“Furnace?” Alleyn asked.

“That’s right, sir.”

“Good. I’ll take them.”

He restored them to their envelope, put them in his pocket, and looked up the stairs to where Fox waited on the landing. “Next,” he said, and thought: “It’s like a dentist’s waiting-room.”

The next was the Colonel. He came down in fairly good order with his shoulders squared and his chin up and feeling with the back of his heels for the stair-treads. As he turned into the shop he pressed up the corners of his moustache.

After the histrionics of Gomez, the Colonel’s confrontation with the Sanskrits passed off quietly. He fetched up short, stood in absolute silence for a few seconds, and then said with an air that almost resembled dignity, “This is disgraceful.”

“Disgraceful?” Alleyn repeated.

“They’ve been murdered.”

“Clearly.”

“The bodies ought to be covered. It’s most irregular. And disgusting,” and he added, almost, it seemed, as an afterthought: “It makes me feel sick.” And indeed he perceptibly changed colour.

He turned his back on the Sanskrits and joined Gomez by the window. “I protest categorically,” he said, successfully negotiating the phrase, “at the conduct of these proceedings. And I wish to leave the room.”

“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” Alleyn said as Gomez made a move towards the door, “for either of you.”

“What right,” Gomez demanded, “have you to keep me here? You have no right.”

“Well,” Alleyn said mildly, “if you press the point we can note your objection, which I see Inspector Fox is doing in any case, and if you insist on leaving you may do so in a minute. In that case, of course, we shall ask you to come with us to the Yard. In the meantime: there’s Chubb. Would you, Fox?”

la its own succinct way Chubb’s reaction was a classic. He marched in almost as if Fox were a sergeant-major’s escort, executed a smart left turn, saw Miss Sanskrit, halted, became rigid, asked — unbelievably—“Who done it?” and fainted backwards like the soldier he had been.

And the Colonel, rivalling him in established behaviour, made a sharp exasperated noise and said: “Damn’ bad show.”

Chubb recovered almost immediately. One of the constables brought him a drink of water. He was supported to the only chair in the room and sat in it with his back to the alcove.

“Very sorry, sir,” he mumbled, not to Alleyn but to the Colonel. His gaze alighted on Gomez.

“You done it!” he said, sweating and trembling. “Din’ you? You said you’d fix it and you did. You fixed it.”

“Do you lay a charge against Mr. Gomez?” Alleyn said.

“Gomez? I don’t know any Gomez.”

“Against Mr. Sheridan?”

“I don’t know what it means, lay a charge, and I don’t know how he worked it, do I? But he said last night if it turned out they’d rattled, he’d get them. And I reckon he’s kept ’is word. He’s got them.”

Gomez sprang at him like a released spring, so suddenly and with such venom that it took Gibson and both the constables all their time to hold him. He let out short, disjointed phrases, presumably in Portuguese, wetting his blue chin and mouthing at Alleyn. Perhaps because the supply of invective ran out, he at last fell silent and watchful and seemed the more dangerous for it.

“That was a touch of your old Ng’ombwana form,” Alleyn said. “You’d much better pipe down, Mr. Gomez. Otherwise, you know, we shall have to lock you up.”

“Filth!” said Mr. Gomez, and spat inaccurately in Chubb’s direction.

“Bad show. Damn’ bad show,” reiterated the Colonel, who seemed to have turned himself into a sort of Chorus to the Action.

Alleyn said: “Has one of you lost a pair of gloves?”

The scene went silent. For a second or two nobody moved, and then Chubb got to his feet. Gomez, whose arms were still in custody, looked at his hands with their garnish of black hair and the Colonel thrust his into his pockets. And then, on a common impulse, it seemed they all three began accusing each other incoherently and inanely of the murder of the Sanskrits, and would no doubt have gone on doing so if the front doorbell had not pealed once more. As if the sound-track for whatever drama was being ground out had been turned back for a replay, a woman could be heard making a commotion in the hallway.

“I want to see my husband. Stop that. Don’t touch me. I’m going to see my husband.”

The Colonel whispered, “No! For Chrissake keep her out. Keep her out.”

But she was already in the room, with the constable on duty in the hall making an ineffectual grab after her and the two men inside the door, taken completely by surprise, looking to Alleyn for orders.

He had her by the arms. She was dishevelled and her eyes were out of focus. It would be hard to say whether she smelt stronger of gin or of scent.

Alleyn turned her with her back to the alcove and her face towards her husband. He felt her sagging in his grasp.

“Hughie!” she said. “You haven’t, have you? Hughie, promise you haven’t. Hughie!”

She fought with Alleyn, trying to reach her husband. “I couldn’t stand it, Hughie,” she cried. “Alone, after what you said you’d do. I had to come. I had to know.”

And as Chubb had turned on his wife, so the Colonel, in a different key, turned on her.

“Hold your tongue!” he roared out. “You’re drunk.”

She struggled violently with Alleyn and in doing so swung round in his grasp and faced the alcove.

And screamed. And screamed. And poured out such a stream of fatal words that her husband made a savage attempt to get at her and was held off by Fox and Thompson and Bailey. And then she became terrified of him, begged Alleyn not to let him get to her, and finally collapsed.

There being nowhere else to put her, they carried her upstairs and left her with Mrs. Chubb, gabbling wildly about how badly he treated her and how she knew when he left the house in a blind rage he would do what he said he would do. All of which was noted down by the officer on duty in the upstairs room.

In the downstairs room Alleyn, not having a warrant for his arrest, asked Colonel Cockburn-Montfort to come to the Yard, where he would be formally charged with the murder of the Sanskrits.

“And I should warn you that—”

X

Epilogue

“It was clear from the moment we saw the bodies,” Alleyn said, “that Montfort was the man. The pig-pottery had been under strict surveillance from the time Sanskrit returned to it from the house-agents. The only gap came after Gibson’s men had been drawn off by the bomb scare. The traffic in the Mews piled up between Sergeant Jacks and the flat entrance where Montfort leant against the doorbell, and for at least five minutes, probably longer, the façade was completely hidden by a van. During that time Montfort, who was beginning to make a scene in the street, had been admitted by one or other of the Sanskrits with the object, one supposes, of shutting him up.

“They were in a hurry. They had to get to the airport. They had planned to make their getaway within the next quarter of an hour and were packing up the last lot of pigs and writing a note for the agents. Leaving the drunken Colonel to grind to a halt, they returned to their jobs. Sanskrit put the penultimate pig in the case, his sister sat down to write the note. Montfort followed them up, found himself between the two of them, heaved up the last pig doorstop on the bench and in a drunken fury crashed it down left and right. The shock of what he’d done may have partly sobered him. His gloves were bloodied. He shoved them in the kiln, walked out, and had the sense or the necessity to lean against the doorbell again. The van still blocked the view, and when it removed itself there he stilt was.”

“Who raised the false alarm about the bomb?” asked Troy.

“Oh, one of the Sanskrits, don’t you think? To draw. Gibson’s men off while the two of them did a bunk to Ng’ombwana. They were in a blue funk over the outcome of the assassination and an even bluer one at the thought of the Klu-Klux-Fish. They realized, as they were bound to do, that they’d been rumbled.”