“Well, darling, when I got there, the rag, far from being neatly folded and stowed, was six yards away on a briar bush. I rescued it and put it into your haversack.”
They all looked at Alleyn as if they expected him to make some comment. He was silent, however, and after a considerable pause Lady Lacklander said, “Well, it couldn’t be of less significance, after all. Go indoors and ask them to get the clothes together. Fisher knows what I wore.”
“Ask about mine, old boy, will you?” said George, and Alleyn wondered how many households there were left in England where orders of this sort were still given.
Lady Lacklander turned to Rose. “And what about you, child?”
But Rose stared out with unseeing eyes that had filled again with tears. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief and frowned at herself.
“Rose?” Lady Lacklander said quietly.
Still frowning, Rose turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“They want to know what clothes you wore, my dear.”
“Tennis things, I imagine,” Alleyn said.
Rose said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Tennis things.”
Kitty said, “It’s the day for the cleaner. I saw your tennis things in the box, didn’t I, Rose?”
“I—? Yes,” Rose said. “I’m sorry. Yes, I did put them in.”
“Shall we go and rescue them?” Mark asked.
Rose hesitated. He looked at her for a moment and then said in a level voice, “O.K. I’ll come back,” and went into the house. Rose turned away and stood at some distance from the group.
“It’s toughest for Rose,” Kitty said, unexpectedly compassionate, and then with a return to her own self-protective mannerisms she sipped her sherry. “I wish you joy of my skirt, Mr. Alleyn,” she added loudly. “You won’t find it very delicious.”
“No?” Alleyn said, “Why not?”
“It absolutely reeks of fish.”
Alleyn observed the undistinguished little face and wondered if his own was equally blank. He then, under the guise of bewilderment, looked at the others. He found that Lady Lacklander seemed about as agitated as a Buddha and that George was in process of becoming startled. Rose was still turned away.
“Are you a fisherman too, then, Mrs. Cartarette?” Alleyn asked.
“God forbid!” she uaid with feeling. “No, I tried to take a fish away from a cat last evening.” The others gaped at her.
“My dear Kitty,” Lady Lacklander said, “I suggest that you consider what you say.”
“Why?” Kitty countered, suddenly common and arrogant. “Why? It’s the truth. What are you driving at?” she added nervously. “What’s the matter with saying I’ve got fish on my skirt? Here,” she demanded of Alleyn, “what are they getting at?”
“My good girl—” Lady Lacklander began, but Alleyn cut in. “I’m sorry, Lady Lacklander, but Mrs. Cartarette’s perfectly right. There’s nothing the matter, I assure you, with speaking the truth.” Lady Lacklander shut her mouth with a snap. “Where did you meet your cat and fish, Mrs. Cartarette?”
“This side of the bridge,” Kitty muttered resentfully.
“Did you, now?” Alleyn said with relish.
“It looked a perfectly good trout to me, and I thought the cat had no business with it. I suppose,” Kitty went on, “it was one of old Occy Phinn’s swarm; the cat, I mean. Anyhow, I tried to get the trout away from it. It hung on like a fury. And then when I did jerk the trout away, it turned out to be half eaten on the other side, sort of. So I let the cat have it back,” Kitty said limply.
Alleyn said, “Did you notice any particular mark or scar on the trout?”
“Well, hardly. It was half eaten.”
“Yes, but on the part that was left?”
“I don’t think so. Here! What sort of mark?” Kitty demanded, beginning to look alarmed.
“It doesn’t matter. Really.”
“It was quite a nice trout. I wondered if Maurice had caught it, and then I thought old Occy Phinn must have hooked it and given it to the cat. He’s crazy enough on his cats to give them anything, isn’t he, George?”
“Good God, yes!” George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.
“It’s a possible explanation,” Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.
Mark came back from the house. “The clothes,” he said to Alleyn, “will be packed up and put in your car, which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.”
“Thank you so much,” Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. “I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless, and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitve and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.”
Lady Lacklander stared at him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn and said, “What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray tell us what you want.”
“Certainly. I want to know if, when I arrived, you were discussing Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.”
He knew by their very stillness that he had scored. It struck him, not for the first time, that people who have been given a sudden fright tend to look alike: a sort of homogeneous glassiness overtakes them.
Lady Lacklander first recovered from whatever shock they had all received.
“In point of fact we were,” she said. “You must have extremely sharp ears.”
“I caught the name of my own publishers,” Alleyn said at once. “Brierley and Bentwood. An admirable firm. I wondered if they are to do the memoirs.”
“I’m glad you approve of them,” she said dryly. “I believe they are.”
“Colonel Cartarette was entrusted with the publication, wasn’t he?”
There was a fractional pause before Mark and Rose together said, “Yes.”
“I should think,” Alleyn said pleasantly, “that that would have been a delightful job.”
George, in a strangulated voice, said something about “responsibility” and suddenly offered Alleyn a drink.
“My good George,” his mother said impatiently, “Roderick is on duty and will have none of your sherry. Don’t be an ass.”
George blushed angrily and glanced, possibly for encouragement, at Kitty.
“Nevertheless,” Lady Lacklander said with a sort of grudging bonhomie, “you may as well sit down, Rory. One feels uncomfortable when you loom. There is, after all, a chair.”
“Thank you,” Alleyn said, taking it. “I don’t want to loom any more than I can help, you know, but you can’t expect me to be all smiles and prattle when you, as a group, close your ranks with such a deafening clank whenever I approach you.”
“Nonsense,” she rejoined briskly, but a dull colour actually appeared under her weathered skin, and for a moment there was a fleeting likeness to her son. Alleyn saw that Rose Cartarette was looking at him with a sort of anguished appeal and that Mark had taken her hand.
“Well,” Alleyn said cheerfully, “if it’s all nonsense, I can forget all about it and press on with the no doubt irrelevant details. About the autobiography, for instance. I’m glad Mr. Phinn is not with us at the moment because I want to ask you if Sir Harold gives a full account of young Phinn’s tragedy. He could scarcely, one imagines, avoid doing so, could he?”