Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 1: A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer, The Nursing Home Murder

‘You shall have every opportunity,’ soothed Alleyn. ‘What a tig you are in, to be sure!’

‘It is the knife,’ said Tokareff profoundly. ‘The betrayal of the knife that has been to me my own betrayal. The Pole, Krasinski, who gave it to Mr Rankin was the author of all these misfortunates.’

‘Krasinski is dead,’ said Alleyn, ‘and letters of yours were in his pockets. Who killed him?’

‘How should I know? In the brotherhood no one knows. Krasinski was mad. I wish to write to my country’s ambassador.’

‘You may do so. He’ll be delighted. We’ll leave you now, Fisher. I’ll ring through at about one o’clock. Good night.’

‘Good night,’ mumbled Nigel uncomfortably, and followed the detective out to the car.

Angela did nothing to darken her reputation as a furious driver on that night trip to London. Alleyn refused to talk after having given an address off Coventry Street as their destination, and slept deeply on the back seat. Nigel stared at a young, eager profile and thought his own thoughts.

‘Do you think Mr Alleyn believes Doctor Tokareff did it?’ she said.

‘I don’t know a bit,’ Nigel answered her. ‘As far as I can make it out, Tokareff, perhaps Vassily your butler, and the Pole Krasinski whom Charles met in Switzerland, must all have been members of some Bolshie gang. Krasinski, God knows why, gave Charles Rankin the knife. I guess, from what Sir Hubert, Arthur Wilde, and Tokareff himself have said, that the knife was the symbolic weapon of the brotherhood, and to part with it was a fatal breach of trust. So, on Saturday evening somebody murdered Krasinski in Soho.’

‘And on Sunday someone murdered Charles Rankin at Frantock,’ concluded Angela under her breath. ‘Do you think Tokareff could have darted out of his bedroom, rushed to the head of the stairs, thrown the knife, run back and gone on gaily with the Death of Boris ?’

‘Hardly. And who put out the lights?’ objected Nigel.

‘And what does Mr Alleyn mean by saying Charles himself sounded the gong?’ Angela ended hopelessly.

‘I can’t imagine, but I’m glad he’s asleep. Angela, if I were to kiss the fur on your collar, would you mind very much?’

‘We are now doing sixty, and we are going up to sixty-five. Is this a time for dalliance?’

‘It may be my death,’ said Nigel, ‘but I’ll risk it.’

‘That wasn’t the fur on my collar.’

‘Darling!’

‘What’s the time?’ said Alleyn suddenly from the back seat.

‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ called Angela, and was true to her words.

At the top of one of those curious little cul-de-sacs off Coventry Street, where the Bentley looked the size of a caravan, Alleyn fitted a latch-key into a green door.

‘You will find that you know my servant,’ he said over his shoulder.

And, sure enough, there in the little hall waiting for them was an elderly, apologetic figure, anxiously bent forward.

‘Vassily!’ cried Angela.

‘Miss Angela, my little miss! Dushitchka!’ The old Russian was covering her hands with kisses…

‘Oh, Vassily!’ said Angela gently, ‘what have you to do with this? Why did you run away?’

‘I was in terror. In such terrible fright. Picture, little miss, what would they think? I said to myself, the police will find out all. They will question Alexis Andreyevitch, Doctor Tokareff, and he will tell them perhaps that I also was of the brotherhood long, long ago in my own country. He will repeat what I have said: that Mr Rankin should not have the holy little knife that had been blessed to the bratsvo, the brothership. The English police, they know everything, and perhaps they already have known how I have had letters from the brothership in London. It will be useless for me to say that I am no longer, how you say, mixed up with this society. I am already suspect. So before the police come, I run away and am arrested here in London, and to Scotland Yard I have made my statement and to Inspector Alleyn when he comes up to see me on Sunday, and they release me and I stay here. It is splendid!’

‘He behaved like an old donkey,’ said Alleyn. ‘Did you get my message, Vassily?’

‘Yes, certainly, and already dinner is waiting and cork-tails.’

‘Then let Miss Angela powder her nose in the guest suite, while Mr Bathgate and I remove the turf from our ears in the lonely west wing.’

Alleyn was still about this business when Nigel, emerging from a diminutive dressing-room, found Angela already in the inspector’s extremely comfortable study.

‘Tell me,’ she said in an engaging whisper, ‘do detective chief inspectors usually invite the relatives and friends of the victim to dine in their flat, and do they invariably engage disappearing butlers as their own servants as soon as they are freed from arrest?’

‘Perhaps it is The Thing Done in the Yard,’ answered Nigel; ‘though, I must say, he doesn’t conform to my mental pictures of a sleuth-hound. I had an idea they lived privately amidst inlaid linoleum, aspidistras, and enlarged photographs of constabulary groups.’

‘Taking a strong cuppa at six-thirty in their shirt sleeves. Well, pooh to us for a couple of snobs, anyway.’

‘All the same,’ said Nigel, ‘I do think he’s a bit unorthodox. He must be a gent with private means who sleuths for sleuthing’s sake.’

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ said Alleyn in the doorway. ‘Have one of Vassily’s “corktails”, and then let us dine.’

Vassily, important and beaming, rolled back sliding doors, and the inspector ushered them into the dining-room. The dinner was a very pleasant little ceremony. When Vassily had brought in coffee, set a decanter in front of the inspector, and taken himself off, Alleyn looked at his watch.

‘We can talk for fifteen minutes,’ he said, ‘and then I want you to do a job of work for me. Perhaps I should say I can talk for fifteen minutes because I should like, if it wouldn’t bore you, to go over the history of this case. It is of enormous help, I find, to talk to someone who is not a CID man. You needn’t look so inordinately perky, Bathgate. I don’t expect you to solve the mystery; I merely want you to tell me how clever I am, whether you think so or not.’

‘Oke,’ said Nigel tractably.

Alleyn gave him a friendly grin, lit a cigarette, and with a faintly didactic air began his résumé.

‘I shall return to the official manner,’ he said. ‘I find it impresses you. Rankin was stabbed in the back at five minutes to eight. That was the time by your watch when the gong sounded, and your watch synchronized with Mary’s, who told Wilde it was ten-to as he went upstairs. She saw him go up. You spoke to him when he went into the bathroom and during the time that followed; that leaves four minutes when Rankin was alone until the murder took place—less, because Mary didn’t go away immediately. He was stabbed from behind, either by somebody over six feet, or by somebody standing on a raised area. In falling back he struck the gong with his head.’

‘Oh!’ gasped Angela and Nigel together.

‘Yes, indeed. You were slow there. Baby-class stuff at the Yard, I do assure you. There was a very slight abrasion on the head, and I am pretty sure that was how it was caused. You all described the sound as a single, slightly muffled, booming note. “Skulls and brass in musical conjunction”, said I to myself. The moving of the body was definitely naughty—I was very cross about it—but that is how I reconstruct it. Rankin was bending over pouring out his drink, poor chap! The shaker was beside him on the floor and the glass overturned. Miss Grant noticed that. The murderer—I shan’t bother to add “or murderess” every time—then switched off the lights, wearing a glove or having something wrapped round the hand. He then ran away. Where to? For reasons that I shan’t bore you with, I think he went upstairs.

‘Now, at that precise moment where was everybody? The servants are all accounted for, even that old goat Vassily, who was alone in the boot-room. You, Bathgate, were in your room. A housemaid saw you there when the gong sounded, and I have other excellent reasons for believing your evidence. Sir Hubert says he was in his dressing-room. You saw him there, Miss Angela, when you fetched the aspirin, and you had only just got back to Miss Grant’s room when the alarm sounded. Sir Hubert is a very active man for his age, but he could not have got downstairs in that time, be he ever so nippy. You might possibly have managed it, but in your case, Miss Angela, there is a complete absence of motive and I have washed you out as a possibility. No cause célèbre for you this time.’

‘Too kind,’ muttered Nigel.

‘Besides, Florence saw you in the passage. “Saved by the Servants” is the subtitle as far as you two are concerned. Miss Grant went upstairs, bathed, went to Rankin’s room, returned, found Florence in her room. Miss Grant, in her account, deliberately gave a miss to her visit to Rankin’s room, but unless she had bribed Florence to tell a tarradiddle for her, their meeting, although it does not save her from coming definitely under suspicion, gives her a very short time in which to get downstairs, take the dagger from the wall, drive it home, and return. She studied medicine at the university, clever girl, and intended to become a doctor. Please don’t interrupt, either of you.

‘Tokareff sang in his bedroom, and Florence tells me she heard him. So did Sir Hubert. They are under the impression he was rendering the bellows of Boris unceasingly until the gong sounded. Such impressions are not very trustworthy. He may well have stopped for four minutes without their having any recollection of it.

‘Mrs Wilde, whose room is at the head of the stairs, was nearest to the victim. You say you heard her talking after the lights went out. There are certain other features that go far towards scratching her off the list of possibles, but she has subsequently done one or two things that show she was desperately anxious to conceal certain aspects of her friendship for Rankin.’

‘Surely,’ ventured Angela gently, ‘that is very understandable.’

‘I think so too, but all the same, they must be cleared up. That is why you are going to help me tonight. Wilde we have dealt with exhaustively. We are all sick of Wilde. He has tried to give himself up for the murder, but his movements have been described from the time he left Rankin and went upstairs under the gaze of the housemaid until the gong sounded. Bathgate talked to him all the time, and Florence heard them. The bath gave an excellent fingerprint, and so on, and so on. He also left some prints on the banister, just to make it more difficult.

‘Lastly, there is the melodramatic Russian element. Your uncle has written several excellent essays on Russian characteristics and customs. In my opinion, the truest thing he ever wrote about Russians was that no Englishman could understand them. The idea of a villainous secret brotherhood belongs to Merejkowski and contributors to Chums. The idea of Russians stabbing people in England because someone has given away a sacred dagger is so highly coloured that a decent policeman blushes to advance it. Yet Krasinski the Pole was murdered for this reason, Rankin was the man to whom the knife was given, and two members of the association were in the house when it happened. One is already under arrest for sedition, but—blast his eyes!—he sang while the murder was going on.’