“No.”
“I want to see them,” he said. “I am longing to see them.”
“And so you shall,” said Alleyn.
He glanced at Fox, who went downstairs. Gomez moved towards the door.
The constable who had been on duty in the room came back and stationed himself inside the door.
“Shall we go down?” Alleyn said and led the way.
It was from this point that the sequence of events in the pig-pottery took on such a grotesque, such a macabre aspect that Alleyn was to look back on the episode as possibly the most outlandish in his professional career. From the moment the corpse of Miss Sanskrit received the first of her gentlemen visitors, they all three in turn became puppet-like caricatures of themselves, acting in a two-dimensional, crudely exaggerated style. In any other setting the element of black farce would have rioted. Even here, under the terrible auspices of the Sanskrits, it rose from time to time like a bout of unseemly hysteria at the bad performance of a Jacobean tragedy.
The room downstairs had been made ready for the visit. Bailey and Thompson waited near the window, Gibson by the desk, and Fox, with his notebook in hand, near the alcove. Two uniform police stood inside the door and a third at the back of the alcove. The bodies of the Sanskrits, brother and sister, had not been moved or shrouded. The room was now dreadfully stuffy.
Alleyn joined Fox. “Come in, Mr. Gomez,” he said.
Gomez stood on the threshold, a wary animal, Alleyn thought, waiting with its ears laid back before advancing into strange territory. He looked, without moving his head, from one to another of the men in the room, seemed to hesitate, seemed to suspect, and then, swaggering a little, came into the room.
He stopped dead in front of Alleyn and said: “Well?”
Alleyn made a slight gesture. Gomez followed it, turned his head — and saw.
The noise he made was something between a retch and an exclamation. For a moment he was perfectly still, and it was as if he and Miss Sanskrit actually and sensibly confronted each other. And because of the arch manner in which the lifeless head lolled on the lifeless arm and the dead eyes seemed to leer at him, it was as if Miss Sanskrit had done a Banquo and found Mr. Gomez out.
He walked down the room and into the alcove. The policeman by the furnace gave a slight cough and eased his chin. Gomez inspected the bodies. He walked round the work table and he looked into the packing case. He might have been a visitor to a museum. There was no sound in the room other than the light fall of his feet on the wooden floor and the dry buzzing of flies.
Then he turned his back on the alcove, pointed at Alleyn, and said: “You! What did you think to achieve by this? Make me lose my nerve? Terrify me into saying something you could twist into an admission? Oh, no, my friend! I had no hand in the destruction of this vermin. Show me the man who did it and I’ll kiss him on both cheeks and salute him as a brother, but I had no hand in it and you’ll never prove anything else.”
He stopped. He was shaking as if with a rigor. He made to leave the room and saw that the door was guarded. And then he screamed out: “Cover them up. They’re obscene,” and went to the curtained window, turning his back on the room.
Fox, on a look from Alleyn, had gone upstairs. Thompson said under his breath, “Could I have a second, Mr. Alleyn?”
They went into the hallway. Thompson produced an envelope from his pocket and shook the contents out in his palm — two circular flattish objects about the size of an old sixpence, with convex upper surfaces. The under-surface of one had a pimple on it and on the other, a hole. They were blistered and there were tiny fragments of an indistinguishable charred substance clinging to them.
“Furnace?” Alleyn asked.
“That’s right, sir.”
“Good. I’ll take them.”
He restored them to their envelope, put them in his pocket, and looked up the stairs to where Fox waited on the landing. “Next,” he said, and thought: “It’s like a dentist’s waiting-room.”
The next was the Colonel. He came down in fairly good order with his shoulders squared and his chin up and feeling with the back of his heels for the stair-treads. As he turned into the shop he pressed up the corners of his moustache.
After the histrionics of Gomez, the Colonel’s confrontation with the Sanskrits passed off quietly. He fetched up short, stood in absolute silence for a few seconds, and then said with an air that almost resembled dignity, “This is disgraceful.”
“Disgraceful?” Alleyn repeated.
“They’ve been murdered.”
“Clearly.”
“The bodies ought to be covered. It’s most irregular. And disgusting,” and he added, almost, it seemed, as an afterthought: “It makes me feel sick.” And indeed he perceptibly changed colour.
He turned his back on the Sanskrits and joined Gomez by the window. “I protest categorically,” he said, successfully negotiating the phrase, “at the conduct of these proceedings. And I wish to leave the room.”
“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” Alleyn said as Gomez made a move towards the door, “for either of you.”
“What right,” Gomez demanded, “have you to keep me here? You have no right.”
“Well,” Alleyn said mildly, “if you press the point we can note your objection, which I see Inspector Fox is doing in any case, and if you insist on leaving you may do so in a minute. In that case, of course, we shall ask you to come with us to the Yard. In the meantime: there’s Chubb. Would you, Fox?”
la its own succinct way Chubb’s reaction was a classic. He marched in almost as if Fox were a sergeant-major’s escort, executed a smart left turn, saw Miss Sanskrit, halted, became rigid, asked — unbelievably—“Who done it?” and fainted backwards like the soldier he had been.
And the Colonel, rivalling him in established behaviour, made a sharp exasperated noise and said: “Damn’ bad show.”
Chubb recovered almost immediately. One of the constables brought him a drink of water. He was supported to the only chair in the room and sat in it with his back to the alcove.
“Very sorry, sir,” he mumbled, not to Alleyn but to the Colonel. His gaze alighted on Gomez.
“You done it!” he said, sweating and trembling. “Din’ you? You said you’d fix it and you did. You fixed it.”
“Do you lay a charge against Mr. Gomez?” Alleyn said.
“Gomez? I don’t know any Gomez.”
“Against Mr. Sheridan?”
“I don’t know what it means, lay a charge, and I don’t know how he worked it, do I? But he said last night if it turned out they’d rattled, he’d get them. And I reckon he’s kept ’is word. He’s got them.”
Gomez sprang at him like a released spring, so suddenly and with such venom that it took Gibson and both the constables all their time to hold him. He let out short, disjointed phrases, presumably in Portuguese, wetting his blue chin and mouthing at Alleyn. Perhaps because the supply of invective ran out, he at last fell silent and watchful and seemed the more dangerous for it.
“That was a touch of your old Ng’ombwana form,” Alleyn said. “You’d much better pipe down, Mr. Gomez. Otherwise, you know, we shall have to lock you up.”
“Filth!” said Mr. Gomez, and spat inaccurately in Chubb’s direction.
“Bad show. Damn’ bad show,” reiterated the Colonel, who seemed to have turned himself into a sort of Chorus to the Action.
Alleyn said: “Has one of you lost a pair of gloves?”
The scene went silent. For a second or two nobody moved, and then Chubb got to his feet. Gomez, whose arms were still in custody, looked at his hands with their garnish of black hair and the Colonel thrust his into his pockets. And then, on a common impulse, it seemed they all three began accusing each other incoherently and inanely of the murder of the Sanskrits, and would no doubt have gone on doing so if the front doorbell had not pealed once more. As if the sound-track for whatever drama was being ground out had been turned back for a replay, a woman could be heard making a commotion in the hallway.