“So you always tell us, sir,” said Fox.
“All right, all right; I grow to a dotage and repeat myself. There’s the lovelorn C.P.’s car. We wait here while they hunt up the garments of the two ladies. Mrs. Cartarette’s will be brand-new extra-loud tweeds smelling of Schiaparelli and, presumably, of fish.”
“Must be a bit lonely,” Fox mused.
“Who?”
“Mrs. Cartarette. An outsider, you might say, dumped down in a little place where they’ve known each other’s pedigrees since the time they were all using bows and arrows. Bit lonely. More she tries to fit in, I daresay, the less they seem to take to her. More polite they get, the more uncomfortable they make her feel.”
“Yes,” Alleyn said, “true enough. You’ve shoved your great fat finger into the middle of one of those uncomfortable minor tragedies that the Lacklanders of this world prefer to cut dead. And I’ll tell you something else, Fox. Of the whole crowd of them, not excluding your girl-friend, there isn’t one that wouldn’t feel a kind of relief if she turned out to have murdered her husband.”
Fox looked startled. “One, surely?” he ejaculated.
“No,” Alleyn insisted with a sort of violence that was very rare with him. “Not one. Not one. For all of them she’s the intruder, the disturber, the outsider. The very effort some of them have tried to make on her behalf has added to their secret resentment. I bet you. How did you get on in Chyning?”
“I saw Dr. Curtis. He’s fixed up very comfortably in the hospital mortuary and was well on with the P.M. Nothing new cropped up about the injuries. He says he thinks it’s true enough about the fish scales and will watch out for them and do the microscope job with all the exhibits. The Yard’s going to look up the late Sir Harold’s will and check Commander Syce’s activities in Singapore. They say it won’t take long if the Navy List gives them a line on anybody in the Service who was there at the time and has a shore job now. If they strike it lucky, they may call us back in a couple of hours. I said the Boy and Donkey and the Chyning station to be sure of catching us.”
“Good,” Alleyn said without much show of interest. “Hullo, listen who’s coming! Here we go.”
He was out of the car before Fox could reply and with an abrupt change of speed began to stroll down the drive. His pipe was in his hands and he busied himself with filling it. The object of this unexpected pantomime now pedalled into Mr. Fox’s ken: the village postman.
Alleyn, stuffing his pipe, waited until the postman was abreast with him.
“Good morning,” said Alleyn.
“Morning, sir,” said the postman, braking his bicycle.
“I’ll take them, shall I?” Alleyn suggested.
The postman steadied himself with one foot on the ground. “Well, ta,” he said and with a vague suggestion of condolence added, “Save the disturbance, like, won’t it, sir? Only one, anyway.” He fetched a long envelope from his bag and held it out. “For the deceased,” he said in a special voice. “Terrible sad, if I may pass the remark.”
“Indeed, yes,” Alleyn said, taking, with a sense of rising excitement, the long, and to him familiar, envelope.
“Terrible thing to happen in the Vale,” the postman continued. “What I mean, the crime, and the Colonel that highly respected and never a word that wasn’t kindness itself. Everybody’s that upset and that sorry for the ladies. Poor Miss Rose, now! Well, it’s terrible.”
The postman, genuinely distressed and at the same time consumed with a countryman’s inquisitiveness, looked sideways at Alleyn. “You’d be a relative, I daresay, sir.”
“How very kind of you,” Alleyn said, blandly ignoring this assumption. “I’ll tell them you sent your sympathy, shall I?”
“Ta,” said the postman. “And whoever done it; what I mean, I’m sure I hope they get ’em. I hear it’s reckoned to be a job for the Yard and altogether beyond the scope of Bert Oliphant, which won’t surprise us in the Vale, although the man’s active enough when it comes to after hours at the Boy and Donkey. Well, I’ll be getting along.”
When he had gone, Alleyn returned to Fox.
“Look what I’ve got,” he said.
Fox contemplated the long envelope and, when Alleyn showed him the reverse side, read the printed legend on the flap: “From Brierley and Bentwood, St. Peter’s Place, London, W. 1.”
“Publishers?” said Fox.
“Yes. We’ve got to know what this is, Fox. The flap’s very sketchily gummed down. A little tweak and — how easy it would be. Justifiable enough, too, I suppose. However, we’ll go the other way round. Here comes Miss Cartarette.”
She came out, followed by Mark carrying a suitcase, a tennis racket in a press and a very new golf bag and clubs.
“Here you are, sir,” Mark said. “We had to fish the clothes out of the dry cleaner’s box, but they’re all present and correct. Rose said you might want her racket, which is absurd, but this is it.”
“Thank you,” Alleyn said, and Fox relieved Mark of his load and put it in the police car. Alleyn showed Rose the envelope.
He said, “This has come for your father. I’m afraid we may have to ask for all his recent correspondence and certainly for anything that comes now. They will, of course, be returned and, unless used in evidence, will be treated as strictly confidential. I’m so sorry, but that’s how it is. If you wish, you may refuse to let me have this one without an official order.”
He was holding it out with the typed superscription uppermost. Rose looked at it without interest.
Mark said, “Look, darling, I think perhaps you shouldn’t—”
“Please take it,” she said to Alleyn. “It’s a pamphlet, I should think.”
Alleyn thanked her and watched her go off with Mark in his car.
“Shame to take the money,” said Fox.
Alleyn said, “I hope, if he knows, the Colonel doesn’t think too badly of me.”
He opened the envelope, drew out the enclosure and unfolded it.
Colonel M. C. V. Cartarette, M.V.O., D.S.C.
Hammer Farm
Swevenings
Dear Sir:
The late Sir Harold Lacklander, three weeks before he died, called upon me for a discussion about his memoirs, which my firm is to publish. A difficulty had arisen in respect of Chapter 7, and Sir Harold informed me that he proposed to take your advice in this matter. He added that if he should not live to see the publication of his memoirs, he wished you, if you would accept the responsibility, to edit the work in toto. He asked me, in the event of his death, to communicate directly with you and with nobody else and stressed the point that your decision in every respect must be considered final.
We have had no further instructions or communications of any kind from Sir Harold Lacklander, and I now write, in accordance with his wishes, to ask if you have, in fact, accepted the responsibility of editing the memoirs, if you have received the manuscript, and if you have arrived at a decision in the delicate and important matter of Chapter 7.
I shall be most grateful for an early reply. Perhaps you would give me the pleasure of lunching with me when next you are in London. If you would be kind enough to let me know the appropriate date, I shall keep it free.
I am, my dear sir,
Yours truly,
Timothy Bentwood
“And I’ll give you two guesses, Br’er Fox,” Alleyn said as he refolded the letter and returned it to its envelope, “what constitutes the delicate and important matter of Chapter 7.”
When Mark had turned in at the Nunspardon Lodge gates, Rose asked him to stop somewhere on the drive.
“It’s no use going on,” she said. “There’s something I’ve got to say. Please stop.”
“Of course.” Mark pulled into an open space alongside the drive. He stopped his engine and turned to look at her. “Now,” he said, “tell me.”