Colour Scheme (31 page)

After a short delay Huia, still weeping, appeared in the doorway.

“What you want?” she sobbed.

“Did you go in Mr. Questing’s car to Pohutukawa Bay on the day when Smith was nearly run over?”

“I never do anything bad with him,” roared poor Huia, relapsing into pidgin English. “Only go for drive to te Bay and come back. Never stop te engine, all time.”

“Did you see the pootacows?” said Simon.

“How can we go to Pohutukawa Bay and not see
pohutukawas
? Of course we see
pohutukawas
like blazes all over te shop.”

“Did Eru Saul change his shirt in the kitchen that night?”

“What te devil you ask me nex’! Let me catch him change his shirt in my kitchen.”

“Oh, gee!” said Simon disgustedly and Huia plunged back into the house.

“It must be nearly lunch time,” the Colonel remarked vaguely. He followed Huia indoors and shouted for his wife.

“This is a madhouse,” said Dr. Ackrington.

Webley came out of Questing’s room. “Mr. Bell,” he said, “may I trouble you, please?”
iv

“I couldn’t feel more uncomfortable,” Dikon thought as he walked along the verandah, “if I’d killed poor old Questing myself. It’s extraordinary.”

Webley stood on one side at the door, followed Dikon inside and shut it. The blind was pulled down and the light was on so that Dikon was vividly reminded of his visit of the previous night. The pearl-grey worsted suit was still neatly disposed upon a chair. The ties and the puce-coloured pyjamas were in their former positions. Webley went to the dressing-table and took up an envelope. Dikon saw with astonishment that it was addressed to himself in the neat commercial script of Smith’s talisman.

“Before you open this, Mr. Bell, I’d like to have a witness.” He put his head round the door and mumbled inaudibly. Mr. Falls was cautiously admitted.

“A witness before or after the fact, Sergeant?” he asked archly.

“A witness to the fact, shall we say, sir?”

“But why in heaven’s name did he write to me?” Dikon murmured.

“That’s what we’ll find out, Mr. Bell. Will you open it?”

It was written in green ink on a sheet of business paper on which printed titles were set out, representing Mr. Questing as an indent agent and representative of several firms. It bore the date of the previous day and was headed: “Private and Confidential.”

“I can’t go on with this,” said Dikon.

“If you don’t, sir, we will. He’s dead, remember.”

“Oh, hell!”

“You can read it to yourself if you like, Mr. Bell,” said Webley, keeping his eyes on Mr. Falls, “and then hand it over.”

Dikon read on a little way, made an ejaculation and finally said: “No, by George, you shall hear it.” And he read the letter aloud.

Mr. Falls murmured: “Enchanting circumlocution.”

“That’ll be the Peak,” said Webley, still watching him. “Quite.”

Dikon folded the letter and gave it to Webley.

“ ‘
I do not think he trusts me
,’ ” quoted Mr. Falls. “How right he was!”

“Yes,” Dikon agreed and added, “He was right about another thing too. He was an appalling scamp, but I always rather liked him.”

Huia rang the luncheon bell.

Before they left the room Webley showed Dikon how Questing had already packed most of his clothes. Webley had forced open a heavy leather suitcase and found it full of pieces of greenstone, implements, and weapons; the fruits, he supposed, of many nights’ digging on the Peak. Rewi’s adze, Webley said, had been locked apart in another case. Dikon guessed that Questing had planned to show it to Gaunt when they returned from the concert and had kept it apart for that purpose.

“Do you suppose he meant to try and sell the other stuff in Australia?” he asked.

“That might be the case, Mr. Bell, but he would never have got it past the Customs examination. The export of such things is strictly prohibited.”

“Or perhaps,” Mr. Falls suggested, “he was merely a passionate collector. There are men, you know, who, without any real appreciation for such things, become obsessed with a most imperative desire to acquire them. Scrupulous in other things they are entirely unscrupulous in that.”

“He was a pretty keen man of business,” Dikon said.

“I’ll say he was,” said Webley. “We’ve found blueprints for a new Wai-ata-tapu hotel and grounds that’d make Rotorua look like Shanty-town. Wonderful place he’d planned to make of it.”

He put Questing’s letter in a large envelope, made a note of its contents across the back, and asked Dikon and Falls to sign it. They went out and he locked the door after them.

“Well,” said Dikon as they walked along the verandah. “I never quite believed he was a spy.”

“It seems to leave the field wide-open again, doesn’t it?” Mr. Falls murmured.

“For an enemy agent who is also a murderer?”

“It is a strong presumption. Have you any objection, Webley, to our making this new development known to the rest of our party?”

Webley was close behind them. Mr. Falls stopped and turned to await his answer. It was a long time coming.

“Well, no,” said Webley at last. “There’s no objection to that. I can’t exactly stop you, can I, Mr. Falls?”

“I mean, with an enemy in our midst, isn’t it a wise policy to put everyone on the alert as it were? Will you go in, Bell?”

“After you,” said Dikon.

“Mr. Falls and I,” said Webley, “are going to wash our hands. Don’t wait for us, Mr. Bell.”

Upon this sufficiently broad hint, Dikon went in to lunch.

The rest of the party was already seated. Dikon joined his employer. Dr. Ackrington and the Claires, with the exception of Simon, were at the large family table. Simon sat apart with his friend Mr. Smith. Mr. Falls, when at last he and Webley came in, went to his own table close by.

“Do you mind if I join you, sir?” said Webley and did so.

“But I am honoured, Sergeant. As my guest, I hope?”

“No, no, sir, thanking you, all the same,” said Webley. “I see there’s a place laid, that’s all.”

He had made a mistake, it seemed. There was no second place laid at Mr. Falls’s table but Huia, still very woebegone, rectified this, and he sat down.

“Nice of you to join me, Dikon,” said Gaunt loudly. “I appear to be in disgrace.”

Barbara turned her head swiftly and as swiftly looked away again.

“I forgot to say,” Gaunt added, “that Questing asked fifty guineas for the adze. I shall always wonder if the price was excessive. I must ask the embarrassing old gentleman.”

Nobody answered this sally. Gaunt thrust out his chin and gave Dikon one of his hard bright glances.

Luncheon went forward in a silence that was only broken by Sergeant Webley’s conscientious attention to his food. At an early stage of this uncomfortable meal Dikon, who faced the windows, saw two of Webley’s men come round the shoulder of the hill carrying a covered stretcher between them. They disappeared behind the manuka hedge, taking the roundabout path to the cabins. This unmistakable incident killed what little appetite he had. In a minute or two the men, without their burden, appeared on the verandah. Here they were joined by a young man in grey flannel trousers and a sports coat whom Dikon had no difficulty in recognizing as a representative of the press. This new arrival, with an air of innocent detachment, stared in at the windows. Webley looked at him with lack-lustre eyes and shook his head. The two plain-clothes men hung about near the door. The pressman sat on the verandah step and lit his pipe. The party in the dining-room, though aware of these proceedings, paid no attention to them. “The resemblance to the monkey-house at feeding time grows more pronounced every second,” thought Dikon. Huia collected the plates and, when Mrs. Claire was not watching her, tipped uneaten pieces of cold meat onto one dish. As if by agreement, Mrs. Claire and Barbara went out together.

Smith sucked his teeth savagely, muttered “Excuse me” and slouched out to the verandah. The pressman looked up hopefully and spoke to him but evidently got an uncompromising answer. He let Smith move off, looking wistfully after him.

In heavy silence the remaining seven men finished their meal.

“One can hardly hear oneself speak for the buzz of gay inconsequent chatter,” said Gaunt. “I think I shall relax for half an hour.”

He pushed back his chair.

“There is, after all, sufficient reason for our silence,” said Mr. Falls.

Something in his attitude, though he had not risen, and some new quality in the tone of his voice, which was a deep one, brought a sudden stillness upon his hearers.

“When one is in danger of arrest,” said Mr. Falls, “one does not feel disposed for chatter. May I, however, claim the attention of the company for a moment? Sergeant Webley, will you indulge me?”

Webley, who had made a brusque movement when Gaunt’s chair scraped on the floor, leant the palms of his hands on the table and, looking attentively at Falls, said: “Go ahead, sir.”

“I don’t know,” said Mr. Falls, “whether you are all devotees of detective fiction. I must confess that I am. It is argued, in respect of these tales, that they bear little or no relation to fact. Police investigation, we protest, is not a matter of equally balanced motives, tortuous elaborations, and a final revelation in the course of which the investigator’s threat hangs like an
ignis fatuus
over first one and then another of the artificially assembled suspects. It is rather the slow amassment of facts sufficient to justify the arrest of someone who has been more or less suspect from the moment that the crime was discovered. Sergeant Webley,” said Mr. Falls, “will correct me if I am wrong.”

Sergeant Webley cleared his throat sluggishly. One of the men outside the window looked over his shoulder into the room, turned away again, and moved out of sight.

“However that may be,” Falls continued, and they listened to him with confused attention as if he had, without warning, thrust an embarrassing ceremony upon them, “however that may be, I detect some resemblance in our present assembly to those arbitrary musters, and with the permission of Sergeant Webley I should like, before we break up, to clear the memory of Mr. Maurice Questing. Mr. Questing was
not
an enemy agent.”

Here Dr. Ackrington broke out with some violence and was not silenced until an account of Questing’s letter had, by a sort of forcible feeding, been rammed down the gullet of his understanding. He took it rather badly. The recovery of Questing’s skull had evidently been broken to him but this final blow to the very cornerstone of all his theories seemed literally to horrify him. He turned quite pale, his protestations ceased, and he waited in silence for Falls to go on.

“Not only was Questing innocent of espionage but, if we are to believe his letter, he actually recognized and accused the real culprit, who adopted a threatening attitude, and, by a species of blackmail, extracted an undertaking from Questing that he would not betray him. Questing suggests that when they parted they were mutually distrustful of one another, and I suggest that fright, rather than business, prompted his sudden decision to go to Australia. He felt himself to be in danger just as we now feel ourselves to be in danger, and, in a figure that he himself might have used, he passed the buck to Mr. Bell. I think he must have written that letter just before we left for the concert. I happened to pass his open door and saw him with his elbows squared on his table. As you know, some three hours later he was killed.”

“Will you excuse me,” said Gaunt. “I don’t want to be difficult but, as I’ve tried to point out before, I’ve been extremely upset by this unspeakably horrible affair and I’m afraid I just haven’t got the kind of mind that revels in
post mortems
. I’m sorry. I shall leave you to it.”

“One moment, Mr. Gaunt,” said Falls. “You’re upset, I fancy, not so much by the knowledge that Questing died very horridly, as by the fear that you yourself might be implicated.”

“I won’t have this!” cried Gaunt, and sprang to his feet. “I resent this, bitterly.”

“Do sit down. You see,” said Mr. Falls looking amiably about him, “in spite of ourselves we are becoming the orthodox muster of suspects. Here is Mr. Gaunt who quarrelled with Mr. Questing because Mr. Questing used his name as an advertisement, and because he pretended he was the author of a gift that Mr. Gaunt himself had made.”

Barbara started galvanically. Gaunt began to accuse Dikon. “So I’ve got you to thank — ”

“No,” said Falls. “My dear Gaunt, who but you could have made this gift? A quotation from Shakespeare on the card? Written by the shop assistant? You see I have heard all about it. And, if that was not enough, your very expressive face betrayed you most completely last night, when Questing spoke of her enchanting dress to Miss Barbara. You looked — please forgive the unhappy phrase — positively murderous. Was it not the memory of this that led you to conceal your subsequent quarrel with Questing? It seems to me you had quite a lot to agitate you when Questing was killed.”

“I have explained to the point of hysteria that I was anxious to avoid publicity. Good God, who ever committed murder for such a motive? Sergeant Webley, I beg that you — ”

“I quite agree,” said Falls. “Who ever did? May I pass on, for the moment, to another of our suspects? Mr. Smith.”

“Here, you lay off Bert!” shouted Simon. “He’s right out of this. He’d got his agreement.”

“His motive,” Mr. Falls continued precisely, “appears at first to be revenge. Revenge for an attempt on his life.”

“Revenge, my foot. They buried the hatchet.”

“In order to resurrect a much more valuable one in the form of Rewi’s adze. Yes, yes, I agree that the revenge motive breaks down but it does well enough for a red herring. Dr. Ackrington: your motive, at first, would seem to be a kind of quintessence of fury. You believed Questing to be a traitor and you could find little support in your efforts to bring him to book.”

“It’s perfectly obvious to me now, Falls, that the man was done to death by someone from the native settlement. No doubt some wretched youth in the pay of the enemy.”

“Ah! The Maori theme. Shall we leave that for the moment? Now, in your case, Colonel, the motive is much more credible. Forgive me for introducing a painful theme but your position was, I’m afraid, only too clear. Questing’s extraordinary assumption of proprietorship alone would have betrayed it. He was, as Mr. Bell remarked a little while ago, a keen man of business. Have you not benefited greatly by his death…”

“Cut that out!” Simon cried out angrily. “You damn’ well lay off my father.”

“Be quiet, Simon,” said the Colonel.

“… as indeed,” Mr. Falls completed his sentence, “have all the members of your family?” He looked at his hands, lightly clasped on the table. “The Maori element,” he said, and paused. “Revenge for the violation of a sacred object? Not an inconsiderable motive. To my mind, a perfectly credible motive. But did anybody beside Mr. Gaunt, outside the Old Firm, as I feel tempted to call the Smith-Questing-Saul link-up, know of the disappearance of the adze? And beyond that there seems to be a jealousy theme centering round your maid, Colonel. Questing appears to have supplanted the man with the debatable shirt. Eru. Eru Saul.”

“But my dear Falls,” said Dr. Ackrington, “you seem to accept Questing’s letter. Surely, then, the murderer is the spy?”

“Certainly. It is most probable. The point I am leading up to is this. It seems to me that in this case motive should, for the moment, be disregarded. There are too many motives. Let us look instead at circumstances. At fact.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gaunt said wearily.

“Four apparently inexplicable points have interested me enormously. The railway signal. Eru Saul’s shirt. The
pohutukawa
trees. The misplaced flag. It seems to me that if an explanation is found that will apply equally to these four parts, then we shall have gone a long way towards solving the whole. These are factual things.”

“How about yourself?” Simon demanded abruptly. “If it comes to facts you look pretty fishy, don’t you?”

“I am coming to myself,” said Mr. Falls modestly. “I look extremely fishy. I have left myself to the last because what I have to say, or part of it, is in the nature of a confession.”

Webley looked up quickly. He moved his chair back a little and shifted the position of his great feet.

“When I left the hall,” said Mr. Falls, “I went immediately into the thermal reserve. I have stated that I saw Questing ahead of me and recognized him by his overcoat. I have also stated that I paused and lit my pipe, that I then heard Questing scream, and that a few moments later Bell came along from the direction of the village. I had no alibi. Later, having insisted that none of us should return to the scene of the crime, I myself returned there. You saw me from the hill, did you not, Bell? I was obliged, by the nature of my errand, to use my torch. I heard you plunging down the hillside and realized that you must have seen me. On my return I informed Colonel Claire and Dr. Ackrington of my visit to the forbidden territory. Later, I believe, they told you I had given, as an excuse, a story that I had heard someone moving about on the other side of the mound. This was untrue. There was nobody there. And now,” Falls continued, “I come to the last episode in my story.” With a swift movement he thrust his hand inside his jacket.