Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘It’s scandalous,’ exclaimed Knott-Sloman. ‘No one admired and respected O’Brien more than I did. At the same time—’

  ‘—You want to get back to your fizz and your frolic,’ interrupted Philip Starling sourly, not looking up from the Times leading article. Knott-Sloman looked daggers in his direction, but they were blunted on the impervious back of the Times. Lucilla, in an odalisque pose on the sofa, drawled:

  ‘The whole thing’s a crashing bore, of course. But the police are so stupid, they won’t find the murderer till all of us are murdered in our beds. It’s what they call the process of elimination.’

  ‘All but one of us, Lucy,’ said Starling politely.

  ‘I consider that a damned tactless and uncalled-for remark,’ said Knott-Sloman. ‘As good as accusing one of us of being a murderer. No doubt you feel quite safe yourself, after the way you’ve succeeded in sucking up to the police: though I could tell them a thing or two which might alter their attitude to you.’

  Philip Starling laid down his Times in a leisurely way and, fixing Knott-Sloman with his most hubristic and irritating stare, said:

  ‘That’s just what’s wrong with you retired army men. Not content with practically losing us our Empire through sheer inefficiency, you settle down in Cheltenham or some low nightclub and spend the rest of your lives in malicious gossip. Gossip, gossip, gossip—like a lot of old women. Tchah!’

  Knott-Sloman rose in his wrath. ‘My God! You damned little squirt. What the devil d’you mean by talking like that? It’s—it’s an insult to the Service. You, you’—he collected himself for a crowning piece of invective—‘you rotten little highbrow.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Just what I thought. A moral coward,’ said Starling briskly, walking right up to Knott-Sloman. ‘Daren’t attack me except in public. Very typical. Squalid fellow.’ He suddenly darted forward his hand, whisked Knott-Sloman’s tie out of his waistcoat, and stumped from the room before his flabbergasted adversary could recover his breath. Lucilla suddenly burst out into a peal of laughter.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ she bubbled. ‘Oh, Law-love-a-duck! What a riot! Poor Cyril, you were outclassed, weren’t you? Now do tuck your tie in and stop looking like Second Murderer.’

  Knott-Sloman went out, tucking in his tie, but still looking very definitely like Second Murderer. Nigel noticed that Lucilla had dropped her distinguished-widow pose, for tactical reasons, perhaps, and resumed the girl-about-town manner. He remained for a few minutes talking to Georgia Cavendish. Lucilla seemed quite willing to console herself with Edward. Then a message came for him that Bleakley would like to see him in the morning room. The superintendent, who looked very cock-a-hoop, introduced him to Detective-Inspector Blount. Blount was a man of middle height, with a bland, youngish face, but almost entirely bald. He had a dry and precise, yet courteous manner, horn-rimmed glasses and rather impersonal eyes. He would have been mistaken anywhere for a bank manager. Bleakley could scarcely restrain himself till the preliminary politenesses were over.

  ‘Got some good news for us, the inspector has, Mr Strangeways.’

  ‘I’m glad. We need it.’

  Blount handed an envelope to Nigel. ‘These are the reports you asked the Assistant Commissioner for—as much as we could get in the time. Shall I tell him the other points, sir?’ he asked Bleakley.

  ‘You fire ahead.’

  ‘First, we examined the package addressed to Cyril Knott-Sloman at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club. It contained a number of letters written by Edward Cavendish to Miss Thrale—letters of a compromising character.’ Blount looked up over the top of his horn-rims to see how Nigel was taking it. He added, with an inflection of dry humour, ‘There were no plans or formulae, I’m afraid, sir.’

  Nigel smiled. ‘I’m afraid the superintendent has been betraying my romantic processes of thought to you.’

  ‘However, the package also contained a note from Knott-Sloman to the deceased. This note suggested that, if O’Brien was a gentleman, he would make Miss Thrale some recompense for having trifled with her affections: and if he did not certain steps would have to be taken.’

  ‘So that’s what he was looking for,’ murmured Nigel. ‘Funny he didn’t destroy it at once.’

  ‘We have also discovered and got into communication with O’Brien’s solicitors. They have no knowledge of any will made by the deceased. But they have in their possession a sealed envelope which was entrusted to them last October by O’Brien with strict injunctions that it should not be opened till a year after his decease. It is not improbable that it may contain a will.’

  ‘That’s queer. He told me he kept it in his safe. Still, we can’t expect everything all at once. And you’ve given us all we can digest for the moment,’ said Nigel.

  The superintendent, who had been looking like a rather overloaded cornucopia, positively bursting with good things, could contain himself no longer.

  ‘Ah, Mr Strangeways, sir, but that isn’t all. The inspector has kept the bonne booch, as you might say, to the last.’ He hastily gathered the remnants of his official dignity about him, twirled his moustache, and nodded severely at Blount. ‘Please continue, Inspector.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’ Blount’s mouth betrayed the slightest quirk of amusement. Then he proceeded, in the well-modulated but impersonal tones of a chairman reading the annual report. ‘After we discovered the contents of the package sent off by Knott-Sloman, the Assistant Commissioner suggested that unofficial investigations should be made at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club. I went down there late last night. Working on a line also suggested by the Assistant Commissioner, and simulating an advanced stage of inebriety, I wandered at large over the premises. In the course of these investigations I found myself’—Blount’s eyes twinkled faintly—‘in Knott-Sloman’s private office. There I discovered a typewriter, with which I managed to write a few lines before I was—er—thrown out. On returning to the Yard I handed over this writing to an expert, who declares that it was made by the same machine on which the threatening letters to O’Brien were written.’

  ‘Oh, my hat,’ said Nigel slowly, his face a comical mixture of surprise and relief. ‘Well, that seems to sew everything up pretty decisively.’

  Blount was looking at him, his eyes suddenly keen as steel. ‘It doesn’t fit in with your theories, sir?’

  ‘Couldn’t we drop the “sir”? Always makes me feel like a schoolmaster. No, it doesn’t fit in. But my theory will just have to be altered to accommodate it.’ He thought hard for a minute, then said, in rather a strained voice:

  ‘Look here, will you read this? Dark thoughts of blackest midnight born. I’d like to have ’em off my conscience.’

  He handed over to Blount the loose pages on which he had put down his reasonings of the previous night. While Blount and Bleakley put their heads together over these, Nigel studied the reports his uncle had sent. They added little to what the omniscient Philip Starling had told him. They were confirmation that Edward Cavendish had got into low water, but he had already admitted this himself. Knott-Sloman evidently had a bad reputation. His club had come under the notice of the police once or twice, but he had been clever enough to avoid any serious charge. They had also picked up rumours of blackmail in connection with him, but naturally these were only rumours. Nothing significant came to light about Starling, Lucilla or Georgia. Sir John Strangeways had also sent along a detailed dossier on O’Brien. Nigel flipped through this. The most remarkable thing about it was what it didn’t tell him. O’Brien seemed not to have been alive at all till he joined up in London in 1915, giving his age as twenty. After he had become famous several papers had invited him to put his name to his life story as written by them, but they had never succeeded in tracing it back beyond 1915—and what the press couldn’t ferret, Nigel reflected, must be concealed in the king of all burrows. Scotland Yard had got into touch with the Special Branch in Dublin; but they knew nothing of O’Brien’s early years, and as the name under which he had joined up was probably an a
ssumed one, it didn’t seem likely that they would have much success in tracing him.

  ‘Well, Mr Strangeways,’ Blount said, ‘this is very interesting. I am not sure whether we should let it modify our attitude to Knott-Sloman—after all, it’s mainly theorising.’ He sketched a neat, apologetic gesture. ‘As I see it, the facts all point to Knott-Sloman as the murderer, probably in collusion with Miss Thrale. It is as good as proved that he wrote the threatening letters. We know that he was hanging about the hut after midnight when O’Brien came out of the house. Now my theory is this: Sloman writes the threatening letters—’

  ‘Why?’ interrupted Nigel. ‘Surely would-be murderers don’t advertise their intentions?’

  ‘Because he planned to fake the murder as a suicide. To do so, he had to use O’Brien’s gun. O’Brien wouldn’t have been carrying a gun unless he was on his guard against some threat. That’s why the threat had to be made.’

  Bleakley beamed proudly from Blount to Nigel, as though showing off an infant prodigy. ‘We never thought of that, Mr Strangeways,’ he said.

  ‘Then Sloman got Miss Thrale to write that note. They wanted O’Brien in the hut, where the murder and fake suicide could be done without interruptions,’ the inspector continued.

  ‘Why wasn’t the note destroyed, then?’

  ‘I suggest that either O’Brien folded it up and stuck it in the window absent-mindedly, or that Sloman found it on his body, kept it till the suicide fake was exposed, and then put it there to throw all the suspicion on Miss Thrale. From what I’ve heard about him he’s quite capable of double-crossing. I imagine he must have been talking with O’Brien for at least a quarter of an hour, possibly manoeuvring to get near the revolver. That would put the actual murder about twelve-thirty. Faking the suicide and generally tidying up might take him ten minutes longer. Then he looks out and finds himself trapped by the snow thickening on the ground. He daren’t walk out, in case the snow should stop before it had filled in his footprints. So he sits down and thinks it out, and finally lights on the idea of wearing O’Brien’s shoes and walking backwards.’

  ‘M’m,’ said Nigel. ‘He must have taken a long time to think it out. The snow was thinning at quarter to two, which suggests that the tracks must have been made somewhere about one-thirty; otherwise they would have been far more obliterated. It was nearly an hour before the bright idea struck him. Well, I always thought he was a bit of a numbskull, in spite of having been on the staff in the war. The wonder is that he could have thought up all the rest of the bag of tricks.’

  ‘He had to get the shoes back into the hut,’ the inspector went on. ‘No doubt that was done when Mr Strangeways was holding his reception there the next morning.’ Blount’s voice was at its driest, but the whimsical sideways glance he gave Nigel over his spectacles took the sting out of his words. ‘Did you happen to notice whether Knott-Sloman was carrying a spare pair of shoes?’

  ‘I can definitely state that he was not,’ Nigel replied with equal seriousness; ‘but he was wearing an overcoat and could easily have got them stowed away somewhere in it.’

  ‘Good. That brings us to the attack on the man Bellamy. I have been examining the place where it was made, and I think it would have been difficult for one person to synchronise it successfully. We shall have to make some experiments before we can be definite on the point. But the easiest method, if I may so put it, would have been for someone to have kept watch on the passage and the main staircase, after Bellamy had come out from the kitchen passage, while his accomplice hurried into the kitchen, took the poker and hid behind the swing-door. A good place to keep watch would be from the door of the lounge. Knott-Sloman and Miss Thrale were together for five minutes, Cavendish has deposed, in the middle of the game of billiards. That would have been ample time. I gather your chief objection to such a theory, Mr Strangeways, is the lack of motive for a premeditated murder by Knott-Sloman. Now you know what penalties are attached to blackmail. Supposing O’Brien had told Sloman that he intended to expose him as a blackmailer. Wouldn’t that have given Sloman a sufficient motive to do away with him? He might easily prefer the risk of hanging for a sheep to the certainty of going to prison for a lamb.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nigel, ‘you make it all sound most convincing. What action are you going to take?’

  ‘The superintendent agrees that we should wait to see if we can’t get more evidence. In any case, the chief constable must be consulted first. But there can be no harm in asking Sloman to explain—er—some of the disputed points of evidence, don’t you think, sir.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Bleakley. ‘I’ll fetch him in.’

  Knott-Sloman entered, his hands in his pockets, a bold stare in his pale-blue eyes. The inspector introduced himself, then said:

  ‘There are certain points, sir, in which your evidence conflicts with—er—other evidence we have received. We shall be glad if you can assist us. At the same time, you are not compelled to answer our questions, and you may wish to consult a solicitor first.’

  Knott-Sloman, who had been fidgeting about, suddenly sat stone-still. It was as though someone had begun sniping from a nearby roof. ‘Well, let’s hear your questions first,’ he said.

  ‘You gave evidence, I think, that shortly after midnight on the night of the crime, you stopped playing billiards and went straight up to bed?’ There was the slightest emphasis on the ‘straight’.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Knott–Sloman eyed Blount warily. ‘No! Damned silly of me! Quite forgot. I went out first for a breath of air.’

  ‘In the snow, sir? I don’t expect you stayed out long.’

  ‘No, just looked out of the door and came in again.’

  The inspector’s voice became smooth, paternal, but faintly censorious, like that of a bank manager speaking to a client about a not very serious overdraft.

  ‘I’m just asking, because we have evidence that you were in the hut about twelve-fifteen.’

  Knott-Sloman bounced up from his chair and struck the table with his fist. ‘This is all a damned bluff!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll not stand for any more of this insinuation.’

  ‘That’s as you like, sir,’ said Blount smoothly. Then his voice turned hard as granite. ‘But it’s by no means insinuation. We have a reliable witness’—Nigel blinked at the word ‘reliable’—‘who testifies to having seen a man in the hut at that time, and has since identified the man as yourself.’

  Knott-Sloman’s bold stare challenged the inspector for a few seconds. Then it crumpled. He made a rather ghastly attempt at a conciliatory laugh.

  ‘Oh, all right, then. You fellows seem to know everything. Yes, I did just look into the hut.’

  ‘For what purpose, may I ask, sir?’

  ‘No, you bloody well may not,’ exclaimed Knott-Sloman, with a brief return to aggressiveness. Blount unexpectedly and adroitly shifted his ground.

  ‘A package, addressed by you to yourself at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club, has come into our possession,’ he said conversationally. ‘It contained certain letters written to Miss Thrale by Edward Cavendish. In view of the charges of blackmail made by Cavendish against Miss Thrale and yourself, you may think it advisable to give some explanation of how these letters came into your hands.’

  Knott-Sloman’s eyes flickered from Blount to the superintendent.

  ‘Well, that’s a bit of a facer,’ he said with an apologetic laugh. ‘I don’t like letting a woman down, but … It’s like this: Lucilla—Miss Thrale—gave me a package yesterday. She said she wanted me to put it in some safe place. Seemed to me rather curious then, but of course I didn’t know what was in it. I can see now she wouldn’t want letters like that about the place when there was likely to be a search. But it’s ridiculous to talk about blackmail. I’m afraid poor old Cavendish’s financial worries have made him a bit unbalanced. There’s nothing criminal in a woman keeping her old love-letters, is there? Or perhaps the police don’t allow us to do even that nowadays.’

  ‘I se
e,’ replied the inspector in tones of polite but devastating incredulity. ‘No doubt then you will be able to give us an equally—er—satisfactory explanation why in one of these letters there was also a note written by you to O’Brien suggesting that some pecuniary redress should be made to Miss Thrale.’

  ‘What the devil? But I couldn’t find it—’

  ‘So that’s what you were looking for in the hut.’

  Knott-Sloman’s resistance crumbled like a collapsing house. His expression was a shameful mixture of panic and baffled rage.

  ‘So the little bitch double-crossed me! She must have had the note and put it amongst her letters. I suppose she told you to examine them, too. My God, and after I’d written it for her, too.’

  ‘You admit, then, that you wrote it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And if I’d known Lucilla was going to do the dirty on me like this, I’d have cut off my right hand before I—I’d better explain. I was sorry for her. O’Brien had treated her badly, and frankly I thought he ought to pay for it. Perhaps the method was a bit unconventional, but I didn’t want him to be dragged into a breach-of-promise case.’

  ‘Your motive sounds most laudable, sir, but I think the law might use a harsher word than “unconventional” for your proceedings.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Nigel broke in. ‘Did Miss Thrale actually suggest that you should approach O’Brien on these lines? And when did you give him the note?’

  ‘Yes, she did. I gave it to him after tea on Christmas Day,’ Knott-Sloman said sullenly.

  ‘Why do it in writing? Why not have talked to him about it?’

  Knott-Sloman twisted in his chair. ‘Well, y’see, I was going to talk to him later, of course. But he was a bit hot-tempered, y’know, and I thought—well—the note would give him time to think things over and cool down.’

  ‘You were going to talk to him in the hut that night? Or was Miss Thrale going to? Is that why she wrote her note asking him to meet her there?’