“Indeed no.”
“Good. Want me any more, dear boy?” he asked, suddenly gracious.
“I think not. Unless — and believe me I wouldn’t ask if the question was irrelevant to the case — unless you care to tell me if Mrs. Constantia Guzmann really confided to you that she is a buyer of hot objects d’art on the intercontinental black market.”
It was no good. Back in a flash came the empurpled visage and the flashing eye. Back, too, came an unmistakable background of sheepishness and discomfort
“No comment,” said Marcus Knight
“No? Not even a tiny hint?”
“You are mad to expect it,” he said, and with that they had to let him go.
“Well, Br’er Fox, we’ve caught a snarled up little job this time, haven’t we?”
“We have that,” Fox agreed warmly. “It’d be nice,” he added wistfully, “if we could put it down to simple theft, discovery and violence.”
“It’d be lovely but we can’t, you know. We can’t. For one thing the theft of a famous object is always bedevilled by the circumstance of its being indisposable through the usual channels. No normal high-class fence, unless he’s got very special contacts, is going to touch Shakespeare’s note or his son’s glove.”
“So, for a start you’ve got either a crank who steals and gloats or a crank of the type of young Jones who steals to keep the swag in England or a thorough wised-up, high grade professional in touch with the top international racket And at the receiving end somebody of the nature of this Mrs. Guzmann, who’s a millionaire crank in her own right and doesn’t care how she gets her stuff.”
“That’s right. Or a kidnapper who holds the stuff for ransom. And you might have a non-professional thief who knows all about Mrs. G. and believes she’ll play and he’ll make a pocket.”
“That seems to take in the entire boiling of this lot, seeing Mr. Grove’s broadcast the Guzmann-Knight anecdote for all it’s worth. I tell you what, Mr. Alleyn; it wouldn’t be the most astonishing event in my working life if Mr. Knight took to Mr. Grove. Mr. Grove’s teasing ways seem to put him out to a remarkable degree, don’t you think?”
“I think,” Alleyn said, “we’d better, both of us, remind ourselves about actors.”
“You do? What about them?”
“One must always remember that they’re trained to convey emotion. On or off the stage, they make the most of everything they feel. Now this doesn’t mean they express their feelings up to saturation point. When you and I and all the rest of the non-actors do our damnedest to understate and be ironical about our emotional reflexes, the actor, even when he underplays them, does so with such expertise that he convinces us laymen that he’s in extremis. He isn’t. He’s only being professionally articulate about something that happens offstage instead of in front of an official audience.”
“How does all this apply to Mr. Knight, then?”
“When he turns purple and roars anathemas against Grove it means A: that he’s hot-tempered, pathologically vain and going through a momentary hell and B: that he’s letting you know up to the nth degree just how angry and dangerous he’s feeling. It doesn’t necessarily mean that once his present emotion has subsided he will do anything further about it, and nor does it mean that he’s superficial or a hypocrite. It’s his job to take the micky out of an audience, and even in the throes of a completely genuine emotional crisis, he does just that thing if it’s only an audience of one.”
“Is this what they call being an extrovert?”
“Yes, Br’er Fox, I expect it is. But the interesting thing about Knight, I thought, was that when it came to Conducis he turned uncommunicative and cagey.”
“Fancied himself slighted over something, it seemed. Do you reckon Knight believes all that about Grove? Being a homicidal type? All that stuff about pale eyes etcetera. Because,” Fox said with great emphasis, “it’s all poppycock: there aren’t any facial characteristics for murder. What’s that you’re always quoting about there being no art to find the mind’s construction in the face? I reckon it’s fair enough where homicide’s concerned. Although,” Fox added, opening his own eyes very wide, “I always fancy there’s a kind of look about sex offenders of a certain type. That I will allow.”
“Be that as it may it doesn’t get us much further along our present road. No news from the hospital?”
“No. They’d ring through at once if there was.”
“I know. I know.”
“What do we do about Mr. Jeremy Jones?”
“Oh, blast! What indeed! I think we take delivery of the glove and documents, give him hell and go no further. I’ll talk to the A.C. about him and I rather think I’ll have to tell Conducis as soon as possible. Who’ve we got left here? Only little Meyer. Ask him into his own office, Br’er Fox. We needn’t keep him long, I think.”
Winter Meyer came in quoting Queen Mary. “This,” he said wearily, “is a pretty kettle of fish. This is a carry-on. I’m not complaining, mind, and I’m not blaming anybody but what, oh what, has set Marco off again? Sorry. Not your headache, old boy.”
Alleyn uttered consolatory phrases, sat him at his own desk, checked his alibi, which was no better and no worse than anyone else’s in that after he left the theatre with Knight he drove to his house at Golders Green where his wife and family were all in bed. When he wound up his watch he noticed it said ten to twelve. He had heard the Knight-Guzmann story. “I thought it bloody sad,” he said. “Poor woman. Terrible, you know, the problem of the plain, highly sexed woman. Marco ought to have held his tongue. He ought never to have told Harry. Of course Harry made it sound a bit of a yell, but I didn’t like Marco telling about it. I don’t think that sort of thing’s funny.”
“It does appear that on her own admission to Knight, she’s a buyer on a colossal scale under the museum-piece counter.”
Winter Meyer spread his hands. “We all have our weaknesses,” he said. “So she likes nice things and she can pay for them. Marcus Knight should complain!”
“Well!” Alleyn ejaculated. ’That’s one way of looking the Big Black Market in the eyes, I must say! Have you ever met Mrs. Guzmann, by the way?”
Winter Meyer had rather white eyelids. They now dropped a little. “No,” he said, “not in person. Her husband was a most brilliant man. The equal and more of Conducis.”
“Self-made?”
“Shall we say self-created? It was a superb achievement.”
Alleyn looked his enjoyment of this phrase and Meyer answered his look with a little sigh. “Ah yes!” he said. “These colossi! How marvellous!”
“In your opinion,” Alleyn said, “without prejudice and within these four walls and all that: how many people in this theatre know the combination of that lock?”
Meyer blushed. “Yes,” he said. “Well. This is where I don’t exactly shine with a clear white radiance, isn’t it? Well, as he’s told you, Charlie Random for one. Got it right, as you no doubt observed. He says he didn’t pass it on and personally I believe that. He’s a very quiet type, Charlie. Never opens up about his own or anybody else’s business. I’m sure he’s dead right about the boy not knowing the combination.”
“You are? Why?”
“Because as I said, the bloody kid was always pestering me about it.”
“And so you would have been pretty sure, would you, that only you yourself, Random, and Mr. Conducis knew the combination?”