Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Miss Thrale was mistaken, then, when she said you came into the lounge about ten to three?’

  After the slightest hesitation Knott-Sloman replied, showing his teeth in an apologetic and dentifrice-advertisement smile. ‘Of course. Damned silly of me. Just shows how difficult it is to remember everything. I went into the lounge for a minute to compare my watch with the clock there. I had some letters to write and didn’t want to miss the afternoon post. Found it was later than I thought, so Cavendish and I just finished off that game, and then I came in here, wrote my letters and walked down to the village with them. Didn’t get back till after you’d discovered poor old Bellamy. How is he? Going to turn the comer, I hope.’

  The superintendent said that there was some slight hope of Bellamy’s recovery. He asked next whether there had been anyone else in the study while Knott-Sloman was writing his letters.

  ‘Yes, Miss Cavendish was there. She was busy quill-driving too.’

  Bleakley was about to dismiss this witness when Nigel, who had been sitting hunched-up in his chair, gazing noncommittally down his nose, roused himself and said:

  ‘You say you knew O’Brien in the war. Were you in the R.A.F.?’

  Knott-Sloman gave him an insolent stare. ‘So Saul also is among the sleuths. Well, wonders never cease. If you want to know, I was a pilot till ‘sixteen: then I got a job on the staff. I came across O’Brien because I held a command in his sector from the summer of ‘seventeen. Quite satisfied now?’

  ‘Can you tell me the name and address of anyone living who was in O’Brien’s flight or squadron or whatever it is?’ Nigel answered imperturbably.

  ‘Let me see.’ Knott-Sloman appeared to be taken rather aback. ‘Anstruther, Greaves, Fear, McIlray—they all went west, though. Ah, I’ve got the man for you. Jimmy Hope. He was living somewhere down this way when I heard of him last: a chicken farm just outside Bridgewest—Staynton; that was the name of the place.’

  ‘Thanks. You interested in aeroplane engines?’

  Knott-Sloman surveyed him insolently. ‘Not particularly. Are you?’ He turned to Bleakley. ‘Perhaps when your assistant has finished with the round games he will permit me to go.’

  Bleakley looked inquiringly at Nigel, who said in his most infuriating manner, ‘O.K. We’ll get down to a bout of consequences tomorrow, if the gentleman cares to play.’

  Knott-Sloman scowled at him and departed. Bleakley raised his eyebrows at Nigel and was about to say something, when a constable entered hurriedly. A poker had been found in the incinerator. It naturally enough bore no signs by now of having been used for the attack on Bellamy: but Mrs Grant swore that she had used it at lunchtime to poke the kitchen range, and she conceded grudgingly that even the slut Nellie would not be such a fool as to put it in the incinerator. Nellie was not on the spot to confirm this, as she always went home for a few hours after washing up the lunch things, but Bleakley arranged that she should be sent to him as soon as she returned.

  ‘That incinerator’s in the scullery,’ he said. ‘Whoever it was had to go into the kitchen for the poker, and go right through the kitchen again to hide it in the incinerator. Lucky for him Mrs Grant takes her nap upstairs in her bedroom. She must be a sound sleeper, and no error, to sleep through all that.’

  ‘If, indeed, she was asleep at all,’ said Nigel in tones of bloodcurdling suggestiveness.

  The superintendent looked startled, then contemplative, then amused. ‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘you can’t pull my leg like that. Mrs Grant may be an old — but she don’t go about shooting people and battering them with pokers, I’ll lay my pension on it. Well, we’d better get on with it. Miss Cavendish next.’

  Philip Starling’s description of Georgia had been very accurate, Nigel thought, watching her as Bleakley put his preliminary questions. Her eyes, that the night before had been so happy and vivacious, now were cups of sorrow—dazed, forlorn, hopeless as a ghost’s; she moved as though her whole body were bruised; yet in its steely control and the restraint of hand and feature there was something indomitable.

  ‘Yes,’ she was saying, ‘Fergus did say he was going to leave me his money, or some of it. I’ve got all I need, really; but we used to joke about how I would have enough to explore Atlantis when he was dead. He was very ill, you know, and didn’t expect—’

  Her voice shook very slightly and she had to stop. There’s only one country you want to explore now, thought Nigel, and that’s the country O’Brien has gone to.

  Georgia knew nothing more about the will. When told that O’Brien had been murdered she was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Yes,’ with a shuddering intensity, as though submitting to a blow she had for a long time seen coming. Then she beat her small brown hand on the table and exclaimed:

  ‘No! Who would ever kill him? He had no enemies. Only cowards and bullies get murdered. He was very ill. The doctors said he could not live for long. Why can’t you leave him in peace now?’

  Bleakley tilted back his chair and looked at her intently. ‘I’m sorry, miss, but there doesn’t seem any chance of it being suicide. Why, you’re the only one of his friends who hasn’t said that he was the last person to kill himself.’

  After this outburst, Georgia Cavendish withdrew into herself again, answering Bleakley’s questions in an absent-minded way. She corroborated Lucilla’s statement that she had been with her in the lounge from lunchtime till about two forty-five. She had then gone into the study to write a letter: Knott-Sloman had come in a little after three o’clock—she could not be sure of exact times. He was still there when she finished her letter and went up to her room. She had stayed in her room till she heard the commotion below. She had no witness to this. Lucilla had been just behind her as she ran downstairs. When Bleakley had finished, Nigel said:

  ‘I’m afraid this is a very impertinent question, Miss Cavendish; but will you tell us just how things stood between you and O’Brien?’

  Georgia looked at him hard; then, as though he had passed some test, she gave him a friendly smile and said:

  ‘We loved each other. We really did ever since that first time we met in Africa—at least, I did. But we didn’t seem to realise it till just lately. As soon as I—I knew, I wanted us to get married: I like carrying things to extremes,’ she added with a ghost of her old impish smile. ‘But Fergus said the doctors had told him he was a dying man, and he didn’t want to saddle me with a corpse. I thought that was all rot, of course, but he stood firm. Said Nature had not intended me for a sick nurse. So we just—we were lovers.’

  ‘I see,’ Nigel smiled at her gravely. ‘Now please don’t be offended—I believe what you have told us—but it does rather conflict with Miss Thrale’s testimony and, er, general behaviour, and so forth.’

  ‘This is damned difficult,’ said Georgia, clasping her hands and pressing them into her lap. ‘You see, it’s like this. She was—she had been Fergus’s mistress. She is a pretty grand piece of work, after all. But when Fergus and I—well, woke up to each other, he didn’t want her any more. Damned odd, but there it is. He really had her down here to sort of break it to her—always the gentleman, you know, and all that. Apparently she didn’t quite grasp what he was driving at—I mean, this official mourner stuff she’s putting on now — no, that’s catty of me—she did love him—why shouldn’t she? Oh, hell!’

  Georgia relapsed into confusion and Bleakley tactfully dismissed her, asking her to send her brother along next. As soon as the door was shut he cast an eloquent glance at Nigel.

  ‘That puts Miss Thrale in a nasty position, don’t it, sir?’

  ‘We don’t yet know for certain that O’Brien had officially paid her off,’ Nigel replied; but Georgia’s evidence had undoubtedly given a definite direction to the case.

  Edward Cavendish entered, wearing the same bewildered and harassed appearance that he seemed to have worn since he and Nigel found the body in the hut. He sat down heavily in the chair that was offered him, looking a good deal more tha
n his fifty-three years. The superintendent questioned him as to his address and occupation, then asked whether he could not, as an old friend of O’Brien, give them some inkling of the motive for the murder.

  ‘You’re misinformed about that, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I’m not an old friend of O’Brien’s. Only got to know him this year. My sister introduced us.’

  ‘Well, sir, let us say “friend,” then. You had got to know him pretty well, I take it.’

  ‘No. He used to ask my advice occasionally on investments; he had considerable capital; but we were dissimilar types and had quite different interests.’

  ‘A friend for the sake of advantage, as Aristotle puts it,’ murmured Nigel, gazing beneath almost closed lids at Cavendish’s big, round, well-shaved, pale face; the eyes behind rimless glasses—eyes in which the professional reticence of the big-business man could not conceal some deep perturbation; the lines of anxiety on the forehead and the thinning, pomaded hair. His mouth suggested sensuality and even ruthlessness; yet there was something curiously babyish about his expression as a whole, something that no doubt appealed to the mothering instinct in his sister.

  Bleakley was now asking him about his movements since lunch.

  ‘I was playing billiards with Knott-Sloman till about three o’clock. Then I went out for a walk in the park.’

  ‘Meet anyone on your walk, sir?’

  ‘No, I can’t say I did. Very poor alibi,’ he added with a ghastly attempt at a smile. ‘I got back between four and a quarter past, and a constable told me Bellamy had just been discovered.’

  ‘Was Mr Knott-Sloman with you all the time in the billiard room?’

  ‘Yes. No—I remember; he went out to find the time—about ten minutes before we stopped playing, it was.’

  ‘Just went into the lounge and came back again, did he, sir?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t quite say that. He must have been out five minutes at least.’

  The superintendent could scarcely suppress a start of surprise, and Bolter’s pencil remained poised in mid-air.

  ‘You’re sure of that, are you, sir?’ asked Bleakley, as unemphatically as possible.

  ‘Yes. Why not?’ Cavendish looked at him in a puzzled way. Then his whole expression changed. He seemed to be nerving himself for some crucial utterance. He moistened his lips and said:

  ‘Look here, Superintendent, are you sure about this murder business? I mean, couldn’t it have been suicide? Damn it all, I can’t believe that anyone here—’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. There can be no question about it on the evidence we have got so far.’

  Cavendish looked again at Bleakley and Nigel, as though weighing something in his mind. His fists clenched and unclenched.

  ‘The evidence,’ he muttered: ‘but supposing I—’

  Whatever disclosure was coming did not arrive, for at that moment the sergeant entered, looking portentous as a Greek tragedy messenger, and laid a piece of paper before the super.

  ‘Found it in Mr O’Brien’s bedroom,’ he whispered to Bleakley, ‘folded up and used as a window wedge.’

  Bleakley gave one look at the paper: his eyes bulged and his waxed moustaches seemed to quiver like wires. He pointed to the paper and said to Cavendish:

  ‘Recognise this handwriting, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Er—it’s Miss Thrale’s; but—’

  ‘Bring Miss Thrale in, George.’

  While the sergeant was fetching Lucilla, Nigel leant across the table and looked at the paper. On it was written, in a large, slap-dash kind of handwriting:

  I must see you tonight. Can’t we forget what has happened since—Meet me in the hut after the others have gone to bed. Please, darling, please. Lucilla.

  Lucilla Thrale entered regally, pausing for a moment in the doorway as though waiting for the applause to die down. But this time there was no applause. Bleakley stood up, held the note in front of her, and rapped out:

  ‘Did you write this, Miss Thrale?’

  Her hand flew to her throat. A deep flush rose in her face.

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! no! no!’

  ‘But Mr Cavendish testifies this is your handwriting.’

  She turned on Cavendish, bending forward, her fingers hooked like claws. Her voice, cold and harsh at first, rose to a shrill distraught screaming.

  ‘So you testify, do you? You would like to give me away, wouldn’t you. You were jealous because I left you for a better man. Jealous! You white-faced, double-crossing skunk, pretending to be respectable, and all the time—You hated Fergus. It was you who killed him! I know you did it! I—’

  ‘Now then, Miss Thrale, that’s enough of that. Did you write this note?’

  ‘Yes, yes, YES! I wrote it. I loved him. But I didn’t go to the hut—I didn’t, I tell you. He wouldn’t let me—’

  She looked round at the cold, incredulous faces.

  ‘It’s a frame-up,’ she screamed at Cavendish. ‘You’re trying to put this on me!’ She turned to Bleakley, pointing wildly at Cavendish. ‘Can’t you hear? He’s planted it on me. He put it in my room this afternoon! I saw him.’

  ‘The note was not found in your room, Miss Thrale. If your other statements are as false as this one, you’re going to find yourself in a very awkward situation.’

  ‘Just a minute, Bleakley,’ interrupted Nigel. ‘Cavendish, were you in Miss Thrale’s room this afternoon? You said nothing about it in your statement.’

  Cavendish’s cheeks were flaming, as though Lucilla had been boxing his ears. Dignity and anger seemed to be struggling for supremacy in his countenance. The image of a churchwarden accused of stealing from the collection bag rose unbidden into Nigel’s mind. Outraged dignity and righteous anger were in the man’s voice when he spoke.

  ‘Very well, then. As Miss Thrale has chosen to make these ridiculous accusations, she cannot expect me to be tender to her reputation. I was in her room this afternoon, and I’ll tell you why.’

  ‘No, Edward! Please! I was upset—made to say what I did. You know I didn’t mean it.’ Lucilla’s voice was broken and pleading, but Cavendish did not even look at her.

  ‘When Knott-Sloman came into the billiard room again this afternoon he said Lucilla—Miss Thrale—wanted to see me in her room. We finished our game and I went up. Miss Thrale made me a proposition. Either I should pay her £10,000 or she would let the police know that she had been my mistress. She had letters of mine. She said that if our relationship was disclosed it would do me great damage publicly: she also said that the police would soon be looking for motives, because O’Brien had been murdered, and the fact that O’Brien had taken her away from me—as she put it—would seem to them a very sufficient motive for my having killed him. I told her that I was not accustomed to being intimidated by blackmailers. She then swore she would also tell the police that I had killed O’Brien in order to benefit by his will and get myself out of those difficulties, as well as from motives of revenge. I replied that, if O’Brien had been murdered, the police would investigate the position of every one of this party, and the state of my finances would be discovered soon enough. I had naturally intended to keep quiet about all this. This is why I said I was out for a walk this afternoon, when actually I was in Miss Thrale’s room most of the time. I did go out for a little after that, by the way. But now Miss Thrale has chosen to make these accusations in public, I see no point in further dissimulation. I have no wish to retaliate; but, as things have gone so far already, Superintendent, I suggest that you ask Knott-Sloman how much of this £10,000 blackmail money was to be his share.’

  VIII

  A TALE OF WOE

  AS NIGEL DROVE with Bleakley towards Taviston that evening the sun that had melted the last night’s snow was drawing up mists like thick woollen combinations about the lower parts of the hills. Or so he unromantically described it to himself. The road switchbacked up and down and round these hills, so that now they would be travelling through clear air and looking down on a kind of lake
of steam, now they plunged downwards into a patch of it and could see nothing much beyond their own radiator cap. The constable who was driving dashed with speculative abandon into these patches and, emerging on the far side still on the road, muttered to himself audible congratulations. Bleakley was to drive back with Nigel later that night, as he felt it imperative to be on the spot just at present. If they managed to get through the fog, which would be much worse after dinner. But no fog, Nigel was thinking—not even the dense and universal steam that first covered the earth as it hung cooling in space—could hope to compete with the utter caliginous inspissated fog in his own mind.

  The series of revelations they had just been hearing, like magnesium flashes in a dark room, had only served to blind the eye. Each fresh clue seemed to lead in a different direction and then to break off in the hand before it had got them anywhere. For the fifth time Nigel forced himself calmly to review the web of contradictions. Lucilla Thrale had denied Cavendish’s accusations: she admitted that he had been in her room after lunch, but swore they were just having a friendly conversation. A curious place for light chat, Nigel had reflected, but you couldn’t be certain. Lucilla emphatically denied having been in the hut last night, her denials finally reaching such a pitch of hysteria that Bleakley had to turn her over to Georgia Cavendish and salve his official conscience by detailing a man to see she made no attempt at escape. Knott-Sloman, faced with Cavendish’s charge of complicity in the blackmail, had first blustered and threatened several kinds of action, from physical assault to legal redress; then he had cooled down and magnanimously declared that he would forget it all, as poor old Edward was really knocked-up and not responsible. Poor old Edward, however, persisted in his statement, though he could give no satisfactory reason for connecting Knott-Sloman with Lucilla over the alleged blackmail. Knott-Sloman and he also continued to contradict each other as to the length of time the former had been out of the billiard room.

  This brought Nigel’s sorely belaboured mind back again to the problem of Bellamy’s assailant. Every one of the household except Philip Starling had had the opportunity. Lucilla could have done it between two forty-five, when Georgia had left her in the lounge, and the time when Cavendish came up to her room; with the exception of that minute (or was it five minutes?) when Knott-Sloman was in the lounge: or he and she might have done it together then, Knott-Sloman wielding the blunt instrument and Lucilla keeping cave. Georgia had no witnesses to her movements from about three o’clock till the body was discovered. Her brother could have slipped out of the billiard room after Knott-Sloman, though this was unlikely, as he could not have known how long Knott-Sloman was going to be; but Cavendish also could have done the deed after he had left Lucilla’s room. Knott-Sloman himself, apart from a possible complicity with Lucilla, might have attacked Bellamy after Georgia left the study and before he went to post his letters. It seemed on the whole more likely that a man had made the assault. The position of the wound suggested someone fairly tall behind the poker, but did not imply it. Nor was it impossible that a woman should have had the strength to drag him by the heels into the pantry. Almost anyone might have done it, including Mrs Grant.