Scales of Justice ra-18

by Ngaio Marsh

  He turned back to the riverbank and gathered up every blade of grass that was scattered where the Colonel had cut it. He examined the Colonel’s pocket knife and found that, in addition to having traces of grass, it smelt of fish. Then he very cautiously lifted the Old ’Un and examined the patch of stones where the great fish had lain all night.

  “Traces there, all right,” he said. “Are they all off this one fish, however? Look, there’s a sharp flinty bit of stone with a flap of fish skin on it. Now let’s see.”

  He turned the great trout over and searched its clamminess for a sign of a missing piece of skin and could find none. “This looks more like business,” he muttered and took out his pocket lens. His subordinates coughed and shifted their feet. Fox watched him with calm approval.

  “Well,” Alleyn said at last, “we’ll have to get an expert’s opinion and it may be crucial. But it’s pretty clear that he made a catch of his own, that it lay on this patch, that a bit of its skin was torn off on this stone, that the fish itself was subsequently removed and the Old ’Un put in its place. It doesn’t look as if it was chucked back in the stream, does it? In that case he would have taken it off his hook and thrown it back at once. He wouldn’t have laid it down on the bank. And why was a flap of its skin scraped off on the stone? And why was the Old ’Un laid over the trace of the other fish? And by whom? And when?”

  Fox said, “As for when: before the rain at all events. The ground shows that.”

  “That doesn’t help, since he was killed before the rain and found before the rain. But consider, Br’er Fox, he was killed with a tuft of cut grass in his hand. Isn’t it at least possible that he was cutting his grass to wrap up his own catch? He had refused to touch the Old ’Un and had left it lying on the bridge. The people who knew him best all agree he’d stick to his word. All right. Somebody kills him. Is it that ‘somebody’ who takes the Colonel’s fish and replaces it with the Old ’Un?”

  “You’d think so, Mr. Alleyn, wouldn’t you?”

  “And why did he do it?”

  “Gawd knows!” said Oliphant in disgust. Sergeants Bailey and Thompson and P. C. Gripper made sympathetic noises. Dr. Curtis, squatting by the stretcher, grinned to himself.

  “What was the actual position of the killer at the time of the blow or blows?” Alleyn continued. “As I read it, and you’ll correct me here, Curtis, Colonel Cartarette was squatting on his heels facing the stream with the cut grass in his hands. The heel marks and subsequent position suggest that when he was struck on the left temple he keeled over, away from the blow, and fell in the position in which Nurse Kettle found him. Now, he was either belted from behind by a lefthander or rammed by a sort of crouching charge from his left side or struck from the front by a swinging right-handed swipe… Yes, Oliphant?”

  Sergeant Oliphant said, “Well, pardon me, sir, I was only going to remark, would it be, for example, something like the sort of blow a quarryman gives a wedge that is sticking out from a rock-face at the level of his knee?”

  “Ah!” said P. C. Gripper appreciatively. “Or an underhand serve, like tennis.”

  “That kind of thing,” Alleyn said, exchanging a look with Fox. “Now there wasn’t enough room between the Colonel and the brink for such a blow to be delivered; which is why I suggested his assailant would have had to be three feet out on the surface of the stream. Now, take a look up-stream towards the bridge, Br’er Fox. Go roundabout, because we’ll still keep the immediate vicinity unmucked up, and then come out here.”

  Fox joined Alleyn on the lower bank of the little bay at the point where it jutted farthest out into the stream. They looked up the Chyne past the willow grove, which hid the near end of the bridge, to the far end, which was just visible about forty feet away with the old punt moored in the hole beneath it.

  Alleyn said, “Charming, isn’t it? Like a lead-pencil vignette in a Victorian album. I wonder if Lady Lacklander ever sketches from this point. Have you read The Rape of Lucrèce, Br’er Fox?”

  “I can’t say I have, unless it’s on the police list, which it sounds as if it might be. Or would it be Shakespeare?”

  “The latter. There’s a bit about the eccentricities of river currents. The poem really refers to the Avon at Clopton Bridge, but it might have been written about the Chyne at this very point. Something about the stream that, coming through an arch, “yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride back to the strait that forced him on.” Look at that twig sailing towards us now. It’s got into just such a current, do you see, and instead of passing down the main stream is coming into this bay. Here it comes. Round it swirls in the eddy and back it goes towards the bridge. It’s a strong and quite considerable sort of counter-current. Stay where you are, Fox, for a moment, will you. Get down on your sinful old hunkers and bow your head over an imaginary fish. Imitate the action of the angler. Don’t look up and don’t move till I tell you.”

  “Ah, what’s all this, I do wonder,” Mr. Fox speculated and squatted calmly at the water’s edge with his great hands between his feet.

  Alleyn skirted round the crucial area and disappeared into the willow grove.

  “What’s he up to?” Curtis asked of no one in particular and added a rude professional joke about Mr. Fox’s posture. Sergeant Oliphant and P. C. Gripper exchanged scandalized glances. Bailey and Thompson grinned. They all heard Alleyn walk briskly across Bottom Bridge, though only Fox, who faithfully kept his gaze on the ground, was in a position to see him. The others waited, expecting him for some reason of his own to appear on the opposite bank.

  It was quite a shock to Dr. Curtis, Bailey, Thompson, Oliphant and Gripper when round the up-stream point of the willow-grove bay the old punt came sliding with Alleyn standing in it, a wilted daisy head in his hand.

  The punt was carried transversely by the current away from the far bank and across the main stream into the little willow-grove harbour. It glided silently to rest, its square prow fitting neatly into the scar Alleyn had pointed out in the down-stream bank. At the same time its bottom grated on the gravel spit and it became motionless.

  “I suppose,” Alleyn said, “you heard that, didn’t you?”

  Fox looked up.

  “I heard it,” he said. “But I saw and heard nothing until then.”

  “Cartarette must have heard it too,” Alleyn said. “Which accounts, I fancy, for the daisies. Br’er Fox, do we think we know whodunit?”

  Fox said, “If I take your meaning, Mr. Alleyn, I think you think you do.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Watt’s Hill

  “Things to be borne in mind,” Alleyn said, still speaking from the punt. “Point one: I found the daisy head in the prow. That is to say, on the same line with the other two heads but a bit further from the point of impact. Point two: this old crock has got a spare mooring line about thirty feet long. It’s still made fast at the other end and I’ve only got to haul myself back. I imagine the arrangement is for the convenience of Lady Lacklander, who, judging by splashes of old water-colour and a squashed tube, occasionally paints from the punt. It’s a sobering thought. I should like to see her, resembling one of the more obese female deities, seated in the prow of the punt, hauling herself back to harbourage. There is also, by the way, a pale-yellow giant hairpin in close association with two or three cigarette butts, some with lipstick and some not. Been there for some considerable time, I should say, so that’s another story.”

  “Sir G.,” Fox ruminated, “and the girl-friend?”

  “Trust you,” Alleyn said, “for clamping down on the sex-story. To return. Point three: remember that the punt-journey would be hidden from the dwellers on Watt’s Hill. Only this end of the bridge and the small area between it and the willow grove is visible to them. You can take him away now, Gripper.” Dr. Curtis covered the body with the groundsheet. P. C. Gripper and the constable-driver of the Yard car, assisted by Bailey and Thompson, carried Colonel Cartarette out of the willow grove and along the banks of his private fishing
to Watt’s Lane, where the Swevenings hospital van awaited him.

  “He was a very pleasant gentleman,” said Sergeant Oliphant. “I hope we get this chap, sir.”

  “Oh, we’ll get him,” Fox remarked and looked composedly at his principal.

  “I suggest,” Alleyn said, “that the killer saw Cartarette from the other bank, squatting over his catch. I suggest that the killer, familiar with the punt, slipped into it, let go the painter and was carried by what I’d like to call Shakespeare’s current across the stream and into this bay, where the punt grounded and left the scar of its prow in the bank there. I suggest that this person was well enough acquainted with the Colonel for him merely to look up when he heard the punt grate on the gravel and not rise. You can see the punt’s quite firmly grounded. Now if I stand about here, rather aft of amidships, I’m opposite the place where Cartarette squatted over his task and within striking distance of him if the blow was of the kind I think it was.”

  “If,” said Fox.

  “Yes, I know, ‘if.’ If you know of a better damn’ theory, you can damn’ well go to it,” Alleyn said cheerfully.

  “O.K.,” Fox said. “I don’t, sir. So far.”

  “What may at first look tiresome,” Alleyn went on, “is the position of the three decapitated daisy stalks and their heads. It’s true that one swipe of a suitable instrument might have beheaded all three and landed one daisy on the Colonel, a second on the bank and a third in the punt. Fair enough. But the same swipe couldn’t have reached the Colonel himself.”

  Oliphant stared pointedly at the pole lying in the punt.

  “No, Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “You try standing in this punt, whirling that thing round your head, swishing it through the daisies and catching a squatting man neatly on the temple with the end. What do you think our killer is… a caber-tosser from Braemar?”

  “Do you reckon then,” Fox said, “that the daisies were beheaded by a second blow or earlier in the day? Or something?”

  Sergeant Oliphant suddenly remarked, “Pardon me, but did the daisies necessairily have anything to do with the crime?”

  “I think there’s probably a connection,” Alleyn rejoined, giving the sergeant his full attention. “The three heads are fresh enough to suggest it. One was in the Colonel’s coat and one was in the punt.”

  “Well, pardon me, sir.” the emboldened sergeant continued with a slight modulation of his theme, “but did the punt necessarily have any bearing on the crime?”

  “Unless we find a left-handed suspect, I think we must accept the punt as a working hypothesis. Have a look at the area between the punt and the place where the body lay and the patch of stones between the tuft from which the grass was cut and the place where the fish lay. It would be possible to step from the punt onto that patch of stones, and you would then be standing close to the position of Colonel Cartarette’s head. You would leave little or no trace of your presence. Now, on the willow-grove side of the body the ground is soft and earthy. The Colonel himself, Nurse Kettle and Dr. Lacklander have all left recognizable prints there. But there are no traces of a fourth visitor. Accept for the moment the theory that, after the Colonel had been knocked out, our assailant did step ashore onto the stony patch to deliver the final injury, or perhaps merely to make sure the victim was already dead. How would such a theory fit in with the missing trout, the punt and the daisies?”

  Alleyn looked from Oliphant to Fox. The former had assumed that air of portentousness that so often waits upon utter bewilderment. The latter merely looked mildly astonished. This expression indicated that Mr. Fox had caught on.

  Alleyn elaborated his theory of the trout, the punt and the daisies, building up a complete and detailed picture of one way in which Colonel Cartarette might have been murdered. “I realize,” he said, “that it’s all as full of ‘ifs’ as a passport to paradise. Produce any other theory that fits the facts and I’ll embrace it with fervour.”

  Fox said dubiously, “Funny business if it works out that way. About the punt, now…”

  “About the punt, yes. There are several pieces of cut grass in the bottom of the punt, and they smell of fish.”

  “Do they, now?” said Fox appreciatively and added, “So what we’re meant to believe in is a murderer who sails up to his victim in a punt and lays him out. Not satisfied in his own mind that the man’s dead, he steps ashore and has another go with another instrument. Then for reasons you’ve made out to sound O.K., Mr. Alleyn, though there’s not much solid evidence, he swaps the Colonel’s fish for the Old ’Un. To do this he has to tootle back in the punt and fetch it. And by way of a change at some time or another he swipes the heads off daisies. Where he gets his weapons and what he does with the first fish is a great big secret. Is that the story, Mr. Alleyn?”

  “It is and I’m sticking to it. Moreover, I’m leaving orders, Oliphant, for a number one search for the missing fish. And meet me,” Alleyn said to Fox, “on the other bank. I’ve something to show you.”

  He gathered up the long tow-rope, pulled himself easily into the counter-current and so back across forty feet of water to the boatshed. When Fox, having come round by the bridge, joined him there, he was shaking his head.

  “Oliphant and his boy have been over the ground like a herd of rhinos,” he said. “Getting their planks last night. Pity. Still… have a look here, Fox.”

  He led the way into a deep hollow on the left bank. Here the rain had not obliterated the characteristic scars left by Lady Lacklander’s sketching stool and easel. Alleyn pointed to them. “But the really interesting exhibit is up here on the hillock. Come and see.”

  Fox followed him over grass that carried faint signs of having been trampled. In a moment they stood looking down at a scarcely perceptible hole in the turf. It still held water. The grass nearby showed traces of pressure.

  “If you examine that hole closely,” Alleyn said, “you’ll see it’s surrounded by a circular indentation.”

  “Yes,” Fox said after a long pause, “yes, by God, so it is. Same as the injury, by God.”

  “It’s the mark of the second weapon,” Alleyn said. “It’s the mark of a shooting-stick, Br’er Fox.”

  “Attractive house,” Alleyn said as they emerged from the Home Coppice into full view of Nunspardon, “attractive house, Fox, isn’t it?”

  “Very fine residence,” Fox said. “Georgian, would it be?”

  “It would. Built on the site of the former house, which was a nunnery. Hence Nunspardon. Presented (as usual, by Henry VIII) to the Lacklanders. We’ll have to go cautiously here, Br’er Fox, by gum, we shall. They’ll have just about finished their breakfast. I wonder if Lady Lacklander has it downstairs or in her room. She has it downstairs,” he added as Lady Lacklander herself came out of the house with half a dozen dogs at her heels.

  “She’s wearing men’s boots!” Fox observed.

  “That may be because of her ulcerated toe.”

  “Ah, to be sure. Lord love us!” Fox ejaculated. “She’s got a shooting-stick on her arm.”

  “So she has. It may not be the one. And then again,” Alleyn muttered as he removed his hat and gaily lifted it on high to the distant figure, “it may.”

  “Here she comes. No, she doesn’t.”

  “Hell’s boots, she’s going to sit on it.”

  Lady Lacklander had in fact begun to tramp towards them but had evidently changed her mind. She answered Alleyn’s salute by waving a heavy gardening glove at him. Then she halted, opened her shooting-stick and, with alarming empiricism, let herself down on it.

  “With her weight,” Alleyn said crossly, “she’ll bloody well bury it. Come on.”

  As soon as they were within hailing distance, Lady Lacklander shouted, “Good morning to you.” She then remained perfectly still and stared at them as they approached. Alleyn thought, “Old basilisk! She’s being deliberately embarrassing, damn her,” and he returned the stare with inoffensive interest, smiling vaguely.

  “H
ave you been up all night?” she asked when they were at an appropriate distance. “Not that you look like it, I must say.”

  Alleyn said, “We’re sorry to begin plaguing you so early but we’re in a bit of a jam.”

  “Baffled?”

  “Jolly nearly. Do you mind,” Alleyn went on with what his wife would have called sheer rude charm, “do you mind having your brains picked at nine o’clock in the morning?”

  “What do you want with other people’s brains, I should like to know,” she said. Her eyes, screwed in between swags of flesh, glittered at him.

  Alleyn embarked on a careful tarradiddle. “We begin to wonder,” he said, “if Cartarette’s murderer may have been lying doggo in the vicinity for some time before the assault.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “I mean really doggo. And as far as we know, which is not as far as we’d like, there’s no telling exactly where the hiding place could have been. We think it might have been somewhere that commanded at any rate a partial view of the bridge and the willow grove. We also think that it may have overlooked your sketching hollow.”

  “You’ve discovered where that is, have you?”

  “Simplicity itself, I promise you. You used an easel and a sketching stool.”

  “And with my weight to sustain,” she said rocking, to his dismay, backwards and forwards on the shooting-stick, “the latter no doubt left its mark.”

  “The thing is,” Alleyn said, “we think this person in hiding may have waited until he saw you go before coming out of cover. Did you stay down in your hollow all the time?”

  “No, I had a look at my sketch several times from a distance. Anaemic beast it turned out, in the end.”

  “Where exactly did you stand when you looked at it?”

  “On the rise between the hollow and the bridge. You can’t have gone over your ground properly or you’d have found that out for yourself.”