“Great grief!” Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats. “I liked Cartarette.”
“You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?”
“ ‘Love,’ ” Syce repeated turning purple. “What a word!”
“Well, my dear man — put it this way. Did she love you?”
“Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or — or — I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,” Commander Syce shouted angrily, “and Bywaters, by God!”
“What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?”
“A few more cracks like that and I bloody well will send for a solicitor.”
“You are being difficult,” Alleyn said without rancour. “Will you let me have the clothes you were wearing last evening?”
“What the hell for?”
“For one thing, to see if Cartarette’s blood is on them.”
“How absolutely piffling.”
“Well, may I have them?”
“I’m wearing them, blast it.”
“Would you mind wearing something else?”
Commander Syce fixed his intensely blue and slightly bloodshot eyes on a distant point in the landscape and said, “I’ll shift.”
“Thank you. I see you’ve been using this as a bed-sitting-room during, no doubt, your attack of lumbago. Perhaps for the time being you could shift into your dressing-gown and slippers.”
Syce followed this suggestion. Little gales of whisky were wafted from him, and his hands were unsteady, but he achieved his change with the economy of movement practised by sailors. He folded up the garments as they were discarded, passed a line of cord round them, made an appropriate knot and gave the bundle to Fox, who wrote out a receipt for it.
Syce tied his dressing-gown cord with a savage jerk.
“No return,” Alleyn remarked, “of the ailment?”
Syce did not reply.
Alleyn said, “Why not tell me about it? You must know damn’ well that I can’t cut all this background stuff dead. Why the devil did you pretend to have lumbago last evening? Was it for the love of a lady?”
It would be inaccurate to say that Commander Syce blushed, since his face, throughout the interview, had been suffused. But at this juncture it certainly darkened to an alarming degree.
“Well, was it?” Alleyn insisted on a note of exasperation. Fox clapped the bundle of clothes down on a table.
“I know what it’s like,” Commander Syce began incomprehensibly. He moved his hand in the direction of Hammer Farm. “Lonely as hell. Poor little Kit. Suppose she wanted security. Natural. Ever seen that play? I believe they put it on again a year or two ago. I don’t go in for poodle-faking, but it was damn’ true. In the end she pitched herself out of a top window, poor thing. Frozen out. County.”
“Can you mean The Second Mrs. Tanqueray?”
“I daresay. And they’d better change their course or she’ll do the same thing. Lonely. I know what it’s like.”
His gaze travelled to a corner cupboard. “You have to do something,” he said and then eyed the tumbler on his luncheon table. “No good offering you a drink,” he mumbled.
“None in the world, worse luck.”
“Well,” Syce said. He added something that sounded like “luck” and suddenly drained the tumbler.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m thinking of giving it up myself. Alcohol.”
“It’s a ‘good familiar creature,’ ” Alleyn quoted, “ ‘if it is well used.’ ”
“That’s all right as far as it goes, but what sort of a perisher,” Syce surprisingly observed, “took the bearings? ‘A nasty little man and a beastly liar into the bargain.’ ”
“True enough. But we’re not, after all, discussing Iago and alcohol but you and lumbago. Why—”
“All right, I heard you before. I’m just thinking what to say.”
He went to the corner cupboard and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “It’s damn’ ticklish, I’d have you know.” He helped himself to a treble whisky.
“In that case, wouldn’t you do better without that snorter you’ve just poured out?”
“Think so?”
Fox, with his masterly command of the totally unexpected, said, “She would.”
“Who?” shouted Commander Syce looking terrified. He drank half his whisky.
“Miss Kettle.”
“She would what?”
“Think you’d be better without it, sir.”
“She knows what to do,” he muttered, “if she wants to stop me. Or rather she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her,” Commander Syce added in a deeper voice than Alleyn could have imagined him to produce, “I wouldn’t mention it to her on any account whatsoever, never.”
“I’m afraid you really are very tight.”
“It’s the last time so early; in future I’m going to wait till the sun’s over the yard-arm. It happens to be a promise.”
“To Miss Kettle?”
“Who else?” Syce said grandly. “Why not?”
“An admirable idea. Was it,” Alleyn asked, “on Miss Kettle’s account, by any chance, that you pretended to have lumbago last evening?”
“Who else’s?” admitted Syce, who appeared to have got into one unchangeable gear. “Why not?”
“Does she know?”
Fox muttered something indistinguishable and Syce said, “She guessed.” He added wretchedly, “We parted brass rags.”
“You had a row about it?” Alleyn ventured.
“Not about that. About that.” He indicated the tumbler. “So I promised. After to-day. Yard-arm.”
“Good luck to it.”
With the swiftest possible movement Alleyn whisked the arrow from the golf bag and held it under Syce’s nose. “Do you know anything about that?” he asked.
“That’s mine. You took it away.”
“No. This is another of your arrows. This was found in Bottom Meadow at the foot of Watt’s Hill. If you examine it, you’ll see there’s a difference.”
Alleyn whipped the cover off the tip of the arrow. “Look,” he said.
Syce stared owlishly at the point.
“Bloody,” he observed.
“Looks like it. What blood? Whose blood?”
Syce thrust his fingers distractedly through his thin hair.
“Cat’s blood,” he said.
This was the selfsame arrow, Commander Syce urged, with which some weeks ago he had inadvertently slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett. He himself had found the body and in his distress had withdrawn the arrow and cast it from him into the adjacent bushes. He had taken the body to Mr. Phinn, who had refused to accept his explanation and apologies, and they had parted, as Commander Syce again put it, brass rags.
Alleyn asked him if he did not consider it at all dangerous to fire off arrows at random into his neighbours’ spinneys and over them. The reply was confused and shamefaced. More by surmise and conjecture than by any positive means, Alleyn understood Syce to suggest a close relationship between the degree of his potations and the incontinence of his archery. At this juncture he became morose, and they could get no more out of him.