Scales of Justice (22 page)

“So I had supposed,” Alleyn said. “But don’t you think you had better let me see it?”

There was a long silence. “Without the consent of Lady Lacklander,” Mr. Phinn said, “never. Not for all the sleuths in Christendom.”

“Well,” Alleyn said, “that’s all very correct, I daresay. Would you suggest, for the sake of argument, that Chapter 7 constitutes a sort of confession on the part of the author? Does Sir Harold Lacklander, for instance, perhaps admit that he was virtually responsible for the leakage of information that tragic time in Zlomce?”

Mr. Phinn said breathlessly, “Pray, what inspires this gush of unbridled empiricism?”

“It’s not altogether that,” Alleyn rejoined with perfect good-humour. “As I think I told you this morning, I have some knowledge of the Zlomce affair. You tell us that the new version of Chapter 7 constitutes for you a contra-motive. If this is so, if, for instance, it provides exoneration, can you do anything but welcome its publication?”

Mr. Phinn said nothing.

“I think I must tell you,” Alleyn went on, “that I shall ask the prospective publishers for the full story of Chapter 7.”

“They have not been informed—”

“On the contrary, unknown to Colonel Cartarette, they were informed by the author.”

“Indeed?” said Mr. Phinn, trembling slightly. “If they profess any vestige of professional rectitude, they will refuse to divulge the content.”

“As you do?”

“As I do. I shall refuse any information in this affair, no matter what pressure is put upon me, Inspector Alleyn.”

Mr. Phinn had already turned aside when his garden gate creaked and Alleyn said quietly, “Good morning once again, Lady Lacklander.”

Mr. Phinn spun round with an inarticulate ejaculation.

She stood blinking in the sun, huge, without expression and very slightly tremulous.

“Roderick,” said Lady Lacklander, “I have come to confess.”

Lady Lacklander advanced slowly towards them.

“If that contraption of yours will support my weight, Octavius,” she said, “I’ll take it.”

They stood aside for her. Mr. Phinn suddenly began to gabble. “No, no, no! Not another word! I forbid it.”

She let herself down on a rustic seat.

“For God’s sake,” Mr. Phinn implored her frantically, “hold your tongue, Lady L.”

“Nonsense, Occy,” she rejoined, panting slightly. “Hold yours, my good fool.” She stared at him for a moment and then gave a sort of laugh.

“Good Lord, you think I did it myself, do you?”

“No, no, no. What a thing to say!”

She shifted her great torso and addressed herself to Alleyn. “I’m here, Roderick, virtually on behalf of my husband. The confession I have to offer is his.”

“At last,” Alleyn said. “Chapter 7.”

“Precisely. I’ve no idea how much you think you already know or how much you may have been told.”

“By me,” Mr. Phinn cried out, “nothing!”

“Humph!” she said. “Uncommon generous of you, Octavius.”

Mr. Phinn began to protest, threw up his hands and was silent.

“There are, however, other sources,” she went on. “I understand his wife has been kept posted.” She stared at Alleyn, who thought, “George has told Kitty Cartarette about Chapter 7 and Lady Lacklander has found out. She thinks Kitty has told me.” He said nothing.

“You may suppose, therefore,” Lady Lacklander continued, “that I am merely making a virtue of necessity.”

Alleyn bowed.

“It is not altogether that. To begin with, we are, as a family, under a certain obligation to you, Octavius.”

“Stop!” Mr. Phinn shouted. “Before you go on much further, before you
utter
—”

“Mr. Phinn,” Alleyn cut in, breaking about three vital items of the police code in one sentence, “if you don’t stop chattering, I shall take drastic steps to make you. Shut up, Mr. Phinn.”

“Yes, Occy,” Lady Lacklander said, “I couldn’t agree more. Either shut up or take yourself off, my dear fellow.” She lifted a tiny, fat hand, holding it aloft as if it was one of Mr. Phinn’s kittens. “Do me the favour,” she said, “of believing I have thought things over very carefully, and be quiet.”

While Mr. Phinn still hesitated, eyeing Alleyn and fingering his lips, Lady Lacklander made a brief comprehensive gesture with her short arms and said, “Roderick, my husband was a traitor.”

They made a strange group, sitting there on uncomfortable rustic benches. Fox took unobtrusive notes, Mr. Phinn held his head in his hands, Lady Lacklander, immobile behind the great façade of her fat, talked and talked. Cats came and went, gracefully indifferent to the human situation.

“That,” Lady Lacklander said, “is what you will find in Chapter 7.” She broke off and, after a moment, said, “This is not going to be easy and I’ve no wish to make a fool of myself. Will you forgive me for a moment?”

“Of course,” Alleyn said, and they waited while Lady Lacklander, staring before her, beat her puff-ball palms on her knees and got her mouth under control. “That’s better,” she said at last. “I can manage now.” And she went on steadily. “At the time of the Zlomce incident my husband was in secret negotiation with a group of Prussian fascists. The top group: the men about Hitler. They looked upon him, it appears, as their trump card: a British diplomat whose name—” her voice creaked and steadied—“was above reproach in his own country. He was absolutely and traitorously committed to the Nazi programme.” Alleyn saw that her eyes were bitter with tears. “They never found that out at your M.I.5., Roderick, did they?”

“No.”

“And yet this morning I thought that perhaps you knew.”

“I wondered. That was all.”

“So she didn’t say anything.”

“She?”

“Maurice’s wife. Kitty.”

“No.”

“You never know,” she muttered, “with that sort of people what they may do.”

“Nor,” he said, “with other sorts either, it seems.”

A dark unlovely flush flooded her face.

“The extraordinary thing,” Mr. Phinn said suddenly, “is
why. Why
did Lacklander do it?”

“The Herrenvolk heresy?” Alleyn suggested. “An aristocratic Anglo-German alliance as the only alternative to war and communism and the only hope for the survival of his own class? It was a popular heresy at that time. He wasn’t alone. No doubt he was promised great things.”

“You don’t spare him,” Lady Lacklander said under her breath.

“How can I? In the new Chapter 7, I imagine, he doesn’t spare himself.”

“He repented bitterly. His remorse was frightful.”

“Yes,” Mr. Phinn said. “That is clear enough.”

“Ah, yes!” she cried out. “Ah, yes, Occy, yes. And most of all for the terrible injury he did your boy — most of all for that.”

“The injury?” Alleyn repeated, cutting short an attempt on Mr. Phinn’s part to intervene. “I’m sorry, Mr. Phinn. We must have it.”

Lady Lacklander said, “Why do you try to stop me, Occy? You’ve read it. You must want to shout it from the roof-tops.”

Alleyn said, “Does Sir Harold exonerate Ludovic Phinn?”

“Of everything but carelessness.”

“I see.”

Lady Lacklander put her little fat hands over her face. It was a gesture so out of key with the general tenor of her behaviour that it was as shocking in its way as a bout of hysteria.

Alleyn said, “I think I understand. In the business of the railway concessions in Zlomce, was Sir Harold, while apparently acting in accordance with his instructions from the British Government, about to allow the German interest to get control?”

He saw that he was right and went on, “And at the most delicate stage of these negotiations, at the very moment where he desired above all things that no breath of suspicion should be aroused, his private secretary goes out on a Central European bender and lets a German agent get hold of the contents of the vital cable which Sir Harold had left him to decode. Sir Harold is informed by his own government of the leakage. He is obliged to put up a terrific show of ambassadorial rage. He has no alternative but to send for young Phinn. He accuses him of such things and threatens him with such disastrous exposures, such disgrace and ruin, that the boy goes out and puts an end to it all. Was it like that?”

He looked from one to the other.

“It was like that,” Lady Lacklander said. She raised her voice as if she repeated some intolerable lesson. “My husband writes that he drove Viccy Phinn to his death as surely as if he had killed him with his own hands. He was instructed to do so by his Nazi masters. It was then that he began to understand what he had done and to what frightful lengths his German associates could drive him. I knew, at that time, he was wretchedly unhappy, but put it down to the shock of Viccy’s death and — as I, of course, thought — treachery. But the treachery, Occy, was ours, and your Viccy was only a foolish and tragically careless boy.” She looked at Mr. Phinn and frowned. “Yesterday,” she said, “after your row with Maurice over the trout, he came to me and told me he’d left a copy of the amended Chapter 7 at your house. Why haven’t you produced it, Occy? Why just now did you try to stop me? Was it because—”

“Dear me, no,” Mr. Phinn said very quietly, “not from any high-flown scruples, I assure you. It was, if you will believe me, in deference to my boy’s wishes. Before he killed himself, Viccy wrote to his mother and to me. He begged us to believe him innocent. He also begged us most solemnly, whatever the future might hold, never to take any action that might injure Sir Harold Lacklander. You may not have noticed, my dear Lady L., that my foolish boy hero-worshipped your husband. We decided to respect his wishes.”

Mr. Phinn stood up. He looked both old and shabby. “I am not concerned,” he said, “with the Lacklander conscience, the Lacklander motive, or the Lacklander remorse. I no longer desire the Lacklanders to suffer for my dear boy’s death. I do not, I think, believe any more in human expiation. Now if I may, I shall ask you to excuse me. And if you want to know what I did with Chapter 7, I burnt it to ashes, my dear Chief Inspector, half an hour ago.”

He raised his dreadful smoking cap, bowed to Lady Lacklander and walked into his house, followed by his cats.

Lady Lacklander stood up. She began to move towards the gate, seemed to recollect herself and paused. “I am going to Nunspardon,” she said. Alleyn opened the gate. She went out without looking at him, got into her great car and was driven away.

Fox said, “Painful business. I suppose the young fellow suspected what was up at the last interview. Unpleasant.”

“Very.”

“Still, as Mr. Phinn says, this Chapter 7 really puts him in the clear as far as killing Colonel Cartarette is concerned.”

“Well, no,” Alleyn said.

“No?”

“Not exactly. The Colonel left Chapter 7 at Jacob’s Cottage. Phinn, on his own statement, didn’t re-enter the house after his row with the Colonel. He returned to the willow grove, found the body and lost his spectacles. He read Chapter 7 for the first time this morning, I fancy, by the aid of a magnifying glass.”

“Of course,” Fox said, as they turned into Commander Syce’s drive, “it will have been a copy. The Colonel’d never hand over the original.”

“No. My guess is he locked the original in the bottom drawer of the left-hand side of his desk.”

“Ah! Now!” Fox said with relish. “That might well be.”

“In which case one of his own family or one of the Lacklanders or any other interested person has pinched it, and it’s probably gone up in smoke like its sister-ship. On the other hand, the bottom drawer may have been empty and the original typescript in Cartarette’s bank. It doesn’t very much matter, Fox. The publisher was evidently given a pretty sound idea of the alternative version by its author. He could always be called. We may not have to bring the actual text in evidence. I hope we won’t.”

“What d’you reckon is the dowager’s real motive in coming so remarkably clean all of a sudden?”

Alleyn said crossly, “I’ve had my bellyful of motives. Take your choice, Br’er Fox.”

“Of course,” Fox said, “she’s a very sharp old lady. She must have guessed we’d find out anyway.”

Alleyn muttered obscurely, “The mixture as before. And here we go with a particularly odious little interview. Look out for squalls, Br’er Fox. Gosh! See who’s here!”

It was Nurse Kettle. She had emerged from the front door, escorted by Commander Syce, who carried a napkin in his hand. She was about to enter her car, and this process was accelerated by Commander Syce, who quite obviously drew her attention to the approaching police car and then, limping to her own, opened the door and waited with some evidence of trepidation for her to get in. She did so without glancing at him and started her engine.

“She’s told him,” Alleyn said crossly, “that we’ve rumbled the ’bago.”

“Acting, no doubt,” Fox rejoined stiffly, “from the kindest of motives.”

“No doubt.” Alleyn lifted his hat as Nurse Kettle, having engaged her bottom gear with some precipitance, shot past them like a leaping eland. She was extremely red in the face.

Syce waited for them.

Fox pulled up and they both got out. Alleyn slung the golf bag over his shoulder as he addressed himself to Syce.

“May we speak to you indoors somewhere?” Alleyn asked.

Without a word Syce led the way into his living-room, where a grim little meal, half consumed, was laid out on a small table in close proximity to a very dark whisky-and-water.

The improvised bed was still in commission. A dressing-gown was folded neatly across the foot.

“Sit down?” Syce jerked out, but, as he evidently was not going to do so himself, neither Alleyn nor Fox followed his suggestion.

“What’s up now?” he demanded.

Alleyn said, “I’ve come to ask you a number of questions, all of which you will find grossly impertinent. They concern the last occasion when you were in Singapore. The time we discussed this morning, you remember, when you told us you introduced the present Mrs. Cartarette to her husband?”

Syce didn’t answer. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and stared out of the window.

“I’m afraid,” Alleyn said, “I shall have to press this a little further. In a word, I must ask you if you were not, in fact, on terms of the greatest intimacy with Miss de Vere, as she was then.”

“Bloody impertinence.”

“Well, yes. But so, when one comes to think of it, is murder.”

“What the hell are you driving at?”

“Ah!” Alleyn exclaimed with one of his very rare gestures. “How footling all this is! You know damn’ well what I’m driving at. Why should we stumble about like a couple of maladroit fencers? See here. I’ve information from the best possible sources that before she was married, you were living with Mrs. Cartarette in Singapore. You yourself have told me you introduced her to Cartarette. You came back here and found them man and wife: the last thing, so you told me, that you had intended. All right. Cartarette was murdered last night in the bottom meadow, and there’s a hole in his head that might have been made by an arrow. You gave out that you were laid by with lumbago, but you were heard twanging away at your sixty-pound bow when you were supposed to be incapacitated on your bed. Now, send for your solicitor if you like and refuse to talk till he comes, but for the love of Mike don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m driving at.”

“Great grief!” Syce exclaimed with exactly the same inflection he had used of cats. “I
liked
Cartarette.”

“You may have liked Cartarette, but did you love his wife?”

“ ‘Love,’ ” Syce repeated turning purple. “What a word!”

“Well, my dear man — put it this way. Did she love you?”

“Look here, are you trying to make out that she egged me on or — or — I egged her on or any perishing rot of that sort! Thompson,” Commander Syce shouted angrily, “and Bywaters, by God!”

“What put them into your head, I wonder? The coincidence that he was a seafaring man and she, poor woman, an unfaithful wife?”

“A few more cracks like that and I bloody well will send for a solicitor.”