by Ngaio Marsh
“Yes,” Kitty agreed with a half-smile. “I told him.”
“You did?”
It was as if Rose was for the first time positively aware of her stepmother.
“You needn’t mind,” Kitty said. “It was natural enough. I couldn’t help noticing.”
“We told him ourselves,” Rose muttered.
“Was he pleased? Look, Rose,” Kitty said, still in that half-exhausted, half-good-natured manner, “don’t let’s bother to hedge. I know about the business over Old Man Lacklander’s memoirs.”
Rose made a slight distasteful movement. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
“No,” Kitty agreed, “in a way, I suppose it doesn’t — now. What’s the matter?”
Rose’s chin had gone up. “I think I hear Mark,” she said.
She went to the door.
“Rose,” Kitty said strongly, and Rose stopped short. “I know it’s none of my business but — you’re all over the place now. We all are. I wouldn’t rush anything! ‘Don’t rush your fences,’ that’s what your father would have said, isn’t it?”
Rose looked at Kitty with an air of dawning astonishment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “What fences?”
She had opened the door. A well-kept hand came round it and closed over hers.
“Hallo?” Mark’s voice said. “May I come in?”
Rose looked at Kitty, who again hesitated. “Why, yes,” she said. “Of course. Come in, Mark.”
He was really a very handsome young man: tall, dark and with enough emphasis in his mouth and jaw to give him the masterful air that is supposed to be so irrestible to women. He stood looking down at Kitty with Rose’s hand drawn through his arm. They made what used to be known as a striking couple.
“I heard your voices,” he said, “and thought I’d look in. Is there anything I can do at all? I’ve bought some things for Rose to help her get to sleep; if you’d like to take one, it might be quite an idea.”
“I’ll see,” she said. “I’ve got something, actually, somewhere.”
“Shall we leave one in case?” Mark suggested. He shook a couple of capsules from a packet onto her bedside table and fetched a glass of water. “One is enough,” he said.
He was standing above Kitty and between her and Rose, who had not moved from the door at the far end of the room. Kitty looked up into his face and said loudly, “You were the first there, weren’t you?”
Mark made a slight admonitory gesture and turned towards Rose. “Not actually the first,” he said quietly. “Miss Kettle—”
“Oh — old Kettle,” Kitty said irritably, dismissing her. “What I want to know — after all, I am his wife — what happened?”
“Rose,” Mark said. “You run along to bed.”
“No, Mark darling,” Rose said, turning deadly white. “I want to know, too. Please. It’s worse not to.”
“Yes, much worse,” Kitty agreed. “Always.”
Mark waited for an appreciable time and then said quickly, “Well first of all — there’s no disfigurement to his face—”
Kitty made a sharp grimace and Rose put her hands to her eyes.
“—and I don’t think he felt anything at all,” Mark said. He lifted a finger. “All right. It was a blow. Here. On the temple.”
“That—?” Rose said. “Just that?”
“It’s a very vulnerable part, darling.”
“Then — might it be some sort of accident?”
“Well — no, I’m afraid not.”
“O, Mark, why not?”
“It’s out of the question, Rose darling.”
“But why?”
“The nature of the injuries.”
“More than one?” she said. He went quickly to her and took her hands in his.
“Well — yes.”
“But you said—” Rose began.
“You see, there are several injuries all in that one small area. It wouldn’t do any good if I let you think they might have been caused accidentally, because the — the pathologist will certainly find that they were not.”
Kitty, unnoticed, said, “I see,” and added abruptly, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can take any more to-night. D’you mind?”
Mark looked at her with sharpened interest. “You should try to settle down.” He lifted her wrist professionally.
“No, no,” she said and drew it away. “That’s unnecessary, thanks all the same. But I do think Rose ought to go to bed before she drops in her tracks.”
“I quite agree,” Mark said again, rather coldly, and opened the door. Rose said, “Yes, I’m going; I hope you do manage to sleep, Kitty,” and went out. Mark followed her to her own door.
“Mark, darling, good-night,” Rose said. She freed herself gently.
“To-morrow,” he said, “I’m going to carry you off to Nunspardon.”
“Oh,” she said, “no — I don’t think we can quite do that, do you? Why Nunspardon?”
“Because I want to look after you and because, making all due allowances, I don’t think your stepmother’s particularly sympathetic or congenial company for you,” Mark Lacklander said, frowning.
“It’s all right,” Rose said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve learned not to notice.”
Fox was duly acquainted with the story of Ludovic Phinn over a breakfast of ham and eggs in the parlour of the Boy and Donkey shortly after dawn. Bailey and Thompson, who had also spent the tag end of the night at the pub, were already afoot in Bottom Meadow with the tools of their trade, and the Home Office pathologist was expected from London. The day promised to be fine and warm.
“I know about young Phinn,” Alleyn said, “because his debacle occurred when I was doing a spell in the Special Branch in 1937. At that time the late Sir Harold Lacklander was our Ambassador at Zlomce, and Master Danberry-Phinn was his personal secretary. It was known that the German Government was embarked on a leisurely and elaborate parly with the local government over railway concessions. We picked up information to the effect that the German boys were prepared to sign an important and, to us, disastrous undertaking in the fairly distant future. Lacklander was instructed to throw a spanner in the works. He was empowered to offer the Zlomce boys certain delectable concessions, and it was fully expected that they would play. The Germans, however, learnt of his little plot and immediately pressed on their own negotiations to a successful and greatly accelerated conclusion. Our government wanted to know why. Lacklander realized that there had been a leakage of information and, since there was nobody else in a position to let the leakage occur, he tackled young Phinn, who at once broke down and admitted that it was his doing. It seems that he had not been able to assimilate his Zlomce oats too well. It’s an old and regrettable story. He arrived with his alma mater’s milk wet on his lips, full of sophisticated backchat and unsophisticated thinking. He made some very dubious Zlomce chums, among whom was a young gent whom we afterwards found to be a German agent of a particularly persuasive sort. He was said to have fastened on young Phinn, who became completely sold on the Nazi formula and agreed to act for the Germans. As usual, our sources of information were in themselves dubious. Phinn was judged on results, and undoubtedly he behaved like a traitor. On the night after a crucial cable had come through for his chief, he went off to the gypsies or somewhere with his Nazi friend. The decoding of the cable had been entrusted to him. It developed that he presented his Zlomce chums with the whole story. It was said afterwards that he’d taken bribes. Lacklander gave him bottled hell, and he went away and blew his brains out. We were told that he’d had a kind of hero-fixation on Lacklander, and we always thought it odd that he should have behaved as he did. But he was, I believe, a brilliant but unbalanced boy, an only child whose father, the Octavius we saw last night, expected him to retrieve the fortunes of their old and rather reduced family. His mother died a few months afterwards, I believe.”
“Sad,” said Mr. Fox.
�
��It was indeed.”
“Would you say, Mr. Alleyn, now, that this Mr. Phinn, Sr., was slightly round the bend?”
“Dotty?”
“Well — eccentric.”
“His behaviour in the watches of last night was certainly oddish. He was a frightened man, Fox, if I ever saw one. What do you think?”
“The opportunity was there,” Fox said, going straight to the first principle of police investigation.
“It was. And, by the way, Bailey’s done his dab-drill. The spectacles are Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s.”
“There now!” Fox ejaculated with the utmost satisfaction.
“It’s not conclusive, you know. He might have lost them down there earlier in the day. He’d still be very chary of owning to them.”
“Well…” Fox said sceptically.
“I quite agree. I’ve got my own idea about when and how they got there, which is this.”
He propounded his idea. Fox listened with raised brows.
“And as for opportunity, Fox,” Alleyn went on, “as far as we’ve got, it was also there for his wife, all three Lacklanders and, for a matter of that, Nurse Kettle herself.”
Fox opened his mouth, caught a derisive glint in his senior’s eye and shut it again.
“Of course,” Alleyn said, “we can’t exclude the tramps or even the dark-skinned stranger from the Far East. But there’s one item that emerged last night which I don’t think we can afford to disregard, Fox. It seems that Colonel Cartarette was entrusted by Sir Harold Lacklander, then on his deathbed, with the Lacklander memoirs. He was to supervise their publication.”
“Well, now,” Fox began, “I can’t say…”
“This item may be of no significance whatever,” Alleyn rejoined. “On the other hand, isn’t it just possible that it may be a link between the Lacklanders on the one hand and Mr. Octavius Phinn on the other, that link being provided by Colonel Cartarette with the memoirs in his hands.”
“I take it,” Fox said in his deliberate way, “that you’re wondering if there’s a full account of young Phinn’s offence in the memoirs and if his father’s got to know of it and made up his mind to stop publication.”
“It sounds hellish thin when you put it like that, doesn’t it? Where does such a theory land us? Cartarette goes down the hill at twenty past seven, sees Phinn poaching, and, overheard by Lady Lacklander, has a flaming row with him. They part company. Cartarette moves on to talk to Lady Lacklander, stays with her for ten minutes and then goes to the willow grove to fish. Lady L. returns home and Phinn comes back and murders Cartarette because Cartarette is going to publish old Lacklander’s memoirs to the discredit of young Phinn’s name. But Lady L. doesn’t say a word about this to me. She doesn’t say she heard them quarrel about the memoirs, although, if they did, there’s no reason that I can see why she wouldn’t. She merely says that they had a row about poaching and that Cartarette talked about this to her. She adds that he and she also discussed a private and domestic business which had nothing to do with Cartarette’s death. This, of course, is as it may be. Could the private and domestic business by any chance be anything to do with the publication of the memoirs? If so, why should she refuse to discuss it with me?”
“Have we any reason to think it might be about these memoirs, though?”
“No. I’m doing what I always say you shouldn’t do. I’m speculating. But it was clear, wasn’t it, that young Lacklander didn’t like the memoirs being mentioned. He shut up like a trap over them. They crop up, Br’er Fox. They occur. They link the Cartarettes with the Lacklanders, and they may well link Mr. Phinn with both. They provide, so far, the only, connecting theme in this group of apparently very conventional people.”
“I wouldn’t call her ladyship conventional,” Fox observed.
“She’s unconventional along orthodox lines, believe me. There’s a car pulling up. It’ll be Dr. Curtis. Let’s return to the bottom field and to the question of opportunity and evidence.”
But before he led the way out, he stood rubbing his nose and staring at his colleague.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “That old Lacklander died with what sounds like an uneasy conscience and the word ‘Vic’ on his lips.”
“Ah. Vic.”
“Yes. And Mark Lacklander referred to young Phinn as Viccy! Makes you fink, don’t it? Come on.”
By mid-summer morning light, Colonel Cartarette looked incongruous in the willow grove. His coverings had been taken away and there, close to the river’s brink, he was: curled up, empty of thought and motion, wearing the badge of violence upon his temple… a much photographed corpse. Bailey and Thompson had repeated the work of the previous night but without, Alleyn thought, a great deal of success. Water had flooded under duck boards, seeped up through earthy places soaked into Colonel Cartarette’s Harris tweeds and had collected in a pool in the palm of his right hand.
Dr. Curtis completed a superficial examination and stood up.
“That’s all I want here, Alleyn,” he said. “I’ve given Oliphant the contents of the pockets. A bundle of keys, tobacco, pipe, lighter. Fly case. Handkerchief. Pocket book with a few notes and a photograph of his daughter. That’s all. As for general appearances: rigor is well established and is, I think, about to go off. I understand you’ve found out that he was alive up to quarter past eight and that he was found dead at nine. I won’t get any closer in time than that.”
“The injuries?”
“I’d say, tentatively, two weapons, or possibly one weapon used in two ways. There’s a clean puncture with deep penetration, there’s a circular indentation with the puncture as its centre, and there’s been a heavy blow over the same area that has apparently caused extensive fracturing and a lot of extravasation. It might have been made by one of those stone-breaker’s hammers or even by a flat oval-shaped stone itself. I think it was the first injury he got. It would almost certainly have knocked him right out. Might have killed him. In any case it would have left him wide open to the second attack.”
Alleyn had moved round the body to the edge of the stream.
“And no prints?” he said looking at Bailey.
“There’s prints from the people that found him,” Bailey said, “clear enough. Man and woman. Overlapping and straight forward… walk towards, squat down, stand, walk away. And there’s his own heel marks, Mr. Alleyn, as you noticed last night. Half filled with surface drainage they were then, but you can see how he was, clear enough.”
“Yes,” Alleyn said. “Squatting on a bit of soft ground. Facing the stream. He’d cut several handfuls of grass with his knife and was about to wrap up that trout. There’s the knife, there’s the grass in his hands, and there’s the trout! A whopper if ever there was one. Sergeant Oliphant says the Colonel himself hooked and lost him some days ago.”
He stooped and slipped an exploratory finger into the trout’s maw. “Ah, yes,” he said, “it’s still there. We’d better have a look at it.”
His long fingers were busy for a minute. Presently they emerged from the jaws of the Old ’Un with a broken cast. “That’s not a standard commercial fly,” he said. “It’s a beautiful home-made one. Scraps of red feather and gold cloth bound with bronze hair, and I think I’ve seen its mates in the Colonel’s study. Rose Cartarette tied the flies for her father, and I fancy this is the one he lost when he hooked the Old ’Un on the afternoon before Sir Harold Lacklander’s death.”
Alleyn looked at the Colonel’s broken head and blankly acquiescent face. “But you didn’t hook him this time,” he said, “and why in the world should you shout, at half past seven, that you wouldn’t be seen dead with him, and be found dead with him at nine?”
He turned towards the stream. The willow grove sheltered a sort of miniature harbour with its curved bank going sheer down to the depth of about five feet at the top end of the little bay and running out in a stony shelf at the lower end. The stream poured into this bay with a swirling movement, turning back upon its course.
“Look here, Fox,” Alleyn said, “and here, above it.” He nodded at a group of tall daisies, strung along the edge of the bank up-stream from where the Colonel lay and perhaps a yard from his feet. They were in flower. Alleyn pointed to three leggy stems, taller than their fellows, from which the blooms had been cut away.
“You can move him,” he said. “But don’t tramp over the ground more than you can help. We may want another peer at it. And, by the way, Fox, have you noticed that inside the willow grove, near the point of entry, there’s a flattened patch of grass and several broken and bent twigs? Remember that Nurse Kettle thought she was observed. Go ahead, Oliphant.”
Sergeant Oliphant and P. C. Gripper came forward with a stretcher. They put it down some distance from the body, which they now raised. As they did so, a daisy head, crumpled and sodden, dropped from the coat.
“Pick it up, tenderly,” Alleyn said as he did so, “and treat it with care. We must find the other two if we can. This murderer said it with flowers.” He put it away in his case. Oliphant and Gripper laid the body on the stretcher and waited.
Alleyn found a second daisy on the bank below the point where Colonel Cartarette’s head had lain. “The third,” he said, “may have gone down-stream, but we’ll see.”
He now looked at Colonel Cartarette’s rod, squatting beside it where it rested on the bank, its point overhanging the stream. Alleyn lifted the cast, letting it dangle from his long fingers. “The fellow of the one that the Old ’Un broke for him,” he said.
He looked more closely at the cast and sniffed at it.
“He hooked a fish yesterday,” he said; “there’s a flake of flesh on the barb. Where, then, is this trout he caught? Too small? Did he chuck it back? Or what? Damn this ruined ground.” He separated the cast from the line and put it away in his case. He sniffed into the dead curved hands. “Yes,” he said, “he’s handled a fish. We’ll go over the hands, fingernails and clothes for any more traces. Keep that tuft of grass that’s in his hand. Where’s the rest of it?”