Scales of Justice ra-18

by Ngaio Marsh

  “Well, now, he did get me wondering what exactly are his feelings about this lady? I mean, they seem to be old acquaintances, don’t they? Miss Kettle said he made a picture of Mrs. Cartarette before she was married. And then he didn’t seem to have fancied the marriage much, did he? Practically smoked when it was mentioned, he got so hot. My idea is there was something between him and her and the magnolia bush wherever East meets West.”

  “You dirty old man,” Alleyn said absently. “We’ll have to find out, you know.”

  “Crime passionnel?”

  “Again you never know. We’ll ring the Yard and ask them to look him up in the Navy List. They can find out when he was in Singapore and get a confidential report.”

  “Say,” Fox speculated, “that he was sweet on her. Say they were engaged when he introduced her to the Colonel. Say he went off in his ship and then was retired from the navy and came home and found Kitty de Vere changed into the second Mrs. Cartarette. So he takes to the bottle and gets,” said Mr. Fox, “an idé fixe.”

  “So will you, if you go on speculating with such insatiable virtuosity. And what about his lumbago? Personally, I think he’s having a dim fling with Nurse Kettle.”

  Fox looked put out.

  “Very unsuitable,” he said.

  “Here is Mr. Phinn’s spinney and here, I think, is our girlfriend of last night.”

  Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett was, in fact, taking a stroll. When she saw them, she wafted her tail, blinked and sat down.

  “Good morning, my dear,” said Alleyn.

  He sat on his heels and extended his hand. Mrs. Twitchett did not advance upon it, but she broke into an extremely loud purring.

  “You know,” Alleyn continued severely, “if you could do a little better than purrs and mews, I rather fancy you could give us exactly the information we need. You were in the bottom meadow last night, my dear, and I’ll be bound you were all eyes and ears.”

  Mrs. Twitchett half closed her eyes, sniffed at his extended forefinger and began to lick it.

  “Thinks you’re a kitten,” Fox said sardonically.

  Alleyn in his turn sniffed at his finger and then lowered his face almost to the level of the cat’s. She saluted him with a brief dab of her nose.

  “What a girl,” Fox said.

  “She no longer smells of raw fish. Milk and a little cooked rabbit, I fancy. Do you remember where we met her last night?”

  “Soon after we began to climb the hill on this side, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. We’ll have a look over the terrain when we get the chance. Come on.”

  They climbed up through Mr. Phinn’s spinney and finally emerged on the lawn before Jacob’s Cottage. “Though if that’s a cottage,” Fox observed, “Buck House is a bungalow.”

  “Case of inverted snobbism, I daresay. It’s a nice front, nevertheless. Might have been the dower house to Nunspardon at one time. Rum go, couple of unattached males living side-by-side in houses that are much too big for them.”

  “I wonder how Mr. Phinn and the Commander hit it off.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a bet that they don’t. Look, here he comes.”

  “Cripes!” Mr. Fox ejaculated. “What a menagerie!”

  Mr. Phinn had, in fact, come out of his house accompanied by an escort of cats and Mrs. Twitchett’s three fat kittens.

  “No more!” he was saying in his curious alto voice. “All gone! Go and catch micey, you lazy lot of furs.”

  He set down the empty dish he had been carrying. Some object fell from his breast pocket and he replaced it in a hurry. Some of his cats pretended alarm and flounced off, the others merely stared at him. The three kittens, seeing their mother, galloped unsteadily towards her with stiff tails and a great deal of conversation. Mr. Phinn saw Alleyn and Fox. Staring at them, he clapped his hands like a mechanical toy that had not quite run down.

  The tassel of his smoking cap had swung over his nose, but his sudden pallor undid its comic effect. The handle of the concealed object protruded from his breast pocket. He began to walk towards them, and his feline escort, with the exception of the Twitchetts, scattered before him.

  “Good morning,” Mr. Phinn fluted thickly. He swept aside his tassel with a not quite steady hand and pulled up a dingy handkerchief, thus concealing the protruding handle. “To what beneficent constabular breeze do I owe this enchanting surprise? Detectives, emerging from a grove of trees!” he exclaimed and clasped his hands. “Like fauns in pursuit of some elusive hamadryad! Armed, I perceive,” he added with a malevolent glance at Commander Syce’s arrow, which Alleyn had retained by the simple expedient of absent-mindedly walking away with it.

  “Good morning, Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said. “I have been renewing my acquaintance with your charming cat.”

  “Isn’t she sweet?” Mr. Phinn moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “Such a devoted mama, you can’t think!”

  Alleyn sat on his heels beside Mrs. Twitchett, who gently kicked away one of her too-greedy kittens. “Her fur’s in wonderful condition for a nursing mother,” he said, stroking it. “Do you give her anything special to eat?”

  Mr. Phinn began to talk with the sickening extravagance of the feline-fanatic. “A balanced diet,” he explained in a high-pitched voice, “of her own choosing. Fissy on Mondays and Fridays. Steaky on Tuesdays. Livvy on Wednesdays. Cooked bun on Thursdays and Sundays. Embellished,” he added with a merciless smile, “by our own clever claws, with micey and birdie.”

  “Fish only twice a week,” Alleyn mused, and Fox, suddenly feeling that something was expected of him, said, “Fancy!”

  “She is looking forward to to-morrow,” Mr. Phinn said, “with the devoted acquiescence of a good Catholic, although, of course, theistically, she professes the mysteries of Old Nile.”

  “You don’t occasionally catch her dinner for her in the Chyne?”

  “When I am successful,” Mr. Phinn said, “we share.”

  “Did you,” Alleyn asked, fatuously addressing himself to the cat, “did you have fresh fissy for your supper last night, my angel?” Mrs. Twitchett turned contemptuously to her kittens.

  “No!” said Mr. Phinn in his natural voice.

  “You made no other catch then, besides the fabulous Old ’Un?”

  “No!”

  “May we talk?”

  Mr. Phinn, silent for once, led the way through a side door and down a passage into a sizable library.

  Alleyn’s eye for other people’s houses unobtrusively explored the room. The Colonel’s study had been pleasant, civilized and not lacking in feminine graces. Commander Syce’s drawing-room was at once clean, orderly, desolate and entirely masculine. Mr. Phinn’s library was disorderly, dirty, neglected and ambiguous. It exhibited confused traces of Georgian grace, Victorian pomposity and Edwardian muddle. Cushions that had once been fashionably elaborate were now stained and tarnished. There were yards of dead canvas that had once been acceptable to Burlington House, including the portrait of a fragile-looking lady with a contradictory jaw that was vaguely familiar. There were rows and rows of “gift” books about cats, cheek-by-jowl with Edwardian novels which, if opened, would be found to contain illustrations of young women in dust coats and motoring veils making haughty little moues at gladiators in Norfolk jackets. But there were also one or two admirable chairs, an unmistakable Lyly and a lovely, though filthy, rug. And among the decrepit novels were books of distinction and authority. It was on Mr. Phinn’s shelves that Alleyn noticed an unexpected link with the Colonel. For here among a collection of books on angling he saw again The Scaly Breed by Maurice Cartarette. But what interested Alleyn perhaps more than all these items was a state of chaos that was to be observed on and near a very nice serpentine-fronted bureau. The choked drawers were half out, one indeed was on the floor, the top was covered with miscellaneous objects which, to a police-trained eye, had clearly been dragged out in handfuls, while the carpet nearby was littered with a further assortment. A burglar, taken by su
rprise, could not have left clearer evidence behind him.

  “How can I serve you?” asked Mr. Phinn. “A little refreshment, by the way? A glass of sherry? Does Tio Pepe recommend himself to your notice?”

  “Not quite so early in the morning, thank you, and I’m afraid this is a duty call.”

  “Indeed? How I wish I could be of some help. I have spent a perfectly wretched night — such of it as remained to me — fretting and speculating, you know. A murderer in the Vale! Really, if it wasn’t so dreadful, there would be a kind of grotesque humour in the thought. We are so very respectable in Swevenings. Not a ripple, one would have thought, on the surface of the Chyne!”

  He flinched and made the sort of grimace that is induced by a sudden twinge of toothache.

  “Would one not? What,” Alleyn asked, “about the Battle of the Old ’Un?”

  Mr. Phinn was ready for him. He fluttered his fingers. “Nil nisi,” he said, with rather breathless airiness, “and all the rest of it, but really the Colonel was most exasperating as an angler. A monument of integrity in every other respect, I daresay, but as a fly-fisherman I am sorry to say there were some hideous lapses. It is an ethical paradox that so noble a sport should occasionally be wedded to such lamentable malpractices.”

  “Such,” Alleyn suggested, “as casting under a bridge into your neighbour’s preserves?”

  “I will defend my action before the Judgment Seat, and the ghost of the sublime Walton himself will thunder in my defence. It was entirely permissable.”

  “Did you and the Colonel,” Alleyn said, “speak of anything else but this… ah… this ethical paradox?”

  Mr. Phinn glared at him, opened his mouth, thought perhaps of Lady Lacklander and shut it again. Alleyn for his part remembered, with exasperation, the law on extra-judicial admissions. Lady Lacklander had told him there had been a further discussion between the two men but had refused to say what it was about. If Mr. Phinn should ever come to trial for the murder of Maurice Cartarette, or even if he should merely be called to give evidence against someone else, the use by Alleyn of the first of Lady Lacklander’s admissions and the concealment of the second would be held by a court of law to be improper. He decided to take a risk.

  “We have been given to understand,” he said, “that there was, in fact, a further discussion.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well, Mr. Phinn?”

  “Well. I am waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “I believe it is known as the Usual Warning,” Mr. Phinn said.

  “The police are only obliged to give the Usual Warning when they have decided to make an arrest.”

  “And you have not yet arrived at this decision?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You, of course, have your information from the Lady Gargantua, the Mammoth Chatelaine, the Great, repeat Great, Lady of Nunspardon,” said Mr. Phinn, and then surprisingly turned pink. His gaze, oddly fixed, was directed past Alleyn’s elbow to some object behind him. It did not waver. “Not,” Mr. Phinn added, “that, in certain respects, her worth does not correspond by a rough computation with her avoirdupois. Did she divulge the nature of my further conversation with the Colonel?”

  “No.”

  “Then neither,” said Mr. Phinn, “shall I. At least, not yet. Not unless I am obliged to do so.”

  The direction of his gaze had not shifted.

  “Very well,” Alleyn said and turned away with an air of finality.

  He had been standing with his back to a desk. Presiding over an incredibly heaped-up litter were two photographs in tarnished silver frames. One was of the lady of the portrait. The other was of a young man bearing a strong resemblance to her and was inscribed in a flowing hand: “Ludovic.”

  It was at this photograph that Mr. Phinn had been staring.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Jacob’s Cottage

  Alleyn decided to press home what might or might not be an advantage and so did so with distaste. He had been in the police service for over twenty years. Under slow pressure his outward habit had toughened, but, like an ice cube that under warmth will yield its surface but retain its inward form, so his personality had kept its pattern intact. When an investigation led him, as this did, to take action that was distasteful to him, he imposed a discipline upon himself and went forward. It was a kind of abstinence, however, that prompted him to do so.

  He said, looking at the photograph, “This is your son, sir, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Phinn, in a voice that was quite unlike his usual emphatic alto, said, “My son, Ludovic.”

  “I didn’t meet him, but I was in the Special Branch in 1937. I heard about his tragedy, of course.”

  “He was a good boy,” Mr. Phinn said. “I think I may have spoiled him. I fear I may have done so.”

  “One can’t tell about these things.”

  “No. One can’t tell.”

  “I don’t ask you to forgive me for speaking of him. In a case of homicide I’m afraid no holds are barred. We have discovered that Sir Harold Lacklander died with the name ‘Vic’ on his lips and full of concern about the publication of his own memoirs which he had entrusted to Colonel Cartarette. We know that your son was Sir Harold’s secretary during a crucial period of his administration in Zlomce and that Sir Harold could hardly avoid mention of the tragedy of your son’s death if he was to write anything like a definitive record of his own career.”

  “You need go no further,” said Mr. Phinn with a wave of his hand. “I see very clearly what is in your mind.” He looked at Fox, whose notebook was in his palm. “Pray write openly, Inspector. Mr. Alleyn, you wonder, do you not, if I quarrelled with Colonel Cartarette because he proposed to make public, through Lacklander’s memoirs, the ruin of my boy. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

  “I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if the discussion, that Lady Lacklander overheard but doesn’t care to reveal, was about some such matter.”

  Mr. Phinn suddenly beat his pudgy hands together, once. “If Lady L. does not care to tell you,” he announced, “then neither for the time being do I.”

  “I wonder, too,” Alleyn continued, “if it wouldn’t be easy to misjudge completely your own motives and those of Lady Lacklander.”

  “Ah,” Mr. Phinn said, with extraordinary complacency, “you are on dangerous ground indeed, my dear Alleyn. Peel away the layers of motive from the ethical onion and your eyes may well begin to water. It is no occupation, believe me, for a Chief Detective-Inspector.”

  A faint smile played conceitedly about the corners of his mouth. Alleyn might have supposed him to have completely recovered his equanimity if it had not been for the slightest possible tic in the lower lid of his right eye and a movement of the fingers of one hand across the back of the other.

  “I wonder,” Alleyn said, “if you’d mind showing us your fishing gear… the whole equipment as you took it down yesterday to the Chyne?”

  “And why not?” Mr. Phinn rejoined. “But I demand,” he added loudly, “to know if you suspect me of this crime. Do you? Do you?”

  “Come now,” Alleyn said, “you must know very well that you can’t in the same breath refuse to answer our questions and demand an answer to your own. If we may, we would like to see your fishing gear.”

  Mr. Phinn stared at him. “It’s not here,” he said. “I’ll get it.”

  “Fox will help you.”

  Mr. Phinn looked as if he didn’t much relish this offer but appeared to think better of refusing it. He and Fox went out together. Alleyn moved over to the book-lined wall on his left and took down Maurice Cartarette’s work on The Scaly Breed. It was inscribed on the title page: “January 1930. For Viccy on his eighteenth birthday with good wishes for many happy castings,” and was signed by the author. The Colonel, Alleyn reflected, had evidently been on better terms with young Phinn than with his father.

  He riffled through the pages. The book had been published in 1929 and appeared to be a serie
s of short and pleasantly written essays on the behaviour and eccentricities of freshwater fish. It contained an odd mixture of folkishness, natural history, mild flights of fancy and, apparently, a certain amount of scientific fact. It was illustrated, rather charmingly, with marginal drawings. Alleyn turned back to the title page and found that they were by Geoffrey Syce: another instance, he thought, of the way the people of Swevenings stick together, and he wondered if, twenty-six years ago, the Colonel in his regiment and the Commander in his ship had written to each other about the scaly breed and about how they should fashion their book. His eye fell on a page-heading, “No Two Alike,” and with astonishment he saw what at first he took to be a familiar enough kind of diagram: that of two magnified fingerprints, showing the essential dissimilarities. At first glance they might have been lifted from a manual on criminal investigation. When, however, he looked more closely, he found, written underneath: “Microphotographs. Fig. 1. Scale of Brown Trout. 6 years. 2½ lbs. Chyne River. Showing 4 years’ poor growth followed by 2 years’ vigorous growth. Fig. 2. Scale of Trout. 4 years. 1 lb. Chyne River. Note differences in circuli, winter bands and spawning marks.” With sharpened interest he began to read the accompanying letterpress:

  It is not perhaps generally known [the Colonel had written] that the scales of no two trout are alike: I mean microscopically alike in the sense that no two sets of finger-prints correspond. It is amusing to reflect that in the watery world a rogue-trout may leave incriminating evidence behind him in the form of what might be called scales of justice.

  For the margin Commander Syce had made a facetious picture of a roach with meerschaum and deerstalker hat examining through a lens the scales of a very tough-looking trout.

  Alleyn had time to re-read the page. He turned back to the frontispiece — a drawing of the Colonel himself. Alleyn found in the face a dual suggestion of soldier and diplomat superimposed, he fancied, on something that was pure countryman. “A nice chap, he looks. I wonder if it would have amused him to know that he himself has put into my hands the prize piece of information received.”