Collected Short Mysteries by Ngaio Marsh

Author:Ngaio Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631940712
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The smoking room was crowded for the inquest. Everybody was there, including Mrs. Simpson who sat in the back row with her candies and her crossword puzzle. It went through very quickly. The rector deposed to finding the body. Richard De’ath, sober and less truculent than usual, was questioned as to his sojourn outside the churchyard and said he’d noticed nothing unusual apart from hearing a disturbance among the pigeons roosting in the balcony. From where he stood, he said, he couldn’t see the face of the tower.

An open verdict was recorded.

Alleyn had invited the rector, Miss Hart, Mrs. Simpson, Richard De’ath, and, reluctantly, Edward Pilbrow, to join him in the Bar-Parlor and had arranged with the landlord that nobody else would be admitted. The Public Bar, as a result, drove a roaring trade.

When they had all been served and the hatch closed, Alleyn walked into the middle of the room and raised his hand. It was the slightest of gestures but it secured their attention.

He said, “I think you must all realize that we are not satisfied this was an accident. The evidence against accident has been collected piecemeal from the persons in this room and I am going to put it before you. If I go wrong I want you to correct me. I ask you to do this with absolute frankness, even if you are obliged to implicate someone who you would say was the last person in the world to be capable of a crime of violence.”

He waited. Pilbrow, who had come very close, had his ear cupped in his hand. The rector looked vaguely horrified. Richard De’ath suddenly gulped down his double whiskey. Miss Hart coughed over her lemonade and Mrs. Simpson avidly popped a peppermint cream in her mouth and took a swig of her port-and-raspberry.

Alleyn nodded to Fox, who laid Mr. Bates’s Bible, open at the flyleaf, on the table before him.

“The case,” Alleyn said, “hinges on this book. You have all seen the entries. I remind you of the recorded deaths in 1779 of the three Hadets—Stewart Shakespeare, Naomi Balbus, and Peter Rook. To each of these is attached a biblical text suggesting that they met their death by violence. There have never been any Hadets in this village and the days of the week are wrong for the given dates. They are right, however, for the year 1921 and they fit the deaths, all by falling from a height, of William Wagstaff, Ruth Wall, and Simon Castle.

“By analogy the Christian names agree. William suggests Shakespeare. Naomi—Ruth; Balbus—a wall. Simon—Peter; and a Rook is a Castle in chess. And Hadet,” Alleyn said without emphasis, “is an anagram of Death.”

“Balderdash!” Miss Hart cried out in an unrecognizable voice.

“No, it’s not,” said Mrs. Simpson. “It’s jolly good crossword stuff.”

“Wicked balderdash. Richard!”

De’ath said, “Be quiet. Let him go on.”

“We believe,” Alleyn said, “that these three people met their deaths by one hand. Motive is a secondary consideration, but it is present in several instances, predominantly in one.

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