Scales of Justice (10 page)

He said to Lady Lacklander, “Did you stay there long after he left you?”

“No. We talked for about ten minutes and then Maurice re-crossed the bridge, as I told you, and disappeared behind the willows on the right bank.”

“Which way did you go home?”

“Up through the Home Spinney to Nunspardon.”

“Could you see into the willow grove at all?”

“Certainly. When I was half-way up I stopped to pant, and I looked down and there he was, casting into the willow-grove reach.”

“That would be about eight.”

“About eight, yes.”

“I think you said you left your painting gear to be collected, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Who collected it, please?”

“One of the servants. William, the footman, probably.”

“No,” Mark said. “No, Gar. I did.”

“You?” his grandmother said. “What were you doing…” and stopped short.

Mark said rapidly that after making a professional call in the village he had gone in to play tennis at Hammer and had stayed there until about ten minutes past eight. He had returned home by the river path and as he approached Bottom Bridge had seen his grandmother’s shooting-stick, stool and painting gear in a deserted group on a hillock. He carried them back to Nunspardon and was just in time to prevent the footman from going down to collect them. Alleyn asked him if he had noticed a large trout lying on Bottom Bridge. Mark said that he hadn’t done so, but at the same moment his grandmother gave one of her short ejaculations.

“You must have seen it, Mark,” she said. “Great gaping thing lying there where Octavius Phinn must have chucked it down. On the bridge, my dear boy. You must have practically stepped over it.”

“It wasn’t there,” Mark said. “Sorry, Gar, but it wasn’t, when I went home.”

“Mrs. Cartarette,” Alleyn said, “you must have crossed Bottom Bridge a few minutes after Lady Lacklander had gone home, mustn’t you?”

“That’s right,” Kitty said. “We saw her going into the Nunspardon Home Spinney as we came over the hill by the second tee.”

“And Sir George, then, in his turn, went home through the Home Spinney, and you came down the hill by the river path?”

“That’s right,” she said drearily.

“Did you see the fabulous trout lying on Bottom Bridge?”

“Not a sign of it, I’m afraid.”

“So that between about ten to eight and ten past eight the trout was removed by somebody and subsequently left in the willow grove. Are you all of the opinion that Colonel Cartarette would have been unlikely to change his mind and go back for it?” Alleyn asked.

George looked huffy and said he didn’t know, he was sure, and Lady Lacklander said that judging by what Colonel Cartarette had said to her, she was persuaded that wild horses wouldn’t have induced him to touch the trout. Alleyn thought to himself, “If he was disinclined to touch it, still less would he feel like wrapping it up in grass in order to stow it away in his creel, which apparently was what he had been doing when he died.”

“I suppose there’s no doubt about this fish being the classic Old ’Un?” Alleyn asked.

“None,” Mark said. “There’s not such another in the Chyne. No question.”

“By the way, did you look down at the willow grove as you climbed up the hill to the Home Spinney?”

“I don’t remember doing so. I was hung about with my grandmother’s sketching gear and I didn’t…”

It was at this moment that Kitty Cartarette screamed.

She did not scream very loudly; the sound was checked almost as soon as it was born, but she had half risen from her sofa and was staring at something beyond and behind Alleyn. She had clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were wide open beneath their raised brows. He noticed that they were inclined to be prominent.

They all turned to discover what it was that Kitty stared at but found only an uncovered French window reflecting the lighted room and the ghosts of their own startled faces.

“There’s someone out there!” Kitty whispered. “A man looked in at the window. George!”

“My dear girl,” Lady Lacklander said, “you saw George’s reflection. There’s nobody there.”

“There is.”

“It’s probably Sergeant Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “We left him outside. Fox?”

Fox was already on his way, but before he reached the French window, the figure of a man appeared beyond its reflected images. The figure moved uncertainly, coming in from the side and halting when it was some way from the glass. Kitty made a slight retching sound. Fox’s hand was on the knob of the French window when beyond it the beam of Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shot across the dark and the man’s face was illuminated. It was crowned by a tasselled smoking cap and was deadly pale.

Fox opened the French windows.

“Pray forgive an unwarrantable intrusion,” said Mr. Danberry-Phinn. “I am in quest of a fish.”

Mr. Phinn’s behaviour was singular. The light from the room seemed to dazzle him. He screwed up his eyes and nose, and this gave him a supercilious look greatly at variance with his extreme pallor and unsteady hands. He squinted at Fox and then beyond him at the company in the drawing-room.

“I fear I have called at an inconvenient moment,” he said. “I had no idea… I had hoped to see…” his Adam’s apple bobbed furiously …“to see,” he repeated, “in point of fact, Colonel Cartarette.” He disclosed his teeth, clamped together in the oddest kind of smile.

Kitty made an indeterminate sound, and Lady Lacklander began, “My dear Octavius…” but before either of them could get any further, Alleyn moved in front of Mr. Phinn. “Did you say, sir,” Alleyn asked, “that you are looking for a fish?”

Mr. Phinn said, “Forgive me, I don’t
think
I have the pleasure…?” and peered up into Alleyn’s face. “
Have
I the pleasure?” he asked. He blinked away from Alleyn towards Fox. Fox was one of those, nowadays rather rare, detectives who look very much like their job. He was a large, grizzled man with extremely bright eyes.

“And in this case,” Mr. Phinn continued with a breathless little laugh, “I indubitably have
not
the pleasure.”

“We are police officers,” Alleyn said. “Colonel Cartarette has been murdered, Mr. Phinn. You are Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, I think, aren’t you?”

“But how perfectly terrible!” said Mr. Phinn. “My dear Mrs. Cartarette! My dear Miss Rose! I am appalled. APPALLED!” Mr. Phinn repeated, opening his eyes as wide as they could go.

“You’d better come in, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said. “They’ll want to talk to you.”

“To
me
!” he ejaculated. He came in and Fox shut the French window behind him.

Alleyn said, “I shall want to have a word with you, sir. In fact, I think it is time that we saw some of you individually rather than together, but before we do that, I should like Mr. Phinn to tell us about the fish he is looking for.” He raised his hand. If any of his audience had felt like interjecting, they now thought better of the impulse. “If you please, Mr. Phinn?” Alleyn said.

“I’m so confused, indeed so horrified at what you have told me…”

“Dreadful,” Alleyn said, “isn’t it? About the fish?”

“The fish? The fish, my dear sir, is or was a magnificent trout. The fish is a fish of great fame. It is the trout to end all trout. A piscine emperor. And I, let me tell you, I caught him.”

“Where?” Lady Lacklander demanded.

Mr. Phinn blinked twice. “Above Bottom Bridge, my dear Lady L.,” he said. “Above Bottom Bridge.”

“You
are
an old humbug, Occy,” she said.

George suddenly roared out, “That’s a bloody lie, Octavius. You poached him. You were fishing under the bridge. We saw you from the second tee.”

“Dear me, George,” said Mr. Phinn going white to the lips. “What a noise you do make, to be sure.”

Fox had stepped unobtrusively aside and was busy with his notebook.

“To talk like that!” Mr. Phinn continued with two half bows in the direction of Kitty and Rose. “In a house of mourning! Really, George, I must say!”

“By God…!” George began, but Alleyn intervened.

“What,” he asked Mr. Phinn, “happened to your catch?”

Mr. Phinn sucked in a deep breath and began to speak very quickly indeed. “Flushed,” he said in a voice that was not quite steady, “with triumph, I resolved to try the upper reaches of the Chyne. I therefore laid my captive to rest on the very field of his defeat,
id est,
the upper, repeat upper, approach to Bottom Bridge. When I returned, much later, I cannot tell you
how
much later for I did not carry a watch, but much,
much
later, I went to the exact spot where my Prince of Piscines should have rested and…” he made a wide gesture during the execution of which it was apparent that his hands were tremulous… “Gone! Vanished! Not a sign! Lost!” he said.

“Now, look here, Occy…” Lady Lacklander in her turn began, and in her tum was checked by Alleyn.

“Please, Lady Lacklander,” Alleyn interjected. She glared at him. “Do you mind?” he said.

She clasped her plump hands together and rested the entire system of her chins upon them. “Well,” she said, “I called you in, after all. Go on.”

“What did you do,” Alleyn asked Mr. Phinn, “when you discovered your loss?”

Mr. Phinn looked very fixedly at him. “Do?” he repeated” “What should I do? It was growing dark. I looked about in the precincts of the bridge but to no avail. The trout was gone. I returned home, a bitterly chagrined man.”

“And there you remained, it seems, for about four hours. It’s now five minutes past one in the morning. Why, at such an hour, are you paying this visit, Mr. Phinn?”

Looking at Mr. Phinn, Alleyn thought, “He was ready for that one.”

“Why!” Mr. Phinn exclaimed spreading his unsteady hands. “My dear sir, I will tell you why. Rendered almost suicidal by the loss of this Homeric catch, I was unable to contemplate my couch with any prospect of repose. Misery and frustration would have been my bedfellows, I assure you, had I sought it. I attempted to read, to commune with the persons of my house (I refer to my cats, sir), to listen to an indescribably tedious piece of buffoonery upon the wireless. All, I regret to say, was of no avail: my mind was wholly occupied by The Great Fish. Some three quarters of an hour or so ago, I sought the relief of fresh air and took a turn down the river path. On emerging from the ruffian Syce’s spinney, I observed lights behind these windows. I heard voices. Knowing,” he said with a singular gulp, “knowing that poor Cartarette’s interest as a fellow angler would be aroused, I… my dear Lady L., why
are
you looking at me in this most disconcerting fashion?”

“Occy!” Lady Lacklander said. “Yard or no Yard, I can’t contain my information for another second. I was within a stone’s throw of you when you had your row with Maurice Cartarette. What’s more a few minutes earlier his wife and George both saw you poaching under the bridge. I heard you or Maurice throw down the trout on the bridge and I heard you part company in a high rage. What’s more Maurice came hotfoot to where I was painting and I had the whole story all over again from him. Now, my dear Roderick Alleyn, you may be as cross with me as you please, but I really could not allow this nonsensical tarradiddle to meander on for another second.”

Mr. Phinn blinked and peered and fumbled with his lips. “It used to be quite a little joke between my dear wife and me,” he said at last, “that one must never contradict a Lacklander.”

Only Alleyn and Fox looked at him.

“Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn said, “you normally wear spectacles, I think, don’t you?”

Mr. Phinn made a strange little gesture with his thumb and forefinger as if he actually adjusted his glasses. Thus, momentarily, he hid the red groove across the top of his nose and the flush that had begun to spread across his face. “Not all the time,” he said. “Only for reading.”

Lady Lacklander suddenly clapped the palms of her hands down on the arms of her chair. “So there we are,” she said. “And having said my say, George, I should like you, if you please, to take me home.”

She put out her right arm and as George was a little slow in coming, Alleyn took her hand, braced himself and hauled.

“ ‘Up she rises,’ ” Lady Lacklander quoted self-derisively, and up she rose. She stared for a moment at Mr. Phinn, who gaped back at her and mouthed something indistinguishable. She looked straight into Alleyn’s eyes. “Do you, after all,” she said, “propose to let me go home?”

Alleyn raised an eyebrow. “I shall feel a good deal safer,” he said, “with you there than here, Lady Lacklander.”

“Take me to my car. I have to shuffle a bit because of my damn’ toe. It’s no better, Kettle. George, you may join me in five minutes. I want to have a word with Roderick Alleyn.”

She said goodbye to Rose, holding her for a moment in her arms. Rose clung to her and gave a shuddering sob. Lady Lacklander said, “My poor child, my poor little Rose; you must come to us as soon as possible. Get Mark to give you something to make you sleep.”

Kitty had risen. “It was awfully kind of you to come,” she said and held out her hand. Lady Lacklander took it and after a scarcely perceptible pause let it be known that Kitty was expected to kiss her. This Kitty did with caution.

“Come and see me to-morrow, Kettle,” said Lady Lacklander, “unless they lock you up.”

“Let ’em try,” said Nurse Kettle, who had been entirely silent ever since Mr. Phinn’s arrival. Lady Lacklander gave a short laugh. She paid no attention to Mr. Phinn but nodded to Alleyn. He hastened to open the door and followed her through a large and charmingly shaped hall to the main entrance. Outside this a vast elderly car waited.

“I’ll sit in the back,” she said. “George will drive. I find him an irritating companion in time of trouble.”

Alleyn opened the door and switched on a light in the car.

“Now, tell me,” she said, after she had heaved herself in, “tell me, not as a policeman to an octogenarian dowager but as a man of discretion to one of your mother’s oldest friends, what did you think of Occy Phinn’s behaviour just now?”

Alleyn said, “Octogenarian dowagers, even if they are my mother’s oldest friend, shouldn’t lure me out of doors at night and make improper suggestions.”