Nigel unwillingly interrupted the General’s polemic, and explained the reason for his visit. He was concerned in the Rattery murder case and wanted to find out more about their family history. The dead man’s father had been in the army – Cyril Rattery; fell in the South African War. Could General Shrivenham put him on to somebody who might have known Cyril Rattery?
‘Rattery? Good Lord, he is the chap then. When I saw about this case in the papers, I wondered if the fella had anything to do with Cyril Rattery. His son, you say? Well, I don’t wonder. There’s bad blood in that family. Look here, have a glass of sherry and I’ll tell you what I know about it. No, no trouble at all. I always take a glass of sherry and a biscuit in the middle of the morning.’
The General trotted out of the room and returned with a decanter and a plate of Romary biscuits. When they were all provided with refreshment, he began to talk, his eyes lighting up with a certain relish of reminiscence.
‘There was a scandal about Cyril Rattery, you know. I wonder the papers haven’t dragged it out again; it must have been hushed up at the time better than these things usually are. He went through the early part of the war with gallantry, but, when we began to get the upper hand, he cracked. One of those fellas who keep a stiff upper lip, y’know – scared to death, really, like the rest of us, only they won’t admit it even to themselves – and then one day the whole thing blows up. I came across him once or twice, in the early days when the Boers were teaching us our job. Magnificent fellows, the Boers. Mind you, I’m only an old cut-and-thrust, but I know a rare type when I see one. Cyril Rattery was. Too good for the army. Ought to have been a poet: But even then he struck me as a bit – what do they call it nowadays? – a bit neurotic. Neurotic. Conscience, too. He had too much conscience. Cairnes is another fella like that, but that’s by the way. The breaking point came when Cyril Rattery was sent out in command of a detachment to burn some farms. I don’t know all the details, but apparently the first farm they came to hadn’t been evacuated in time – there was some resistance and one or two of Rattery’s men were killed. The rest got a bit out of hand, and when they’d mopped up the opposition they set fire to the buildings without enquiring too carefully if there was anyone left in them. As it happened, there was a woman there, who’d stayed behind with her sick child. They were burnt to death, both of them. Mind you, in war those sort of accidents are bound to happen. Don’t like it myself – horrible. Nowadays you bomb non-combatants as a matter of course. Glad I’m too old to get mixed up in that sort of thing. Well anyway, this finished Cyril Rattery. He led his men straight back, refused to destroy the rest of the farms. Disobeying orders, of course. He was broken for it. Disgraced. That was the end of him, poor fellow.’
‘But I’d got the impression from old Mrs Rattery that her husband was killed in action.’
‘Not a bit of it. What with the incident at that farm, and the disgrace – he was genuinely keen on his profession, y’know – and the state of his mind, which must have been getting rockier and rockier all through the war, well, he went right off his head. Died in a madhouse some years later, I believe.’
They talked for a little longer. Then Nigel and Georgia tore themselves reluctantly away from their delightful host and got into the car. As they drove back through the rolling, small hills of the Cotswolds, Nigel was very silent. He could see the whole thing now, and he hated the sight of it. He wanted to tell the driver to drive them straight back to London, right out of this sad and damnable case, but it was too late now, he feared.
They were back in Severnbridge, crunching up the gravel drive to the Angler’s Arms. There seemed to be an unusual agitation around this quiet hotel. A policeman by the door: a knot of people gathered on the lawn. A woman broke away from this little gathering when their car approached; it was Lena Lawson, her ash-blonde hair streaming as she ran towards the car, her eyes wild with anxiety.
‘Oh, thank God you’re back,’ she cried.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Nigel. ‘Has Felix—?’
‘It’s Phil. He’s disappeared.’
Part Four
The Guilt is Seen
INSPECTOR BLOUNT HAD left word for Nigel to come down to the police station as soon as he returned. As the car took him there, he reviewed the disappearance of Phil, pieced together from the almost incoherent words of Lena and Felix Cairnes. In the confusion from last night’s attack on Nigel, no one had noticed that Phil had not been in the hotel for breakfast. Felix assumed he had already had breakfast before he himself came down; Georgia had been too busy attending to Nigel; the hotel waiter thought the boy must have gone to his mother’s house for breakfast. So it was not till the housemaid entered Phil’s bedroom at 10 a.m., and found the bed had not been slept in, that anyone realised he was gone. She had also found, on the chest of drawers, an envelope addressed to Inspector Blount. What this envelope contained Blount had not yet divulged, but Nigel thought he could make a pretty accurate guess.
Felix Cairnes was almost distraught with anxiety. Nigel had never felt so deeply sorry for him. He wished he could spare him the tragedy which must ensue, but he knew that was impossible now. Things had started to move, and one had no more hope of stopping them than of checking a landslide or the launching of a liner when the button has once been pressed. The tragedy had begun when George Rattery ran down Martie Cairnes in that country lane. It had begun, you might even say, before Phil Rattery was born. These latest events were its catastrophe. There remained now only the epilogue. But that epilogue would be long and painful. It would not be finished till whatever span of life was left to Felix Cairnes, to Violet, to Lena and Phil, was also ended.
Inspector Blount, when Nigel found him in the police station, had an air of subdued triumph. He told Nigel of the steps that had been taken to find Phil: railway and bus stations watched, AA men warned, lorry drivers questioned. It was only a matter of time. ‘Though,’ he added very seriously, ‘it may turn out to be a matter of dragging the river.’
‘Oh God, you don’t think he’d do that?’
The Inspector shrugged his shoulders. The silence between them became intolerable to Nigel. He said, a little feverishly, ‘It’s just Phil’s last quixotic gesture. It must be. You know, I thought I saw a movement in the shrubbery. It must have been Phil. He heard you say that you were going to arrest Felix. He’s passionately devoted to Felix. No doubt he thought, by running away, to divert suspicion from him. That’s what was in his mind.’
Blount looked at him, shaking his head gravely.
‘I wish I could think that was so, Mr Strangeways. But it’s no good now. I know that it was Phil who poisoned George Rattery. The poor wee boy.’
Nigel opened his mouth to speak, but the Inspector went on, ‘You said yourself, the solution of this affair must lie somewhere in Mr Cairnes’ diary. I was reading it through again last night and I got a glimmering of an idea; what’s happened since proves it. I’ll take the clues in the order they came to my mind. First, Phil was awful upset by the way his father treated his mother: George Rattery used to bully her and knock her about; Phil complained to Mr Cairnes about it one time, but of course Mr Cairnes could not do anything. Now carry your mind to that dinner party he mentions in his diary. They were talking about the right to kill. Mr Cairnes says one is justified in killing a person who makes life miserable for everyone around him. And then, you remember, it’s written down in the diary, Phil had piped up with some question, and Mr Cairnes wrote in his diary – ‘We’d all forgotten he was there, I think. He’d only just been promoted to late dinner.’ We’ve all been forgetting that the wee boy was there, I’m afraid – all the time. I did not even take his fingerprints. Well now, think of the effect on an impressionable, neurotic child of that chance remark of Cairnes’ about getting rid of social pests. There was Phil, brooding about the way his father treated his mother, and then the man whom Phil admires most in the world says openly that one has a right to kill people who make life miserable for others
. Remember Phil’s implicit confidence in Cairnes – and you know there’s nothing a boy won’t do if it seems to be sanctioned by someone he worships like that. And remember that he had appealed to Cairnes to do something about it, and his appeal had failed. You’ve said yourself, often enough, that the environment in which Phil was brought up was enough to make any child mentally unbalanced. Well, there’s your motive and your state of mind.’
‘General Shrivenham told me this morning that Phil’s grandfather – Ethel Rattery’s husband – died in a lunatic asylum,’ said Nigel softly, to himself.
‘There you are. It was in the blood. Uh-huh. Now for the means. We knew that the wee boy would be down at the garage often enough, and then there’s confirmation in Cairnes’ diary: he says there that George Rattery told him Phil used to go potting with his airgun at the rats on the rubbish dump. Nothing easier than for him to take away a quantity of the vermin-killer. There had been an unusually painful scene between George and Violet last week; Phil had seen his mother knocked down and tried to protect her. That scene must have finally made up the poor laddie’s mind for him – or turned his brain, whichever you like to call it.’
‘But you’re still up against the fantastic coincidence that Phil should have chosen the same day as Cairnes to murder George Rattery,’ protested Nigel.
‘Not so fantastic when you consider it was only a couple of days after this culminating scene between his father and mother. But it may not have been a coincidence either. The diary was hidden under the floorboards in Cairnes’ room. Now Phil was always in and out of that room; he did his lessons there, for one thing, and a loose floorboard is just what you might expect a wee boy to discover or to have known of already. He may have kept his own secret treasures there once.’
‘But surely, when Phil was so fond of Felix, the last thing he’d do would be to poison his father on the same day that Felix’s own attempt was made; and thus incriminate Felix so obviously.’
‘Ah, you’re being too subtle, Mr Strangeways. Remember, it’s a boy’s mind we’re dealing with. My theory is that, if it was not a coincidence, Phil discovered Cairnes’ diary, found out that Cairnes intended to try and drown George, and when his father returned safe and sound from the river, put the poison in the tonic himself. It would never occur to him that he was incriminating Felix, because he had no idea that the diary had also been found by George and was already in the hands of solicitors. I know there are difficulties about this. That’s why on the whole I’m inclined to believe the two murder attempts happening on the same day was a coincidence.’
‘Yes, that all sounds reasonable enough, I’m afraid.’
‘Now for some further points. After dinner on Saturday, when the poison had begun to work on Rattery, Lena Lawson goes into the dining room and notices the bottle of tonic on the table. She jumps to the conclusion that Felix is responsible for the poisoning and in a panic thinks only of getting rid of the bottle. She goes to throw it out of the window, and she sees Phil’s face pressed against the pane. What was he doing there? If he was innocent, but knew that his father had been taken ill, he’d surely have been making himself useful, running messages, fetching things?’
‘Knowing Phil’s type, I’d say he’d more likely have run away as far as he could, up to his own room perhaps, trying to blot the horrible scene out of his mind – running away from it, anyhow.’
‘I daresay you’re right. In any case, one wouldn’t expect to find him staring in at the dining-room window, unless he had put the poison in the bottle and wanted to make sure the room was empty before he came in to take the bottle away and hide it. It’d be natural for a wee boy, knowing he’s done something wrong, to try and hide the evidence of his guilt. Well then, he told you later where the bottle was hidden and climbed over the roof to get it.’
‘Why, if he’d poisoned it and hidden it to protect himself?’
‘Because he now knew that Lena had told you she’d handed it on to him. He couldn’t pretend now that he knew nothing about the bottle. What he could do was to destroy it. And he tried his best. He chucked it off the roof and, when he found that I’d collected up the fragments, he went for me like a little fury – you noticed how worked up he was about that. I thought for a moment he’d gone mad. I realise now, he was mad – he was mad already. The only thought in his poor, crazed little head was still to get rid of the bottle somehow or other. You see, all along we’ve been explaining his queer actions by his devotion to Felix Cairnes. It never occurred to us that it was himself he was trying to protect.’
Nigel sat back, fingering the bandage on his head. It reminded him of something.
‘How d’you square up Phil’s guilt with your belief that it was Felix who dented my skull last night?’
‘It wasn’t though. The wee boy did that for you. Listen, this is how I reconstruct it. He made up his mind to run away. He creeps downstairs after midnight, in the dark. Just as he gets to the bottom of the stairs, he hears the door of the writing room open. He knows there is someone between him and the front door by which he’d intended to leave the hotel. He knows, too, that whoever it is has just come out of the writing room will likely switch on the hall lights, and then he’ll be discovered. As he cowers close to the wall, his hand touches that putter which has been left leaning against it. He’s desperate and terrified – the poor laddie – in a trap. He takes up the putter and swings it blindly in the darkness, hitting out towards this invisible person who stands between him and escape. He hits you and you fall. Phil is horrified by what he’s done. He’s afraid to turn on the lights, afraid of the body that lies between him and the front door. He remembers the French windows in the dining room, and slinks out that way instead. It was his fingerprints on the French windows, we compared them with the prints he’d left in his bedroom.’
‘He was afraid of the body?’ said Nigel dreamily. ‘He ran away from it out of the hotel?’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. Yes, I’m sure that’s what he would have done. I shall always take up the cudgels for you in the future, if anyone says to me that Scotland Yard has no imagination. By the way, you must meet General Shrivenham some time – you might make him alter his opinion about the Scotch.’
‘The Scots, please.’
‘But seriously, Blount, your case is brilliantly worked out; it’s all theory though, isn’t it? You haven’t a scrap of material evidence against Phil.’
‘A scrap of paper,’ said the Inspector sombrely. ‘A wee scrap of paper. He left it for me in his room. A letter for me. A confession.’
He handed across to Nigel a sheet of lined paper torn out of an exercise book. Nigel read,
Dear Inspector Blount,
this is to tell you it wasn’t Felix, it was me who put the poison in that medicine bottle. I hated Dad because he was cruel to Mummy. I’m going to run away where you can’t find me.
yours sincerely
Philip Rattery
‘The poor boy,’ muttered Nigel. ‘What a pitiable affair this is. God, what a set-up!’ He went on urgently, ‘Look here, Blount, you’ve got to find him. Quickly. I’m afraid of what may happen. Phil’s capable of anything.’
‘We’re doing all we can. Maybe, though, it’d be a better thing if we – e-eh – found him too late. He’d be sent to a home, you know: a mental home. I hate to think of it, Mr Strangeways.’
‘Never mind about that,’ said Nigel, looking with a strange intensity at Blount. ‘Find him. You’ve got to find him before anything happens.’
‘We’ll find him all right, trust me. I’m afraid there’s no doubt about that. He can’t get far away. Unless he’s gone by the river,’ Blount added with sad significance.
Five minutes later Nigel was back at the Angler’s Arms. At the door Felix Cairnes was awaiting him, his eyes dark with anxiety, unspoken questions trembling on his lips.
‘What have they—?’
‘Can we go up to your room?’ said Nig
el quickly. ‘I’ve a lot to tell you, and it’s a bit too public here.’
Upstairs, in Felix’s room, Nigel sat down. His head had begun to ache again; for a moment the room swam before his eyes. Felix was standing by the window, looking out upon the gracious curves and shining reaches of the river upon which he and George Rattery had embarked. His body was tense. He felt an intolerable weight on his tongue and on his heart, preventing him from asking the question that had been growing within him all day.
‘Did you know that Phil had left a confession?’ asked Nigel gently. Felix spun round, his hands gripping the window sill behind him.
‘A confession that it was he who poisoned George Rattery.’
‘But it’s crazy! The boy must have gone mad,’ exclaimed Felix, in a wild, random kind of agitation. ‘He’d no more kill – look here, Blount’s not taking it seriously, is he?’
‘Blount has worked out an extraordinarily convincing case against Phil, I’m afraid, and this confession put the lid on it.’
‘Phil didn’t do it. He couldn’t have done it. I know he didn’t do it.’
‘So do I,’ said Nigel, in level tones.
Felix’s hand stopped short in the middle of a gesture. For a second he stared at Nigel uncomprehendingly.
Then he whispered:
‘You know? How d’you know?’
‘Because I’ve found out at last who really did do it. I shall need your help to fill in the detail of my theory. Then we can decide what’s to be done.’
‘Go on. Who was it? Go on, tell me, please.’
‘You remember that phrase of Cicero’s – it comes somewhere in the De Officiis, I think. “In ipsa dubitatione facinus inest”? – “The guilt is seen in the very hesitation.” I’m very sorry, Felix. You’re too good a chap to commit a successful murder. As Shrivenham said to me this morning, you’ve got too much conscience.’
The Beast Must Die Page 20
