The Case of the Gilded Fly (15 page)

Fen, becoming belatedly aware of his duties as host, surged hurriedly to his feet. ‘My dear fellow,' he cried, ‘I really must apologize for giving you a most abominable evening. I'm afraid you'll never want to come here again. And I did so want to talk to you about your play. But I shall see it on Monday night, and I'd like to come to the rehearsal tomorrow, if I may.'

‘By all means,' said Robert agreeably. ‘And for heaven's sake don't apologize. It's not your fault if a murder's committed under our noses. I wish you joy of it. Anything more I can do, let me know.'

‘I'm afraid this business is going to make things very difficult for you,' said Fen. ‘You'll have to find someone at short notice to play the girl's part.'

‘I'm not worried,' said Robert. ‘Jane, who's understudying her, is perfectly competent.'

Fen nodded, and Robert, after bowing slightly to Sir Richard, Nigel and the Inspector, went to the door. There he turned and looked back.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘am I right in supposing that the gun which killed Yseut is the one she was playing about with at the party? It seems the most likely thing.'

‘Yes, Mr Warner,' the Inspector answered. ‘Someone – we don't know who – went back after the party and removed it.'

‘In that case,' said Robert, ‘I can help you a little more. You see, I saw the person who took it.'

‘You what!' exclaimed the Inspector, sitting up abruptly.

‘Of course I didn't realize what they were up to until this evening. But as I went to the bathroom, on my way to bed, I saw someone slip into Graham's room without turning on the light, and come out again carrying something which at the time I didn't recognize. I simply thought that a guest at the party had left something behind.'

‘Yes, yes!' the Inspector almost shouted. ‘And that person was – ?'

‘Jean Whitelegge,' said Robert.

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell

The Inspector gazed at Robert severely. One felt that this surprising piece of information had existed all along at the bottom of his mind in a pure and immaterial form, and that he was offended at this brutal thrusting of it into the coarse and limited medium of words. He regarded Robert as a man might be regarded who has capped a peculiarly subtle and appropriate literary allusion with the hackneyed banality of a proverb.

‘You would swear to that?' he inquired automatically. The question was a perfectly rhetorical one, and manifestly he had no notion that the method of compelling truth which it involved was something like three centuries outworn.

‘Well,' said Robert kindly, relapsing into the constatation of obvious extenuating circumstances which is employed in instructing the very unsophisticated, ‘I'd swear to the fact that she went back to that room. Naturally I can't be certain that she took the gun away with her.'

The Inspector dismissed this cautious and scholarly emendation with a slight frown. ‘We may draw our own conclusions about that, sir,' he said, with the aggressive air of one claiming a prerogative. ‘Thank you, Mr Warner, you have been very helpful – very helpful indeed,' he added more emphatically, feeling the expression to be inadequate. Robert vanished almost imperceptibly from the room. The Inspector cast about in his mind for words suitably expressive of gratified surprise, and finding none, abandoned the responsibility of comment and asked of the company in general:

‘Well, now: and what have we to say to that?'

Nigel at least had nothing to say. There was the fact, and there seemed to be nothing further to say about it at the moment; doubtless it was interesting. ‘Interesting.' He proffered
the opinion with a certain gloom, conscious of its futility.

‘Entirely valueless,' opined Fen infuriatingly.

‘Something to be investigated,' said Sir Richard prosaically.

This last comment appeared adequately to fill a disturbing blank in the Inspector's mind. ‘And investigated it shall be,' he said with something of the procrastinating valour of Achilles when required to fight against the Trojans. ‘As to the rest of the interview, to
me
at any rate' – he underlined the pronoun as though challenging anyone to submit it to pejorative scrutiny – ‘it appears obvious that Mr Warner
did
spend that Wednesday night with Miss Haskell.' He breathed heavily.

‘If you think that has anything to do with the case, Cordery,' said Sir Richard coldly, ‘doubtless you were right to be as persistent as you were. But you must remember that you are a policeman, and not a Watch Committee.'

The Inspector received the rebuke with appropriately qualified penitence. ‘None the less, sir,' he said, ‘you must admit it may very well have some bearing on the matter in hand.'

‘I'm getting very bored with all this,' interposed Fen suddenly. ‘I shall go away if it continues. We have completely lost the point in a maze of routine investigation.' He became minatory. ‘There are only two points to decide: first, whether this was suicide – I have given the reasons why it obviously was not (incidentally, did you notice there was no dent in the soft pine-wood floor where the gun fell? Another slip). And second, since it was evidently murder, how it was done.' He became plaintive. ‘There are only a few relevant questions to be asked, and the whole thing's over. Yet they have to be submerged in a mass of irrelevant –
stuff.'
He pronounced the word with a disgust intensified by his inability to think of a better one. ‘That's all very well in a detective novel, where it has to be put in to camouflage the significant things – though I must say I think some more entertaining form of camouflage might be devised –'

Sir Richard roused himself acerbly. ‘Really, Gervase: if there's anything I profoundly dislike, it is the sort of detective story in which one of the characters propounds views on how detective stories should be written. It's bad enough having a detective who
reads
the things – they all do –'

A gust of overwhelming fury smote the Inspector. ‘Now it is you,' he cried hoarsely, ‘who are wandering from the point. The problem is not to decide how the murder was done, though that may have its importance. The problem is to decide who did it.'

‘But we know that, don't we?' said Fen with deliberate malice.

The Inspector paused. He appeared to be summoning up his resources for a titanic counterblast to this offensive suggestion. His lower jaw dropped and the blood rushed pinkly to his cheeks. No adequate rhetoric, however, was at his disposal, and regretfully dismissing the impulse of violent physical expression, he resorted to a heavy, subliminal irony. ‘
You
may know, sir,' he said ineffectually at last.

‘I do,' said Fen simply.

Sir Richard was at once the incarnation of bluff, hearty common sense. ‘Nonsense, Gervase!'

‘I
do
know.' Fen adopted the theatrical wail of those who believe themselves to be everlastingly misunderstood by their fellows. ‘I knew three minutes after we arrived in that room.'

‘Three mi –!' Curiosity struggled with indignation in Sir Richard's mind, and curiosity abruptly won. ‘Who then?'

‘Ah!'

Sir Richard lifted both hands, palms outward, in the conventional mime for despair. ‘Oh Lord!' he said. ‘Mystification again. I know: it can't come out till the last chapter.'

‘Nothing of the sort,' said Fen huffily. ‘The case isn't complete yet. I cannot imagine, in the first place,
why
this person should do such a thing.'

‘Good heavens! Aren't there enough motives hanging around?'

‘All sexual motives, my dear Dick. I don't believe in the
crime passionnel
, particularly when the passion appears, as in this case, to be chiefly frustration. Money, vengeance, security: there are your plausible motives, and I shall look for one of them. I confess, too, that certain details, though probably inessential, still puzzle me.'

‘Well, that's a relief, anyway,' said the Inspector with a sudden access of unconvincing jocosity. ‘I think,' he added
cautiously, apparently fearful of opposition, ‘that we'd better see Mr Fellowes next.' This exercise of initiative appeared to console him somewhat.

‘He'll be up in a moment,' said Nicholas, who had appeared opportunely on the Inspector's words. ‘At the moment he is on my instigation engaged in being violently and repeatedly sick. He holds his liquor ill. It's my opinion that he shouldn't be allowed to drink at all, or only very little.'

He smiled benevolently round the gathering, seeming to see support for this suggestion. ‘May I ask how you're getting on?'

‘Impossible to say at the moment,' said Sir Richard. ‘We progress, but in what direction – there's been no landmark of sufficient size yet to enable us to tell.'

‘Do you still adhere to this absurd suicide theory?'

‘You disagree then?' By lowering his voice at the end of the sentence the Inspector converted it from a question to a statement, which he contemplated resignedly.

‘The idea is perfectly ridiculous. Yseut was rich, and had moreover just succeeded in creating a situation full of the most uncomfortable possibilities – a wide, fecund horizon of mischief-making. To abandon that would be to abandon every principle she ever possessed. Anything to give pain, as Hamlet might have said.' He considered the paraphrase critically for a moment, prior to casting it before lesser intelligences. ‘Certainly she wouldn't have exchanged all that potential unpleasantness for being blown with restless violence round about the pendent world. Rachel, Jean, Donald and Robert were all tied to her apron-strings – more exactly I should say to her shoulder-straps – in an undignified huddle. I fear it was murder – motive either money or sex.'

‘Fen,' said Sir Richard, ‘has just been derogating sex as a murder motive.'

‘ “Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke,”' answered Nicholas urbanely, and added: ‘A trite comparison.'

‘I beg your pardon, sir?'

‘A quotation from
Pericles
, Inspector: a dirty play about brothels, by Shakespeare – of whom no doubt you have heard.'

Sir Richard interrupted in some haste. ‘And money? The girl was rich?'

‘Quite tediously so. About two thousand a year, I take it. Her sister Helen inherits. And while I'm on the subject I ought perhaps to mention that Yseut told Helen at the party the other night that she proposed visiting town shortly to alter her will.'

Nigel said: ‘What the hell are you suggesting?'

Nicholas waved him aside. ‘These mistaken impulses of chivalry, Nigel – originally, as the Inspector no doubt is aware, denoting an affection for horses – are wildly out of place.'

The Inspector gazed at him with distaste. ‘You're prepared to swear to that, sir?' It was, Nigel thought, a perfectly unreflecting action which could be brought about by any particularly outrageous statement, like the salivating of Pavlov's dogs at the sound of the dinner-bell.

‘Unlike yourself, Inspector,' said Nicholas with mock severity, ‘I make no distinction between ordinary truth and truth under oath. And besides, I have an agnostic's mind. There's nothing I could sincerely swear by.'

‘No primary philosophical principle?' put in Nigel sarcastically.

‘Apart from the primary philosophical principle that there is no primary philosophical principle,' replied Nicholas unruffled, ‘no. However: we're confusing the good inspector. You may take it, Inspector, that I did in fact overhear this conversation.'

‘Was anyone else present, sir?'

‘Innumerable other people were
present
, Inspector. Whether any of them heard what I heard I'm sure I couldn't say.'

At this point, Fen, who had been gazing critically at his features in a mirror at the other end of the room, turned and strode purposefully towards them. ‘You are being imbecile and jejune,' he said offensively to Nicholas. ‘Answer me a question: what were you and Fellowes doing this evening in a room not belonging to either of you?'

Nicholas' bland command of the situation vanished abruptly. ‘We were listening to the wireless,' he replied lamely. ‘Donald has none, and the owner of the room was out, so we took possession.'

‘Did either of you leave the room at any time?' Fen's manner had become thunderously official, a forbidding parody of the Inspector's.

Nicholas scratched his nose apologetically. ‘No,' he said with surprising brevity.

‘Did you hear the shot?'

‘Dimly.
Heldenleben
was going on at the time. Even though the windows were open it wasn't startling.'

‘Good heavens, boy. Do you mean to say that you were playing that thing with all the windows open?'

‘Well,' said Nicholas ruefully, ‘it was hot.'

‘You were playing the wireless with the windows open,' said Fen. ‘Oh my ears and whiskers!' he added, abandoning the official manner. The Inspector gazed at him with polite astonishment. ‘We have it at last. And what was on before
Heldenleben
, may I ask?' he inquired, adopting a tone of oily courtesy.

Nicholas looked surprised. ‘The
Meistersinger
overture, I think.'

‘The
Meistersinger
overture. Splendid, splendid!' Fen rubbed his hands, looking suddenly pedagogic. ‘An admirable work, admirable, admirable.'

‘Really, sir, I hardly think – ' began the Inspector, but Fen interrupted him.

‘I suspected it all along,' he said. ‘No, no, my dear man, not your powers of reasoning. The method, the method! We have it at last!' He collapsed into a chair in a state of subdued ecstasy and appeared to go to sleep.