“Well, I’d have heard pretty soon if she’d said anything to my father.”
“Then she did threaten to tell your father?”
“God damn you, I tell you I don’t remember what she threatened.”
“Did you give her any money?”
Pilgrim moved his head restlessly.
“I advise you to answer me, Mr. Pilgrim.”
“I needn’t answer anything. I can get a lawyer.”
“Certainly. Do you wish to do that?”
Pilgrim opened his mouth and shut it again. He frowned to himself as if he thought very deeply, and at last he seemed to come to a decision. He looked from Alleyn to Fox and suddenly he smiled.
“Look here,” he said, “I didn’t kill that girl. I couldn’t have killed her. The Parkers and Valmai will tell you I spent Friday night with them. My father and everyone else at Ankerton knows I was there on Saturday. I hadn’t a chance to rig the knife. I suppose there’s no reason why I should shy off talking about this business with Sonia except that — well, when there’s a crime like this in the air one’s apt to get nervous.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“You know all about my father, I expect. He’s been given a good deal of publicity. Some bounder of a journalist wrote a lot of miserable gup in one of the papers the other day. The Methodist Peer and all that. Everyone knows he’s a bit fantastic on the subject of morals, and if he ever got to hear of this business there’d be a row of simply devastating magnitude. That’s why I didn’t want it to leak out. He’d do some tremendous heavy father stuff at me, and have a stroke on top of it as likely as not. That’s why I didn’t want to say any more about it than I could possibly help. I see now that I’ve been a fool not to tell you the whole thing.”
“Good,” said Alleyn.
“As a matter of fact I did give Sonia a cheque for a hundred, and she promised she’d make no more scenes. In the end she practically admitted the child was not mine, but,” he smiled ruefully, “as she pointed out, she had a perfectly good story to tell my father or Valmai if she felt inclined to do so.”
“Have you made a clean breast of this to Miss Seacliff?”
“No. I–I—couldn’t do that. It seems so foul to go to her with a squalid little story when we were just engaged. You see, I happen to feel rather strongly about — well, about some things. I rather disliked myself for what had happened. Valmai’s so marvelous.” His face lit up with a sudden intensity of emotion. He seemed translated. “She’s so far beyond all that kind of thing. She’s terribly, terribly attractive — you only had to see how the other men here fell for her — but she remains quite aloof from her own loveliness. Just accepts it as something she can’t help and then ignores it. It’s amazing that she should care—” He stopped short. “I don’t know that we need discuss all this.”
“I don’t think we need. I shall ask you later on to sign a statement of your own movements from Friday to Sunday.”
“Will the Sonia business have to come out, sir?”
“I can promise nothing about that. If it is irrelevant it will not be used. I think it advisable that you should tell Miss Seacliff, but that, of course, is entirely a matter of your own judgment.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Possibly not. There’s one other question. Did you return to the studio on Friday before you left for Boxover?”
“No. I packed my suit-case after lunch. Young Hatchett came in and talked to me while I was at it. Then I called Valmai and we set off in the car.”
“I see. Thank you. I won’t keep you any longer, Mr. Pilgrim.”
“Very well, sir. Thank you.”
Fox showed Pilgrim out and returned to the fire. He looked dubious. Nigel reappeared and sat on the wide fender.
“Well, Fox,” said Alleyn, raising an eyebrow, “what did you think of that?”
“His ideas on the subject of his young lady seem a bit high-flown from what we’ve seen of her,” said Fox.
“What’s she like?” asked Nigel.
“She’s extremely beautiful,” Alleyn said. “Beautiful enough to launch a thousand crimes, perhaps. But I should not have thought the Sonia episode would have caused her to so much as bat an eyelid. She has completely wiped the floor with all the other females, and that, I imagine, is all that matters to Miss Seacliff.”
“Of course, the poor fool’s besotted on her. You can see that with half an eye,” said Nigel. He glanced at his shorthand notes. “What about his alibi?”
“If this place Boxover is only twelve miles away,” grunted Fox, “his alibi isn’t of much account. Is it, Mr. Alleyn? They went to bed early on Friday night. He could slip out, run over here, rig the knife and get back to Boxover almost within the hour.”
“You must remember that Garcia slept in the studio.”
“Yes, that’s so. But he may not have been there on Friday night. He may have packed up by then and gone off on his tour.”
“Pilgrim must have known that, Fox, if he planned to come to the studio.”
“Yes. That’s so. Mind, I still think Garcia’s our man. This Mr. Pilgrim doesn’t strike me as the chap for a job of this sort.”
“He’s a bit too obviously the clean young Englishman, though, isn’t he?” said Nigel.
“Hullo,” remarked Alleyn, “didn’t Pilgrim come up to your high expectations, Bathgate?”
“Well, you were remarkably cold and snorty with him, yourself.”
“Because throughout our conversation he so repeatedly shifted ground. That sort of behaviour is always exceedingly tedious. It was only because I was round with him that we got the blackmail story at all.”
“He seemed quite an honest-to-God sort of fellow, really,” pronounced Nigel. “I think it was that stuff about being ashamed of his affair with the model that put me off him. It sounded spurious. Anyway, it’s the sort of thing one doesn’t talk about to people one has just met.”
“Under rather unusual conditions,” Alleyn pointed out.
“Certainly. All the same he talks too much.”
“The remark about bounding journalists and miserable gup was perhaps gratuitous.”
“I didn’t mean that,” said Nigel in a hurry.
“I’m inclined to agree with you. Let us see Miss Valmai Seacliff, Brer Fox.”
“I wish you wouldn’t make me coil up in that chair,” complained Nigel when Fox had gone. “It’s plaguilly uncomfortable and right in a draught. Can’t I just be here, openly? I’d like to have a look at this lovely.”
“Very well. I suppose you’ll do no harm. The concealment was your own suggestion, if you remember. You may sit at the desk and make an attempt to look like the Yard.”
“You don’t look much like it yourself in your smart gent’s dinner jacket. Tell me, Alleyn, have you fallen in love with Miss Troy?”
“Don’t be a fool, Bathgate,” said Alleyn, with such unusual warmth that Nigel’s eyebrows went up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Merely a pleasantry. No offence and so on.”
“I’m sorry, too. You must forgive me. I’m bothered about this case.”
“There, there,” said Nigel. “Coom, coom, coom, it’s early days yet.”
“True enough. But suppose Garcia walks in with a happy smile in answer to our broadcast? That bit of clay in the drape. Acid marks and no acid to make ’em. This legendary warehouse. Clay models of comedy and tragedy melted into the night. Damn, I’ve got the mumbles.”
The door was thrown open, and in came Valmai Seacliff followed by Fox. Miss Seacliff managed to convey by her entrance that she never moved anywhere without a masculine satellite. That Inspector Fox in his double-breasted blue serge was not precisely in the right manner did nothing to unsettle her poise. She was dressed in a silk trousered garment. Her hair was swept off her forehead into a knot on the nape of her neck. Moving her hips voluptuously, she walked rather like a mannequin. When she reached the chair Alleyn had pushed forward, she turned, paused, and then sank into it with the glorious certainty of a well-trained show-girl. She stared languidly at Nigel whose hand had gone automatically to his tie.