He walked suddenly to a wall cupboard and opened it. A great quantity of papers instantly fell out. Thomas stared indignantly at them. “I distinctly remember,” he said, turning to Alleyn and Fox with his mouth slightly open. “I distinctly remember saying to myself—” But this sentence was also fated to remain unfinished, for Thomas pounced unexpectedly upon some fragment from the cupboard. “I’ve been looking for that all over the place,” he said. “It’s most important. A cheque, in fact.”
He sat on the floor and began scuffling absently among the papers. Alleyn, who for some minutes had been inspecting the chaos that reigned upon the table, lifted a pile of drawings and discovered a white bundle. He loosened the knot at the top and a stained tin was disclosed. It bore a bright red label with the legend: “Rat-X-it! Poison,” and, in slightly smaller print, the antidote for arsenical poisoning.
“Here it is, Mr. Ancred,” said Alleyn.
“What?” asked Thomas. He glanced up. “Oh, that,” he said. “I thought I’d put it on the table.”
Fox came forward with a bag. Alleyn, muttering something about futile gestures, lifted the tin by the handkerchief. “You don’t mind,” he said to Thomas, “if we take charge of this? We’ll give you a receipt for it.”
“Oh, will you?” asked Thomas mildly. “Thanks awfully.” He watched them stow away the tin, and then, seeing that they were about to go, scrambled to his feet. “You must have a drink,” he said. “There’s a bottle of Papa’s whisky — I think.”
Alleyn and Fox managed to head him off a further search. He sat down, and listened with an air of helplessness to Alleyn’s parting exposition.
“Now, Mr. Ancred,” Alleyn said, “I think I ought to make as clear as possible the usual procedure following the sort of information you have brought to us. Before any definite step can be taken, the police make what are known as ‘further inquiries’. They do this as inconspicuously as possible, since neither their original informant, nor they, enjoy the public exploration of a mare’s nest. If these inquiries seem to point to a suspicion of ill practice, the police then get permission from the Home Secretary for the next step to be taken. You know what that is, I expect?”
“I say,” said Thomas, “that would be beastly, wouldn’t it?” A sudden thought seemed to strike him. “I say,” he repeated, “would I have to be there?”
“We’d probably ask for formal identification by a member of his family.”
“Oh, Lor’!” Thomas whispered dismally. He pinched his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. A gleam of consolation appeared to visit him.
“I say,” he said, “it’s a good job after all, isn’t it, that the Nation didn’t plump for the Abbey?”
CHAPTER XI
Alleyn at Ancreton
i
In our game,” said Fox as they drove back to the Yard, “you get some funny glimpses into what you might call human nature. I dare say I’ve said that before, but it’s a fact.”
“I believe you,” said Alleyn.
“Look at this chap we’ve just left,” Fox continued with an air of controversy. “Vague! And yet he must be good at his job, wouldn’t you say, sir?”
“Indisputably.”
“There! Good at his job, and yet to meet him you’d say he’d lose his play, and his actors, and his way to the theatre. In view of which,” Fox summed up, “I ask myself if this chap’s as muddleheaded as he lets on.”
“A pose, you think, do you, Fox?”
“You never know with some jokers,” Fox muttered, and, wiping his great hand over his face, seemed by that gesture to dispose of Thomas Ancred’s vagaries. “I suppose,” he said, “it’ll be a matter of seeing the doctor, won’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. I’ve looked out trains. There’s one in an hour. Get us there by midday. We may have to spend the night in Ancreton village. We can pick up our emergency bags at the Yard. I’ll talk to the A.C. and telephone Troy. What a hell of a thing to turn up.”
“It doesn’t look as if we’ll be able to let it alone, do you reckon, Mr. Alleyn?”
“I still have hopes. As it stands, there’s not a case in Thomas’s story to hang a dead dog on. They lose a tin of rat poison and find it in a garret. Somebody reads a book about embalming, and thinks up an elaborate theme based on an arbitrary supposition. Counsel could play skittles with it — as it stands.”
“Suppose we did get an order for exhumation. Suppose they found arsenic in the body. With this embalming business it’d seem as if it would prove nothing.”
“On the contrary,” said Alleyn, “I rather think, Fox, that if they did find arsenic in the body it would prove everything.”
Fox turned slowly and looked at him. “I don’t get that one, Mr. Alleyn,” he said.
“I’m not at all sure that I’m right. We’ll have to look it up. Here we are. I’ll explain on the way down to this accursed village. Come on.”
He saw his Assistant Commissioner, who, with the air of a connoisseur, discussed the propriety of an investigator handling a case in which his wife might be called as a witness. “Of course, my dear Rory, if by any chance the thing should come into court and your wife be subpoenaed, we would have to reconsider our position. We’ve no precedent, so far as I know. But for the time being I imagine it’s more reasonable for you to discuss it with her than for anybody else to do so — Fox, for instance. Now, you go down to this place, talk to the indigenous G.P., and come back and tell us what you think about it. Tiresome, if it comes to anything. Good luck.”
As they left, Alleyn took from his desk the second volume of a work on medical jurisprudence. It dealt principally with poisons. In the train he commended certain passages to Fox’s notice. He watched his old friend put on his spectacles, raise his eyebrows, and develop the slightly catarrhal breathing that invariably accompanied his reading.
“Yes,” said Fox, removing his spectacles as the train drew into Ancreton Halt, “that’s different, of course.”
ii
Doctor Herbert Withers was a short, tolerably plump man, with little of the air of wellbeing normally associated with plumpness. He came out into his hall as they arrived, admitting from some inner room the sound of a racing broadcast. After a glance at Alleyn’s professional card he took them to his consulting-room, and sat at his desk with a movement whose briskness seemed to overlie a controlled fatigue.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
It was the conventional opening. Alleyn thought it had slipped involuntarily from Dr. Withers’s lips.
“We hope there’s no trouble,” he said. “Would you mind if I asked you to clear up a few points about Sir Henry Ancred’s death?”
The mechanical attentiveness of Dr. Withers’s glance sharpened. He made an abrupt movement and looked from Alleyn to Fox.
“Certainly,” he said, “if there’s any necessity. But why?” He still held Alleyn’s card in his hand and he glanced at it again. “You don’t mean to say—” he began, and stopped short. “Well, what are these few points?”
“I think I’d better tell you exactly what’s happened,” Alleyn said. He took a copy of the anonymous letter from his pocket and handed it to Dr. Withers. “Mr. Thomas Ancred brought eight of these to us this morning,” he said.
“Damn disgusting piffle,” said Dr. Withers and handed it back.
“I hope so. But when we’re shown these wretched things we have to do something about them.”
“Well?”