Affairs of Death

by Nigel Fitzgerald

  “I imagine that when you went home you and Barney corresponded through Kinky; it would have been a fairly obvious precaution. The drawback was that Kinky is over-sexed and that Barney not only was out of touch with his wife but that out of a misplaced sense of respect he had refrained from seducing you, in any case you weren’t on the spot. It could, of course, be that you were determined to keep the cherry well wrapped till you got what you wanted in return.”

  “Need you be so coarse, darling?” she inquired.

  “The upshot was that Barney and Kinky embarked on an affair that was entirely physical, though he probably remained romantically in love with you. That was the state of things till the matter of the field came up. Probably what you told me about that was largely the truth, except that it had been given to you, of course, not Kinky, though she may have acted as go-between for you in the re-sale — you couldn’t have let your mother know anything at all about the field. And I don’t believe for a moment that you thought that it was Barney who wanted it back. He was in America; you may have thought that he was cooling off; you were offered more money for the field than you had ever handled in your life, so you sold. A couple of hundred in the hand was better than a millionaire in the bush — and you may have thought that Barney would not learn about the sale till after you’d had a chance to pitch him some cock and bull story to account for it. Anyhow you couldn’t refuse the ready cash.”

  “I’ve never had money, darling. That’s why I like it.”

  “You hadn’t reckoned with Stella. She bought back the field anonymously, offered you a ridiculous price for it so that you couldn’t refuse to sell, on purpose to show you up. She didn’t tell Barney that it was she who had bought it, so she didn’t have to admit that she knew of your existence — yet she succeeded in showing you up. On account of the oil, Barney had to go into the question of ownership the moment he got back from America, and he found that you had cared so little for his present that you got rid of it without even telling him. From your point of view, of course, you hadn’t just sold a five acre field, you had killed the golden goose. Barney had given you the field when it appeared to be of little value, when only he knew about the prospects of oil, and he was too much of an instinctive business-man to tell even you about the possible future value of his present. On his return from America, then, Barney was faced not only with the realisation of what you had done but with the necessity of somehow getting back the field from some mysterious unknown who must surely have got wind of his plans. No wonder you were unpopular with him for a bit. That was the situation when you and I got to Rossderg on the bus last Thursday evening.”

  Juliet seemed to be no more than politely interested; she had abandoned her reclining position and was sitting up with her arms folded across her stomach. Of this I was rather glad. I noticed that the boat had begun to rock a little.

  “I’m not surprised that when you heard about the oil — I know it was only a rumour — you began to feel that you’d been double-crossed and began to hate Kinky; you had always hated Stella. You had been able to wind Barney round your finger in the past, though, and you might be able to do it again, but of one thing you were certain: you must clinch matters with Barney on this visit or say good-bye to your hopes of any permanent relationship with him. That was when you decided that I was your only ace. At the party you took pains to impress on me that Stella was mine for the asking. You weren’t particularly subtle about it but your time was short; if you were to have any chance, I must take Stella back to London with me when I left. You weren’t to know that I should have taken her away with me, if she had lived.”

  Juliet’s expression hardened a little; that was her only reaction.

  “That was the position on the morning of last Friday when I went down to the Hazard Arms to telephone. I dropped a letter — remember? You picked it up.”

  “I picked up nothing at that pub except a headache,” she said.

  “I don’t know whether you read that letter at once or waited till you could be alone on the beach — you were going for a swim with the Myleses. In any case you must have thought when you read it that your last hope was gone; I would now go back to my wife, instead of taking Stella away with me. You left the Myleses on the beach and followed me, perhaps to try and find out what I was really going to do. You watched us in the hay-field; you saw Barney leave the field and drive away, you saw me make love to Stella on the wind, and your hate for us all mounted. You must have thought that this was my farewell to Stella before I went back to my wife — you didn’t know that I had not then read the letter.”

  I could see hate for me in her eyes now; I was sure that I was right. I was very, very nearly sure that I was right.

  “You watched us and you let your hate simmer. Stella had a husband and a lover, so had Kinky; Barney had a mistress and a wife, and so had I. And you had nothing — not even the little five acre section of a possible oilfield that you could have had if you hadn’t been so greedy — and it was Stella who stood between you and everything. You knew that there was at large a murderer who had driven a hay-fork into a girl’s body, and there were hay-forks standing ready in the field; you would like nothing better than to plunge one of them into Stella’s body. Then I went for a swim — by myself — and your way was clear. You hid my clothes to delay my return and went back to the hay-field and spoke to Stella, because you couldn’t get at her with the fork while she was on top of the wind. She was naked, sun-bathing, so she asked you to bring her a bikini from a pile of things beside the luncheon-basket. You did, and she put it on, then she slid down to talk to you. What you did was to hold a fork so that she slid down on to its tines and impaled herself.”

  “It makes a nice story,” Juliet said. I could read nothing at all in her eyes now.

  “Why you happened to have a magnifying glass with you I don’t know, but you had. You left it so that it would concentrate the sun’s rays on some dry loose hay by Stella’s head. You did this so as to complete the picture, originally painted by Scanlon, of impalement and fire; there was the additional advantage that the fire would not get going till you were well out of the way. What you did after that is of no damned interest to me or to anyone else.”

  She said nothing. The boat was teetering now as if her keel were balanced on a whale’s back. The sun had turned lemon yellow and was more dazzling but had lost its heat. Perhaps it was the catalogue of enormities that I had been reciting that made me feel that the ocean was going to rise up silently and engulf us. If Juliet had an answer to what I had said, I hoped that she would not take too long about it; our time was running out, and I longed for a cigarette. Apparently I must have longed out loud.

  “I’ve got some here,” she said.

  There was not sufficient room in her costume to have concealed a pea; her bathing-cap, however, was on the thwart in front of her. She stretched out a hand to get it. Instinctively I got to my feet; she might still make a grab for a fish-spear. From the cap she took a tiny packet of the cheapest brand of cigarettes and a box of matches; she lobbed the packet towards me. There was something pathetic about her action and the inferiority of what she had to offer that made me feel rather more of a beast than I had already considered myself to be; I was not so much distracted, though, as to forget to keep half an eye fixed on the fish-spears. Perhaps that was why I failed to notice that she had picked up an oar that lay across the thwarts till she had lunged with it with all her weight, stabbing its blade at my groin. It was only at the last fraction of a second that I managed to twist out of the direct line to escape with a momentarily crippling blow that removed a neat slice of skin and flesh from my hip. With no one at the tiller the boat was dancing a slow waltz; I could not regain my balance and subsided backwards into the sea.

  It was lucky for me that Juliet, too, lost her balance. She, however, merely fell over the thwart and landed on her face with the loss of a few odd sections of skin from her decorative anatomy; she had only to pick herself up and get to t
he tiller. My problem was more complex. We were roughly perhaps half a mile to a mile from the nearest point of the mainland, the inhospitable outer cliffs of Hazard Point, and at least twice that distance from safety in the bay; the nearest land of any kind was a barren island some three furlongs off, a long swim for a man out of condition in a rising sea. Moreover, it was not at all certain that, if I managed to make the distance, I should find it possible to get ashore. It was also to be remembered that these gloomy calculations left my cousin Juliet out of the reckoning, and out of the reckoning was something that the little bitch seemed determined not to be. Within a minute she had me located and, fish-spear in hand, was bearing down on me.

  A rowing boat with an outboard-engine is no power-craft but it can make better speed through the water than a swimmer can — and keep it up for a longer time. On the first run that she made at me I felt the boat’s bows pushing at my shoulders, trying to ride over me; all that I had to do was to turn over and fend off, pushing myself out of the line. Then, of course, the stern came abreast and there was Juliet with her spear stabbing down at my face. She was not so expert with the spear as she had proved herself to be with the hay-fork, but I was moving, the boat was moving and the sea was moving; my head, too, must have presented a less obvious target than Stella’s naked diaphragm had been. Nevertheless she ripped a shoulder with a glancing thrust. She was soon past me, though, and had to turn the boat full circle before she could come in again for the kill. How far could I swim in the time? Thirty or forty yards perhaps, a rate that would give her nearly twenty chances at me on the six hundred yard swim to the island. She would not have to go the full distance, because I could not; sheer tiredness, and maybe loss of blood, must slow me down so much that I must soon be at her mercy. At least my mind was still working properly — but for how long? I had just come to the conclusion that only by the immediate exercise of guile could I hope to survive when I felt something like a sharp bite in my left thigh and a gentle but persistent tug. This was too much; it seemed as though the fish were joining in on Juliet’s side.

  Investigation proved that it was not a mackerel but the hook on the end of the line that I had put out to catch mackerel. Painfully but quickly I removed the hook but held on to the line; it proved strong enough to tow me through the water. At any moment it might break, but at least it gave me a respite, a rest from swimming and leisure to think, though it was not at the moment getting me any nearer to land; then a wreath of floating seaweed suddenly encircling my neck gave me an idea. I have said that the slack water in the lee of the reef was a forest of sailor’s boot-laces; if I could lead Juliet into that forest, I might become entangled and drown but it was odds on that the weed would snarl up the propeller and immobilise the boat for a time at any rate. It was worth trying because I could think of nothing else to try. The boat had now travelled through a full arc of 360 degrees back to the approximate position in which Juliet had launched her spear attack and I was still in its wake — a fact which must be worrying my murderous cousin — while, more to the point, I was between the boat and the reef and therefore had a start of some forty yards in my flight to the shelter of the sailor’s boot-laces. I let go of the line and went into a racing crawl.

  I was not far short of my goal when I judged by the sound that the boat was almost on top of me. This time I did not wait for it to touch me but swung round to shove off with my feet; I was only just in time. Juliet had come up to the bows and had an oar poised for a hammer-blow; she launched it at my head and missed. The thin edge of the oar-blade sliced into the water beside my ear, and the water held it and pushed it back at me; I grabbed it and held on. I felt strong slimy tentacles trying to wrap themselves round my legs as the boat with no one at the tiller carried us deep into the forest of weed.

  Juliet had seen the danger too late; perhaps she had not recognised it. It was only, I think, when the engine gave a last cough and fell silent that she realised that the oar which I was holding might yet be vital to her. We faced each other for a moment not like two fighting dogs but like two rats; her eyes held such viciousness as I had not seen before and hope that I never shall.

  Tired though I was from swimming and weakened by loss of blood, I could probably have got the oar away from her without much difficulty, but I wanted more than that; I wanted to get into the boat — if I could. She not only wanted the oar, she wanted to kill me. It was not quite stalemate; her job on the whole seemed more practicable than mine. For the moment we were linked by the oar. Suddenly I pulled on it hard. I let go with one hand and grabbed her wrist then I sought for a hold with my other hand; my hands were too slimy, though, from contact with seaweed to get a grip on her bare flesh. I twisted my fingers in her bikini-top but it came away in my hand just as I felt a searing pain from the point of a fish-spear glancing along a rib and slid under water to the embrace of a thousand sailors’ boot-laces. It seemed an age before I worked my way gently back to the surface, gently because struggling against weed only makes it hold the more tightly. As I came up into the air, something bumped against my face; it was the oar. I hitched my arms over it and gasped for breath.

  A few yards away was the boat. Juliet was working desperately to get the engine in-board. I supposed that she could cut the weed away with the point of a spear, then she would have to replace the engine — and with any luck she might drop it into the sea — then she would have to paddle her way out of the weed with one oar; all this would take some time. What I had to do was less complicated: I had to get back to the shore. It was high time that I got on my way.

  “I’ll come back for you,” I called without much conviction.

  She glanced at me but said nothing. With the pale sun shining on her pale hair and golden skin she looked like an angel again — an angel with the devil in her eyes.

  Outside of the slack water the surface of the sea was rushing towards the land; all that I could do was to let it carry me. I held on to the oar and kicked my way laboriously into the stream then I concentrated all my effort and all my consciousness on holding on; I remember little of what followed and nothing clearly. The sun disappeared as if it had been turned off with a switch and the sea grew wilder; lightning flashed and thunder rolled and cracked overhead. Through the din I heard the throb of a boat’s engine sounding very close and very powerful but I saw no boat and I was not particularly interested; I was anaesthetised by loss of blood and the motion of the sea. When jagged rocks loomed before me I viewed them with unconcern and when through a gap in the rocks there showed a tiny patch of beach at the foot of low cliffs it seemed to matter little upon which of these geological features the sea decided to cast me. Perhaps it would not really have mattered at all if there had not been people waiting on the beach to pull me from the waves.

  I remember a guard in uniform, and a man in a mustard-coloured suit — and I remember a flask of whisky. It tasted oddly after so much sea-water.

  It was about then that I retired completely from consciousness.

  CHAPTER XI

  Bed was a very nice place. Superintendent Duffy was a very pleasant fellow. I wished that Barney would not be so abjectly miserable when he came to see me. I found Frankie Marr’s company far more stimulating. The nurses seemed to think that I had done something creditable; I was afraid that it would be a different story when I came face to face with Juliet’s mother. She had come, and I had had the good luck to be still unconscious — but she would come again, she had said that she would. What did anything else really matter though? I had got a letter from Grace.

  I was better now and able to see people, several people at a time. It was in my room at the hospital that Duffy explained the solution of the murders to Frankie Marr. I only listened occasionally; I was thinking of Grace. I knew most of it already anyhow.

  One thing I did not know was the Scanlon sequence. Scanlon had hitch-hiked his way from Dublin to Rossderg, being taken most of the way by Rupert, the queen of the witches. Scanlon had conversed most sanely on the way a
bout various things, including marital infidelity. He had said quite casually — “If I found my Elly with another man, I’d stick a pitchfork in her guts.” Rupert had taken this as a joke but had remembered it at the Myleses’ party in the climate of mild hate against Stella. He had organised the witchery to have the pleasure of sticking a pitchfork symbolically into Stella’s guts. When his spiteful but not serious wish was realised actually he had been too frightened to volunteer information; so much for Rupert.

  A more important actor in the drama had been Elly’s boy-friend. He had called at the Joyces’ cottage as was his custom to take Elly into Rossderg after her weekly stint of cleaning up and her weekly bath. He had found Scanlon there. Scanlon had got violent. The boy-friend had taken from its cupboard the shot-gun that Elly had shown him on a previous visit. Elly had said — “Go away and take the gun with you. It’s you that’s putting him in a rage. I can manage him.” Apparently on this occasion she had proved unable to manage him. After her death her boy-friend had searched day and night for Scanlon with the intention of marching him at gun-point to the guards. It was Scanlon who ambushed him; in the fight that followed the gun went off and Scanlon was killed. In a panic the young man disposed of the body and the gun in the sea. It was partly because he bore marks of the fight and partly because he was known to be Elly’s boy-friend that the guards took him in for questioning, as the sergeant told us in Barney’s study on the night of Stella’s murder.

  According to Duffy, the boy-friend had in the first place refrained from going to the guards because of an instinctive urge to “keep out of it.” His widowed mother was probably the only adult resident of the village who did not know of his affair with Elly, and he still hoped to keep her in ignorance. Anyhow the guards were looking for Scanlon from the moment that the body was found. Later the boy-friend began increasingly to feel that he had acted like a coward in leaving Elly with her violent husband; the discovery of a second body added to his remorse. In going out after Scanlon he was trying to recover his own self-esteem. So much for him.