‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Well now, isn’t that a – well now indeed! And you’re going to spring some surprise on me, I can see it written all over you.’
Nigel played for time. He was never above a nice piece of exhibitionism, but, when he had a good curtain line, he liked to lead up to it.
‘So this is a crime?’ he said. ‘Murder, I mean, not one of your two-a-penny suicides.’
‘Suicides,’ remarked Blount a trifle sententiously, ‘do not generally swallow the bottle as well as the poison.’
‘You mean, the vehicle, or whatever you call it, has disappeared? You’d better tell me all about it, if you will. I don’t know a thing about Rattery’s death so far, except that a chap who’s been living here, Felix Lane – his real name’s Frank Cairnes, as I expect you know, but everyone’s so used to calling him “Felix” that we’d better call him Felix Cairnes in future – anyway, this chap intended to murder George Rattery, but, according to him, it didn’t come off, so somebody else must have stepped into the breach.’
Inspector Blount received this bombshell with an aplomb worthy of the Old Guard. He removed his pince-nez with great deliberation, blew on the glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his nose. Then he said:
‘Felix Cairnes? Ye-es, ye-es. The wee man with the beard. He writes these detective novels, doesn’t he? Now that’s very interesting.’
He glanced at Nigel with mild indulgence.
‘Shall we toss for first innings?’ asked Nigel.
‘Are you – e-eh – in any sense acting for this Mr Cairnes?’ Inspector Blount was treading delicately, but very firmly.
‘Yes. Until he is proved guilty, of course.’
‘Uh-huh. I see. And you are convinced he’s innocent. I think you had better put your cards on the table first.’
So Nigel told him the gist of Felix’s confession. When he arrived at Felix’s plan to drown George Rattery, Blount for once failed to conceal perfectly his excitement.
‘The dead man’s solicitors rang us up just now. They said they had something in their possession which would interest us. That will be this diary you mention, I’ve no doubt. Very damaging for your – e-eh – client, Mr Strangeways.’
‘You can’t tell that till you’ve read it. I’m not at all sure that it won’t save him.’
‘Eh well, they’re sending it by special messenger, so we’ll know soon enough.’
‘I won’t argue it yet. You tell me a story now.’
Inspector Blount picked up a ruler from the desk, and sighted along it with one eye screwed up. Then he suddenly sat up straight, speaking with remarkable incisiveness.
‘George Rattery was poisoned by strychnine. Can’t enlarge upon that till after the autopsy – be finished by midday. He, Mrs Rattery, Lena Lawson, old Mrs Rattery, his mother, and his son Philip – a wee boy – had dinner together. They all ate the same food. The deceased and his mother took whisky with their food, the rest water. None of the others suffered any ill effects. They left the dinner table about quarter-past eight, the women and the wee boy first, the deceased following them in a minute’s time. They all repaired to the drawing room with the exception of Master Philip. George Rattery was seized with severe pains between ten and fifteen minutes later. The women folk, poor souls, were helpless. They gave him a mustard emetic, but that only aggravated the seizure; the symptoms, of course, are very horrifying. Their own medical man, whom they rang up first, was out to a road accident, and by the time they had got hold of another, it was too late. Dr Clarkson arrived a little before ten – he’d been out on a maternity case – and applied the usual chloroform treatment, but Rattery was too far gone then. He died five or ten minutes later. I’ll not bother you with the details. I’ve assured myself, however, that the poison could not have been introduced through any of the food or drink taken at dinner. The symptoms of strychnine poisoning, moreover, rarely take longer than an hour to supervene. The company sat down to dinner at quarter-past seven, therefore Rattery could not likely have taken the poison before dinner. There remains the interval of one minute between the time the others left the dining room and the time Rattery rejoined them in the drawing room.’
‘Coffee? Port? No, of course it couldn’t have been in the port. Nobody gulps that down and strychnine’s got such a bitter taste, anyone’d spit it out at once unless he was expecting a bitter taste.’
‘Just so. And the family did not take coffee on Saturday night – the parlourmaid had broken the percolator.’
‘It sounds to me like suicide, then.’
Inspector Blount’s face betrayed a slight impatience. ‘My dear Mr Strangeways,’ he said, ‘a suicide does not take poison and then walk into the drawing room – into the bosom of his family – so that they can all watch the poison taking effect. In the second place, Colesby could find no trace of how he took it.’
‘Had the dinner things been washed up?’
‘The glass and silver. Not all the crockery, though. Mind you, Colesby – he’s the local chap – may have missed something. I didn’t get down here till this morning myself, but –’
‘You know that Cairnes did not return to this house after he left it in the early afternoon?’
‘Indeed? Have you proof of that?’
‘Well, no,’ said Nigel, taken rather aback. ‘At the moment, I haven’t. He told me that, after the showdown in the dinghy, Rattery refused to let him come back here, even to pack his things. It can be verified, anyway.’
‘Maybe,’ said Blount cautiously. He drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘I think – ye-es, I think we might take another peek at the dining room.’
4
IT WAS A dark, heavy room, congested with pieces of Victorian walnut-wood furniture – table, chairs and a huge sideboard – which had obviously been designed for a much bigger room and gave off a kind of aura of overeating and stodgy conversation. This meaty, congested motif was continued in the heavy, maroon plush curtains, the faded but still repellent dark-red wallpaper, and the oil paintings on the wall, which represented respectively a fox gorging itself on a semi-eviscerated hare (very realistic), a miraculous draught of fishes – lobsters, crabs, eels, cod and salmon – laid out on a marble slab, and an ancestor of sorts who had evidently died of apoplexy or a surfeit of rich food.
‘Gluttony recollected in tranquillity,’ murmured Nigel, looking round instinctively for a bottle of soda mints. Inspector Blount was standing over the sideboard, meditatively rubbing his finger on its jaundice-yellow surface.
‘Take a look here, Mr Strangeways,’ he said. He was pointing at a sticky ring – the kind that might have been left by a medicine bottle whose contents had dribbled down to its base. Blount licked his finger.
‘Well now,’ he said. ‘I wonder –’
With great deliberation, he took out a white silk pocket handkerchief, wiped his finger, and pressed the bell push. Presently a woman appeared – the parlourmaid, no doubt – very starched and disapproving in stiff cuffs and high, old-fashioned white cap.
‘You rang, sir?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Tell me now, Annie –’
‘Merritt.’ Her thin, pursed lips expressed her disapproval of policemen who ventured to address parlourmaids by their Christian names. ‘Merritt? Tell me then, Miss Merritt, what made this ring here?’
Without appearing to raise her eyes, which she kept downcast and discreet, like a nun, the woman said:
‘The master’s – the late master’s tonic.’
‘Oh ye-es. Uh-huh. And where has the bottle gone to?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
Further questioning elicited a statement that Merritt had last seen the bottle after lunch on Saturday; she had not noticed if it was there when she cleared away after dinner.
‘Did he take it out of a glass or a spoon?’
‘A tablespoon, sir.’
‘And after dinner on Saturday, did you wash up this particular spoon with the others?’
Merritt bridled slightly. ‘I do not wash up,’ she said, with frigid emphasis. ‘I clear away.’
‘Did you clear away the spoon with which your master took his tonic?’ said Blount patiently.
‘French without Tears,’ Nigel giggled.
‘I did, sir.’
‘And it was washed up?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That’s a pity. Now let me see – e-eh – would you ask your mistress to step this way.’
‘Mrs Rattery senior is indisposed, sir.’
‘I meant – oh, well, perhaps it’d be better – yes, ask Miss Lawson if she can spare me a few minutes.’
‘It’s easy to see who’s mistress in this house,’ remarked Nigel when the parlourmaid had gone out.
‘Very interesting. This substance tastes to me like a tonic I once had, that contained nux vomica.’
‘Nux vomica?’ Nigel whistled. ‘So that would account for his not noticing the bitter taste. And he stayed behind a minute after the others left the dining room. You seem to have got somewhere.’
Blount looked at him slyly. ‘Still keen on the suicide theory, Mr Strangeways?’
‘It doesn’t look too good, if this bottle was really the vehicle of the poison. But how very odd of the murderer to get rid of the bottle. Spoilt his chance of making it look like suicide.’
‘Murderers do very odd things, you’ll not be denying.’
‘However, it seems to let out Felix Cairnes. That is to say, if—’
Nigel stopped short, hearing a step outside the door. The girl who entered was unexpected yet somehow not out of place in the sombre room, like a sunray slanting into a prison cell. Her ash-blonde hair, the white linen suit she wore, and her vivid make-up were a defiance to everything this room meant – both in life and in death. Even if Felix had not told him, Nigel would have known she was an actress by the slight pause she made inside the door, the studied naturalness with which she took the seat Inspector Blount offered her. Blount introduced Nigel and himself, and expressed his sympathy for Miss Lawson and her sister. Lena received this with a rather perfunctory inclination of her head; she was evidently as eager as the Inspector to get down to brass tacks. Eager, and yet apprehensive of the results, thought Nigel, noticing the way her fingers were twidding a button of her coat, the exhibited candour in her eyes.
Blount was asking questions gently, moving from one aspect of the case to another, like a doctor palpating the body of a patient, waiting for the twinge that reveals the seat of the trouble. Yes, Miss Lawson had been in the room when the first convulsion seized her brother-in-law. No, Phil had not been there, luckily, he must have gone straight upstairs after dinner. What had she herself done from the time they left the dining room? Well, she was with the others till George’s seizure began. Then his mother sent her out to fetch some mustard and water – yes, she particularly remembered it was his mother who had suggested this – and afterwards she’d been busy on the phone trying to get a doctor. No, George had not said anything in between the spasms of pain to suggest what had happened – he had lain quite still, and once or twice seemed to have fallen asleep.
‘And during the attacks?’
Lena’s lashes swept down over her eyes, but not quickly enough to hide the start of fear in them.
‘Oh, he was groaning terribly, complaining of the pain. It was awful. He was on the floor. He curved up, like a hoop – I ran over a cat once in a car, and it – oh, don’t please don’t, I can’t bear it!’
She hid her face in her hands and began to sob. Blount patted her shoulder in a fatherly way but, when she had recovered, he insisted gently:
‘And during these attacks, he didn’t say – didn’t mention anyone’s name, for instance?’
‘I – I wasn’t in the room most of the time.’
‘Come now, Miss Lawson. You must realise there’s no point in concealing something that doubtless two other people beside you heard. What a man may have said in extremity of pain is not going to convict anyone without a great deal more evidence.’
‘Well, then,’ the girl flung at him angrily, ‘he said something about Felix – Mr Lane. He said, “Lane. Tried it on before” – something like that. And he cursed him horribly. It doesn’t mean anything. He hated Felix. He was bewildered – beside himself with pain. You can’t—’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Miss Lawson. Mr Strangeways here will be able to reassure you about that, I hope.’ Inspector Blount smoothed his jaw, and said confidentially, ‘Do you know, by any chance, what reason Mr Rattery could have had for suicide? Money troubles? Illness? He was taking a tonic, I am told.’
Lena stared at him, frozen rigid, her eyes like the insensate glare of a tragedy mask. For a second or two she could not speak. Then she said hurriedly:
‘Suicide? You startled me for a moment, I mean, we’d all thought he must have eaten some bad food or something. Yes, it must have been suicide, I suppose, though I can’t imagine why –’
Nigel felt somehow that suicide was not the operative word in causing the girl so openly to panic. His intuition was shortly to be justified.
‘This tonic that he took, now,’ Blount said, ‘it contained nux vomica, I believe?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
‘No. Did he take his usual tablespoonful after lunch?’
The girl knitted her brows. ‘I don’t remember for certain. He always did, so I suppose if he hadn’t after lunch, I’d have noticed it.’
‘Quite right. Ye-es. A very subtle observation, if you’ll allow me to say so,’ Blount congratulated her. He took off his pince-nez, and played with them indecisively. ‘You see, Miss Lawson, I’m wondering about the bottle. It’s disappeared. It’s vairy awkward, you see, because we’ve an idea – just an idea, mind you – that this bottle may be – e-eh – connected with his death. Nux vomica is a poison, you see, of the strychnine group, and Mr Rattery might have added a wee bit more of the poison to his dose, if he’d wanted to make away with himself. But if that was the way of it, he’d no be like to make away with the bottle too.’ Blount’s suppressed excitement resurrected his almost extinct Glasgow accent, so that the last word sounded like ‘the boul tu’. This time Lena had either regained control over her expression or had nothing to give away. She spoke hesitantly.
‘You mean, if this bottle had been found on the sideboard after George’s death, it would have proved it was suicide?’
‘No, not quite that, Miss Lawson,’ said Blount benignly. Then his lips lost their kindness, he leant forward and spoke with cold deliberation. ‘I mean that the absence of this bottle makes it look like murder.’
‘A-ah,’ sighed the girl. A sigh of relief, almost, as though the suspense of waiting for this dreadful word was now ended, and she knew there was nothing worse left for her to face.
‘You are not surprised?’ asked Blount sharply, a little piqued by the girl’s calmness.
‘What ought I to do? Burst into tears on your shoulder? Start chewing the legs of the table?’
Nigel caught Blount’s embarrassed eye and gave him a saucy look. He enjoyed seeing Blount discomfited.
‘Just one thing, Miss Lawson,’ said Nigel. ‘It sounds a rather alarming question, but I expect Felix has told you I’ve come down here on his behalf. I’m not trying to get at you. But did you ever suspect that Felix intended all along to murder George Rattery?’
‘No! No! It’s a lie! He didn’t!’ Lena’s hands went up in front of her face, as though she was trying to push Nigel’s question away from her. The panic was replaced by a kind of puzzlement on her expressive features. ‘All along?’ she said slowly. ‘How do you mean, “all along”?’
‘Well, since you met him, before he came down here,’ said Nigel, equally puzzled.
‘No, of course he didn’t,’ the girl replied with obvious sincerity. Then she bit her lip. ‘But he didn’t,’ she cried, ‘he never killed George. I know he didn’t.’
‘You were in George Rattery’s
car when he ran over and killed a small boy, Martin Cairnes, last January,’ said Inspector Blount, not unsympathetically.
‘Oh God,’ Lena whispered, ‘so you’ve found that out at last.’ She gazed at them candidly. ‘It wasn’t my fault. I tried to make him stop and – but he wouldn’t. I’ve dreamt about that for months. It was ghastly. But I don’t understand. What –?’
‘I think we can let Miss Lawson go now, don’t you, Blount?’ interposed Nigel quickly. The Inspector smoothed his chin.
‘Ye-es. Maybe you’re right. Just one thing more. Had Mr Rattery any enemies, would you say?’
‘He might. He was the sort who’d make them, I think. But I don’t know of any.’
After the girl had gone out, Blount said, ‘That was very suggestive. She knows something about the missing bottle, I’ll swear. And she’s afraid that this Mr Cairnes did the job, but she hasn’t yet connected up Felix Lane with the father of the boy George Rattery killed. A pretty lassie. Pity she won’t tell the truth. Eh well, we’ll find it out before long. What made you ask her whether she suspected Felix of intending to murder Rattery? I thought it was a wee bit early to be letting that cat out of the bag.’
Nigel flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘The point was this. If Felix did not kill Rattery, we’re up against a most outrageous coincidence – that on the very day he planned and failed to murder him, somebody else planned and succeeded.’
‘A most outrageous coincidence, as you admit,’ said Blount sceptically.
‘No. Wait a minute. I’m not prepared to dismiss the coincidence as impossible. If a sufficient number of monkeys played with typewriters for a sufficient number of centuries, they’d have turned out all the sonnets of Shakespeare: that’s a coincidence, but it’s also scientifically true. But if George’s poisoning was not a coincidence, and if Felix wasn’t responsible, it follows logically that some third person must have known of Felix’s intentions – either through reading the diary himself or through being taken into George’s confidence.’
‘Ah. Now I see what you’re driving at,’ said Blount, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. ‘Assume a third person, who had this special knowledge and wanted George to be killed. When Felix’s attempt failed, this third person took up the running himself and conveyed the poison to George, probably through that tonic. He could be pretty sure of the suspicion falling on Felix, on account of the diary. But he had to act immediately, since he could not expect Felix to stay on in Severnbridge for more than a night after the failure of the dinghy scheme. Lena was the obvious person to ask first, since she’d be the obvious person for George to have confided in over the diary – he and she both having been mixed up in the manslaughter of Martin Cairnes which it revealed. But I think she was quite sincere just now, when she gave the impression that she hadn’t connected up Felix Lane with the boy, Martin. Therefore she doesn’t know of the diary. Therefore we can eliminate her from our list of suspects, unless the attempted murder and the real one were sheer coincidence.’
The Beast Must Die Page 12
