Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(62)

‘I was willing to do him a kindness,’ said Mysterioso mildly, ‘that was all.’

‘Well, it made a change then, if you were,’ said the boy. ‘You’d done him anything but a kindness two years before, hadn’t you?’ And he looked at the rest of them with a triumph almost pitiful because it was so filled with spite. ‘You want a motive?’ he said. ‘Well, I’ll tell it to you—the Inspector could have told it to you long ago, only he protects this man like all the rest have done. All the world knew that Mysterioso had taken Mr. Photoze’s girl friend away from him.’

‘Dear me,’ said Marguerite Devine, ‘would you say that this was where I come in?’

There fell a verbal silence in which even Mr. Photoze lost his recent poise, jangling his golden bracelets with nervous movements of his hands. Perhaps it was their tinkling that led him to say finally, ‘Do I really give the impression of a man who would kill another man for taking a woman away from him?’

‘Speaking from memory,’ said Marguerite, ‘I would say that the answer to that one is—no.’

‘You’ll confirm it, Marguerite?—all I did was to take pictures of you.’ He explained to the ‘court’. ‘I lived in the same group of flats. I was a lodger—with this young man’s parents, us in the basement, her ladyship here in considerably more comfort on the fifth floor. She was a star then, at the top of her career—’

‘Not to say a little over the hill,’ admitted Marguerite ruefully.

‘Do you think she’d have looked at me in that way?—a scruffy little press photographer without tuppence to bless himself with. But she was an actress, she was resting at the time, and all actresses, all that our young gentleman here would call “their kind”, like having their pictures taken. It’s part of their stock in trade. So… It was good practice for me; and in those days, what a marvellous profile!’

‘For “in those days”, dear,’ said Marguerite, ‘much thanks!’ But she added, kindly, to the boy, ‘However, at least an honest face, love, I hope. And in all honesty I tell you—he wouldn’t have killed so much as a fly on account of me.’

‘Well, some other reason then, what does it matter? But he was up on that roof, he could have done it, and nobody else could, so he must have.’

Inspector Block got suddenly to his feet. ‘Now look here, my lad! You’ve had a long innings, you’ve done a lot of very clever talking—now you listen for a change! Your theory is beautifully ingenious, but it has one tiny flaw, and that is, it won’t work. The whole thing depends on a hole in the roof so big that Mr. Photoze could get down through it and then up again. But the police do think of these things too, you know; and that hole was most carefully examined, and the simple fact is that he couldn’t have got his head through it, let alone the rest of him. The slates were securely pegged down and couldn’t be removed; the only hole was the small one he made by shattering one of the slates with the heel of his shoe.’

The boy was taken aback. It had seemed to fit so well, justify all his suspicions. And now nothing was left of it. Back to the parrot cry that had sustained him all this bitter time since his father had died. ‘He was on the roof. There was only him and my father—’

‘That’s right,’ said Inspector Block. ‘Him—and your father.’

You couldn’t call him slow on the uptake. The boy was there before any of them and had sprung to his feet—frightened now, really frightened. ‘You mean—together? In it together?’

The rifle hidden away during the night—it was true that these things, the gun, the bag of apples, the string, might very easily have escaped detection during the more cursory inspection on the day of the ceremony: small enough objects to be lost among the innumerable bits and pieces lying about in a building still under construction. Up to the roof with Mr. Photoze, then, searched and found free of the impedimenta of murder; he’d have been smuggled up there without permission if none had been given, of course; had they been surprised, those two, in the middle of their plan, when Mysterioso and the Superintendent had come upon them outside the main entrance? Up to the roof, anyway—and the bolt shot that would keep him up there. ‘It was P.C. Robbins who suggested that the inside bolt be shot. It left his accomplice, now that he was known to be on the roof, safe from accusation of firing the gun.’

The boy did not argue. There was in his heart now a terrible fear.

Everyone gone off at last to prepare for the ceremony—a clear field. P.C. Robbins leaves his post at the main entrance and nips up the stairs—no patients yet, perhaps, to mark his going, or if there are, after all the passings up and down that morning, who is going to recall one more policeman checking things once again?