Perhaps we could have Evans lurk outside Sutherland House this evening, and finger—as the professionals say—either Blanton, Hutchison, or Ogilvie when they turned up.
And if he didn’t recognize either of them, then it might have been Dominic Rivers in the motorcar.
Although did it really matter who had dropped Gladys off? She had told Crispin it was Hutchison. Hutchison had said it wasn’t him. One of them had lied. But did it really matter who? Whoever it was, needn’t have been the person who killed her. It was no crime to drive Gladys to our flat and drop her off.
“I don’t imagine so, Miss Darling,” Evans said apologetically. “As I said, it was only a glimpse. The gentleman stayed inside the motorcar.”
I thanked him and headed upstairs, where the first thing I did, after stripping off the clothes I had worn for far too long, was to fill the bathtub with a lot of lovely warm water and bath salts and sink in to my neck. Then I lay there, while the water lapped gently at the bottom of my hair, and thought things through.
From the beginning.
Crispin and I had gone to Rectors to look for Christopher. Montrose had been there, as he had said, in the hopes of experiencing another raid or something similar. Something newsworthy for his tabloid.
Blanton, Hutchison, Ogilvie and Gladys Long had been there for fun, or perhaps to meet Dominic Rivers.
As Blanton had said (and Crispin had confirmed), customers did not seek Rivers out. He came to them. So it was likely that Rivers had told Blanton to meet him at Rectors. He might have been doing business with someone else there, and Blanton was, according to the hints Rivers had dropped, uneasy about his sexuality.
When we all left Rectors to go to Blanton’s flat, Montrose had attached himself to the party. Logically, he must have noticed Blanton’s symptoms and/or had recognized Rivers, and had decided that the dope angle was a better scoop than another potential raid. He had come with us to Mayfair to dig up more information.
Montrose had been killed in the butler’s pantry while Christopher, Crispin and I were sitting in Ronnie Blanton’s parlor.
Dominic Rivers and Gladys Long had been in the kitchen, at least if you believed what they said. They had both said the same thing on separate occasions.
Furthermore, there was really no reason to think they hadn’t been where they said they were. Whether or not they’d been in the kitchen made no difference to the case against either of them. If Rivers had killed Montrose and Gladys knew it, they might have made an agreement to lie. Rivers had Gladys over a barrel, since he controlled her access to the dope she needed, and so she would have agreed to lie for him, to keep the supply coming. They could have noticed Montrose spying on them through the door between the kitchen and butler’s pantry—a door which gave them access to Montrose in a way that the rest of us in the flat didn’t have, without having to go out into the hallway—and then Gladys watched Rivers kill Montrose.
As Tom had pointed out, Rivers probably did have the best motive of anyone in the flat for wanting Montrose out of the way, and in this scenario, Gladys’s murder made perfect sense. She knew that Rivers had killed Montrose, and even if she had agreed to keep mum about it, he might have felt safer with her dead.
Or perhaps Gladys was the one who had noticed Montrose spying on them while Rivers was getting her dope ready, and she was the one who had picked up the rolling pin and whacked him over the head. Whether she’d been strong enough to do that was questionable, but say for a moment that she had. Rivers might have been induced to lie for her—he’d want to keep her as a client, and he would have been happy to have Montrose out of the way himself, I assumed—although this scenario did not explain who might have killed Gladys or why.
Blanton, Hutchison, and Ogilvie had been in the parlor with Crispin, Christopher, and me when Montrose excused himself to look for the loo. Blanton had been flying high after his own excursion into the kitchen with Rivers. Hutchison had been mixing drinks, and Ogilvie had been chatting with Christopher.
Practically as soon as Montrose left, Hutchison sent Blanton after him, and as soon as Blanton left, Hutchison had excused himself, as well. That might have taken a minute, perhaps two. Ogilvie had looked very uncomfortable for another minute or two, before Crispin managed to talk him into following the others. And then the three of us had had a conversation that must have lasted a few minutes before Gladys started screaming bloody murder—pardon the pun—in the hallway.
She had told Crispin—and so had Rivers, separately—that they had seen the others at the butler’s pantry door when they’d left the kitchen, and that was the first they knew that anything had happened to Montrose.
That might be true, or it might not.
Hutchison had told Christopher and me that when he’d arrived in the butler’s pantry, Montrose was already dead. If he had been telling the truth, Rivers, Gladys, or Blanton had to be the murderer.
If Gladys and Rivers had told the truthandHutchison had told the truth, it had to be Blanton.
Unless Hutchison had gone somewhere else before the butler’s pantry—there might have been a search on for Montrose throughout the flat; nobody had known exactly where he’d be, I assumed—in which case, Ogilvie might have had time to kill him, too.
Or Hutchison might have lied and killed Montrose himself.
This was getting me no closer to a solution. I turned around in the tub, and made the water slosh against the edges before it settled down again.
Crispin thought he knew who the killer was, and seemed sad about it. That meant it was most likely someone he would consider a friend. He might not include Rivers in that designation, and he had said, hadn’t he, that he and Ogilvie weren’t close?
And so I seemed to be back to Hutchison and Blanton again.
Crispin had seen a red Morris Oxford parked outside the mews when he came out after walking Gladys to her door. Blanton owned a red Morris Oxford. Hutchison could have had access to Blanton’s red Morris Oxford.
Of course, Rivers also had a red Morris Oxford, which rather muddied the waters.
Of the four of them, we knew that Rivers and Ogilvie had been out and about yesterday, while Blanton and Hutchison had been at home when Christopher and I stopped by.
But we’d only seen them for a few minutes each, and there was no reason why they couldn’t have left their respective flats before or after we’d been there.
