Chapter Eighteen
Enid and Pluck returned to the interview room to find Bartoff rolling around on the floor with his dog, laughing in the pure rapture of having found someone who loved him.
Ignoring them, Enid said to Pluck: “I suggest we interview this Curtis person next.”
Pluck, taking his seat, laughed at her ignorance. “But my dear Miss Trojczakowski, surely you realise—I am Curtis.”
“I mean the member of staff at this hotel who shares your, assumed, name. The porter who instructed Poor Larry to restock the papers in the reading room—on the afternoon when no new papers had arrived.”
“Ah.”
“I feel he may be the key to the whole mystery,” she went on.
Pluck arranged the papers before him and smiled indulgently. “And what whole mystery is that, Miss Trojczakowski?”
“I mean the murder, Mister Pluck.”
“Ah. That. Yes, well, the murder’s as good as solved, you know.”
“I feel like there are a few little holes that still require tidying up.”
“And how does one tidy up holes, exactly, Miss Trojczakowski? Hmm?”
She smiled. “You have detected my mixed metaphor, Mister Pluck. You are something of a detective at that.”
He made a little bow from his seat; she moved back at once, in case he should head-butt her. He then struck the bell with authority, summoning Poor Larry the Bellhop into the room. On seeing him, Pluck leapt to his feet (a leap of no great length) with an exclamation of joy—his tiny black eyes danced, his fingers fluttered, he ran over and embraced him manfully (causing Larry to drop the vase of mineral water he’d been carrying; I won’t bother to describe its inevitable telos). “Returned from the land of the shades—a miracle!” Pluck exclaimed. He pushed Larry out into the lobby, which was sparsely peopled with now thoroughly bored guests, and declared: “A boy has been brought back from the dead, in answer to my prayers! Behold a prophet, a seer—my son!” Pluck dropped to his knees. “I praise thee, Tawaret, thou hippopotamus of the aether, for your selfless intervention!”
“Please, monsieur, I beg you to leave me alone.”
“Hush, child, hush!” Pluck held him to his chest, and stroked his hair. “Everything’s going to be all right, now. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
The protestations and soothing went on for some time, before Manager Mifkin succeeded in persuading the good inspector that Larry was required for some important hotel business, and did Pluck the honour of personally escorting Missus Charlotte Drig to the interview room for questioning.
“‘Drig’. English, no?” Pluck began with a smile.
“That’s right, sir,” the lady glowered at him. There she sat, short and stout and hugging herself in her shawl. She must have been forty, but looked ages older, thanks no doubt, thought Pluck, to having had to tear herself open—speaking with regard to both her vagina and her heart—for the benefit of six rotten children. Regrets? Pluck imagined she was stuffed full of them like a pepper overflowing with beef, rice and all sorts of offal that would have otherwise been consigned to the bin or the dogs. Yes, motherhood: a ghastly invention that Pluck, fortunately, given his coin-toss triumph at being born a man, would never have to undergo, or even to witness—now that he’d found himself a ready-made adolescent he was shortly to adopt, train up as a fellow inspector, grow old with, and finally bequeath his album of naked fat ladies to.
After several minutes’ (again, literally) pondering, Pluck cleared his throat and asked his second question: “Why—”
“Excuse me, Inspector, but whatever happened to your eyelashes?”
“I pluck them, Missus Drig, if you must know. Yes, I pluck them, yes, per my name, according to an esoteric ethical principle I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Now, if I might proceed?”
“Carry on.”
“Where were you the night of October the third, three years ago?”
“Why, at home, I should imagine. Whatever could that have to do with anything?”
“Probably nothing, probably nothing.” He fiddled with his bow tie. “But riddle me this: Where were you not the night of October the third, three years ago?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Where were you not the night of October the third, three years ago?”
“Where were you?!” screamed Bartoff, not bothering to remove his eyes from his beloved pet in his lap (I mean the dog).
“You’ve repeated the question, all right, but I can’t say I can make head or tails of it,” Missus Drig protested. She had rather thick eyebrows, Pluck noticed. He marked that down on his notepad, and proceeded:
“I will endeavour to explain. You say—you claim—you were at home on the evening in question.”
“So far as I can remember.”
“Please be silent while I speak; I find your interruptions scarcely less rude than they are imbecilic. You say you were at home on the evening in question; very well. Let us suppose that you are telling the truth, and you are not a complete moron. Fine. Good. So now I am forced to ask: Where were you not, at the same time?”
“What—do you want me to list where I wasn’t?”
“Yes.”
“All the places I wasn’t at?”
“That’s right.”
“All the places in the world?”
“I see you’ve understood.”
She laughed, rudely. “I think that would take a bit of time, don’t you?”
He shrugged, with limitless equanimity. “We have all the time you need.”
Enid leaned in: “Do you really think this is going to help, Curtis?” she asked.
“Why would I want to help Curtis?”
“I meant you. Thaddeus. Curtis.” He looked about him, bewildered. “Mister Pluck.” He turned back to her.
“Are you talking to me?”
“Yes,” Enid confirmed. “Surely there’s an easier way to go about this.”
“I bloody well think so!” Missus Drig exclaimed.
Pluck whirled in her direction. “Eavesdropping, are we, Missus Drig?!”
“I’d hardly call it that! I can hear you both just fine where I’m sat.”
“I disagree,” countered Pluck.
“You disagree with what?”
“With your statement.”
“What statement was that—that I heard you from here?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, then: if I couldn’t have heard you, I could hardly have been eavesdropping, could I?”
Pluck stiffened. Foolishly, he’d let her lead him through this pernicious logical labyrinth and straight into a trap. He marshalled his rhetorical forces, realising that his antagonist was far more deadly than he’d assumed. “Missus Drig, have you ever been in love?” he asked, to throw her off the track and, to feed more oxygen to the metaphor, raise her onto ground he deemed safer for himself.
“Aye,” she answered, without batting an eye. “I love me husband, and me kids.”
“Missus Drig, I asked you a serious question, and I’ll have you know I therefore expect a serious answer.”
“I gave you a serious answer, but I’ll have you know that I’ll expect some less stupid questions in future!”
Reflections of the fireplace’s flames curled along her frame. She had a large mouth, which boasted, Pluck realised, a formal beauty out of proportion with the rest of her face or person.
“And furthermore,” she went on, “I find the way you lot have treated me kids to be nothing short of outrageous! Outrageous! The way you’ve conducted this inquiry on the whole has been inhuman an’ ungodly! I know you’ll burn where you’re goin’, sir, believe you me—maybe not today, maybe not this year, but the day will come when you will burn for what you’ve done to us in this hotel this holiday!”
“Missus Drig. . .forgive the unprofessionalism of what I’m about to submit, but. . .I cannot help but notice that you are really a quite extraordinarily beautiful woman.”
She laughed, and waved him away. “Aw, tosh!”
“No, I mean it. Your face—your mouth, in particular. Enid, have a look. Don’t you agree?”
“Of course.” Enid really had nothing to say on the matter.
“Would you—Miss Drig—”
“‘Missus’, of course, you naughty boy!” she laughed.
“Oh, surely not so many years from when you were a miss, now is it? Heh-heh—Missus Drig, would you terribly mind smiling even a little more broadly—that’s it—mouth open. . .yes! Yes! Enid, don’t you see? Bartoff?”
But Bartoff was gazing adoringly into his little pooch’s mouth, while Enid was hugging herself with an inexplicable testiness that had all of a sudden come over her.
Missus Drig was chuckling, beaming, despite herself. Pluck got out of his chair and walked around the table to her. He knelt down and held her cheeks between his palms, gazing at the beauty, like a perfectly shaped pond as seen by a bronze-winged pionus in flight overhead, of her mouth.
He then stood up, and, taking her hand, raised her from her seat.
“Miss Drig—”
She shook her finger at him, teasingly: “Ah-ah!”
“That is,” he chuckled, “Missus Drig: I take the greatest pleasure in informing you that you are no longer of interest to this investigation. The white purity of lamb’s wool should not be denied; it should be celebrated. You are excused, with the manifest regret that I’ll no longer be able to gaze upon you from across that table, like the inexorable grief of a mayfly who’s just bid adieu to his sole setting sun. But would you be so kind as to invite your dear husband to our merry gathering? For it just might be possible that he knows some little tufts of information which will lead us to the man who murdered a clerk.”