‘And what steps have you taken?’
‘I have done my utmost to supervise what Lady Grayle eats and drinks.’
Mr Parker Pyne nodded. ‘Do you think Lady Grayle has any suspicion herself?’ he asked casually.
‘Oh, no, I’m sure she hasn’t.’
‘There you are wrong,’ said Mr Parker Pyne. ‘Lady Grayle does suspect.’
Miss MacNaughton showed her astonishment.
‘Lady Grayle is more capable of keeping a secret than you imagine,’ said Mr Parker Pyne. ‘She is a woman who knows how to keep her own counsel very well.’
‘That surprises me very much,’ said Miss MacNaughton slowly.
‘I should like to ask you one more question, Miss MacNaughton. Do you think Lady Grayle likes you?’
‘I’ve never thought about it.’
They were interrupted. Mohammed came in, his face beaming, his robes flowing behind him.
‘Lady, she hear you come back; she ask for you. She say why you not come to her?’
Elsie MacNaughton rose hurriedly. Mr Parker Pyne rose also.
‘Would a consultation early tomorrow morning suit you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, that would be the best time. Lady Grayle sleeps late. In the meantime, I shall be very careful.’
‘I think Lady Grayle will be careful too.’
Miss MacNaughton disappeared.
Mr Parker Pyne did not see Lady Grayle till just before dinner. She was sitting smoking a cigarette and burning what seemed to be a letter. She took no notice at all of him, by which he gathered that she was still offended.
After dinner he played bridge with Sir George, Pamela and Basil. Everyone seemed a little distrait, and the bridge game broke up early.
It was some hours later when Mr Parker Pyne was roused. It was Mohammed who came to him.
‘Old lady, she very ill. Nurse, she very frightened. I try to get doctor.’
Mr Parker Pyne hurried on some clothes. He arrived at the doorway of Lady Grayle’s cabin at the same time as Basil West. Sir George and Pamela were inside. Elsie MacNaughton was working desperately over her patient. As Mr Parker Pyne arrived, a final convulsion seized the poor lady. Her arched body writhed and stiffened. Then she fell back on her pillows.
Mr Parker Pyne drew Pamela gently outside.
‘How awful!’ the girl was half-sobbing. ‘How awful! Is she, is she–?’
‘Dead? Yes, I am afraid it is all over.’
He put her into Basil’s keeping. Sir George came out of the cabin, looking dazed.
‘I never thought she was really ill,’ he was muttering. ‘Never thought it for a moment.’
Mr Parker Pyne pushed past him and entered the cabin.
Elsie MacNaughton’s face was white and drawn. ‘They have sent for a doctor?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ Then he said: ‘Strychnine?’
‘Yes. Those convulsions are unmistakable. Oh, I can’t believe it!’ She sank into a chair, weeping. He patted her shoulder.
Then an idea seemed to strike him. He left the cabin hurriedly and went to the lounge. There was a little scrap of paper left unburnt in an ash-tray. Just a few words were distinguishable:
‘Now, that’s interesting,’ said Mr Parker Pyne.
III
Mr Parker Pyne sat in the room of a prominent Cairo official. ‘So that’s the evidence,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘Yes, pretty complete. Man must have been a damned fool.’
‘I shouldn’t call Sir George a brainy man.’
‘All the same!’ The other recapitulated: ‘Lady Grayle wants a cup of Bovril. The nurse makes it for her. Then she must have sherry in it. Sir George produces the sherry. Two hours later, Lady Grayle dies with unmistakable signs of strychnine poisoning. A packet of strychnine is found in Sir George’s cabin and another packet actually in the pocket of his dinner jacket.’
‘Very thorough,’ said Mr Parker Pyne. ‘Where did the strychnine come from, by the way?’
‘There’s a little doubt over that. The nurse had some–in case Lady Grayle’s heart troubled her–but she’s contradicted herself once or twice. First she said her supply was intact, and now she says it isn’t.’
‘Very unlike her not to be sure,’ was Mr Parker Pyne’s comment.
‘They were in it together, in my opinion. They’ve got a weakness for each other, those two.’
‘Possibly; but if Miss MacNaughton had been planning murder, she’d have done it a good deal better. She’s an efficient young woman.’
‘Well, there it is. In my opinion, Sir George is in for it. He hasn’t a dog’s chance.’
‘Well, well,’ said Mr Parker Pyne, ‘I must see what I can do.’
He sought out the pretty niece.
Pamela was white and indignant. ‘Nunks never did such a thing–never–never–never!’
‘Then who did?’ said Mr Parker Pyne placidly.
Pamela came nearer. ‘Do you know what I think? She did it herself. She’s been frightfully queer lately. She used to imagine things.’
‘What things?’
‘Queer things. Basil, for instance. She was always hinting that Basil was in love with her. And Basil and I are–we are–’
‘I realize that,’ said Mr Parker Pyne, smiling.
‘All that about Basil was pure imagination. I think she had a down on poor little Nunks, and I think she made up that story and told it to you, and then put the strychnine in his cabin and in his pocket and poisoned herself. People have done things like that, haven’t they?’
‘They have,’ admitted Mr Parker Pyne. ‘But I don’t think that Lady Grayle did. She wasn’t, if you’ll allow me to say so, the type.’
‘But the delusions?’
‘Yes, I’d like to ask Mr West about that.’
He found the young man in his room. Basil answered his questions readily enough.
‘I don’t want to sound fatuous, but she took a fancy to me. That’s why I daren’t let her know about me and Pamela. She’d have had Sir George fire me.’
‘You think Miss Grayle’s theory a likely one?’
‘Well, it’s possible, I suppose.’ The young man was doubtful.
‘But not good enough,’ said Mr Parker Pyne quietly. ‘No, we must find something better.’ He became lost in meditation for a minute or two. ‘A confession would be best,’ he said briskly. He unscrewed his fountain pen and produced a sheet of paper. ‘Just write it out, will you?’
Basil West stared at him in amazement. ‘Me? What on earth do you mean?’
‘My dear young man’–Mr Parker Pyne sounded almost paternal–‘I know all about it. How you made love to the good lady. How she had scruples. How you fell in love with the pretty, penniless niece. How you arranged your plot. Slow poisoning. It might pass for natural death from gastroenteritis–if not, it would be laid to Sir George’s doing, since you were careful to let the attacks coincide with his presence.
‘Then your discovery that the lady was suspicious and had talked to me about the matter. Quick action! You abstracted some strychnine from Miss MacNaughton’s store. Planted some of it in Sir George’s cabin, and some in his pocket, and put sufficient into a cachet which you enclosed with a note to the lady, telling her it was a “cachet of dreams.”
‘A romantic idea. She’d take it as soon as the nurse had left her, and no one would know anything about it. But you made one mistake, my young man. It is useless asking a lady to burn letters. They never do. I’ve got all that pretty correspondence, including the one about the cachet.’
Basil West had turned green. All his good looks had vanished. He looked like a trapped rat.
‘Damn you,’ he snarled. ‘So you know all about it. You damned interfering Nosey Parker.’
Mr Parker Pyne was saved from physical violence by the appearance of the witnesses he had thoughtfully arranged to have listening outside the half-closed door.
IV
Mr Parker Pyne was again discussing the case with hi
s friend the high official.
‘And I hadn’t a shred of evidence! Only an almost indecipherable fragment, with ‘Burn this!’ on it. I deduced the whole story and tried it on him. It worked. I’d stumbled on the truth. The letters did it. Lady Grayle had burned every scrap he wrote, but he didn’t know that.
‘She was really a very unusual woman. I was puzzled when she came to me. What she wanted was for me to tell her that her husband was poisoning her. In that case, she meant to go off with young West. But she wanted to act fairly. Curious character.’
‘That poor little girl is going to suffer,’ said the other.
‘She’ll get over it,’ said Mr Parker Pyne callously. ‘She’s young. I’m anxious that Sir George should get a little enjoyment before it’s too late. He’s been treated like a worm for ten years. Now, Elsie MacNaughton will be very kind to him.’
He beamed. Then he sighed. ‘I am thinking of going incognito to Greece. I really must have a holiday!’
The Oracle at Delphi
I
Mrs Willard J. Peters did not really care for Greece. And of Delphi she had, in her secret heart, no opinion at all.
Mrs Peters’ spiritual homes were in Paris, London and the Riviera. She was a woman who enjoyed hotel life, but her idea of a hotel bedroom was a soft-pile carpet, a luxurious bed, a profusion of different arrangements of electric light, including a shaded bedside lamp, plenty of hot and cold water and a telephone beside the bed, by means of which you could order tea, meals, mineral waters, cocktails and speak to your friends.
In the hotel at Delphi there were none of these things. There was a marvellous view from the windows, the bed was clean and so was the whitewashed room. There was a chair, a wash-stand and a chest of drawers. Baths took place by arrangement and were occasionally disappointing as regarded hot water.
It would, she supposed, be nice to say that you had been to Delphi, and Mrs Peters had tried hard to take an interest in Ancient Greece, but she found it difficult. Their statuary seemed so unfinished; so lacking in heads and arms and legs. Secretly, she much preferred the handsome marble angel complete with wings which was erected on the late Mr Willard Peters’ tomb.
But all these secret opinions she kept carefully to herself, for fear her son Willard should despise her. It was for Willard’s sake that she was here, in this chilly and uncomfortable room, with a sulky maid and a disgusted chauffeur in the offing.
For Willard (until recently called Junior–a title which he hated) was Mrs Peters’ eighteen-year-old son, and she worshipped him to distraction. It was Willard who had this strange passion for bygone art. It was Willard, thin, pale, spectacled and dyspeptic, who had dragged his adoring mother on this tour through Greece.
They had been to Olympia, which Mrs Peters thought a sad mess. She had enjoyed the Parthenon, but she considered Athens a hopeless city. And a visit to Corinth and Mycenae had been agony to both her and the chauffeur.
Delphi, Mrs Peters thought unhappily, was the last straw. Absolutely nothing to do but walk along the road and look at the ruins. Willard spent long hours on his knees deciphering Greek inscriptions, saying, ‘Mother, just listen to this! Isn’t it splendid?’ And then he would read out something that seemed to Mrs Peters the quintessence of dullness.
This morning Willard had started early to see some Byzantine mosaics. Mrs Peters, feeling instinctively that Byzantine mosaics would leave her cold (in the literal as well as the spiritual sense), had excused herself.
‘I understand, Mother,’ Willard had said. ‘You want to be alone just to sit in the theatre or up in the stadium and look down over it and let it sink in.’
‘That’s right, pet,’ said Mrs Peters.
‘I knew this place would get you,’ said Willard exultantly and departed.
Now, with a sigh, Mrs Peters prepared to rise and breakfast.
She came into the dining-room to find it empty save for four people. A mother and daughter, dressed in what seemed to Mrs Peters a most peculiar style (not recognizing the peplum as such), who were discoursing on the art of self-expression in dancing; a plump, middle-aged gentleman who had rescued a suitcase for her when she got off the train and whose name was Thompson; and a newcomer, a middle-aged gentleman with a bald head who had arrived on the preceding evening.
This personage was the last left in the breakfast room, and Mrs Peters soon fell into conversation with him. She was a friendly woman and liked someone to talk to. Mr Thompson had been distinctly discouraging in manner (British reserve, Mrs Peters called it), and the mother and daughter had been very superior and highbrow, though the girl had got on rather well with Willard.
Mrs Peters found the newcomer a very pleasant person. He was informative without being highbrow. He told her several interesting, friendly little details about the Greeks, which made her feel much more as though they were real people and not just tiresome history out of a book.
Mrs Peters told her new friend all about Willard and what a clever boy he was, and how Culture might be said to be his middle name. There was something about this benevolent and bland personage which made him easy to talk to.
What he himself did and what his name was, Mrs Peters did not learn. Beyond the fact that he had been travelling and that he was having a complete rest from business (what business?) he was not communicative about himself.
Altogether, the day passed more quickly than might have been anticipated. The mother and daughter and Mr Thompson continued to be unsociable. They encountered the latter coming out of the museum, and he immediately turned in the opposite direction.
Mrs Peters’ new friend looked after him with a little frown.
‘Now I wonder who that fellow is!’ he said.
Mrs Peters supplied him with the other’s name, but could do no more.
‘Thompson–Thompson. No, I don’t think I’ve met him before and yet somehow or other his face seems familiar. But I can’t place him.’
In the afternoon Mrs Peters enjoyed a quiet nap in a shady spot. The book she took with her to read was not the excellent one on Grecian Art recommended to her by her son but was, on the contrary, entitled The River Launch Mystery. It had four murders in it, three abductions, and a large and varied gang of dangerous criminals. Mrs Peters found herself both invigorated and soothed by the perusal of it.
It was four o’clock when she returned to the hotel. Willard, she felt sure, would be back by this time. So far was she from any presentiment of evil that she almost forgot to open a note which the proprietor said had been left for her by a strange man during the afternoon.
It was an extremely dirty note. Idly she ripped it open. As she read the first few lines her face blanched and she put out a hand to steady herself. The handwriting was foreign but the language employed was English.
Lady (it began),–This to hand to inform you that your son is being held captive by us in place of great security. No harm shall happen to honoured young gentleman if you obey orders of yours truly. We demand for him ransom of ten thousand English pounds sterling. If you speak of this to hotel proprietor or police or any such person your son will be killed. This is given you to reflect. Tomorrow directions in way of paying money will be given. If not obeyed the honoured young gentleman’s ears will be cut off and sent you. And following day if still not obeyed he will be killed. Again this is not idle threat. Let the Kyria reflect again–above all–be silent.
Demetrius the Black Browed
It were idle to describe the poor lady’s state of mind. Preposterous and childishly worded as the demand was, it yet brought home to her a grim atmosphere of peril. Willard, her boy, her pet, her delicate, serious Willard.
She would go at once to the police; she would rouse the neighbourhood. But perhaps, if she did–she shivered.
Then, rousing herself, she went out of her room in search of the hotel proprietor–the sole person in the hotel who could speak English.
‘It is getting late,’ she said. ‘My son has not returned yet.’
The pleasant little man beamed at her. ‘True. Monsieur dismissed the mules. He wished to return on foot. He should have been here by now, but doubtless he has lingered on the way.’ He smiled happily.
‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Peters abruptly, ‘have you any bad characters in the neighbourhood?’
Bad characters was a term not embraced by the little man’s knowledge of English. Mrs Peters made her meaning plainer. She received in reply an assurance that all around Delphi were very good, very quiet people–all well disposed towards foreigners.
Words trembled on her lips, but she forced them back. That sinister threat tied her tongue. It might be the merest bluff. But suppose it wasn’t? A friend of hers in America had had a child kidnapped, and on her informing the police, the child had been killed. Such things did happen.
She was nearly frantic. What was she to do? Ten thousand pounds–what was that?–between forty or fifty thousand dollars! What was that to her in comparison with Willard’s safety? But how could she obtain such a sum? There were endless difficulties just now as regarded money and the drawing of cash. A letter of credit for a few hundred pounds was all she had with her.
Would the bandits understand this? Would they be reasonable? Would they wait?
When her maid came to her, she dismissed the girl fiercely. A bell sounded for dinner, and the poor lady was driven to the dining-room. She ate mechanically. She saw no one. The room might have been empty as far as she was concerned.
With the arrival of fruit, a note was placed before her. She winced, but the handwriting was entirely different from that which she had feared to see–a neat, clerkly English hand. She opened it without much interest, but she found its contents intriguing:
At Delphi you can no longer consult the oracle (so it ran), but you can consult Mr Parker Pyne.
Below that there was a cutting of an advertisement pinned to the paper, and at the bottom of the sheet a passport photograph was attached. It was the photograph of her bald-headed friend of the morning.
Mrs Peters read the printed cutting twice.
Are you happy? If not, consult Mr Parker Pyne.