by Ngaio Marsh
‘I dare say,’ Fox said with great simplicity, ‘she has a fancy for someone of her own class.’
Alleyn replied absently: ‘Do you, now?’ And it said something for their friendship that neither of them felt the smallest embarrassment. Alleyn continued to ruminate on the Lacklanders. ‘Before the war,’ he said, ‘the old boy was Chargé d’Affaires at Zlomce. The Special Branch got involved for a time, I remember. There was a very nasty bit of leakage: a decoded message followed by the suicide of the chap concerned. He was said to have been in cahoots with known agents. I was with the Special Branch at that time and had quite a bit to do with it. Perhaps the Dowager wishes to revive old memories or something. Or perhaps she merely runs the village of Swevenings, murdered colonels and all, with the same virtuosity she brought to her husband’s public life. Do you know Swevenings, Brer Fox?’
‘Can’t say I do, sir.’
‘I do. Troy did a week’s painting there a summer or two ago. It’s superficially pretty and fundamentally beautiful,’ Alleyn said. ‘Quaint as hell but take a walk after dusk and you wouldn’t be surprised at anything you met. It’s one of the oldest in England. ‘Swevenings,’ meaning Dreams. There was some near-prehistoric set-to in the valley, I forget what, and another during Bolingbroke’s rebellion and yet another in the Civil Wars. This Colonel’s blood is not the first soldier’s by a long chalk to be spilt at Swevenings.’
‘They will do it,’ Fox said cryptically and with resignation. For a long time they drove on in a silence broken at long intervals by the desultory conversation of old friends.
‘We’re running into a summer storm,’ Alleyn said presently. Giant drops appeared on the windscreen and were followed in seconds by a blinding downpour.
‘Nice set-up for fieldwork,’ Fox grumbled.
‘It may be local. Although … no, by gum, we’re nearly there. This is Chyning. Chyning; meaning I fancy, a yawn or yawning.’
‘Yawns and dreams,’ Fox said. ‘Funny sort of district! What language would that be, Mr Alleyn?’
‘Chaucerian English, only don’t depend on me. The whole district is called the Vale of Traunce or brown-study. It all sounds hellishly quaint, but that’s how it goes. There’s the blue lamp.’
The air smelt fresher when they got out. Rain drummed on roofs and flagstones and cascaded down the sides of houses. Alleyn led the way into a typical county police station and was greeted by a tall sandy-haired sergeant.
‘Chief Inspector Alleyn, sir? Sergeant Oliphant. Very glad to see you, sir.’
‘Inspector Fox,’ Alleyn said, introducing him. There followed a solemn shaking of hands and a lament that has become increasingly common of late years in the police force. ‘We’re that short of chaps in the country,’ Sergeant Oliphant said. ‘We don’t know which way to turn if anything of this nature crops up. The Chief Constable said to me, ‘Can we do it, Oliphant? Suppose we call on Siminster can we do it?’ And, look, Mr Alleyn, I had to say no, we can’t.’
Fox said: ‘T’ch.’
‘Well, exactly, Mr Fox,’ Oliphant said. ‘If you haven’t got the chaps it’s no good blundering in, is it? I’ve left my one PC in charge of the body and that reduces my staff to me. Shall we move off, Mr Alleyn? You’ll find it wettish.’
Alleyn and Fox accompanied the sergeant in his car while Bailey, Thompson and the Yard driver followed their lead. On the way Sergeant Oliphant gave a businesslike report. Sir George Lacklander had rung up Sir James Punston, the Chief Constable, who in turn had rung Oliphant at about nine o’clock. Oliphant and his constable had then gone to Bottom Meadow and had found Dr Mark Lacklander, Nurse Kettle and the body of Colonel Cartarette. They had taken a brief statement from Nurse Kettle and asked her to remain handy. Dr Lacklander who, in Oliphant’s presence, made a very brief examination of the body, had then gone to break the news to the relatives of the deceased, taking Nurse Kettle with him. The sergeant had returned to Chyning and reported to the Chief Constable who decided to call in the Yard. The constable had remained on guard by the body with Colonel Cartarette’s spaniel, the latter having strenuously resisted all attempts to remove him.
‘Did you form any opinion at all, Oliphant?’ Alleyn asked. This is the most tactful remark a CID man can make to a county officer and Oliphant coruscated under its influence.
‘Not to say opinion, sir,’ he said. ‘Not to say that. One thing I did make sure of was not to disturb anything. He’s lying on a patch of shingle screened in by a half-circle of willows and cut off on the open side by the stream. He’s lying on his right side, kind of curled up as if he’d been bowled over from a kneeling position, like. His hat was over his face. Nurse Kettle moved it when she found him and Dr Lacklander moved it again when he examined the wound which is in the left temple. A dirty great puncture,’ the sergeant continued, easing off his official manner a point or two, ‘with what the doctor calls extensive fractures all round it. Quite turned my chap’s stomach, drunks-in-charge and disorderly behaviour being the full extent of his experience.’
Alleyn and Fox having chuckled in the right place, the sergeant continued: ‘No sign of the weapon so far as we could make out, flashing our torches round. I was particular not to go hoofing over the ground.’
‘Admirable,’ said Alleyn.
‘Well,’ said Sergeant Oliphant, ‘it’s what we’re told, sir, isn’t it?’
‘Notice anything at all out of the way?’ Alleyn asked. The question was inspired more by kindliness than curiosity and the sergeant’s reaction surprised him. Oliphant brought his two freckled hams of hands down on the driving-wheel and made a complicated snorting noise. ‘Out of the way!’ he shouted. ‘Ah, my God, I’ll say we did. Out of the way! Tell me, now, sir, are you a fly-fisherman?’
‘Only fair to middling to worse. I do when I get the chance. Why?’
‘Now listen,’ Sergeant Oliphant said, quite abandoning his official position. ‘There’s a dirty great fish in this Chyne here would turn your guts over for you. Pounds if he’s an ounce, he is. Old in cunning, he is; wary and sullen and that lordly in his lurkings and slinkings he’d break your heart. Sometimes he’ll rise like a monster,’ said Sergeant Oliphant, urging his car up Watt’s Hill, ‘and snap, he’s took it, though that’s only three times. Once being the deceased’s doing a matter of a fortnight ago, which he left his cast in his jaws he being a mighty fighter. And once the late squire, Sir Harold Lacklander, he lost him through being, as the man himself frankly admitted, overzealous in the playing of him. Now,’ the sergeant shouted, ‘NOW, for the last and final cast, hooked, played and landed by the poor Colonel, sir, and lying there by his dead body, or I can’t tell a five-pound trout from a stickleback. Well, if he had to die, he couldn’t have had a more glorious end. The Colonel, I mean, Mr Alleyn, not the Old ’Un,’ said Sergeant Oliphant.
They had followed Watt’s Lane down into the valley and up the slope through blinding rain to the village. Oliphant pulled up at a spot opposite the Boy and Donkey. A figure in a mackintosh and tweed hat stood in the lighted doorway.
‘The Chief Constable, sir,’ said Oliphant. ‘Sir James Punston. He said he’d drive over and meet you.’
‘I’ll have a word with him, before we go in. Wait a moment.’
Alleyn crossed the road and introduced himself. The Chief Constable was a weather-beaten tough-looking man who had been a chief commissioner of police in India.
‘Thought I’d better come over,’ Sir James said, ‘and take a look at this show. Damn’ bad show it is. Damn’ nice fellow, Cartarette. Can’t imagine who’d want to set about him, but no doubt you’ll be able to tell us. I’ll come down with you. Filthy night, isn’t it?’
The Yard car had drawn up behind Oliphant’s. Bailey, Thompson and the driver got out and unloaded their gear with the economic movements of long usage and a stubborn disregard of the rain. The two parties joined up and led by the Chief Constable climbed a stile and followed a rough path down a drenched hillside. Their torches flashed o
n rods of rain and dripping furze bushes.
‘They call this River Path,’ the Chief Constable said. ‘It’s a right-of-way through the Nunspardon estate and comes out at Bottom Bridge which we have to cross. I hear the Dowager rang you up.’
‘She did indeed,’ Alleyn said.
‘Lucky they decided it was your pigeon, anyway. She’d have raised hell if they hadn’t.’
‘I don’t see where she fits in.’
‘She doesn’t in any ordinary sense of the phrase. She’s merely taken it upon herself ever since she came to Nunspardon to run Chyning and Swevenings. For some reason they seem to like it. Survival of the feudal instinct you might think. It does survive, you know, in isolated pockets. Swevenings is an isolated pocket and Hermione, Lady Lacklander, has got it pretty well where she wants it.’ Sir James continued in this local strain as they slid and squelched down the muddy hillside. He gave Alleyn an account of the Cartarette family and their neighbours with a particularly racy profile of Lady Lacklander herself.
‘There’s the local gossip for you,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows everybody and has done so for centuries. There have been no stockbroking overflows into Swevenings. The Lacklanders, the Phinns, the Syces and the Cartarettes have lived in their respective houses for a great many generations. They’re all on terms of intimacy except that of late years there’s been, I fancy, a little coolness between the Lacklanders and old Occy Phinn. And now I come to think of it, I fancy Maurice Cartarette fell out with Phinn over fishing or something. But then old Occy is really a bit mad. Rows with everybody. Cartarette, on the other hand, was a very pleasant nice chap. Oddly formal and devilishly polite, though, especially with people he didn’t like or had fallen out with. Not that he was a quarrelsome chap. Far from it. I have heard, by the way,’ Sir James gossiped, ‘that there’s been some sort of coldness between Cartarette and that ass George Lacklander. However! And after all that, here’s the bridge.’
As they crossed it they could hear the sound of rain beating on the surface of the stream. On the far side their feet sank into mud. They turned left on the rough path. Alleyn’s shoes filled with water and water poured off the brim of his hat.
‘Hell of a thing to happen, this bloody rain,’ said the Chief Constable. ‘Ruin the terrain.’
A wet branch of willow slapped Alleyn’s face. On the hill to their right they could see the lighted windows of three houses. As they walked on, however, distant groups of trees intervened and the windows were shut off.
‘Can the people up there see into the actual area?’ Alleyn asked.
Sergeant Oliphant said: ‘No, sir. Their own trees as well as this belt of willows screen it. They can see the stretch on the far side above the bridge, and a wee way below it.’
‘That’s Mr Danberry-Phinn’s preserve, isn’t it?’ asked the Chief Constable, ‘above the bridge?’
‘Mr Danberry-Phinn?’ Alleyn said sharply.
‘Mr Octavius Danberry-Phinn to give you the complete works. The ‘Danberry’ isn’t insisted upon. He’s the local eccentric I told you about. He lives in the top house up there. We don’t have a village idiot in Swevenings; we have a bloody-minded old gentleman. It’s more classy,’ said Sir James acidly.
‘Danberry-Phinn,’ Alleyn repeated. ‘Isn’t there some connection there with the Lacklanders?’
Sir James said shortly: ‘Both Swevenings men, of course.’ His voice faded uncertainly as he floundered into a patch of reeds. Somewhere close at hand a dog howled dismally and a deep voice apostrophized it. ‘Ah, stow it, will you.’ A light bobbed up ahead of them.
‘Here we are,’ Sir James said. ‘That you, Gripper?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the deep voice. The mackintosh cape of a uniformed constable shone in the torchlight.
‘Dog still at it seemingly,’ said the sergeant.
‘That’s right, Mr Oliphant. I’ve got him tethered here.’ A torch flashed on Skip, tied by a handkerchief to a willow branch.
‘Hallo, old fellow,’ Alleyn said.
They all waited for him to go through the thicket. The constable shoved back a dripping willow branch for him.
‘You’ll need to stoop a little, sir.’
Alleyn pushed through the thicket. His torchlight darted about in the rain and settled almost at once on a glistening mound.
‘We got some groundsheets down and covered him,’ the sergeant said. ‘When it looked like rain.’
‘Good.’
‘… and we’ve covered up the area round the corpse as best we could. Bricks and one or two planks from the old boat shed yonder. But I dare say the water’s got under just the same.’
Alleyn said: ‘Fair enough. We couldn’t ask for better. I think before we go any nearer we’ll get photographs. Come through, Bailey. Do the best you can. As it stands and then uncovered, with all the detail you can get in case it washes out before morning. By jove, though, I believe it’s lifting.’
They all listened. The thicket was loud with the sound of dripping foliage, but the heavy drumming of rain had stopped and by the time Bailey had set up his camera a waxing moon had ridden out over the valley.
When Bailey had taken his last flash-photograph of the area and the covered body, he took away the groundsheet and photographed the body again from many angles, first with the tweed hat over the face and then without it. He put his camera close to Colonel Cartarette’s face and it flashed out in the night with raised eyebrows and pursed lips. Only when all this had been done did Alleyn, walking delicately, go closer, stoop over the head and shine his torch full on the wound.
‘Sharp instrument?’ said Fox.
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘Yes, a great puncture, certainly. But could a sharp instrument do all that, Brer Fox? No use speculating till we know what it was.’ His torchlight moved away from the face and found a silver glint on a patch of grass near Colonel Cartarette’s hands and almost on the brink of the stream. ‘And this is the Old ’Un?’ he murmured.
The Chief Constable and Sergeant Oliphant both broke into excited sounds of confirmation. The light moved to the hands, lying close together. One of them was clenched about a wisp of green.
‘Cut grass,’ Alleyn said. ‘He was going to wrap his trout in it. There’s his knife, and there’s the creel beside him.’
‘What we reckoned, sir,’ said the sergeant in agreement.
‘Woundy great fish, isn’t it?’ said the Chief Constable, and there was an involuntary note of envy in his voice.
Alleyn said: ‘What was the surface like before it rained?’
‘Well, sir,’ the sergeant volunteered, ‘as you see, it’s partly gravel. There was nothing to see in the willows where the ground was dry as a chip. There was what we reckoned were the deceased’s footprints on the bank where it was soft and where he’d been fishing and one or two on the earthy bits near where he fell, but I couldn’t make out anything else and we didn’t try for fear of messing up what little there was.’
‘Quite right. Will it rain again before morning?’
The three local men moved back into the meadow and looked up at the sky.
‘All over, I reckon, sir,’ said the sergeant.
‘Set fine,’ said the deep-voiced constable.
‘Clearing,’ said Sir James Punston.
‘Cover everything up again, Sergeant, and set a watch till morning. Have we any tips of any sort about times? Anybody known to have come this way?’
‘Nurse Kettle, sir, who found him. Young Dr Lacklander came back with her to look at him and he says he came through the valley and over the bridge earlier in the evening. We haven’t spoken to anyone else, sir.’
‘How deep,’ Alleyn asked, ‘is the stream just here?’
‘About five foot,’ said Sergeant Oliphant.
‘Really? And he lies on his right side roughly parallel with the stream and facing it. Not more than two feet from the brink. Head pointing downstream, feet towards the bridge. The fish lies right on the brink by the strand of
grass he was cutting to wrap it in. And the wound’s in the left temple. I take it he was squatting on his heels within two feet of the brink and just about to bed his catch down in the grass. Now, if, as the heelmarks near his feet seem to indicate, he keeled straight over into the position the body still holds, one or two things must have happened, wouldn’t you say, Brer Fox?’
‘Either,’ Fox said stolidly, ‘he was coshed by a left-handed person standing behind him or by a right-handed person standing in front of him and at least three feet away.’
‘Which would place the assailant,’ said Alleyn, ‘about twelve inches out on the surface of the stream. Which is not as absurd as it sounds when you put it that way. All right. Let’s move on. What comes next?’
The Chief Constable who had listened to all this in silence now said: ‘I gather there’s a cry of possible witnesses waiting for you at Hammer. That’s Cartarette’s house up here on Watt’s Hill. If you’ll forgive me, Alleyn, I won’t go up with you. Serve no useful purpose. If you want me I’m five miles away at Tourets. Anything I can do, delighted, but sure you’d rather be left in peace. I would in my day. By the way, I’ve told them at the Boy and Donkey that you’ll probably want beds for what’s left of the night. You’ll find a room at the head of the stairs. They’ll give you an early breakfast if you leave a note. Goodnight.’
He was gone before Alleyn could thank him.
With the sergeant as guide, Alleyn and Fox prepared to set out for Hammer. Alleyn had succeeded in persuading the spaniel Skip to accept them and after one or two false starts and whimperings, he followed at their heels. They used torches in order to make their way with as little blundering as possible through the grove. Oliphant, who was in the lead, suddenly uttered a violent oath.
‘What is it?’ Alleyn asked, startled.
‘Gawd!’ Oliphant said. ‘I thought someone was looking at me. Gawd, d’you see that!’
His wavering torchlight flickered on wet willow leaves. A pair of luminous discs stared out at them from the level of a short man’s eyes.
‘Touches of surrealism,’ Alleyn muttered. ‘In Bottom Meadow.’ He advanced his own torch and they saw a pair of spectacles caught up in a broken twig.
