by Ngaio Marsh
‘Of everything but carelessness.’
‘I see.’
Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour, that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.
Alleyn said: ‘I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?’
He saw that he was right and went on: ‘And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of Ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?’
He looked from one to the other.
‘It was like that,’ Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. ‘My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and – as I, of course, thought – treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.’ She looked at Mr Phinn and frowned. ‘Yesterday,’ she said, ‘after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because –’
‘Dear me, no,’ Mr Phinn said very quietly, ‘not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.’
Mr Phinn stood up. He looked both old and shabby. ‘I am not concerned,’ he said, ‘with the Lacklander conscience, the Lacklander motive, or the Lacklander remorse. I no longer desire the Lacklanders to suffer for my dear boy’s death. I do not, I think, believe any more in human expiation. Now, if I may, I shall ask you to excuse me. And if you want to know what I did with Chapter 7, I burnt it to ashes, my dear Chief Inspector, half an hour ago.’
He raised his dreadful smoking-cap, bowed to Lady Lacklander, and walked into his house, followed by his cats.
Lady Lacklander stood up. She began to move towards the gate, seemed to recollect herself and paused. ‘I am going to Nunspardon,’ she said. Alleyn opened the gate. She went out without looking at him, got into her great car and was driven away.
Fox said: ‘Painful business. I suppose the young fellow suspected what was up at the last interview. Unpleasant.’
‘Very.’
‘Still, as Mr Phinn says, this Chapter 7 really puts him in the clear as far as killing Colonel Cartarette is concerned.’
‘Well, no,’ Alleyn said.
‘No?’
‘Not exactly. The Colonel left Chapter 7 at Jacob’s Cottage. Phinn, on his own statement, didn’t re-enter the house after his row with the Colonel. He returned to the willow grove, found the body and lost his spectacles. He read Chapter 7 for the first time this morning, I fancy, by the aid of a magnifying glass.’
III
‘Of course,’ Fox said, as they turned into Commander Syce’s drive, ‘it will have been a copy. The Colonel’d never hand over the original.’
‘No. My guess is: he locked the original in the bottom drawer on the left-hand side of his desk.’
‘Ah! Now!’ Fox said, with relish. ‘That might well be.’
‘In which case one of his own family or one of the Lacklanders or any other interested person has pinched it and it’s probably gone up in smoke like its sister-ship. On the other hand, the bottom drawer may have been empty and the original typescript in Cartarette’s bank. It doesn’t very much matter, Fox. The publisher was evidently given a pretty sound idea of the alternative version by its author. He could always be called. We may not have to bring the actual text in evidence. I hope we won’t.’
‘What d’you reckon is the dowager’s real motive in coming so remarkably clean all of a sudden?’
Alleyn said crossly: ‘I’ve had my bellyful of motives. Take your choice, Brer Fox.’
‘Of course,’ Fox said, ‘she’s a very sharp old lady. She must have guessed we’d find out anyway.’
Alleyn muttered obscurely: ‘The mixture as before. And here we go with a particularly odious little interview. Look out for squalls, Brer Fox. Gosh! See who’s here!’
It was Nurse Kettle. She had emerged from the front door, escorted by Commander Syce who carried a napkin in his hand. She was about to enter her car and this process was accelerated by Commander Syce who quite obviously drew her attention to the approaching police car and then, limping to her own, opened the door and waited with some evidence of trepidation for her to get in. She did so without glancing at him and started her engine.
‘She’s told him,’ Alleyn said crossly, ‘that we’ve rumbled the ‘bago.’
‘Acting, no doubt,’ Fox rejoined stiffly, ‘from the kindest of motives.’
‘No doubt.’ Alleyn lifted his hat as Nurse Kettle, having engaged her bottom gear with some precipitance, shot past them like a leaping eland. She was extremely red in the face.
Syce waited for them.
Fox pulled up and they both got out. Alleyn slung the golf bag over his shoulder as he addressed himself to Syce.
‘May we speak to you indoors somewhere?’ Alleyn asked.
Without a word Syce led the way into his living-room where a grim little meal, half-consumed, was laid out on a small table in close proximity to a very dark whisky and water.
The improvised bed was still in commission. A dressing-gown was folded neatly across the foot.
‘Sit down?’ Syce jerked out but, as he evidently was not going to do so himself, neither Alleyn nor Fox followed his suggestion.
‘What’s up now?’ he demanded.
Alleyn said: ‘I’ve come to ask you a number of questions all of which you will find grossly impertinent. They concern the last occasion when you were in Singapore. The time we discussed this morning, you remember, when you told us you introduced the present Mrs Cartarette to her husband?’
Syce didn’t answer. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stared out of the window.
‘I’m afraid,’ Alleyn said, ‘I shall have to press this a little further. In a word I must ask you if you were not in fact on terms of the greatest intimacy with Miss de Vere, as she was then.’
‘Bloody impertinence.’
‘Well, yes. But so, when one comes to think of it, is murder.’
‘What the hell are you driving at?’
‘Ah!’ Alleyn exclaimed with one of his very rare gestures, ‘how footling all this is! You know damn’ well what I’m driving at. Why should we stumble about like a couple of maladroit fencers? See here. I’ve information from the best possible sources that before she was married you were living with Mrs Cartarette in Singapore. You yourself have told me you introduced her to Cartarette. You came back here and found them man and wife: the last thing, so you told me, that you had intended. All right. Cartarette was murdered last night in the Bottom
Meadow and there’s a hole in his head that might have been made by an arrow. You gave out that you were laid by with lumbago but you were heard twanging away at your sixty-pound bow when you were supposed to be incapacitated on your bed. Now, send for your solicitor if you like and refuse to talk till he comes, but for the love of Mike don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m driving at.’
‘Great grief!’ Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats, ‘I liked Cartarette.’
‘You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?’
‘Love,’ Syce repeated, turning purple. ‘What a word!’
‘Well, my dear man – put it this way. Did she love you?’
‘Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or – or – I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,’ Commander Syce shouted angrily, ‘and Bywaters, by God!’
‘What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?’
‘A few more cracks like that and I bloody well will send for a solicitor.’
‘You are being difficult,’ Alleyn said without rancour. ‘Will you let me have the clothes you were wearing last evening?’
‘What the hell for?’
‘For one thing to see if Cartarette’s blood is on them.’
‘How absolutely piffling.’
‘Well, may I have them?’
‘I’m wearing them, blast it.’
‘Would you mind wearing something else?’
Commander Syce fixed his intensely blue and slightly bloodshot eyes on a distant point in the landscape, and said: ‘I’ll shift.’
‘Thank you. I see you’ve been using this as a bed-sitting-room during, no doubt, your attack of lumbago. Perhaps for the time being you could shift into your dressing-gown and slippers.’
Syce followed this suggestion. Little gales of whisky were wafted from him and his hands were unsteady, but he achieved his change with the economy of movement practised by sailors. He folded up the garments as they were discarded, passed a line of cord round them, made an appropriate knot and gave the bundle to Fox who wrote out a receipt for it.
Syce tied his dressing-gown cord with a savage jerk.
‘No return,’ Alleyn remarked, ‘of the ailment?’
Syce did not reply.
Alleyn said: ‘Why not tell me about it? You must know damn’ well that I can’t cut all this background stuff dead. Why the devil did you pretend to have lumbago last evening? Was it for the love of a lady?’
It would be inaccurate to say that Commander Syce blushed since his face, throughout the interview, had been suffused. But at this juncture it certainly darkened to an alarming degree.
‘Well, was it?’ Alleyn insisted on a note of exasperation. Fox clapped the bundle of clothes down on a table.
‘I know what it’s like,’ Commander Syce began incomprehensibly. He waved his hand in the direction of Hammer Farm. ‘Lonely as hell. Poor little Kit. Suppose she wanted security. Natural. Ever seen that play? I believe they put it on again a year or two ago. I don’t go in for poodle-faking but it was damn’ true. In the end she pitched herself out of a top window, poor thing. Frozen out. County.’
‘Can you mean The Second Mrs Tanqueray?’
‘I dare say. And they’d better change their course or she’ll do the same thing. Lonely. I know what it’s like.’
His gaze travelled to a corner cupboard. ‘You have to do something,’ he said, and then eyed the tumbler on his luncheon table. ‘No good offering you a drink,’ he mumbled.
‘None in the world, worse luck.’
‘Well,’ Syce said. He added something that sounded like: ‘luck,’ and suddenly drained the tumbler.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m thinking of giving it up myself. Alcohol.’
‘It’s a “good familiar creature,”’ Alleyn quoted, ‘“if it be well us’d.”’
‘That’s all right as far as it goes, but what sort of a perisher,’ Syce surprisingly observed, ‘took the bearings? A nasty little man and a beastly liar into the bargain.’
‘True enough. But we’re not, after all, discussing Iago and alcohol, but you and lumbago. Why –’
‘All right, I heard you before. I’m just thinking what to say.’
He went to the corner cupboard and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky. ‘I’ve got to think,’ he said. ‘It’s damn’ ticklish, I’d have you know.’ He helped himself to a treble whisky.
‘In that case wouldn’t you do better without that snorter you’ve just poured out?’
‘Think so?’
Fox, with his masterly command of the totally unexpected, said: ‘She would.’
‘Who?’ shouted Commander Syce, looking terrified. He drank half his whisky.
‘Miss Kettle.’
‘She would what?’
‘Think you’d be better without it, sir.’
‘She knows what to do,’ he muttered, ‘if she wants to stop me. Or rather she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her,’ Commander Syce added in a deeper voice than Alleyn could have imagined him to produce, ‘I wouldn’t mention it to her on any account whatsoever, never.’
‘I’m afraid you really are very tight.’
‘It’s the last time so early: in future I’m going to wait till the sun’s over the yard arm. It happens to be a promise.’
‘To Miss Kettle?’
‘Who else?’ Syce said grandly. ‘Why not?’
‘An admirable idea. Was it,’ Alleyn asked, ‘on Miss Kettle’s account, by any chance, that you pretended to have lumbago last evening?’
‘Who else’s,’ admitted Syce who appeared to have got into one unchangeable gear. ‘Why not?’
‘Does she know?’
Fox muttered something undistinguishable, and Syce said: ‘She guessed.’ He added wretchedly: ‘We parted brass rags.’
‘You had a row about it?’ Alleyn ventured.
‘Not about that. About that.’ He indicated the tumbler. ‘So I promised. After today. Yard arm.’
‘Good luck to it.’
With the swiftest possible movement Alleyn whisked the arrow from the golf bag and held it under Syce’s nose. ‘Do you know anything about that?’ he asked.
‘That’s mine. You took it away.’
‘No. This is another of your arrows. This was found in Bottom Meadow at the foot of Watt’s Hill. If you examine it you’ll see there’s a difference.’
Alleyn whipped the cover off the tip of the arrow. ‘Look,’ he said.
Syce stared owlishly at the point.
‘Bloody,’ he observed.
‘Looks like it. What blood? Whose blood?’
Syce thrust his fingers distractedly through his thin hair. ‘Cat’s blood,’ he said.
IV
This was the selfsame arrow, Commander Syce urged, with which some weeks ago he had inadvertently slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett. He himself had found the body and in his distress had withdrawn the arrow and qast it from him into the adjacent bushes. He had taken the body to Mr Phinn who had refused to accept his explanation and apologies and they had parted, as Commander Syce again put it, brass rags.
Alleyn asked him if he did not consider it at all dangerous to fire off arrows at random into his neighbours’ spinneys and over them. The reply was confused and shamefaced. More by surmise and conjecture than by any positive means, Alleyn understood Syce to suggest a close relationship between the degree of his potations and the incontinence of his archery. At this juncture he became moros and they could get no more out of him.
‘It appears,’ Alleyn said as they drove away, ‘that when he’s completely plastered he gets a sort of cupid fixation and looses off his shafts blindly into the landscape with a classic disregard for their billets. It’s a terrifying thought, but I suppose his immediate neighbours have learnt to look after themselves.’
‘I’m afraid,’ Fox sa
id heavily, ‘she’s bitten off more than she can chew. I’m afraid so.’
‘My dear old Fox, there’s no end to the punishment some women will take.’
‘Of course,’ Fox said dismally, ‘in a manner of speaking, she’s trained for it. There is that.’
‘I rather think, you know, that she’s one of the sort that has got to have somebody to cosset.’
‘I dare say. Whereas barring the odd bilious turn I’m never out of sorts. What do we do now, Mr Alleyn?’ Fox continued, dismissing the more intimate theme with an air of finality.
‘We can’t do anything really conclusive until we get a lead from Curtis. But we interview George Lacklander all the same, Brer Fox, and I hope, lay the ghost of young Ludovic Phinn. It’s half-past one. We may as well let them have their luncheon. Let’s see what they can do for us at the Boy and Donkey.’
They ate their cold meat, potato and beetroot with the concentration of men whose meals do not occur as a matter of course, but are consumed precariously when chances present themselves. Before they had finished Dr Curtis rang up to give an interim report. He now plumped unreservedly for a blow on the temple with a blunt instrument while Colonel Cartarette squatted over his catch. Subsequent injuries had been inflicted with a pointed instrument after he lay on his side, unconscious or possibly already lifeless. The second injury had all but obliterated the first. He was unable with any certainty to name the first instrument, but the second was undoubtedly the shooting-stick. Sir William Roskill had found traces of recently shed blood under the collar of the disc. He was now checking for the blood group.
‘I see,’ Alleyn said. ‘And the shooting-stick was used –?’
‘My dear chap, in the normal way, one must suppose.’
‘Yes, one must, mustn’t one? Deliberately pushed home and sat on. Horrid-awful behaviour.’
‘Brutal,’ Dr Curtis said dispassionately.
‘All the brutality in the world. Has Willy tackled the fish scales?’
‘Give him time. But, yes, he’s begun. No report yet?’
‘We’re going to Nunspardon. Telephone me if there’s anything, Curtis, will you? You or Willy?’