person who will give you fine, healthy children. This Lord Peter Wimsey, par example, who is obviously a gentleman of the most
perfect integrity –’
‘Oh, never mind him!’ broke in Harriet, hastily. ‘I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about Paul Alexis and these people we are going to see.’
‘Ah! c’est différent. Mademoiselle, I think you know very well the difference between love which is important and love which is not important. But you must remember that one may have an important love for an unimportant person. And you must remember also that where people are sick in their minds or their bodies it does not need even love to make them do foolish things. When I kill myself, for example, it may be out of boredom, or disgust, or because I have the headache or the stomach-ache or because I am no longer able to take a first-class position and do not want to be third-rate.’
‘I hope you’re not thinking of anything of the sort.’
‘Oh, I shall kill myself one of these days,’ said Antoine, cheerfully. ‘But it will not be for love. No. I am not so détraqù as all that.’
The taxi drew up at the Winter Gardens. Harriet felt a certain delicacy about paying the fare, but soon realised that for Antoine the thing was a commonplace. She accompanied him to the orchestra entrance where, in a few minutes’ time, they were joined by Leila Garland and Luis da Soto – the perfect platinum blonde and the perfect lounge-lizard. Both were perfectly self-possessed and incredibly polite; the only difficulty – as Harriet found when they were seated together at a table – was to get any reliable information out of them. Leila had evidently taken up an attitude, and stuck to it. Paul Alexis was ‘a terribly nice boy’, but ‘too romantic altogether’. Leila had been ‘terribly grieved’ to send him away, he ‘took it so terribly hard’ – but, after all, her feeling for him had been no more than pity – he had been ‘so terribly timid and lonely’. When Luis came along, she realised at once where her affections really lay. She rolled her large periwinkle eyes at Mr da Soto, who responded by a languishing droop of his fringed lids.
‘I was all the more sorry about it,’ said Leila, ‘because poor darling Paul –’
‘Not darling, honey.’
‘Of course not, Luis – only the poor thing’s dead. Anyway, I was sorry because poor Paul seemed to be so terribly worried about something. But he didn’t confide in me, and what is a girl to do when a man won’t confide in her? I sometimes used to wonder if he wasn’t being blackmailed by somebody.’
‘Why? Did he seem to be short of money?’
‘Well, yes, he did. Of course, that wouldn’t make any difference to me; I’m not that sort of girl. Still, it’s not pleasant, you know, to think that one of your gentleman friends is being blackmailed. I mean, a girl never knows she may not get mixed up in something unpleasant. I mean, it isn’t quite nice, is it?’
‘Far from it. How long ago did he start being worried?’
‘Let me see. I think it was about five months ago. Yes, it was. I mean, that was when the letters started coming.’
‘Letters?’
‘Yes; long letters with foreign stamps on them. I think they came from Czechoslovakia or one of those queer places. It wasn’t Russia, anyway, because I asked him and he said no. I thought it was very funny, because he said he’d never been in any foreign country except Russia when he was quite a little boy, and in America, of course.’
‘Have you told anybody else about these letters?’
‘No. You see, Paul always said it would do him harm to have them mentioned. He said the Bolsheviks would kill him if anything got out. I said to him, “I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said, “I’m not a Bolshie,” I said, “and I don’t know any people of that sort, so what harm would it do to tell me about it?” But now he’s dead it can’t do any harm, can it? Besides, if you ask me, I don’t believe it was Bolshies at all. I mean, it doesn’t seem likely, does it? I said to him, “If you expect me to swallow that story, you’re expecting a lot,” I said. But he wouldn’t tell me, and of course, that did make a little coolness between us. I mean to say, when a girl is friends with a man, like me and Paul, she does expect a little consideration.’
‘Of course she does,’ said Harriet, warmly. ‘It was very wrong of him not to be perfectly frank with you. I really think, in your place, I’d have felt justified in trying to find out who the letters were from.’
Leila played delicately with a piece of bread.
‘As a matter of fact,’ she admitted, ‘I did take a tiny peep once. I thought I owed it to myself. But they were all nonsense. You couldn’t make a word of them.’
‘Were they in a foreign language?’
‘Well, I don’t know. They were all in printing letters and some of the words hadn’t any vowels in them at all. You couldn’t possibly pronounce them.’
‘It sounds like a cipher,’ suggested Antoine.
‘Yes, that’s just what I thought. I did think it was terribly funny.’
‘But surely,’ said Harriet, ‘an ordinary blackmailer wouldn’t write letters in cipher.’
‘Oh, but why shouldn’t they? I mean, they might have been a gang, you know, like in that story, The Trail of the Purple Python. Have you read it? The Purple Python was a Turkish millionaire, and he had a secret house full of steel-lined rooms and luxurious divans and obelisks–’
‘Obelisks?’
‘Well, you know. Ladies who weren’t quite respectable. And he had agents in every country in Europe, who bought up compromising letters and he wrote to his victims in cipher and signed his missives with a squiggle in purple ink. Only the English detective’s young lady found out his secret by disguising herself as an obelisk and the detective who was really Lord Humphrey Chillingfold arrived with the police just in time to rescue her from the loathsome embrace of the Purple Python. It was a terribly exciting book. Paul read lots of books like that – I expect he was trying to pick up ideas for getting the better of the gang. He liked the talkies too. Of course, in those stories, the hero always comes out on top, only poor dear Paul wasn’t really a bit like a hero. I said to him one day, “It’s all very well,’ I said, “but I can’t see you venturing into a Chinese opium den full of gangsters, with a pistol in your pocket, and being gassed and sandbagged and then throwing off your bonds and attacking the Underworld King with an electric lamp. You’d be afraid of getting hurt,” I said to him. And so he would.’
Mr da Soto snickered appreciatively.
‘You said a mouthful, honey. Poor Alexis was a friend of mine, but courage was just what he didn’t have. I told him, if he didn’t stand out of my way and let little Leila pick her own sweetie, I would give him a sock on the jaw. I give you my word, he was scared stiff.’
‘So he was,’ said Leila. ‘Of course, a girl couldn’t feel any respect for a man that didn’t stand up for himself.’
‘Remarkable!’ said Antoine. ‘And this young man, so timid, so complaisant, cuts his throat with a big, ugly gash because you turn him down. C’est inoui.’
‘I suppose you believe his Bolshie story,’ said Leila, offended.
‘I? I believe nothing. I am agnostic. But I say that your portrait of Alexis is not very logical.’
‘Antoine always talks about logic,’ said Leila, ‘but what I say is, people aren’t logical. Look at all the funny things they do. Especially men. I always think men are terribly inconsistent.’
‘You bet they are,’ said Mr da Soto. ‘You’re just dead right, sweetest. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be bothered with naughty little girlies like you.’
‘Yes, but the letters,’ said Harriet, sticking desperately to her point. ‘How often did they come?’
‘About once a week, sometimes oftener. He kept them locked up in a little box. He used to answer them, too. Sometimes when I went round to see him, he’d have his door locked, and old Ma Lefranc said he was writing letters and wasn’t to be disturbed. Naturally, a girl doesn’t like her gentleman friend to behave like that. I mean, you do expect him to pay a little attention to you and not shut himself up writing letters when you come to see him. I mean, it wasn’t t
he sort of thing you could expect a girl to put up with.’
‘Of course you couldn’t baby,’ said Mr da Soto.
Antoine smiled, and murmured unexpectedly:
‘Mais si quelqu’un venoit de la part de Cassandre,
Ouvre-luy tost la porte, et ne le fais attendre,
Soudain entre dans ma chambre, et me vien accoustrer.’
Harriet smiled back at him and then, struck with an idea, asked Leila:
‘When did the last of these letters arrive?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t friends with him any more after I got friendly with Luis. But I expect Ma Lefranc would tell you. There isn’t much goes on that Ma Lefranc doesn’t know about.’
‘Did you and Alexis live together when you were friendly?’ demanded Harriet, bluntly.
‘Of course not; what a dreadful thing to ask a girl.’
‘I mean, in the same house.’
‘Oh, no. We used to go and see each other quite often, but of course, after Luis and me became friends, I said to Paul that it would be better if we didn’t see each other any more. You see, Paul was so fond of me, and Luis would have been imagining things – wouldn’t you, Luis?’
‘You bet your life I would, honey.’
‘Haven’t you told the police about these letters?’
‘No, I have not,’ replied Miss Garland, decidedly. ‘I don’t say I mightn’t have told them if they had asked properly, but the way that fat Umpelty went on, you’d have thought I wasn’t a respectable girl. So I said to him, “I know nothing about it,” I said, “and you’ve got nothing against me,” I said, “and you can’t make me answer your silly questions unless you take me down to your dirty old police-station and charge me,” I said.’ Miss Garland’s carefully modulated tones escaped from control and became shrill. ‘And I said, “It wouldn’t be a scrap of good if you did,” I said, “because I know nothing about Paul Alexis and I haven’t seen him for months,” I said, “and you can ask anybody you like,” I said, “and what’s more, if you get bullying a respectable girl like this,” I said, “you’ll get yourself into trouble, Mr Rumpelty-Bumpelty,” I said, “so now you know where you get off.” That’s what I said, and it’s a good thing there’s a law in this country to protect girls like I.’