by Ngaio Marsh
He replaced the book and turned to the desk with its indescribable litter of pamphlets, brochures, unopened and opened letters, newspapers and magazines. Having inspected the surface, he began, gingerly, to disturb the top layer and in a moment or two had disclosed a letter addressed to “Octavius Phinn, Esq.” in the beautiful and unmistakable handwriting of Colonel Cartarette.
Alleyn had just had time enough to discover that it contained about thirty pages of typescript marked on the outside: “7,” when he heard Fox’s voice on the stairs. He turned away and placed himself in front of the portrait.
Mr. Phinn and Fox reappeared with the fishing gear.
“I have,” Alleyn said, “been enjoying this very charming portrait.”
“My wife.”
“Am I imagining — perhaps I am — a likeness to Dr. Mark Lacklander?”
“There was,” Mr. Phinn said shortly, “a distant connection. Here are my toys,”
He was evidently one of those anglers who cannot resist the call of the illustrated catalogue and the lure of the gadget. His creel, his gaff, his net, his case of flies and his superb rod were supplemented by every conceivable toy, all of them, Alleyn expected, extremely expensive. His canvas bag was slotted and pocketted to receive these mysteries, and Alleyn drew them out one after another to discover that they were all freshly cleaned and in wonderful order.
“With what fly,” he asked Mr. Phinn, “did you hook the Old ’Un? It must have been a Homeric struggle, surely?”
“Grant me the bridge,” Mr. Phinn shouted excitedly, “grant me that, and I’ll tell you.”
“Very well,” Alleyn conceded with a grin, “we’ll take the bridge in our stride. I concede it. Let’s have the story.”
Mr. Phinn went strongly into action. It appeared that, at the mention of his prowess, the emotions that had so lately seemed to grip him were completely forgotten. Fear, if he had known fear, paternal anguish, if he had in fact experienced it, and anger, if it was indeed anger that had occasionally moved him, were all abandoned for the absolute passion of the angler. He led them out of doors, exhibited his retrospective prowess in casting, led them in again and re-enacted in the strangest pantomime his battle with the Old ’Un: how he was played, with breath-taking reverses, up through the waters under the bridge and into Mr. Phinn’s indisputable preserves; how he was nearly lost, and what cunning he displayed, and how Mr. Phinn countered with even greater cunning of his own. Finally there was the great capitulation, the landing and the coup de grâce, this last being administered, as Mr. Phinn made clear in spirited pantomime, with a sort of angler’s cosh: a short, heavily leaded rod.
Alleyn took this instrument in his hand and balanced it. “What do you call the thing?” he asked.
“A priest,” Mr. Phinn said. “It is called a priest. I don’t know why.”
“Perhaps because of its valedictory function.” He laid it on the desk and placed Commander Syce’s arrow beside it. Mr. Phinn stared but said nothing.
“I really must return his arrow to Commander Syce,” Alleyn said absently. “I found it in the spinney, embedded in a tree trunk.”
He might have touched off a high-explosive. The colour flooded angrily into Mr. Phinn’s face and he began to shout of the infamies of Commander Syce and his archery. The death of Thomasina Twitchett’s mother at the hands of Commander Syce was furiously recalled. Syce, Mr. Phinn said, was a monster, an alcoholic sadist, possessed of a blood-lust. It was with malice aforethought that he had transfixed the dowager Twitchett. The plea of accident was ridiculous: the thing was an obsession. Syce would drink himself into a sagittal fury and fire arrows off madly into the landscape. Only last night, Mr. Phinn continued, when he himself was returning from the Chyne after what he now called his little mésentente with Colonel Cartarette, the Commander’s bow was twanging away on the archery lawn and Mr. Phinn had actually heard the “tuck” of an arrow in a tree trunk dangerously near to himself. The time was a quarter past eight. He remembered hearing his clock chime at the same time.
“I think you must be mistaken,” Alleyn put in mildly. “Nurse Kettle tells us that last evening Commander Syce was completely incapacitated by an acute attack of lumbago.”
Mr. Phinn shouted out a rude and derisive word. “A farrago of nonsense!” he continued. “Either she is his accomplice or his paramour or possibly,” he amended more charitably, “his dupe. I swear he was devilishly active last night. I swear it. I trembled lest my Thomasina, who had accompanied me to the Chyne, should share the fate of her mama. She did not join me on my return but had preferred to linger in the evening air. Indeed, the reason for my perhaps slightly dramatic entry into Hammer in the early hours of this morning was my hope of retrieving my errant Fur. The dreadful news with which you met me quite put her out of my head,” Mr. Phinn concluded and did not look as if he expected to be believed.
“I see,” Alleyn said and did not look as if he believed him. “Quite a chapter of accidents. Do you mind if we take possession of your fishing gear for a short time? Part of a routine check, you know.”
Mr. Phinn was at a loss for words. “But how quite extraordinary!” he at last exclaimed. “My fishing gear? Well, I suppose one must not refuse.”
“We shan’t keep it any longer than is necessary,” Alleyn assured him.
Fox put the kit in order and slung it over his massive shoulder.
“And also, I’m afraid,” Alleyn said apologetically, “the shoes and suit that you wore on your fishing expedition.”
“My shoes? My suit! But why, why! I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.”
“It may be some comfort to you to know that I shall make the same awkward demands of at least four other persons.”
Mr. Phinn seemed to brighten a little. “Blood?” he asked.
“Not necessarily,” Alleyn said coolly. “This and that, you know, and the other thing. May we have them?”
“A fat lot of use,” Mr. Phinn muttered, “if I said no. And in any case you are perfectly welcome to every garment I possess. Homicidally speaking, they are as pure as the driven snow.”
When he saw them, Alleyn reflected that although, homicidally speaking, this might be true, from any other point of view it was grossly inaccurate: Mr. Phinn’s angling garments were exceedingly grubby and smelt quite strongly of fish. Alleyn saw with satisfaction a slimy deposit on the right leg of a pair of old-fashioned knickerbockers. The shoes were filthy and the stockings in holes. With a gesture of defiance, their owner flung on top of them a dilapidated tweed hat with the usual collection of flies in the band.
“Make what you like of them,” he said grandly, “and see that you let me have them back in the order in which you receive them.”
Alleyn gave him grave assurance to this effect and wrapped up the garments. Fox wrote out a receipt for the unlovely bundle.
“We won’t keep you any longer,” Alleyn said, “unless by any chance you would care to give us a true account of your ramblings in the watches of the night.”
Mr. Phinn gaped at him and in doing so resembled for the moment the Old ’Un himself.
“Because,” Alleyn went on, “you haven’t done so yet, you know. I mean, your story of seeing lighted windows and calling to tell the Colonel of your catch was completely blown-up by Lady Lacklander. And your latest version… that you were on the hunt for your mother-cat… really won’t do at all. Feline nursing mothers, and you tell us this is a particularly devoted one, do not desert their kittens for six hours on end. Moreover, we came upon Mrs. Twitchett last night on her way home about half past twelve. And why, if the Twitchett story was the true one, did you not produce it in the first instance?” Alleyn waited for some seconds. “You see,” he said, “you have no answer to any of these questions.”
“I shall not make any further statements. I prefer to remain silent.”
“Shall I tell you what I think may have happened last night? I think that when you made your first remark as you stood in the Fren
ch window at Hammer, you said something that was near the truth. I think that either then, or perhaps earlier in the evening, you had sallied out in search of your great trout. I think you regretted having flung it down on the bridge during your quarrel with Colonel Cartarette. You knew he wouldn’t touch it, because he had told you so and had gone off, leaving it there. Did you not go down into the valley of the Chyne to retrieve the trout, and did you not find it gone from the bridge when you got there?”
The colour mounted in Mr. Phinn’s face in uneven patches. He lowered his chin and looked quickly at Alleyn from under his meagre brows. But he said nothing.
“If this is so,” Alleyn went on, “and I am encouraged by your silence to hope that it may be, I can’t help wondering what you did next. Did you come straight back to Hammer and seeing the lighted windows make up your mind to accuse the Colonel of having pinched your fish after all? But no. If that had been so, your behaviour would have been different. You would not, before you were aware of his death, have trembled and gone white to the lips. Nor would you have invented your cock-and-bull story of wanting to tell the Colonel all about your catch: a story that was at once disproved when Lady Lacklander told us about your row with the Colonel over that very catch and by the fact that for a long time you have not been on visiting terms with your neighbour.”
Mr. Phinn had turned aside, and Alleyn walked round him until they were again face-to-face.
“How,” he said, “is one to explain your behaviour of last night? Shall I tell you what I think? I think that when you arrived at Hammer Farm at five past one this morning, you knew already that Colonel Cartarette was dead.”
Still Mr. Phinn said nothing.
“Now if this is true,” Alleyn said, “and again you don’t deny it, you have misinformed us about your movements. You let us understand that you returned to the bottom meadow just before you came to Hammer Farm at about one o’clock. But your coat was as dry as a chip. So it must have been much earlier in the evening before the rain that you returned to the bridge in the hope of retrieving the fish and found it gone. And knowing that the Colonel was fishing his own waters not far away, would you not seek him out? Now, if you did behave as I have suggested, you did so at a time when nobody saw you. That must have been after Lady Lacklander, Mrs. Cartarette and Dr. Lacklander had all gone home. Mrs. Cartarette reached Hammer Farm at about five past eight, and Dr. Lacklander went home at a quarter past eight. Neither of them saw the trout. On my working hypothesis, then, you revisited the valley after a quarter past eight and, one would suppose, before a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle did so. And there, Mr. Phinn, in the willow grove you found Colonel Cartarette’s dead body with your mammoth trout beside it. And didn’t Nurse Kettle very nearly catch you in the willow grove?”
Mr. Phinn ejaculated, “Has she said—” and caught his voice back.
“No,” Alleyn said. “Not specifically. It is I who suggest that you hid and watched her and crept away when she had gone. I suggest, moreover, that when you bolted for cover, your reading spectacles were snatched from your hat by an envious sliver and that in your panic and your terror of being seen, you dared not look for them. Possibly you did not realize they had gone until you got home. And that’s why, after the rain, you stole out again — to try and find your glasses in case they were lost in a place where they might incriminate you. Then you saw the lights of Hammer Farm and dared go no further. You couldn’t endure the suspense of not knowing if the Colonel had been found. You drew nearer and Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shone in your eyes.”
Alleyn turned to the window and looked down at Mr. Phinn’s spinney, at the upper reaches of the Chyne and at a glimpse, between trees, of the near end of the bridge.
“That,” he said, “is how I think you moved about the landscape yesterday evening and last night.” Alleyn drew a pair of spectacles from the breast pocket of his coat and dangled them before Mr. Phinn. “I’m afraid I can’t let you have them back just yet. But”—he extended his long finger toward Mr. Phinn’s breast pocket—“isn’t that a magnifying glass you have managed to unearth?”
Mr. Phinn was silent.
“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s our view of your activities. It’s a picture based on your own behaviour and one or two known facts. If it is accurate, believe me, you will be wise to say so.”
Mr. Phinn said in an unrecognizable voice, “And if I don’t choose to speak?”
“You will be within your rights, and we shall draw our own conclusions.”
“You still don’t give me the famous Usual Warning one hears so much about?”
“No.”
“I suppose,” Mr. Phinn said, “I am a timid man, but I know, in respect of this crime, that I am an innocent one.”
“Well, then,” Alleyn said and tried to lend the colour of freshness to an assurance he had so often given, “your innocence should cancel your timidity. You have nothing to fear.”
It seemed to Alleyn as he watched Mr. Phinn that he was looking on at the superficial signs of a profound disturbance. It was as if Mr. Phinn’s personality had been disrupted from below like a thermal pool and in a minute or two would begin to boil.
Some kind of climax was in fact achieved, and he began to talk very rapidly in his high voice.
“You are a very clever man. You reason from character to fact and back again. There! I have admitted everything. It’s all quite true. I tiffed with Cartarette. I flung my noble Fin on the bridge. I came home but did not enter my house. I walked distractedly about my garden. I repented of my gesture and returned. The Fin had gone. I sought out my rival and because of the howl of his dog — a disagreeable canine’I found him—” here Mr. Phinn shut his eyes very tight- “no, really, it was too disagreeable! Even though his hat was over his face, one knew at a glance. And the dog never even looked at one. Howl! Howl! I didn’t go near them, but I saw my fish! My trout! My Superfin! And then, you know, I heard her. Kettle. Stump, stump, stump past the willow grove. I ran, I doubled, I flung myself on my face in the undergrowth and waited until she had gone. And then I came home,” said Mr. Phinn, “and as you have surmised, I discovered the loss of my reading glasses, which I frequently keep in my hatband. I was afraid. And there you are.”
“Yes,” Alleyn said, “there we are. How do you feel about making a signed statement to this effect?”
“Another statement. O, tedious task! But I am resigned.”
“Good. We’ll leave you to write it with the aid of your reading glasses. Will you begin with the actual catching of the Old ’Un?”
Mr. Phinn nodded.
“And you are still disinclined to tell us the full substance of your discussion with Colonel Cartarette?”
Mr. Phinn nodded.
He had his back to the windows and Alleyn faced them. Sergeant Oliphant had come out of the spinney and stood at the foot of the garden. Alleyn moved up to the windows. The sergeant, when he saw him, put his thumb up and turned back into the trees.
Fox picked up the parcel of clothes.
Alleyn said, “We’ll call later for the statement. Or perhaps you would bring it to the police-station in Chyning this evening?”
“Very well.” Mr. Phinn swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “After all,” he said, “I would hardly desert my Glorious Fin. Would I?”
“You did so before. Why shouldn’t you do so again?”
“I am completely innocent.”
“Grand. We mustn’t bother you any longer. Goodbye, then, until, shall we say, five o’clock in Chyning.”
They went out by a side door and down the garden to the spinney. The path wound downhill amongst trees to a stile that gave onto the river path. Here Sergeant Oliphant waited for them. Alleyn’s homicide bag, which had been entrusted to the sergeant, rested on the stile. At the sound of their voices he turned, and they saw that across his palms there lay a sheet of newspaper.
On the newspaper were the dilapidated remains of a trout.
> “I got ’er,” said Sergeant Oliphant.
“She was a short piece above the bridge on this side,” explained the sergeant, who had the habit of referring to inanimate but recalcitrant objects in the feminine gender. “Laying in some long grass to which I’d say she’d been dragged. Cat’s work, sir, as you can see by the teeth-marks.”
“As we supposed,” Alleyn agreed. “Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett’s work.”
“A nice fish; she’s been, say, two pound, but nothing to the Old ’Un,” said the sergeant.
Alleyn laid the paper and its contents on a step of the stile and hung fondly over it. Mrs. Twitchett, if indeed it was she, had made short work of most of the Colonel’s trout, if indeed this was his trout. The body was picked almost clean and some of the smaller bones had been chewed. The head appeared to have been ejected after a determined onslaught and the tail was semi-detached. But from the ribs there still depended some pieces of flesh and rags of skin that originally covered part of the flank and belly of the fish, and it was over an unlovely fragment of skin that Alleyn pored. He laid it out flat, using two pairs of pocket tweezers for the purpose, with a long finger pointed to something that might have been part of an indented scar. It was about a quarter of an inch wide and had a curved margin. It was pierced in one place as if by a short spike.
“Now blow me down flat,” Alleyn exulted, “if this isn’t the answer to the good little investigating officer’s prayer. See here, Fox, isn’t this a piece of the sort of scar we would expect to find? And look here.”
Very gingerly he turned the trout over and discovered, clinging to the other flank, a further rag of skin with the apex of a sharp triangular gap in it.
“Sink me if I don’t have a look,” Alleyn muttered.
Under Oliphant’s enchanted gaze, he opened his case, took from it a flat enamel dish, which he laid on the bottom step of the stile, and a small glass jar with a screw-on lid. Using his tweezers, he spread out the piece of skin with the triangular gap on the plate. From the glass jar he took the piece of skin that had been found on the sharp stone under the Old ’Un. Muttering and whistling under his breath, and with a delicate dexterity, he laid the second fragment beside the first, opened it out and pushed and fiddled the one into the other as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They fitted exactly.