… You are a gump to collect these blood-suckers… he’s a nasty little animal… that little devil Sonia Gluck… behaving abominably… funny this ‘It’ stuff… you’re different. They’d fall for you if you’d let them, only you’re so unprovocative… (Alleyn shook his head at Katti Bostock.) Your allusions to a detective are quite incomprehensible, but if he interrupted you in your work you had every right to bite his head off. What had you been up to anyway? Well, so long until the 3rd. Katti.
The envelope was addressed to Troy at the Chateau Frontenac.
“Evidently,” thought Alleyn, “I had begun to make a nuisance of myself on board. Interrupting her work. Oh Lord!”
In a minute or two he had finished. It would have been absolutely all right if he had never asked about her room. No need for that little scene. He hung up the last garment, glanced round the room and looked for the fourth or fifth time at the photograph of a man that stood on the top of the bow-fronted chest. A good-looking man who had signed himself “John.” Alleyn, yielding to an unworthy impulse, made a hideous grimace at this photograph, turned to leave the room and saw Troy, amazed, in the doorway. He felt his face burning like a sky sign.
“Have you finished, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Quite finished, thank you.”
He knew she had seen him. There was a singular expression in her eyes.
“I have just made a face at the photograph on your tallboy,” said Alleyn.
“So I observed.”
“I have gone through your clothes, fished in your pockets and read all your letters. You may go to bed. The house will be watched, of course. Good night, Miss Troy.”
“Good morning, Mr. Alleyn.”
Alleyn went to Katti Bostock’s room where he found nothing of note. It was a great deal untidier than Troy’s room, and took longer. He found several pairs of paint-stained slacks huddled together on the floor of the wardrobe, an evening dress in close proximity to a painting-smock, and a row of stubborn-looking shoes with no trees in them. There were odds and ends in all the pockets. He plodded through a mass of receipts, colour-men’s catalogues, drawings and books. The only personal letter he found was the one Troy had written and posted at Vancouver. This had to be read. Troy’s catalogue of the students was interesting. Then he came to the passages about himself. “… turned out to be intelligent, so I felt the fool… Looks like a grandee… on the defensive about this sleuth… Took it like a gent and made me feel like a bounder.” As he read, Alleyn’s left eyebrow climbed up his forehead. He folded the letter very carefully, smoothed it out and returned it to its place among a box of half-used oil-colours. He began to whistle under his breath, polished off Katti Bostock’s effects, and went in search of Fox and Bailey. They had finished the men’s bedrooms.
Fox had found Malmsley’s opium-smoking impedimenta and had impounded it. The amount of opium was small. There were signs that the jar had at one time been full.
“Which does not altogether agree with Mr. Malmsley’s little story,” grunted Alleyn. “Has Bailey tried the thing for prints?”
“Yes. Two sets, Garcia’s and Malmsley’s on the pipe, the lamp and the jar.”
“The jar. That’s interesting. Well, let’s get on with it.”
He sent Bailey into Phillida Lee’s room, while he and Fox tackled Valmai Seacliff’s. Miss Seacliff’s walls were chiefly adorned with pictures of herself. Malmsley and Ormerin had each painted her, and Pilgrim had drawn her once and painted her twice.
“The successful nymphomaniac,” thought Alleyn, remembering Katti’s letter.
A very clever pencil drawing of Pilgrim, signed “Seacliff,” stood on the bedside table. The room was extremely tidy and much more obviously feminine than Troy’s or Katti’s. Seacliff had at least three times as many clothes, and quantities of hats and berets. Alleyn noticed that her slacks were made in Savile Row, and her dresses in Paris. He was amused to find that even the Seacliff painting-bags and smock smelt of Worth. Her week-end case had not been completely unpacked. In it he found three evening dresses, a nightdress and bath-gown, shoes, three pairs of coloured gloves, two day dresses, two berets, and an evening bag containing among other things a half-full bottle of aspirin.
“Maybe Pilgrim’s,” said Alleyn, and put them in his case. “Now for the correspondence.”
They found more than enough of that. Two of her dressing-table drawers were filled with neatly tied-up packets of letters.
“Help!” said Alleyn. “We’ll have to glance at these, Fox. There might be something. Here, you take this lot. Very special. Red ribbon. Must be Pilgrim’s, I imagine. Yes, they are.”
Fox put on his spectacles and began impassively to read Basil Pilgrim’s love-letters.
“Very gentlemanly,” he said, after the first three.
“You’re out of luck. I’ve struck a most impassioned series from a young man, who compares her bitterly and obscurely to a mirage. Golly, here’s a sonnet.”
For some time there was no sound but the faint crackle of note-paper. Bailey came in and said he had drawn a blank in Phillida Lee’s room. Alleyn threw a bundle of letters at him.
“There’s something here you might like to see,” said Fox. “The last one from the Honourable Mr. Pilgrim.”
“What’s he say?”
Fox cleared his throat.
“ ‘Darling,’ ” he began, ‘I’ve got the usual sort of feelings about not being anything like good enough for you. Your last letter telling me you first liked me because I seemed a bit different from other men has made me feel rather bogus. I suppose, without being an insufferable prig, I might agree that I can at any rate bear comparison with the gang we’ve got to know — the studio lot — like Garcia and Malmsley and Co. But that’s not a hell of a compliment to myself, is it? As a matter of fact, I simply loathe seeing you in that setting. Men like Garcia have no right to be in the same room as yourself, my lovely, terrifyingly remote Valmai. I know people scream with mirth at the sound of the word “pure.” It’s gone all déclassé like “genteel.” But there is a strange sort of purity about you, Valmai, truly. If I’ve understood you, you’ve seen something of — God, this sounds frightful — something of the same sort of quality in me. Oh, darling, don’t see too much of that in me. Just because I don’t get tight and talk bawdy, I’m not a blooming Galahad, you know. This letter’s going all the wrong way. Bless you a thousand, thousand—’ I think that’s the lot, sir,” concluded Fox.
“Yes. I see. Any letters in Pilgrim’s room?”
“None. He may have taken them to Ankerton Manor, chief.”
“So he may. I’d like to see the one where Miss Seacliff praised his purity. By the Lord, Fox, she has without a doubt got a wonderful technique. She’s got that not undesirable parti, who’ll be a perfectly good peer before very long, if it’s true that old Pilgrim is failing; she’s got him all besotted and wondering if he’s good enough.” Alleyn paused and rubbed his nose. “Men turn peculiar when they fall in love, Brer Fox. Sometimes they turn damned peculiar, and that’s a fact.”