“Shall we go in, boots and all, or wait till after lunch?” he said.
“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m sorry to be such an ass but after all it was a bit of a night. I suppose murder doesn’t suit me.”
“Oh, no,” he said, “that won’t do. You don’t bolt like a rabbit at the sight of me because somebody killed a piano-accordionist.” And after a long pause, he added smoothly, “Unless, by any chance, you think I killed him. Do you?”
“Don’t be a dolt,” she said, and by some fortuitous mischance, an accident quite beyond her control and unrelated to any recognizable impulse, her answer sounded unconvincing and too violent. It was the last question she had expected from him.
“Well, at least I’m glad of that,” he said. He sat on the table near to her. She did not look up at him but straight before her at his left hand, lying easily across his knee. “Come on,” he said, “what have I done? There is something I’ve done. What is it?”
She thought: “I’ll have to tell him something — part of it. Not the real thing itself but the other bit that doesn’t matter so much.” She began to search for an approach, a line to take, some kind of credible presentation, but she was deadly tired and she astonished herself by saying abruptly and loud: “I’ve found out about G.P.F.”
His hand moved swiftly, out of her range of sight. She looked up expecting to be confronted by his anger or astonishment but he had turned aside, skewing round to put his glass down on the table behind him.
“Have you?” he said. “That’s awkward, isn’t it?” He moved quickly away from her and across the room to a wall cupboard which he opened. With his back turned to her he said: “Who told you? Did Cousin George?”
“No,” she said, wearily surprised. “No. I saw the letter.”
“Which letter?” he asked, groping in the cupboard.
“The one to Félicité.”
“Oh,” said Manx slowly. “That one.” He turned round. He had a packet of cigarettes in his hand and came towards her holding it out. She shook her head and he lit one himself with steady hands. “How did you come to see it?” he said.
“It was lost. It — I — oh, what does it matter! The whole thing was perfectly clear. Need we go on?”
“I still don’t see why this discovery should inspire you to sprint like an athlete at the sight of me.”
“I don’t think I know myself.”
“What were you doing last night?” he demanded suddenly. “Where did you go after we got back to Duke’s Gate? Why did you turn up again with Alleyn? What were you up to?”
It was impossible to tell him that Félicité had lost the letter. That would lead at once to his discovering that Alleyn had read it: worse than that, it would lead inevitably to the admittance, perhaps the discussion, of his new attitude towards Félicité. “He might,” she thought, “tell me, point-blank, that he is in love with Fée and I’m in no shape to jump that hurdle.”
So she said: “It doesn’t matter what I was up to. I can’t tell you. In a way it would be a breach of confidence.”
“Was it something to do with this G.P.F. business?” Manx said sharply, and after a pause. “You haven’t told anybody about this discovery, have you?”
She hadn’t told Alleyn. He had found out for himself. Miserably she shook her head. He stooped over her. “You mustn’t tell anybody, Lisle. That’s important. You realize how important, don’t you?”
Isolated sentences of an indescribable archness flashed up in her memory of that abominable page. “You don’t need to tell me that,” she said, looking away from his intent and frowning eyes, and suddenly burst out: “It’s such ghastly stuff, Ned. That magazine. It’s like one of our novelettes gone hay-wire. How you could!”
“My articles are all right,” he said, and. after a pause: “So that’s it, is it. You are a purist, aren’t you?”
She clasped her hands together and fixed her gaze on them. “I must tell you,” she said, “that if, in some hellish, muddled way, entirely beyond my comprehension, this G.P.F. business has anything to do with Rivera’s death…”
“Well?”
“I mean, if it’s going to — I mean — ”
“You mean that if Alleyn asks you point-blank about it, you’ll tell him?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I see.”
Carlisle’s head ached. She had been unable to face her breakfast and the drink he had given her had taken effect. Their confused antagonism, the sense of being trapped in this alien room, her personal misery: all these circumstances were joined in a haze of uncertainty. The whole scene had become unreal and unendurable. When he put his hands on her shoulders and said loudly: “There’s more to it than this. Come on. What is it?” she seemed to hear him from a great distance. His hands were bearing down hard. “I will know,” he was saying.
At the far end of the room a telephone bell began to ring. She watched him go to it and take the receiver off. His voice changed its quality and became the easy friendly voice she had known for so long.
“Hullo? Hullo, Fée darling. I’m terribly sorry, I should have rung up. They kept Lisle for hours grilling her at the Yard. Yes; I ran into her and she asked me to telephone and say she was so late she’d try for a meal somewhere at hand, so I asked her to have one with me. Please tell Cousin Cécile it’s entirely my fault and not hers. I promised to ring for her.” He looked at Carlisle over the telephone. “She’s perfectly all right,” he said. “I’m looking after her.”
If any painter, a surrealist for choice, attempted to set the figure of a working detective officer against an appropriate and composite background, he would turn his attention to rooms overlaid with films of dust, to objects suspended in unaccustomed dinginess, to ash-trays and table-cloths, unemptied waste bins, table littered with powder, dirty glasses, disordered chairs, stale food, and garments that retained an unfresh smell of disuse.
When Alleyn and Fox entered the Metronome at twelve-thirty on this Sunday morning, it smelt of Saturday night. The restaurant, serveries and kitchens had been cleaned but the vestibule and offices were untouched and upon them the aftermath of festivity lay like a thin pall of dust. Three men in shirt-sleeves greeted Alleyn with that tinge of gloomy satisfaction which marks an unsuccessful search.
“No luck?” Alleyn said.
“No luck yet, sir.”
“There’s the passage that runs through from the foyer and behind the offices to the back premises,” said Fox. “That’s the way the deceased must have gone to make his entrance from the far end of the restaurant.”
“We’ve been along there, Mr. Fox.”
“Plumbing?”
“Not yet, Mr. Alleyn.”
“I’d try that next.” Alleyn pointed through the two open doors of Caesar Bonn’s office into the inner room. “Begin there,” he said.
He went alone into the restaurant. The table he and Troy had sat at was the second on the right. The chairs were turned up on its surface. He replaced one of them and seated himself. “For twenty years,” he thought, “I have trained my memory and trained it rigorously. This is the first time I have been my own witness in a case of this sort. Am I any good or am I rotten?”
Sitting alone there, he re-created his scene, beginning with small things: the white cloth, the objects on the table, Troy’s long hand close to his own and just within his orbit of vision. He waited until these details were firm in his memory and then reached out a little further. At the next table, her back towards him, sat Félicité de Suze in a red dress. She turned a white carnation in her fingers and looked sidelong at the man beside her. He was between Alleyn and the lamp on their table. His profile was rimmed with light. His head was turned towards the band dais. On his right, more clearly visible, more brilliantly lit, was Carlisle Wayne. In order to watch the performance she had swung round with her back half-turned to the table. Her hair curved back from her temples. There was a look of compassion and bewilderment in her face. Beyond Carlisle, with her back to the wall, a heavy shape almost obscured by the others, sat Lady Pastern. As they moved he could see in turn her stony coiffure, her important shoulders, the rigid silhouette of her bust; but never her face.