by Ngaio Marsh
“They manage by a freak. Within the last two generations the Lacklanders have won first prizes in world lotteries. I remember because I was still in the Foreign Service when George Lacklander rang the bell in the Calcutta Sweep. In addition to that, they’re fantastically lucky race-horse owners and possess one of the most spectacular collections of private jewels in England, which I suppose they could use as a sort of lucky dip if they felt the draught. Really, they’re one of the few remaining country families who are wealthy through sheer luck.”
“Is that so?” Fox observed mildly. “And Miss Kettle tells me they’ve stood high in the county for something like a thousand years. Never a scandal, she says, but then I daresay she’s partial.”
“I daresay. A thousand years,” Alleyn said dryly, “is a tidy reach even for the allegedly blameless Lacklanders.”
“Well, to Miss Kettle’s knowledge there’s never been the slightest hint of anything past or present.”
“When, for the love of wonder, did you enjoy this cosy chat with Nurse Kettle?”
“Last evening, Mr. Alleyn. When you were in the study, you know, Miss Kettle, who was saying at the time that the Colonel was quite one of the old sort, a real gentleman and so on, mentioned that she and her ladyship had chatted on the subject only that afternoon!” Fox stopped, scraped his chin and became abstracted.
“What’s up? What subject?”
“Well, er — class obligation and that style of thing. It didn’t seem to amount to anything last night, because at that stage no connection had been established with the family.”
“Come on.”
“Miss Kettle mentioned in passing that her ladyship had talked about the — er — the — er — as you might say — the — er — principle of ‘noblesse oblige’ and had let it be known she was very worried.”
“About what?”
“No particular cause was named.”
“And you’re wondering now if she was worried about the prospect of an imminent debunking through Chapter 7 of the blameless Lacklanders?”
“Well, it makes you think,” Fox said.
“So it does,” Alleyn agreed as they turned into the long drive to Nunspardon.
“She being a great lady.”
“Are you reminding me of her character, her social position or what Mr. Phinn calls her avoirdupois?”
“She must be all of seventeen stone,” Fox mused, “and I wouldn’t mind betting the son’ll be the same at her age. Very heavy-built.”
“And damn’ heavy going into the bargain.”
“Mrs. Cartarette doesn’t seem to think so.”
“My dear man, as you have already guessed, he’s the only human being in the district, apart from her husband, who’s sent her out any signals of any kind at all, and he’s sent plenty.”
“You don’t reckon she’s in love with him, though?”
“You never know — never. I daresay he has his ponderous attractions.”
“Ah, well,” Fox said and with an air of freshening himself up stared at a point some distance ahead. It was impossible to guess whether he ruminated upon the tender passion, the character of George Lacklander or the problematical gratitude of Kitty Cartarette. “You never know,” he sighed, “he may even be turning it over in his mind how long he ought to wait before it’ll be all right to propose to her.”
“I hardly think so, and I must say I hope she’s not building on it.”
“You’ve made up your mind, of course,” Fox said after a pause.
“Well, I have, Fox. I can only see one answer that will fit all the evidence, but unless we get the go-ahead sign from the experts in Chyning, we haven’t a case. There we are again.”
They had rounded the final bend in the drive and had come out before the now familiar façade of Nunspardon.
The butler admitted them and contrived to suggest with next to no expenditure of behaviour that Alleyn was a friend of the family and Fox completely invisible. Sir George, he said, was still at luncheon. If Alleyn would step this way, he would inform Sir George. Alleyn, followed by the unmoved Fox, was shown into George Lacklander’s study: the last of the studies they were to visit. It still bore, Alleyn recognized, the imprint of Sir Harold Lacklander’s personality, and he looked with interest at a framed caricature of his erstwhile chief made a quarter of a century ago when Alleyn was a promising young man in the Foreign Service. The drawing revived his memories of Sir Harold Lacklander; of his professional charm, his conformation to type, his sudden flashes of wit and his extreme sensitiveness to criticism. There was a large photograph of George on the desk, and it was strange to see in it, as Alleyn fancied he could, these elements adulterated and transformed by the addition of something that was either stupidity or indifference. Stupidity? Was George, after all, such an ass? It depended, as usual, on “what one meant” by an ass.
At this point in Alleyn’s meditations, George himself, looking huffily postprandial, walked, in. His expression was truculent.
“I should have thought, I must say, Alleyn,” he said, “that one’s luncheon hour at least might be left to one.”
“I’m sorry,” Alleyn said, “I thought you’d finished. Do you smoke between the courses, perhaps?”
Lacklander angrily pitched his cigarette into the fireplace. “I wasn’t hungry,” he said.
“In that case I am relieved that I didn’t, after all, interrupt you.”
“What are you driving at? I’m damned if I like your tone, Alleyn. What do you want?”
“I want,” Alleyn said, “the truth. I want the truth about what you did yesterday evening. I want the truth about what you did when you went to Hammer Farm last night. I want the truth, and I think I have it, about Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs. A man has been murdered. I am a policeman and I want facts.”
“None of these matters has anything to do with Cartarette’s death,” Lacklander said and wet his lips.
“You won’t persuade me of that by refusing to discuss them.”
“Have I said that I refuse to discuss them?”
“All right,” Alleyn sighed. “Without more ado, then, did you expect to find a copy of Chapter 7 when you broke open the drawer in Colonel Cartarette’s desk last night?”
“You’re deliberately insulting me, by God!”
“Do you deny that you broke open the drawer?”
Lacklander made a small gaping movement with his lips and an ineffectual gesture with his hands. Then, with some appearance of boldness he said, “Naturally, I don’t do anything of the sort. I did it by — at the desire of his family. The keys seemed to be lost and there were certain things that had to be done — people to be told and all that. She didn’t even know the name of his solicitors. And there were people to ring up. They thought his address book might be there.”
“In the locked drawer? The address book?”
“Yes.”
“Was it there?”
He boggled for a moment and then said, “No.”
“And you did this job before we arrived?”
“Yes.”
“At Mrs. Cartarette’s request?”
“Yes.”
“And Miss Cartarette? Was she in the search party?”
“No.”
“Was there, in fact, anything in the drawer?”
“No,” George said hardily. “There wasn’t.” His face had begun to look coarse and blank.
“I put it to you that you did not break open the drawer at Mrs. Cartarette’s request. It was you, I suggest, who insisted upon doing it because you were in a muck-sweat wanting to find out where the amended Chapter 7 of your father’s memoirs might be. I put it to you that your relationship with Mrs. Cartarette is such that you were in a position to dictate this manoeuvre.”
“No. You have no right, damn you—”
“I suggest that you are very well aware of the fact that your father wrote an amended version of Chapter 7 which was, in effect, a confession. In this version he stated firstly that
he himself was responsible for young Ludovic Phinn’s suicide and secondly that he himself had traitorously conspired against his own government with certain elements in the German Government. This chapter, if it were published, would throw such opprobrium upon your father’s name that in order to stop its being made public, I suggest, you were prepared to go to the lengths to which you have, in fact, gone. You are an immensely vain man with a confused, indeed a fanatical sense of your family prestige. Have you anything to say to all this?”
A tremor had begun to develop in George Lacklander’s hands. He glanced down at them and with an air of covering up a social blunder, thrust them into his pockets. Most unexpectedly he began to laugh, an awkward, rocketing sound made on the intake of breath, harsh as a hacksaw.
“It’s ridiculous,” he gasped, hunching his shoulders and bending at the waist in a spasm that parodied an ecstacy of amusement. “No, honestly, it’s too much!”
“Why,” Alleyn asked sedately, “are you laughing?”
Lacklander shook his head and screwed up his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he gasped. “Frightful of me, I know, but really!” Alleyn saw that through his almost sealed eyelids he was peeping out, wary and agitated. “You don’t mean to say you think that I—?” He waved away his uncompleted sentence with a flap of his pink freckled hand.
“That you murdered Colonel Cartarette, were you going to say?”
“Such a notion! I mean, how? When? With what?”
Alleyn, watching his antics, found them insupportable.
“I know I shouldn’t laugh,” Lacklander gabbled, “but it’s so fantastic. How? When? With what?” And through Alleyn’s mind dodged a disjointed jingle. “Quomodo? Quando? Quibus auxiliis?”
“He was killed,” Alleyn said, “by a blow and a stab. The injuries were inflicted at about five past eight last evening. The murderer stood in the old punt. As for ‘with what’—”
He forced himself to look at George Lacklander, whose face, like a bad mask, was still crumpled in a false declaration of mirth.
“The puncture,” Alleyn said, “was made by your mother’s shooting-stick and the initial blow—” he saw the pink hands flex and stretch, flex and stretch—“by a golf-club. Probably a driver.”
At that moment the desk telephone rang. It was Dr. Curtis for Alleyn.
He was still talking when the door opened and Lady Lacklander came in followed by Mark. They lined themselves up by George and all three watched Alleyn.
Curtis said, “Can I talk?”
“Ah yes,” Alleyn said airily. “That’s all right. I’m afraid I can’t do anything to help you, but you can go ahead quietly on your own.”
“I suppose,” Dr. Curtis’s voice said very softly, “you’re in a nest of Lacklanders?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“All right. I’ve rung up to tell you about the scales. Willy can’t find both types on any of the clothes or gear.”
“No?”
“No. Only on the rag: the paint-rag.”
“Both types on that?”
“Yes. And on the punt seat.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Shall I go on?”
“Do.”
Dr. Curtis went on. Alleyn and the Lacklanders watched each other.
CHAPTER XI
Between Hammer and Nunspardon
Nurse Kettle had finished her afternoon jobs in Swevenings, but before she returned to Chyning, she thought she should visit the child with the abscess in the gardener’s cottage at Hammer Farm. She felt some delicacy about this duty because of the calamity that had befallen the Cartarettes. Still, she could slip quietly round the house and down to the cottage without bothering anybody, and perhaps the gardener’s wife would have a scrap or two of mournful gossip for her about when the funeral was to take place and what the police were doing and how the ladies were bearing up and whether general opinion favoured an early marriage between Miss Rose and Dr. Mark. She also wondered privately what, if anything, was being said about Mrs. Cartarette and Sir George Lacklander, though her loyalty to The Family, she told herself, would oblige her to give a good slap down to any nonsense that was talked in that direction.
Perhaps her recent interview with Commander Syce had a little upset her. It had been such a bitter and unexpected disappointment to find him at high noon so distinctly the worse for wear. Perhaps it was disappointment that had made her say such astonishingly snappish things to him; or, more likely, she thought, anxiety. Because, she reflected as she drove up Watt’s Hill, she was dreadfully anxious about him. Of course, she knew very well that he had pretended to be prostrate with lumbago because he wanted her to go on visiting him, and this duplicity, she had to admit, gave her a cosy feeling under her diaphragm. But Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn would have a very different point of view about the deception; perhaps a terrifying point of view. Well, there, she thought, turning in at the Hammer Farm drive, it was no good at her age getting the flutters. In her simple snobbishness she comforted herself with the thought that “Handsome Alleyn,” as the evening papers called him, was the Right Sort, by which Nurse Kettle meant the Lacklander as opposed to the Kettle or Fox or Oliphant sort or, she was obliged to add to herself, the Kitty Cartarette sort. As this thought occurred to her, she compressed her generous lips. The memory had arisen of Commander Syce trying half-heartedly to conceal a rather exotic water-colour of Kitty Cartarette. It was a memory that, however much Nurse Kettle might try to shove it out of sight, recurred with unpleasant frequency.
By this time she was out of the car and stumping round the house by a path that ran down to the gardener’s cottage. She carried her bag and looked straight before her, and she quite jumped when she heard her name called: “Hullo, there! Nurse Kettle!”
It was Kitty Cartarette sitting out on the terrace with a tea-table in front of her. “Come and have some,” she called.
Nurse Kettle was dying for a good cup of tea, and what was more, she had a bone to pick with Kitty Cartarette. She accepted and presently was seated before the table.
“You pour out,” Kitty said. “Help yourself.”
She looked exhausted and had made the mistake of over-painting her face. Nurse Kettle asked her briefly if she had had any sleep.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “doped myself up to the eyebrows last night, but you don’t feel so good after it, do you?”
“You certainly do not. You want to be careful about that sort of thing, you know, dear.”
“Ah, what the hell!” Kitty said impatiently and lit a cigarette at the stub of her old one. Her hands shook. She burnt her finger and swore distractedly.
“Now, then,” Nurse Kettle said making an unwilling concession to the prompting of her professional conscience. “Steady.” And thinking it might help Kitty to talk, she asked, “What have you been doing with yourself all day, I wonder?”
“Doing? God, I don’t know. This morning for my sins I had to go over to Lacklanders’.”
Nurse Kettle found this statement deeply offensive in two ways. Kitty had commonly referred to the Lacklanders as if they were shopkeepers. She had also suggested that they were bores.
“To Nunspardon?” Nurse Kettle said with refinement. “What a lovely old home it is! A show place if ever there was one,” and she sipped her tea.
“The place is all right,” Kitty muttered under her breath.
This scarcely veiled slight upon the Lacklanders angered Nurse Kettle still further. She began to wish that she had not accepted tea from Kitty. She replaced her cucumber sandwich on her plate and her cup and saucer on the table.
“Perhaps,” she said, ’’you prefer Uplands.”
Kitty stared at her. “Uplands?” she repeated, and after a moment’s consideration she asked without any great display of interest, “Here! what are you getting at?”
“I thought,” Nurse Kettle said with mounting colour, “you might find the company at Uplands more to your taste than the company at Nunspardon.”
“G
eoff Syce?” Kitty gave a short laugh. “God, that old bit of wreckage! Have a heart!”
Nurse Kettle’s face was scarlet. “If the Commander isn’t the man he used to be,” she said, “I wonder whose fault it is.”
“His own, I should think,” Kitty said indifferently.
“Personally, I’ve found it’s more often a case of cherchez,” Nurse Kettle said carefully, “la femme.”
“What?”
“When a nice man takes to solitary drinking, it’s generally because some woman’s let him down.”
Kitty looked at her guest with the momentarily deflected interest of a bitter preoccupation. “Are you suggesting I’m the woman in this case?” she asked.
“I’m not suggesting anything. But you knew him out in the East, I believe?” Nurse Kettle added with a spurious air of making polite conversation.
“Oh, yes,” Kitty agreed contemptuously. “I knew him all right. Did he tell you? Here, what has he told you?” she demanded, and unexpectedly there was a note of something like desperation in her voice.
“Nothing, I’m sure, that you could take exception to; the Commander, whatever you like to say, is a gentleman.”
“How can you be such a fool,” Kitty said drearily.
“Well, really!”
“Don’t talk to me about gentlemen. I’ve had them, thank you. If you ask me, it’s a case of the higher you go the fewer. Look,” Kitty said with savagery, “at George Lacklander.”
“Tell me this,” Nurse Kettle cried out; “did he love you?”
“Lacklander?”
“No.” She swallowed and with dignity corrected Kitty, “I was referring to the Commander.”
“You talk like a kid. Love!”
“Honestly!”
“Look!” Kitty said. “You don’t know anything. Face it; you don’t know a single damn’ thing. You haven’t got a clue.”
“Well, I must say! You can’t train for nursing, I’ll have you know—”