Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  When Inspector Blount returned to the room, he found Nigel smoking a cigarette and playing idiotically with fragments of a nut. For a fearful moment Blount thought that the tragedy had turned his brain. But then Nigel said, with all the symptoms of sanity:

  ‘You needn’t go on with the search, Inspector. I’ve found the answer to the puzzle.’

  ‘The deuce you have!’

  ‘Yes. It is one of those stories that are told in a nutshell.’

  Nigel told the story. The inspector looked polite, incredulous, absorbed, triumphant, and frankly horrified, by turns.

  ‘Great Scott, Mr Strangeways, that’s a grand piece of work of yours. But I don’t like this; I don’t like it at all. There’s a sort of—what can you call it—deadly, cold precision about this crime. The sooner we get our hands on the fellow the better.’

  ‘Not much choice left now,’ said Nigel slowly.

  ‘No. And it shouldn’t take long, luckily. I wish Bellamy would come round. He’s probably got the key to it all. The doctor says he has a good chance now, but he may be unconscious for days yet, and there’s always the danger of loss of memory after a blow like that. We’ll have to get on without him. I’m sending out descriptions of everyone here to the chemists. You can’t buy prussic acid like butter, but even if the murderer has managed to sign a false name in the register, which is most unlikely, we’ll get him identified with luck. My chaps are going on with the search; but I imagine whoever fixed up that nut didn’t do it here. Now, Mr Strangeways, if you’re free for an hour or so, I’d like to clear up my ideas about—’

  ‘No, no,’ interrupted Nigel firmly. ‘You professionals may be able to go for days without food; but it’s now long after my dinner hour, and I propose to make a pretty large hole in the larder. You’d better join in. I’ll get Lily to bring all the food there is in the house into the morning room.’

  Nigel ate steadily through a pound or so of cold beef, ten potatoes, half a loaf of bread, and the greater part of an apple pie, refusing any response to the inspector’s professional gambits. At last he withdrew his head wistfully from an emptied jug of beer, wiped his mouth and said:

  ‘Proceed. You have our ear.’

  ‘First, I take it there is no question now of suicide. Knott-Sloman would scarcely go to all that trouble with the nut for his own benefit.’

  ‘Dashed true and, if I may say so, very well put.’ Nigel was in that expansive, unanchored and vaguely drifting state of mind which anything over three pints of beer will induce.

  ‘There’s no point in our going into the whereabouts of everyone this afternoon, as the nut might have been placed there any time in the last few days. Mrs Grant says that the plate beside Knott-Sloman’s bed was kept well supplied from the beginning of his stay. Now either this poisoning is connected with the two previous crimes, or it is not.’

  ‘A small point, but one worth making,’ murmured Nigel.

  ‘If it is not, we should have to postulate two separate murderers in the house—’

  ‘Two minds with but a single thought. Sorry. Pass on.’

  ‘We may be pretty certain that there is a connection. Very well, then. The obvious one is that Knott-Sloman had some knowledge which was vitally dangerous to the murderer. What could that be?’

  ‘Knowledge about the murder of O’Brien, I should hazard.’ Nigel threw both legs over the arm of his armchair, lit a cigarette, and rumpled his hair in the manner of Stan Laurel.

  ‘That’s exactly what I had concluded. We know that Sloman was near the hut shortly before O’Brien’s murder. Suppose he saw someone else enter the hut after O’Brien. The next day he finds murder has been committed. The natural reaction of his type would be not to expose this someone else to the police, but to cash in on his knowledge. He was killed because he was blackmailing the murderer of O’Brien.’

  ‘Why not sooner? Why did the murderer wait two days?’

  ‘Ah, that’s very significant to my mind. It was not till this afternoon that Knott-Sloman knew he was suspected. The only way he could get rid of this suspicion was to admit his having seen X enter the hut after O’Brien. He hesitated about doing this, because it involved killing the goose that was laying his golden eggs: also, perhaps, because such a statement would have been received by us with a certain lack of credulity. I suggest Sloman was keeping this statement as a last card, till he knew for certain whether we were bluffing or not. In the course of this afternoon the murderer discovers, either because Knott-Sloman tells him or from his demeanour, that Sloman is under suspicion. Fearing that Sloman’s nerve will break and he will tell the police what he knows, the murderer at once lays the poison-trap for him.’

  ‘That’s very sound up to a point. But it implies some pretty quick work with the preparation of the nut, doesn’t it?’

  ‘We should have still to assume that the murderer brought the nut with him. It might have been an alternative method of killing O’Brien, or perhaps just a safe way of carrying poison about with him against a possible emergency.’

  ‘Or, thirdly, there is this theory: X might have wanted to get rid of Knott-Sloman because he was blackmailing him, not over O’Brien’s murder, but over something else. He brought the death-nut, as our American cousins would put it, on spec. Finding that Sloman was suspected of murder, he planted the nut in the expectation that it would flourish into a perfectly natural suicide. Note the beautifully constructed metaphor.’

  ‘Yes, that seems a very reasonable alternative, Mr Strangeways. Your theory would point to Cavendish. He has hinted himself that he was being blackmailed by Knott-Sloman, apart from the evidence we’ve got for it. He may quite well be the murderer of O’Brien, too. From what I’ve seen of him, I should say that his demeanour was highly suspicious. He looks nervous and worried, and everyone seems to have assumed rather too readily that this was due to his financial difficulties.’

  ‘Cavendish’s demeanour is the oddest thing in this very outré case,’ murmured Nigel. The inspector took off his horn-rims with deliberation and, swinging them in his right hand, leant towards Nigel.

  ‘Now then, sir, what exactly do you mean by that? You’ve got something on your mind.’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t tell you—because I simply don’t know. I’ve been watching Cavendish hard for two days, and his demeanour is more like that of a murderer on the point of losing his nerve than one could believe possible. He looks just too guilty to be true. It beats me.’

  Blount leant back, a bit disappointed. ‘I think you’re being oversubtle. My experience is that the murderer—the educated type, not the thug, I mean—generally gives himself away in his behaviour. The poker-face fiend is a product of fiction.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right.’

  Blount glanced sharply at Nigel. He was staring, with a glassy and hypnotised expression, apparently at the apex of the inspector’s bald head.

  ‘Funny,’ Nigel said, ‘I’d not noticed it before. A Picasso, isn’t it?’

  He got up and inspected a small framed drawing on the wall behind the inspector.

  ‘You were saying, Mr Strangeways,’ Blount pressed relentlessly, ‘that you hoped I was right. Does that mean you suspect someone else?’

  Nigel returned and slumped wearily into his chair. ‘In fairness to Edward Cavendish,’ he said, ‘one must admit that there are other possibilities. For instance, before lunch today there was a bit of a dust-up, featuring Knott-Sloman and Philip Starling. In the course of it Sloman blurted out that he knew a thing or two about Starling which would alter the attitude of the police to him. Mind you, I know Philip well. As far as murder goes, I should call him one hundred per cent pure. And—’

  ‘The snag about him,’ Blount interrupted, ‘was that he couldn’t have attacked Bellamy. Still, it is not inconceivable that this attack may not have been made by the murderer. I shall have to see Mrs Grant, though, to make sure that Bellamy really was about the place till two-thirty that afternoon.’

  ‘I should
n’t take that suggestion of mine too seriously. It was only made to show that Cavendish isn’t the only pebble on the beach of the incarnadined sea. There’s Lucilla, for instance. She’d just fallen out with Knott-Sloman: and when knaves fall out—Poison is a woman’s weapon, they say. Knott-Sloman might have killed O’Brien with her complicity; then she sees he is on the point of losing his nerve and slips him the poison in self-protection. Or there’s Mrs Grant—a woman, presumably, though she gives little evidence of it, and therefore a potential poisoner. Suppose that earlier in her life she had Sacrificed All for Love and Taken the Wrong Turning. She is left with a fatherless (fie!) cheeild, and spends the rest of her life working her fingers to the bone to put him through college. Knott-Sloman finds out her secret and blackmails her. ‘I had only one wish, to make a gentleman of him,’ sobs errant cook. No? You flout the suggestion? Well, I’m not sure I don’t agree with you. I can’t quite see Mrs Grant in the role of Another Poor Girl Gone Wrong. What about the gardener, then? Name of Jeremiah Pegrum: and a name like that should lead one into the worst excesses. Spends most of his time meditating in the outhouses, but you’ve only to read T.F. Powys to discover that murder is the chief winter sport amongst English rustics. The long winter evenings are coming. Buy a set of our guaranteed ever-sharp hatchets. It will keep young and old amused. Packed in fancy box, with directions, seven shillings and sixpence net. Packets of assorted hemlock, ratsbane, henbane and deadly nightshade, sixpence extra.’

  Inspector Blount rose deliberately. He exhibited that faint relaxation of the facial muscles by which a Scotsman indicates that a joke has been a roaring success. In his gravest official voice he said, ‘I will bear in mind your valuable suggestions, Mr Strangeways,’ and retired. Nigel went to bed soon, too. He did not, in spite of appearances, feel wildly hilarious. Indeed, he had scarcely laid his head on the pillow when he went off into a nightmare, in which Georgia Cavendish, her green parrot on her shoulder, smiled reproachfully at him and then the parrot turned into a loudspeaker that advanced gaping towards him, gaping and bellowing louder and louder, ‘Poison is a woman’s weapon. POISON IS A WOMAN’S WEAPON!’

  XI

  THE TRAVELLER’S TALE

  ON THE RARE occasions afterwards when Nigel could be induced to talk about the fantastic and paradoxical case of the ‘Chatcombe Killings’, as the newspapers once termed them, he was wont to say that it had been solved by a professor of Greek and a seventeenth-century dramatist. Whatever may be the truth of this dictum—and anyone who perseveres to the end of this book may incline to give Nigel Strangeways himself a considerable share of the credit—it provided a suitably cryptic opening to his account of this most cryptic of cases. When Nigel arose on the morning of the twenty-eighth of December, there were no indications that the end of the affair was in sight. It was one of those mornings when the world seems to be weeping hopelessly over man’s first fall, and man himself, peering dismally and shamefacedly into his shaving mirror, wonders whether a sharp stroke over the left carotid artery would not really be best for all concerned. On Chatcombe Park a grey sky gloomed like the hangover of some Olympian debauch. Mists obscured the surrounding hills. And in the garden the leaves of evergreens were depressed and released spasmodically by raindrops from the trees overhead, like typewriter keys under invisible and inexpert fingers. Jeremiah Pegrum, feeling no doubt that the weather was sufficiently subnormal to justify an emergence from his usual outhouse, was pottering round the beds, a sack over his shoulders and an expression on his face that would have done credit to his Hebrew namesake. As Nigel shaved, the events of the last three days performed a sluggish and disordered dance round his mind. The conviction came upon him, more strongly than ever, that they would never set into a pattern until the central figure was clearly in position. O’Brien was the key, and until he knew a great deal more about O’Brien he would continue to fumble like a man trying to unlock an unfamiliar door in pitch darkness. Georgia was the person, surely, who could tell him most. If she would. The trouble was that, if one took each aspect of the crimes separately, one found it attaching itself most easily to some aspect of Georgia Cavendish. Yet the sum total of Georgia, so to speak, simply did not tally with the crimes as a whole. ‘By which ingenious nonsense,’ Nigel said to himself, ‘I really mean nothing more than that I like Georgia very much and prefer flying in the face of all probability to working out a case against her.’ A heart-to-heart with Georgia, anyway, must be the first thing in the programme. If she is innocent it will tell me a lot about O’Brien: if she is not, she will be bound to make hesitations and contradictions that will hint the worst about herself.

  There was nobody in the dining room but Philip Starling. He was examining a piece of toast with the expression of brisk animosity which he was wont to turn upon an untalented undergraduate’s compositions.

  ‘This toast,’ he declared, brandishing it in Nigel’s face, ‘is a scandal. One expects this sort of thing in college; my colleagues are all so wrapped up in the Higher Criticism or Buchmanism or some other equally squalid form of intellectual suicide that they are quite blind to the importance of creature comforts. But in a private house, and one where the cooking otherwise reaches a very tolerable standard, one does expect one’s toast to be crisp.’

  So saying, he piled marmalade on the offending piece and swallowed it with every appearance of relish.

  ‘Possibly the recent contretemps have unsettled the kitchen staff,’ suggested Nigel.

  ‘You refer to the murders? Do I detect a certain reproach beneath your words? We must preserve our sense of proportion, my dear Nigel. Your nonconformist conscience leads you to overestimate the importance of the next world at the expense of this. Now I maintain the opposite position. I hold that life is more important than death; and therefore that murder is no excuse for flabby toast. Though, apart from that, why Knott-Sloman’s demise should unsettle anyone, I cannot conceive: it ought to have put the household staff on their best form. By the way, old boy, talking of murders, isn’t it about time you solved these? Things are coming to a pretty pass. Yesterday I was searched, by a sergeant of police: a disagreeable experience, as I happen to be very ticklish. I can’t go out of doors without being followed by a constable as though I were going to commit an offence in Hyde Park. My name will be mud in the common room when they find out I was staying at Chatcombe in the vac. And my digestion is suffering from the irregularity of the dinner hour.’

  ‘Dinner,’ said Nigel ruminatively: ‘dinner. It strikes a chord. There was something I meant to ask you. Now what the devil was it? Yes, I remember. You were going to tell me something O’Brien had done or said at dinner on Christmas night. You were saying, “I suppose you noticed how O’Brien—” and then we were interrupted by that shindy over Arthur Bellamy.’

  Philip Starling looked puzzled. Then his brow cleared. ‘It was that passage he recited: “Doth the silkworm expend her yellow labours.” He gave us to understand that it was Webster. Actually, it comes in one of Tourneur’s plays. I didn’t notice it at the time. It struck me later. Odd, because he seemed a well-read fellow.’

  Nigel was disappointed. He had expected some more valuable revelation. An hour later he went into the morning room and found Georgia Cavendish writing letters. She had on a suede leather coat and a bright red skirt, and her parrot was sitting on her shoulder.

  ‘Will you come out for a walk?’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  The parrot cocked an obscene eye at him, and enunciated brightly, ‘You naughty old b—!’

  Georgia laughed. ‘I must apologise for Nestor. He had a nautical education. Yes, of course I will. Just wait till I’ve finished this and put Nestor in his cage: he doesn’t like rain.’