“Yes,” said Miss Lee restlessly.
“Good. Are you sure of that, Miss Lee?”
“Yes. I mean I know I did because I was absolutely exhausted. It always takes it out of me most frightfully when I paint. It simply drains every ounce of my energy. I even forget to breathe.”
“That must be most uncomfortable,” said Alleyn gravely. “You came out to breathe, perhaps?”
“Yes. I mean I felt I must get away from it all. So I simply put down my brushes and walked out. Miss Troy and Bostock were just ahead of me.”
“You went straight to the house?”
“Yes, I think so. Yes, I did.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Watt Hatchett loudly. “You came straight up here because I was just after you, see? I saw you through the dining-room window. This window here, Mr. Alleyn. That’s right, Miss Lee. You went up to the sideboard and began eating something.”
“I–I don’t remember that,” said Miss Lee in a high voice. She darted an unfriendly glance at Hatchett.
“Well,” said Alleyn briskly, “that leaves Miss Seacliff, Messrs. Ormerin, Pilgrim, Malmsley and Garcia, and the model. Who came next?”
“We all did — except Garcia and Sonia,” said Valmai Seacliff. “Sonia hadn’t dressed. I remember I went into the junk-room and washed my brushes under the tap. Ormerin and Malmsley and Basil followed me there.”
She spoke with a slight hesitation, the merest shadow of a stutter, and with a markedly falling inflexion. She had a trick of uttering the last words of a phrase on an indrawn breath. Everything she looked and did, Alleyn felt, was the result of a carefully concealed deliberation. She managed now to convey the impression that men followed her inevitably, wherever she went.
“They were in the way,” she went on. “I told them to go. Then I finished washing my brushes and came up to the house.”
“Garcia was in the junk-room, too, I think,” said Ormerin.
“Oh, yes,” agreed Seacliff softly. “He came in, as soon as you’d gone. He would, you know. Sonia was glaring through the door — furious, of course.” Her voice died away and was caught up on that small gasp. She looked through her eyelashes at Alleyn. “I walked up to the house with the other three.”
“That is so,” agreed Ormerin.
“Leaving Mr. Garcia and the model in the studio?” asked Alleyn.
“I suppose so.”
“Yes,” said Pilgrim.
“You say the model was furious, Miss Seacliff,” said Alleyn. “Why was that?”
“Oh, because Garcia was making passes at me in the junk-room. Nothing much. He can’t help himself — Garcia.”
“I see,” said Alleyn politely. “Now, please. Did any of you revisit the studio before you went up to London?”
“I did,” said Ormerin.
“At what time?”
“Immediately after lunch. I wished to look again at my work. I was very troubled about my work. Everything was difficult. The model—” He stopped short.
“Yes?”
“Never for a second was she still. It was impossible. Impossible! I believe that she did it deliberately.”
“She’s dead now,” said Phillida Lee, on muted strings. “Poor little Sonia.”
“Spare us the nil nisi touch, for God’s sake,” begged Malmsley.
“Did you all notice the model’s restlessness?”
“You bet!” said Watt Hatchett. “She was saucy, that’s what she was. Seemed to have got hold of the idea she amounted to something. She gave me a pain in the neck, dinkum, always slinging off about Aussie.”
“ ‘Aussie,’ ” groaned Malmsley. “ ‘Ausie,’ ‘Tassie,’ ‘a goo-dee,’ ‘a badee.’ Pray spare me these bloody abbreviations.”
“Look, Mr. Malmsley, I’d sooner talk plain honest Australian than make a noise like I’d got a fish-bone stuck in me gullet. Aussie’ll do me. And one other thing, too. If you walked down Bondi beach with that half-chewed mouthful of hay sprouting out of your dial, they’d phone the Zoo something was missing.”
“Hatchett,” said Troy. “Pipe down.”
“Good oh, Miss Troy.”
“I gather,” said Alleyn mildly, “that you didn’t altogether like the model?”
“Who, me? Too right I didn’t. I’m sorry the poor kid’s coughed out. Gosh, I reckon it’s a fair cow, but just the same she gave me a pain in the neck. I asked her one day had she got fleas or something, the way she was twitching. And did she go crook!” Hatchett uttered a raucous yelp of laughter. Malmsley shuddered.
“Thank you, Mr. Hatchett,” said Alleyn firmly. “The next point I want to raise is this. Have there been any definite quarrels with the model? Any scenes, any rows between Miss Gluck and somebody else?”
He looked round the table. Everyone seemed disconcerted. There was a sudden feeling of tension. Alleyn waited. After a silence of perhaps a minute, Katti Bostock said slowly:
“I suppose you might say there were a good many scenes.”
“You had one with her yourself, Bostock,” said Malmsley.
“I did.”
“What was that about, Miss Bostock?”
“Same thing. Wriggling. I’m doing — I was doing a big thing. I wanted to finish it in time for the Group Show. It opened last Friday. She was to give me separate sittings — out of class, you know. She seemed to have the devil in her. Fidgeting, going out when I wanted her. Complaining. Drove me dotty. I didn’t get the thing finished, of course.”
“Was that the trapeze-artiste picture?” asked Alleyn.
Katti Bostock scowled.
“I dislike people looking at my things before they’re finished.”
“I’m sorry; it is beastly, I know,” said Alleyn. “But, you see, we’ve got to do our nosing round.”
“I suppose you have. Well”—she laughed shortly—“it’ll never be finished now.”
“It wouldn’t have been finished anyway, though, would it?” asked Phillida Lee. “I meant I heard you tell her you hated the sight of her, and she could go to the devil.”
“What d’you mean?” demanded Katti Bostock harshly. “You were not there when I was working.”
“I happened to come in on Thursday afternoon. I only got inside the door, and you were having such a frightful row I beetled off again.”
“You’d no business to hang about and eavesdrop,” said Miss Bostock. Her broad face was dull crimson; she leant forward, scowling.
“There’s no need to lose your temper with me,” squeaked Miss Lee. “I didn’t eavesdrop. I simply walked in. You couldn’t see me because of the screen inside the door, and anyway, you were in such a seething rage you wouldn’t have noticed the Angel Gabriel himself.”
“For Heaven’s sake let’s keep our sense of proportion,” said Troy. “The poor little wretch was infuriating, and we’ve all lost our tempers with her again and again.” She looked at Alleyn. “Really, you might say each of us has felt like murdering her at some time or another.”
“Yes, Miss Troy,” said Phillida Lee, still staring at Katti Bostock, “but we haven’t all said so, have we?”
“My God— ”
“Katti,” said Troy. “Please!”
“She’s practically suggesting that— ”
“No, no,” said Ormerin. “Let us, as Troy says, keep our sense of proportion. If exasperation could have stabbed this girl, any one of us might be a murderer. But whichever one of us did— ”
“I don’t see why it need be one of us,” objected Valmai Seacliff placidly.
“Nor I,” drawled Malmsley. “The cook may have taken a dislike to her and crawled down to the studio with murder in her heart.”
“Are we meant to laugh at that?” asked Hatchett.
“It is perfectly clearly to be seen,” Ormerin said loudly, “what is the view of the police. This gentleman, Mr. Alleyn, who is so quiet and so polite, who waits in silence for us to make fools of ourselves — he knows as each of us must know in his heart that the murderer of this girl was present in the studio on the morning we made the experiment with the dagger. That declares itself. There is no big motive that sticks out like a bundle in a haystack, so Mr. Alleyn sits and says nothing and hears much. And we — we talk.”