Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  Bleakley scratched his knee. He did not like to admit that Nigel’s last reasonings had taken him right out of his depth. Then, with a desperate effort to get back to solid ground, he said:

  ‘That may be so, sir. But don’t you remember? The writer of those letters said something about how Mr O’Brien mustn’t balk him of his revenge by committing suicide. Now, that might’ve been just what Mr O’Brien did, see.’

  ‘That’s a bright idea of yours, Bleakley. It would have tickled O’Brien’s sense of humour to forestall the fire-breathing Mr X like that. But I don’t believe it. And, don’t you see, X probably put that bit about suicide in deliberately; he had laid his plans to commit murder and make it look like suicide; and this was just another detail to impress the idea of suicide on our innocent minds.’

  ‘Very ingenious, Mr Strangeways,’ said the superintendent obstinately; ‘but it’s all up in the air, in a manner of speaking. It’s not evidence, sir.’

  Nigel jumped up, walked over to the safe, set his coffee cup on it, and brandished the spoon at Bleakley.

  ‘Very well, then, try to keep this one out of your wicket. If O’Brien intended to commit suicide, why, why, why did he ask me down here to help him repel the would-be murderer? If he wanted to be dead as much as all that, why go to such trouble to prevent someone doing the job for him?’

  Bleakley was evidently impressed by this argument. ‘That’s a very pretty point, sir. I suppose, though, he might have intended to kill himself, yet not wanted the person who made those threats to escape unpunished.’

  ‘Unlikely, I think. And all that paraphernalia of carrying a revolver and pretending to be sleeping in the house—Oh, I hadn’t told you.’ Nigel explained O’Brien’s ruse. ‘Now why in the name of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms should he have bothered himself with such precautions against death if death was what he wanted?’

  ‘I don’t know about—er—about the gentlemen you mentioned,’ said Bleakley cautiously, ‘but it certainly don’t seem sense. Nor,’ he added, ‘don’t it seem sense for a man who was on the lookout for a murderer and not intending to be murdered to let someone walk up to him and put a gun right up against his waistcoat—and his own gun, too. Nor yet don’t it seem sense,’ his moustache bristled belligerently, ‘for a murderer to walk away from the hut through an inch of snow and leave no tracks. Why, sir, it’s soopernatural—that’s what it is, soopernatural.’

  ‘It must have been someone he could never have thought of suspecting,’ said Nigel slowly; ‘and yet it’s queer. The very reason he had this particular party down was that he suspected some or all of its members.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ The superintendent started upright in his chair.

  ‘Stupid of me. I keep on talking as though you knew all I know about it.’ Nigel mentioned the hints which O’Brien had let fall about his will and the aeroplane plans. ‘So you see, there is quite enough motive to be getting on with. And there may have been another motive that O’Brien didn’t reckon on at all. You remember what Mrs Grant said about Lucilla Thrale. Well, I happen to know for certain that she was O’Brien’s mistress—Lucilla, I mean, not Mrs Grant.’ Bleakley gave one explosive guffaw, then assumed his most ferociously official expression. ‘Lucilla tried to persuade O’Brien to let her come to his room last night: not unnaturally, he staved her off: ‘soft hands cling to the booted spur’, or however it goes. Now supposing O’Brien had cut out somebody else with the fair Lucilla. The somebody else would not be pleased. He might even carry his displeasure as far as murder. It has been done before. And there is a strong smell of personal hatred about those threatening letters.’

  ‘Ar, Sex,’ said the superintendent profoundly. ‘Churchee lar fem. Why, only last week my old woman was in a fair taking, and just because—’ He was spared further revelations by a not altogether convincing attack of coughing and the appearance of Arthur Bellamy. Arthur whispered hoarsely into Nigel’s ear, then departed, eyeing Bleakley with the expression of a man who is not quite sure whether the object before him is a slow-worm or an adder.

  Nigel looked down his nose, and said dreamily, ‘I wonder. Disappearance of a young woman in riding kit. Where has she gone, and why?’

  ‘What’s this, sir? A young lady disappeared? Out of the house, do you mean? What is the party’s name?’

  ‘I don’t know her name. And she has not disappeared out of the house exactly. She was in this hut till yesterday—No!’ he exclaimed with a sudden violence that made Bleakley clutch the arms of his chair, ‘now I remember. I will explain all. I asked Arthur before you came to look round the hut and see if anything was missing. He has just told me that the photograph of a girl that used to be on the cupboard inside the cubicle there is gone.’

  ‘Probably Mr O’Brien burnt it before he shot himself. Suicides often—’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve just remembered that on the day the other guests arrived I happened to look in at the window and got the impression that something was missing. I’d noticed the photograph there the afternoon before. I forgot about it, because just then Philip Starling turned up. But I know now. It was this photograph that had disappeared. Now why should O’Brien remove it?’

  ‘It was not a photo of either of the ladies staying here?’

  Nigel shook his head.

  ‘Well, I reckon it’s naught to do with this business.’ The superintendent got up cumbrously and stretched himself. Perhaps he felt that he had been twisted too easily round Nigel’s finger, too easily persuaded of something that was against all reason and all criminal textbooks. At any rate, he put on his official manner and said, ‘I’ll bear in mind your suggestions, Mr Strangeways; but I don’t think I have sufficient grounds for—’

  Nigel advanced on him with his ostrich strides, took him by the shoulders, and pressed him down into the chair again in a friendly but firm manner.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ he said, grinning. ‘I’ve not nearly finished yet. So far has been merely theorising, bombarding the clouds to try to bring down rain. Now we’ll come down to earth ourselves and deal with the material evidence. You’d better have some coffee, or smoke a pipe, or bring out the hypodermic syringe, because I’m going to spread myself over this with some abandon.’

  Bleakley’s official shell could not stand the strain of this good-humoured informality. He emerged from it, not without relief, grinned amiably, and started chewing a piece of toast. ‘Now,’ said Nigel, looking—with his thick glasses, his rumpled hair and clothing, his air of precise abstraction, and his demonstrative forefinger—rather like a university lecturer on Aristotle. ‘Now, I don’t pretend to have got any explanation of the footprints—or rather, the absence of them. We’ll leave them aside for the moment. Let us consider O’Brien’s movements last night. About eleven forty-five he told them in the billiard room that he was going up to bed. His plan was to jump from that window on to the veranda roof—it’s only a few feet—and from the roof on to the ground, go over to the hut, lock himself in presumably with revolver. But from the evidence of the snow he couldn’t have gone out till somewhere round about one-thirty. Why did he stay in his bedroom till then? Everyone else had gone up an hour ago or more. Why should he wait in the obvious danger spot an hour and a half after the Feast of Stephen had begun? And another curious question: Why didn’t he go out by the window as he said he was going to do?’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t?’

  ‘Because I looked out of that very window this morning, before I went downstairs. The snow on the veranda roof showed no trace of anyone’s having passed that way. It was quite smooth. What does that suggest?’

  ‘Either that he went out that way before the snow began to fall heavily—’

  ‘In which case, he didn’t make the footprints over the lawn,’ interrupted Nigel excitedly.

  ‘—Or else that he went down the stairs, out of the front door, and so on, not long before the snowfall ceased.’

  ‘Exactly. Now, if O’Brien wanted to be killed, why s
hould he not have waited in his bedroom, the obvious place for the killer to come to? If he didn’t, why alter his plans and invite death by going out of his door, walking along the passage and down through the lounge, with the killer for all he knew wide awake and listening for such a move. He would be simply giving himself away.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bleakley, scratching his head, ‘put like that, it do sound as though he must have gone out before the snow began.’

  ‘Then who made the tracks?’ asked Nigel unemphatically.

  ‘Why, that’s obvious—the person who killed h—Dash it, sir, you’ve been and hypnotized me like into saying what I never—’ Nigel’s eyes were shining with the mild benevolence of the schoolmaster who has trapped a favorite pupil.

  ‘But what about the shoes, Mr Strangeways, sir?’ went on the Superintendent, seeing a way out. ‘How did they get hold of Mr O ’Brien’s shoes? You answer me that, sir.’

  ‘We don’t know for certain they were his shoes. All we know is that his shoes tallied with the footprints. It might mean simply that he and X wear the same size.’

  Bleakley whipped out his notebook and made a note. Here obviously was a line of action. But, even as he wrote, his pen slowed to a standstill.

  ‘I reckon I’m getting fair mazed,’ he exclaimed irritably. ‘I was forgetting that these blamed footsteps were going to the hut, not coming from it. It’s no good, sir.’

  ‘I know. We haven’t got over that yet. The only clue the footsteps give us is that whoever made them was running. The impress of the toe was deeper than that of the heel, as you noticed. A priori, this might apply equally well to O’Brien or a murderer. Neither would want to be seen going out to the hut, so they’d try to get there as quickly as possible. Anyway, I’ve got another idea about those shoes: I’ll tell you it when we arrive at that point.’ Nigel resumed his professional manner and went on: ‘Assume O’Brien has arrived at the hut, some time about midnight. Assume, if you like, that he intended to kill himself. He locked the windows, but not the door—for it was not locked when we found him dead. Contradiction number one: Why lock windows and not door? He takes off his shoes and puts on carpet slippers. Would a person like him—or anyone—change their shoes before committing suicide?’

  ‘Might be just force of habit.’

  ‘It might; but it’s a point worth noticing. My uncle told me, too, that there was a legend about O’Brien’s always putting on carpet slippers when he went into action in the air. Sounds as if he felt he was going into action again—against an unknown enemy.’

  ‘I call that pretty far-fetched,’ protested Bleakley.

  ‘But possibly worth the carriage,’ murmured Nigel, quoting Dr Johnson; ‘and interesting in relation to the fingerprints on the revolver.’

  The superintendent’s brick-red face looked blank as a wall.

  ‘Supposing O’Brien intended to commit suicide. He would either have been quite determined about it, in which case he would simply have pulled out the revolver and shot himself without bothering to change his shoes; or he might have wavered at the last moment, in which case he would surely have fingered the gun nervously and there would have been prints on the muzzle. But he did change his shoes, and there were no prints except on the handle.’

  ‘That’s downright clever, sir, that is. But it’s not conclusive, not by any manner of means.’

  ‘“Little drops of water, Little grains of sand”—you know. Here’s another. How many suicides have you heard of who have shot themselves in the heart? Through the temples they do it; or else put the muzzle into their mouth.’

  ‘Ah. I’d wondered about that,’ admitted Bleakley.

  ‘To proceed. Your theory is, I presume, that he shot himself, and struck his wrist against the edge of the table as he fell, bruising himself and breaking the cufflink. I have two objections to that. A blow of this type would make a single bruise, not two; and the little chain of a cufflink is surely not so weak that the impact of an arm falling limply on a table edge would break it. Now imagine this pipe is a revolver. I am pointing it at you and you seize my wrist with your right hand to deflect the muzzle away from yourself. You would probably try to push it away with your left hand, too. Come on, man, fight! You see. Your thumb and fingers would leave two bruises on the inside of my wrist, just where they were on O’Brien’s, and my cufflink might quite conceivably be snapped by a strain.’

  Bleakley tugged furiously at his moustache. ‘By God, sir, I believe you’ve got it. The murderer comes in. O’Brien at once, or maybe after a bit of talk, suspects him and draws his gun. The murderer somehow or other distracts his attention, seizes his wrist, forces the gun round and—that accounts for his getting it at such close range and in the heart. Then the murderer tidies up all signs of a struggle, rubs any fingermarks off the muzzle, makes it look like a suicide, and—’ he groaned. ‘There we are up against it again. Flies back to the house, I suppose.’

  Nigel evaded this point. ‘To return to the shoes. Just where did you find them?’

  ‘They were on the floor over there, half hidden by that armchair.’

  ‘When you say half-hidden, you don’t mean three-quarters, seven-eighths or altogether?’

  ‘I certainly don’t, sir. I could see the heels without moving the chair at all,’ said Bleakley with some heat.

  ‘Well, this morning, after I’d made sure O’Brien was dead, it occurred to me to wonder where were the shoes in which he had come to the hut. I looked all round; hadn’t time to open cupboards and things, but I looked by that chair, and I could swear there weren’t any shoes there then.’

  The superintendent’s expression changed to the shocked anguish of one who, munching placidly a mouthful of pheasant, suddenly bites on a piece of shot; then to the wild surmise of one pursuing the shot tortuously with his tongue through the masticated mass.

  ‘Gor!’ he said finally. ‘Why, that means—’

  ‘Taken in conjunction with the fact that (a) there were no prints on the shoes, (b) that their soles were quite dry although the stove had gone out long before, the point is—as old Uncle Sherlock would say—highly suggestive,’ Nigel interrupted. ‘However, it’s not a point that would carry any weight by itself in the courts. It might not even be enough to persuade your chief constable that this is a case for further investigation. However, there’s one thing more.’ Nigel was speaking half to himself now. ‘I shall look a prize zany if it doesn’t come off.’ He twitched his shoulders, as though shaking off indecision. ‘Are you by any chance a nob at opening safes, Bleakley? It would save time and put me out of agony.’

  The superintendent walked over to the safe and inspected it for a minute. ‘I reckon I could manage this one. It’s only a matter of time and patience, if you’ve got the knack like. A friend of mine, Harris, at the Yard, taught me how. What’s on your mind, sir?’

  ‘O’Brien told me that he kept his will in there. If we find that safe empty, we shall have almost certain proof he was murdered; and it will begin to clear up the question of motive, too.’

  For nearly half an hour Bleakley worked over the safe. His touch was surprisingly delicate, and his head was cocked like a violinist’s while he tunes his instrument. Nigel prowled restlessly about, lighting cigarette after cigarette, pulling out books and putting them back in the wrong places. At last there came a final click, an oath from Bleakley. The safe door swung open. The safe was empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

  VI

  THE DON’S TALE

  BLEAKLEY WAS NOW convinced, and sprang into a furious activity with which his companion could not and would not compete. Nigel had an extraordinary capacity for absorption in the task in hand; it was one of his strongest points as a detective. While he had been exerting all his powers to achieve his preliminary aim—the persuasion of Bleakley against the suicide theory—his mind had been immersed in the facts to the exclusion of any emotional significance. It was simply a matter of arranging them in a convincing pattern, or rationally
working out a problem to which he already knew intuitively the only possible answer. Death levels all, and for Nigel’s purpose up till now all the facts had had to be equal in value, equally devoid of emotional content. A mathematician working out a problem cannot afford to let his mind wander to the Hebrew significance of the number 7 or to modern superstition about the number 13. So to Nigel nothing had been relevant but the cut-and-dried logic of facts. O’Brien had been simply a dead body, of neither more nor less value than the snow on a veranda roof or the prints on the handle of a revolver. But now, as though it had been a dog obediently playing dead, O’Brien’s body jumped up again before his eyes and took on life. From now on, O’Brien was to be the centre of everything: it was his living personality alone that could lead them to the hand which had killed it. Nigel walked out of the hut, leaving the Superintendent to his proper activities. They had agreed that the members of the house-party should for as long as possible be undisillusioned as to the manner of O’Brien’s death. One of them, of course, had never had any illusions about it; but there was no harm in his believing that the police were still pottering about at the end of the garden path up which he had led them. Nigel strode about in the park, allowing the concentration of his mind to diffuse and play upon the personality of O’Brien.

  While Nigel was trampling the fast-melting snow, the superintendent was weaving a web of complicated activity. First, Bolter was sent to keep an unobtrusive eye on the house; from his point of vantage he noticed Knott-Sloman steer a battered two-seater up the drive and away in the direction of the village, and Georgia Cavendish and her brother setting out for a walk in the park. Bleakley telephoned to the chief constable, giving him a résumé of the case and arranging for an interview with him that afternoon. He then got in touch with headquarters and ordered reinforcements. His next move was back to the hut, which he now examined with elaborate thoroughness. For this task he enlisted Bellamy’s services. They discovered that they had both served for a time in the same station in India; and, uniting in some very flowery invective against a certain quartermaster there, they soon thawed the previous frigidity between them. Bleakley’s main object was to find further proof of a struggle’s having taken place in the hut. He asked Bellamy to look for anything out of place.