Florian frowned at the picture. “Bah, it is a failure.” He swung round upon Mrs. Fortune. “Why should you care for it? You cannot. What would you have? I am mixed. It tries to be grand and it is only shocking. It is not of me. If you please, look at my quiet things. They are succeeded.”
“I thought they were immensely clever,” Mrs. Fortune said.
“Ah, yes. That is me.” Florian smiled. “Thank you very much.” He made her an obsequious bow and bustled away.
“One is so modest when one feels an artist,” said Lindsay. “But it is sincere. He does not know what his best strokes are. That flash of the Electra complex is a new thing in art.”
“Well, well. Very interestin’,” Reggie murmured, and took his wife away.
When they were in their car, “What creepy people,’ said Mrs. Fortune. “Did you know that Lindsay man?”
“Know of him, yes. Psychologist. Modern popular psychology is Mr. Lindsay’s trade. As indicated by his profound learning.”
“What is an Electra complex?”
“Jargon for daughter who loves father and hates mother. Electra was the daughter of the late Agamemnon. When her mother Clytaemnestra slew father, she grew up with the simple purpose of slaying mother.”
Mrs. Fortune stirred. “That’s what the painter meant by that spiteful, silly child’s face.”
“Yes. Accordin’ to the profound Lindsay. I wonder.”
“What?”
“I wonder who called Fanny Rook Faustine. I don’t think it was Golly Dodd.” He murmured the Swinburne ballad: “You could do all things but be good Or chaste of mien, And that you would not if you could, We know, Faustine.”
This was the first time Reggie met the case, and he did not meet it again till the next year… .
London was steaming to an early spring when Golly Dodd rang him up and asked him if he could come round to Alien Place, Kensington, at once.
“I don’t want to,” Reggie said. “Why should I?”
“I should be very much obliged if you would.” Dodd’s slow speech was unsteady. “I’m rather worried. The man’s dead, sir.”
“Thank you. Till then I am useless, as you say. Patient of yours?”
“Not exactly. In a way. I mean, I’m the family doctor. It’s Samuel Rook.”
“Is it? Don’t mean anything in my virtuous life. Oh. One moment. Rook. Father of damsel with flaxen poodle hair? Fanny, alias Faustine. Is that right?”
“Miss Rook’s father.” Dodd sounded stiff and annoyed. “That’s the man. Can you come? The Lindens, Alien Place.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. You’ll be at the house, what? Right.” As Reggie drove out to Kensington, other verses of the ballad were in his head:
“If one should love you with real love (Such things have been Things your fair face knows nothing of), You’d give him - - poison shall we say? Or what, Faustine?”
Alien Place, Kensington, was a relic of the quiet past. Old - world houses stood each apart in its walled garden, half hidden by trees breaking into leaf, limes and aspens glistening lemon green in the sunlit rain.
Opening the gate of The Lindens, Reggie passed through a garden well contrived to look big and wild, with a Victorian pagoda of a summer - house commanding its vistas.
Windows opened on the garden, but all their blinds were drawn. He had hardly rung the bell before he was let in by a tremulous butler, and in the hall Golly Dodd met him. “Awfully good of you, sir.” Dodd was boyish in his nervousness. “He’s not been moved. I’ve had nothing touched. Would you come up?”
On the floor of a bathroom, naked except for a towel across it, lay a man’s body. The bath was nearly full of dirty water, the floor damp. The man was of mean physique, bearded, bald. Except that he lay completely still, he looked in ordinary health. Reggie knelt on the bath - mat beside him… .
Reggie stood up and gazed at Dodd with large and pensive eyes. “I’ve finished,” he complained.
Dodd took him away into a room which seemed to be the study of a man who used few books. There was a large desk, a cabinet of files, and on the walls nothing but a map and a few Asiatic curios - a golden mask, an elephant’s tusk deeply carved, a scimitar, and a pair of long daggers, an ancient gun with engraved barrel and inlaid stock.
Reggie surveyed them dreamily. “Well, well.” He sank into a chair. “Been in the Far East, had he? Yes. Not wholly irrelevant. However. I should say death from natural causes. Failure of the heart’s action. Fatty degeneration - valvular disease from endocarditis - something like that. Circumstances familiar and corroborative. Went for his bath - had it hot - rather too hot - felt faint, struggled out, and collapsed. As he didn’t come out of the bathroom, they knocked, got no answer, broke open the door, found him dead, and sent for you.”
