Thou Shell of Death

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘I got so far in my imaginary reconstruction. There was nothing among the known facts that conflicted with this theory of O’Brien’s getting Cavendish into the hut and trapping him into apparent murder. O’Brien had been helped by the snow, too, which he couldn’t have counted on. But at this point old Edward put up a better fight than O’Brien had expected. He couldn’t bring himself to tell what had actually happened: it would sound fantastic and would merely call attention to the very good reasons he had had for killing O’Brien. So he decided to fake a suicide. Except for the broken cufflink and the bruises on O’Brien’s wrist, he left no clues behind him. The track in the snow was an improvisation of great brilliance. It’s pretty gripping, when you come to think of it, this duel between a living man and a dead one.’

  The two listeners certainly were gripped. Philip Starling was following every point with alert and critical intelligence. Sir John’s expression had passed from irritated incredulity, through scepticism, to a wary and qualified approval. Nigel went on.

  ‘So far, so good for Edward Cavendish. But he couldn’t keep it up. Whether Knott-Sloman had really seen him enter the hut and started to blackmail him, we shall never know. At any rate, Cavendish’s morale—as O’Brien anticipated—began to collapse: he began to look exactly like a guilty man. But with a very important difference. He looked puzzled as well as nervous. Of course he looked puzzled. The fact that he did so clinched my bizarre theory. He was trying to puzzle out all the time why O’Brien had behaved in such an extraordinary way, why O’Brien had put him into such a precarious position. He had no reason to connect O’Brien with Jack Lambert. In fact, no other theory than mine could—as far as I could see—account for Cavendish looking both puzzled and apprehensive.’

  ‘Just a minute, Nigel. Surely O’Brien, if he had planned everything in this elaborate way, would have anticipated that Cavendish would fake a suicide?’ asked Sir John.

  ‘That was the very thing that next occurred to me. And it provided a reasonable explanation of four points that I didn’t seem to be able to fit into any other theory. First, why should O’Brien have written those threatening letters and then shown them to us, except in order to make us suspicious of an appearance of suicide when the time came? He made a mistake, though, in giving rein to his grim, impish sense of humour in those letters. He just couldn’t deny himself a good joke. In fact, he said to me at dinner that first night, “Y’know, if I was going to kill someone, I’ve a feeling I’d write to him just that way.’ He couldn’t resist a leg-pull. He ought to have written them in the character of Edward Cavendish. Second, the hints he let out about someone wanting to get hold of his aeroplane plans: I was puzzled almost from the beginning why he should load me up with a shilling-shocker tale of secret agents and the sinister Foreign Power and so on; it was just his flamboyant Irish imagination running away with him again. Third, the will. He told me he kept his will in the safe in the hut. Naturally, when we found his body, we looked in the safe, and the fact that it was empty seemed to prove that someone had murdered him to get hold of the will. He had, of course, taken it out of the safe—if it ever was there—and sent it in that sealed envelope to his solicitors long before. But he was a bit slipshod over his work here: didn’t think it out far enough. Because it at once struck me as odd that any murderer should be able to open the safe. How could he know the combination? An intimate friend of his might know it, but surely not Cavendish. The fourth precaution he took against his death’s being passed off as a suicide was to get me down. He hoped that I should be intelligent enough, with the aid of the hints he gave me, to see through a fake suicide: and he was convinced that I would not be intelligent enough to see right through to the real facts.

  ‘When I had got that far, I was certain I held the true explanation of O’Brien’s death. In no other way could I get round what was the biggest stumbling block—the question why O’Brien had allowed himself to be killed. From the beginning I could not really believe, you see, that a man like O’Brien, forewarned and forearmed against an attack as he was, would allow himself to be tricked and jumped on and then shot with his own revolver. It was fantastic. Then I looked around to see if other curious things I had noticed would fit in with my theory. Well, there was the photograph of Judith Fear in the hut. Why on earth should he remove and destroy it before the other guests arrived? The only sensible answer was that somebody might see it and recognise it, and that such a recognition would be fatal to his plans. But the only one of the guests who would recognise Judith Fear was Cavendish. Ergo, he destroyed it lest it should put Cavendish on his guard. All the time he was talking to me privately, too, I felt that there were dark undercurrents beneath what he was saying. After the other guests arrived, I was watching them like a stoat. I remember thinking on Christmas Day that the threats against O’Brien must be a hoax, because no one had seemed to be behaving less naturally to O’Brien than to the others, and I didn’t believe you could plan a man’s murder and yet act perfectly normally to him a few hours before it was scheduled. You may “smile and smile, and be a villain,” but after the event, not before it. And, when I thought it over again, I realised that O’Brien was the only person there who was not behaving normally. He was just about to set in motion the events which were, slowly and surely, to murder Edward Cavendish. O’Brien hoped to give him a few weeks’ hell with a noose at the end of them: even he could never have imagined the poetic justice of Cavendish’s throwing himself from an aeroplane. Funny, I told Bleakley, long before I began to suspect, that I could imagine O’Brien killing a man for revenge.’

  Nigel paused. The other two were motionless. Then, as though by common consent, they raised their glasses to their lips. It might have been a toast, to Nigel; or perhaps to the remorseless, demon-driven spirit of Fergus O’Brien. Sir John said:

  ‘I think perhaps we can postpone the visit of the alienist. That’s a thundering good case you’ve made out, and I believe you’re right. But what about Knott-Sloman? How did O’Brien kill him, and why?’

  ‘Oh, compared with the rest of the case, that’s fairly simple. The method pointed unerringly to O’Brien. Cavendish wouldn’t have killed Knott-Sloman in that way, because if he wanted to get rid of him he’d want to get rid of him at once, before he could split to the police. If it were done when ’tis done, it were well it were done quickly. But O’Brien was in no hurry. He had eternity to wait, so a few days wouldn’t matter. The nut was a delayed action shell and contained the kernel of the problem—’

  Sir John groaned. ‘Didn’t you teach him at Oxford that mixed metaphors are ungentlemanly, Starling?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Nigel, ‘they are signs of a vivid and proleptic imagination. To proceed. If O’Brien had wished to kill Knott-Sloman after his own death, it was the only way he could do it. Delayed action. The revenging hand striking from Hades. O’Brien knew that Georgia had some poison and it wouldn’t be very difficult for him to find where she kept it. He chose to kill Sloman in that post-mortem sort of way partly, I believe, in order to throw additional suspicion on Cavendish. He may have suspected that Sloman was blackmailing Cavendish, and of course Cavendish would be the obvious person to have pinched his sister’s poison. O’Brien probably wrote the threatening letters on Knott-Sloman’s typewriter with the same motive that a mischievous boy flings a stone at a church; it may hit a window or it may not. The threatening letters might hit Cavendish, a frequenter of the club, or Sloman its proprietor—or they might not. As it happened, they did. O’Brien took the poison, anyway, and prepared the nut and placed it at the bottom of the plateful by Knott-Sloman’s bed. He had a funny womanish trait that made him like doing the household arrangements. It was he, I found, who put flowers in my bedroom and filled the biscuit tin. He knew Sloman’s habit of cracking nuts in his teeth, and knew that he was the sort of greedy person who likes consuming his delicacies in private and is most unlikely to offer them to anyone else. But first he made sure at dinner that none of us could crack
nuts with our teeth, and therefore would not be apt to do it in the ordinary course of events. It was taking a risk, of course. But O’Brien had scant respect for human life, and the infinitesimal chance that the nut might get into the wrong person’s mouth wouldn’t worry him unduly. A bigger risk was that Georgia would be suspected of the murder. But he couldn’t see any possible motive that might be attributed to her, I expect, and he didn’t imagine for a moment that anyone could suspect her of killing himself. Everyone knew that she loved him.

  ‘But the chief reason why Sloman had to be poisoned well after O’Brien himself died was that otherwise O’Brien might very easily have been suspected of it. You see, there was an obvious link between him and Knott-Sloman, and one would only have to pull on this sufficiently hard to draw up the real motive.’

  ‘I’ll remember to use a link when I next go fishing,’ said Sir John sourly. ‘But what was the real motive? Blackmail?’

  ‘No. Something much more colourful than that. The link was that they were both in the R.A.F. during the war. Sloman called O’Brien “Slip-Slop”—a nickname that no one else of us used except Jimmy Hope, the chap in O’Brien’s flight who lives near Bridgewest. It wasn’t one of his nicknames that the press had familiarised us with—I was quite surprised when I first heard it. So it seemed a reasonable deduction that Knott-Sloman had served in the same unit as O’Brien. Now one of the first things that struck me about the house-party at Chatcombe was that it seemed really a very odd sort of party indeed. It was odd for a person like O’Brien, who ostensibly wanted to lead the life of a recluse, to have a party at all. It was still odder that he should invite at least three people who couldn’t have been congenial to a man of his type—Cavendish, Lucilla and Knott-Sloman. He gave me the explanation that amongst the party were those he suspected as possible authors of the anonymous letters and that he wanted to have them under his eye. But that explanation only begged another question: Why had he ever taken up with a man like Knott-Sloman? Georgia told me that it was O’Brien’s idea that he should go and visit Sloman’s roadhouse. Yet O’Brien was the sort of person you’d think would avoid roadhouses like the plague.’

  ‘I must say I’d wondered myself what a bounder and a bore like Sloman was doing down here,’ said Philip Starling.

  ‘Exactly. Now you remember telling me, uncle, that when O’Brien had become a flight commander some B.F. at headquarters ordered his flight to do a piece of ground strafing in impossible weather conditions, and all the flight were shot down except himself, and after that he became even more desperately daring than before. Now Jimmy Hope told me that, in the same week and the same sector, at the end of 1917 it was, Judith’s brother had been shot down doing the same sort of work. He also told me how O’Brien and young Fear had been like David and Jonathan, how O’Brien looked after him in the air, and so on. Clearly, some of his love for Judith was transferred to young Fear: O’Brien tried to preserve her image in her brother. Now go over to a piece of Knott-Sloman’s evidence. He said he had been a pilot in the R.A.F. and then got a staff job, and held command in O’Brien’s sector from the summer of 1917. I hadn’t begun to see light properly when I had that talk with Jimmy Hope. But after my day in Ireland I realised that O’Brien might very well have got it in for Knott-Sloman, because Sloman had been the B.F of a staff officer who sent young Fear to his death. He held an Air Force command in that sector at that date. Last Tuesday I managed to dig up a bloke who was at H.Q. with Knott-Sloman, and he confirmed that Sloman did give the order. Cavendish was made to suffer the slow mental agonies of Judith, Knott-Sloman the swift annihilation of Judith’s brother. It was poetical justice—poetical in more ways than one,’ Nigel added ruminatively.

  ‘Is that, by any chance, a reference to the Revenger’s Tragedy?’ asked Philip Starling.

  ‘You’re waking up. Yes, it is. And that’s what I meant by saying that you had given me the solution of the problem. You were the person who called my attention to the curious mistake O’Brien made at dinner when he quoted some lines from the play and attributed them to Webster. It was a kind of tryout—to see if anyone knew the play well enough to recognise the mistake. Not that he would have altered his plans if anyone had, I believe. But the fact is that both the murders and their motives had a most astonishing counterpart in that play of Tourneur’s, as doubtless you realise now, Philip.’

  ‘Could you stop this literary chat, and tell me what you’re driving at?’ exclaimed Sir John Strangeways.

  ‘If you would occasionally read something more high-class than seven-and-sixpenny bloods and gardening catalogues,’ retorted Nigel offensively, ‘you would not only improve your mind, but you would also render it unnecessary for me to give you elementary lessons in English literature. The Revenger’s Tragedy, Tourneur, 1607, or thereabouts. A piece of really juicy Elizabethan carnage, interspersed with some divine bits of poetry. It opens very agreeably. A young man called Vendice enters with a skull in his hand. Then a Duke, whom Vendice addresses spiritedly but presumably soatto voce, “Duke! Royal lecher! Go, grey-haired adultery!” He then warms to his work and calls the Duke a number of other things, including “a parched and juiceless luxur”. It transpires presently that the skull Vendice holds is that of his dead mistress, whom the Duke has poisoned because she would not, in Vendice’s admirably outspoken words, “consent unto his palsied lust”. Cavendish was an old man compared with Judith, and she died because she would not consent to him.

  ‘O’Brien must have been reading the play when he was contemplating his revenge, because both the situation and the action of Vendice correspond in a really uncanny way with O’Brien’s. In the play, Vendice destroys the Duke by becoming his pander and then leading him into a pavilion at night with the promise of a new wench. He has rigged up a dummy behind a curtain, topped by the skull of his mistress, the lips of which he has smeared with a corrosive poison. The Duke rushes at this figure, kisses the skull before he realises that someone has made a terrible mistake, and dies in acute discomfort. Now compare the Dower House version. O’Brien—Vendice: Cavendish—the Duke. O’Brien lures Cavendish into a pavilion at night, by pandering to his weakness, viz. Lucilla. It was really an amazing coincidence that Lucilla should have sent O’Brien that note just then, for by passing it on to Cavendish he was accurately re-enacting the business by which Vendice lured the Duke to his doom. It was the same with Knott-Sloman. He was killed through the instrument of his own appetite—he was excessively greedy over nuts: and that, too, was a murder of sheer, naked, flamboyant, rhetorical, Elizabethan revenge. Herbert Marlinworth was saying truer than he knew when he called O’Brien “the last of the Elizabethans”.

  ‘O’Brien must have had the play at his fingertips. You remember, Philip, the lines he quoted at dinner: “Does the Silkworm expend her yellow labors For thee? For thee does she undo herself?” If only I’d remembered the three lines that come immediately before that passage, I’d have had the solution of everything in my hands. Listen to them—’

  Nigel spoke the lines, his voice low and a little harsh as ever, but passionate with some profound emotion. Judith Fear, that sweet bewildered innocent whom he had never known, was as real to him at that moment as his two friends in the room:

  ‘“And now methinks I could e’en

  chide myself

  For doating on her beauty, though her death

  Shall be revenged after no common action.”

  ‘Yes, Judith Fear’s death was revenged after no common action,’ Nigel went on after a long silence. ‘O’Brien had those lines on his lips as he went out to revenge her through his own death. The speeches of the remorseless, heartbroken Vendice must have been running through his head for months before. Why, the very first words he spoke to me were a phrase of Vendice’s; and if only I’d been a bit quicker on the uptake I would have realised he had given me the first clue to the whole tortuous affair. I was snooping about in the hut; he caught me looking at that photograph of Judith Fear, and he came up behi
nd me and said, “My study’s ornament”. I remember thinking vaguely it was rather an odd remark. The day Cavendish killed himself I read through the Revenger’s Tragedy, and on the second page I came to this: Vendice is talking to the skull; he says:

  ‘“My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,

  Once the bright face of my betrothed lady. …”

  ‘Thou shell of death. A shell contained O’Brien’s vengeance on Knott-Sloman. And O’Brien’s death was like a shell that held in secret the answer to the deaths of his two enemies. “It is a piteous tale.” One could not help loving O’Brien. But for him love was buried in the grave of Judith. After she was dead, from the moment he brought down his first enemy plane to the moment he baited with his own body the trap for Cavendish, life for him was a revenger’s tragedy, a shell of death.’

  There was a long, long silence in the room. The sound of traffic pulsed and ebbed along the streets below. Then Philip Starling rose to his feet and exclaimed briskly:

  ‘Well, Nigel, old boy, you’re a credit to my pedagogy. The only redeeming feature I can see in this case is the extinction of Knott-Sloman. A squalid fellow.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t quite say that,’ Nigel said softly. ‘Not the only redeeming feature.’

  Judith Fear’s lovely, sad, elfish face was fading from his mind’s eye. And the face of Georgia Cavendish seemed to smile at him out of the shadowy future.

  THE END

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