Ellis Peters - George Felse 06 - Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart (9 page)

“Was she amenable?” asked George, with a wooden face.

“Metaphorically speaking, she spat in my eye. Nobody was going to put Liri off her grudges or her fancies.”

“And which was this?”

“At that stage, I’d say practically all grudge. She’d been badly hurt, and she can be an implacable enemy. I saw I was getting nowhere, so I gave up and came away. There was hardly anybody about, I’m afraid, I can’t bring witnesses, but I give you my word I was back in the walled garden soon after three o’clock, and I didn’t leave there until I came in to tea. There are archery butts there. I was practising all by myself until four, and then I came indoors to wash. And that’s all. Not a very productive afternoon.”

“And you left Liri there at the tower. When would that be?”

“Maybe about twenty minutes to three. She was sitting there alone, nobody else in sight that I noticed.”

“You wouldn’t see very much of the river’s course from there?”

The winsome blue eyes lit with a flare of intelligence that was not winsome at all. “Well, not from the ground, that I do know. There are tall trees in between, all you see is a gleam of water here and there. But there’s a stairway up that tower,” he added helpfully. “I haven’t been up there, but I should think you’d get a pretty good view with that added height. Not that she showed any signs of making use of it,” he concluded fairly, “while I was there.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Meurice, you’ve been very helpful. If we should have any difficulty in filling in the details of the afternoon, I’m sure you’ll do your best for us again. And you will keep the matter confidential?”

Give him his due, he could take a double-edged hint as well as the next man. He promised secrecy with almost unnecessary fervour, and departed, having done his level best to plant the suggestion that, if something had really happened to Lucien Galt, Liri Palmer had made it happen. Who else, after all, had threatened his life?

George sighed, grimaced, and sent for Liri Palmer.

“Oh, he was there, all right.” Liri crossed her long and elegant legs, and declined a cigarette with a shake of her head. “He was doing his best to make up to me, but I wasn’t having any. What it adds up to is that he was inviting me to join in an all-out attack on Lucien’s professional position. A lot of dirty work goes on in the record business, and popular disc-jockeys have a lot of influence. With a few like-minded assassins as dedicated as himself, Meurice could ruin a man.”

“And you were not interested?”

Her lips curled disdainfully. “If I decide on assassination, I shan’t need any allies. I told him where he could go.”

“Yesterday, I hear, you made what could be considered as being a threat against Galt, about as publicly as possible.”

“Oh, that!” A tight, dark smile hollowed her cheeks, but she was not disconcerted. “Dickie made sure you knew about that, of course. He needn’t have worried, I’d have told you myself. Yes, it’s true. I did that.” She sounded faintly astonished now in looking back at it, as though it had become irrelevant and quite unaccountable in retrospect.

“Did you mean it?” asked George directly.

“Did I mean it… Yes, at the time I probably did. But even then what I really had in mind was not action so much as a declaration of my position. All the rest of them just happened to be there,” she said, with an arrogance Lucifer himself could not have bettered. “It was nothing to do with them.”

“Then you didn’t act on it, this afternoon?”

It was the first direct and deliberate suggestion that Lucien Galt might have suffered a murderous attack, might, in fact, be dead at that moment. She received it fully, thoughtfully and silently, and betrayed neither surprise nor any other emotion. What she thought, what she felt, she kept to herself. Like her private communications in song, they were nothing to do with anyone else. This was a young woman accustomed to standing on her own feet, and asking no quarter from anyone.

“I didn’t see Lucien this afternoon. He never came near me, and I didn’t go looking for him. I sent Dickie Meurice away, and stayed up there at the folly until it was time to come in to tea.”

“Not, I feel, without some sort of occupation?”

Her smile warmed a little, but remained dark and laden. “I was wrestling with an idea for a song. It didn’t work out.”

“Miss Palmer, I’ve gathered – and not only from Meurice – that a little while ago your relations with Lucien Galt were very close indeed. Would you mind telling me the reason for your break with him?”

“Yes,” said Liri, directly, firmly, “I would mind. It’s a private matter between him and me, and I want it to stay that way.”

He accepted that without question. “Then, if you’re good at keeping things private, keep this interview, this whole investigation, between the few of us. This week-end may as well run its course without a general alarm, if it can. And there’s one more thing I’d like to consult you about.”

He laid upon her knee the small box in which he had placed the silver medal and chain. “My son found this at a certain spot by the river. Maybe you’ve already seen it.”

She took up the box in her palm, and touched the little disc gently with one long finger. “Yes, I’ve seen it. Dominic showed it to us – the few of us who knew. It’s Lucien’s. He always wore it.”

“Always? As long as you’ve known him?”

“Yes, from the first time I met him. He said he’d worn it ever since he was a child. It was the one thing he had that belonged to his father.”

“He told you that himself? And how long have you known him?”

“Just over two years now. Yes, he told me himself.” There had been confidences between them then, and confidence. He was not, by all accounts, a person who talked about himself, or indeed much of a talker on any subject. “He wouldn’t have much left from his parents, obviously, after their shop was flattened by a buzz-bomb. You know about the Galts? They had a newsagent and tobacconist business in Islington. It was one of the last bombs of the war that got it. Both his parents were killed. He grew up in a children’s home.”

“I know what’s been published about him,” said George.

“That’s all most of us know. He loved his foster-parents at the home, though, there wasn’t any warping there. He still goes back there pretty regularly.” She looked up suddenly, her face was pale and still. “He
did
,” she said, and closed the box carefully over the silver medal.

“Mr. Marshall has told me,” said Audrey Arundale in a low, constrained voice, “about this affair, and about your great kindness in coming here privately to help us. We’re very grateful to you. My husband would wish me to thank you on his behalf, as well as my own. I feel – you’ll understand and excuse me – terribly lost without him.”

She stood in her own rose-and-white sitting-room, herself a white rose ever so slightly past her most radiant bloom, fair and frightened and gallant, terribly lost without Edward. She was used only to things that went smoothly; things that went hideously off the rails bewildered and confused her.

“Please sit down, Mr. Felse. I feel so guilty at making use of you in this way, when we have really nothing to go on. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

“As a matter of form, I should like to know how you spent this afternoon, whether you saw anyone, and what time your husband left. I want to form as full a picture as possible of the hours between lunch and tea.”

“I understand, yes. I was indoors all afternoon. Edward was here with me until just before three o’clock, then he went out to the car, to load it for his trip. I can’t say exactly what time he got off, because I didn’t see him go. I think he wanted to pick up some books from the library, but that wouldn’t take long. I should think he was away by a quarter past three. After he left I was in here writing letters.” She made a faint gesture of one hand towards the neat little pile of them, lying on her writing-desk. “I didn’t go down to join the party at tea, I had it in here. I didn’t realise that Mr. Galt was missing, though I noticed, naturally, that he didn’t take part in the five o’clock session. He hasn’t come back, of course.” Her anxious face hoped against hope for reassurance.

“He hasn’t. On the contrary, we’ve found certain traces which suggest that we have a serious matter on our hands.”

“May I know?” she asked hesitantly, “what they are?”

He told her. She turned half aside from the mention of blood, and seemed for an instant to want to withdraw absolutely from this place and these events, which obeyed no rules in her ordered existence, and made chaos of her security. She reached out blindly and briefly with one hand for Edward, who had always been there, but Edward wasn’t there. She said, though with dignity and quietness, exactly what George had felt sure she would say:

“Don’t you think we ought to contact my husband and tell him what’s happened? I wouldn’t think of suggesting it in any normal circumstances, when Harry’s in charge, but these aren’t normal circumstances. This is more than the mere responsibility for the present course, it’s a question of the responsibility for Follymead as an institution. Edward can’t delegate that, not in such a serious matter.” She looked across the room at Henry Marshall, who had sat silent throughout this exchange. “I’m sorry, Harry, I ought to have left it to you even to make the suggestion. I know you would have done.”

No mistake about it, that fancy boarding school of hers had done pretty well by the tradesman’s daughter, even if she hadn’t distinguished herself in examination, like Felicity’s illustrious kin. No wonder Marshall looked at her with something like devotion.

“Mr. Felse and I have already recognised the need to put this matter on a proper footing. Obviously I hoped and believed we should have some word from Mr. Galt, or that he would turn up again with his own explanation, but after so many hours without news it becomes rather a different case. Yes, I think we should call Dr. Arundale.”

“I think perhaps I’d better do it,” said George, “if I may. Where will he be at this hour?”

The clock on the desk said ten-forty. “It’s a guild dinner,” said Audrey. “He’s staying overnight with the chairman afterwards, but they won’t be very early. I should think they’re still at the Metropole. I have the number here.”

George dialled and waited for his connection. It was very quiet in the room; even the clock was almost silent.

“Hotel Metropole? I believe you’ve got the Vintners’ annual dinner there to-night? Is the party still in session? Good! Would you ask Mr. Arundale to come to the phone? That’s right, Edward Arundale – he’s their speaker tonight.” He waited. Audrey felt behind for her for the arm of a chair, and sat down very slowly and silently, never taking her eyes from George’s face. It felt so still that she might have been holding her breath.

“Hullo, is that…? Oh, I see. No, I didn’t know that.” There was a long, curious pause while he listened, and the faint clacking of the distant voice that was, surprisingly, doing all the talking. “At what time was that?” And again: “You’re sure? You’d know the voice? No, that’s all right, I’m sorry to have disturbed you, I’ll contact him there. Thank you! Good-bye!”

He cradled the receiver and held it down in its rest, and over the hand that pinned it in position he looked up gently at Audrey.

“Mrs. Arundale, I’m afraid this is going to be a surprise to you. Even a shock. Mr. Arundale isn’t there. That was a man named Malcolmson speaking to me, the president of the Vintners’ Guild. Mr. Arundale cancelled his engagement, they had to whip up a substitute speaker at a minute’s notice.”

“But… that’s impossible!” she said in a soundless whisper. “Why should he cancel it? He said nothing to me. He took his notes… and the references he needed for tomorrow… everything. I didn’t know anything about this… I didn’t know…”

“All the same, he did it. There’s no doubt at all about this. He says Mr. Arundale rang up to explain and apologise, this afternoon, just about three o’clock. He says he’s known him for eight years, he knows his voice on the telephone too well for any possibility of mistake. It was your husband himself who called. An emergency, so he told him, here at Follymead, that made it impossible for him to leave as planned. Naturally Mr. Malcolmson didn’t question it, however inconvenient it might be for him.” He lifted the receiver again; distant and staccato, the dialling tone fired its dotted line of machine-gun bullets into the silence. “Can you give me the number of someone who’ll know about this conference to-morrow? The secretary?”

She got up from her chair and moved to the pedestal of the desk like a creature in a bad dream. Her fingers fumbled through the pages of a notebook, and found the entry. The secretary was the vicar of a suburban parish, and his voice, when he answered, sounded young and crisp and agile.

“I’m sorry to trouble you at this late hour, but I’m clearing up a few arrears of business for Mr. Arundale, and the notes he’s left me don’t make it clear whether he managed to call you about the conference to-morrow. Have you already heard from him to-day?” No need to sound the alarm yet; this would do better than candour.

“Yes, he telephoned this afternoon,” said the distant voice promptly. “We’re very sorry indeed that we shan’t have him with us to-morrow, after all, it’s a great disappointment. But I know he wouldn’t have called it off if he could possibly have avoided it.”

“No, of course not. About what time did he ring you?”

“Oh, I suppose shortly after three. It might even have been a little earlier.”

“Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”

The telephone clashed softly in its cradle.

“He telephoned there, too, and cancelled his engagement. Wiped out all his arrangements for the week-end. And yet he took the car and left, at about the time he was expected to leave, and without mentioning to anyone that he’d changed his plans. So where has he gone? And why?”

Marshall let his hands fall empty before him; there was nowhere he could get a hold on this, and no way he could make sense of it. “I don’t know. I don’t understand anything about it.”

Audrey stood motionless, her eyes enormous in shock and bewilderment. In an arduous whisper she asked: “What must we do?”