“M
iss Dalrymple, Crane? The Honourable Daisy Dalrymple?”
Sitting in Superintendent Crane's office, Alec heard the anguished yelp over the internal telephone, as clear as if the Assistant Commissioner (C.I.D.) were in the same room.
“First on the scene, sir,” confirmed the Super gloomily. “Do you want to speak to Fletcher? I have him here.”
Alec held his breath.
“No,” said the A.C., after a pause which suggested he had counted to ten. “I suppose she doesn't do it on purpose. Does she?”
“Hardly, sir.”
“No, and he couldn't stop her if she did. Yet. On second thoughts, give him to me.”
Crane handed over the telephone.
“Fletcher here, sir.”
“Fletcher, for God's sake and the sake of my sanity, marry the woman soon!”
“Yes, sir,” said Alec, surprised but nothing loath.
“Then at least you'll have the right, if not the ability, to keep her out of trouble. You'll have to take this museum case.
I can't ask anyone else to attempt to control her. I'm counting on you to keep her from getting any more deeply embroiled.”
“I'll do my best, sir,” Alec promised, sincerely though unhopefully.
His pessimism must have travelled along the wire, for the A.C. said something which sounded very like “Pshaw!” and hung up the 'phone.
The Super pushed a slim file across his desk. “All yours,” he said. “Good luck, Chief Inspector.”
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“Tell me about it, Tom,” Alec invited, dropping the file on his desk and himself in his chair.
Detective Sergeant Tring had on his most stolid expression, but Alec knew him too well to be deceived. Behind the moustache and the straight face, Tom was quivering with merriment. He had a soft spot for Daisy, if not the unquestioning adulation manifested by Detective Constable Piper.
“She wasn't just there, Chief,” he said. He coughed a couple of times, though otherwise his cold seemed vanquished. Leaning back in his chair, at the desk at right angles to Alec's, he went on, “She knows all the suspects.”
Alec clutched his head. “Great Scott! I might have guessed. She has been doing research at the museum for weeks, talking to the staff.”
“But it's not only the staff. Miss Dalrymple knows the Grand Duke, too.”
“Grand Duke?” Alec queried hollowly.
Tom Tring permitted his moustache to twitch in a grin. “Grand Duke Rudolf Maximilian of Transcarpathia. Miss Dalrymple put me on to him. I thought he was just a visitor.”
“I'm going to have to talk to her about them, aren't I?”
“Oh yes, Chief. All I got last night was statements about
people's movements, all there in that file. I didn't ask Miss Dalrymple about anything but what she actually witnessed, and not all of that. She was a bit shook up.”
“I'll
shake her,” said Alec grimly, then discovered what he really wanted to do was take her in his arms and comfort her. “No, forget I said that, Tom. Was it very messy?”
“Not like you'd expect of a stabbing. Looked like he was stabbed several yards from where he fell. He left a trail of drops of blood staggering along, but the floor's made up of what they call mo-sake, little tiny bits in a pattern of white and black and red, so I don't expect Miss Dalrymple noticed the spots. She couldn't've missed the stain on his shirt and weskit, but there wasn't floods of blood, because the weapon was left in the wound.”
“What was it? A dinosaur bone?”
“That's what we won't know, Chief, till Dr. Renfrew tells us. Whatever it was must've bust off, not enough left sticking out to identify. If it is a bit of bone, we'll never find the missing part. The place is full of 'em! For a start, the deceased crashed into a skeletonânot a dinosaur, some other kind of ruddy great monsterâand smashed it half to pieces.”
“I assume you bagged the remains.”
“Got the lot, but if it was a bone he was stabbed with, I don't reckon it's among 'em. He was on his back, so the weapon didn't bust off when he fell, and by then the murderer had scarpered, if you ask me, while Pettigrew was staggering about. By the by, there's going to be trouble over them bones with the reptile man, Septimus Mummery by name.”
“Mummery? I'd better get to know the
dramatis personae
, and where they claim they were.” Alec pulled the file towards him. “Telephone DaisyâMiss Dalrympleâwill you, Tom? Ask her if we can see her at home in an hour or so. Make sure
she realizes this is an official visit. All we want is facts, her actual observations, not her opinions and theories.”
“Ah,” said Tring enigmatically, coughed twice, and reached for his telephone.
Opening the file, Alec sighed. Daisy's theories, though often misleading, were occasionally helpful. He couldn't afford to ignore them, any more than he could prevent her uttering them. As for her opinions, they tended to lead her to take one or more suspects under her wing, which created all sorts of difficulties for a detective striving to be impartial. He could cope with that when her protégés turned out to be innocent, but if not, it was decidedly painful.
At least she was apparently not a suspect this time.
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Alec read through the file, discussed the contents and his plans with Tring, then sent for Detective Constables Ross and Piper. With the sergeant beside him and the constables in the back, Piper reading the file, he drove his little yellow Austin Seven to South Kensington. At the Natural History Museum he dropped off Tring and Ross to talk to the commissionaires and museum police. He and Ernie Piper went on to Chelsea, stopping before Daisy's little white house in Mulberry Place.
Mrs. Potter stood on the newly scrubbed doorstep, industriously polishing the front-door handle.
“Mornin', Mr. Fletcher,” she said. “You're up and about bright and early today.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Potter. Miss Dalrymple is expecting us.”
The daily noticed the detective constable behind him. “Well, if it isn't Mr. Piper, too! Hello, ducks, how's tricks?” Her eyes rounded. “Lawks, never say you're on official business, sir?”
“It's all right, I'm not going to arrest her,” Alec assured her, recalling the times he had been tempted to do just that, for hindering the police in the course of their duties.
“As though I'd think such a thing! Miss got herself mixed up in another p'leece case, has she?” Mrs. Potter asked, folding plump arms across her substantial bosom with an air of settling in to gossip. With discomforting perspicacity, she went on, “The Museum Murder what was in the papers this morning, is it? Always popping round there, she is.”
“Now you know I can't talk about it, Mrs. Potter, and I hope you won't either.”
“Never fear, I'll keep it under me âat,” she sighed. Reluctantly she turned and pushed open the door for them. “There you go, sir. She's in her study. You 'ang on a minute, young feller-me-lad. Let's see you wipe your boots proper. I just done the hall.”
Whether on purpose or not, the charwoman delayed Piper long enough for Alec to enter Daisy's study alone. It was just as well, since Daisy forestalled his carefully planned greetingâa judicious compromise between loving fiancé and interrogating officerâby flinging herself at him. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him, then laid her cheek against his chest and said, “Oh, Alec, I'm frightfully glad it's you.”
“So am I,” he said ruefully, hugging her cuddlesome curves and dropping a kiss on her feathery curls, “but I could wish it wasn't you.”
She looked up at him with a half-guilty smile in her deceptively guileless blue eyes. “Not me in the case, I hope you mean, not not me in your arms.”
So he kissed her again, properly.
“Er-hem.”
Daisy broke away, blushing delightfully. Ernie's cheeks were equally pink, though Alec took no delight in them.
“Do come in, Mr. Piper,” Daisy invited as she put the desk between herself and Alec. “The Chief didn't mention he'd brought you with him. How nice to see you. Oh, would you mind fetching yourself a chair from the dining room? Sit down, Alec, do, and stop towering over me.”
However hard one tried, Alec thought, taking a statement from one's beloved was not quite the same as from a stranger.
“It's official business, love,” he said.
“I know,” she said mournfully. “I'm most frightfully sorry, darling. I would never have taken on the job, let alone taken Belinda there, if I'd known Pettigrew was going to get himself murdered.”
“How could you guess?” said Alec, finding his plaint preempted. And it really was not fair to blame her ⦠only how did she manage it? “At least Bel wasn't with you when it happened this time.”
“She rather liked Dr. Pettigrew, I'm afraid. He was quite good with the children, like Mr.â”
Alec held up his hand. “Please, darling! Let's stick to what you saw and heard yesterday.”
“I'll try,” she promised, as Ernie came in with a chair, “only you're always saying one never can tell what insignificant detail may be relevant.”
Hoist by his own petard, Alec ignored the reminder and said, “Ready, Ernie?”
“Course, Chief,” said the detective constable, his notebook and one of his everlasting supply of well-sharpened pencils already in his hands.
With a few nudges away from speculation, Daisy ran through the previous day's events, from leaving Dr. Smith Woodward's office to D. C. Ross fetching her to see Tom Tring.
“Who took a very incomplete statement from you,” Alec observed.
“It wasn't his fault. I was telling him about finding the body and I suddenly felt awfully peculiar. I'm sure he would have gone on questioning me anyway if he hadn't already known I wasn't a suspect.”
Piper snorted.
Recalling Tring's mention of Daisy's acquaintance with Rudolf Maximilian of Transcarpathia, Alec glanced again at the statement she had made last night. He frowned. No reference to the Grand Duke there, so at what point had they talked about him? After she turned “peculiar,” had Tom let her stay on listening to the rest of the interviews?
If so, he was bloody well going to rap the sergeant's knucklesâexcept that Tom and Daisy would never give each other away, and Alec could not stoop to asking Ross. Especially as he himself had more than once been manoeuvred into the same misdemeanour.
“By the way, how is Mr. Tring's cold today?” Daisy asked, with the innocent expression which always made Alec suspicious.
“Much improved.”
For some reason, she laughed. “Spiffing! Right-oh, Chief, that's all I have to tell you about yesterday, so now you can leave me to get on with my work.”
“Not so fast,” Alec said reluctantly. “Who was nice to Belinda and Derek may be irrelevant, but as Tom pointed out to me, you've been consulting these people for your article. You'd better tell me about them.”
Daisy tried hard not to look smug. “Right-oh, Chief,” she said again.
“Unofficial notes, Ernie. Let's go through them in the
order in which Tom interviewed them.” He reached for the file he had laid on her desk.
“Dr. Smith Woodward, Chief,” said Piper, who had a phenomenal memory for anything to do with names or numbers, “Keeper of Geology. But he was with Miss Dalrymple when the incident occurred.”
“Yes,” said Daisy, “I can't see how he can have had anything to do with it. Besides, he's the epitome of the dedicated scientist, and though Pettigrew was pretty offensive to him, I don't believe he would waste precious time retaliating, even in words. He's twice broken limbs because he reads while he walks.”
“Cor, honestly?” interjected Ernie Piper.
“Honestly. I heard it from more than one person. He wouldn't even go to hospital to ⦔
“Thank you, Daisy!” Alec cut her off. “Only evidence of some sort of incredibly complicated booby-trap could implicate Dr. Smith Woodward. Piper?”
“Mrs. Ditchley, Chief.”
“Ah, yes, grandmother and ex-nurse. You're not telling me you knew her, Daisy.”
“Not before. I talked to her quite a bit while we waited. But she's not a suspect?”
“She was very close to the scene. Tom didn't ask the children if she stayed with them the entire time, but as he says, we couldn't rely on their testimony where their grandmother is concerned. We'll have to investigate whether she had any link with the deceased.”
“I suppose so. I'm pretty sure she didn't, and still surer that she wouldn't have killed him there and then, however good a motive she had, not with her grandchildren liable to run after her.”