by Ngaio Marsh
‘I’m not suggesting anything. But you knew him out in the East, I believe?’ Nurse Kettle added, with a spurious air of making polite conversation.
‘Oh, yes,’ Kitty agreed contemptuously. ‘I knew him all right. Did he tell you? Here, what has he told you?’ she demanded and unexpectedly there was a note of something like desperation in her voice.
‘Nothing, I’m sure, that you could take exception to; the Commander, whatever you like to say, is a gentleman.’
‘How can you be such a fool,’ Kitty said drearily.
‘Well, really!’
‘Don’t talk to me about gentlemen. I’ve had them, thank you. If you ask me it’s a case of the higher you go the fewer. Look,’ Kitty said with savagery, ‘at George Lacklander.’
‘Tell me this,’ Nurse Kettle cried out, ‘did he love you?’
‘Lacklander?’
‘No.’ She swallowed and with dignity corrected Kitty. ‘I was referring to the Commander.’
‘You talk like a kid. Love!’
‘Honestly!’
‘Look!’ Kitty said, ‘you don’t know anything. Face it: you don’t know a single damn’ thing. You haven’t got a clue.’
‘Well, I must say! You can’t train for nursing I’ll have you know –’
‘Oh, well, all right. OK. From that point of view. But from my point of view, honestly, you have no idea.’
‘I don’t know what we’re talking about,’ Nurse Kettle said in a worried voice.
‘I bet you don’t.’
‘The Commander …’ She stopped short, and Kitty stared at her incredulously.
‘Do I see,’ Kitty asked, ‘what I think I see? You don’t tell me you and Geoff Syce … God, that’s funny!’
Words, phrases, whole speeches suddenly began to pour out of Nurse Kettle. She had been hurt in the most sensitive part of her emotional anatomy and her reflex action was surprising. She scarcely knew herself what she said. Every word she uttered was spoken in defence of something that she would have been unable to define. It is possible that Nurse Kettle, made vulnerable by her feeling for Commander Syce – a feeling that in her cooler moments she would have classed as ‘unsuitable’ – found in Kitty Cartarette’s contempt an implicit threat to what Lady Lacklander had called her belief in degree. In Kitty, over-painted, knowledgeable, fantastically ‘Notquite,’ Nurse Kettle felt the sting of implied criticism. It was as if, by her very existence, Kitty Cartarette challenged the hierarchy that was Nurse Kettle’s symbol of perfection.
‘– so you’ve no business,’ she heard herself saying, ‘you’ve no business to be where you are and behave the way you’re behaving. I don’t care what’s happened. I don’t care how he felt about you in Singapore or wherever it was. That was his business. I don’t care.’
Kitty had listened to this tirade without making any sign that she thought it exceptional. Indeed, she scarcely seemed to give it her whole attention but suffered it with an air of brooding discontent. When at last Nurse Kettle ran out of words and breath, Kitty turned and stared abstractedly at her.
‘I don’t know why you’re making such a fuss,’ she said. ‘Is he game to marry you?’
Nurse Kettle felt dreadful. ‘I wish I hadn’t said anything,’ she muttered. ‘I’m going.’
‘I suppose he might like the idea of being dry-nursed. You’ve nothing to moan about. Suppose I was friends with him in Singapore? What of it? Go right ahead. Mix in with the bloody county and I hope you enjoy yourself.’
‘Don’t talk about them like that,’ Nurse Kettle shouted. ‘Don’t do it! You know nothing about them. You’re ignorant. I always say they’re the salt of the earth.’
‘Do you!’ With methodical care Kitty moved the tea-tray aside as if it prevented her in some way from getting at Nurse Kettle. ‘Listen,’ she continued, holding the edges of the table and leaning forward, ‘listen to me. I asked you to come and sit here because I’ve got to talk and I thought you might be partly human. I didn’t know you were a yes-girl to this gang of fossils. God! You make me sick! What have they got, except money and snob-value, that you haven’t got?’
‘Lots,’ Nurse Kettle declaimed stoutly.
‘Like hell, they have! No, listen. Listen! OK, I lived with your boyfriend in Singapore. He was bloody dull but I was in a bit of a jam, and it suited us both. OK, he introduced me to Maurie. OK, he did it like they do: ‘look what I’ve found,’ and sailed away in his great big boat and got the shock of his life when he came home and found me next door as Mrs Maurice Cartarette. So what does he do? He couldn’t care less what happened to me, of course, but could he be just ordinary-friendly and give me a leg up with these survivals from the Ice Age? Not he! He shies off as if I was a nasty smell and takes to the bottle. Not that he wasn’t pretty expert at that before.’
Nurse Kettle made as if to rise, but Kitty stopped her with a sharp gesture. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said. ‘I’m talking. So here I was. Married to a – I don’t know what – the sort they call a nice chap. Too damn’ nice for me. I’d never have pulled it off with him in Singapore if it hadn’t been he was lonely and missing Rose. He couldn’t bear not to have Rose somewhere about. He was a real baby, though, about other women: more like a mother’s darling than an experienced man. You had to laugh sometimes. He wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was down to it and, anyway, his sort owed me something.’
‘Oh, dear!’ Nurse Kettle lamented under her breath. ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear!’ Kitty glanced at her and went on.
‘So how did it go? We married and came here, and he started writing some god-awful book, and Rose and he sat in each other’s pockets and the county called. Yes, they called, all right, talking one language to each other and another one to me. Old Occy Phinn, as mad as a meat-axe and doesn’t even keep himself clean. The Fat Woman of Nunspardon who took one look at me and then turned polite for the first time in history. Rose, trying so hard to be nice, it’s a wonder she didn’t rupture something. The parson and his wife and half a dozen women dressed in tweed sacks and felt buckets with faces like the backside of a mule. My God, what have they got? They aren’t fun, they aren’t gay, they don’t do anything and they look like the wreck of the schooner Hesperus. Talk about a living death! And me! Dumped like a sack and meant to be grateful!’
‘You don’t understand,’ Nurse Kettle began and then gave it up. Kitty had doubled her left hand into a fist and was screwing it into the palm of the right, a strangely masculine gesture at odds with her enamelled nails.
‘Don’t!’ Nurse Kettle said sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’
‘Not one of them, not a damn’ one was what you might call friendly.’
‘Well, dear me, I must say! What about Sir George!’ Nurse Kettle cried, exasperated and rattled into indiscretion.
‘George! George wanted what they all want and now things have got awkward he doesn’t want that. George! George, the umpteenth baronet, is in a muck-sweat. George can’t think,’ Kitty said in savage mimicry, ‘what people might not be saying. He told me so himself! If you knew what I know about George …’ Her face, abruptly, was as blank as a shuttered house. ‘Everything,’ she said, ‘has gone wrong. I just don’t have the luck.’
All sorts of notions, scarcely comprehensible to herself, writhed about in the mid-region of Nurse Kettle’s thoughts. She was reminded of seaweed in the depths of a marine pool. Monstrous revelations threatened to emerge and were suppressed by a sort of creaming over of the surface of her mind. She wanted to go away from Kitty Cartarette before any more was done to her innocent idolatries, and yet found herself unable to make the appropriate gestures of departure. She was held in thrall by a convention. Kitty had been talking dismally for some time and Nurse Kettle had not listened. She now caught a desultory phrase.
‘Their fault!’ Kitty was saying. ‘You can say what you like, but whatever has happened is their fault.’
‘No, no, no!’ Miss Kettle cried out, beating her short scrubbed hands together. ‘How
can you think that! You terrify me. What are you suggesting?’
II
‘What are you suggesting?’ George Lacklander demanded as Alleyn at last put down the receiver. ‘Who have you been speaking to? What did you mean by what you said to me just now – about –’ he looked round at his mother and son an instrument,’ he said.
Lady Lacklander said: ‘George, I don’t know what you and Roderick have been talking about, but I think it’s odds on that you’d better hold your tongue.’
‘I’m sending for my solicitor.’
She grasped the edge of the desk and let herself down into a chair. The folds of flesh under her chin began to tremble. She pointed at Alleyn.
‘Well, Rory,’ she demanded, ‘what is all this? What are you suggesting?’
Alleyn hesitated for a moment, and then said: ‘At the moment, I suggest that I see your son alone.’
‘No.’
Mark looking rather desperate said: ‘Gar, don’t you think it might be better?’
‘No,’ she jabbed her fat finger at Alleyn. ‘What have you said and what were you going to say to George?’
‘I told him that Colonel Cartarette was knocked out by a golf club. I’ll now add for the information of you all, since you choose to stay here, that he was finally killed by a stab through the temple made by your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander. Your paint rag was used to wipe the scales of two trout from the murderer’s hands. The first blow was made from the punt. The murderer in order to avoid being seen from Watt’s Hill, got into the punt and slid down the stream using the long mooring rope as you probably did when you yourself sketched from the punt. The punt, borne by the current, came to rest in the little bay by the willow grove and the murderer stood in it idly swinging a club at the daisies growing on the edge of the bank. This enemy of the Colonel’s was so well known to him that he paid little attention; said something perhaps about the trout he had caught and went on cutting grass to wrap it in. Perhaps the last thing he saw was the shadow of the club moving swiftly across the ground. Then he was struck on the temple. We think there was a return visit with your shooting-stick, Lady Lacklander, and that the murderer quite deliberately used the shooting-stick on Colonel Cartarette as you used it this morning on your garden path. Placed it over the bruised temple and sat on it. What did you say? Nothing? It’s a grotesque and horrible thought, isn’t it? We think that on getting up and releasing the shooting-stick there was literally a slip. A stumble, you know. It would take quite a bit of pulling out. There was a backward lunge. A heel came down on the Colonel’s trout. The fish would have slid away, no doubt, if it had not been lying on a sharp triangular stone. It was trodden down and, as it were, transfixed on the stone. A flap of skin was torn away and the foot, instead of sliding off, sank in and left an impression. An impression of the spiked heel of a golf shoe.’
George Lacklander said in an unrecognizable voice: ‘All this is conjecture!’
‘No,’ Alleyn said, ‘I assure you. Not conjecture.’ He looked at Lady Lacklander and Mark. ‘Shall I go on?’
Lady Lacklander, using strange uncoordinated gestures, fiddled with the brooches that, as usual, were stuck about her bosom. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
Mark, who throughout Alleyn’s discourse, had kept his gaze fixed on his father, said: ‘Go on. By all means. Why not?’
‘Right,’ Alleyn said. ‘Now the murderer was faced with evidence of identity. One imagines the trout glistening with a clear spiked heel mark showing on its hide. It wouldn’t do to throw it into the stream or the willow grove and run away. There lay the Colonel with his hands smelling of fish and pieces of cut grass all round him. For all his murderer knew, there might have been a witness to the catch. This, of course, wouldn’t matter as long as the murderer’s identity was unsuspected. But there is a panic sequel to most crimes of violence and it is under its pressure that the fatal touch of over-cleverness usually appears. I believe that while the killer stood there, fighting down terror, the memory of the Old ’Un lying on Bottom Bridge, arose. Hadn’t Danberry-Phinn and the Colonel quarrelled loudly, repeatedly and vociferously – quarrelled that very afternoon over the Old ’Un? Why not replace the Colonel’s catch with the fruits of Mr Phinn’s poaching tactics and drag, not a red-herring, but a whacking great trout across the trail? Would that not draw attention towards the known enemy and away from the secret one? So there was a final trip in the punt. The Colonel’s trout was removed and the Old ’Un substituted. It was at this juncture that Fate, in the person of Mrs Thomasina Twitchett appeared to come to the murderer’s aid.’
‘For God’s sake,’ George Lacklander shouted, ‘stop talking …’ He half-formed an extremely raw epithet, broke off and muttered something indistinguishable.
‘Who are you talking about, Rory?’ Lady Lacklander demanded. ‘Mrs Who?’
‘Mr Phinn’s cat. You will remember Mrs Cartarette told us that in Bottom Meadow she came upon a cat with a half-eaten trout. We have found the remains. There is a triangular gash corresponding with the triangular flap of skin torn off by the sharp stone, and as if justice of nemesis or somebody had assuaged the cat’s appetite at the crucial moment, there is also a shred of skin bearing the unmistakable mark of part of a heel and the scar of a spike.’
‘But can all this …’ Mark began. ‘I mean, when you talk of correspondence –’
‘Our case,’ Alleyn said, ‘will, I assure you, rest upon scientific evidence of an unusually precise character. At the moment I’m giving you the sequence of events. The Colonel’s trout was bestowed upon the cat. Lady Lacklander’s paint rag was used to clean the spike of the shooting-stick and the murderer’s hands. You may remember, Dr Lacklander, that your grandmother said she had put all her painting gear tidily away but you, on the contrary, said you found the rag caught up in a briar bush.’
‘You suggest then,’ Mark said evenly, ‘that the murder was done some time between ten to eight when my grandmother went home and a quarter-past eight when I went home.’ He thought for a moment and then said: ‘I suppose that’s quite possible. The murderer might have heard or caught sight of me, thrown down the rag in a panic and taken to the nearest cover only to emerge after I’d picked up the sketching gear and gone on my way.’
Lady Lacklander said after a long pause: ‘I find that a horrible suggestion. Horrible.’
‘I dare say,’ Alleyn agreed dryly. ‘It was an abominable business after all.’
‘You spoke of scientific evidence,’ Mark said.
Alleyn explained about the essential dissimilarities in individual fish scales. ‘It’s all in Colonel Cartarette’s book,’ he said, and looked at George Lacklander. ‘You had forgotten that perhaps.’
‘Matter of fact, I – ah – I don’t know that I ever read poor old Maurice’s little book.’
‘It seems to me to be both charming,’ Alleyn said, ‘and instructive. In respect of the scales it is perfectly accurate. A trout’s scales, the Colonel tells us, are his diary in which his whole life-history is recorded for those who can read them. Only if two fish have identical histories will their scales correspond. Our two sets of scales, luckily, are widely dissimilar. There is Group A; the scales of a nine-or ten-year-old fish who has lived all his life in one environment. And there is Group B, belonging to a smaller fish who, after a slow growth of four years, changed his environment, adopted possibly a sea-going habit, made a sudden spurt of growth and was very likely a newcomer to the Chyne. You will see where this leads us, of course?’
‘I’m damned if I do,’ George Lacklander said.
‘Oh, but, yes, surely. The people who, on their own and other evidence are known to have handled one fish or the other are Mr Phinn, Mrs Cartarette and the Colonel himself. Mr Phinn caught the Old ’Un, Mrs Cartarette tells us she tried to take a fish away from Thomasina Twitchett. The Colonel handled his own catch and refused to touch the Old ’Un. Lady Lacklander’s paint rag with the traces of both types of fish-scales, tells us that someb
ody, we believe the murderer, handled both fish. The further discovery of minute bloodstains tells us that the spike of the shooting-stick was twisted in the rag after being partially cleaned in the earth. If, therefore, with the help of the microscope we could find scales from both fish on the garments of any one of you, that one will be Colonel Cartarette’s murderer. That,’ Alleyn said, ‘was our belief.’
‘Was?’ Mark said quickly and Fox, who had been staring at a facetious Victorian hunting print, refocused his gaze on his senior officer.
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘The telephone conversation I have just had was with one of the Home Office men who are looking after the pathological side. It is from him that I got all this expert’s stuff about scales. He tells me that on none of the garments submitted are there scales of both types.’
The normal purplish colour flooded back into George Lacklander’s face. ‘I said from the beginning,’ he shouted, ‘it was some tramp. Though why the devil you had to – to’ (he seemed to hunt for a moderate word) ‘to put us through hoops like this …’ His voice faded. Alleyn had lifted his hand. ‘Well?’ Lacklander cried out. ‘What is it? What the hell is it? I beg your pardon, Mama.’
Lady Lacklander said automatically: ‘Don’t be an ass, George.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Alleyn said, ‘exactly what the pathologist has found. He has found traces of scales where we expected to find them: on the Colonel’s hands and the edge of one cuff, on Mr Phinn’s coat and knickerbockers and, as she warned us, on Mrs Cartarette’s skirt. The first of these traces belongs to Group B and the other two to Group A. Yes?’ Alleyn said, looking at Mark who had begun to speak and
then stopped short.
‘Nothing,’ Mark said. ‘I – no, go on.’
‘I’ve almost finished. I’ve said that we think the initial blow was made by a golf club probably a driver. I may as well tell you at once that so far none of the clubs has revealed any trace of blood. On the other hand, they have all been extremely well cleaned.’