Scales of Justice (17 page)

“Shall I tell you what I think may have happened last night? I think that when you made your first remark as you stood in the French window at Hammer, you said something that was near the truth. I think that either then, or perhaps earlier in the evening, you had sallied out in search of your great trout. I think you regretted having flung it down on the bridge during your quarrel with Colonel Cartarette. You knew he wouldn’t touch it, because he had told you so and had gone off, leaving it there. Did you not go down into the valley of the Chyne to retrieve the trout, and did you not find it gone from the bridge when you got there?”

The colour mounted in Mr. Phinn’s face in uneven patches. He lowered his chin and looked quickly at Alleyn from under his meagre brows. But he said nothing.

“If this is so,” Alleyn went on, “and I am encouraged by your silence to hope that it may be, I can’t help wondering what you did next. Did you come straight back to Hammer and seeing the lighted windows make up your mind to accuse the Colonel of having pinched your fish after all? But no. If that had been so, your behaviour would have been different. You would not, before you were aware of his death, have trembled and gone white to the lips. Nor would you have invented your cock-and-bull story of wanting to tell the Colonel all about your catch: a story that was at once disproved when Lady Lacklander told us about your row with the Colonel over that very catch and by the fact that for a long time you have not been on visiting terms with your neighbour.”

Mr. Phinn had turned aside, and Alleyn walked round him until they were again face-to-face.

“How,” he said, “is one to explain your behaviour of last night? Shall I tell you what I think? I think that when you arrived at Hammer Farm at five past one this morning, you knew already that Colonel Cartarette was dead.”

Still Mr. Phinn said nothing.

“Now if this is true,” Alleyn said, “and again you don’t deny it, you have misinformed us about your movements. You let us understand that you returned to the bottom meadow just before you came to Hammer Farm at about one o’clock. But your coat was as dry as a chip. So it must have been much earlier in the evening before the rain that you returned to the bridge in the hope of retrieving the fish and found it gone. And knowing that the Colonel was fishing his own waters not far away, would you not seek him out? Now, if you did behave as I have suggested, you did so at a time when nobody saw you. That must have been after Lady Lacklander, Mrs. Cartarette and Dr. Lacklander had all gone home. Mrs. Cartarette reached Hammer Farm at about five past eight, and Dr. Lacklander went home at a quarter past eight. Neither of them saw the trout. On my working hypothesis, then, you revisited the valley after a quarter past eight and, one would suppose, before a quarter to nine when Nurse Kettle did so. And there, Mr. Phinn, in the willow grove you found Colonel Cartarette’s dead body with your mammoth trout beside it. And didn’t Nurse Kettle very nearly catch you in the willow grove?”

Mr. Phinn ejaculated, “Has she said—” and caught his voice back.

“No,” Alleyn said. “Not specifically. It is I who suggest that you hid and watched her and crept away when she had gone. I suggest, moreover, that when you bolted for cover, your reading spectacles were snatched from your hat by an envious sliver and that in your panic and your terror of being seen, you dared not look for them. Possibly you did not realize they had gone until you got home. And that’s why, after the rain, you stole out again — to try and find your glasses in case they were lost in a place where they might incriminate you. Then you saw the lights of Hammer Farm and dared go no further. You couldn’t endure the suspense of not knowing if the Colonel had been found. You drew nearer and Sergeant Oliphant’s torchlight shone in your eyes.”

Alleyn turned to the window and looked down at Mr. Phinn’s spinney, at the upper reaches of the Chyne and at a glimpse, between trees, of the near end of the bridge.

“That,” he said, “is how I think you moved about the landscape yesterday evening and last night.” Alleyn drew a pair of spectacles from the breast pocket of his coat and dangled them before Mr. Phinn. “I’m afraid I can’t let you have them back just yet. But”—he extended his long finger toward Mr. Phinn’s breast pocket—“isn’t that a magnifying glass you have managed to unearth?”

Mr. Phinn was silent.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s our view of your activities. It’s a picture based on your own behaviour and one or two known facts. If it is accurate, believe me, you will be wise to say so.”

Mr. Phinn said in an unrecognizable voice, “And if I don’t choose to speak?”

“You will be within your rights, and we shall draw our own conclusions.”

“You still don’t give me the famous Usual Warning one hears so much about?”

“No.”

“I suppose,” Mr. Phinn said, “I am a timid man, but I know, in respect of this crime, that I am an innocent one.”

“Well, then,” Alleyn said and tried to lend the colour of freshness to an assurance he had so often given, “your innocence should cancel your timidity. You have nothing to fear.”

It seemed to Alleyn as he watched Mr. Phinn that he was looking on at the superficial signs of a profound disturbance. It was as if Mr. Phinn’s personality had been disrupted from below like a thermal pool and in a minute or two would begin to boil.

Some kind of climax was in fact achieved, and he began to talk very rapidly in his high voice.

“You are a very clever man. You reason from character to fact and back again. There! I have admitted everything. It’s all quite true. I tiffed with Cartarette. I flung my noble Fin on the bridge. I came home but did not enter my house. I walked distractedly about my garden. I repented of my gesture and returned. The Fin had gone. I sought out my rival and because of the howl of his dog — a disagreeable canine’I found him—” here Mr. Phinn shut his eyes very tight- “no, really, it was too disagreeable! Even though his hat was over his face, one knew at a glance. And the dog never even looked at one. Howl! Howl! I didn’t go near them, but I saw my fish! My trout! My Superfin! And then, you know, I heard
her.
Kettle. Stump, stump, stump past the willow grove. I ran, I doubled, I flung myself on my face in the undergrowth and waited until she had gone. And then I came home,” said Mr. Phinn, “and as you have surmised, I discovered the loss of my reading glasses, which I frequently keep in my hatband. I was afraid. And there you are.”

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “there we are. How do you feel about making a signed statement to this effect?”

“Another statement. O, tedious task! But I am resigned.”

“Good. We’ll leave you to write it with the aid of your reading glasses. Will you begin with the actual catching of the Old ’Un?”

Mr. Phinn nodded.

“And you are still disinclined to tell us the full substance of your discussion with Colonel Cartarette?”

Mr. Phinn nodded.

He had his back to the windows and Alleyn faced them. Sergeant Oliphant had come out of the spinney and stood at the foot of the garden. Alleyn moved up to the windows. The sergeant, when he saw him, put his thumb up and turned back into the trees.

Fox picked up the parcel of clothes.

Alleyn said, “We’ll call later for the statement. Or perhaps you would bring it to the police-station in Chyning this evening?”

“Very well.” Mr. Phinn swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “After all,” he said, “I would hardly desert my Glorious Fin. Would I?”

“You did so before. Why shouldn’t you do so again?”

“I am completely innocent.”

“Grand. We mustn’t bother you any longer. Goodbye, then, until, shall we say, five o’clock in Chyning.”

They went out by a side door and down the garden to the spinney. The path wound downhill amongst trees to a stile that gave onto the river path. Here Sergeant Oliphant waited for them. Alleyn’s homicide bag, which had been entrusted to the sergeant, rested on the stile. At the sound of their voices he turned, and they saw that across his palms there lay a sheet of newspaper.

On the newspaper were the dilapidated remains of a trout.

“I got ’er,” said Sergeant Oliphant.

“She was a short piece above the bridge on this side,” explained the sergeant, who had the habit of referring to inanimate but recalcitrant objects in the feminine gender. “Laying in some long grass to which I’d say she’d been dragged. Cat’s work, sir, as you can see by the teeth-marks.”

“As we supposed,” Alleyn agreed. “Mrs. Thomasina Twitchett’s work.”

“A nice fish; she’s been, say, two pound, but nothing to the Old ’Un,” said the sergeant.

Alleyn laid the paper and its contents on a step of the stile and hung fondly over it. Mrs. Twitchett, if indeed it was she, had made short work of most of the Colonel’s trout, if indeed this was his trout. The body was picked almost clean and some of the smaller bones had been chewed. The head appeared to have been ejected after a determined onslaught and the tail was semi-detached. But from the ribs there still depended some pieces of flesh and rags of skin that originally covered part of the flank and belly of the fish, and it was over an unlovely fragment of skin that Alleyn pored. He laid it out flat, using two pairs of pocket tweezers for the purpose, with a long finger pointed to something that might have been part of an indented scar. It was about a quarter of an inch wide and had a curved margin. It was pierced in one place as if by a short spike.

“Now blow me down flat,” Alleyn exulted, “if this isn’t the answer to the good little investigating officer’s prayer. See here, Fox, isn’t this a piece of the sort of scar we would expect to find? And look here.”

Very gingerly he turned the trout over and discovered, clinging to the other flank, a further rag of skin with the apex of a sharp triangular gap in it.

“Sink me if I don’t have a look,” Alleyn muttered.

Under Oliphant’s enchanted gaze, he opened his case, took from it a flat enamel dish, which he laid on the bottom step of the stile, and a small glass jar with a screw-on lid. Using his tweezers, he spread out the piece of skin with the triangular gap on the plate. From the glass jar he took the piece of skin that had been found on the sharp stone under the Old ’Un. Muttering and whistling under his breath, and with a delicate dexterity, he laid the second fragment beside the first, opened it out and pushed and fiddled the one into the other as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They fitted exactly.

“And that,” Alleyn said, “is why Mrs. Twitchett met us last night smelling of fresh fish when she should have been stinking of liver. O, Fate! O, Nemesis! O, Something or Another!” he apostrophized. “Thy hand is here!” And in answer to Oliphant’s glassy stare he added, “You’ve done damned handily, Sergeant, to pick this up so quickly. Now, listen, and I’ll explain.”

The explanation was detailed and exhaustive. Alleyn ended it with an account of the passage he had read in Colonel Cartarette’s book. “We’ll send out a signal to some piscatorial pundit,” he said, “and get a check. But if the Colonel was right, and he seems to have been a conscientious, knowledgeable chap, our two trout cannot exhibit identical scales. The Colonel’s killer, and only his killer can have handled both fish. We do a round-up of garments, my hearties, and hope for returns.”

Sergeant Oliphant cleared his throat and with an air of modest achievement stooped behind a briar bush. “There’s one other matter, sir,” he said. “I found this at the bottom of the hill in a bit of underbrush.”

He straightened up. In his hand was an arrow. “It appears,” he said, “to have blood on it.”

“Does it, indeed?” Alleyn said and took it. “All right, Oliphant. Damn’ good show. We’re getting on very prettily. And if,” he summarized for the benefit of the gratified and anxious Oliphant, “if it all tallies up as I believe it must, then the pattern will indeed begin to emerge, won’t it, Fox?”

“I hope so, Mr. Alleyn,” Fox rejoined cheerfully.

“So off you go, Oliphant,” Alleyn said. “Drive Mr. Fox to the station, where he will ring the Yard and the Natural History Museum. Deliver your treasure-trove to Dr. Curtis. I hope to have the rest of the exhibits before this evening. Come on, chaps, this case begins to ripen.”

He led them back to the valley, saw Oliphant and Fox on their way with an accumulation of gear and objects of interest, and himself climbed up the hill to Nunspardon.

Here, to his surprise, he ran into a sort of party. Shaded from the noontide sun on the terrace before the great house were assembled the three Lacklanders, Kitty Cartarette and Rose. It was now half past twelve, and a cocktail tray gave an appearance of conviviality to a singularly wretched-looking assembly. Lady Lacklander seemed to have retired behind her formidable façade leaving in her wake an expression of bland inscrutability. George stood in a teapot attitude: one hand in his jacket pocket, the other on the back of a chair; one neatly knickered leg straight, one bent. Mark scowled devotedly upon Rose, who was pale, had obviously wept a great deal and seemed in addition to her grief to be desperately worried. Kitty, in a tweed suit, high heels and embroidered gloves, was talking to George. She looked exhausted and faintly sulky, as if tragedy had taken her by surprise and let her down. She lent an incongruous note to a conversation piece that seemed only to lack the attendant figures of grooms with hounds in leashes. Her voice was a high-pitched one. Before she noticed Alleyn, she had completed a sentence and he had heard it: “That’s right,” she had said, “Brierley and Bentwood,” and then she saw him and made an abrupt movement that drew all their eyes upon him.

He wondered how many more times he would have to approach these people through their gardens and from an uncomfortable distance. In a way, he was beginning to enjoy it. He felt certain that this time, if George Lacklander could have managed it, the waiting group would have been scattered by a vigorous gesture, George himself would have retired to some manly den and Alleyn, in the ripeness of time, would have been admitted by a footman.

As it was, all of them except Lady Lacklander made involuntary movements which were immediately checked. Kitty half rose as if to beat a retreat, looked disconsolately at George and sank back in her chair.