Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  All round Nigel the conversation played, rising and falling and blowing to this side and that like fountains on a gusty day. But gradually, in the centre of it all, Nigel grew conscious of a deep nervous excitement. He had the fancy that it was not the cumulative excitement of a successful party, but radiated from one person. He shook his head irritably: what could it be but his own apprehension of O’Brien’s approaching zero hour? O’Brien himself looked almost fey. He rose suddenly, glass in hand, shot an incalculable glance at Nigel, and cried:

  ‘A toast! To absent friends—and to present enemies!’

  There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Georgia Cavendish bit her lip: her brother looked vaguely worried: Lord Marlinworth tapped on the table: Lucilla and Knott-Sloman glanced at each other: Philip Starling was smirking with amusement at the general embarrassment. Lady Marlinworth broke the spell. ‘What a droll toast, Mr. O’Brien! An old Irish one, I suppose. Such a whimsical people!’ The old lady tittered and sipped at her wine; the rest followed suit. Just as they were laying down their glasses, the lights went out. Nigel’s heart dropped like a stone. Now it was coming. It was here at last. The next moment he was cursing himself for a hysterical old woman. Arthur Bellamy entered with a flaming Christmas pudding. He set it down before O’Brien, remarking in a perfectly audible whisper, ‘Took a box of matches to light the blasted stuff, colonel. That there Mrs Grant been swigging it on the Q.T. you betcha life, and filling up the bottle with water.’ He retired and switched on the lights. O’Brien looked at Lady Marlinworth apologetically, but she was far beyond being shocked.

  ‘What a delightfully outspoken man your butler is! Quite a character! No, not a drop more. I vow you will have me tipsy. Well, just half a glass, then,’ she giggled. ‘You know,’ she proceeded, staring fixedly at him, and tapping his arm archly with her fan, ‘your face reminds me of someone—someone I met a long time ago. Herbert!’ she rapped out, ‘who does Mr O’Brien remind me of?’

  Herbert Marlinworth started, and fingered his silky gray moustache. ‘I’m sure I don’t know, my dear. Possibly one of your—ah—unlucky suitors. I don’t think we have had the pleasure of meeting any of the Irish O’Briens. What part of the country do you—?’

  ‘Our seat,’ replied O’Brien with the utmost gravity, ‘reposes on the site of the palace of the great king, Brian Boru.’

  Knott-Sloman began to guffaw but, receiving an icy look from O’Brien, turned it into a cough. Georgia Cavendish, her stubby nose wrinkled up in distaste, said to O’Brien:

  ‘I suppose your family has a banshee as well as a castle. You’ve never told me about it.’

  ‘Banshee? That’s a kind of fairy or something, isn’t it? Can’t see a fairy getting much change out of old Slip-Slop,’ said Knott-Sloman. A curious nickname for O’Brien, Nigel thought, and judging by their puzzled expressions, none of the others knew it. O’Brien cut in quickly:

  ‘A banshee is a spirit that howls about the place when one of the family is going to die. So if anny of yez hears an ululation tonight ye’ll know I’m for ut.’

  ‘And we’ll all come rushing down the stairs and find it’s only Ajax having a nightmare,’ exclaimed Georgia with the barest perceptible tremor in her voice. Lucilla Thrale shivered delicately.

  ‘Brr,’ she said, ‘this is getting a morbid party. Death is too fearfully middle-class and Victorian, don’t you think? I call it a poor do altogether.’

  ‘Dear lady,’ said Lord Marlinworth, leaping in with Edwardian gallantry, ‘you need have no fear. Death has only to look at your face once and he will be like the rest of us—a captive at your feet.’ He sketched a courtly gesture, and continued to the company at large. ‘The death-warning is not confined to the Emerald Isle. I well recollect a similar phenomenon attaching to the family of my old friend, Viscount Hawsewater. The bell of a ruined chantry on the estate was reputed to toll at night when the death of the head of the family was at hand. One night poor Hawsewater, who was enjoying perfect health at the time, heard it: unfortunately he was tone-deaf and mistook it for the fire-bell: he rushed out of the house, omitting to put on any—if the ladies will pardon me—nether garments. It was bitterly cold that night. He caught a chill, contracted pneumonia, and was dead in two days. Poor fellow. A melancholy end. But it shows one must not dismiss too lightly these supernatural warnings. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, I think. I think so.’

  At this point Lady Marlinworth thought it best to beckon the ladies into the drawing room. The men gathered nearer to their host.

  ‘Coffee for you, Lord Marlinworth? Coffee, Nigel?’ he said, passing the cups along. ‘Pass the port round. Just reach out if you want nuts—afraid I haven’t got any of your speciality, Knott-Sloman: Farquhar’s are late with their consignment. You must show us your parlour trick. I bet you’re the only person here who can crack a walnut with his teeth.’ Knott-Sloman duly showed off, and the rest ignominiously failed. O’Brien went on: ‘I see you are a student of Shakespeare, Lord Marlinworth. Did you ever read any of the post-Elizabethan dramatists? Grand stuff. Shakespeare slew his thousands, but Webster slew his tens of thousands. I must say I like the stage littered with corpses at the final curtain. And what poetry! “Doth the silkworm expend her yellow labors”.’ O’Brien began to recite the passage, his eyes looking away into illimitable distance, his voice soft and thrilling. Before he had finished he broke off suddenly, as though ashamed at being betrayed into such emotion by mere words. Lord Marlinworth tapped the table deprecatingly.

  ‘Very striking, no doubt. But not Shakespeare, not Shakespeare. I may be old-fashioned, but I fancy the Bard stands alone.’

  Before long they joined the ladies. Nigel afterwards retained the vaguest memory of the absurd paper games they played, the blood-curdling ghost stories that were told, the general horseplay, for he felt sleepier and sleepier—as well he might after such a dinner. One thing he remembered clearly—the resonant voice and infectious laughter of Fergus O’Brien, contrasting so strangely with the fey look in his eyes, the look of one seeing things beyond the world’s edge. When Lord and Lady Marlinworth took their leave at 11 p.m. and some of the men adjourned to the billiard room, Nigel went up to bed. He wanted to rest. Hoax or no hoax, he meant to be near the hut tonight. O’Brien might be able to look after himself, but four hands were better than two. The hut … zero hour … ‘Look after him, won’t you?’ … four hands better than … zero hour …

  IV

  A DEAD MAN’S TALE

  NIGEL, COMING AWAKE by slow degrees, was conscious first of light and then of silence. The light seemed to be striking down at him from the ceiling, which was surely odd on a winter’s morning. The silence was not, now that he listened to it more attentively, exactly silence; but a damping-down of all the country sounds, of dog-bark, harness-jingle, wagon-rumble, cockcrow, and footfall, as though some gigantic soft pedal had been pressed down over the countryside. Nigel wondered vaguely if these phenomena were the after-effect of drugs. Then he pointed out to himself, rather laboriously, that he did not take drugs. Then his mind started working properly, and he exclaimed, ‘Snow!’ He went to look out of the window. Yes, there had been a fall in the night: not enough to overload roofs and branches, but blanketing earth and all its sounds. Nigel’s heart contracted suddenly. O’Brien! The hut! He ran along to the room in which O’Brien had pretended to be sleeping, and looked out towards the hut. A single trail of footsteps, half obliterated by the snow, led to it from the veranda. There was a thin layer of smooth snow on the veranda roof. ‘Thank God, that’s all right,’ Nigel muttered. ‘No one but O’Brien has been out there. Nothing has happened after all.’ Returning to his room, he looked at his wrist watch. Eight-forty. He had slept late. So had O’Brien, it seemed: he was usually out feeding the birds by this time. Well, after a dinner like that, what could you expect? But a little flaw of apprehension crawled over Nigel’s heart again. He would have been told if—Arthur Bellamy would have told him. But Arthur had no
t been out to the hut; or, if he had been out, he had not come back. And why hadn’t he called Nigel?

  Nigel hurried on his clothes. A nightmare sensation was gnawing at him—the sensation he had felt as a boy, dreaming that he was late for school. He ran downstairs. Edward Cavendish was stamping up and down the front veranda in an overcoat.

  ‘Getting up an appetite for breakfast,’ he said. ‘Everyone seems very sleepy this morning. I wasn’t called at all—though I suppose one couldn’t expect that in this house.’ His tones were a little pettish.

  ‘I’m just going out to the hut to see if our host is awake,’ said Nigel. ‘Coming?’

  Nigel’s uneasiness must have communicated itself to Cavendish, for the latter preceded him with alacrity round the corner of the house. The trail of footsteps stretched out before them from opposite the french windows to the hut door, a distance of about fifty yards. Nigel hurried out, unconsciously keeping well away from this trail, Cavendish a little ahead of him. He knocked on the door of the hut. There was no answer. Nigel looked in at the window, and what he saw made him leap for the door, thrust it open and stumble inside. The enormous kitchen table was still there, strewn with books and papers; the oil stove and the easy chairs were as he had seen them last. One of the carpet slippers was there on the floor, too; but the other was on the foot of O‘Brien, who lay in a heap beside the desk.

  Nigel knelt down and touched one of his hands. It was dead cold. It did not need the dried trickle of blood from his heart, the scorching of black lapel and white shirt-front to tell Nigel that Fergus O’Brien was dead. A revolver lay beside the stiffened fingers of his right hand. His eyes were blank, but his black beard jutted out indomitably even in this hour of defeat, and some whimsy of death had set his lips into a smile—the half-impish, half-sardonic smile with which he had looked down the dinner-table only twelve hours before. Nigel never forgot that look. It seemed to forgive him for his own failure, to invite him to be amused at the way death had outwitted them both. But Nigel was very far from being amused. In a few days he had come to feel for O’Brien an affection and deep respect he had never felt for anyone but his uncle before. He had failed; and the completeness of that failure was the measure of his determination to win through to the truth in the end.

  ‘Keep still, and don’t touch anything!’ he snapped at his companion. Cavendish was not in a state to touch anything. He was standing against the wall, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, breathing heavily, and staring at the body and the revolver as though he expected the one to leap up and the other to explode at any moment. He made some incoherent sounds, then controlled his voice and said:

  ‘What on earth? Why did he—?’

  ‘We shall find out. Close that door—we don’t want everyone looking in. No! Keep your hands off it! Use your elbow.’

  Nigel made a hasty survey of the room and the adjoining cubicle. The bed had not been slept in. Nothing seemed out of place anywhere. The windows were shut and locked. The key was on the inside of the door. Nigel felt the oil stove; it was cold as O’Brien’s hand. The hut was icy, too. He looked round in a puzzled way, as though missing something.

  ‘I wonder where his—’

  ‘There’s Bellamy,’ interrupted Cavendish, standing at the window. ‘Shall I call him?’

  Nigel nodded absent-mindedly. Cavendish shouted ‘Bellamy!’ at the top of his voice; but the sound seemed deadened and, though he shouted again, it had no effect. Nigel opened the door, using a handkerchief to turn the handle. Arthur Bellamy was standing on the veranda, blinking into the sun and rubbing his eyes with his huge fists.

  ‘Arthur!’ he called. ‘Come over here, and keep off that single trail of footprints. Didn’t you hear us shouting for you?’

  ‘Can’t hear much from in there when the door’s shut,’ said Arthur, lumbering over the snow like a bear. ‘The Colonel had it sound-proofed like. Says ’e can’t work with the shindy the cocks and ’ens and whatnot make round about ’ere.’

  ‘That’s why no one was awakened by the shot,’ thought Nigel.

  ‘’Ere, wot is all this, Mr Strangeways, sir?’ said Arthur, now approaching the door and suddenly realising that there was something unusual in the situation. ‘Ain’t the Colonel in there? I was coming to call him. I overslept, you might say, and—’

  Nigel’s expression silenced him. ‘Yes, the Colonel is in here. But he won’t be working here any more,’ Nigel said gently, and let Arthur Bellamy come in.

  The big man staggered, as though he had collided with a wall. ‘So they got him!’ he gasped finally in a high, hoarse voice.

  ‘Who “got him”?’ asked Cavendish, bewildered. No one paid any attention to him. Arthur, who had been bending over O’Brien, straightened himself, as it were, with a giant effort—like Atlas with the sagging sky on his shoulders. Tears were pouring down his face, but his voice was firm as he said, ‘When I gets my hands on the—wot did this, I’ll beat his—carcase into a—paste, I’ll—’

  ‘Hold it, Arthur. Some of the others will be coming out in a minute.’ He drew the big man aside, and whispered to him quickly. ‘We know this isn’t a suicide, but it’s going to be damned difficult to prove. There’ll be no harm the rest thinking we think it’s suicide, for a bit. Pull yourself together now and act up.’

  Arthur acted up. ‘Strite, guv’nor? You’re sure it’s sooicide? Ar, the gun there and that scorching on his coat. I reckon you must be right.’

  Cavendish, looking through the door, said, ‘Some of the others are on the veranda. They must have heard our voices. You’d better tell them to keep off those footprints. Oh, God, there’s Lucilla. She mustn’t see this.’

  Nigel went to the door and hailed the guests. ‘Stay where you are a minute. Yes, all of you. Arthur, just walk round the hut and see if there’s any trail up to the back. We’d better make sure, before they all start tramping about.’

  Arthur moved away. ‘But look here, Strangeways,’ Cavendish protested, ‘you can’t let those women come in here and see—’ He shuddered.

  ‘I can and I propose to,’ said Nigel brusquely. He did not intend to lose this golden opportunity for studying reactions. Arthur returned and informed him that there were no footprints at the back of the hut. Nigel spoke to the guests huddled on the veranda.

  ‘You can come out now, but keep well away from that single track of footmarks. O’Brien has met with an accident.’

  There was a gasp, and Georgia Cavendish came running out ahead of the rest. They were all dressed, except for Knott-Sloman, who was wearing an overcoat over his pyjamas, and Lucilla Thrale, who had on a magnificent grey mink coat over what looked suspiciously like nothing else at all. With her silver-gold hair and white throat and frozen expression she was a veritable Snow Queen.

  Nigel put his back to the far wall of the hut, and said, ‘You can come in. But stand still and don’t touch anything.’

  They filed in and stood fidgeting in a row, like a company of amateur actors with bad stage fright. For a second they did not know where to look. Then Georgia pointed a trembling finger, bit her lip hard, said in a small solemn voice, ‘Fergus. Oh, Fergus!’ and fell deathly silent. Knott-Sloman’s face grew taut and his pale blue eyes seemed to turn to stone. ‘Good God! Dead! Is he dead? Who—did he do it himself?’ Philip Starling pursed up his lips and gave a long whistle.

  ‘He is dead,’ said Nigel, ‘and everything points to suicide.’

  Lucilla Thrale’s frozen expression suddenly broke up like a landslide. Her scarlet mouth dropped open; and with a violence that appalled everyone she screamed out: ‘Fergus? Fergus! You can’t! It’s not true! Fergus!’ Then she reeled and fell back into Knott-Sloman’s arms. The little group split up. Nigel glanced at Georgia. She was gazing at her brother now with an indecipherable look. Suddenly aware of Nigel’s scrutiny, she dropped her eyes and walked out, bending and just touching O’Brien’s hair on the way.

  ‘Look here, Strangeways,’ Knott-Sloman exclaimed angrily. �
��What the devil do you mean by letting these ladies come in and—it’s outrageous.’

  ‘You can all go out now,’ said Nigel impassively. ‘Stay in the house, please. You will be needed for the formality of questioning. I am just going to ring the police.’

  Knott-Sloman’s face grew purple, and knotted veins stood out. ‘Who the hell are you to give orders here?’ he roared. ‘I’ve stood just about enough of your buck.’ He broke off. Nigel was looking at him, a very different proposition from the mild, bespectacled, amiable creature of the day before. His tow-coloured hair stood on end berserk fashion, his boyish expression had been left behind with the jokes and crackers of last night, his eyes looked dangerous as the muzzles of machine guns. Knott-Sloman capitulated, and retired to the house grumbling. The others followed. Lucille Thrale, who was getting full emotional value out of the occasion and behaving like a tragedy queen, was being supported into the house by Georgia and Philip Starling. Nigel told Arthur to stay on guard in the hut and to see if he could find anything missing there or out of place. He himself went into the house and phoned up Taviston. He was put through to Superintendent Bleakley, who promised to come at once with a police doctor and other accessories. Taviston was a good fifteen miles distant, and Nigel spent the intervening time putting through a trunk call to his uncle in London. Sir John Strangeways’ reception of the news was typical of the man.

  ‘Shot …? Suicide to all appearances …? You don’t think so …? Well, go to it … I’ll send Tommy Blount down if they call in the Yard … No, don’t blame yourself, boy; I know you did your best. He didn’t give us a chance … Going to be a rumpus about this, though. I’ll have to see what we can do about nobbling the Press … So long. Let me know if you want anything … Oh, right. Who? Cyril Knott-Sloman, Lucilla Thrale, Edward and Georgia Cavendish, Philip Starling. Right, I’ll have ’em looked up … So long. Be good to yourself.’