by Ngaio Marsh
‘A nice fish, she’s been, say two pound, but nothing to the Old ’Un,’ said the sergeant.
Alleyn laid the paper and its contents on a step of the stile and hung fondly over it. Mrs Twitchett, if indeed it was she, had made short work of most of the Colonel’s trout, if indeed this was his trout. The body was picked almost clean, and some of the smaller bones had been chewed. The head appeared to have been ejected after a determined onslaught and the tail was semi-detached. But from the ribs there still depended some pieces of flesh and rags of skin that originally covered part of the flank and belly of the fish, and it was over an unlovely fragment of skin that Alleyn pored. He laid it out flat, using two pairs of pocket tweezers for the purpose, and with a long finger pointed to something that might have been part of an indented scar. It was about a quarter of an inch wide and had a curved margin. It was pierced in one place as if by a short spike.
‘Now blow me down flat,’ Alleyn exulted, ‘if this isn’t the answer to the good little investigating officer’s prayer. See here, Fox, isn’t this a piece of the sort of scar we would expect to find? And look here.’
Very gingerly he turned the trout over and discovered, clinging to the other flank, a further rag of skin with the apex of a sharp triangular gap in it.
‘Sink me if I don’t have a look,’ Alleyn muttered.
Under Oliphant’s enchanted gaze, he opened his case, took from it a flat enamel dish, which he laid on the bottom step of the stile, and a small glass jar with a screw-on lid. Using his tweezers he spread out the piece of skin with the triangular gap on the plate. From the glass jar he took the piece of skin that had been found on the sharp stone under the Old ’Un. Muttering and whistling under his breath, and with a delicate dexterity, he laid the second fragment beside the first, opened it out and pushed and fiddled the one into the other as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They fitted exactly.
‘And that,’ Alleyn said, ‘is why Mrs Twitchett met us last night smelling of fresh fish when she should have been stinking of liver. O Fate! O Nemesis! O Something or Another!’ he apostrophized. ‘Thy hand is here!’ And in answer to Oliphant’s glassy stare, he added: ‘You’ve done damned handily, Sergeant, to pick this up so quickly. Now, listen and I’ll explain.’
The explanation was detailed and exhaustive. Alleyn ended it with an account of the passage he had read in Colonel Cartarette’s book. ‘We’ll send out a signal to some piscatorial pundit,’ he said, ‘and get a check. But if the Colonel was right, and he seems to have been a conscientious knowledgeable chap, our two trout cannot exhibit identical scales. The Colonel’s killer, and only his killer, can have handled both fish. We do a round-up of garments, my hearties, and hope for returns.’
Sergeant Oliphant cleared his throat and with an air of modest achievement stooped behind a briar bush. ‘There’s one other matter, sir,’ he said. ‘I found this at the bottom of the hill in a bit of underbrush.’
He straightened up. In his hand was an arrow. ‘It appears,’ he said, ‘to have blood on it.’
‘Does it, indeed?’ Alleyn said, and took it. ‘All right, Oliphant. Damn’ good show. We’re getting on very prettily. And if,’ he summarized for the benefit of the gratified and anxious Oliphant, ‘if it all tallies up as I believe it must then the pattern will indeed begin to emerge, won’t it, Fox?’
‘I hope so, Mr Alleyn,’ Fox rejoined cheerfully.
‘So off you go, Oliphant,’ Alleyn said. ‘Drive Mr Fox to the station where he will ring the Yard and the Natural History Museum. Deliver your treasure-trove to Dr Curtis. I hope to have the rest of the exhibits before this evening. Come on, chaps, this case begins to ripen.’
He led them back into the valley, saw Oliphant and Fox on their way with an accumulation of gear and objects of interest, and himself climbed up the hill to Nunspardon.
Here, to his surprise, he ran into a sort of party. Shaded from the noontide sun on the terrace before the great house were assembled the three Lacklanders, Kitty Cartarette and Rose. It was now half-past twelve and a cocktail tray gave an appearance of conviviality to a singularly wretched-looking assembly. Lady Lacklander seemed to have retired behind her formidable façade leaving in her wake an expression of bland inscrutability: George stood in a teapot attitude, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other on the back of a chair, one neatly knickered leg straight, one bent. Mark scowled devotedly upon Rose who was pale, had obviously wept a great deal and seemed in addition to her grief to be desperately worried. Kitty, in a tweed suit, high heels and embroidered gloves, was talking to George. She looked exhausted and faintly sulky, as if tragedy had taken her by surprise and let her down. She lent an incongruous note to a conversation piece that seemed only to lack the attendant figures of grooms with hounds in leashes. Her voice was a high-pitched one. Before she noticed Alleyn she had completed a sentence and he had heard it. ‘That’s right,’ she had said. ‘Brierley and Bentwood,’ and then she saw him and made an abrupt movement that drew all their eyes upon him.
He wondered how many more times he would have to approach these people through their gardens and from an uncomfortable distance. In a way he was beginning to enjoy it. He felt certain that this time, if George Lacklander could have managed it, the waiting group would have been scattered by a vigorous gesture, George himself would have retired to some manly den and Alleyn, in the ripeness of time, would have been admitted by a footman.
As it was, all of them except Lady Lacklander made involuntary movements which were immediately checked. Kitty half-rose as if to beat a retreat, looked disconsolately at George and sank back in her chair.
‘They’ve been having a council of war,’ thought Alleyn.
After a moment’s further hesitation Mark, with an air of coming to a decision, put his chin up, said loudly: ‘It’s Mr Alleyn,’ and came to meet him. As they approached each other Alleyn saw Rose’s face, watchful and anxious, beyond Mark’s advancing figure. His momentary relish for the scene evaporated.
‘Good morning,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’m sorry to reappear so soon and to make a further nuisance of myself. I won’t keep you long.’
‘That’s all right,’ Mark said pleasantly. ‘Who do you want to see?’
‘Why, in point of fact, all of you, if I may. I’m lucky to find you in a group like this.’
Mark had fallen into step with him and together they approached the group.
‘Well, Rory,’ Lady Lacklander shouted as soon as he was within range, ‘you don’t give us much peace, do you? What do you want this time? The clothes off our backs?’
‘Yes,’ Alleyn said, ‘I’m afraid I do. More or less.’
‘And what may that mean? More or less?’
‘The clothes off your yesterday-evening backs, if you please.’
‘Is this what my sporadic reading has led me to understand as ‘a matter of routine’?’
‘In a way,’ Alleyn said coolly, ‘yes. Yes, it is. Routine.’
‘And who,’ Kitty Cartarette asked in a care-worn voice of nobody in particular, ‘said that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one?’
This remark was followed by a curious little gap. It was as if her audience had awarded Kitty a point for attempting, under the circumstances, her small joke but at the same time were unable to accept her air of uncertain intimacy which apparently even George found embarrassing. He laughed uncomfortably. Lady Lacklander raised her eyebrows, and Mark scowled at his boots.
‘Do you mean,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘the clothes that we were all wearing when Maurice Cartarette was murdered?’
‘I do, yes.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re welcome to mine. What was I wearing yesterday, George?’
‘Really, Mama, I’m afraid I don’t …’
‘Nor do I. Mark?’
Mark grinned at her. ‘A green tent, I fancy, Gar, darling; a solar topee and a pair of Grandfather’s boots.’
‘You’re perfectly right. My green Harris, it was. I’ll tell my
maid, Roderick, and you shall have them.’
‘Thank you.’ Alleyn looked at George. ‘Your clothes and boots, please?’
‘Ah, spiked shoes and stockings and plus-fours,’ George said loudly. ‘Very old-fogeyish. Ha-ha.’
‘I think they’re jolly good,’ Kitty said wearily. ‘On the right man.’ George’s hand went to his moustache, but he didn’t look at Kitty. He seemed to be exquisitely uncomfortable. ‘I,’ Kitty added, ‘wore a check skirt and a twin set. Madly county, you know,’ she added, desperately attempting another joke, ‘on account we played golf.’ She sounded near to tears.
‘And your shoes?’ Alleyn asked.
Kitty stuck out her feet. Her legs, Alleyn noted, were good. Her feet, which were tiny, were shod in lizard skin shoes with immensely high heels. ‘Not so county,’ Kitty said, with the ghost of a grin; ‘but the best I had.’
George, apparently in an agony of embarrassment, glanced at the shoes, at his mother and at the distant prospect of the Home Spinney.
Alleyn said: ‘If I may, I’ll borrow the clothes, gloves, and stockings. We’ll pick them up at Hammer Farm on our way back to Chyning.’
Kitty accepted this. She was looking at Alleyn with the eye, however wan, of a woman who spots a genuine Dior in a bargain basement.
‘I’ll hurry back,’ she said, ‘and get them ready for you.’
‘There’s no immediate hurry.’
Mark said: ‘I was wearing whites. I put brogues on for going home and carried my tennis shoes.’
‘And your racket?’
‘Yes.’
‘And, after Bottom Bridge, Lady Lacklander’s sketching gear and shooting-stick?’
‘That’s right.’
‘By the way,’ Alleyn asked him, ‘had you gone straight to your tennis party from Nunspardon?’
‘I looked in on a patient in the village.’
‘And on the gardener’s child, didn’t you?’ Kitty said. ‘They told me you’d lanced its gumboil.’
‘Yes. An abscess, poor kid,’ Mark said cheerfully.
‘So you had your professional bag too?’ Alleyn suggested.
‘It’s not very big.’
‘Still; quite a load.’
‘It was rather.’
‘But Lady Lacklander had left it all tidily packed up, hadn’t she?’
‘Well,’ Mark said, with a smile at his grandmother, ‘more or less.’
‘Nonsense,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘there was no more or less about it. I’m a tidy woman and I left everything tidy.’
Mark opened his mouth and shut it again.
‘Your paint rag for instance?’ Alleyn said, and Mark glanced sharply at him.
‘I overlooked the rag, certainly,’ said Lady Lacklander rather grandly, ‘when I packed up. But I folded it neatly and tucked it under the strap of my haversack. Why have you put on that look, Mark?’ she added crossly.
‘Well, darling, when I got there, the rag, far from being neatly folded and stowed, was six yards away on a briar bush. I rescued it and put it into your haversack.’
They all looked at Alleyn as if they expected him to make some comment. He was silent, however, and after a considerable pause Lady Lacklander said: ‘Well, it couldn’t be of less significance, after all. Go indoors and ask them to get the clothes together. Fisher knows what I wore.’
‘Ask about mine, old boy, will you?’ said George, and Alleyn wondered how many households there were left in England where orders of this sort were still given.
Lady Lacklander turned to Rose. ‘And what about you, child?’
But Rose stared out with unseeing eyes that had filled again with tears. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief and frowned at herself.
‘Rose?’ Lady Lacklander said quietly.
Still frowning, Rose turned and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘They want to know what clothes you wore, my dear.’
‘Tennis things, I imagine,’ Alleyn said.
Rose said: ‘Oh, yes. Of course. Tennis things.’
Kitty said: ‘It’s the day for the cleaner. I saw your tennis things in the box, didn’t I, Rose?’
‘I? … Yes,’ Rose said. ‘I’m sorry. Yes, I did put them in.’
‘Shall we go and rescue them?’ Mark asked.
Rose hesitated. He looked at her for a moment and then said in a level voice: ‘OK. I’ll come back,’ and went into the house. Rose turned away and stood at some distance from the group.
‘It’s toughest for Rose,’ Kitty said, unexpectedly compassionate, and then with a return to her own self-protective mannerisms she sipped her sherry. ‘I wish you joy of my skirt, Mr Alleyn,’ she added loudly. ‘You won’t find it very delicious.’
‘No?’ Alleyn said. ‘Why not?’
‘It absolutely reeks of fish.’
III
Alleyn observed the undistinguished little face and wondered if his own was equally blank. He then, under the guise of bewilderment, looked at the others. He found that Lady Lacklander seemed about as agitated as a Buddha and that George was in process of becoming startled. Rose was still turned away.
‘Are you a fisherman too, then, Mrs Cartarette?’ Alleyn asked.
‘God forbid!’ she said, with feeling. ‘No, I tried to take a fish away from a cat last evening.’ The others gaped at her.
‘My dear Kitty,’ Lady Lacklander said, ‘I suggest that you consider what you say.’
‘Why?’ Kitty countered, suddenly common and arrogant. ‘Why? It’s the truth. What are you driving at?’ she added nervously. ‘What’s the matter with saying I’ve got fish on my skirt? Here,’ she demanded of Alleyn, ‘what are they getting at?’
‘My good girl …’ Lady Lacklander began, but Alleyn cut in:
‘I’m sorry, Lady Lacklander, but Mrs Cartarette’s perfectly right. There’s nothing the matter, I assure you, with speaking the truth.’ Lady Lacklander shut her mouth with a snap. ‘Where did you meet your cat and fish, Mrs Cartarette?’
‘This side of the bridge,’ Kitty muttered resentfully.
‘Did you, now?’ Alleyn said with relish.
‘It looked a perfectly good trout to me, and I thought the cat had no business with it. I suppose,’ Kitty went on, ‘it was one of old Occy Phinn’s swarm; the cat, I mean. Anyhow, I tried to get the trout away from it. It hung on like a fury. And then when I did jerk the trout away it turned out to be half-eaten on the other side, sort of. So I let the cat have it back,’ Kitty said limply.
Alleyn said: ‘Did you notice any particular mark or scar on the trout?’
‘Well, hardly. It was half-eaten.’
‘Yes, but on the part that was left?’
‘I don’t think so. Here! What sort of mark?’ Kitty demanded, beginning to look alarmed.
‘It doesn’t matter. Really.’
‘It was quite a nice trout. I wondered if Maurice had caught it and then I thought old Occy Phinn must have hooked it and given it to the cat. He’s crazy enough on his cats to give them anything, isn’t he, George?’
‘Good God, yes!’ George ejaculated automatically, without looking at Kitty.
‘It’s a possible explanation,’ Alleyn said as if it didn’t much matter either way.
Mark came back from the house. ‘The clothes,’ he said to Alleyn, ‘will be packed up and put in your car which has arrived, by the way. I rang up Hammer and asked them to keep back the things for the cleaner.’
‘Thank you so much,’ Alleyn said. He turned to Lady Lacklander. ‘I know you’ll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine per cent of the information is quite useless and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitive and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth.’
Lady Lacklander stared a
t him like a basilisk. She had a habit of blinking slowly, her rather white eyelids dropping conspicuously like shutters: a slightly reptilian habit that was disconcerting. She blinked twice in this manner at Alleyn, and said: ‘What are you getting at, my dear Roderick? I hope you won’t finesse too elaborately. Pray, tell us what you want.’
‘Certainly. I want to know if, when I arrived, you were discussing Sir Harold Lacklander’s memoirs.’
He knew by their very stillness that he had scored. It struck him, not for the first time, that people who have been given a sudden fright tend to look alike; a sort of homogeneous glassiness overtakes them.
Lady Lacklander first recovered from whatever shock they had all received.
‘In point of fact we were,’ she said. ‘You must have extremely sharp ears.’
‘I caught the name of my own publishers,’ Alleyn said at once. ‘Brierley and Bentwood. An admirable firm. I wondered if they are to do the memoirs.’
‘I’m glad you approve of them,’ she said dryly. ‘I believe they are.’
‘Colonel Cartarette was entrusted with the publication, wasn’t he?’
There was a fractional pause before Mark and Rose together said: ‘Yes.’
‘I should think,’ Alleyn said pleasantly, ‘that that would have been a delightful job.’
George, in a strangulated voice, said something about ‘Responsibility,’ and suddenly offered Alleyn a drink.
‘My good George,’ his mother said impatiently, ‘Roderick is on duty and will have none of your sherry. Don’t be an ass.’
George blushed angrily and glanced, possibly for encouragement, at Kitty.
‘Nevertheless,’ Lady Lacklander said, with a sort of grudging bonhomie, ‘you may as well sit down, Rory. One feels uncomfortable when you loom. There is, after all, a chair.’
‘Thank you,’ Alleyn said, taking it. ‘I don’t want to loom any more than I can help, you know, but you can’t expect me to be all smiles and prattle when you, as a group, close your ranks with such a deafening clank whenever I approach you.’
‘Nonsense,’ she rejoined briskly, but a dull colour actually appeared under her weathered skin and for a moment there was a fleeting likeness to her son. Alleyn saw that Rose Cartarette was looking at him with a sort of anguished appeal and that Mark had taken her hand.
