‘Yes, Fox, that is my idea. There’s no earthly reason why an innocent person should not admit to interrupting the telephone call and nobody has admitted to it. I’m afraid we’ll have to go again through the whole damn boiling, guests, servants and all, to make sure of our ground. And we’ll have to ask every man jack of ’em if they burst across the threshold of Miss Harris’s outer sanctuary. Every man jack. Thank the Lord there’s no need for the women, though from what I know of my niece Sarah we wouldn’t meet with many mantling cheeks and conscious looks among the débutantes. If nobody admits to the telephone incident, or to the sequel in the usual offices, then we can plot another joint in our pattern. We can say there is a strong probability that our man overheard Bunchy telephone to me, interrupted the sentence: “and he’s working with –” waited in the green sitting-room until Bunchy had gone and then blundered into the ante-room.’
‘But why would he do that?’ said Fox. ‘Did he think it was a man’s, or was he trying to avoid somebody? Or what?’
‘It’s a curious picture, isn’t it? That dim figure seen through the thick glass. Even in her mortal shame Miss Harris noticed that he seemed to be agitated. The hands over the face, the body leaning for a moment against the door. And then suddenly he pulls himself together and goes out. He looked, said Miss Harris, as though he’d had a shock. He’d just intercepted a telephone call to the Yard from a man who apparently knew all there was to know about his blackmailing activities. He might well feel he must blunder through the first door he came to and have a moment alone to pull himself together.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Fox, ‘so he might. I’d like something a bit more definite to hinge it on, though.’
‘And so, I promise you, would I. The detestable realms of conjecture! How I hate them.’
‘Miss Harris didn’t get us any further with the business down in the hall.’
‘The final departures? No, she didn’t. She simply bore out everything we’d already been told.’
‘She’s an observant little lady, isn’t she?’ said Fox.
‘Yes, Fox, she’s no fool, for all her tender qualms. And now we have a delightful job ahead of us. We’ve got to try to bamboozle, cajole, or bully Mrs Halcut-Hackett into giving away her best young man. A charming occupation.’
‘Will we be seeing the General, too? I suppose we’ll have to. I don’t think the other chaps will have tackled him. I told them not to touch any of our lot.’
‘Quite right,’ said Alleyn, with a sigh. ‘We shall be seeing the General. And here we are at Halkin Street. The Halcut-Hacketts of Halkin Street! An important collection of aspirates and rending consonants. The General first, I suppose.’
The General was expecting them. They walked through a hall which, though it had no tongue, yet it did speak of the most expensive and most fashionable house decorator in London. They were shown into a study smelling of leather and cigars and decorated with that pleasant sequence of prints of the Nightcap Steeplechase. Alleyn wondered if the General had stood with his cavalry sabre on the threshold of this room, daring the fashionable decorator to come on and see what he would get. Or possibly Mrs Halcut-Hackett, being an American, caused her husband’s study to be aggressively British. Alleyn and Fox waited for five minutes before they heard a very firm step and a loud cough. General Halcut-Hackett walked into the room.
‘Hullo! Afternoon! What!’ he shouted.
His face was terra-cotta, his moustache formidable, his eyes china blue. He was the original ramrod brass-hat, the subject of all army jokes kindly or malicious. It was impossible to believe his mind was as blank as his face would seem to confess. So true to type was he that he would have seemed unreal, a two-dimensional figure that had stepped from a coloured cartoon of a regimental dinner, had it not been for a certain air of solidity and a kind of childlike constancy that was rather appealing. Alleyn thought: ‘Now, he really is a simple soldier-man.’
‘Sit down,’ said General Halcut-Hackett. ‘Bad business! Damn blackguardly killer. Place is getting no better than Chicago. What are you fellows doing about it? What? Going to get the feller? What?’
‘I hope so, sir,’ said Alleyn.
‘Hope so! By Gad, I should hope you hope so. Well, what can I do for you?’
‘Answer one or two questions, if you will, sir.’
‘’Course I will. Bloody outrage. The country’s going to pieces in my opinion and this is only another proof of it. Men like Robert Gospell can’t take a cab without gettin’ the life choked out of them. What it amounts to. Well?’
‘Well, sir, the first point is this. Did you walk into the green sitting-room on the top landing at one o’clock this morning while Lord Robert Gospell was using the telephone?’
‘No. Never went near the place. Next!’
‘What time did you leave Marsdon House?’
‘Between twelve and one.’
‘Early,’ remarked Alleyn.
‘My wife’s charge had toothache. Brought her home. Whole damn business had been too much for her. Poodle-faking and racketing! All people think of nowadays. Goin’ through her paces from morning till night. Enough to kill a horse.’
‘Yes,’ said Alleyn. ‘One wonders how they get through it.’
‘Is your name Alleyn?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘George Alleyn’s son, are you? You’re like him. He was in my regiment. I’m sixty-seven,’ added General Halcut-Hackett with considerable force. ‘Sixty-seven. Why didn’t you go into your father’s regiment? Because you preferred this? What?’
‘That’s it, sir. The next point is –’
‘What? Get on with the job, eh? Quite right.’
‘Did you return to Marsdon House?’
‘Why the devil should I do that?’
‘I thought perhaps your wife was –’
The General glared at the second print in the Nightcap series and said:
‘M’wife preferred to stay on. Matter of fact, Robert Gospell offered to see her home.’
‘He didn’t do so, however?’
‘Damn it, sir, my wife is not a murderess.’
‘Lord Robert might have crossed the square as escort to your wife, sir, and returned.’
‘Well, he didn’t. She tells me they missed each other.’
‘And you, sir. You saw your daughter in and then –’
‘She’s not my daughter!’ said the General with a good deal of emphasis. ‘She’s the daughter of some friend of my wife’s.’ He glowered and then muttered half to himself: ‘Unheard of in my day, that sort of thing. Makes a woman look like a damn trainer. Girl’s no more than a miserable scared filly. Pah!’
Alleyn said: ‘Yes, sir. Well, then, you saw Miss –’
‘Birnbaum. Rose Birnbaum, poor little devil. Call her Poppet.’
‘– Miss Birnbaum in and then –’
‘Well?’
‘Did you stay up?’
To Alleyn’s astonishment the General’s face turned from terra-cotta to purple, not, it seemed, with anger, but with embarrassment. He blew out his moustache several times, pouted like a baby, and blinked. At last he said:
‘Upon my soul, I can’t see what the devil it matters whether I went to bed at twelve or one.’
‘The question may sound impertinent,’