Scales of Justice ra-18

by Ngaio Marsh

  It was at this moment that Kitty Cartarette screamed.

  She did not scream very loudly; the sound was checked almost as soon as it was born, but she had half risen from her sofa and was staring at something beyond and behind Alleyn. She had clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide open beneath their raised brows. He noticed that they were inclined to be prominent.

  They all turned to discover what it was that Kitty stared at but found only an uncovered French window reflecting the lighted room and the ghosts of their own startled faces.

  “There’s someone out there!” Kitty whispered. “A man looked in at the window. George!”

  “My dear girl,” Lady Lacklander said, “you saw George’s reflection. There’s nobody there.”

  “There is.”

  “It’s probably Sergeant Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “We left him outside. Fox?”

  Fox was already on his way, but before he reached the French window, the figure of a man appeared beyond its reflected images. The figure moved uncertainly, coming in from the side and halting when it was some way from the glass. Kitty made a slight retching sound. Fox’s hand was on the knob of the French window when beyond it the beam of Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shot across the dark and the man’s face was illuminated. It was crowned by a tasselled smoking cap and was deadly pale.

  Fox opened the French windows.

  “Pray forgive an unwarrantable intrusion,” said Mr. Danberry-Phinn. “I am in quest of a fish.”

  Mr. Phinn’s behaviour was singular. The light from the room seemed to dazzle him. He screwed up his eyes and nose, and this gave him a supercilious look greatly at variance with his extreme pallor and unsteady hands. He squinted at Fox and then beyond him at the company in the drawing-room.

  “I fear I have called at an inconvenient moment,” he said. “I had no idea… I had hoped to see…” his Adam’s apple bobbed furiously …“to see,” he repeated, “in point of fact, Colonel Cartarette.” He disclosed his teeth, clamped together in the oddest kind of smile.

  Kitty made an indeterminate sound, and Lady Lacklander began, “My dear Octavius…” but before either of them could get any further, Alleyn moved in front of Mr. Phinn. “Did you say, sir,” Alleyn asked, “that you are looking for a fish?”

  Mr. Phinn said, “Forgive me, I don’t think I have the pleasure…?” and peered up into Alleyn’s face. “Have I the pleasure?” he asked. He blinked away from Alleyn towards Fox. Fox was one of those, nowadays rather rare, detectives who look very much like their job. He was a large, grizzled man with extremely bright eyes.

  “And in this case,” Mr. Phinn continued with a breathless little laugh, “I indubitably have not the pleasure.”

  “We are police officers,” Alleyn said. “Colonel Cartarette has been murdered, Mr. Phinn. You are Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, I think, aren’t you?”

  “But how perfectly terrible!” said Mr. Phinn. “My dear Mrs. Cartarette! My dear Miss Rose! I am appalled. APPALLED!” Mr. Phinn repeated, opening his eyes as wide as they could go.

  “You’d better come in, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “To me!” he ejaculated. He came in and Fox shut the French window behind him.

  Alleyn said, “I shall want to have a word with you, sir. In fact, I think it is time that we saw some of you individually rather than together, but before we do that, I should like Mr. Phinn to tell us about the fish he is looking for.” He raised his hand. If any of his audience had felt like interjecting, they now thought better of the impulse. “If you please, Mr. Phinn?” Alleyn said.

  “I’m so confused, indeed so horrified at what you have told me…”

  “Dreadful,” Alleyn said, “isn’t it? About the fish?”

  “The fish? The fish, my dear sir, is or was a magnificent trout. The fish is a fish of great fame. It is the trout to end all trout. A piscine emperor. And I, let me tell you, I caught him.”

  “Where?” Lady Lacklander demanded.

  Mr. Phinn blinked twice. “Above Bottom Bridge, my dear Lady L.,” he said. “Above Bottom Bridge.”

  “You are an old humbug, Occy,” she said.

  George suddenly roared out, “That’s a bloody lie, Octavius. You poached him. You were fishing under the bridge. We saw you from the second tee.”

  “Dear me, George,” said Mr. Phinn going white to the lips. “What a noise you do make, to be sure.”

  Fox had stepped unobtrusively aside and was busy with his notebook.

  “To talk like that!” Mr. Phinn continued with two half bows in the direction of Kitty and Rose. “In a house of mourning! Really, George, I must say!”

  “By God…!” George began, but Alleyn intervened.

  “What,” he asked Mr. Phinn, “happened to your catch?”

  Mr. Phinn sucked in a deep breath and began to speak very quickly indeed. “Flushed,” he said in a voice that was not quite steady, “with triumph, I resolved to try the upper reaches of the Chyne. I therefore laid my captive to rest on the very field of his defeat, id est, the upper, repeat upper, approach to Bottom Bridge. When I returned, much later, I cannot tell you how much later for I did not carry a watch, but much, much later, I went to the exact spot where my Prince of Piscines should have rested and…” he made a wide gesture during the execution of which it was apparent that his hands were tremulous… “Gone! Vanished! Not a sign! Lost!” he said.

  “Now, look here, Occy…” Lady Lacklander in her turn began, and in her tum was checked by Alleyn.

  “Please, Lady Lacklander,” Alleyn interjected. She glared at him. “Do you mind?” he said.

  She clasped her plump hands together and rested the entire system of her chins upon them. “Well,” she said, “I called you in, after all. Go on.”

  “What did you do,” Alleyn asked Mr. Phinn, “when you discovered your loss?”

  Mr. Phinn looked very fixedly at him. “Do?” he repeated” “What should I do? It was growing dark. I looked about in the precincts of the bridge but to no avail. The trout was gone. I returned home, a bitterly chagrined man.”

  “And there you remained, it seems, for about four hours. It’s now five minutes past one in the morning. Why, at such an hour, are you paying this visit, Mr. Phinn?”

  Looking at Mr. Phinn, Alleyn thought, “He was ready for that one.”

  “Why!” Mr. Phinn exclaimed spreading his unsteady hands. “My dear sir, I will tell you why. Rendered almost suicidal by the loss of this Homeric catch, I was unable to contemplate my couch with any prospect of repose. Misery and frustration would have been my bedfellows, I assure you, had I sought it. I attempted to read, to commune with the persons of my house (I refer to my cats, sir), to listen to an indescribably tedious piece of buffoonery upon the wireless. All, I regret to say, was of no avail: my mind was wholly occupied by The Great Fish. Some three quarters of an hour or so ago, I sought the relief of fresh air and took a turn down the river path. On emerging from the ruffian Syce’s spinney, I observed lights behind these windows. I heard voices. Knowing,” he said with a singular gulp, “knowing that poor Cartarette’s interest as a fellow angler would be aroused, I… my dear Lady L., why are you looking at me in this most disconcerting fashion?”

  “Occy!” Lady Lacklander said. “Yard or no Yard, I can’t contain my information for another second. I was within a stone’s throw of you when you had your row with Maurice Cartarette. What’s more a few minutes earlier his wife and George both saw you poaching under the bridge. I heard you or Maurice throw down the trout on the bridge and I heard you part company in a high rage. What’s more Maurice came hotfoot to where I was painting and I had the whole story all over again from him. Now, my dear Roderick Alleyn, you may be as cross with me as you please, but I really could not allow this nonsensical tarradiddle to meander on for another second.”

  Mr. Phinn blinked and peered and fumbled with his lips. “It used to be quite a little joke between my dear wife and me,”
he said at last, “that one must never contradict a Lacklander.”

  Only Alleyn and Fox looked at him.

  “Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said, “you normally wear spectacles, I think, don’t you?”

  Mr. Phinn made a strange little gesture with his thumb and forefinger as if he actually adjusted his glasses. Thus, momentarily, he hid the red groove across the top of his nose and the flush that had begun to spread across his face. “Not all the time,” he said. “Only for reading.”

  Lady Lacklander suddenly clapped the palms of her hands down on the arms of her chair. “So there we are,” she said. “And having said my say, George, I should like you, if you please, to take me home.”

  She put out her right arm and as George was a little slow in coming, Alleyn took her hand, braced himself and hauled.

  “ ‘Up she rises,’ ” Lady Lacklander quoted self-derisively, and up she rose. She stared for a moment at Mr. Phinn, who gaped back at her and mouthed something indistinguishable. She looked straight into Alleyn’s eyes. “Do you, after all,” she said, “propose to let me go home?”

  Alleyn raised an eyebrow. “I shall feel a good deal safer,” he said, “with you there than here, Lady Lacklander.”

  “Take me to my car. I have to shuffle a bit because of my damn’ toe. It’s no better, Kettle. George, you may join me in five minutes. I want to have a word with Roderick Alleyn.”

  She said goodbye to Rose, holding her for a moment in her arms. Rose clung to her and gave a shuddering sob. Lady Lacklander said, “My poor child, my poor little Rose; you must come to us as soon as possible. Get Mark to give you something to make you sleep.”

  Kitty had risen. “It was awfully kind of you to come,” she said and held out her hand. Lady Lacklander took it and after a scarcely perceptible pause let it be known that Kitty was expected to kiss her. This Kitty did with caution.

  “Come and see me to-morrow, Kettle,” said Lady Lacklander, “unless they lock you up.”

  “Let ’em try,” said Nurse Kettle, who had been entirely silent ever since Mr. Phinn’s arrival. Lady Lacklander gave a short laugh. She paid no attention to Mr. Phinn but nodded to Alleyn. He hastened to open the door and followed her through a large and charmingly shaped hall to the main entrance. Outside this a vast elderly car waited.

  “I’ll sit in the back,” she said. “George will drive. I find him an irritating companion in time of trouble.”

  Alleyn opened the door and switched on a light in the car.

  “Now, tell me,” she said, after she had heaved herself in, “tell me, not as a policeman to an octogenarian dowager but as a man of discretion to one of your mother’s oldest friends, what did you think of Occy Phinn’s behaviour just now?”

  Alleyn said, “Octogenarian dowagers, even if they are my mother’s oldest friend, shouldn’t lure me out of doors at night and make improper suggestions.”

  “Ah,” she said, “so you’re not going to respond.”

  “Tell me, did Mr. Phinn have a son called Ludovic? Ludovic Danberry-Phinn?”

  In the not very bright light he watched her face harden as if, behind its mask of fat, she had set her jaw. “Yes,” she said. “Why?”

  “It could hardly not be, could it, with those names?”

  “I wouldn’t mention the boy if I were you. He was in the Foreign Service and blotted his copybook, as I daresay you know. It was quite a tragedy. It’s never mentioned.”

  “Is it not? What sort of a man was Colonel Cartarette?”

  “Pigheaded, quixotic fellow. Obstinate as a mule. One of those pathetically conscientious people who aim so high they get a permanent crick in their conscience.”

  “Are you thinking of any particular incident?”

  “No,” Lady Lacklander said firmly, “I am not.”

  “Do you mind telling me what you and Colonel Cartarette talked about?”

  “We talked,” Lady Lacklander said coolly, “about Occy poaching and about a domestic matter that is for the moment private and can have no bearing whatever on Maurice’s death. Good-night to you, Roderick. I suppose I call you Roderick, don’t I?”

  “When we’re alone together.”

  “Impudent fellow!” she said and aimed a sort of dab at him. “Go back and bully those poor things in there. And tell George to hurry.”

  “Can you remember exactly what Mr. Phinn and Colonel Cartarette said to each other when they had their row?”

  She looked hard at him, folded her jewelled hands together and said, “Not word for word. They had a row over the fish. Occy rows with everybody.”

  “Did they talk about anything else?”

  Lady Lacklander continued to look at him and said, “No,” very coolly indeed.

  Alleyn made her a little bow. “Good-night,” he said. “If you remember specifically anything that they said to each other, would you be terribly kind and write it down?”

  “Roderick,” Lady Lacklander said, “Occy Phinn is no murderer.”

  “Is he not?” Alleyn said, “Well, that’s something to know, isn’t it? Good-night.”

  He shut the door. The light in the car went out.

  As he turned back to the house, Alleyn met George Lacklander. It struck him that George was remarkably ill at ease in his company and would greatly have preferred to deal exclusively with Fox.

  “Oh… ah, hullo,” George said. “I… ah… I wonder, may I have a word with you? I don’t suppose you remember, by the way, but we have met a thousand years ago, ha, ha, when, I think, you were one of my father’s bright young men, weren’t you?”

  Alleyn’s twenty-five-year-old recollection of George rested solely on the late Sir Harold Lacklander’s scorching comments on his son’s limitations. “No damn’ use expecting anything of George,” Sir Harold had once confided. “Let him strike attitudes at Nunspardon and in the ripeness of time become a J.P. That is George’s form.” It occurred to Alleyn that this prophecy had probably been fulfilled.

  He answered George’s opening question and blandly disregarded its sequel. “Please do,” he said.

  “Fact is,” George said, “I’m wondering just what the drill is. I am, by the way, and not that it makes any real difference, a Beak. So I suppose I may be said to fill my humble pigeonhole in the maintenance of the Queen’s peace, what?”

  “And why not?” Alleyn infuriatingly replied.

  “Yes,” George continued, goggling at him in the dark. “Yes. Well, now, I wanted to ask you what exactly will be the drill about poor Maurice Cartarette’s — ah — about the — ah — the body. I mean, one is concerned for Kitty’s sake. For their sake, I mean. His wife and daughter. One can perhaps help with the arrangements for the funeral and all that. What?”

  “Yes, of course,” Alleyn agreed. “Colonel Cartarette’s body will remain where it is under guard until to-morrow morning. It will then be taken to the nearest mortuary and a police surgeon will make an examination and possibly an extensive autopsy. We will, of course, let Mrs. Cartarette know as soon as possible when the funeral may be held. I think we shall probably be ready to hand over in three days, but it doesn’t do to be positive about these things.”

  “O, quite!” George said. “Quite. Quite. Quite.”

  Alleyn said, “Simply for the record — I shall have to put this sort of question to everybody who was in Colonel Cartarette’s landscape last evening — you and Mrs. Cartarette began your round of golf, I think you said, at seven?”

  “I didn’t notice the exact time,” George said in a hurry.

  “Perhaps Mrs. Cartarette will remember. Did she meet you on the course?”

  “Ah — no. No, I — ah — I called for her in the car. On my way back from Chyning.”

  “But you didn’t drive her back?”

  “No. Shorter to walk, we thought. From where we were.”

  “Yes, I see… And Mrs. Cartarette says she arrived here at about five past eight. Perhaps you played golf, roughly, for an hour. How many holes?”

  �
��We didn’t go round the course. Mrs. Cartarette is learning. It was her first — ah — attempt. She asked me to give her a little coaching. We — ah — we only played a couple of holes. We spent the rest of the time practising some of her shots,” George said, haughtily.

  “Ah, yes. And you parted company at about ten to eight. Where?”

  “At the top of the river path,” he said and added, “as far as I remember.”

  “From there would you see Lady Lacklander coming up towards you? She began her ascent at ten to eight.”

  “I didn’t look down. I didn’t notice.”

  “Then you won’t have noticed Colonel Cartarette either. Lady Lacklander says he was fishing in the willow grove at the time and that the willow grove is visible from the river path.”

  “I didn’t look down. I… ah… I merely saw Mrs. Cartarette to the river path and went on through the Home Spinney to Nunspardon. My mother arrived a few minutes later. And now,” George said, “if you’ll excuse me, I really must drive my mama home. By the way, I do hope you’ll make use of us. I mean, you may need a headquarters and so on. Anything one can do.”

  “How very kind,” Alleyn rejoined. “Yes, I think we may let you go now. Afraid I shall have to ask you to stay in Swevenings for the time being.”

  He saw George’s jaw drop.

  “Of course,” he added, “if you have important business elsewhere, it will be quite in order to come and tell me about it and we’ll see what can be done. I shall be at the Boy and Donkey.”

  “Good God, my dear Alleyn…”

  “Damn’ nuisance, I know,” Alleyn said, “but there you are. If they will turn on homicide in your bottom meadow. Goodnight to you.”

  He circumnavigated George and returned to the drawing-room, where he found Rose, Mark and Kitty uneasily silent, Mr. Phinn biting his fingers, and Inspector Fox in brisk conversation with Nurse Kettle on the subject of learning French conversation by means of Gramophone records. “I don’t,” Mr. Fox was saying, “make the headway I’d like to.”

  “I picked up more on a cycling tour in Brittany when I had to than I ever got out of my records.”