Thou Shell of Death (13 page)

‘I see,’ Nigel smiled at her gravely. ‘Now please don’t be offended—I believe what you have told us—but it does rather conflict with Miss Thrale’s testimony and, er, general behaviour, and so forth.’

‘This is damned difficult,’ said Georgia, clasping her hands and pressing them into her lap. ‘You see, it’s like this. She was—she had been Fergus’s mistress. She
is
a pretty grand piece of work, after all. But when Fergus and I—well, woke up to each other, he didn’t want her any more. Damned odd, but there it is. He really had her down here to sort of break it to her—always the gentleman, you know, and all that. Apparently she didn’t quite grasp what he was driving at—I mean, this official mourner stuff she’s putting on now — no, that’s catty of me—she
did
love him—why shouldn’t she? Oh, hell!’

Georgia relapsed into confusion and Bleakley tactfully dismissed her, asking her to send her brother along next. As soon as the door was shut he cast an eloquent glance at Nigel.

‘That puts Miss Thrale in a nasty position, don’t it, sir?’

‘We don’t yet know for certain that O’Brien had officially paid her off,’ Nigel replied; but Georgia’s evidence had undoubtedly given a definite direction to the case.

Edward Cavendish entered, wearing the same bewildered and harassed appearance that he seemed
to
have worn since he and Nigel found the body in the hut. He sat down heavily in the chair that was offered him, looking a good deal more than his fifty-three years. The superintendent questioned him as to his address and occupation, then asked whether he could not, as an old friend of O’Brien, give them some inkling of the motive for the murder.

‘You’re misinformed about that, Superintendent,’ he said. ‘I’m not an old friend of O’Brien’s. Only got to know him this year. My sister introduced us.’

‘Well, sir, let us say “friend,” then. You had got to know him pretty well, I take it.’

‘No. He used to ask my advice occasionally on investments; he had considerable capital; but we were dissimilar types and had quite different interests.’

‘A friend for the sake of advantage, as Aristotle puts it,’ murmured Nigel, gazing beneath almost closed lids at Cavendish’s big, round, well-shaved, pale face; the eyes behind rimless glasses—eyes in which the professional reticence of the big-business man could not conceal some deep perturbation; the lines of anxiety on the forehead and the thinning, pomaded hair. His mouth suggested sensuality and even ruthlessness; yet there was something curiously babyish about his expression as a whole, something that no doubt appealed to the mothering instinct in his sister.

Bleakley was now asking him about his movements since lunch.

‘I was playing billiards with Knott-Sloman till about three o’clock. Then I went out for a walk in the park.’

‘Meet anyone on your walk, sir?’

‘No, I can’t say I did. Very poor alibi,’ he added with a ghastly attempt at a smile. ‘I got back between four and a quarter past, and a constable told me Bellamy had just been discovered.’

‘Was Mr Knott-Sloman with you all the time in the billiard room?’

‘Yes. No—I remember; he went out to find the time—about ten minutes before we stopped playing, it was.’

‘Just went into the lounge and came back again, did he, sir?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t quite say that. He must have been out five minutes at least.’

The superintendent could scarcely suppress a start of surprise, and Bolter’s pencil remained poised in mid-air.

‘You’re sure of that, are you, sir?’ asked Bleakley, as unemphatically as possible.

‘Yes. Why not?’ Cavendish looked at him in a puzzled way. Then his whole expression changed. He seemed to be nerving himself for some crucial utterance. He moistened his lips and said:

‘Look here, Superintendent, are you sure about this murder business? I mean, couldn’t it have been suicide? Damn it all, I can’t believe that anyone here—’

‘I’m sorry, sir. There can be no question about it on the evidence we have got so far.’

Cavendish looked again at Bleakley and Nigel, as though weighing something in his mind. His fists clenched and unclenched.

‘The evidence,’ he muttered: ‘but supposing I—’

Whatever disclosure was coming did not arrive, for at that moment the sergeant entered, looking portentous as a Greek tragedy messenger, and laid a piece of paper before the super.

‘Found it in Mr O’Brien’s bedroom,’ he whispered to Bleakley, ‘folded up and used as a window wedge.’

Bleakley gave one look at the paper: his eyes bulged and his waxed moustaches seemed to quiver like wires. He pointed to the paper and said to Cavendish:

‘Recognise this handwriting, sir?’

‘Yes. Er—it’s Miss Thrale’s; but—’

‘Bring Miss Thrale in, George.’

While the sergeant was fetching Lucilla, Nigel leant across the table and looked at the paper. On it was written, in a large, slap-dash kind of handwriting:

I must see you tonight. Can’t we forget what has happened since—Meet me in the hut after the others have gone to bed. Please, darling, please. Lucilla
.

Lucilla Thrale entered regally, pausing for a moment in the doorway as though waiting for the applause to die down. But this time there was no applause. Bleakley stood up, held the note in front of her, and rapped out:

‘Did you write this, Miss Thrale?’

Her hand flew to her throat. A deep flush rose in her face.

‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! no! no!’

‘But Mr Cavendish testifies this is your handwriting.’

She turned on Cavendish, bending forward, her fingers hooked like claws. Her voice, cold and harsh at first, rose to a shrill distraught screaming.

‘So
you
testify, do you? You would like to give me away, wouldn’t you. You were jealous because I left you for a better man. Jealous! You white-faced, double-crossing skunk, pretending to be respectable, and all the time—You hated Fergus. It was you who killed him! I know you did it! I—’

‘Now then, Miss Thrale, that’s enough of that. Did you write this note?’

‘Yes, yes, YES! I wrote it. I loved him. But I didn’t go to the hut—I didn’t, I tell you. He wouldn’t let me—’

She looked round at the cold, incredulous faces.

‘It’s a frame-up,’ she screamed at Cavendish. ‘You’re trying to put this on me!’ She turned to Bleakley, pointing wildly at Cavendish. ‘Can’t you hear? He’s planted it on me. He put it in my room this afternoon! I saw him.’

‘The note was not found in your room, Miss Thrale. If your other statements are as false as this one, you’re going to find yourself in a very awkward situation.’

‘Just a minute, Bleakley,’ interrupted Nigel. ‘Cavendish, were you in Miss Thrale’s room this
afternoon?
You said nothing about it in your statement.’

Cavendish’s cheeks were flaming, as though Lucilla had been boxing his ears. Dignity and anger seemed to be struggling for supremacy in his countenance. The image of a churchwarden accused of stealing from the collection bag rose unbidden into Nigel’s mind. Outraged dignity and righteous anger were in the man’s voice when he spoke.

‘Very well, then. As Miss Thrale has chosen to make these ridiculous accusations, she cannot expect me to be tender to
her
reputation. I
was
in her room this afternoon, and I’ll tell you why.’

‘No, Edward! Please! I was upset—made to say what I did. You know I didn’t mean it.’ Lucilla’s voice was broken and pleading, but Cavendish did not even look at her.

‘When Knott-Sloman came into the billiard room again this afternoon he said Lucilla—Miss Thrale—wanted to see me in her room. We finished our game and I went up. Miss Thrale made me a proposition. Either I should pay her £10,000 or she would let the police know that she had been my mistress. She had letters of mine. She said that if our relationship was disclosed it would do me great damage publicly: she also said that the police would soon be looking for motives, because O’Brien had been murdered, and the fact that O’Brien had taken her away from me—as she put it—would seem to them a very sufficient motive for my having killed him. I told her that I was not
accustomed
to being intimidated by blackmailers. She then swore she would also tell the police that I had killed O’Brien in order to benefit by his will and get myself out of those difficulties, as well as from motives of revenge. I replied that, if O’Brien
had
been murdered, the police would investigate the position of every one of this party, and the state of my finances would be discovered soon enough. I had naturally intended to keep quiet about all this. This is why I said I was out for a walk this afternoon, when actually I was in Miss Thrale’s room most of the time. I did go out for a little after that, by the way. But now Miss Thrale has chosen to make these accusations in public, I see no point in further dissimulation. I have no wish to retaliate; but, as things have gone so far already, Superintendent, I suggest that you ask Knott-Sloman how much of this £10,000 blackmail money was to be his share.’

VIII

A TALE OF WOE

AS NIGEL DROVE
with Bleakley towards Taviston that evening the sun that had melted the last night’s snow was drawing up mists like thick woollen combinations about the lower parts of the hills. Or so he unromantically described it to himself. The road switchbacked up and down and round these hills, so that now they would be travelling through clear air and looking down on a kind of lake of steam, now they plunged downwards into a patch of it and could see nothing much beyond their own radiator cap. The constable who was driving dashed with speculative abandon into these patches and, emerging on the far side still on the road, muttered to himself audible congratulations. Bleakley was to drive back with Nigel later that night, as he felt it imperative to be on the spot just at present. If they managed to get through the fog, which would be much worse after dinner. But no fog, Nigel was thinking—not even the dense and universal steam that first covered the earth as it hung cooling in space—could hope to compete with the utter caliginous inspissated fog in his own mind.

The series of revelations they had just been hearing, like magnesium flashes in a dark room, had only served to blind the eye. Each fresh clue seemed to lead in a different direction and then to break off in the hand before it had got them anywhere. For the fifth time Nigel forced himself calmly to review the web of contradictions. Lucilla Thrale had denied Cavendish’s accusations: she admitted that he had been in her room after lunch, but swore they were just having a friendly conversation. A curious place for light chat, Nigel had reflected, but you couldn’t be certain. Lucilla emphatically denied having been in the hut last night, her denials finally reaching such a pitch of hysteria that Bleakley had to turn her over to Georgia Cavendish and salve his official conscience by detailing a man to see she made no attempt at escape. Knott-Sloman, faced with Cavendish’s charge of complicity in the blackmail, had first blustered and threatened several kinds of action, from physical assault to legal redress; then he had cooled down and magnanimously declared that he would forget it all, as poor old Edward was really knocked-up and not responsible. Poor old Edward, however, persisted in his statement, though he could give no satisfactory reason for connecting Knott-Sloman with Lucilla over the alleged blackmail. Knott-Sloman and he also continued to contradict each other as to the length of time the former had been out of the billiard room.

This brought Nigel’s sorely belaboured mind back again to the problem of Bellamy’s assailant. Every one
of
the household except Philip Starling had had the opportunity. Lucilla could have done it between two forty-five, when Georgia had left her in the lounge, and the time when Cavendish came up to her room; with the exception of that minute (or was it five minutes?) when Knott-Sloman was in the lounge: or he and she might have done it together then, Knott-Sloman wielding the blunt instrument and Lucilla keeping
cave
. Georgia had no witnesses to her movements from about three o’clock till the body was discovered. Her brother could have slipped out of the billiard room after Knott-Sloman, though this was unlikely, as he could not have known how long Knott-Sloman was going to be; but Cavendish also could have done the deed after he had left Lucilla’s room. Knott-Sloman himself, apart from a possible complicity with Lucilla, might have attacked Bellamy after Georgia left the study and before he went to post his letters. It seemed on the whole more likely that a man had made the assault. The position of the wound suggested someone fairly tall behind the poker, but did not imply it. Nor was it impossible that a woman should have had the strength to drag him by the heels into the pantry. Almost anyone might have done it, including Mrs Grant.

So much for opportunity. Knowledge of the ground? O’Brien had only rented the Dower House a few months ago, and none of the present party had visited there before. Except for Mrs Grant, therefore, they all started from scratch. On the whole, a woman
would
be more likely to have learnt the layout of the kitchen premises and Mrs Grant’s habits, and to know where poker and incinerator were to be found. But, as the job had presumably been premeditated, there was nothing to prevent a man finding out the details beforehand. Then there was the question of timing the assault. Nigel imagined that the assailant must have watched for Bellamy to come through the swing-door from the kitchen premises, hurried into the kitchen, seized the poker, and hidden himself behind the swing-door in time to catch Bellamy on his return. The only thing there seemed no doubt about was that the poker had been the weapon. Nellie had been interviewed by Bleakley when she came back from the village, and had sworn first indignantly and then tearfully that she never put pokers inside incinerators and Mrs Grant was that strict she’d have her skin off if she touched her poker, the old cat. To Nigel it appeared that Mrs Grant ought logically to be chief suspect, though why she should have done it he couldn’t imagine. Calvinist Cook Cracks ex-Serviceman on Crumpet. Grand. One expected a Calvinist to disapprove of everyone else on principle, but scarcely to carry this disapproval to the length of poker-work.