Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 3: Death in a White Tie, Overture to Death, Death at the Bar. Ngaio Marsh
of you to come to me,’ he said. ‘I said on the telephone that I was quite ready to report at Scotland Yard whenever it suited you. Do sit down.’
They sat down. Alleyn glanced round the room and what he saw pleased him. It was a charming room with apple-green walls, an Adam fireplace and silver-starred curtains. Above the mantelpiece hung a sunny landscape by a famous painter. A silk praying-mat that would not have disgraced a collector’s walls did workaday service before the fireplace. Sir Daniel’s desk was an adapted spinet, his inkwell recalled the days when sanded paper was inscribed with high-sounding phrases in quill-scratched calligraphy. As he sat at his desk Sir Daniel saw before him in Chinese ceramic, a little rose-red horse. A beautiful and expensive room, crying in devious tones of the gratitude of wealthy patients. The most exalted, if not the richest, of these stared with blank magnificence from a silver frame.
Sir Daniel himself, neat, exquisite in London clothes and a slightly flamboyant tie, with something a little exotic about his fine dark head, looked as though he could have no other setting than this. He seated himself at his desk, joined his hands and contemplated Alleyn with frank curiosity.
‘Surely you are Roderick Alleyn?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I have read your book.’
‘Are you interested in criminology?’ asked Alleyn with a smile.
‘Enormously! I hardly dare to tell you this because you must so often fall a victim to the enthusiasm of fools. I, too! “Oh, Sir Daniel, it must be too marvellous to be able to look into the minds of people as you do.” Their minds! My God! Their stomachs are enough. But I often think quite seriously that I should have liked to follow medical jurisprudence.’
‘We have lost a great figure then,’ said Alleyn.
‘That’s very graceful. But it’s untrue, I’m afraid. I am too impatient and altogether too much of a partisan. As in this case. Lord Robert was a friend of mine. It would be impossible for me to look at this case with an equal eye.’
‘If you mean,’ said Alleyn, ‘that you do not feel kindly disposed towards his murderer, no more do we. Do we, Fox?’
‘No, sir, that we do not,’ said Fox.
Davidson’s brilliant eyes rested for a moment on Fox. With a single glance he seemed to draw him into the warm circle of his confidence and regard. ‘All the same,’ thought Alleyn, ‘he’s uneasy. He doesn’t quite know where to begin.’ And he said:
‘You very kindly rang up to say you might be able to help us.’
‘Yes,’ said Davidson, ‘yes, I did.’ He lifted a very beautiful jade paperweight and put it down. ‘I don’t know how to begin.’ He darted a shrewd and somehow impish glance at Alleyn. ‘I find myself in the unenviable position of being one of the last people to see Lord Robert.’
Fox took out his notebook. Davidson looked distastefully at it.
‘When did you see him?’ Alleyn asked.
‘In the hall. Just before I left.’
‘You left, I understand, after Mrs Halcut-Hackett, Captain Withers and Mr Donald Potter, who went away severally about three-thirty.’
Davidson’s jaw dropped. He flung up his beautiful hands.
‘Believe it or not,’ he said, ‘I had a definite struggle with my conscience before I made up my mind to admit it.’
‘Why was that?’ asked Alleyn.
Again that sideways impish glance.
‘I didn’t want to come forward at all. Not a bit. It’s very bad for us parasites to appear in murder trials. In the long run, it is very bad indeed. By the way, I suppose it is a case of homicide. No doubt about it? Or shouldn’t I ask?’
‘Of course you can ask. There seems to be no doubt at all. He was smothered.’
‘Smothered!’ Davidson leant forward, his hands clasped on the desk. Alleyn read in his face the subtle change that comes upon all men when they embark on their own subject. ‘Good God!’ he said, ‘he wasn’t a Desdemona! Why didn’t he make a rumpus? Is he marked?’
‘There are no marks of violence.’
‘None? Who did the autopsy?’
‘Curtis. He’s our expert.’
‘Curtis, Curtis? – yes, of course. How does he account for the absence of violence? Heart? His heart was in a poor condition.’
‘How do you know that, Sir Daniel?’
‘My dear fellow, I examined him most thoroughly three weeks ago.’
‘Did you!’ exclaimed Alleyn. ‘That’s very interesting. What did you find?’
‘I found a very unpleasant condition. Evidence of fatty degeneration. I ordered him to avoid cigars like the plague, to deny himself his port and to rest for two hours every day. I am firmly persuaded that he paid no attention whatsoever. Nevertheless, my dear Mr Alleyn, it was not a condition under which I would expect an unprovoked heart attack. A struggle certainly might induce it and you tell me there is no evidence of a struggle.’
‘He was knocked out.’
‘Knocked out! Why didn’t you say so before? Because I gave you no opportunity, of course. I see. And quietly asphyxiated? How very horrible and how ingenious.’
‘Would the condition of the heart make it quicker?’
‘I should say so, undoubtedly.’
Davidson suddenly ran his fingers through his picturesque hair.
‘I am more distressed by this abominable, this unspeakable crime than I would have thought possible. Mr Alleyn, I had the deepest regard for Lord Robert. It would be impossible to exaggerate my regard for him. He seemed a comic figure, an aristocratic droll with an unusual amount of charm. He was much more than that. He had a keen brain. In conversation, he understood everything that one left unsaid, his mind was both subtle and firm. I am a man of the people. I adore all my smart friends and I understand – Cristo Mio, do I not understand! – my smart patients! But I am not, deep in my heart, at ease with them. With Lord Robert I was at ease. I showed off and was not ashamed afterwards that I had done so.’
‘You pay him a great compliment when you confess as much,’ said Alleyn.
‘Do I not? Listen. If it had been anyone else, do you know what I should have done? I should have kept quiet and I should have said to myself il ne faut pas réveiller le chat qui dort, and hoped nobody would remember that I stood in the hall this morning at Marsdon House and watched Lord Robert at the foot of the stairs. But as it is I have screwed myself up to making the superb gesture of coming to you with information you have already received. Gros-Jean en remontre à son curé!’
‘Not altogether,’ said Alleyn. ‘It is not entirely une vieille histoire. You may yet glow with conscious virtue. I am longing for a precise account of those last minutes in the hall. We have the order of the going but not the nature of it. If you don’t mind giving us a microscopically exact version?’
‘Ah!’ Davidson frowned. ‘You must give me a moment to arrange my facts. A microscopically exact version! Wait now.’ He closed his eyes and his right hand explored the surface of the carved jade paperweight. The deliberate movement of the fingers arrested Alleyn’s attention. The piece of jade might have been warm and living, so sensitively did the fingertips caress it. Alleyn thought: ‘He loves his beautiful possessions.’ He determined to learn more of this poseur who called himself a man of the people and spattered his conversation with French and Italian tags, who was at once so frankly theatrical and so theatrically frank.
Davidson opened his eyes. The effect was quite startling. They were such remarkable eyes. The light grey iris, unusually large, was ringed with black, the pupil