Free False Scent by Ngaio Marsh

a little as if the guests gave rattling good performances of themselves arriving at a cocktail party. They did this to music, for Miss Bellamy, in an alcove of her great saloon, had stationed a blameless instrumental trio.
    Although, in the natural course of events, they met each other very often, there was a tendency among the guests to express astonishment, even rapture, at this particular encounter. Each congratulated Miss Bellamy on her birthday and her superb appearance. Some held her at arm’s length the better to admire. Some expressed bewilderment and others a sort of matey reverence. Then in turn they shook hands with Charles and by the particular pains the nice ones took with him, they somehow established the fact that he was not quite of their own world.
    When Pinky and Bertie arrived, Miss Bellamy greeted them with magnanimity.
    “
So
glad,” she said to both of them, “that you decided to come.” The kiss that accompanied this greeting was tinctured with forebearance and what passed with Miss Bellamy for charity. It also, in some ineffable manner, seemed to convey a threat. They were meant to receive it like a sacrament and (however reluctantly) they did so, progressing on the conveyor belt of hospitality to Charles, who was markedly cordial to both of them.
    They passed on down the long drawing-room and were followed by two Dames, a Knight, three distinguished commoners, another Knight and his Lady, Montague Marchant and Timon Gantry.
    Richard, filling his established role of a sort of unofficial son of the house, took over the guests as they came his way. He was expected to pilot them through the bottleneck of the intake and encourage them to move to the dining-room and conservatory. He also helped the hired barman and the housemaid with the drinks until Gracefield and the parlourmaid were able to carry on. He was profoundly uneasy. He had been out to lunch and late returning and had had no chance to speak to Mary before the first guests appeared. But he knew that all was not well. There were certain only too unmistakable signs, of which a slight twitch in Mary’s triangular smile was the most ominous. “There’s been another temperament,” Richard thought, and he fancied he saw confirmation of this in Charles, whose hands were not quite steady and whose face was unevenly patched.
    The rooms filled up. He kept looking towards the door and thinking he saw Anelida.
    Timon Gantry came up to him. “I’ve been talking to Monty,” he said. “Have you got a typescript for him?”
    “Timmy, how kind of you! Yes, of course.”
    “Here?”
    “Yes. Mary’s got one. She said she’d leave it in my old room upstairs.”
    “
Mary
! Why?”
    “I always show her my things.”
    Gantry looked at him for a moment, gave his little gasp and then said, “I see I must speak frankly. Will Mary think you wrote the part for her?”
    Richard said, “I — that was not my intention…”
    “Because you’d better understand at once, Dicky, that I wouldn’t dream of producing this play with Mary in the lead. Nor would I dream of advising the Management to back it with Mary in the lead. Nor could it be anything but a disastrous flop with Mary in the lead. Is that clear?”
    “Abundantly,” Richard said.
    “Moreover,” Gantry said, “I should be lacking in honesty and friendship if I didn’t tell you it was high time you cut loose from those particular apron strings. Thank you, I would prefer whisky and water.”
    Richard, shaken, turned aside to get it. As he made his way back to Gantry he was aware of one of those unaccountable lulls that sometimes fall across the insistent din of a cocktail party. Gantry, inches taller than anyone else in the room, was looking across the other guests toward the door. Several of them also had turned in the same direction, so that it was past the backs of heads and through a gap between shoulders that Richard first saw Anelida and Octavius come in.
    It was not until a long time