“He was in bed when you visited him?”
“Yes.” She waited for a moment, looking at her enamelled finger-nails. “People seem to think I’ve got no feelings, but I’ve been very upset. Honestly. Well, he was sweet. And when a girl’s going to be married and everything’s marvellous it’s a terrible thing for this to happen, I don’t care what any one says.”
“Did he seem very ill?”
“That’s what everybody keeps asking. The doctor and old Pauline and Milly. On and on. Honestly, I could scream. He just had one of his turns and he felt queer. And with the way he’d eaten and thrown a temperament on top of it, no wonder. I gave him his hot drink and kissed him nighty-nighty and he seemed all right and that’s all I know.”
“He drank his hot milk while you were with him?”
She swung over a little with a luxurious movement and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “That’s right,” she said. “Drank it and liked it.”
“And his medicine?”
“He poured that out for himself. I told him to drink up like a good boy, but he said he’d wait a bit and see if his tummy wouldn’t settle down without it. So I went.”
“Right. Now, Miss Orrincourt,” said Alleyn, facing her with his hands in his pockets, “you’ve been very frank. I shall follow your example. You want to know what we’re doing here. I’ll tell you. Our job, or a major part of it, is to find out why you played a string of rather infantile practical jokes on Sir Henry Ancred and let it be thought that his granddaughter was responsible.”
She was on her feet so quickly that he actually felt his nerves jump. She was close to him now; her under-lip jutted out and her brows, thin hairy lines, were drawn together in a scowl. She resembled some drawing in a man’s magazine of an infuriated baggage in a bedroom. One almost expected some dubious caption to issue in a balloon from her lips.
“Who says I did it?” she demanded.
“I do, at the moment,” Alleyn said. “Come now. Let’s start at Mr. Juniper’s shop. You bought the Raspberry there, you know.”
“The dirty little so-and-so,” she said meditatively. “What a pal! And what a gentleman, I don’t suppose.”
Alleyn ignored these strictures upon Mr. Juniper. “Then,” he said, “there’s that business about the paint on the banisters.”
Obviously this astonished her. Her face was suddenly bereft of expression, a mask with slightly dilated eyes. “Wait a bit,” she said. “That’s funny!”
Alleyn waited.
“Here!” she said. “Have you been talking to young Ceddie?”
“No.”
“That’s what you say,” she muttered, and turned on Fox. “What about you, then?”
“No, Miss Orrincourt,” said Fox blandly. “Not me or the Chief Inspector.”
“Chief Inspector!” she said. “Coo!”
Alleyn saw that she was looking at him with a new interest and had a premonition of what was to come.
“That’d be one of the high-ups, wouldn’t it? Chief Inspector who? I don’t seem to have caught the name.”
Any hopes he may have entertained that his connection with Troy was unknown to her vanished when she repeated his name, clapped her hand over her mouth and ejaculating “Coo! That’s a good one,” burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter.
“Pardon me,” she said presently, “but when you come to think of it it’s funny. You can’t get away from it, you know, it’s funny. Seeing it was her that — Well, of course! That’s how you knew about the paint on the banisters.”
“And what,” Alleyn asked, “is the connection between Sir Cedric Ancred and the paint on the banisters?”
“I’m not going to give myself away,” said Miss Orrincourt, “nor Ceddie either, if it comes to that. Ceddie’s pretty well up the spout anyway. If he’s let me down he’s crazy. There’s a whole lot of things I want to know first. What’s all this stuff about a book? What’s the idea? Is it me, or is it everybody else in this dump that’s gone hay-wire? Look! Somebody puts a dirty little book in a cheese-dish and serves it up for lunch. And when they find it, what do these half-wits do? Look at me as if I was the original hoodunit. Well, I mean to say, it’s silly. And what a book! Written by somebody with a lisp and what about? Keeping people fresh after they’re dead. Give you the willies. And when I say I never put it in the cheese-dish what do they do? Pauline starts tearing herself to shreds and Dessy says, ‘We’re not so foolish as to suppose you’d want to run your head in a noose,’ and Milly says she happens to know I’ve read it, and they all go out as if I was something the cat’d brought in, and I sit there wondering if it’s me or all of them who ought to be locked up.”
“And had you ever seen the book before?”
“I seem to remember,” she began, and then looking from Alleyn to Fox with a new wariness, she said sharply: “Not to notice. Not to know what it was about.” And after a pause she added dully: “I’m not much of a one for reading.”
Alleyn said: “Miss Orrincourt, will you without prejudice tell me if you personally were responsible for any of the practical jokes other than the ones already under discussion?”
“I’m not answering any questions. I don’t know what’s going on here. A girl’s got to look after herself. I thought I had one friend in this crazy-gang, now I’m beginning to think he’s let me down.”
“I suppose,” said Alleyn, wearily, “you mean Sir Cedric Ancred?”
“Sir Cedric Ancred,” Miss Orrincourt repeated with a shrill laugh. “The bloody little baronet. Excuse my smile, but honestly it’s a scream.” She turned her back on them and walked out, leaving the door open.
They could still hear her laughing with unconvincing virtuosity as she walked away down the corridor.
v
“Have we,” Fox asked blandly, “got anywhere with that young lady? Or have we not?”
“Not very far, if anywhere at all,” Alleyn said, morosely. “I don’t know about you, Fox, but I found her performance tolerably convincing. Not that impressions of that sort amount to very much. Suppose she did put arsenic in the old man’s hot milk, wouldn’t this be the only line she could reasonably take? And at this stage of the proceedings, when I still have a very faint hope that we may come across something that blows their damn’ suspicions to smithereens, I couldn’t very well insist on anything. We’ll just have to go mousing along.”
“Where to?” Fox asked.
“For the moment, in different directions. I’ve been carrying you about like a broody hen, Foxkin, and it’s time you brought forth. Down you go and exercise the famous technique on Barker and his retinue of elderly maids. Find out all about the milk, trace its whole insipid history from cow to Thermos. Inspire gossip. Prattle. Seek out the paper-dump, the bottle-dump, the mops and the pails. Let us go clanking back to London like a dry canteen. Salvage the Thermos flask. We’ll have to try for an analysis but what a hope! Get along with you, Fox. Do your stuff.”
“And where may I ask, Mr. Alleyn, are you going?”
“Oh,” said Alleyn, “I’m a snob. I’m going to see the baronet.” Fox paused at the doorway. “Taking it by and large, sir,” he said, “and on the face of it as it stands, do you reckon there’ll be an exhumation?”
“There’ll be one exhumation at all events. To-morrow, if Dr. Curtis can manage it.”
“To-morrow!” said Fox, startled. “Dr. Curtis? Sir Henry Ancred?”
“No,” Alleyn said, “the cat, Carabbas.”
CHAPTER XIII
Spotlight on Cedric
i
Alleyn interviewed Cedric in the library. It was a place without character or life. Rows of uniform editions stood coldly behind glass doors. There was no smell of tobacco, or memory of fires, only the darkness of an unused room.