Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 7: Off With His Head, Singing in the Shrouds, False Scent. Ngaio Marsh
The shutters were down over the Private Bar and the room was deserted. Camilla went in and sat by the fire. Since last night she had felt the cold. It was as if some of her own natural warmth had deserted her. When the landlord had driven her and Trixie back to the pub from Mardian Castle, Camilla shivered so violently that they gave her a scalding toddy and two aspirins and Trixie put three stone hot-jugs in her bed. Eventually, she had dropped into a doze and was running away again from ‘Crack’. He was the big drum in a band. Somebody beat him with two swords making a sound like a fiddle. His jaws snapped, dreadfully close. She experienced the dream of frustrated escape. His breath was hot on her neck and her feet were leaden. Then there was Ralph with his arms strapped close about her, saying: ‘It’s all right. I’ll take care of you.’ That was heaven at first, but even that wasn’t quite satisfactory because Ralph was trying to stop her looking at something. In the over-distinct voice of nightmare, he said: ‘You don’t want to watch Ernie because it’s not most awfully nice.’ But Ernie jumped up on the dolmen and shouted at the top of his voice: ‘What price blood for the stone?’ Then all the Morris bells began to jingle like an alarm clock and she woke.
Awake, she remembered how Ralph had, in fact, run to where she and Trixie stood and had told them to go to the car at once. That was after Ernie had fainted and Dame Alice had made her announcement. The landlord, Tom Plowman, had gone up to the stone and had been ordered away by Dr Otterly and Superintendent Carey. He drove the girls back to the pub and, on the way, told them in great detail what he had seen. He was very excited and pleased with himself for having looked behind the stone. In one of her dreams during the night, Camilla thought he made her look too.
Now she sat by the fire and tried to get a little order into her thoughts. It was her grandfather who had been murdered, dreadfully and mysteriously, and it was her uncle who had exulted and collapsed. She herself, therefore, must be said to be involved. She felt as if she was marooned and deserted. For the first time since the event she was inclined to cry.
The door opened and she turned, her hand over her mouth. ‘Ralph!’ she said.
He came to her quickly and dragged up a chair so that he could sit and hold both her hands.
‘You want me now, Camilla,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’
Ralph had big hands. When they closed like twin shells over Camilla’s, her own felt imprisoned and fluttery like birds.
She looked at his eyes and hair, which were black, at his face, which was lean and at his ears, which were protuberant and, at that moment, scarlet. ‘I am in love with Ralph,’ thought Camilla.
She said: ‘Hallo, you. I thought we’d agreed not to meet again. After last Sunday.’
‘Thing of the past,’ Ralph said grandly.
‘You promised your father.’
‘I’ve told him I consider myself free. Under the circs.’
‘Ralph,’ Camilla said, ‘you mustn’t cash in on murder.’
‘Is that a very kind thing to say?’
‘Perhaps it’s not. I don’t mean I’m not glad to see you – but – well, you know.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘there are one or two things I’ve got to know. Important things. I’ve got to know them, Camilla. The first is: are you terribly upset about last night? Well, of course you are, but so much upset, I mean, that one just mustn’t bother you about anything. Or are you – oh, God, Camilla, I’ve never so much as kissed you and I do love you so much.’
‘Do you? No, never mind. About your first question: I just don’t know how I feel about Grandfather and that’s a fact. As far as it’s a personal thing – well, I scarcely even knew him ten days ago. But, since I got here, we’ve seen quite a lot of each other and – this is what you may find hard to believe – we kind of clicked, Grandfather and I.’
Ralph said on an odd inflexion: ‘You certainly did that,’ and then looked as if he wished he hadn’t.
Camilla, frowning with concentration, unconsciously laced her fingers through his.
‘You, of course,’ she said, ‘just think of him as a bucolic character. The Old Guiser. Wonderful old boy in his way. Not many left. Didn’t have much truck with soap and water. Half me felt like that about him: the Campion half. Smelly old cup of tea, it thought. But then I’d see my mother look out of his eyes.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘Do you? You can’t quite know, dear Ralph. You’re all of a piece: half Mardian, half Stayne. I’m an alloy.’
‘You’re a terrible old inverted snob,’ he said fondly, but she paid no attention to this.
‘But as for sorrow – personal grief,’ she was saying, ‘no. No. Not exactly that. It doesn’t arise. It’s the awful grotesquerie that’s so nightmarish. It’s like something out of Webster or Marlowe: horror-plus. It gives one the horrors to think of it.’
‘So you know what happened. Exactly, I mean?’
She made a movement of her head indicating the landlord. ‘He saw. He told us: Trixie and me.’
She felt a stillness in his hands: almost as if he would draw them away, but he didn’t do that. ‘The whole thing!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s so outlandish and sickening and ghastly. The way he was dressed and everything. And then one feels such pity.’
‘He couldn’t have known anything about it.’
‘Are you sure? How can you tell?’
‘Dr Otterly says so.’
‘And then – worst of all, unthinkably worst – the – what it was – the crime. You see, I can’t use the word.’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said. ‘There’s that.’
Camilla looked at him with panic in her eyes. ‘The boys!’ she said. ‘They couldn’t. Any of them. Could they?’ He didn’t answer, and she cried out: ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about Ernie and – what he’s like. You’re remembering what I told you about the dog. And what you said happened with his sword? Aren’t you?’
‘All right,’ Ralph said. ‘I am. No, darling. Wait a bit. Suppose, just suppose it is that. It would be quite dreadful and Ernie would have to go through a very bad time and probably spend several years in a criminal lunatic asylum. But there’d be no question of anything worse than that happening to him. It’s perfectly obvious, if you’ll excuse me, darling, that old Ernie’s only about fifteen and fourpence in the pound.’
‘Well, I dare say it is,’ Camilla said, looking very white. ‘But to do that!’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m going on to my next question. Please, answer it.’
‘I can guess –’
‘All right. Wait a bit. I’ve told you I love you. You said you were not sure how you felt and wanted to get away and think about it. Fair enough. I respected that and I’d have held off and not waited for you on Sunday if it hadn’t been for seeing you in church and – well, you know.’
‘Yes, well, we disposed of that, didn’t we?’
‘You were marvellously understanding. I thought everything was going my way. But then you started up this business. Antediluvian