by Ngaio Marsh
‘I didn’t look down. I – ah – I merely saw Mrs Cartarette to the River Path and went on through the Home Spinney to Nunspardon. My mother arrived a few minutes later. And now,’ George said, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I really must drive my mama home. By the way, I do hope you’ll make use of us. I mean you may need a headquarters and so on. Anything one can do.’
‘How very kind,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘Yes, I think we may let you go now. Afraid I shall have to ask you to stay in Swevenings for the time being.’ He saw George’s jaw drop.
‘Of course,’ he added, ‘if you have important business elsewhere it will be quite in order to come and tell me about it, and we’ll see what can be done. I shall be at the Boy and Donkey.’
‘Good God, my dear Alleyn
‘Damn’ nuisance I know,’ Alleyn said; ‘but there you are. If they will turn on homicide in your bottom meadow. Goodnight to you.’
He circumnavigated George and returned to the drawing-room where he found Rose, Mark and Kitty uneasily silent, Mr Phinn biting his fingers and Inspector Fox in brisk conversation with Nurse Kettle on the subject of learning French conversation by means of gramophone records. ‘I don’t,’ Mr Fox was saying, ‘make the headway I’d like to.’
‘I picked up more on a cycling tour in Brittany when I had to than I ever got out of my records.’
‘That’s what they all tell me, but in our line what chance do you get?’
‘You must get a holiday some time, for heaven’s sake.’
True,’ Fox said, sighing. ‘That’s a fact. You do. But somehow I’ve never got round to spending it anywhere but Birchington. Excuse me, Miss Kettle, here’s the Chief.’
Alleyn gave Fox a look that both of them understood very well and the latter rose blandly to his feet. Alleyn addressed himself to Kitty Cartarette.
‘If I may,’ he said, ‘I should like to have a very short talk with Miss Kettle. Is there perhaps another room we may use? I saw one, I think, as I came across the hall. A study perhaps.’
He had a feeling that Mrs Cartarette was not overanxious for him to use the study. She hesitated but Rose said: ‘Yes, of course. I’ll show you.’
Fox had gone to the french window and had made a majestical signal to the sergeant who now came into the drawing-room.
‘You all know Sergeant Oliphant, of course,’ Alleyn said. ‘He will be in charge of the local arrangements, Mrs Cartarette, and I thought perhaps you would like to have a word with him. I would be grateful if you would give him the names of your husband’s solicitor and bank, and also of any relations who should be informed. Mr Phinn, I will ask you to repeat the substance of your account to Sergeant Oliphant who will take it down and get you to sign it if it is correct.’
Mr Phinn blinked at him. ‘I cannot,’ he said, with a show of spirit, ‘of course be compelled.’
‘Of course not. But I’m afraid we shall have to trouble all of you to give us signed statements, if you are willing to do so – if you do yours first it will leave you free to go home. I hope,’ Alleyn concluded, ‘that you will not find it too difficult without your glasses. And now, Miss Cartarette, may we indeed use the study?’
Rose led the way across the hall into the room where eight hours ago she had talked to her father about her love for Mark. Alleyn and Fox followed her. She waited for a moment and stared, as it seemed to Alleyn, with a kind of wonder at the familiar chairs and desk. Perhaps she saw a look of compassion in his face. She said: ‘He seems to be here, you know. The room can’t go on without him, one would think. This was his place more than anywhere else.’ She faltered for a moment, and then said: ‘Mr Alleyn, he was such a darling, my father. He was as much like my child as my father, he depended on me so completely. I don’t know why I’m saying this to you.’
‘It’s sometimes a good idea to say things like that to strangers. They make uncomplicated confidants.’
‘Yes,’ she said and her voice was surprised, ‘that’s quite true. I’m glad I told you.’
Alleyn saw that she suffered from the kind of nervous ricochet that often follows a severe shock. Under its impetus the guard that people normally set over their lightest remarks is lowered and they speak spontaneously of the most surprising matters: as now when Rose suddenly added: ‘Mark says he couldn’t have felt anything. I’m sure he’s not just saying that to comfort me because being a doctor he wouldn’t. So I suppose in a way it’s what people call a release. From everything.’
Alleyn asked quietly: ‘Was he worried about anything in particular?’
‘Yes,’ Rose said sombrely, ‘he was indeed. But I can’t tell you about that. It’s private; and even if it wasn’t it couldn’t possibly be of any use.’
‘You never know,’ he said lightly.
‘You do in this case.’
‘When did you see him last?’
‘This evening. I mean last evening, don’t I? He went out soon after seven. I think it was about ten past seven.’
‘Where did he go?’
She hesitated, and then said: ‘I believe to call on Mr Phinn. He took his rod and told me he would go on down to the Chyne for the evening rise. He said he wouldn’t come in for dinner and I asked for something to be left out for him.’
‘Do you know why he called on Mr Phinn?’
Rose waited for a long time and then said: ‘I think it had something to do with – with the publishing business.’
‘The publishing business?’
She pushed a strand of hair back and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘I don’t know who could do such a thing to him,’ she said. Her voice was drained of all its colour. ‘She’s exhausted,’ Alleyn thought and against his inclination, decided to keep her a little longer.
‘Can you tell me, very briefly, what sort of pattern his life has taken over the last twenty years?’
Rose sat on the arm of her father’s chair. Her right arm was hooked over its back and she smoothed and resmoothed the place where his bald head had rested. She was quite calm and told Alleyn in a flat voice of the Colonel’s appointments as military attaché at various embassies, of his job at Whitehall during the war, of his appointment as military secretary to a post-war commission that had been set up in Hong Kong and finally, after his second marriage, of his retirement and absorption in a history he had planned to write of his own regiment. He was a great reader it seemed, particularly of the Elizabethan dramatists, an interest that his daughter had ardently shared. His only recreation apart from his books had been fishing. Rose’s eyes, fatigued by tears, looked for a moment at a table against the wall where a tray of threads, scraps of feathers and a number of casts was set out.
‘I always tied the flies. We made up a fly he nearly always fished with. I tied one this afternoon.’
Her voice trembled and trailed away and she yawned suddenly like a child.
The door opened and Mark Lacklander came in looking angry.
‘Ah, there you are!’ he said. He walked straight over to her and put his fingers on her wrist. ‘You’re going to bed at once,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked Nurse Kettle to make a hot drink for you. She’s waiting for you now. I’ll come and see you later and give you a nembutal. I’ll have to run into Chyning for it. You don’t want me again, I imagine?’ he said to Alleyn.
‘I do for a few minutes, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh!’ Mark said, and after a pause. ‘Well, yes, of course, I suppose you do. Stupid of me.’
‘I don’t want any dope, Mark, honestly,’ Rose said.
‘We’ll see about that when you’re tucked up. Go to bed now.’ He glared at Alleyn. ‘Miss Cartarette is my patient,’ he said, ‘and those are my instructions.’
‘They sound altogether admirable,’ Alleyn rejoined.
‘Goodnight, Miss Cartarette. We’ll try to worry you as little as possible.’
‘You don’t worry me at all,’ Rose said politely, and gave him her hand.
‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said to Mark, ‘if we ma
y see Nurse Kettle as soon as she is free. And you, a little later if you please, Doctor Lacklander.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ Mark said stiffly, and taking Rose’s arm led her out of the room.
‘And I also wonder, Brer Fox,’ Alleyn said, ‘apart from bloody murder, what it is that’s biting all these people.’
‘I’ve got a funny sort of notion,’ Fox said, ‘and mind, it’s only a notion so far, that the whole thing will turn out to hang on that fish.’
‘And I’ve got a funny sort of notion you’re right.’
CHAPTER 6
The Willow Grove
Nurse Kettle sat tidily on an armless chair with her feet crossed at the ankles and her hands at the wrists. Her apron was turned up in the regulation manner under her uniform coat and her regulation hat was on her head. She had just given Alleyn a neat account of her finding of Colonel Cartarette’s body and Fox, who had taken the notes, was gazing at her with an expression of the liveliest approval.
‘That’s all, really,’ she said, ‘except that I had a jolly strong feeling I was being watched. There now!’
Her statement hitherto had been so positively one of fact that they both stared at her in surprise. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘you’ll think I’m a silly hysterical female because although I thought once that I heard a twig snap and fancied that when a bird flew out of the thicket it was not me who’d disturbed it, I didn’t see anything at all. Not a thing. And yet I thought I was watched. You get it on night duty in a ward. A patient lying awake and staring at you. You always know before you look. Now laugh that away if you like.’
‘Who’s laughing?’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘We’re not, are we, Fox?’
‘On no account,’ Fox said. ‘I’ve had the same sensation many a time on night beat in the old days and it always turned out there was a party in a dark doorway having a look at you.’
‘Well, fancy!’ said the gratified Nurse Kettle.
‘I suppose,’ Alleyn said, ‘you know all these people pretty well, don’t you, Miss Kettle? I always think in country districts the Queen’s Nurses are rather like liaison officers.’
Nurse Kettle looked pleased. ‘Well, now,’ she said, ‘we do get to know people. Of course our duties take us mostly to the ordinary folk although with the present shortage we find ourselves doing quite a lot for the other sort. They pay the full fee and that helps the Association, so, as long as it’s not depriving the ones who can’t afford it, we take the odd upper-class case. Like me and Lady Lacklander’s toe, for instance.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Alleyn said, ‘there’s the toe.’ He observed with surprise the expression of enraptured interest in his colleague’s elderly face.
‘Septic,’ Nurse Kettle said cosily.
‘’T, ’t, ’t,’ said Fox.
‘And then again, for example,’ Nurse Kettle went on, ‘I nightnursed the old gentleman. With him when he died actually. Well, so was the family. And the Colonel, too, as it happens.’
‘Colonel Cartarette?’ Alleyn asked without laying much stress on it.
‘That’s right. Or wait a moment. I’m telling stories. The Colonel didn’t come back into the room. He stayed on the landing with the papers.’
‘The papers?’
‘The old gentleman’s memoirs they were. The Colonel was to see about publishing them, I fancy, but I don’t really know. The old gentleman was very troubled about them. He couldn’t be content to say good-bye and give up until he’d seen the Colonel. Mind you, Sir Harold was a great man in his day and his memoirs’ll be very important affairs, no doubt.’
‘No doubt. He was a distinguished ambassador.’
‘That’s right. Not many of that sort left I always say. Everything kept up. Quite feudal.’
‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘there aren’t many families left who can afford to be feudal. Don’t they call them the Lucky Lacklanders?’
‘That’s right. Mind, there are some who think the old gentleman overdid it.’
‘Indeed?’ Alleyn said, keeping his mental fingers crossed. ‘How?’
‘Well, not leaving the grandson anything. Because of him taking up medicine instead of going into the army. Of course, it’ll all come to him in the end, but in the meantime, he has to make do with what he earns, though of course – but listen to me gossiping. Where was I now. Oh, the old gentleman and the memoirs. Well, no sooner had he handed them over than he took much worse and the Colonel gave the alarm. We all went in. I gave brandy. Dr Mark gave an injection but it was all over in a minute. ‘“Vic,”’ he said, ‘“Vic, Vic,”’ and that was all.’ Alleyn repeated ‘“Vic?”’ and then was silent for so long that Nurse Kettle had begun to say: ‘Well, if that’s all I can do …’ when he interrupted her.
‘I was going to ask you,’ he said, ‘who lives in the house between this one and Mr Phinn’s?’
Nurse Kettle smiled all over her good-humoured face. ‘At Uplands?’ she said. ‘Commander Syce, to be sure. He’s another of my victims,’ she added, and unaccountably turned rather pink. ‘Down with a bad go of ’bago, poor chap.’
‘Out of the picture, then, from our point of view?’
‘Yes, if you’re looking for … oh, my gracious,’ Nurse Kettle suddenly ejaculated, ‘here we are at goodness knows what hour of the morning talking away as pleasant as you please and all the time you’re wondering where you’re going to find a murderer. Isn’t that frightful!’
‘Don’t let it worry you,’ Fox begged her.
Alleyn stared at him.
‘Well, of course I’m worried. Even suppose it turns out to have been a tramp. Tramps are people just like other people,’ Nurse Kettle said vigorously.
‘Is Mr Phinn one of your patients?’ Alleyn asked.
‘Not to say patient. I nursed a carbuncle for him years ago. I wouldn’t go getting ideas about him if I were you.’
‘In our job,’ Alleyn rejoined, ‘we have to get ideas about everybody.’
‘Not about me, I hope and trust.’
Fox made a complicated soothing and scandalized noise in his throat.
Alleyn said: ‘Miss Kettle, you liked Colonel Cartarette, didn’t you? It was clear from your manner, I thought, that you liked him very much indeed.’
‘Well, I did,’ she said emphatically. ‘He was one of the nicest and gentlest souls: a gentle man if ever I saw one. Devoted father. Never said an unkind word about anybody.’
‘Not even about Mr Phinn?’
‘Now look here,’ she began, then caught herself up. ‘Listen,’ she said; ‘Mr Phinn’s eccentric. No use my pretending otherwise for you’ve seen him for yourselves and you’ll hear what others say about him. But there’s no malice. No, perhaps I wouldn’t say there’s no malice exactly, but there’s no real harm in him. Not a scrap. He’s had this tragedy in his life, poor man, and in my opinion he’s never been the same since it happened. Before the war, it was. His only son did away with himself. Shocking thing.’
‘Wasn’t the son in the Foreign Service?’
‘That’s right. Ludovic was his name, poor chap. Ludovic! I ask you! Nice boy and very clever. He was in some foreign place when it happened. Broke his mother’s heart they always say, but she was a cardiac anyway, poor thing. Mr Phinn never really got over it. You never know, do you?’
‘Never. I remember hearing about it,’ Alleyn said vaguely. ‘Wasn’t he one of Sir Harold Lacklander’s young men?’
‘That’s right. The old gentleman was a real squire. You know: the old Swevenings families and all that. I think he asked for young Phinn to be sent out to him, and I know he was very cut up when it happened. I dare say he felt responsible.’
‘You never know,’ Alleyn repeated. ‘So the Swevenings families,’ he added, ‘tend to gravitate towards foreign parts?’
Nurse Kettle said that they certainly seemed to do so. Apart from young Viccy Danberry-Phinn getting a job in Sir Harold’s embassy there was Commander Syce whose ship had been based on Singapore and the Colonel himself who h
ad been attached to a number of missions in the Far East, including one at Singapore. Nurse Kettle added, after a pause, that she believed he had met his second wife there.
‘Really?’ Alleyn said, with no display of interest. ‘At the time when Syce was out there, do you mean?’ It was the merest shot in the dark, but it found its mark. Nurse Kettle became pink in the face and said with excessive brightness that she believed that ‘the Commander and the second Mrs C.’ had known each other out in the East. She added, with an air of cramming herself over some emotional hurdle, that she had seen a very pretty drawing that the Commander had made of Mrs Cartarette. ‘You’d pick it out for her at once,’ she said. ‘Speaking likeness, really, with tropical flowers behind and all.’
‘Did you know the first Mrs Cartarette?’
‘Well, not to say know. They were only married eighteen months when she died giving birth to Miss Rose. She was an heiress, you know. The whole fortune goes to Miss Rose. It’s well known. The Colonel was quite hard up but he’s never touched a penny of his first wife’s money. It’s well known,’ Nurse Kettle repeated, ‘so I’m not talking gossip.’
Alleyn skated dexterously on towards Mark Lacklander and it was obvious that Nurse Kettle was delighted to sing Mark’s praises. Fox respectfully staring at her, said there was a bit of romance going on there, seemingly, and she at once replied that that was as plain as the noses on all their faces and a splendid thing, too. A real Swevenings romance, she added.
Alleyn said: ‘You do like to keep yourselves to yourselves in this district, don’t you?’
‘Well,’ Nurse Kettle chuckled, ‘I dare say we do. As I was saying to a gentleman patient of mine, we’re rather like one of those picture-maps. Little world of our own if you know what I mean. I was suggesting …’ Nurse Kettle turned bright pink and primmed up her lips. ‘Personally,’ she added rather obscurely, ‘I’m all for the old families and the old ways of looking at things.’
‘Now, it strikes me,’ Fox said, raising his brows in bland surprise, ‘and mind, I may be wrong: very likely I am: but it strikes me that the present Mrs Cartarette belongs to quite a different world. Much more mondaine if you’ll overlook the faulty accent, Miss Kettle.’