Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 8: Death at the Dolphin, Hand in Glove, Dead Water. Ngaio Marsh
for the planks, the lantern and the crowbar. Here, Detective-Sergeants Thompson and Bailey were to be found, having taken further and more extensive photographs.
‘I’m a bit of a camera-fiend myself and they’ve been using my dark-room,’ said Williams. ‘We’re getting the workmen to bring the drain-pipe along in their crane-truck. Raikes’ll come back with them and keep an eye on it, but these chaps of yours tell me they got what they wanted on the spot.’
Alleyn made the appropriate compliments which were genuine indeed. Williams was the sort of colleague that visiting superintendents yearn after and Alleyn told him so.
Bailey, a man of few words, great devotion and mulish disposition, indicated the two foot-planks which had been laid across packing cases, underside up.
‘Hairs,’ he said. ‘Three. Consistent with deceased’s.’
‘Good.’
‘There’s another thing.’ Bailey jerked his finger at a piece of microphotographic film and a print laid out under glass on an improvised bench. ‘The print brings it up. Still wet, but you can make it out. Just.’
The planks were muddy where they had dug into the walls of the ditch, but at the edges and ten inches from the ends the microphotograph showed confused traces. Alleyn spent some time over them.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gloved hands. I don’t mind betting. Big, heavy gloves.’ He looked up at Bailey. ‘It’s a rough under-surface. If you can find as much leather as would go in the eye of a needle we’re not home and dry but we may be in sight. Which way were they carried here?’
‘Underside up,’ Bailey said.
‘Right. Well, you can but try.’
‘I have, Mr Alleyn. Can again.’
‘Do,’ said Alleyn. He was going over the under-surface of the planks with his lens. ‘Tweezers,’ he said.
Bailey put a pair in his hand and fetched a sheet of paper.
‘Have a go at these,’ Alleyn said and dropped two minute specks on the paper. ‘They may be damn’ all but it looks as if they might have rubbed off the seam of a heavy glove. Not wash-leather by the way. Strong hide – and – look here.’
He had found another fragment. ‘String,’ he said. ‘Heavy leather and string.’
‘You got to have the eyes for it,’ Detective-Sergeant Thompson said to nobody in particular.
During the brief silence that followed this pronouncement, the unmistakable racket of a souped-up engine made itself heard.
‘That,’ Mr Fox observed, ‘sounds like young Mr Leiss’s sports-car.’
‘Stopping,’ Williams observed.
‘Come on, Fox,’ Alleyn said. They went out to the gate. It was indeed Mr Leiss’s sports-car but Mr Leiss was not at the wheel. The car screamed to a halt, leaving a trail of water from its radiator. Moppett, wearing a leather coat and jeans, leaned out of the driving window.
With allowances for her make-up which contrived to look both dirty and extreme, Alleyn would have thought she was pale. Her manner was less assured than it had been: indeed, she seemed to be in something of an emotional predicament.
‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘They told me you might be here. Sorry to bother you.’
‘Not at all,’ Alleyn said. Moppett’s fingers, over-fleshed, sketchily nail-painted and stained with nicotine, moved restlessly on the driving wheel.
‘It’s like this,’ she said. ‘The local cop’s just brought Lenny’s things back: the overcoat and dinner-suit.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes. Well, the thing is, his gloves are missing.’
Alleyn glanced at Fox.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Ralston,’ Fox said, ‘but I saw to the parcel myself. The gloves were returned. Cream wash-leather, size seven.’
‘I don’t mean those,’ Moppett said. ‘I mean his driving gloves. They’re heavy leather ones with string backs. I ought to know. I gave them to him.’
III
‘Suppose,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘you park your car and we get this sorted out.’
‘I don’t want to go in there,’ Moppett said with a sidelong look at the mortuary. ‘That’s the dead-place, isn’t it?’
‘We’ll use the station,’ Alleyn said, and to that small yellow-wood office she was taken. The window was open. From a neighbouring garden came an insistent chatteration of bird-song and the smell of earth and violets. Fox shut a side door that led into the yard. Moppett sat down.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ she said.
Alleyn gave her a cigarette. She kept her hands in her pockets while he lit it. She then began to talk rapidly in a voice that was pitched above its natural level.
‘I can’t be long. Lennie thinks I’m dropping the car at the garage. It’s sprung a leak,’ she added unnecessarily, ‘in the waterworks. He’d be livid if he knew I was here. He’s livid, anyway, about the gloves. He swears they were in his overcoat pocket.’
Alleyn said: ‘They were not there when we collected the coat. Did he have them last night, do you know?’
‘He didn’t wear them. He wore his other ones. He’s jolly fussy about his gloves,’ said Moppett. ‘I tell him Freud would have had something to say about it. And now I suppose I’ll get the rocket.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because of yesterday afternoon. When we were at Baynesholme. We changed cars,’ Moppett said without herself changing colour, ‘and I collected his overcoat from the car he decided not to buy. He says the gloves were in the pocket of the coat.’
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