A Man Lay Dead. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ Rankin, emerging breathless from the hurly-burly. ‘Come on, Nigel…come on, Hubert.’

      ‘There’s always something wrong with old Charles when he rags,’ thought Nigel. But he held the protesting Wilde while his trousers were dragged off, and joined in the laugh when he stood pale and uncomfortable, clutching a hearthrug to his recreant limbs and blinking short-sightedly.

      ‘You’ve smashed my spectacles,’ he said.

      ‘Darling!’ screamed Mrs Wilde, ‘you look too stupid to be believed. Charles, what a horror you are to make such nonsense of my husband!’

      ‘I feel I look rather magnificent,’ declared Wilde. ‘Who’s got my trousers? You, Angela! My Edwardian blood congeals at the sight. Give them up, child, or I grow churlish.’

      ‘Here you are, Adonis,’ said Rankin, snatching the trousers from Angela and tying them round Wilde’s neck. ‘Gosh, what a lovely sight! Perfect picture of a gentleman who has stroked his eight to victory.’

      ‘Run and put them on, my pet,’ said Mrs Wilde, ‘or you’ll get growing pains.’

      Wilde obediently disappeared.

      ‘Last time I de-bagged Arthur was at Eton,’ said Rankin. ‘God, what ages ago it seems!’

      He turned to the wireless and began tuning in to a concert of dance music.

      ‘Come on, Rosamund,’ he said, ‘let’s dance.’

      ‘I’m too hot,’ said Rosamund, who had been talking to Tokareff.

      ‘Marjorie!’ shouted Rankin, ‘can you bear to trip a measure?’

      ‘Has Rosamund turned you down? Too dreary for you, Charles.’

      ‘I’ve let him off his duty dance,’ said Rosamund. ‘Doctor Tokareff is telling a story a thousand years old, and I must hear the end.’

      ‘This is a history,’ began Tokareff, ‘of a hospodin…a noble…and two ladies. It is what you call eternal triangle…very old motif in human history.’

      ‘So old that it is, don’t you think, rather boring?’ asked Rankin.

      ‘Do dance, Marjorie,’ said Angela.

      Without waiting for her consent, Rankin put his arm round Mrs Wilde, and at once Nigel saw that she was translated.

      There are some women who, when they dance, express a depth of feeling and of temperament that actually they do not possess. He saw that Mrs Wilde was one of these women. Under the spell of that blatantly exotic measure she seemed to flower, to become significant and dangerous. Rankin, rapt and serious, was at once her foil and her master. He never took his eyes off hers, and she, unfriendly, provocative, stared back at him as though she were insulting him. Nigel, Angela, and Handesley stopped talking to watch these two, and Wilde, returning, stood stock still in the doorway. Only the Russian seemed disinterested. He had bent over the wireless set and was examining it intently.

      The quicker second movement slid back into the original theme of the tango. The dancers had come together in the first steps of their final embrace, when an ear-splitting shriek from the wireless shattered the spell.

      ‘What the devil!’ exclaimed Rankin angrily.

      ‘Please forgive,’ said Tokareff calmly. ‘Evidently I have blundered. Sush a funny muck-up and screechiness I never before have heard…’

      ‘Wait a moment…I’ll get it back,’ suggested Handesley.

      ‘No, no, don’t bother—it would be too stupid to go on,’ answered Rankin ungraciously. He lit a cigarette and walked away from his partner.

      ‘Charles,’ said Handesley quietly, ‘Arthur and I have been discussing your dagger. It really is enormously interesting. Do be a little more forthcoming about its history.’

      ‘All I can tell you,’ said Rankin, ‘is this. I pulled a wild-looking gentleman out of a crevasse in Switzerland last year. I don’t speak Russian, and he didn’t speak English. I never saw him again, but apparently he traced me—through my guide, I suppose—to my hotel, and thence, presumably, to England. The knife with the two words, “Switzerland” (so lavish) and “thanks” only reached me yesterday. I conclude it was from him.’

      ‘Will you sell it to me, Charles?’ asked Sir Hubert. ‘I’ll give you much more than you deserve for it.’

      ‘No, Hubert, I won’t. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll leave it to you. Nigel here gets all my possessions. Nigel! If I kick the bucket, my lad, Hubert is to have the dagger. Bear witness, all of you.’

      ‘It shall be done,’ said Nigel.

      ‘Considering I’m ten years your senior, it’s not what I should call a handsome offer,’ complained Handesley. ‘Still, let’s have it in writing.’

      ‘You old ghoul, Hubert!’ laughed Rankin.

      ‘Hubert!’ shrieked Marjorie Wilde, ‘how can you be so utterly bloodsucking!’

      Rankin had walked to the writing-desk.

      ‘Here you are, you maniac,’ he said. ‘Nigel and Arthur can witness.’

      He wrote the necessary phrase and signed it. Nigel and Wilde witnessed, and Rankin handed it to Handesley.

      ‘You’d much better sell it to me,’ said Handesley coolly.

      ‘Excuse me, please,’ boomed Doctor Tokareff. ‘I do not entirely understand.’

      ‘No?’ The note of antagonism had crept into Rankin’s voice. ‘I merely leave instructions that if a sticky end should overtake me—’

      ‘Excuse me, please…a sticky end?’

      ‘Oh, damn! If I should die, or be murdered, or disappear from view, this knife which you, Doctor Tokareff, consider has no business to be in my possession, shall become the property of our host.’

      ‘Thank you,’ said Doctor Tokareff composedly.

      ‘You do not approve?’

      ‘Niet. No. By my standpoint of view, zis knoife does not belong by you.’

      ‘The knife was given to me.’

      ‘Such indiscretion has doubtless been suitably chastized,’ remarked the Russian peacefully.

      ‘Well,’ broke in Handesley, noting perhaps the two little scarlet danger signals in Rankin’s cheeks, ‘let us hope it will give no offence by hanging for tonight at the foot of my stairs. Come and have a cocktail.’

      Charles Rankin lingered in the drawing-room with his cousin. He slipped his arm through Nigel’s.

      ‘Not a very delicious gentleman, that dago,’ he said loudly.

      ‘Look out, he’ll hear you!’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ