Scales of Justice (23 page)

“You
are
being difficult,” Alleyn said without rancour. “Will you let me have the clothes you were wearing last evening?”

“What the hell for?”

“For one thing, to see if Cartarette’s blood is on them.”

“How absolutely piffling.”

“Well, may I have them?”

“I’m wearing them, blast it.”

“Would you mind wearing something else?”

Commander Syce fixed his intensely blue and slightly bloodshot eyes on a distant point in the landscape and said, “I’ll shift.”

“Thank you. I see you’ve been using this as a bed-sitting-room during, no doubt, your attack of lumbago. Perhaps for the time being you could shift into your dressing-gown and slippers.”

Syce followed this suggestion. Little gales of whisky were wafted from him, and his hands were unsteady, but he achieved his change with the economy of movement practised by sailors. He folded up the garments as they were discarded, passed a line of cord round them, made an appropriate knot and gave the bundle to Fox, who wrote out a receipt for it.

Syce tied his dressing-gown cord with a savage jerk.

“No return,” Alleyn remarked, “of the ailment?”

Syce did not reply.

Alleyn said, “Why not tell me about it? You must know damn’ well that I can’t cut all this background stuff dead. Why the devil did you pretend to have lumbago last evening? Was it for the love of a lady?”

It would be inaccurate to say that Commander Syce blushed, since his face, throughout the interview, had been suffused. But at this juncture it certainly darkened to an alarming degree.

“Well,
was
it?” Alleyn insisted on a note of exasperation. Fox clapped the bundle of clothes down on a table.

“I know what it’s like,” Commander Syce began incomprehensibly. He moved his hand in the direction of Hammer Farm. “Lonely as hell. Poor little Kit. Suppose she wanted security. Natural. Ever seen that play? I believe they put it on again a year or two ago. I don’t go in for poodle-faking, but it was damn’ true. In the end she pitched herself out of a top window, poor thing. Frozen out. County.”

“Can you mean
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
?”

“I daresay. And they’d better change their course or she’ll do the same thing. Lonely. I know what it’s like.”

His gaze travelled to a corner cupboard. “You have to do something,” he said and then eyed the tumbler on his luncheon table. “No good offering you a drink,” he mumbled.

“None in the world, worse luck.”

“Well,” Syce said. He added something that sounded like “luck” and suddenly drained the tumbler.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m thinking of giving it up myself. Alcohol.”

“It’s a ‘good familiar creature,’ ” Alleyn quoted, “ ‘if it is well used.’ ”

“That’s all right as far as it goes, but what sort of a perisher,” Syce surprisingly observed, “took the bearings? ‘A nasty little man and a beastly liar into the bargain.’ ”

“True enough. But we’re not, after all, discussing Iago and alcohol but you and lumbago. Why—”

“All right, I heard you before. I’m just thinking what to say.”

He went to the corner cupboard and returned with a half-empty bottle of whisky. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “It’s damn’ ticklish, I’d have you know.” He helped himself to a treble whisky.

“In that case, wouldn’t you do better without that snorter you’ve just poured out?”

“Think so?”

Fox, with his masterly command of the totally unexpected, said, “
She
would.”

“Who?” shouted Commander Syce looking terrified. He drank half his whisky.

“Miss Kettle.”

“She would what?”

“Think you’d be better without it, sir.”

“She knows what to do,” he muttered, “if she wants to stop me. Or rather she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell
her
,” Commander Syce added in a deeper voice than Alleyn could have imagined him to produce, “I wouldn’t mention it to her on any account whatsoever, never.”

“I’m afraid you really are very tight.”

“It’s the last time so early; in future I’m going to wait till the sun’s over the yard-arm. It happens to be a promise.”

“To Miss Kettle?”

“Who else?” Syce said grandly. “Why not?”

“An admirable idea. Was it,” Alleyn asked, “on Miss Kettle’s account, by any chance, that you pretended to have lumbago last evening?”

“Who else’s?” admitted Syce, who appeared to have got into one unchangeable gear. “Why not?”

“Does she know?”

Fox muttered something indistinguishable and Syce said, “She guessed.” He added wretchedly, “We parted brass rags.”

“You had a row about it?” Alleyn ventured.

“Not about that. About
that
.” He indicated the tumbler. “So I promised. After to-day. Yard-arm.”

“Good luck to it.”

With the swiftest possible movement Alleyn whisked the arrow from the golf bag and held it under Syce’s nose. “Do you know anything about that?” he asked.

“That’s mine. You took it away.”

“No. This is another of your arrows. This was found in Bottom Meadow at the foot of Watt’s Hill. If you examine it, you’ll see there’s a difference.”

Alleyn whipped the cover off the tip of the arrow. “Look,” he said.

Syce stared owlishly at the point.

“Bloody,” he observed.

“Looks like it. What blood? Whose blood?”

Syce thrust his fingers distractedly through his thin hair.

“Cat’s blood,” he said.

This was the selfsame arrow, Commander Syce urged, with which some weeks ago he had inadvertently slain the mother of Thomasina Twitchett. He himself had found the body and in his distress had withdrawn the arrow and cast it from him into the adjacent bushes. He had taken the body to Mr. Phinn, who had refused to accept his explanation and apologies, and they had parted, as Commander Syce again put it, brass rags.

Alleyn asked him if he did not consider it at all dangerous to fire off arrows at random into his neighbours’ spinneys and over them. The reply was confused and shamefaced. More by surmise and conjecture than by any positive means, Alleyn understood Syce to suggest a close relationship between the degree of his potations and the incontinence of his archery. At this juncture he became morose, and they could get no more out of him.

“It appears,” Alleyn said as they drove away, “that when he’s completely plastered, he gets a sort of cupid fixation and looses off his shafts blindly into the landscape with a classic disregard for their billets. It’s a terrifying thought, but I suppose his immediate neighbours have learnt to look after themselves.”

“I’m afraid,” Fox said heavily, “she’s bitten off more than she can chew. I’m afraid so.”

“My dear old Fox, there’s no end to the punishment some women will take.”

“Of course,” Fox said dismally, “in a manner of speaking, she’s trained for it. There is that.”

“I rather think, you know, that she’s one of the sort that has got to have somebody to cosset.”

“I daresay. Whereas, barring the odd bilious turn, I’m never out of sorts. What do we do now, Mr. Alleyn?” Fox continued, dismissing the more intimate theme with an air of finality.

“We can’t do anything really conclusive until we get a lead from Curtis. But we interview George Lacklander all the same, Br’er Fox, and, I hope, lay the ghost of young Ludovic Phinn. It’s half past one. We may as well let them have their luncheon. Let’s see what they can do for us at the Boy and Donkey.”

They ate their cold meat, potato and beetroot with the concentration of men whose meals do not occur as a matter of course but are consumed precariously when chances present themselves. Before they had finished, Dr. Curtis rang up to give an interim report. He now plumped unreservedly for a blow on the temple with a blunt instrument while Colonel Cartarette squatted over his catch. Subsequent injuries had been inflicted with a pointed instrument after he lay on his side, unconscious or possibly already lifeless. The second injury had all but obliterated the first. He was unable with any certainty to name the first instrument, but the second was undoubtedly the shooting-stick. Sir William Roskill had found traces of recently shed blood under the collar of the disk. He was now checking for the blood group.

“I see,” Alleyn said. “And the shooting-stick was used—?”

“My dear chap, in the normal way, one must suppose.”

“Yes, one must, mustn’t one? Deliberately pushed home and sat on. Horrid — awful behavior.”

“Brutal,” Dr. Curtis said dispassionately.

“All the brutality in the world. Has Willy tackled the fish scales?”

“Give him time. But yes, he’s begun. No report yet.”

“We’re going to Nunspardon. Telephone me if there’s anything, Curtis, will you? You or Willy?”

“O.K.”

Alleyn turned away from the telephone to discover Sergeant Bailey waiting for him with the air of morose detachment that meant he had something of interest to impart. He had, in fact, come from a further detailed overhaul of Colonel Cartarette’s study. The bottom drawer on the left of the desk carried an identifiable finger-print of Sir George Lacklander’s.

“I checked it with his grog glass,” Bailey said, looking at his boots. “The drawer seems to have been wiped over, but a dab on the underside must have been missed or something. It’s his all right.”

“Very useful,” Alleyn said.

Fox wore that expression of bland inscrutability that always seemed to grow upon him as a case approached its close. He would listen attentively to witnesses, suspects, colleagues or his chief and would presently glance up and move the focus of his gaze to some distant object of complete unimportance. This mannerism had the same effect as a change of conversation. It was as if Mr. Fox had become rather pleasurably abstracted. To his associates it was a sign of a peculiar wiliness.

“Remove your attention from the far horizon, Br’er Fox,” Alleyn said, “and bring it to bear on the immediate future. We’re going to Nunspardon.”

They were taken there by the Yard driver, who was now released from his duties in Bottom Meadow.

As they drove past the long wall that marked the Nunspardon marches, Fox began to speculate. “Do you suppose that they throw it open to the public? They must, mustn’t they? Otherwise, how do they manage these days?”

“They manage by a freak. Within the last two generations the Lacklanders have won first prizes in world lotteries. I remember because I was still in the Foreign Service when George Lacklander rang the bell in the Calcutta Sweep. In addition to that, they’re fantastically lucky race-horse owners and possess one of the most spectacular collections of private jewels in England, which I suppose they could use as a sort of lucky dip if they felt the draught. Really, they’re one of the few remaining country families who are wealthy through sheer luck.”

“Is that so?” Fox observed mildly. “And Miss Kettle tells me they’ve stood high in the county for something like a thousand years. Never a scandal, she says, but then I daresay she’s partial.”

“I daresay. A thousand years,” Alleyn said dryly, “is a tidy reach even for the allegedly blameless Lacklanders.”

“Well, to Miss Kettle’s knowledge there’s never been the slightest hint of anything past or present.”

“When, for the love of wonder, did you enjoy this cosy chat with Nurse Kettle?”

“Last evening, Mr. Alleyn. When you were in the study, you know, Miss Kettle, who was saying at the time that the Colonel was quite one of the old sort, a real gentleman and so on, mentioned that she and her ladyship had chatted on the subject only that afternoon!” Fox stopped, scraped his chin and became abstracted.

“What’s up? What subject?”

“Well, er — class obligation and that style of thing. It didn’t seem to amount to anything last night, because at that stage no connection had been established with the family.”

“Come on.”

“Miss Kettle mentioned in passing that her ladyship had talked about the — er — the — er — as you might say — the — er — principle of ‘
noblesse oblige
’ and had let it be known she was very worried.”

“About what?”

“No particular cause was named.”

“And you’re wondering now if she was worried about the prospect of an imminent debunking through Chapter 7 of the blameless Lacklanders?”

“Well, it makes you think,” Fox said.

“So it does,” Alleyn agreed as they turned into the long drive to Nunspardon.

“She being a great lady.”

“Are you reminding me of her character, her social position or what Mr. Phinn calls her avoirdupois?”

“She must be all of seventeen stone,” Fox mused, “and I wouldn’t mind betting the son’ll be the same at her age. Very heavy-built.”

“And damn’ heavy going into the bargain.”

“Mrs. Cartarette doesn’t seem to think so.”

“My dear man, as you have already guessed, he’s the only human being in the district, apart from her husband, who’s sent her out any signals of any kind at all, and he’s sent plenty.”

“You don’t reckon she’s in love with him, though?”

“You never know — never. I daresay he has his ponderous attractions.”

“Ah, well,” Fox said and with an air of freshening himself up stared at a point some distance ahead. It was impossible to guess whether he ruminated upon the tender passion, the character of George Lacklander or the problematical gratitude of Kitty Cartarette. “You never know,” he sighed, “he may even be turning it over in his mind how long he ought to wait before it’ll be all right to propose to her.”

“I hardly think so, and I must say I hope she’s not building on it.”

“You’ve made up your mind, of course,” Fox said after a pause.

“Well, I have, Fox. I can only see one answer that will fit all the evidence, but unless we get the go-ahead sign from the experts in Chyning, we haven’t a case. There we are again.”

They had rounded the final bend in the drive and had come out before the now familiar façade of Nunspardon.

The butler admitted them and contrived to suggest with next to no expenditure of behaviour that Alleyn was a friend of the family and Fox completely invisible. Sir George, he said, was still at luncheon. If Alleyn would step this way, he would inform Sir George. Alleyn, followed by the unmoved Fox, was shown into George Lacklander’s study: the last of the studies they were to visit. It still bore, Alleyn recognized, the imprint of Sir Harold Lacklander’s personality, and he looked with interest at a framed caricature of his erstwhile chief made a quarter of a century ago when Alleyn was a promising young man in the Foreign Service. The drawing revived his memories of Sir Harold Lacklander; of his professional charm, his conformation to type, his sudden flashes of wit and his extreme sensitiveness to criticism. There was a large photograph of George on the desk, and it was strange to see in it, as Alleyn fancied he could, these elements adulterated and transformed by the addition of something that was either stupidity or indifference. Stupidity? Was George, after all, such an ass? It depended, as usual, on “what one meant” by an ass.