Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 10: Last Ditch, Black As He’s Painted, Grave Mistake. Ngaio Marsh
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But after a little further persuasion she did get on with it.
‘I was still there,’ she said. ‘In the loo. Honestly! – Too awkward. And all the lights had gone out but there was a kind of glow outside those slatted sort of windows. And I suppose it was something to do with the performance. You know. That drumming and some sort of dance. I knew you’d be cross, Hughie, waiting for me out there and the concert started and all that but one can’t help these things, can one?’
‘All right. We all know something had upset you.’
‘Yes, well, they finished – the dancing and drums had finished – and – and so had I and I was nearly going when the door burst open and hit me. Hard. On – on the back. And he took hold of me. By the arm. Brutally. And threw me out. I’m bruised and shaken and suffering from shock and you keep me here. He threw me so violently that I fell. In the cloakroom. It was much darker there than in the loo. Almost pitch dark. And I lay there. And outside, I could hear clapping and after that there was music and a voice. I suppose it was wonderful but to me, lying there, hurt and shocked, it was like a lost soul.’
‘Go on, please.’
‘And then there was that ghastly shot. Close. Shattering, in the loo. And the next thing – straight after that – he burst out and kicked me.’
‘Kicked you! You mean deliberately –?’
‘He fell over me,’ said Mrs Cockburn-Montfort. ‘Almost fell, and in so doing kicked me. And I thought now he’s going to shoot me. So of course I screamed. And screamed.’
‘Yes?’
‘And he bolted.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, then there were those three.’ She indicated the attendants. ‘Milling about in the dark and kicking me too. By accident, of course.’
The three ladies stirred in their seats.
‘Where had they come from?’
‘How should I know! Well, anyway, I do know because I heard the doors bang. They’d been in the other three loos.’
‘All of them?’
Alleyn looked at his sergeant. She stood up. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘To try and see Karbo, sir,’ she said, scarlet-faced. ‘He was just outside. Singing.’
‘Standing on the seats, I suppose, the lot of you.’
‘Sir.’
‘I’ll see you later. Sit down.’
‘Sir.’
‘Now, Mrs Cockburn-Montfort, what happened next?’
Someone, it appeared, had had a torch, and by its light they had hauled Mrs Cockburn-Montfort to her feet.
‘Was this you?’ Alleyn asked the sergeant, who said it was. Mrs Cockburn-Montfort had continued to yell. There was a great commotion going on in the garden and other parts of the house. And then all the lights went on. ‘And that girl,’ she said, pointing at the sergeant, ‘that one. There. Do you know what she did?’
‘Slapped your face, perhaps, to stop you screaming?’
‘How she dared! After all that. And shouting questions at me. And then she had the impertinence to say she couldn’t hang round there and left me to the other two. I must say, they had the decency to give me aspirins.’
‘I’m so glad,’ said Alleyn politely. ‘Now, will you please answer the next one very carefully. Did you get an impression at all of what this man was like? There was a certain amount of reflected light from the louvres. Did you get anything like a look at him, however momentary?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said quite calmly. ‘Yes, indeed I did. He was black.’
An appreciable silence followed this statement. Gibson cleared his throat.
‘Are you sure of that? Really sure?’ Alleyn asked.
‘Oh perfectly. I saw his head against the window.’
‘It couldn’t, for instance, have been a white person with a black stocking over his head?’
‘Oh, no. I think he had a stocking over his head but I could tell.’ She glanced at her husband and lowered her voice. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I smelt him. If you’ve lived out there as we did, you can’t mistake it.’
Her husband made a sort of corroborative noise.
‘Yes?’ Alleyn said, ‘I understand they notice the same phenomenon in us. An African friend of mine told me that it took him almost a year before he left off feeling faint in lifts during the London rush hours.’
And before anyone could remark upon this, he said: ‘Well, and then one of our people took over and I think from this point we can depend upon his report.’ He looked at Gibson. ‘Unless you –?’
‘No,’ Gibson said, ‘Thanks. Nothing. We’ll have a typewritten transcript of this little chat, madam, and we’ll ask you to look over it and sign it if it seems OK. Sorry to have troubled you.’ And he added the predictable coda. ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ he said. Alleyn wondered how much these routine civilities cost him.
The Colonel, ignoring Mr Gibson, barked at Alleyn. ‘I take it I may remove my wife? She ought to see her doctor.’
‘Of course. Do. Who is your doctor, Mrs Cockburn-Montfort? Can we ring him up and ask him to meet you at your house?’
She opened her mouth and shut it again when the Colonel said: ‘We won’t trouble you, thank you. Good evening to you.’
They had got as far as the door before Alleyn said: ‘Oh, by the way! Did you by any chance get the impression that the man was in some kind of uniform? Or livery?’
There was a long pause before Mrs Cockburn-Montfort said: ‘I’m afraid not. No. I’ve no idea.’
‘No? By the way, Colonel, are those your smelling-salts?’
The Colonel stared at him as if he was mad and then, vacantly, at the bottle in his hand.
‘Mine!’ he said. ‘Why the devil should they be mine?’
‘They are mine,’ said his wife grandly. ‘Anyone would suppose we’d been shop-lifting. Honestly!’
She put her arm in her husband’s and, clinging to him, gazed resentfully at Alleyn.
‘When that peculiar little Whipples-whatever-it-is introduced you, he might have told us you were a policeman. Come on, Hughie darling,’ said Mrs Cockburn-Montfort and achieved quite a magnificent exit.
II
It had taken all of Alleyn’s tact, patience and sheer authority to get The Boomer stowed away in the library, a smallish room on the first floor. When he had recovered from the effects of shock which must surely, Alleyn thought, have been more severe than he permitted himself to show, he developed a strong inclination to conduct inquiries on his own account.
This was extremely tricky. At the Embassy they were, technically, on Ng’ombwanan soil. Gibson and his Special Branch were there specifically at the invitation of the Ng’ombwanan Ambassador, and how far their authority extended in the somewhat rococo circumstances of that Ambassador having been murdered on the premises was a bit of a poser.
So, in a different key, Alleyn felt, was his own presence on the scene. The Special Branch very much likes to keep itself to itself. Fred Gibson’s frame of mind, at the moment, was one of rigidly suppressed professional chagrin and personal mortification. His initial approach would never have been made under ordinary circumstances and now, Alleyn’s presence on, as it were, the SB’s pitch, gave an almost grotesque twist to an already extremely delicate situation. Particularly since,