Scales of Justice ra-18

by Ngaio Marsh

  Alleyn dropped the chit on Oliphant’s desk.

  “Poor Cartarette,” he said with a change of voice, “and, if you like, poor Syce.”

  “Or, from the other point of view,” Fox said, “poor Kitty.”

  Before they returned to Swevenings, Alleyn and Fox visited Dr. Curtis in the Chyning Hospital mortuary. It was a very small mortuary attached to a sort of pocket-hospital, and there was a ghastly cosiness in the close proximity of the mall to the now irrevocably and dreadfully necrotic Colonel. Curtis, who liked to be thorough in his work, was making an extremely exhaustive autopsy and had not yet completed it. He was able to confirm that there had been an initial blow, followed, it seemed, rather than preceded by, a puncture, but that neither the blow nor the puncture quite accounted for some of the multiple injuries, which were the result, he thought, of pressure. Contrecoup, he said, was present in a very marked degree. He would not entirely dismiss Commander Syce’s arrows nor Lady Lacklander’s umbrella spike, but he thought her shooting-stick the most likely of the sharp instruments produced. The examination of the shooting-stick for blood traces might bring them nearer to a settlement of this point. The paint-rag, undoubtedly, was stained with blood, which had not yet been classified. It smelt quite strongly of fish. Alleyn handed over the rest of his treasure-trove.

  “As soon as you can,” he said, “do, like a good chap, get on to the fishy side of the business. Find me scales of both trout on one person’s article, and only on one person’s, and the rest will follow as the night the day.”

  “You treat me,” Curtis said without malice, “like a tympanist in a jazz band perpetually dodging from one instrument to another. I’ll finish my P.M., blast you, and Willy Roskill can muck about with your damned scales.” Sir William Roskill was an eminent Home Office analyst.

  “I’ll ring him up now,” Alleyn said.

  “It’s all right; I’ve rung him. He’s on his way. As soon as we know anything, we’ll ring the station. What’s biting you about this case, Rory?” Dr. Curtis asked. “You’re always slinging off at the ‘expeditions’ officer and raising your cry of festina lente. Why the fuss and hurry? The man was only killed last night.”

  “It’s a pig of a case,” Alleyn said, “and on second thoughts I’ll keep the other arrow — the bloody one. If it is blood. What the hell can I carry it in? I don’t want him to—” He looked at the collection of objects they had brought with them. “That’ll do,” he said. He slung George Lacklander’s golf bag over his shoulder, wrapped up the tip of Syce’s arrow and dropped it in.

  “A pig of a case,” he repeated; “I hate its guts.”

  “Why this more than another?”

  But Alleyn did not answer. He was looking at the personal effects of the persons under consideration. They were laid out in neat groups along a shelf opposite the dissecting table, almost as if they were component parts of the autopsy. First came the two fish: the Old ’Un, 4 pounds of cold, defeated splendour, and beside it on a plate the bones and rags of the Colonel’s catch. Then the belongings of the men who had caught them: the Colonel’s and Mr. Phinn’s clothes, boots, fishing gear and hat. Kitty’s loud new tweed skirt and twin set. Sir George’s plus fours, stockings and shoes. Mark’s and Rose’s tennis clothes. Lady Lacklander’s tent-like garments, her sketching kit and a pair of ancient but beautifully made brogues. Alleyn stopped, stretched out a hand and lifted one of these brogues.

  “Size about four,” he said. “They were hand-made by the best bootmaker in London in the days when Lady Lacklander still played golf. Here’s her name sewn in. They’ve been cleaned, but the soles are still dampish and—” He turned the shoe over and was looking at the heel. It carried miniature spikes. Alleyn looked at Fox, who, without a word, brought from the end of the shelf a kitchen plate on which were laid out, as if for some starvation-diet, the remains of the Colonel’s fish. The flap of skin with its fragment of an impression was carefully spread out. They waited in silence.

  “It’ll fit all right,” Alleyn said. “Do your stuff, of course, but it’s going to fit. And the better it fits, the less I’m going to like it.”

  And with this illogical observation he went out of the mortuary.

  “What is biting him?” Dr. Curtis asked Fox.

  “Ask yourself, Doctor,” Fox said. “It’s one of the kind that he’s never got, as you might say, used to.”

  “Like that, is it?” Dr. Curtis, for the moment unmindful of his own terrible explicit job, muttered, “I often wonder why on earth he entered the Service.”

  “I’ve never liked to enquire,” Fox said in his plain way, “but I’m sure I’m very glad he did. Well, I’ll leave you with your corpse.”

  “…seeing you,” Dr. Curtis said absently, and Fox rejoined his principal. They returned to the police station, where Alleyn had a word with Sergeant Oliphant. “We’ll leave you here, Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “Sir William Roskill will probably go straight to the hospital, but as soon as there’s anything to report, he or Dr. Curtis will ring you up. Here’s a list of people I’m going to see. If I’m not at one of these places, I’ll be at another. See about applying for a warrant; we may be making an arrest before nightfall.”

  “ ’T, ’t, ’t,” Sergeant Oliphant clicked. “Reely? In what name, sir? Same as you thought?”

  Alleyn pointed his forefinger at a name on the list he had given the sergeant, who stared at it for some seconds, his face perfectly wooden.

  “It’s not positive,” Alleyn said, “but you’d better warn your tame J.P. about the warrant in case we need it in a hurry. We’ll get along with the job now. Put a call through to Brierley and Bentwood, will you, Oliphant? Here’s the number. Ask for Mr. Timothy Bentwood and give my name.”

  He listened while Sergeant Oliphant put the call through and noticed abstractedly that he did this in a quiet and business-like manner.

  Alleyn said, “If Bentwood will play, this should mean the clearing-up of Chapter 7.”

  Fox raised a massive finger and they both listened to Oliphant.

  “O, yerse?” Oliphant was saying. “Yerse? Will you hold the line, sir, while I enquire?”

  “What is it?” Alleyn demanded sharply.

  Oliphant placed the palm of his vast hand over the mouthpiece. “Mr. Bentwood, sir,” he said, “is in hospital. Would you wish to speak to his secretary?”

  “Damnation, blast and bloody hell!” Alleyn said. “No, I wouldn’t. Thank you, Oliphant. Come on, Fox. That little game’s gone cold. We’d better get moving. Oliphant, if we can spare the time, we’ll get something to eat at the Boy and Donkey, but on the way, we’ll make at least one call.” His finger again hovered over the list. The sergeant followed its indication.

  “At Uplands?” he said. “Commander Syce?”

  “Yes,” Alleyn said. “Have everything laid on, and if you get a signal from me, come at once with suitable assistance. It’ll mean an arrest. Come on, Fox.”

  He was very quiet on the way back over Watt’s Hill.

  As they turned the summit and approached Jacob’s Cottage, they saw Mr. Phinn leaning over his gate with a kitten on his shoulder.

  Alleyn said, “It might as well be now as later. Let’s stop.”

  Fox pulled up by the gate and Alleyn got out. He walked over to the gate and Mr. Phinn blinked at him.

  “Dear me, Chief Inspector,” he said, taking the kitten from his neck and caressing it, “how very recurrent you are. Quite decimalite, to coin an adjective.”

  “It’s our job, you know,” Alleyn said mildly. “You’ll find we do tend to crop up.”

  Mr. Phinn blinked and gave a singular little laugh. “Am I to conclude, then, that I am the subject of your interest? Or are you on your way to fresh fields of surmise and conjecture? Nunspardon, for instance. Do you perhaps envisage my Lady Brobdignagia, the Dowager Tun, the Mammoth Matriarch, stealing a tip-toe through the daisies? Or George aflame with his newly acquired dignities, thundering through the willow grove in plu
s fours? Or have the injuries a clinical character? Do we suspect the young Aesculapius with scalpel or probe? You are thinking I am a person of execrable taste, but the truth is there are other candidates for infamy. Perhaps we should look nearer at hand. At our elderly and intemperate merryman of the shaft and quiver. Or at the interesting and mysterious widow with the dubious antecedents? Really, how very footling, if you will forgive me, it all sounds, doesn’t it? What can I do for you?”

  Alleyn looked at the pallid face and restless eyes. “Mr. Phinn,” he said, “will you let me have your copy of Chapter 7?”

  The kitten screamed, opening its mouth and showing its tongue. Mr. Phinn relaxed his fingers, kissed it and put it down.

  “Forgive me, my atom,” he said. “Run to Mother.” He opened the gate. “Shall we go in?” he suggested, and they followed him into a garden dotted about with rustic furniture of an offensive design.

  “Of course,” Alleyn said, “you can refuse. I shall then have to use some other form of approach.”

  “If you imagine,” Mr. Phinn said, wetting his lips, “that as far as I am concerned this Chapter 7, which I am to suppose you have seen on my desk but not read, is in any way incriminating, you are entirely mistaken. It constitutes, for me, what may perhaps be described as a contra-motive.”

  “So I had supposed,” Alleyn said. “But don’t you think you had better let me see it?”

  There was a long silence. “Without the consent of Lady Lacklander,” Mr. Phinn said, “never. Not for all the sleuths in Christendom.”

  “Well,” Alleyn said, “that’s all very correct, I daresay. Would you suggest, for the sake of argument, that Chapter 7 constitutes a sort of confession on the part of the author? Does Sir Harold Lacklander, for instance, perhaps admit that he was virtually responsible for the leakage of information that tragic time in Zlomce?”

  Mr. Phinn said breathlessly, “Pray, what inspires this gush of unbridled empiricism?”

  “It’s not altogether that,” Alleyn rejoined with perfect good-humour. “As I think I told you this morning, I have some knowledge of the Zlomce affair. You tell us that the new version of Chapter 7 constitutes for you a contra-motive. If this is so, if, for instance, it provides exoneration, can you do anything but welcome its publication?”

  Mr. Phinn said nothing.

  “I think I must tell you,” Alleyn went on, “that I shall ask the prospective publishers for the full story of Chapter 7.”

  “They have not been informed—”

  “On the contrary, unknown to Colonel Cartarette, they were informed by the author.”

  “Indeed?” said Mr. Phinn, trembling slightly. “If they profess any vestige of professional rectitude, they will refuse to divulge the content.”

  “As you do?”

  “As I do. I shall refuse any information in this affair, no matter what pressure is put upon me, Inspector Alleyn.”

  Mr. Phinn had already turned aside when his garden gate creaked and Alleyn said quietly, “Good morning once again, Lady Lacklander.”

  Mr. Phinn spun round with an inarticulate ejaculation.

  She stood blinking in the sun, huge, without expression and very slightly tremulous.

  “Roderick,” said Lady Lacklander, “I have come to confess.”

  CHAPTER X

  Return to Swevenings

  Lady Lacklander advanced slowly towards them.

  “If that contraption of yours will support my weight, Octavius,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

  They stood aside for her. Mr. Phinn suddenly began to gabble. “No, no, no! Not another word! I forbid it.”

  She let herself down on a rustic seat.

  “For God’s sake,” Mr. Phinn implored her frantically, “hold your tongue, Lady L.”

  “Nonsense, Occy,” she rejoined, panting slightly. “Hold yours, my good fool.” She stared at him for a moment and then gave a sort of laugh.

  “Good Lord, you think I did it myself, do you?”

  “No, no, no. What a thing to say!”

  She shifted her great torso and addressed herself to Alleyn. “I’m here, Roderick, virtually on behalf of my husband. The confession I have to offer is his.”

  “At last,” Alleyn said. “Chapter 7.”

  “Precisely. I’ve no idea how much you think you already know or how much you may have been told.”

  “By me,” Mr. Phinn cried out, “nothing!”

  “Humph!” she said. “Uncommon generous of you, Octavius.”

  Mr. Phinn began to protest, threw up his hands and was silent.

  “There are, however, other sources,” she went on. “I understand his wife has been kept posted.” She stared at Alleyn, who thought, “George has told Kitty Cartarette about Chapter 7 and Lady Lacklander has found out. She thinks Kitty has told me.” He said nothing.

  “You may suppose, therefore,” Lady Lacklander continued, “that I am merely making a virtue of necessity.”

  Alleyn bowed.

  “It is not altogether that. To begin with, we are, as a family, under a certain obligation to you, Octavius.”

  “Stop!” Mr. Phinn shouted. “Before you go on much further, before you utter—”

  “Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn cut in, breaking about three vital items of the police code in one sentence, “if you don’t stop chattering, I shall take drastic steps to make you. Shut up, Mr. Phinn.”

  “Yes, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said, “I couldn’t agree more. Either shut up or take yourself off, my dear fellow.” She lifted a tiny, fat hand, holding it aloft as if it was one of Mr. Phinn’s kittens. “Do me the favour,” she said, “of believing I have thought things over very carefully, and be quiet.”

  While Mr. Phinn still hesitated, eyeing Alleyn and fingering his lips, Lady Lacklander made a brief comprehensive gesture with her short arms and said, “Roderick, my husband was a traitor.”

  They made a strange group, sitting there on uncomfortable rustic benches. Fox took unobtrusive notes, Mr. Phinn held his head in his hands, Lady Lacklander, immobile behind the great façade of her fat, talked and talked. Cats came and went, gracefully indifferent to the human situation.

  “That,” Lady Lacklander said, “is what you will find in Chapter 7.” She broke off and, after a moment, said, “This is not going to be easy and I’ve no wish to make a fool of myself. Will you forgive me for a moment?”

  “Of course,” Alleyn said, and they waited while Lady Lacklander, staring before her, beat her puff-ball palms on her knees and got her mouth under control. “That’s better,” she said at last. “I can manage now.” And she went on steadily. “At the time of the Zlomce incident my husband was in secret negotiation with a group of Prussian fascists. The top group: the men about Hitler. They looked upon him, it appears, as their trump card: a British diplomat whose name—” her voice creaked and steadied—“was above reproach in his own country. He was absolutely and traitorously committed to the Nazi programme.” Alleyn saw that her eyes were bitter with tears. “They never found that out at your M.I.5., Roderick, did they?”

  “No.”

  “And yet this morning I thought that perhaps you knew.”

  “I wondered. That was all.”

  “So she didn’t say anything.”

  “She?”

  “Maurice’s wife. Kitty.”

  “No.”

  “You never know,” she muttered, “with that sort of people what they may do.”

  “Nor,” he said, “with other sorts either, it seems.”

  A dark unlovely flush flooded her face.

  “The extraordinary thing,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly, “is why. Why did Lacklander do it?”

  “The Herrenvolk heresy?” Alleyn suggested. “An aristocratic Anglo-German alliance as the only alternative to war and communism and the only hope for the survival of his own class? It was a popular heresy at that time. He wasn’t alone. No doubt he was promised great things.”

  “You don’t spare him,” Lady Lacklander said
under her breath.

  “How can I? In the new Chapter 7, I imagine, he doesn’t spare himself.”

  “He repented bitterly. His remorse was frightful.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Phinn said. “That is clear enough.”

  “Ah, yes!” she cried out. “Ah, yes, Occy, yes. And most of all for the terrible injury he did your boy — most of all for that.”

  “The injury?” Alleyn repeated, cutting short an attempt on Mr. Phinn’s part to intervene. “I’m sorry, Mr. Phinn. We must have it.”

  Lady Lacklander said, “Why do you try to stop me, Occy? You’ve read it. You must want to shout it from the roof-tops.”

  Alleyn said, “Does Sir Harold exonerate Ludovic Phinn?”

  “Of everything but carelessness.”

  “I see.”

  Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.

  Alleyn said, “I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?”

  He saw that he was right and went on, “And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations, at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?”

  He looked from one to the other.

  “It was like that,” Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. “My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and — as I, of course, thought — treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours, and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.” She looked at Mr. Phinn and frowned. “Yesterday,” she said, “after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because—”