whispered Angela, as the Bentley ate up the drive.
‘Streuth indeed!’ agreed Nigel. ‘Tokareff is under arrest.’
‘For the murder?’
‘For what else?’
‘But—he sang the Death of Boris all the time.’
‘Seems he couldn’t have.’
‘Well, here we are,’ commented Angela after an indecently brief interval. She slowed down and put on her brakes.
‘Will you wait for us?’ Alleyn asked her. ‘Come on, Doctor Tokareff.’
A police sergeant showed them into a brilliantly lit, white-washed room. A tall blue-uniformed officer greeted them.
‘Inspector Fisher—Mr Bathgate,’ said Alleyn by way of introduction. ‘This is Doctor Tokareff. I wish to charge him with—’
Tokareff, who had been perfectly silent for some time, broke in. ‘I am innocent of murder!’
‘Who said you weren’t?’ rejoined Alleyn wearily. ‘The charge is one of sedition and conspiracy, if that’s the correct phrase. I always get them wrong, don’t I, Fisher? This man is charged with complicity in connection with the operations of an association of Russians having its headquarters at 101 Little Racquet Street, Soho. He is charged with having caused to be published and circulated certain pamphlets containing treasonable utterances and incitements to sedition and—oh, damn it, anyway, that’s the charge.’
‘Righto,’ said Inspector Fisher, crossing to a desk and putting on his spectacles. ‘Let’s have it.’
A brief colloquy between the two policemen followed, interspersed by the scratching of the inspector’s pen. The sergeant came in and said cheerfully: ‘Now then, Doctor, we’ll just move next door.’
‘I wish to write, to make an announcement,’ said Doctor Tokareff suddenly.
‘You shall have every opportunity,’ soothed Alleyn. ‘What a tig you are in, to be sure!’
‘It is the knife,’ said Tokareff profoundly. ‘The betrayal of the knife that has been to me my own betrayal. The Pole, Krasinski, who gave it to Mr Rankin was the author of all these misfortunates.’
‘Krasinski is dead,’ said Alleyn, ‘and letters of yours were in his pockets. Who killed him?’
‘How should I know? In the brotherhood no one knows. Krasinski was mad. I wish to write to my country’s ambassador.’
‘You may do so. He’ll be delighted. We’ll leave you now, Fisher. I’ll ring through at about one o’clock. Good night.’
‘Good night,’ mumbled Nigel uncomfortably, and followed the detective out to the car.
Angela did nothing to darken her reputation as a furious driver on that night trip to London. Alleyn refused to talk after having given an address off Coventry Street as their destination, and slept deeply on the back seat. Nigel stared at a young, eager profile and thought his own thoughts.
‘Do you think Mr Alleyn believes Doctor Tokareff did it?’ she said.
‘I don’t know a bit,’ Nigel answered her. ‘As far as I can make it out, Tokareff, perhaps Vassily your butler, and the Pole Krasinski whom Charles met in Switzerland, must all have been members of some Bolshie gang. Krasinski, God knows why, gave Charles Rankin the knife. I guess, from what Sir Hubert, Arthur Wilde, and Tokareff himself have said, that the knife was the symbolic weapon of the brotherhood, and to part with it was a fatal breach of trust. So, on Saturday evening somebody murdered Krasinski in Soho.’
‘And on Sunday someone murdered Charles Rankin at Frantock,’ concluded Angela under her breath. ‘Do you think Tokareff could have darted out of his bedroom, rushed to the head of the stairs, thrown the knife, run back and gone on gaily with the Death of Boris ?’
‘Hardly. And who put out the lights?’ objected Nigel.
‘And what does Mr Alleyn mean by saying Charles himself sounded the gong?’ Angela ended hopelessly.
‘I can’t imagine, but I’m glad he’s asleep. Angela, if I were to kiss the fur on your collar, would you mind very much?’
‘We are now doing sixty, and we are going up to sixty-five. Is this a time for dalliance?’
‘It may be my death,’ said Nigel, ‘but I’ll risk it.’
‘That wasn’t the fur on my collar.’
‘Darling!’
‘What’s the time?’ said Alleyn suddenly from the back seat.
‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ called Angela, and was true to her words.
At the top of one of those curious little cul-de-sacs off Coventry Street, where the Bentley looked the size of a caravan, Alleyn fitted a latch-key into a green door.
‘You will find that you know my servant,’ he said over his shoulder.
And, sure enough, there in the little hall waiting for them was an elderly, apologetic figure, anxiously bent forward.
‘Vassily!’ cried Angela.
‘Miss Angela, my little miss! Dushitchka!’ The old Russian was covering her hands with kisses…
‘Oh, Vassily!’ said Angela gently, ‘what have you to do with this? Why did you run away?’
‘I was in terror. In such terrible fright. Picture, little miss, what would they think? I said to myself, the police will find out all. They will question Alexis Andreyevitch, Doctor Tokareff, and he will tell them perhaps that I also was of the brotherhood long, long ago in my own country. He will repeat what I have said: that Mr Rankin should not have the holy little knife that had been blessed to the bratsvo, the brothership. The English police, they know everything, and perhaps they already have known how I have had letters from the brothership in London. It will be useless for me to say that I am no longer, how you say, mixed up with this society. I am already suspect. So before the police come, I run away and am arrested here in London, and to Scotland Yard I have made my statement and to Inspector Alleyn when he comes up to see me on Sunday, and they release me and I stay here. It is splendid!’
‘He behaved like an old donkey,’ said Alleyn. ‘Did you get my message, Vassily?’
‘Yes, certainly, and already dinner is waiting and cork-tails.’
‘Then let Miss Angela powder her nose in the guest suite, while Mr Bathgate and I remove the turf from our ears in the lonely west wing.’
Alleyn was still about this business when Nigel, emerging from a diminutive dressing-room, found Angela already in the inspector’s extremely comfortable study.
‘Tell me,’ she said in an engaging whisper, ‘do detective chief inspectors usually invite the relatives and friends of the victim to dine in their flat, and do they invariably engage disappearing
