Thou Shell of Death (27 page)

They had stopped at a fork. Blount was out, scanning the road surface for tyre marks. He found what he wanted in a muddy patch a few yards down the left-hand road. They bucketed off again. ‘Keeping to the lanes,’ shouted Blount. ‘Looks as if he was making for Bridgewest.’ They were whirring like a swarm of hornets up a long incline. At the top the road fell away, and they swooped and swerved down the hillside for three miles. In the distance they could see the telegraph poles of a main road. Cavendish
could
twist and double in the lanes, but once he was on the main road he’d have to go straight for a bit, and the police patrols would be out. They took a blind corner at fifty. The main road was only a hundred yards ahead. Unfortunately there was a cow, too, and it was only twenty yards ahead. The chauffeur trod hard on his brake, but they were still doing thirty when they hit the cow. It was like hitting a man in the stomach with one’s fist. The cow was carted up on to the radiator and dropped aside. They jumped out. There was glass everywhere. The headlights were twisted askew. The chauffeur opened the bonnet. One of the vanes of the fan had been broken clean off.

Blount set off running towards the main road, Nigel after him. They reached it. Almost opposite them, drawn up to the side of the road, was the Lagonda. But no sign of Edward Cavendish. Then they saw the placard, on a hoarding in a long broad meadow to their left.

A
EROPLANE
F
LIGHTS
.

F
IVE
S
HILLINGS
, F
IVE
M
INUTES
.

They ran into the meadow. There seemed to be nothing there but a hut, a windsleeve, and a small, brown-faced man in overalls. He was as laconic as the advertisement. When Blount asked had he seen a man get out of that Lagonda over there, he jerked his thumb at the sky. High and far away, Blount saw a little dot in the air. ‘Police,’ he panted: ‘we’ve
got
to get after him. Have you another plane? Or a telephone?’

‘No telephone,’ said the brown-faced man, chewing expressionlessly on a piece of gum. ‘Here’s Bert, though.’

Another plane drifted silently over their heads, kissed the earth beyond, and ran down the field. They sprinted after it. Blount fired out orders like a machine-gun. Two passengers descended bemusedly from the plane. The mechanic was sent to ring up the nearest R.A.F. depot from the AA box and give them the number of the first plane.

‘Got enough petrol?’ snapped Blount.

The pilot jerked his head. They tumbled into the open cockpit. The plane taxied to the other end of the field, then turned into the wind and rushed at the horizon with a giant crescendo of engine. Would they never rise, thought Nigel, and looked down to find the earth already dropping and streaming away from them like green rapids. They banked steeply, with the lovely slow gesture of a dancer’s hand. The speck in the sky was gone, but it was a cloudless day and they might pick it up again before long. What was happening out of sight up there? What would Cavendish do when his five shillings’ worth was up? Or had he chartered the pilot for a longer journey? The sky gazed back at them blankly. The answer was not very important anyhow.

After ten minutes the speck was in sight again. They
were
heading for the sea. Perhaps Cavendish had hoped to escape to France or Spain.

sang Nigel raucously. His voice was drowned by the engine and torn away in tatters by the racing wind. Blount bellowed in the pilot’s ear:

‘Are we gaining?’

The pilot nodded taciturnly. Blount fumed and fidgeted. The whole of the heavens seemed to stretch between them and that little black dot to the south. He looked down. They were hardly moving at all. The patchwork earth crawled past beneath reluctantly. He gazed forward again. By Jove, they
were
catching them. The speck was now a two-winged insect. Imperceptibly and remorselessly as the minute hand pursues the hour hand, they were creeping up on their quarry over the blank white face of heaven. He turned and gesticulated to Nigel. Cursing his short-sightedness, Nigel leant out from the shelter of the cockpit. The wind fluttered his eyelids madly, and he hastily drew in his head before they were blown right off. The pilot, turning, shouted:

‘Fred’s seen us! He’s holding her back!’

Yes, they were moving up fast now, high above the other plane and to her right. But when they were within
quarter
of a mile, their quarry seemed to lengthen her stride again. They soon knew why. The pilot put down his nose and dropped towards her, every wire screaming. Now they were near enough to see the two figures in the cockpit. Now nearer; so near that Blount could see the revolver which Cavendish was pressing into the back of his pilot. Their long dive brought their wheels within fifty feet of Cavendish’s head. He looked up. Nigel was not to forget for a lifetime the look on his face. Then Nigel suddenly shouted words which the wind whirled away before Blount could catch them, and waved a handkerchief as though for a flag of truce. For Cavendish, still pointing the revolver at the pilot, was clambering desperately out of the cockpit. He stood, swayed, tilted, hung an eternity so, and then fell. He fell with arms and legs sprawling, like a dummy figure. Down and down and down. For years he seemed to be falling. They had lost sight of him altogether a few seconds before there appeared on the sea’s face a tiny white splash, as though someone had thrown a very small pebble …

XV

THE TALE RETOLD

‘
SO SHE WAS
avenged at last,’ said Nigel.

It was a week after Edward Cavendish had chartered the pilot for that long joumey—a longer journey than he had anticipated. Nigel and his uncle and Philip Starling were sitting in Nigel’s town flat. They were sipping sherry as an appetiser for the story which Nigel had promised to tell them. Philip knew nothing of the recent developments: Sir John Strangeways had received the documents and an outline of the case from Inspector Blount, but he hoped to have a number of points cleared up by his nephew this evening. Blount also had received an invitation but had pleaded an accumulation of business, and Nigel had not pressed him, which was unusual in one of his hospitable nature. Philip Starling was gazing with satisfaction into his glass of sherry: he tilted it, pursed his mouth and said, ‘A-ah. Some very tolerable liquor. Oxford taught you one thing at any rate, old boy.’ Sir John looked more like a wire-haired terrier than ever. He had the extraordinary faculty of sitting in a deep armchair and still looking alert. You expected him any
minute
to jump down and go trotting busily off, his ears cocked and his nose twitching. As Nigel spoke, Sir John was raising a glass to his lips. It stopped in mid-air. He cocked his head and said:

‘“Avenged
at last”?
O’Brien was murdered a fortnight ago.’

‘Well, he had a long time to wait. Over twenty years. I should have thought “at last” was in order,’ Nigel replied teasingly.

His uncle gave him a long, appraising stare. ‘No,’ he said finally, ‘you can’t get away with that. You’re just working up to one of those exhibitionist dramatic disclosures of yours. I know you. Showing off. Pah! Well, go ahead. Not bad sherry this.’

‘No,’ said Nigel, ‘nor is it meant to gargle with. Well, I suppose I’d better begin. You know the facts of the case; I’ve told Philip a certain amount and he is quite capable of making up the rest, especially if he goes on drinking my sherry at this rate. Besides, he gave me the solution. So you both start level.’

‘Gave you the solution? What the devil do you mean? Are you referring to that elementary point about Hercules and Cacus—a story which any—’

‘Schoolboy would be able to tell you,’ interrupted Nigel. ‘No. I am not. What did you think of Blount’s statement of the case, Uncle John?’ he asked with apparent irrelevance.

‘Me? Well, a bit fanciful in places, but there were some pretty big gaps in the evidence to bridge. Seemed the best possible explanation of all the facts.
Cavendish’s
flight clinched it, anyway; and Blount’s finding the poison gone from the place his sister had hidden it in, afterwards. Why do you ask?’

‘Only that, academically speaking, of course, I thought Blount’s interpretation was damned awful,’ said Nigel, staring dreamily at the ceiling. Sir John started up in his chair, exclaiming:

‘But, good Lord, I thought you agreed with him. Now you’ve made me spill my sherry. All this infernal exhibitionism.’

‘I agree with him over a number of points: all the unessential ones, in fact. But the main outlines, the blood and bone of the case—far from it. I was just going to set up my own idea of its anatomy, so to speak, when Edward Cavendish did his ill-considered escaping trick.’

‘But, hang it all,’ said Sir John irritably, ‘Blount told me that you agreed with him about Cavendish having shot O’Brien.’

‘Oh, I did. I still do.’

‘I suppose,’ said his uncle with elaborate sarcasm, ‘that you are going to tell me that Cavendish shot O’Brien but was not the murderer.’

‘You are coming on very nicely,’ declared Nigel encouragingly, ‘that
is
just what I am going to tell you.’

Philip Starling groaned. ‘Oh, God. Riddles. Just like our chaplain after a gaudy. I’m going.’

He lay back and poured himself another glass of sherry. Sir John was staring at Nigel with painful
intentness
, as though his nephew were changing into a sea-serpent before his eyes.

‘I’ll just run through the weak points in Blount’s case,’ said Nigel. ‘Now I never doubted that Cavendish went to the hut that night and made the footprints to bear out the suicide he had faked; after all, it was my idea. I’m also still quite prepared to believe that Knott-Sloman saw him enter the hut, and later blackmailed him, though there’s no real evidence for that at all. But Cavendish as a murderer, or rather as capable of this particular kind of murder—no, I simply couldn’t take it.’

‘You mean that Cavendish found O’Brien already dead when he entered the hut?’ asked Sir John.

‘In a sense,’ replied Nigel obliquely. ‘Now Blount, quite correctly, I thought, judged that O’Brien’s will could only represent a secondary motive, if any at all. Revenge, he decided, must have been Cavendish’s chief incentive; which fitted in with the tone of the threatening letters. That was his first error: a cardinal one. Philip, you knew Cavendish. An able, conventional, pompous, rather unhumorous business man. Can you for a moment imagine him composing these letters?’

Nigel handed them across, and prowled restlessly about the room while Philip Starling read them.

‘No. Scarcely poor old Edward’s style, are they? I can’t imagine him indulging in all this melodrama. And the witticism about O’Brien going out on the Feast of Stephen, like King Wenceslas—that would
be
quite beyond the old boy’s power. On internal evidence, Cavendish couldn’t have written these, I agree.’

‘There you are,’ said Nigel triumphantly, ‘and Philip is an authority on stylistic evidence. But if Cavendish
didn’t
write them, he couldn’t have planned the murder. It’s altogether too much of a coincidence, for two separate people to have planned to kill O’Brien on the same day. Now for the psychological possibilities. Blount’s theory was that Cavendish first put O’Brien on his guard by means of the threatening letters. Then followed him into the hut after midnight, knowing that O’Brien would be armed and quite apt to take a potshot at any intruder. He then held O’Brien in light conversation until he saw a chance to jump on him and turn the revolver against him in the struggle. Now I ask you, who on earth, knowing O’Brien’s reputation as a fighter, would be crazy enough to make an attempt like that? Yet Blount had the nerve to suggest that Cavendish would.
Cavendish!
A man who was shivering with apprehension from the moment O’Brien’s body was discovered: a man whose nerve cracked so badly that he began to make panicky and criminal insinuations against his sister as soon as Blount pressed him hard: a man who ran away before he had been accused. And the inspector had the almighty neck to claim that a jelly of a man like this would put his head right inside a lion’s mouth—which was just about what he would have been doing if he’d carried out the murder plan as reconstructed by
Blount
. I must say, I was disappointed in old Blount over that.’

‘But the inspector was quite prepared to believe that Cavendish had got O’Brien out into the hut on some apparently innocent pretext: lulled his suspicions somehow or other,’ objected Sir John.

‘Making an appointment with a bloke after midnight in a lonely hut is a damned curious way to lull his suspicions. After those letters, O’Brien was bound to be on the
qui vive
against everyone, and if Cavendish wrote them he’d know that. Anyway, if you really think Cavendish was capable of a plan of which the cornerstone was the snatching of a loaded revolver from a dangerous man, then I’ll resign.’

‘I don’t like your metaphor, but I think you’ve made out your case so far, Nigel.’

‘Good. Then there’s the matter of the sleeping draught. Blount was right in deducing that Cavendish must have gone into his bedroom not long before Georgia came in to ask him for the stuff, and in pointing out that this strengthened the theory that he had been in the hut. One could understand him doping Bellamy. But why me? How could he have known that I was a danger to him? I’ve never allowed my name to get into the papers in connection with the cases I’ve worked on. Only my intimate friends know that I go in for this kind of thing.’

‘Still, he might have found out,’ said Philip. ‘It’s difficult to touch blood and not be defiled with a certain measure of vulgar notoriety.’

‘Now, now, Philip, don’t get truculent. Well, we’ll pass over that and turn to a nut which is very much harder to crack, though Knott-Sloman didn’t find it so. Blount’s idea was that Cavendish brought the poisoned nut with him as an alternative should his first plan fall down. But O’Brien didn’t crack nuts with his teeth. And if Cavendish used the nut simply as a receptacle, why go to all the bother of sandpapering it so thin that it would probably burst in his pocket, anyhow? It seemed clear to me at once that the nut couldn’t have been intended for O’Brien. For Knott-Sloman, then? Now if Cavendish wanted to get rid of him because he was blackmailing him over O’Brien’s murder, he would scarcely doctor up a nut days before he had done the murder, merely on the off-chance that somebody might butt in on him when he was doing it and blackmail him later. That means he must have been carrying the poison about with him, and carpentered the nut after Sloman threatened to expose him to the police. And Blount and I had agreed that would be difficult at the Dower House, with police strolling in and out all the time. Besides, if he intended to kill Knott-Sloman to prevent himself being exposed to the police, why adopt such a chancy delayed-action method? He couldn’t possibly be certain that Knott-Sloman would eat that particular nut in time to prevent him giving his information to the authorities. The only possible solution on these lines was that Cavendish proposed to do away with Sloman because he was blackmailing him over Lucilla. Theoretically that was
possible
. But I’ve already shown that Cavendish was psychologically n.b.g. as the murderer of O’Brien. So it implied there were two murderers in our merry little house-party—“you in your small corner, and I in mine,” as the hymn puts it—quite separate and unconnected. Well, I couldn’t quite swallow that.’