“I don’t remember. Talking of floozies, oughtn’t you to be asleep yourself?”
“God bless my soul!” Troy complained. “I haven’t been bitten by the tsetse fly. It’s getting on for nine hours since I went to bed, damn it.”
“O.K. O.K.”
“What’s happened, Rory?”
“One of the kind we don’t fancy.”
“Oh, no.”
“You’ll hear about it anyway, so I may as well tell you. It’s that florid number we saw playing the piano-accordion, the one with the teeth and hair.”
“You don’t mean — ”
“Somebody pinked him with a sort of dagger made out of a bit of a parasol and a needlework stiletto.”
“Catch!”
He explained at some length.
“Well but…” Troy stared at her husband. “When have you got to be at the Yard?”
“Ten.”
“All right. You’ve got two hours and time for breakfast. Good morning, darling.”
“Fox is in the bathroom. I know I’m not fit for a lady’s bed chamber.”
“Who said?”
“If you didn’t, nobody.” He put his arm across her and stooped his head. “Troy,” he said, “may I ask Fox this morning?”
“If you want to, my dearest.”
“I think I might. How much, at a rough guess, would you say I loved you?”
“Words fail me,” said Troy, imitating the late Harry Tate.
“And me.”
“There’s Mr. Fox coming out of the bathroom. Away with you.”
“I suppose so. Good morning, Mrs. Quiverful.”
On his way to the bathroom Alleyn looked in upon Fox. He found him lying on the visitors’ room bed, without his jacket but incredibly neat; his hair damp, his jaw gleaming, his shirt stretched tight over his thick pectoral muscles. His eyes were closed but he opened them as Alleyn looked in.
“I’ll call you at half-past nine,” Alleyn said. “Did you know you were going to be a godfather, Br’er Fox?” And as Fox’s eyes widened he shut the door and went whistling to the bathroom.
CHAPTER IX
THE YARD
At ten-thirty in the Chief-Inspector’s room at New Scotland Yard, routine procedure following a case of homicide was efficiently established. Alleyn sat at his desk taking reports from Detective-Sergeants Gibson, Watson, Scott and Sallis. Mr. Fox, with that air of good-humour crossed with severity which was his habitual reaction to reports following observation, listened critically to his juniors, each of whom held his official notebook. Six men going soberly about their day’s work. Earlier that morning, in other parts of London, Captain Entwhistle, an expert on ballistics, had fitted a dart made from a piece of a parasol into a revolver and had fired it into a bag of sand; Mr. Carrick, a government analyst, had submitted a small cork to various tests for certain oils; and Sir Grantly Morton, the famous pathologist, assisted by Curtis, had opened Carlos Rivera’s thorax, and, with the greatest delicacy, removed his heart.
“All right,” Alleyn said. “Get yourselves chairs and smoke if you want to. This is liable to be a session.”
When they were settled, he pointed the stem of his pipe at a heavy-jawed, straw-coloured detective-sergeant with a habitually startled expression. “You searched the deceased’s rooms, didn’t you Gibson? Let’s take you first.”
Gibson thumbed his notebook open, contemplating it in apparent astonishment, and embarked on a high-pitched recital.
“The deceased man, Carlos Rivera,” he said, “lived at 102 Bedford Mansions, Austerly Square S.W.I. Service flats. Rental £500 a year.”
“Why don’t we all play piano-accordions?” Fox asked of nobody in particular.
“At 3 a.m. on the morning of June 1st,” Gibson continued in a shrill — ish voice, “having obtained a search-warrant, I effected entrance to above premises by means of a key on a ring removed from the body of the deceased. The flat consists of an entrance lobby, six-by-eight feet, a sitting-room, twelve-by-fourteen feet, and a bedroom nine-by-eleven feet. Furnishings. Sitting-room: Carpet, purple, thick. Curtains, full length, purple satin.”
“Stay me with flagons!” Alleyn muttered. “Purple.”
“You might call it morve, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Well, go on.”
“Couch, upholstered green velvet, three armchairs ditto, dining table, six dining chairs, open fireplace. Walls painted fawn. Cushions: Seven. Green and purple satin.” He glanced at Alleyn. “I beg pardon, Mr. Alleyn? Anything wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing. Go on.”
“Bookcase. Fourteen books. Foreign. Recognized four as on police lists. Pictures: four.”
“What were they like?” Fox asked.
“Never you mind, you dirty old man,” said Alleyn.
“Two were nude studies, Mr. Fox, what you might call heavy pinups. The others were a bit more so. Cigarette boxes: four. Cigarettes, commercial product. Have taken one from each box. Wall safe. Combination lock but found note of number in deceased’s pocket-book. Contents — ”
“Half a minute,” Alleyn said. “Have all the flats got these safes?”
“I ascertained from inquiries, sir, that deceased had his installed.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Contents. I removed a number of papers, two ledgers or account-books and a locked cash-box containing three hundred pounds in notes of low denomination, and thirteen shillings in silver.” Here Gibson paused of his own accord.
“There now!” said Fox. “Now we may be on to something.”
“I left a note of the contents of the safe in the safe and I locked the safe,” said Gibson, on a note of uncertainty, induced perhaps by misgivings about his prose style. “Shall I produce the contents now, sir, or go on to the bedroom?”
“I doubt if I can take the bedroom,” Alleyn said. “But go on.”
“It was done up in black, sir. Black satin.”
“Do you put all this in your notes?” Fox demanded suddenly. “All this about colours and satin?”
“They tell us to be thorough, Mr. Fox.”
“There’s a medium to all things,” Fox pronounced somberly. “I beg pardon, Mr. Alleyn.”
“Not at all, Br’er Fox. The bedroom, Gibson.”
But there wasn’t anything much to the purpose in Gibson’s meticulous account of Rivera’s bedroom unless the revelation that he wore black satin pyjamas with embroidered initials could be called, as Alleyn suggested, damning and conclusive evidence as to character. Gibson produced the spoil of the wall safe and they examined it. Alleyn took the ledgers and Fox the bundle of correspondence. For some time there was silence, broken only by the whisper of papers.
Presently, however, Fox brought his palm down on his knee and Alleyn, without looking up, said: “Hullo?”
“Peculiar,” Fox grunted. “Listen to this, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
How tender [Mr. Fox began] is the first burgeoning of love! How delicate the tiny bud, how easily cut with frost! Touch it with gentle fingers, dear lad, lest its fragrance be lost to you forever.
“Cor’!” whispered Detective-Sergeant Scott.
You say [Mr. Fox continued] that she is changeable. So is a day in spring. Be patient. Wait for the wee petals to unfold. If you would care for a very special, etc.
Fox removed his spectacles and contemplated his superior.
“What do you mean by your ‘etc.,’ Fox? Why don’t you go on?”
“That’s what it says. Etc. Then it stops. Look.”
He flattened a piece of creased blue letter paper out on the desk before Alleyn. It was covered with typing, closely spaced. The Duke’s Gate address was stamped on the top.
Alleyn said, “What’s that you’re holding back?”
Fox laid his second exhibit before him. It was a press-cutting and printed on paper of the kind used in the more exotic magazines. Alleyn read aloud: