Death of a Peer

sideboard?”

The box was empty. “Would you like to ring for some,” Alleyn asked, “or would these be any use?” He opened his case and put it on the table in front of her with an ash-tray and matches. “They are your sort, I think.”

“So they are. That is kind. But I must see that there are some here, because if we are going to be any time at all I shall smoke all these and then what will you do?”

“Please smoke them. I’m not allowed cigarettes on duty.”

He watched her light the cigarette and inhale deeply. Her hands were not quite steady.

“Now I’m ready for anything,” she said.

“It won’t be a solemn affair. I just want to check over your own movements, which seem to be very plain- sailing, and then I’ll ask you to tell me anything you can think of that may help us to sort things out a little.”

“I expect I’m much more likely to muddle them up, but I’ll try to keep my head.”

“According to my notes,” said Alleyn, looking dubiously at them, “you went to your room with Lady Wutherwood and Lady Katherine Lobe and remained there until you heard Lord Wutherwood call the second time. Then, followed by Lady Wutherwood, you went to the drawing-room.”

“Yes. She didn’t come into the drawing-room, you know. I hurried on ahead of her.”

“To ask for some one to take them down in the lift?”

“Yes,” she said steadily. “That’s it.”

“Did you see anybody else on your way to the drawing-room?”

“I think Mike was in the passage. Nobody else.”

“And Lord Wutherwood was in the lift?”

“I suppose he was. I didn’t look. He sounded cross so I rather skidded past, do you know?”

“I see. And then you asked for some one to work the lift and Mr. Stephen Lamprey went out and worked it.”

IV

Alleyn felt, rather than heard, her draw in her breath. She said lightly: “No, that’s not quite right. You remember that we don’t know which twin went out.”

“I think I know,” said Alleyn. “I’m not trying to trap you into an admission. We’ll leave it that a twin went out and you followed, as far as the hall, to say good-bye. Lady Wutherwood got into the lift and you returned to the drawing-room. That’s all right?”

“About me — yes.”

“I’ll ask you to sign it later, if you will. What I hope you will do now is give us some sort of side-light of Lord Wutherwood himself. I’m afraid many of my questions will sound impertinent. Perhaps the most offensive part of police investigation is the ferreting. We have to ferret, you know, like anything.”

“Ferret away,” said Lady Charles.

“Well, can you think of anybody who would want to kill Lord Wutherwood?”

“That’s not ferreting; it’s more like bombing. I can’t think of anybody who, in their right minds, would actually and literally want to kill Gabriel. I expect lots of people have, as one says, felt like killing him. He was a frightfully irritating fellow, poor dear. Not a fragment of charm and so drearily ungay, do you know? I mean, it does help if people are gay, doesn’t it? I set enormous store on gaiety. But of course one doesn’t kill people simply because they are not exactly one’s own cup of tea and I suppose he had his grey little pleasures. He was passionately interested in plumbing and drainage, I understand, and carried out all sorts of experiments at Deepacres where one pulls chains when one would expect to turn taps and the other way round. So, what with his drains and his Chinese pots, I daresay he had quite a giddy time. And with Violet wrapped up in her black magic, you may say they both had hobbies.”

“I thought I smelt black magic in Lady Wutherwood’s conversation.”

“She didn’t start off about it to you!”

“Well, there were some rather cryptic allusions to unseen forces.”

“Oh, no. Really, Violet is too odd.”

“Lady Charles,” said Alleyn, “do you think she’s at all—”

“Dotty?”

“Well—”

“You needn’t be apologetic, Mr. Alleyn. Violet popped into the drawing-room on her way to see you and if she kept up the form she showed then I’m surprised that you didn’t whisk a strait jacket out of your black bag. Was she very queer?”

“I thought her so, certainly. I wondered if it could all be put down to shock.”

Lady Charles said nothing but solemnly shook her head.

“No?” murmured Alleyn. “You don’t think so?”

“No. I’m afraid I can’t honestly say I do.”

“Has there ever been serious trouble?”

“Well, of course, we don’t see very much of them. My husband rather lost touch with Gabriel when we were in New Zealand but we did hear, from Aunt Kit and people, that she had gone away to a private nursing-home in Devonshire. It had been recommended by old Lady Lorrimer whose husband, as everybody knows, has been under lock and key for a hundred years. We heard that Violet’s trouble comes in sort of bursts, do you know? Cycles.”

“Is there anything of that sort in the family history?”

“Of that one hasn’t the faintest idea. Violet is a Hungarian, or a Yugo-Slav. One or the other. Her name isn’t Violet at all. It’s something beginning with ‘Gla,’ like Gladys, but ending too ridiculously. So Gabriel called her Violet. I think her maiden name was Zadody, but I’m not sure. She was nobody that anyone knew, even in Hungaria or Yugo-Slavia, which was quite another country, of course, in Gabriel’s wild-oatish youth. Gabriel said he had found her at the Embassy. I’m afraid Charlie used to say it was at a cabaret of that name or something slightly worse. You must remember her when you were a young man at parties. Or perhaps you are too young. He had her presented, of course, and everything. She was rather spectacular in those days, and looked like a Gibson Girl who didn’t wash very often. Of course you were too young, but I remember them both very well. I believe that even then there were crises-de-nerfs.”

“That must have been rather difficult for Lord Wutherwood.”

“Yes, miserable for him. Luckily there were no children. Luckily for us too, I suppose, as things have turned out, although I must say I don’t think it’s the pleasantest way of becoming the head of the family.”

Her cigarette had gone out and she lit another. Alleyn felt quite certain that there was more than a touch of bravura in this rapid flow of narrative. It was a little too bright; the inconsequence was overstressed; the rhythm somewhere at fault. He thought that he was being shown a perilous imitation of the normal Lady Charles Lamprey by a Lady Charles Lamprey who was by no means normal. Once or twice he heard the faintest suggestion of a stutter and that reminded him of Stephen who, he felt sure, was overwhelmingly present in his mother’s thoughts. Extreme maternal devotion had never seemed to Alleyn to be a sentimental or a pretty attachment, but rather a passionate concentration which, when its object was threatened, developed a painful intensity. Maternal anxiety, he thought, was the emotion that human beings most consistently misrepresent, degrading its passion into tenderness, its agony with pathos. He was too familiar with the look that appears in frightened maternal eyes to miss recognizing it in Lady Charles’s and, though he was perfectly prepared to make use of her terror, he did not enjoy the knowledge that he had stimulated it. He heard her voice go rattling on and knew that she was trying to force an impression on him. “She wants me,” he thought, “to believe that her sister-in-law is insane.”

“… and I’m so terrified,” she was saying, “that this really will throw her completely off her balance although, to be quite honest, we all thought she was very alarming when she arrived this afternoon.”

“In what way?”

“Well, quite often she didn’t answer when you spoke to her and then when she did speak it was all about this wretched supernatural nonsense, unseen forces, and all the rest of it. The oddest part about it was—”

“Yes?” asked Alleyn, as she hesitated.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this.”

“We shall be grateful if you will tell us anything that occurs to you. I think,” Alleyn added without emphasis, “that I can promise you we shall not lose our sense of proportion.”