Thou Shell of Death (16 page)

Nigel shrank at the result of this equation. X = Georgia Cavendish. He most decidedly didn’t want it to be Georgia. Still, there were those anonymous letters. Surely it’s too much of a coincidence that X should threaten to kill O’Brien on the Feast of Stephen, and then he should get killed more or less by accident on the same day by a hypothetical Y. It
might
have happened. Y
might
have done X’s work for him. But it’s a pretty indigestible lump to swallow. Let’s suppose, then, that the murder was premeditated and committed by the author of the threatening letters. Which of my gallery of suspects fits the frame best? Cavendish. Has the brains to plan it, but surely not the nerve to carry it out. Moreover, there’s something reckless and flamboyant about those letters which simply won’t square with the personality of a staid, outwardly respectable—even though in fact somewhat disreputable—city man. Knott-Sloman has the nerve to have carried it out—he’s hard-boiled enough. On the other hand, it’s doubtful whether he’s got the intelligence to have planned it, and the grim humour of the letters is very different from his brand
of
facetiousness. Nor can one see any reason why he should want O’Brien dead: very much to the contrary, if he hoped to blackmail him. The melodramatic touch in the letters would fit Lucilla quite well; she is capable of the
crime passionel
, but surely has neither the nerve nor the brains for a premeditated one. Georgia? She has the guts, she has the intelligence; what’s more, she is capable of the flamboyant yet cold-blooded humour of those letters. The crime fits her at every point. Except motive. An appalling chill crept over Nigel. Supposing she really hated O’Brien; suppose, like Clytemnestra, she had made up to him only in order to put him—and everyone else—off their guard. Melodramatic; but O’Brien had lived in a world of melodrama. Nigel was compelled to admit that here again Georgia stood out as the most likely suspect.

He had cleared a patch of the jungle, anyway. Like a beast that has turned round and round in tall grasses to trample its lair, his mind curled up and went to sleep in the little clearing it had made. When he woke it was high daylight and his clock said half-past eleven. He went downstairs in his dressing gown and ate some cold sausages. Lady Marlinworth had sent over one of her maids to take Arthur Bellamy’s place, so the household was running fairly smoothly again. As he was eating, Bleakley popped his head in to say that Arthur was still unconscious, but hanging on to life, and that Albert Blenkinsop had sworn to Knott-Sloman as the first of the two men he had seen
entering
the hut. Bleakley proposed to take no further action till the arrival of Detective-Inspector Blount from Scotland Yard, who was expected by midday. Nigel went upstairs again and put down on paper the arguments he had worked out before going to sleep last night. They still looked damnably convincing. He felt uneasy. Georgia; her gallant bearing and mischievous monkey smile; her parrot and her bloodhound; the eccentricities which she wore as naturally as the eight-fifteen business man wears his bowler and umbrella and folded newspaper. How had Philip described her expression? ‘The ghost of an organ-grinder’s monkey.’ Surely a murderess couldn’t act that utter forlornness of sorrow. She wouldn’t look like that if she had hated O’Brien. ‘Ah, yes,’ whispered the relentless voice, ‘but supposing she really did love him: supposing she had to choose between his life—the life of a dying man—and her brother’s ruin? Might she not have done it then? And wouldn’t that account for her death-in-life look—the look of one who cannot cross Lethe, stretching out her arms to the farther bank?’

Nigel shook himself impatiently. He was getting morbid. What he needed was a bit of company. He found his fellow guests sitting about glumly in the lounge. As he entered their eyes all turned to him with a hoping-against-hope expression. They might have been the survivors of a shipwreck, stranded on an island out of the trade routes, and he the one who has come down from the lookout place on the hill.
There
was a moment of constrained silence, and then Edward Cavendish said, ‘Well, any news?’

Nigel shook his head. Cavendish certainly looked in a bad way: there were dark circles under his eyes, and their expression of agonised bewilderment seemed to have sharpened since yesterday. He looked strangely like a small schoolboy who has lost his books and hasn’t done his prep and has a painful appointment with the headmaster before lunch.

‘Have to get your news from the papers,’ grumbled Knott-Sloman, who was sitting near the fire and cracking walnuts with his teeth. ‘The police don’t know any more about it than you or I.’

‘It’s really an infernal nuisance,’ Cavendish went on in worried, petulant tones. ‘I ought to get back to the city tomorrow, but we’ve been told we’ve got to stay here for the inquest, and God knows how long they’ll keep us after that.’

‘Don’t worry, Edward. A few days can’t make much difference one way or the other.’ Georgia’s voice was tender, motherly, yet assured and matter-of-fact.

‘It’s scandalous,’ exclaimed Knott-Sloman. ‘No one admired and respected O’Brien more than I did. At the same time—’

‘—You want to get back to your fizz and your frolic,’ interrupted Philip Starling sourly, not looking up from the
Times
leading article. Knott-Sloman looked daggers in his direction, but they were blunted on the impervious back of the
Times
. Lucilla, in an odalisque pose on the sofa, drawled:

‘The whole thing’s a crashing bore, of course. But the police are so stupid, they won’t find the murderer till all of us are murdered in our beds. It’s what they call the process of elimination.’

‘All but
one
of us, Lucy,’ said Starling politely.

‘I consider that a damned tactless and uncalled-for remark,’ said Knott-Sloman. ‘As good as accusing one of us of being a murderer. No doubt you feel quite safe yourself, after the way you’ve succeeded in sucking up to the police: though I could tell them a thing or two which might alter their attitude to you.’

Philip Starling laid down his
Times
in a leisurely way and, fixing Knott-Sloman with his most hubristic and irritating stare, said:

‘That’s just what’s wrong with you retired army men. Not content with practically losing us our Empire through sheer inefficiency, you settle down in Cheltenham or some low nightclub and spend the rest of your lives in malicious gossip. Gossip, gossip, gossip—like a lot of old women. Tchah!’

Knott-Sloman rose in his wrath. ‘My God! You damned little squirt. What the devil d’you mean by talking like that? It’s—it’s an insult to the Service. You, you’—he collected himself for a crowning piece of invective—‘you rotten little highbrow.’

‘Yes. Yes. Just what I thought. A moral coward,’ said Starling briskly, walking right up to Knott-Sloman. ‘Daren’t attack me except in public. Very typical. Squalid fellow.’ He suddenly darted forward his hand, whisked Knott-Sloman’s tie out of his waistcoat,
and
stumped from the room before his flabbergasted adversary could recover his breath. Lucilla suddenly burst out into a peal of laughter.

‘Oh, dear!’ she bubbled. ‘Oh, Law-love-a-duck! What a riot! Poor Cyril, you
were
outclassed, weren’t you? Now do tuck your tie in and stop looking like Second Murderer.’

Knott-Sloman went out, tucking in his tie, but still looking very definitely like Second Murderer. Nigel noticed that Lucilla had dropped her distinguished-widow pose, for tactical reasons, perhaps, and resumed the girl-about-town manner. He remained for a few minutes talking to Georgia Cavendish. Lucilla seemed quite willing to console herself with Edward. Then a message came for him that Bleakley would like to see him in the morning room. The superintendent, who looked very cock-a-hoop, introduced him to Detective-Inspector Blount. Blount was a man of middle height, with a bland, youngish face, but almost entirely bald. He had a dry and precise, yet courteous manner, horn-rimmed glasses and rather impersonal eyes. He would have been mistaken anywhere for a bank manager. Bleakley could scarcely restrain himself till the preliminary politenesses were over.

‘Got some good news for us, the inspector has, Mr Strangeways.’

‘I’m glad. We need it.’

Blount handed an envelope to Nigel. ‘These are the reports you asked the Assistant Commissioner for—as
much
as we could get in the time. Shall I tell him the other points, sir?’ he asked Bleakley.

‘You fire ahead.’

‘First, we examined the package addressed to Cyril Knott-Sloman at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club. It contained a number of letters written by Edward Cavendish to Miss Thrale—letters of a compromising character.’ Blount looked up over the top of his horn-rims to see how Nigel was taking it. He added, with an inflection of dry humour, ‘There were no plans or formulae, I’m afraid, sir.’

Nigel smiled. ‘I’m afraid the superintendent has been betraying my romantic processes of thought to you.’

‘However, the package also contained a note from Knott-Sloman to the deceased. This note suggested that, if O’Brien was a gentleman, he would make Miss Thrale some recompense for having trifled with her affections: and if he did not certain steps would have to be taken.’

‘So that’s what he was looking for,’ murmured Nigel. ‘Funny he didn’t destroy it at once.’

‘We have also discovered and got into communication with O’Brien’s solicitors. They have no knowledge of any will made by the deceased. But they have in their possession a sealed envelope which was entrusted to them last October by O’Brien with strict injunctions that it should not be opened till a year after his decease. It is not improbable that it may contain a will.’

‘That’s queer. He told me he kept it in his safe. Still, we can’t expect everything all at once. And you’ve given us all we can digest for the moment,’ said Nigel.

The superintendent, who had been looking like a rather overloaded cornucopia, positively bursting with good things, could contain himself no longer.

‘Ah, Mr Strangeways, sir, but that isn’t all. The inspector has kept the
bonne booch
, as you might say, to the last.’ He hastily gathered the remnants of his official dignity about him, twirled his moustache, and nodded severely at Blount. ‘Please continue, Inspector.’

‘Very well, sir.’ Blount’s mouth betrayed the slightest quirk of amusement. Then he proceeded, in the well-modulated but impersonal tones of a chairman reading the annual report. ‘After we discovered the contents of the package sent off by Knott-Sloman, the Assistant Commissioner suggested that unofficial investigations should be made at the Fizz-and-Frolic Club. I went down there late last night. Working on a line also suggested by the Assistant Commissioner, and simulating an advanced stage of inebriety, I wandered at large over the premises. In the course of these investigations I found myself’—Blount’s eyes twinkled faintly—‘in Knott-Sloman’s private office. There I discovered a typewriter, with which I managed to write a few lines before I was—er—thrown out. On returning to the Yard I handed over this writing to an expert, who declares that it was made by the same
machine
on which the threatening letters to O’Brien were written.’

‘Oh, my hat,’ said Nigel slowly, his face a comical mixture of surprise and relief. ‘Well, that seems to sew everything up pretty decisively.’

Blount was looking at him, his eyes suddenly keen as steel. ‘It doesn’t fit in with your theories, sir?’

‘Couldn’t we drop the “sir”? Always makes me feel like a schoolmaster. No, it doesn’t fit in. But my theory will just have to be altered to accommodate it.’ He thought hard for a minute, then said, in rather a strained voice:

‘Look here, will you read this? Dark thoughts of blackest midnight born. I’d like to have ’em off my conscience.’

He handed over to Blount the loose pages on which he had put down his reasonings of the previous night. While Blount and Bleakley put their heads together over these, Nigel studied the reports his uncle had sent. They added little to what the omniscient Philip Starling had told him. They were confirmation that Edward Cavendish had got into low water, but he had already admitted this himself. Knott-Sloman evidently had a bad reputation. His club had come under the notice of the police once or twice, but he had been clever enough to avoid any serious charge. They had also picked up rumours of blackmail in connection with him, but naturally these were only rumours. Nothing significant came to light about Starling, Lucilla or Georgia. Sir John Strangeways had also
sent
along a detailed dossier on O’Brien. Nigel flipped through this. The most remarkable thing about it was what it didn’t tell him. O’Brien seemed not to have been alive at all till he joined up in London in 1915, giving his age as twenty. After he had become famous several papers had invited him to put his name to his life story as written by them, but they had never succeeded in tracing it back beyond 1915—and what the press couldn’t ferret, Nigel reflected, must be concealed in the king of all burrows. Scotland Yard had got into touch with the Special Branch in Dublin; but they knew nothing of O’Brien’s early years, and as the name under which he had joined up was probably an assumed one, it didn’t seem likely that they would have much success in tracing him.

‘Well, Mr Strangeways,’ Blount said, ‘this is very interesting. I am not sure whether we should let it modify our attitude to Knott-Sloman—after all, it’s mainly theorising.’ He sketched a neat, apologetic gesture. ‘As I see it, the facts all point to Knott-Sloman as the murderer, probably in collusion with Miss Thrale. It is as good as proved that he wrote the threatening letters. We know that he was hanging about the hut after midnight when O’Brien came out of the house. Now my theory is this: Sloman writes the threatening letters—’

‘Why?’ interrupted Nigel. ‘Surely would-be murderers don’t advertise their intentions?’

‘Because he planned to fake the murder as a suicide. To do so, he had to use O’Brien’s gun. O’Brien wouldn’t
have
been carrying a gun unless he was on his guard against some threat. That’s why the threat had to be made.’