Death at the Bar. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ Private. The top of the long leg forms a magnificent ingle-nook flanked with settles and scented with three hundred years of driftwood smoke. Opposite the ingle-nook at the bottom angle of the L hangs a dart board made by Abel Pomeroy himself. There, winter and summer alike, the Pomeroys’ chosen friends play for drinks. There is a board in the Public for the rank and file. If strangers to the Feathers choose to play in the Private, the initiates wait until they have finished. If the initiates invite a stranger to play, he is no longer a stranger.

      The midsummer evening was chilly and a fire smouldered in the ingle-nook. Watchman finished his supper, swung his legs up on the settle, and felt for his pipe. He squinted up at Sebastian Parish, who leant against the mantelpiece in an attitude familiar to every West End playgoer in London.

      ‘I like this place,’ Watchman said. ‘Extradordinarily pleasant, isn’t it, returning to a place one likes?’

      Parish made an actor’s expressive gesture.

      ‘Marvellous!’ he said richly. ‘To get away from everything! The noise! The endless racket! The artificiality! God, how I loathe my profession!’

      ‘Come off it, Seb,’ said Watchman. ‘You glory in it. You were born acting. The gamp probably burst into an involuntary round of applause on your first entrance and I bet you played your mother right off the stage.’

      ‘All the same, old boy, this good clean air means a hell of a lot to me.’

      ‘Exactly,’ agreed Watchman dryly. His cousin had a trick of saying things that sounded a little like quotations from an interview with himself. Watchman was amused rather than irritated by this mannerism. It was part and parcel, he thought, of Seb’s harmless staginess, like his clothes which were too exactly what a gentleman, roughing it in South Devon, ought to wear. He liked to watch Seb standing out on Coombe Rock, bareheaded to the breeze, in effect waiting for the camera man to say ‘OK for sound.’ No doubt that was the pose Norman had chosen for his portrait of Sebastian. It occurred to him now that Sebastian was up to something. That speech about the artificiality of the stage was the introduction to a confidence, or Watchman didn’t know his Parish. Whatever it was, Sebastian missed his moment. The door opened and a thin man with untidy fair hair looked in.

      ‘Hallo!’ said Watchman. ‘Our distinguished artist.’ Norman Cubitt grinned, lowered his painter’s pack, and came into the ingle-nook.

      ‘Well, Luke? Good trip?’

      ‘Splendid! You’re painting already?’ Cubitt stretched a hand to the fire. The fingers were grimed with paint.

      ‘I’m doing a thing of Seb,’ he said. ‘I suppose he’s told you about it. Laying it on with a trowel, I am. That’s in the morning. Tonight I started a thing down by the jetty. They’re patching up one of the posts. Very pleasant subject, but my treatment of it so far is bloody.’

      ‘Are you painting in the dark?’ asked Watchman with a smile.

      ‘I was talking to one of the fishing blokes after the light went. They’ve gone all politically-minded in the Coombe.’

      ‘That,’ said Parish, lowering his voice, ‘is Will Pomeroy and his Left Group.’

      ‘Will and Decima together,’ said Cubitt. ‘I’ve suggested they call themselves the Decimbrists.’

      ‘Where are the lads of the village?’ demanded Watchman. ‘I thought I heard the dart game in progress as I went upstairs.’

      ‘Abel’s rat-poisoning in the garage,’ said Parish. ‘They’ve all gone out to see he doesn’t give himself a lethal dose of prussic acid.’

      ‘Good Lord!’ Watchman ejaculated. ‘Is the old fool playing around with cyanide?’

      ‘Apparently. Why wouldn’t we have a drink?’

      ‘Why not indeed?’ agreed Cubitt. ‘Hi, Will!’

      He went to the bar and leant over it, looking into the Public.

      ‘The whole damn place is deserted. I’ll get our drinks and chalk them up. Beer?’

      ‘Beer it is,’ said Parish.

      ‘What form of cyanide has Abel got hold of?’ Watchman asked.

      ‘Eh?’ said Parish vaguely. ‘Oh, let’s see now. I fetched it for him from Illington. The chemist hadn’t got any of the stock rat-banes, but he poked round and found this stuff. I think he called it Scheele’s acid.’

      ‘Good, God!’

      ‘What? Yes, that was it – Scheele’s acid. And then he said he thought the fumes of Scheele’s acid mightn’t be strong enough, so he gingered it up a bit.’

      ‘With what, in the name of all the Borgias?’

      ‘Well – with prussic acid, I imagine.’

      ‘You imagine! You imagine!’

      ‘He said that was what it was. He said it was acid or something. I wouldn’t know. He warned me in sixteen different positions to be careful. Suggested Abel wore a half-crown gas mask, so I bought it in case Abel hadn’t got one. Abel’s using gloves and everything.’

      ‘It’s absolutely monstrous!’

      ‘I had to sign for it, old boy,’ said Parish. ‘Very solemn we were. God, he was a stupid man! Bone from the eyes up, but so, so kind.’

      Watchman said angrily, ‘I should damn well think he was stupid. Do you know that twenty-five drops of Scheele’s acid will kill a man in a few minutes? Why, good Lord, in Rex v. Bull, if I’m not mistaken, it was alleged that accused gave only seven drops. I myself defended a medical student who gave twenty minims in error. Charge of manslaughter. I got him off but – how’s Abel using it?’

      ‘What’s all this?’ inquired Cubitt. ‘There’s your beer.’

      ‘Abel said he was going to put it in a pot and shove it in a rathole,’ explained Parish. ‘I think he’s filled with due respect for its deadliness, Luke, really. He’s going to block the hole up and everything.’

      ‘The chemist had no business to give you Scheele’s, much less this infernal brew. He ought to be struck off the books. The pharmacopœial preparation would have been quite strong enough. He could have diluted even that to advantage.’

      ‘Well, God bless us,’ said Cubitt hastily, and took a pull at his beer.

      ‘What happens, actually, when someone’s poisoned by prussic acid?’ asked Parish.

      ‘Convulsion, clammy sweat, and death.’

      ‘Shut up!’ said Cubitt. ‘What a filthy conversation!’

      ‘Well – cheers, dear,’ said Parish, raising his tankard.

      ‘You do get hold of the most repellent idioms, Seb,’ said his cousin. ‘Te saluto.’

      ‘But not moriturus, I trust,’ added Parish. ‘With all this chat about СКАЧАТЬ